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By Quds News Network

Gaza (QNN)- A newborn baby has died in Gaza due to extreme cold, amid harsh winter conditions and worsening humanitarian suffering as Israel continues its blockade.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health announced on Tuesday the death of two-week-old baby Mohammed Khalil Abu al-Khair. The baby died from a sharp drop in body temperature caused by severe cold.

The ministry said the infant arrived at hospital two days earlier and was admitted to intensive care. He died on Monday despite medical efforts.

Heavy rainfall has flooded large numbers of displacement tents across Gaza, especially in low-lying areas. Thousands of families now face extreme conditions without proper shelter, heating, or protection.

Health Ministry Director General Munir al-Boursh previously warned of rising deaths among infants, the elderly, and sick people due to cold exposure inside flooded tents. He said water and humidity inside shelters create ideal conditions for respiratory diseases. Many patients cannot access medical care.

On Monday, the United Nations said Israel continues to obstruct the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza despite severe winter conditions. The UN warned of a growing risk of newborns freezing to death.

UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq said UN teams and partners continue efforts to deliver aid to the most vulnerable families. He noted that humanitarian needs still exceed response capacity due to ongoing Israeli restrictions.

Haq said recent heavy rain and freezing temperatures have worsened conditions. He confirmed increased risks of hypothermia among newborns. Aid teams are distributing special kits to prevent freezing.

Over the past week, aid agencies distributed 3,800 tents and 4,600 tarpaulins. Relief packages also include basic food and hygiene supplies. However, Haq said partners were forced to scale back assistance since Friday due to access restrictions.

The UN is also working to create temporary learning spaces for 5,000 children. Haq stressed that efforts remain limited because Israel blocks the entry of educational materials.

Last Thursday, Gaza health officials confirmed the death of another infant, Rahaf Abu Jazar, in Khan Younis. She died from cold exposure after rainwater flooded her family’s tent.

Since Wednesday, thousands of tents sheltering survivors of Israel’s genocide have turned into pools of water. Mattresses, clothes, and food were destroyed. Hundreds of families remain exposed to the cold without adequate shelter.

Most displaced people live in worn-out tents. The government media office said in September that 93 percent of tents are no longer fit for use. That equals 125,000 tents out of 135,000.

Although the ceasefire began on October 10, living conditions in Gaza have not improved. Israel continues to restrict aid trucks, violating the humanitarian protocol of the agreement.

Over nearly two years, Israeli attacks damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of tents. Many were hit directly by airstrikes. Others deteriorated due to extreme summer heat and harsh winter storms.

The ceasefire ended a war that began on October 8, 2023. The genocide killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, wounded over 171,000, and destroyed 90 percent of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Initial damage estimates exceed $70 billion.

17 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Introduction

And there it is — the familiar dread. Another attack, this time a mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach; another instant narrative of antisemitic terrorism; another tightening in the chest that many of us now recognize on cue. Before the bodies were counted, the meaning was already assigned.

On December 14, 2025, a father-and-son team opened fire on a crowded Chabad “Chanukah by the Sea” event, killing at least 15 (including children and rabbis) and injuring dozens more in what authorities swiftly declared a targeted antisemitic terrorist act. While the antisemitic motive was undeniable, the public narrative immediately began performing a familiar, consequential act: merging the universal fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the specific political agenda of the Israeli state, thereby preparing the ground for a geopolitical response.

In the immediate coverage — interviews widely circulated and picked up internationally, including on the BBC — voices like Arsen Ostrovsky, a pro-Israel advocate injured in the attack, described the scene as an “absolute bloodbath” and “massacre,” explicitly drawing the parallel: “October 7, that’s the last time I saw this. I never thought I’d see this in Australia, not in my lifetime, on Bondi Beach of all places.” BBC segments also included Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, joint organizer of the event, criticizing government inaction on rising threats and echoing the surge in incidents since October 7. Australian and Israeli flags soon appeared prominently in visuals of memorials and vigils, stitching the attack into a broader Zionist narrative of Jewish vulnerability amid ongoing global tensions.

When I switched on the broadcast here in Amman and caught this coverage, the comparisons struck me as eerily familiar in their immediacy — the witnesses positioned as moral bridges to Israel’s narrative, the symbols snapping into place so swiftly. I turned it off in disgust.

The framing arrived faster than the facts, and my suspicion — formed not from paranoia but from memory — was that the narrative was being steered, prematurely and predictably, toward Israel’s preferred moral universe. It even caused me, momentarily, to wonder about deeper false-flag orchestration — an intrusive possibility shaped by precedent.

My reaction is not conspiratorial. It is pattern recognition — an instinct sharpened by watching premature claims harden into unquestioned truth and first narratives outlast corrections.

Historical Precedents of Reflexive Framing

This reflexive framing has a long record.

In 2017, hundreds of bomb threats targeted Jewish Community Centers and synagogues across the United States and abroad. From the first reports, the wave was framed as a surge in antisemitic terror. Fear spread quickly. Newsrooms and public officials spoke of organized extremist networks and a renewed threat to Jewish life. But when investigators finally traced the calls, one of the principal perpetrators turned out to be Michael Kadar, an Israeli-American Jewish teenager operating from Israel using spoofed phone systems and cyber tools. By the time that fact came to light, the narrative was already fixed. The correction arrived quietly, without urgency, and never displaced the initial attribution. The episode showed how swiftly meaning can congeal — and how little it matters when the meaning turns out to be wrong.

The machinery is not just fast; it is directionally biased. It reliably frames incidents within a narrative of Jews-under-siege-by-external-others, a framework that inherently calls for securitized, nationalist solutions.

More recently, in Australia, police discovered a caravan in Sydney that appeared to be packed with explosives and accompanied by a list of local synagogues. Within hours, the discovery was treated as a looming antisemitic terror attack. Officials spoke publicly of a major threat; headlines echoed the alarm. But when investigators examined the device, they found no detonator, no viable explosive mechanism, and no capacity for mass harm. The plot was ultimately deemed a fabrication — apparently staged by criminals seeking to provoke panic and manipulate the police response.

Yet the initial narrative had already saturated public discourse. What lingered was not the truth, but the emotional imprint of the first interpretation — an imprint perfectly aligned with a worldview that sees Jewish safety as perpetually contingent on state power and vigilance against a hostile outside world. The retraction was subdued, technical, and quickly forgotten.

Temporal Asymmetry and the Politics of First Narration

Taken together, these episodes reveal a dynamic far more pervasive than any question of orchestration. What they expose is temporal asymmetry — the structural advantage of whoever speaks first. The initial narrative does not merely fill a gap; it becomes the event’s remembered meaning.

We saw this on October 7, when early, unverified Israeli claims about atrocities — many later retracted or contradicted — cemented themselves in global consciousness before independent investigations began. And we saw it after 9/11, when the speed of attribution and the moral framing of a “civilizational enemy” shaped U.S. policy and public sentiment long before evidence was assessed or alternative interpretations could surface.

In each case, later facts arrived without the force to dislodge what the public had already absorbed. That is the architecture of the problem: the clock, not the evidence, determines the meaning. Time itself becomes a political instrument, and the first narrative — however speculative — becomes the one history remembers.

Hasbara’s Strategic Function

This gap is where Israeli hasbara thrives. Its strategic genius lies not merely in speed, but in conceptual conflation: it systematically maps the real, global threat of antisemitism onto the geopolitical project of Zionism. It argues, implicitly and explicitly, that the latter is the only possible answer to the former.

This logic depends on the erasure of a competing truth: that the Zionist project of national self-determination in Palestine is fundamentally premised on, and perpetuates, the denial of that same right to Palestinians. Hasbara makes this zero-sum reality invisible, reframing a political conflict over land and sovereignty as a civilizational struggle against innate hatred.

Hasbara defines the event and Western outlets absorb that definition automatically. The frame did not emerge organically; it followed a script the media has internalized to the point of reflex. Elements of the Bondi Beach coverage reflect this reflex.

Bondi Beach: Narrative Uptake and Amplification

In the Bondi Beach coverage, some Zionist and community voices raised the possibility of links to Iran or regional actors early on, drawing on prior incidents attributed to Iranian involvement, while Australian authorities quickly declared the attack a targeted act of antisemitic terrorism. The president of the Zionist Federation of Australia folded the incident into a broader narrative of rising antisemitism, attributing it to years of “unchecked” incitement and government inaction.

This framing does more than warn of prejudice; it often collapses criticism of Israel into hostility toward Jews, a move that has a long institutional history. A similar logic surfaced in 2023 when the Australian Jewish Association circulated a video claiming Gaza protesters had chanted “gas the Jews,” a claim later shown to be unsupported by police forensics, yet widely amplified at the time.

This pattern echoes earlier moments in Zionist political history. Advocacy organizations of the 1930s and 1940s and today’s groups in Australia share a repertoire: framing Jewish vulnerability in ways that consolidate political leverage, defining the permissible boundaries of Jewish identity, and portraying certain forms of dissent — whether Jewish or non-Jewish — as a threat to collective survival. In both cases, atrocity and fear become political capital.

The mechanism in past and present is the same: harness and repurpose a crisis to strengthen advocacy aims, often through narratives of Islamophobia, securitized multiculturalism, and an information ecosystem primed to read Muslim or immigrant violence as part of global terror.

How Elite Narratives Migrate Into Public Common Sense

What made this pattern impossible to ignore was how quickly it surfaced beyond the broadcast. The framing I had just watched was already circulating in public reactions, reproduced by commentators invoking security and social order — in doing so echoing the geopolitical script that hasbara had set in motion. The rapidity of this uptake revealed how deeply the narrative architecture is embedded: it does not stay in elite discourse; it migrates into everyday speech.

A Facebook comment circulating after the Bondi Beach attack transforms an unresolved incident into a blueprint for state discipline. The writer (David Langsam) begins with: “Ban guns… crack down on ALL civilian guns,” then moves immediately to “Ban all protests relating to foreign events,” and finally proposes a compulsory “Australian for Immigrants Course… an Israeli Ulpan-like immersion course” — Israel’s long-standing system for rapidly assimilating immigrants into Zionist national norms to ensure newcomers do not “bring foreign conflicts to our shores.” This is how elite narratives sediment into public common sense.

The Ulpan Analogy and Imported Models of Discipline

The Ulpan analogy is revelatory. Promoted as a neutral model for immigrant integration, the Israeli Ulpan’s historic purpose was to rapidly assimilate Jewish immigrants into a settler-nationalist project, teaching them Hebrew and Zionist ideology while actively erasing their diaspora cultures and languages (Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic). To propose its Australian adaptation is to unconsciously advocate for a model of citizenship built on the suppression of competing political identity. It solves the “problem” of “foreign conflicts” by demanding their abandonment, mirroring the foundational logic of Zionism in Palestine, which required the negation of Palestinian national identity as the price for Jewish sovereignty.

None of this engages what actually happened on Bondi Beach. It redirects the focus from the facts of the case to the communities already coded as threatening, converting a local act of violence into justification for regulating dissent, migration, and political expression. The precision of the shift — and the Israeli Ulpan invoked as a model — reveals how deeply hasbara’s vocabulary has penetrated public common sense.

This is hasbara’s afterlife. Once absorbed into the political bloodstream, it no longer needs Israeli spokespeople or media intermediaries; it circulates on its own. Ordinary reactions begin to treat political difference as disorder, solidarity as imported conflict, and protest as a threat to public safety. The Ulpan analogy makes the point clear: practices born in a settler-colonial context are recast as neutral civic solutions. What looks like spontaneous public common sense is, in fact, the sediment of years of ideological conditioning.

The shift happens fast because the groundwork was laid long before the Bondi Beach attack — through post-9/11 security culture, Islamophobic narratives, and the normalization of reading Muslim or immigrant presence through the lens of global terror. Uncertainty does not remain uncertainty. It becomes an opening for discipline.

Post-9/11 Infrastructure and the Ready-Made Meaning System

This reflex took shape in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when Islamophobia shifted from fringe sentiment to governing logic across the West. Israel did not originate this transformation, but it played a crucial role in giving it coherence and institutional form. In the days after 9/11, Israeli officials worked aggressively to fold their conflict with Palestinians into the emerging “War on Terror.” Ariel Sharon cast Palestinian resistance as an extension of Al-Qaeda; the language of occupation and apartheid disappeared, replaced by a narrative of civilizational struggle against “Islamic terror.”

This rhetorical move was not just an alignment of interests; it was an act of conceptual displacement. The specific, territorial dispute with Palestinians — a struggle between two national movements over the same land — was submerged beneath the abstract, global war against “terror.” The Palestinian quest for self-determination could thus be re-categorized not as a parallel national claim, but as a manifestation of irrational, Islamist extremism. Their political erasure was complete: they were no longer a people with rights, but a vector of terror.

Israel then positioned itself as the West’s frontline laboratory: exporting counterterror doctrine, surveillance tools, airport-profiling protocols, crowd-control tactics, and predictive policing software — marketed as neutral security solutions to a universal threat. The threat was not universal. It was explicitly coded as Muslim.

In this environment, Islamophobia hardened into infrastructure. Suspicion became embedded in policy, technology, training manuals, and professional judgment. Once these systems were in place, Israeli framing no longer required persuasion; it only required an event. A shock, a crime, or an ambiguous act was enough to activate the architecture already built.

Hasbara’s Evolution and Intensification

Hasbara — Israel’s long-standing project of “explaining” its actions to the world — thrives in this infrastructure. The term traces back to early Zionist advocacy, when Theodor Herzl openly called for organized propaganda to promote the Jewish state, and Nahum Sokolow refined it as “hasbara” during World War I. Post-1948, it became formalized state policy; by the digital era, it evolved into “Hasbara 2.0” — coordinated social media campaigns, student fellowships, and influencer networks.

After October 7, 2023, it reached new intensity: rapid amplification of unverified atrocity claims (later retracted or heavily qualified) that nonetheless cemented global outrage before independent verification could begin. Even as a genuine surge in antisemitic incidents followed — documented across the West — the speed and selectivity of framing often harnessed real fear to broader geopolitical ends.

The question is not whether antisemitism exists. It is who gets to define it, deploy it, and benefit from its invocation.

Suspicion as a Political Reaction

The suspicion that surfaced for me while watching the BBC coverage of the Bondi Beach terror attack did not appear out of nowhere. It comes from long experience — years of witnessing how crises are maneuvered and meaning assembled before evidence is fully known. My reaction draws on a record that is fully documented, not imagined.

Israel’s Record: From False Flags to Narrative Laundering

Israel’s record deepens this reflex. The Lavon Affair (Operation Susannah) in 1954 remains the clearest admitted example of a false-flag operation: Israeli military intelligence recruited Egyptian Jews to bomb Western civilian sites in Cairo and Alexandria, intending to blame local nationalists and disrupt Egypt’s ties with Britain and the United States. The plot failed when uncovered, forcing resignations and exposing the tactic’s risks.

Beyond Lavon — a rare case of outright staging — later operations highlight a pattern of covert action paired with aggressive narrative management. The Lillehammer Affair (1973) saw Mossad agents assassinate an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway, mistaking him for a Munich Olympics planner; initial denials crumbled under exposure. The Bus 300 Affair (1984) revealed Shin Bet executing captured Palestinian hijackers and staging evidence to claim they died in a struggle. More recent sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program — the Stuxnet cyberattack (with U.S. collaboration), assassinations of scientists like Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (2020, using remote AI weaponry) — often proceeds with ambiguity or silence, letting strategic outcomes speak while preserving deniability.

Doctrine supports this pattern. The Hannibal Directive, openly debated within Israel, authorized overwhelming force to prevent soldier captures even at the certainty of killing the captives themselves. The logic was explicit: strategic and narrative control outweigh individual life.

These examples clarify why distinguishing outright false-flag operations from narrative laundering matters. False flags require elaborate planning and execution; narrative laundering requires only speed, confidence, and conditioned media reflexes. Israel excels at the latter — front-loading moral claims, deploying symbols, and positioning witnesses as anchors before verification is possible. In the Bondi Beach attack, a verifiable antisemitic atrocity was swiftly woven into familiar geopolitical scripts, illustrating the machinery while underscoring the real human cost of the underlying hatred.

In this context, deceit is not incidental. It is structural. Hasbara front-loads moral claims, assigns blame early, and renders later corrections irrelevant. Western reporting has been conditioned to accept Israeli statements as authoritative and Palestinian accounts as suspect. Narrative discipline replaces verification, and meaning solidifies before the truth can surface.

Conclusion

The consequences of this system reach far beyond misinterpretation. Once a narrative locks into place, it opens a path for action: protest becomes suspect, surveillance appears prudent, and solidarity is recast as imported disorder. Policies harden around these assumptions. Abroad, collective punishment is reframed as preemptive defense. Gaza disappears beneath layers of manufactured inevitability long before the world is ready to absorb the scale of what is being done there.

There is a built-in hierarchy of credibility at work here — one that grants Israeli voices automatic authority while demanding Palestinian voices clear a higher bar just to be heard.

Suspicion, in this landscape, serves a purpose. It interrupts the rush to meaning when that meaning arrives too fully formed and too neatly aligned with the interests of power. Doubt becomes a form of political presence — a way of holding open the space that propaganda tries to seal shut.

The ultimate cost of this machinery is a double betrayal. It betrays Jews by weaponizing their real fear of antisemitism to legitimize a political project that many Jews themselves oppose, fusing Jewish identity with the Israeli state and making all Jews globally accountable for its actions. Simultaneously, it betrays Palestinians by rendering their century-long struggle for self-determination on their own land conceptually invisible, repackaging it as mere antisemitic terror or religious fanaticism. This conflation is the engine that powers the machinery. To interrupt it — to insist on that pause — is to demand the separate dignity of both peoples be seen: the right of Jews to live free from hatred, and the right of Palestinians to live free from occupation.

People like me are not grasping for conspiracies. We are living inside an information order built on speed, amplification, and selective credibility. When meaning arrives already assembled — especially when it predictably shores up the same geopolitical storylines — the responsible response is a pause, not a pledge of allegiance.

That pause is the beginning of literacy — political, historical, and moral. In the Bondi Beach shooting, a verifiable antisemitic atrocity was swiftly woven into geopolitical scripts — illustrating the machinery while underscoring the real human cost.

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.

16 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

The Hague (QNN)- Appeals judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) rejected on Monday one of Israel’s legal challenges seeking to block an investigation into war crimes during the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

On appeal, judges refused to overturn a lower court decision that the prosecution’s investigation into crimes in Israel’s war on Gaza.

The decision clears the way for the continuation of the court’s Palestine investigation, which led to the issuance of arrest warrants in November last year for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This ruling focuses on only one of several Israeli legal challenges against the ICC investigations and the arrest warrants for its officials. There is no timeline for the court to rule on the various other challenges to its jurisdiction in this case.

The appeal focused on whether the ICC prosecutor was required to issue a fresh notification to Israel before investigating events that took place after October 7, 2023. Israel claimed that the post-October 7 assault on Gaza constituted a new situation, triggered by additional referrals submitted to the court by seven other countries since November 2023, including South Africa, Chile and Mexico.

Judges rejected that claim, ruling that the original notification issued in 2021 – when the ICC formally opened its investigation into crimes in occupied Palestine – already covered later events.

They said no new notification was required, meaning the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant remain valid.

The ruling comes as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza despite the fragile ceasefire which took effect on October 10, killing at least 400 Palestinians and wounding 1,063 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Since October 7, 2023, the Ministry added, over 70,600 Palestinians have been killed and 171,139 injured.

16 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad 

Ever since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1998, the United States has attempted to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution. They have tried everything short of a full-scale military invasion: a military coup, selecting a substitute president, cutting off access to the global financial system, imposing layers of sanctions, sabotaging the electricity grid, sending in mercenaries, and attempting to assassinate its leaders. If you can think of a method to overthrow a government, the United States has likely tried it against Venezuela.

However, in 2025, the escalation became unmistakable. The U.S. sent its warships to patrol Venezuela’s coast, began sinking small boats and killing those on board as they left the South American mainland, and seized an oil tanker bound for Cuba. The quantity of attacks on Venezuela has increased, suggesting the quality of the threats has now reached a different magnitude. It feels as if the United States is preparing for a full-blown invasion of the country.

Donald Trump came to office saying that he was opposed to military interventions that did not further U.S. interests, which is why he called the illegal U.S. war on Iraq a waste of “blood and treasure”. This does not mean Trump is against the use of the U.S. military —he deployed it in Afghanistan (remember the “Mother of all Bombs”) and Yemen, and has fully backed the U.S./Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. His formula is not for or against war categorically, but about what the U.S. would gain from it. With Iraq, he stated that the problem was not the war itself, but the failure to seize Iraqi oil. Had the U.S. taken Iraq’s oil, Trump would likely have been in Baghdad, ready to build —with Iraqi treasure— a Trump hotel on one of the former presidential properties.

Naturally, the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is about Venezuelan oil —the largest known reserves in the world. The U.S.-backed politician, Maria Corina Machado —awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 after supporting the Israeli genocide and calling for a U.S. invasion of her own country—, is on record promising to open up her country’s resources to foreign capital. She would welcome the extraction of Venezuela’s wealth rather than allow its social wealth to better the lives of its own people, as is the goal of the Bolivarian Revolution started by Hugo Chávez. A President Machado would immediately surrender any claim to the Essequibo region and grant ExxonMobil full command of Venezuela’s oil reserves. This is certainly the prize.

But it is not the immediate spur. A close reading of the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States shows that there is a renewed emphasis on the Western Hemisphere. The Trump Corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine is clear: the Western Hemisphere must be under U.S. control, and the United States will do what it takes to ensure that only pro-U.S. politicians hold power. It is worth reading that section of the National Security Strategy:

“After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”

When Argentina faced local elections, Trump warned that the U.S. would cut off external financing if candidates opposing pro-U.S. President Javier Milei lost. In Honduras, Trump intervened directly to oppose the Libre Party, even offering to release a convicted drug trafficker (and former President). The United States is moving aggressively because it has accurately assessed the weakness of the Pink Tide and the strength of a new, far-right “Angry Tide.” The emergence of right-wing governments across South America, Central America, and the Caribbean has emboldened the U.S. to squeeze Venezuela and thereby weaken Cuba —the two major poles of the Latin American left. Overturning these revolutionary processes would allow a full-scale Monroe Doctrine domination of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Since the 1990s, the United States began to speak of Latin America as a partner for shared prosperity, emphasizing globalisation over direct control. Now, the language has changed. As the Trump Corollary asserts: “We want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets and that supports critical supply chains…We want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.” Latin America is seen as a battlefield for geopolitical competition against China and a source of threats like immigration and drug trafficking. The attack on Venezuela and Cuba is not merely an assault on these two countries; it is the opening salvo of direct U.S. intervention on behalf of the Angry Tide. This will not deliver better lives for the population, but greater wealth for U.S. corporations and the oligarchies of Latin America.

Trump is ready to revive the belief that any problem can be solved by military force, even when other tools exist. The Trump Corollary promises to use its “military system superior to any country in the world” to steal the hemisphere’s resources.

The aggression against Venezuela is not a war against Venezuela alone. It is a war against all of Latin America.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

14 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (QNN)- Orouba Center for Research and Strategic Thinking released its weekly report on Israeli violations in Gaza. The report covers December 6–12, 2025, and highlights the continuation of large-scale, systematic attacks despite the ceasefire entering its ninth week.

During this period, the center documented 268 violations. The attacks killed 18 Palestinians, including women and children, and injured 56 others. The figures indicate Gaza remains under daily aggression, even as tensions were slightly lower than in previous weeks.

Data revealed a consistent pattern of repeated assaults. These included artillery shelling, airstrikes, direct gunfire, ground incursions, and large-scale demolition of residential buildings. Most violations targeted eastern and northern Gaza.

Gaza City, Khan Younis, and northern Gaza suffered the heaviest toll in terms of deaths, injuries, bombardment, and demolitions.

The report’s ninth-week figures show:

• 18 killed, including women and children
   
• 56 injured
   
• 10 ground incursions
   
• 43 artillery attacks
   
• 24 demolition operations on civilian buildings
   
• 41 direct targeting incidents
   
• 76 shooting incidents
   
• 268 total violations
   

The center said the daily average reached about 38 violations, showing that Trump’s ceasefire has not translated into a meaningful reduction in Israeli military activity.

Airstrikes and shelling hit residential neighborhoods in Gaza City, Khan Younis, Rafah, and Deir al-Balah, causing deaths, injuries, and widespread destruction. Israeli forces advanced in eastern Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah, and Jabalia, bulldozing homes, vandalizing property, and setting up earth mounds. Displaced families inside shelter schools faced continued siege.

Demolition operations included the destruction of entire residential blocks and the use of booby-trapped armored vehicles in urban areas. These attacks forced further displacement and targeted civilian homes and tents of displaced families. Jabalia, Bani Suheila, and Mawasi in Rafah experienced the highest impact.

The humanitarian situation worsened after a recent winter storm. Hundreds of tents flooded, and several homes partially or fully collapsed. Israeli restrictions blocked the entry of relief and humanitarian aid, increasing the vulnerability of displaced families. Children faced the highest risk.

The report also noted ongoing injuries and deaths from unexploded Israeli ordnance scattered across residential and displacement areas.

Orouba Center concluded that the ninth week of the ceasefire shows Israel does not treat the agreement as a political or humanitarian commitment. Instead, it uses it to manage gradual aggression, maintain field pressure, and block any real path toward recovery or stability. Civilians remain under constant threat.

Israel Violates Trump’s ceasefire Again, Murdering Four Palestinians West of Gaza

Four Palestinians have been killed and others wounded on Saturday evening in an Israeli army attack west of Gaza City.

Israeli warplanes fired at least three missiles at a Palestinian car near Nabulsi Roundabout, southwest of Gaza City.

The Israeli army claimed the strike targeted senior Qassam Brigades leader Raed Saad, in yet another violation of the ceasefire.

Saad is a prominent commander in the Qassam Brigades in Gaza. The resistance movement has not confirmed the Israeli claim yet.

Israel had previously claimed it killed Saad during a raid on Al-Shifa Hospital last year.

The attack came as Israeli violations continued across the Gaza Strip despite the ceasefire entering its ninth week. The mediators continue to remain silent.

Orouba Center for Research and Strategic Thinking released its weekly report on Israeli violations in Gaza.

The report covered the period from December 6 to December 12, 2025. The center documented 268 Israeli violations during the week.

The violations killed 18 Palestinians, including women and children. Another 56 people suffered injuries.

The center said the ninth week of the ceasefire shows a clear pattern; Israel does not treat the agreement as a political or humanitarian commitment. It treats it as a framework to manage gradual aggression.

The center said the policy keeps pressure on the ground. It blocks any real path toward recovery or stability in Gaza. As a result, civilians remain under constant threat.

14 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Kuttab

We sometimes hear that it is a pity that Palestinians do not know and are not being taught in their schools, as part of their curriculum, about the Holocaust in Germany. We are told that Palestinians need to learn about the Holocaust to better understand Israelis and how and why they act as they do.

I actually do believe it is important and entirely beneficial for Palestinians to learn about the Holocaust. Sami Awad, a Palestinian activist was indeed deeply moved when he took a trip to Auschwitz and the extermination camps in Poland. I, too, was moved when I visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The evil that was manifested there on an industrial scale is, in fact, something to ponder, and it needs to impact our attitude to toxic, racist, and fascist ideologies. We all need to be shocked and reminded of the potential for unimaginable evil that perhaps resides in all of us.

The real problem is in what lesson does one learn from the Holocaust? For one thing, the evil is so great that anything connected to it becomes an absolute that often clouds rational thinking, and prevents consideration of all other relevant factors. Unfortunately, many people take the wrong lesson from the Holocaust, namely that it shows that international law is meaningless, that the world is a cruel and uncaring place, and that the only security lies in having tremendous and overwhelming military power, in ignoring all laws and restrictions, and in creating your own standards. In other words, the message is that Hitler was correct after all and that “blood and iron” are the only factors to consider. “Never Again” to such people means only that Jews (or any other group for that matter) can only rely on their own military power and need to do whatever they think it takes to achieve security. It feeds a disdain for international norms and provides a justification for all manner of militancy and unjust practices in the name of security, to make sure this evil never happens again to one’s own group and to hell with everyone else.

There is another lesson, however, that can and should be learnt from the Holocaust. It is that even relatively small incidents of racism, discrimination, and bigotry can, if not checked immediately, mushroom into great and unimaginable evil of the type manifested in the Holocaust. It is the sobering thought that all of us, perhaps, carry within us the potential, if not checked, for carrying out unimaginable acts of cruelty towards others. That is why international law, in light of the Holocaust, developed mechanisms for international solidarity, accountability and sanctions against all forms of racism and racial discrimination. A convention dealing with this matter is called the Convention for the Prevention and Punishing the Crime of Genocide to indicate that genocide, like the Holocaust, does not suddenly occur in a vacuum but is often the result of incitement, laws and regulations, and practices that lead to the dehumanization of a particular group. It calls upon us to be vigilant and prevent, and not just punish, the crime of genocide.

The true response to genocide and the Holocaust is therefore to build respect for and to enhance enforceability of international law, norms and institutions. It is to work to improve collective sensitivity against all forms of toxic racism and discrimination, and to strengthen empathy and solidarity as effective tools to limit, marginalize and delegitimize all forms of racism and discrimination, regardless of which group is being targeted and who are the perpetrators. That is why all vulnerable groups (ethnic minorities, minority religious groups, undocumented migrants, children, women, and others) are the most vulnerable and likely to be victims of discrimination, and ultimately genocide. Those who still abide by ideologies that call for supremacy, whether it is Christian Nationalism, Jewish Zionism, or Islamic fanaticism, should be challenged and restricted. Yet we need to recognize also that past victims can easily use their victimhood to seek exemption and even justification for their own racism and violence. After all, German feelings of being unjustly treated in the aftermath of WWI provided potent ammunition for the rise of Hitler and his drive for German power and supremacy. The fact that a people have been traumatized in the past is no guarantee that they will refrain from oppressing and traumatizing others.

The state of Israel and the Zionist movement falls directly into that category. David Schipler of the New York Times argued that Palestinians and other Arabs need to be taught about the Holocaust in their schools. He said that precisely because of the Holocaust, Palestinians need to understand “Israel’s disdain for international law and its need for domination, supremacy and military superiority.” That is precisely the wrong lesson to learn from the Holocaust.

19 December 2025

Source: fosna.org

By PALESTINE WILL BE FREE

An article under the title House Arab, published in Bidoun magazine, appeared some weeks ago. Written by Ismail Ibrahim, an Egyptian journalist, it recounts his experience working as a fact-checker at the liberal propaganda rag The New Yorker in the aftermath of October 7.

Among the article’s many illuminating passages, which bring to light the inner workings of highly-regarded Western pseudo-journalism institutions, there is one that stands out. Ibrahim writes:

I was assigned, at some point, a piece about a spree of killings and land thefts carried out with impunity in the West Bank since October 7th. The piece mostly focused on a single settlement where a man who had gone to pick olives on his land one Saturday was shot by an off-duty Israeli soldier. His execution had been captured on video. The story included a cast of settlers, anti-occupation rabbis, and West-Bank Palestinians who had spent their lives fearing that their homes would be stolen, and that if they were killed or dispossessed, there would be no recourse for them. I ran into the story editor in the hallway, who said he was having trouble balancing the narrative because all the Israeli characters seemed evil, while all the Palestinians were angels. A long section that documented, without any editorializing, that Palestinian dispossession was an ongoing process that had begun long before October 7th was whittled down to a single paragraph after a series of fights between the editor-in-chief and the story editor on one side, and myself and the freelance writer on the other. [Emphasis mine.]

That bit — “he was having trouble balancing the narrative” — is not a confession of editorial difficulty. It is a confession of ideological bankruptcy. It betrays an assumption so deeply embedded in Western journalism that it rarely even announces itself: that every story must be balanced between two sides, presumed to be morally equivalent, even when the material reality is defined precisely by radical imbalance. It is the quiet axiom that truth itself must be symmetrical, that injustice must be diluted until it resembles a disagreement between equals.

But some positions are not merely unbalanced; they are impossible to balance. One cannot “balance” the dispossessed with their dispossessors, the raped with the rapist, the murdered with the murderer, or the genocidaire with their victims. The very attempt to do so is complicity. Balance, in such cases, does not clarify reality — it falsifies it. And that’s precisely the project every mainstream Western journalism institution, not just The New Yorker, has indulged in ever since the supposed “founding” of the illegitimate Jewish state in Palestine.

For most distant observers, “balancing the narrative” was easy when Gaza was portrayed as a tiny block of land in what was labelled the “turbulent Middle East” — a decontextualised framing of both the region and its people, created by the same forces. But things have changed 180 degrees after October 7. Now everyone sees Gaza and they see the Palestinians of Gaza. And once you see them you can not unsee them.

This kind of narrative management was possible only because Gaza was distant, and its inhabitants unfamiliar. Politicians and editors relied on that distance and unfamiliarity to present the situation as complicated, and as an evenly matched fight between two forces, one righteous and the other barbaric. This, in turn, made it easy to repeat, for example, the mythical two-state slogan, a talking point that has functioned less as a political vision and more as a way to avoid admitting what was actually happening on the ground.

Moreover, the sheer repetition of the two-state mantra also served as a cloak that hid the inherent injustice of that equation: the genocidal land usurpers — who view their victims as subhuman cattle — occupy nearly all of the land, while their victims are forced to live in glorified pens in the name of a mythical state that would never materialise.

October 7 has not revealed anything new. It has merely stripped away the last shreds of plausible deniability. In its aftermath, what has come into view is a continuity: the genocidal campaign in Gaza being carried out with enthusiastic Western backing; the open celebration by Israeli politicians, media figures, and soldiers of collective punishment, mass starvation, systemic rapes, and annihilation; the treatment of Palestinian abductees — children included — subjected to torture, sexual violence, killings, and degradation in Israeli dungeons, practices that human rights organisations have documented for decades and that are now defended openly rather than denied.

The reality became impossible to “balance” once Gaza came into full view over the past two years. People now see, without mediation, the scale and nature of the atrocities to which Palestinians have been subjected. They see residential neighbourhoods reduced to dust. They see hospitals levelled, and maternity wards blown apart. They have seen way too many children with their heads blown off and their intestines splattered on the floor to keep a count. They see babies starving to death because food and water has been deliberately cut off. They see entire families killed and buried under rubble. They see soldiers recording themselves vandalising houses, burning down schools, prancing around in the lingerie of the dead and displaced women, and boasting about the devastation they have carried out.

While the world has witnessed the total moral bankruptcy and genocidal bloodlust of the Israelis, it has also seen the righteousness and steadfastness of the Palestinians in full detail. The Palestinians have continued their lives with rare dignity and faith under unbearable conditions. Students have studied for high school exams in flimsy tents. Teenagers have revised lessons on cracked phone screens because their schools no longer exist. Families have walked long distances to find potable water sources. Mothers have deprived themselves of food to keep their children alive. Doctors have operated without anaesthetic and without supplies. Journalists documented their people’s genocide until they themselves were targeted and killed.

For the uninitiated, however, what has perhaps been the most revealing is the social consensus surrounding Israeli barbarism. The public discourse inside Israel, far from recoiling at atrocities, has increasingly celebrated it. Calls for extermination are not fringe mutterings but prime-time talking points. Sexual violence against Palestinians, once euphemised or buried, is now joked about, justified, and dismissed in ways that would be unthinkable if the victims belonged to any population deemed fully human by the West. This is not a matter of individual pathology; it is the moral logic of settler colonialism turbocharged with religious bigotry reaching its logical conclusion.

And yet Western media continues to act as though the primary ethical challenge is tone. It continues to “balance the narrative.” The problem, we are told, is excess — excess anger, excess grief, excess clarity. Palestinians must not only endure dispossession, dehumanisation, and death; they must do so politely, in a way that reassures their barbaric executioners and the audiences that identify with them. They must be silent victims of their own execution. To speak plainly about reality is to be accused of bias. To name genocide is to be “polarising.” To refuse false balance is to be “activist.” And to name the genocidaires “antisemitic.”

What Ibrahim encountered in that hallway was a refusal to abandon a murderous, genocidal fiction. The fiction that religiously-sanctioned overwhelming violence against defenceless people can be narrated without taking sides — even when the sides are the murderer and the murdered. The fiction that morality can be split down the middle. The fiction that a boot on a neck can be described as a balanced altercation.

There is no balanced narrative to be found here, because there is no balanced reality. Until journalism, diplomacy, and liberal conscience reckon with that fact, they will remain what they have long been: instruments of oppression that will insist upon a balance even in the face of a live-streamed genocide, while insisting that you deny the evidence of your own eyes and swallow their narrative whole.

Like Ibrahim, refuse to pay any more reverence to the hideous liberal pieties. If Gaza has awakened you, please don’t go back to sleep.

13 December 2025

Source: palestinewillbefree.substack.com

By Nancy Mancias

I arrived at the Taj Hotel in Baghdad’s Jadriyah neighborhood at 6 a.m., worn thin by the long flight from Los Angeles. After sleeping until mid-afternoon, I stepped out into the 90-degree heat on a simple mission: find falafel, fries, and a place to exchange money. A local bus picked me up and dropped me right across from a falafel shop—a small act of hospitality. Full and settled, I walked beside the Tigris River, watching construction cranes against the sky. Life was visibly moving forward. Yet the mental newsreel kept playing: bombs falling on these same banks twenty years earlier. I was a tourist now in a country I had once protested my own nation for invading. Needing to escape both the heat and the weight of those memories, I returned to the hotel for Nutella cake and Iraqi tea, yet deeply conscious of the complex layers beneath the surface.

The next day settled heavily. We started at Tahrir Monument and the roundabout where Saddam’s statue once stood—toppled in 2003 by U.S. Marines in an image seen around the world. Today, no plaque marks the spot. Only election banners fluttered in the wind. From there, we traveled to the Arch of Ctesiphon, a soaring Persian vault from 540 AD. Nearby lay the relics of a different era: a derelict tourist complex and a museum designed by North Koreans, its walls scarred with bullet marks. Al-Mada’in, our guide remarked, had been a final stronghold against the invasion. It’s one thing to read about war and occupation; another to stand where it happened and touch the pockmarked concrete. Just yards away, young boys kicked a soccer ball in the dust, a powerful scene of life insisting on moving forward. That contrast stayed with me: the tourist complex, once a thriving vacation spot with a luxurious pool, is now a place to store garbage. Aside from the enduring Arch, the entire area lies in ruins, destroyed in the war and never rebuilt. Who knows if it ever will be. For some parts of Iraq, rebuilding only began around 2017, over a decade after the invasion. With elections approaching, I wondered about Iraq’s future—and what accountability looks like when destruction runs so deep.

A slower day followed, wandering through Old Baghdad: its bazaar, colonial facades, antique shops, Christian churches, and tea houses thick with the smoke of cigarettes. But I felt an unease seeing Saddam-era memorabilia, like old currency, sold as casual souvenirs. My time in Iraqi Kurdistan, at Amna Suraka and Halabja Memorial, had shown me the human cost of his brutal regime. Later, we passed the haunting cement skeleton of one of Saddam’s grand mosques, frozen mid-construction by the 2003 war. It stood empty, monumental yet abandoned, like a set from Dune—a stark metaphor for interrupted futures.

We traveled to Babylon. Before entering, we paused before one of the last remaining monuments to Saddam. His image is now outlawed; we gazed at the bullet marks and graffiti scoring the stone. Nearby, his palace loomed over the Euphrates—a hollow shell gazing across timeless dust. After roaming Babylon’s ruins, we crossed a low fence onto the palace grounds. Entering the space once occupied by a brutal dictator again filled me with unease. While others explored the looted, spray-painted halls, I was struck by the collision of histories here: ancient civilization, the US invasion, and the regime’s own atrocities against the Kurds.

From there, we journeyed to Karbala and the breathtaking Al-Abbas Holy Shrine. I wore an abaya to enter, humbled by the devotion, chanting, and crying that resonated in the air. The contrast stayed with me: between ransacked palaces of fallen power, land ravaged by war, and this enduring faith. We paused briefly at one of the world’s largest cemeteries in Najaf before visiting the Holy Shrine of Imam Ali. The long drive south to Nasiriyah that followed gave me space to hold all these layers: history, belief, silence, and dust.

A highlight came in the Mesopotamian Marshes. Gliding by water buffalo through vast wetlands, said to be the Garden of Eden, I felt a deep connection to this ancient ecosystem and the Indigenous communities who sustain it. The use of reeds to build entire homes felt like a quiet miracle. Later, we visited the Great Ziggurat of Ur—a stairway to a Sumerian sky. We moved through biblical landscapes that day, though in the distance stood an old American military base, now repurposed by the Iraqis. Someone showed me photos of U.S. soldiers standing on those same Ziggurat steps.

As I leave Baghdad, I carry a sense of Iraq’s resilience, the palpable scars of war, the warmth of its people, the hope for a better future, and the ongoing story of a nation rebuilding itself. Now, as the world’s attention drifts to other conflicts, the weight of history here feels so obvious. The US footprint left in Iraq is deep—and as it threatens Iraq with sanctions, it is the last thing this country needs as it tries to move forward and heal.

Nancy Mancias, a dedicated organizer and educator, pursues her doctorate as an act of feminist decolonial scholarship, transforming anthropology from within the California Institute of Integral Studies.

13 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Introduction

In my previous essay, The Settlers Are Not Leaving, I argued that Palestinian liberation cannot hinge on hopes of settler withdrawal, a sudden moral awakening among occupiers, or some negotiated coexistence. Zionist domination is a stable, externally reinforced system — bolstered by military superiority, intricate legal frameworks, deep economic ties, diplomatic shields, and the quiet routines of international management.

I pushed back against the liberal dream of peace side-by-side and the romantic idea of a single decisive rupture restoring an intact Palestine. Instead, our urgent task is to pinpoint what sustains Israel’s grip and then strain, disrupt, or erode those supports.

Predictably, the immediate reaction from some readers returned to a familiar refrain: if Israeli power is so deeply rooted, what can possibly weaken it short of total military defeat? For many, direct action — however righteous — seems strategically irrelevant when set against Israel’s violence and the West’s unflinching backing.

That question is what draws me to the CAGE report, Putting Bodies on the Line, released in November 2025. It meticulously tracks how activists strike at the exact points where Israeli violence intersects with legality, profitability, public acceptance, and political accountability.

These are the pressure points where friction builds — making domination heavier, more visible, more expensive to sustain. The report offers no fantasies of swift triumph. Its force lies in showing how entrenched power can be burdened and worn down long before it crumbles. Through precise analysis and documentation, targeted action exposes the contradictions domination desperately hides.

Despair carries political force: it reinforces the very structures that generate it. Naming its sources becomes the first act of loosening its grip.
 — -

1. Why “Entrenchment” Breeds Despair

The reaction resonates because it grows out of hard realities: Israeli domination has shown extraordinary staying power. Institutions endure across governments, military dominance in the region goes unchallenged, and Western alliances provide steady diplomatic cover, economic integration, and technological backing.

For so many of us watching in anguish, this accumulates into a crushing sense of futility — if the system appears this unbreakable, anything less than overwhelming force feels like symbolism rather than strategy.

This despair draws strength from several harsh, interconnected conditions. Extreme power imbalances can feel self-perpetuating: superior arms, global patrons, territorial control — how does resistance outlast that?

Western complicity runs deep: arms flows uninterrupted, vetoes in international bodies, leaders willing to swallow domestic outrage to keep the status quo intact.

And on the Palestinian side, political fragmentation and decades of siege, displacement, and surveillance have exacted a brutal toll. Together, these render domination self-reproducing and resistance as forever outmatched.

There is emotional weight here, but also intellectual weight. It is born from lived trauma: repeated defeats, shattered agreements, settlements expanding without pause. It voices the exhaustion when every door to justice slams shut, when international law is wielded selectively, when today’s horrors echo yesterday’s without relief. Any honest strategy has to grapple with this despair, not brush it aside.

Yet acknowledging the depth of entrenchment clarifies the stakes rather than foreclosing possibility. Entrenchment describes how power operates today, not what it is capable of tomorrow. Recognizing its sources is how we prevent pessimism from calcifying into fatalism. And once the roots of despair are named plainly, a sharper question emerges: not whether domination is strong, but where its strength can be made to cost more than its defenders can bear.
 — -

2. Friction as a Strategy Against Entrenched Power

When Israeli domination feels immovable — fortified by military superiority and Western backing — it is natural to question whether anything short of war can shift it. Yet political theory and historical experience offer a different strategic horizon: friction that accumulates through sustained pressure, making the system grind harder, slower, and more expensively over time.

Antonio Gramsci helps illuminate the terrain. He argued that power endures not only through coercion but through the sense that its dominance is inevitable. Challenging that inevitability requires a “war of position” — a long struggle in which networks, counter-narratives, and persistent disruptions chip away at the cultural and institutional foundations that make domination feel natural.

James C. Scott extends this insight by showing how the powerless resist in ways that rarely appear dramatic but steadily erode the efficiency of oppressive systems. Slowdowns, refusals, and small acts of sabotage force rulers to spend increasing energy on basic maintenance. These forms of resistance accumulate drag, turning everyday life into a site of pressure.

Gene Sharp then maps how this drag becomes strategic. Power depends on the cooperation of workers, firms, bureaucrats, and institutions. When that cooperation is withdrawn — through boycotts, blockades, and civil disobedience — costs rise, legitimacy fractures, and the machinery of domination becomes harder to operate. Repression often accelerates this process by exposing the violence required to keep the system intact.

Frantz Fanon adds a crucial dimension: colonial regimes concede nothing without sustained pressure. Appeals to conscience fail in systems built on dehumanization. Yet Fanon also insists that resistance must be fitted to the moment — strategic, deliberate, and aimed at reclaiming agency by forcing power to yield because the price of maintaining domination becomes too high.

Taken together, these thinkers outline the logic of friction. It is not a softer alternative to confrontation; it is a form of pressure that targets the system’s dependencies — where violence intersects with profit, law, and legitimacy. By imposing costs at these junctions, friction burdens the apparatus of domination until its upkeep becomes increasingly difficult to justify or sustain.

My point here is not theoretical. Real-world examples show friction already working, undermining the sense that entrenched power is impervious.

In the UK, Palestine Action has repeatedly hit Elbit Systems — Israel’s largest private arms manufacturer — with blockades, occupations, and site shutdowns. These disruptions force expensive security upgrades, delays, and ultimately retreats, like the closure of the Bristol Aztec West facility in 2025, despite a lease extending to 2029.

Broader BDS campaigns deepen the pressure: firms distancing themselves from Israeli partnerships, pension funds divesting, port workers refusing cargo. Each action seems small in isolation, but together they slow procurement, complicate logistics, trigger reviews, and shift public debate. They make domination more expensive to administer long before any formal collapse.

Friction is the deliberate creation of administrative, economic, legal, and reputational burdens that force a system of domination to expend increasing energy simply to reproduce itself.

It promises no miracles. What it offers is something more durable: proof that the system has weak points, and that persistent strikes — boycotts, disruptions, divestments — can make injustice increasingly difficult to sustain.

This is a real, grounded strategy that refuses to let domination operate uncontested.
 — -

3. The CAGE Report in Detail: Mapping the Pressure Points

If theory outlines friction’s logic, the CAGE report Putting Bodies on the Line makes it tangible. Released in November 2025 by CAGE International — a group dedicated to exposing state repression — the study examines five years of direct action for Palestine in Britain (2020–2025). Drawing from more than 70 disruptions, including 45 attributed to Palestine Action, it documents how ordinary people channel indignation into targeted interventions that hit the system where it is structurally exposed.

The CAGE report functions as a map of where Israeli domination relies on British cooperation — and therefore where it can be pressured.
The methodology is meticulous: timelines, media coverage, court records, procurement data, and financial reports cross-checked to show ripple effects — delays, reviews, policy reversals, and reputational damage.

The core insight is straightforward but profound: these are not symbolic stunts; they are interventions that force Britain to reckon with its material role in Israeli violence. They make the infrastructure of complicity harder to conceal.

The report identifies four intersections where Israeli power, channeled through UK partnerships, is vulnerable: legality, profitability, public legitimacy, and political risk. Targeting these points produces compounding friction. These four domains — law, finance, legitimacy, and political risk — form the scaffolding that keeps Israeli military production stable. Each becomes a site where friction can be deliberately introduced.

Legality

Pressure begins in the legal arena, where activists turn the state’s own frameworks into sites of exposure. Strategic lawsuits, license challenges, and filings reveal how arms exports evade international obligations. Cases documenting ignored evidence of war crimes have triggered reviews and temporary shipment suspensions. Crowdfunded suits mire regulators in procedural knots, eroding institutional credibility and forcing officials to defend practices that once operated in silence.

Profitability

Legal strain quickly bleeds into financial strain. Once the law casts doubt on an operation’s legitimacy, the economic foundations become more vulnerable. Multi-year campaigns against Elbit facilities have halted production, damaged equipment, forced millions in security spending, and even prompted insurers to withdraw coverage due to “reputational risk.” Small groups of activists have generated disproportionate economic shock across Elbit’s UK operations, demonstrating how targeted disruption destabilizes a corporation’s cost-benefit calculus.

Public legitimacy

Financial pressure reverberates into the realm of public legitimacy. As companies scramble to contain losses, their ties to Israeli violence become harder to obscure. Student occupations have pushed universities to divest from arms-linked pensions; projections and leaked documents have exposed institutional partnerships that depended on silence. Jury acquittals further puncture the state’s narrative, signaling that the public rejects the criminalization of direct action taken in defense of Palestinian life.

Political risk

Eroded legitimacy inevitably heightens political risk. Once the public sees the machinery of complicity, elected officials can no longer rely on quiet consensus. Lobby disruptions have confronted MPs with hard data on arms transfers, prompting debates and motions for tighter export controls. When the UK government attempted to proscribe Palestine Action in July 2025, the move backfired — drawing international condemnation and revealing the political anxiety that sustained activism now produces.

Documentation as force multiplier

Across all four domains, documentation magnifies impact. Timestamped evidence, livestreams, and shared footage transform local disruptions into global templates. A blockade in one city becomes a blueprint for another; leaked contracts fuel lawsuits; acquittals circulate as precedents. Documentation does more than record — it multiplies the force of each action, accelerating replication and widening the terrain of pressure. In a landscape defined by institutional indifference to Gaza, documentation compels attention one disruption at a time.
 — -

4. How Friction Accumulates: The Evidence

Accumulation is the slow conversion of isolated disruptions into systemic instability.

The CAGE report quantifies what friction looks like when sustained over time. Between 2020 and 2025, more than 70 documented disruptions — 45 carried out by Palestine Action — inflicted substantial financial and operational strain on companies involved in supplying Israel’s military apparatus. These were not dramatic coups but steady, cumulative actions: blockades, occupations, strategic lawsuits, and repeated interruptions to production and delivery schedules. Each disruption forced delays, added costs, or compelled defensive adjustments; together they strained entire supply chains and corporate risk calculations.

The Elbit campaign is the clearest example. Persistent pressure led to site closures, such as the shuttering of Aztec West in 2025, years before its lease expired. Suppliers grew wary; insurers withdrew coverage; the company faced spiraling security expenditures. What appeared at a distance as isolated protests, once aggregated, revealed a steady degradation of Elbit’s UK footprint.

These shocks were amplified by broader BDS momentum. Barclays reported zero Elbit holdings after sustained activism. Universities withdrew millions from arms-linked pension funds. The Co-operative Group halted Israeli sourcing in 2025 due to human rights concerns. Each decision chipped away at the web of commercial relationships that insulate Israeli military production from accountability.

These dynamics are not confined to Britain. In the United States, dockworkers in Oakland have repeatedly refused to handle Israeli-linked cargo, delaying shipments and forcing companies to reroute logistics at significant cost.

Political effects followed. In September 2024, the UK government suspended nearly 30 export licenses over concerns about violations of international humanitarian law. Parliamentary debates exposed regulatory loopholes and escalated scrutiny. Support for Israel’s arms network became politically riskier, not safer.

Repression, of course, intensified. Repression is not a sign of activist overreach; it is a sign that the state has been forced into a defensive posture.

July 2025 saw Palestine Action proscribed; arrests mounted; facilities were fortified. But repression did not negate the strategy — it confirmed its potency. Crackdowns drew UN criticism, generated new solidarity, and emboldened activists through high-profile acquittals. The costs of maintaining domination rose faster than the state could contain.

Against the backdrop of Gaza’s devastation, these details are the evidence. They show that entrenchment is not immutable. They turn abstractions into evidence. They offer a sober but vital insight: persistence makes empires pay. Friction erodes the scaffolding of complicity one delay, one withdrawal, one disrupted shipment at a time.

Friction does not promise linear progress; its effects accumulate unevenly, often invisibly, until they suddenly become undeniable.
 — -

5. The Path Forward: Risks, Resilience, and Resolve

The CAGE report, and the actions it chronicles, mark a shift in the terrain of solidarity. Too often, global movements have relied on symbolic acts — marches, statements, social-media waves — that express moral outrage but rarely affect the infrastructures that sustain domination.

These actions matter; they build community and articulate dissent. But entrenched systems require something more: sustained, analytical intervention aimed at the structures that make Israel’s violence materially possible.

Friction reorients the struggle. It channels outrage into disciplined disruption. Palestine Action exemplifies this shift — mapping supply chains, selecting vulnerable sites, repeating strikes until companies retreat. Moral clarity becomes operational leverage.

These actions force public contradictions into view, impose financial and political consequences, and build a movement with the capacity to inflict real costs: delayed arms transfers, abandoned facilities, divestments, regulatory reviews.

Friction multiplies through connection. Documentation multiplies impact. A blockade’s footage feeds campaigns abroad; leaked contracts inform lawsuits; successes circulate as templates. Coordination spreads across borders: UK disruptions inspire actions in the United States and Europe; BDS victories in one country strengthen union and municipal resolutions elsewhere. Coalition-building weaves these threads together — labor boycotts, campus divestments, cultural refusals — creating a web of pressure no single corporation or government can easily untangle.

Hunger strikes transform the body into a site of political indictment.
In UK prisons, Palestine Action members — Teuta “T” Hoxha, Heba Muraisi, Qesser Zuhrah, Kamran Ahmed, Amu Gib, Jon Cink, Muhammad Umer Khalid, and Lewie Chiaramello of the Filton 24 — have surpassed five weeks without food. Hospitalized, weakened, yet resolute, they demand bail, fair trials, and the shutdown of Elbit. Their strike joins a lineage of political prisoners who weaponize their own vulnerability to expose the violence of the state.

The impact is immediate: solidarity hunger strikes from prisoners in the United States, amplified by networks such as Samidoun; renewed scrutiny of Elbit’s operations; mounting public pressure on the UK’s punitive excesses. Even behind bars, they reveal the brittleness of the system.

Burnout and despair are real dangers too. Gaza’s relentless horror drains the spirit; activism’s grind isolates those carrying its weight. But friction adapts faster than repression: every crackdown widens the audience, every arrest generates new alliances, every escalation of violence erodes the state’s legitimacy further. Costs accumulate across every layer of the system that once seemed unshakable.

Friction operates on a different timeline than spectacle; its power lies in duration, repetition, and cumulative strain.

It restores agency to a people pushed toward hopelessness, offering not romantic rupture but durable resistance. It provides direction amid devastation — document, coordinate, sustain — and transforms despair into determination. Each action, however small, is one more weight on the system’s supports, making domination less affordable, less stable, less permanent.

The state escalates because it cannot absorb the costs indefinitely. Each crackdown signals a system pushed into defensive posture, and each escalation widens the field of solidarity that sustains the movement.
 — -

Conclusion

The arc of this essay — from the despair bred by entrenchment to the concrete evidence of friction’s effectiveness — reveals something essential. Weakening Israeli domination is the indispensable foundation of liberation’s long horizon.

Injustice rarely collapses spectacularly; it erodes as the structures that uphold it become too costly to maintain. Targeted disruption does not wait for the perfect balance of forces. It burdens domination now.

Here lies a sober form of optimism. No illusions of imminent victory, no fantasies of collapse — but proof of real shifts already underway: sites abandoned, holdings shed, sourcing halted, licenses scrutinized, juries unconvinced. These are the slow deconstruction of the supports that make domination viable. Each act of friction accumulates force, raising the cost of complicity for those who depend on it.

The task before us is clear. Not to redict when domination will fall, but to make its continuance increasingly untenable. Every disruption, every coordinated effort, every refusal adds weight. When despair feels justified — and it often does — this strategy offers something fiercer: a path that honors Palestinian urgency and refuses the constraints imposed by the oppressor’s imagination.

As I argued in my previous essay, Israeli settlers will not leave voluntarily. But collective friction can raise the price of their permanence until even fortified structures begin to crack. That is where real change begins.

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.

13 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Feroze Mithiborwala

By any sober reading of recent events, the seizure of oil tankers has become the latest theatre in a widening confrontation between a declining unipolar order and a constellation of states determined to defend sovereignty against sanctions, coercion, and regime‑change politics.

The U.S. capture of a tanker accused of carrying Venezuelan and Iranian oil was not an isolated action. It was an escalation—another step in Washington’s long campaign to strangle the Bolivarian People’s Socialist Democratic Revolution and to punish Iran for refusing submission to U.S. diktat. Within hours, Tehran answered in kind. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized a tanker in the Gulf of Oman, once again signalling that the era of one‑way maritime coercion is over. The IRGC boarded the Phoenix, a foreign oil tanker sailing under the flag of the Cook Islands. Iran affirms that the ship lacked proper documentation and was involved in smuggling 2 million litres of diesel fuel. The 17 crew members on board are reportedly from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Earlier, a few days ago, the U.S. had hijacked a Venezuelan Oil Tanker carrying around 2 million litres of crude oil, heading for Cuba. The ship, the VLCC Skipper – formerly Adisa, was earlier sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022, as they believed that it was part of a shadow fleet of Iranian-linked fleet carrying Iranian oil including crude.

This article follows from my earlier examination of Washington’s hijacking of Venezuelan oil on the high seas. What has changed since then is not the logic of empire but the balance of resolve. Venezuela and Iran—two countries with long histories of resisting Western colonialism—are no longer isolated targets. They are nodes in a growing network of political, economic, and military cooperation that now stretches from South America to West Asia, anchored by deepening ties with China and Russia.

Sanctions as Warfare by Other Means

Sanctions are meant to weaken and break societies, weaken the will of the people to resist and eventually bring about the downfall of popular governments that refuse to align and surrender to the West. In practice, they function as collective punishment and economic warfare destroying the economy of entire nations, devastating millions of lives. The seizure of tankers carrying Venezuelan or Iranian crude—often far from U.S. territorial waters—pushes sanctions into openly piratical territory. As Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has argued, unilateral sanctions violate international law and devastate civilian populations while entrenching hardline politics in the targeted states. “Economic strangulation,” Sachs notes, “is a form of warfare that kills silently.”

For Caracas, the oil tanker seizures are part of a familiar script. Since Hugo Chávez first challenged U.S. hegemony, Washington has backed coups, funded

opposition networks, frozen assets, and attempted to throttle Venezuela’s primary source of revenue. Yet the Bolivarian project endures, precisely because it is rooted in mass politics. Elections continue. Communal councils and social programs survive and empowers the masses. The state refuses to bend and does not break.

Iran’s experience is parallel. Since the 1979 revolution, Tehran has lived under varying intensities of sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, and covert war. The response has been strategic patience combined with steady investment in self‑reliance, in developing, diversifying the national economy — and particularly in defence and technology.

Fearless Retaliation and Deterrence

Iran’s seizure of a tanker in the Gulf of Oman was not mere tit‑for‑tat. It was deterrence. As retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor has repeatedly warned, Washington underestimates both Iran’s capabilities and its willingness to defend its interests. Iran today fields one of the most sophisticated missile forces in the world, encompassing short, medium, and long‑range systems. During the recent 12‑day war, Iranian retaliatory strikes on Israeli targets and on the U.S. Al‑Udeid base in Qatar exposed the limits of missile defence and the fragility of escalatory dominance.

Whatever Western media attempted to obscure, the outcome was unmistakable: Israel sought a cessation of hostilities. Airports were closed to prevent a mass exodus. As journalist Chris Hedges has observed, states that rely on permanent war to sustain legitimacy are uniquely vulnerable when their populations lose faith in the promise of security.

Venezuela–Iran: A Partnership of the Sanctioned

Under pressure from successive U.S. regimes, Venezuela and Iran have moved closer. Their cooperation spans energy swaps, refining technology, shipping, industrial production, banking alternatives, and defence. Iranian technicians have helped rehabilitate Venezuelan refineries crippled by sanctions. Caracas, in turn, has provided diplomatic backing and strategic access in the Western Hemisphere.

This is not a relationship of patron and proxy. It is a partnership forged in resistance. George Galloway has framed it bluntly: “The crime of Venezuela and Iran is not dictatorship; it is independence.”

Russia, Iran and China – the RIC Axis

The broader context is the emergence of the Russia‑Iran‑China (RIC) axis. Russia provides energy coordination, arms cooperation, and diplomatic cover at the UN. China brings advanced technology, trade, infrastructure, finance, and an alternative development model free of IMF conditionalities. Together, the three are knitting a lattice of economic corridors, technology sharing, and military coordination that challenges U.S. and NATO influence from West Asia to Latin America.

Iran’s accession to BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has accelerated this shift. These forums are no longer symbolic. They are becoming platforms for de‑dollarization, settlement in local currencies, and coordinated development—trends that terrify a sanctions‑dependent empire.

Regime Change Fantasies

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Washington and Tel Aviv continue to bet on regime change. The Trump‑Netanyahu axis appears increasingly desperate: Venezuela is threatened with invasion rhetoric while suffering ongoing economic siege; Iran is encircled, provoked, and demonized.

Yet both governments retain substantial popular support, not least because external pressure discredits domestic opposition aligned with foreign powers. Anya Parampil has documented how U.S. regime‑change operations repeatedly misread social realities, mistaking online dissent and elite disaffection for mass revolt.

The likely trajectory in Venezuela is not invasion—an act that would ignite continental backlash—but continued economic warfare, asset seizures, and maritime interdictions. These are cheaper politically, though no less brutal in human cost.

Israel’s Escalation Ladder

Meanwhile, Israel continues to bomb southern Lebanon, provoking Hezbollah—a close ally of Iran and not a proxy, as is pejoratively stated. Israel’s long‑term objective is clear: expand the war, manufacture a casus belli against Iran, and drag the United States in. Alone, Israel lacks the capacity to confront Iran. Its last direct exchange demonstrated that starkly.

Israel’s ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank have led to unprecedented global revulsion and anger. Billions spent on narrative management have failed to stem the tide of outrage. From university campuses to trade unions, from the Global South to sections of Western public opinion, Israel’s moral capital is exhausted.

False Flags and Manufactured Consent

As Israel’s position weakens, suspicions grow that it may resort to false‑flag operations—spectacular acts of terror blamed on Hamas or Hezbollah—to reshape public opinion and force U.S. intervention. History offers precedents, from the Lavon Affair to more recent covert actions. Whether such operations materialize or not, the danger lies in the willingness of desperate elites to gamble with mass casualties to preserve power.

This danger is compounded by the fragility of U.S. domestic politics. Donald Trump, weakened by economic turbulence, the Epstein revelations, and serial electoral defeats—including the recent Miami loss—faces a looming 2026 midterm disaster. His MAGA base is fractured, increasingly hostile to foreign wars, and sceptical of blank‑check support for Israel.

A World at the Brink

As 2026 approaches, the crisis of the U.S.‑led order deepens. From seized tankers in the Caribbean to missile exchanges in West Asia, the message from Caracas and Tehran is unmistakable – sovereignty will be defended. As the hitherto US/Western dominated unipolar world order withers away and a multipolar world emerges, the US regime dominated by a predatory Oligarchy, will continue to conserve its fast-declining power and this will create further turbulence and worse – wars.

The Global South, the Global Majority will continue to resist and march ahead to defend its freedom & sovereignty from decades of imperial overreach. Whether Washington adapts to this reality or doubles down on coercion will shape the next decade. What is certain is that the age of uncontested U.S. maritime, financial, and military dominance is ending—and the tankers seized on distant seas are among its clearest symbols.

Footnotes & References

1. Jeffrey D. Sachs, writings and public statements on unilateral sanctions and international law.

2. Douglas Macgregor, interviews and analyses on Iran, Israel, and U.S. military overstretch.

3. George Galloway, speeches and broadcasts on Venezuela, Iran, and anti‑imperialism.

4. Anya Parampil, Corporate Coup, and investigative reporting on U.S. regime‑change operations.

5. Chris Hedges, essays and books on Israel, Gaza, and the logic of permanent war.

6. UN Special Rapporteur reports; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch documentation on Gaza and the West Bank.

Feroze Mithiborwala is an expert on West Asian & International Geostrategic issues. He is the Founder-Gen. Sec. of the India Palestine Solidarity Forum.

13 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org