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By Rima Najjar

Introduction: Why Naming Never Ends

The reasons why disputes on Israel/Palestine on Wikipedia don’t end are the same reasons the conflict itself endures without closure. You cannot pin the meaning down for long. As soon as language sharpens or clarity emerges, a procedural mechanism intervenes to pull it back into a more tightly constrained frame. Instead of a resolution, the result is managed equilibrium — a pause that holds only until the next event, the next challenge, the next naming war.

Before the Bondi-naming war that is currently raging on Wikipedia, there were the high-profile naming wars — “Israel–Hamas war” vs “Gaza war,” “massacre” vs “battle,” “ethnic cleansing” labels, “hostage-taking” vs “capture,” “settler violence” vs “clashes,” “apartheid” vs “system of differential treatment.”

In each case, the lead wording was rewritten repeatedly, not because editors discovered new facts but because the meaning of events was being renegotiated in real time. The current phrasing for each is ever changing, depending on ongoing judgments about intent, motive, and broader social context.

Rather than resolving disagreements, Wikipedia manages the Israel/Palestine conflict by constricting the boundaries of permissible speech.

The Bondi Naming War and the Problem of Fixing Meaning

Consider the Bondi Beach case — the December 14, 2025 shooting at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s shoreline. Within 48 hours, the page stabilized with “terrorist mass shooting” in the lead, “mass shooting” as type, and “antisemitism inspired by ISIS/Islamic State, which Wikipedia later reframed as ‘Islamic Statism,’ as motive”— terms drawn directly from police and government statements. Each of these terms has its own talk-page subsection, its own archive of objections, and its own history of reversion.

A move request to remove the year from the title — an early attempt to canonize the event’s name — has already been initiated by an editor, though such stabilization rarely succeeds while facts remain fluid.

The page has already undergone several partial rewrites as editors attempt to align wording with breaking news, police briefings, emerging evidence, and public interpretations of radicalization. Right now, in the naming of the Bondi Beach shooting, Wikipedia is not only debating “shooting vs attack”; it is also debating what constitutes premature assertion (“motive,” “labels,” “names”), what crosses the threshold into loaded language for an encyclopedia lead (“assassins” vs “shooters” vs “gunmen”), and what degree of contextualization fits within Wikipedia’s strict rules governing lead sections.

The page lends itself to an examination in real time of how, in moments treated as threats, Wikipedia sharply limits what else may be said, when, and by whom.

In this case, even clearly attributed discussion of how the attack was used by politicians or security actors to justify tighter policing or speech controls was treated as premature.

Comparisons to earlier attacks or to well-established research on how such violence is framed were reverted as “editorial,” despite being routine once events are no longer live.

Brief, sourced background on radicalization pathways or transnational jihadist symbolism was excluded unless it came directly from official security voices.

Editors also avoided language that separated antisemitic violence from the political agendas attached to it, effectively collapsing the two.

Finally, early references to the effects such attacks have on Palestinian advocacy, Muslim communities, or protest policing were dismissed as speculative, even though similar patterns are well documented after comparable events.

This dynamic reflects a long-standing governance logic on Wikipedia, most visible in Israel/Palestine coverage, where politically charged topics are managed through timing, attribution, and deferral — determining not only what may be stated, but when claims become speakable and whose framing is allowed to appear as neutral knowledge.

How the Bondi Beach Incident Is Being Labeled — Media vs Wikipedia

The dynamics visible in the Bondi editing dispute are a condensed expression of how Wikipedia has long governed Israel/Palestine as a permanently “contentious topic.”

In the mainstream English-language press, the narrative solidified almost immediately: government briefings and police statements framed the event as a “terrorist attack,” an “antisemitic attack on a Hanukkah celebration,” a “mass shooting,” and, within hours, potentially “ISIS-inspired.”

Most outlets adopted this vocabulary, some hedging briefly as details about the gunmen’s backgrounds emerged, others moving quickly to definitive language once political leaders signaled the preferred frame.

On Wikipedia, the process unfolded differently but with a recognizably patterned logic. From the moment the page appeared, editors debated which elements of the media framing could enter the lead without triggering policy challenges, and which required attribution, delay, or exclusion— whether “ISIS-inspired” met sourcing thresholds or should be softened to “radicalized,” whether antisemitism could be stated as motive in Wikipedia’s voice, how to prioritize competing descriptors, and whether information about Islamophobia, policing justified by a security frame, or actors reshaping the issue to function as political leverage belonged in the opening paragraph.

Even the handling of circulating misinformation prompted disagreement over whether a dedicated subsection was necessary or premature.

What is emerging is not consensus but early containment. This is how it happens:

Official statements are elevated to anchor the framing; structural or contextual analysis is pushed downward; contested interpretations are withheld pending “further verification.” The lead language contracts to what carries the least procedural risk, even when that narrowing strips the event of the structural context that gives it meaning.

The ‘structural context’ deferred in the Bondi case includes the securitization of Muslim communities in Western states, the global instrumentalization of the Israel-Palestine conflict in domestic politics, and the longstanding alignment between counter-terrorism frameworks and specific geopolitical stances — all of which are excluded as ‘undue’ or ‘non-encyclopedic’ to preserve the contained, event-focused frame.

The Bondi page has thus entered the same long-running pattern visible across Israel/Palestine topics: fixation on state-issued terminology, hesitancy around naming deeper dynamics, and progressive tightening of the narrative frame until only those formulations that are procedurally defensible, politically low-risk, and aligned with the narrowest interpretation of Wikipedia policy survive the containment cycle.

It is the encyclopedia’s version of crisis management — stabilizing the surface while deferring everything that might disturb it.

My Own Earlier Encounter

I first saw this machinery at work years ago in a much smaller episode that nevertheless revealed the structure with unusual clarity. On the Wikipedia Quora page, a brief mention of my lawsuit against Quora — filed after my account was banned for posting Palestine-related content — was added to the page.

It lasted only weeks. Editors challenged not the fact of the lawsuit but the legitimacy of acknowledging it: whether it was “notable,” whether sources were “independent enough,” whether its inclusion created “undue emphasis.”

The reference was removed because the platform’s conventions obscure, rather than acknowledge, politically sensitive forms of censorship.

Wikipedia had no procedural space for harms that lacked institutional validation, and censure undertaken by a private corporation — especially one targeting Palestinian speech — fell easily into the category of what could be made to disappear.

Variations of this pattern appear everywhere. When major human rights organizations began issuing detailed reports classifying Israeli rule as apartheid, editors did not contest the evidence; they contested whether the findings were authoritative enough to appear in Wikipedia’s voice.

The reports were pushed into attributed form, prevented from anchoring lead sections, and effectively quarantined from the narrative structure of the main conflict pages. The facts could survive, but their meaning could not.

The same dynamic governs attempts to document digital censorship. Numerous reports by digital rights organizations — and even UN Special Rapporteurs — have tracked the systematic removal of Palestinian content by Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, especially during periods of heightened violence.

These findings struggle for stable placement on Wikipedia because they lack the kind of state-backed institutional framing the platform privileges.

The documentation is credible, the pattern clear, yet the harms remain narratively fragile: acknowledged only on the margins, never permitted to redefine the main account.

A similar narrowing occurs in pages addressing the suppression of protest. The mass arrests of Palestinian citizens of Israel during the 2021 Unity Intifada were widely reported, litigated, and investigated by Israeli and international NGOs.

Yet integration of this episode into the main conflict timeline was repeatedly pared back, shifted to footnotes, or rendered as attributed claims rather than encyclopedic statements. Again, the events were not disproven; they were structurally minimized.

All of this clarifies something essential. Wikipedia’s governance does more than referee disputes. It determines which harms are granted public standing, which may be acknowledged only through attribution, and which dissolve into procedural silence.

The issue on the Wikipidia Quora page was the realization that the encyclopedia’s sourcing hierarchy, notability rules, and deference to institutional authority operate as filters that decide which experiences of repression enter the global record and which remain invisible.

Wikipedia does not merely adjudicate truth claims; it organizes visibility. And in the terrain of Israel/Palestine, that organizational power defines the boundary between what the world is permitted to recognize and what it is trained, systematically, to overlook.

Wikipedia’s Governance Structure and the Logic of Containment

In practice, such Wikipedia governance means an expanded toolkit of control: extended-confirmed protection (limiting edits to veteran accounts), one-revert-per-day rules, discretionary sanctions, topic bans, and arbitration enforcement that can be triggered without a new community vote.

These measures are presented as neutral conflict management, but they function asymmetrically. They privilege editors already embedded in the system, fluent in policy, and disciplined in the rhetorical norms of “neutrality,” while disadvantaging those attempting to introduce language that reflects legal findings, lived experience, or emergent realities.

Crucially, these mechanisms do not decide who is right. They decide what can safely be said. As a result, outcomes are rarely final. They are stabilized pauses — language frozen at the least disruptive point — until the next event forces renegotiation.

This is why debates over terms like occupation, apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide never truly end on Wikipedia. They cycle, reappear, and are re-policed under the same procedural logic.

Wikipedia often treats stability as if it were consensus. Stability reflects the moment at which procedural tools have halted further change, while consensus requires a shared judgment about meaning.

In contentious topic areas, the two rarely align, yet the platform’s governance treats the former as evidence of the latter.

The outcome is almost always provisional: a temporary equilibrium enforced by procedure rather than persuasion.

High-Profile Naming Wars on Palestine/Israel and Their Provisional Outcomes

This logic of containment is evident in the major naming disputes that have shaped Israel/Palestine coverage on Wikipedia over the past two decades. These rarely achieve resolution based on evidence or scholarly consensus; instead, they reach managed pauses that favor narrower, less structural framings.

Key examples include:

War title: The ongoing conflict remains titled “Israel–Hamas war” on Wikipedia — a designation repeatedly contested since October 2023. Alternatives such as “Gaza war,” “2023–25 Gaza war,” “Gaza genocide,” and similar formulations have been proposed by editors seeking to reflect scope, geography, or legal findings. These proposals have triggered extended debates but have not succeeded in moving the title. As with earlier naming disputes, the current title persists not because it captures scholarly or legal consensus, but because it represents the least procedurally risky option: a framing anchored in state and media terminology that sidesteps structural language and avoids acknowledging broader patterns of violence.
Genocide and apartheid: Both terms are largely confined to attributed claims or separate spin-off articles (e.g., “Gaza genocide”), despite reports from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and ICJ advisory opinions on illegal occupation and discrimination. Direct use in Wikipedia’s voice on main conflict pages remains restricted.
Occupation, settler colonialism, and Nakba: “Occupation” is continuously challenged or hedged; “settler colonialism” is treated as a viewpoint rather than a scholarly framework; the Nakba is acknowledged on its dedicated page but partitioned from central narratives, avoiding discussion of intent in the main 1948 war article.
Terrorism and violence descriptors: “Terrorism” is applied readily to Palestinian actions but tightly regulated for Israeli state or settler violence, creating narrative asymmetry defended as neutrality.
Specific events: Incidents like Deir Yassin, Tantura, Jenin (2002), or the Great March of Return cycle between “massacre,” “battle,” “operation,” or “incident,” with stronger terms permitted only where supported by Israeli acknowledgment or heavy attribution.
This pattern — early anchoring of official terminology, deferral of structural context, and stabilization at the least disruptive point — repeats across terms like “blockade,” “collective punishment,” “ethnic cleansing,” or settlement expansion. The Bondi Beach incident follows suit, rapidly incorporating state-framed labels while marginalizing deeper dynamics.

The pattern reveals a burden of proof inversion. Palestinian harms must be repeatedly attributed, qualified, or framed as claims awaiting verification, while Israeli state or settler violence is treated as uncertain until disproven.

The procedural language of caution becomes a gatekeeper regulating which experiences receive immediate legitimacy.

Wikipedia as a Managed Battlefield: The Institutionalization of Hasbara

Against this backdrop, it would be naïve to treat Wikipedia as a neutral arena merely struggling with polarization. For well over a decade, Wikipedia has been a recognized site of organized hasbara.

Israeli government bodies and aligned organizations have openly acknowledged recruiting, training, and coordinating editors to “correct” content, monitor pages, and enforce a Zionist narrative under the banner of neutrality and balance.

In 2010, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched the “Wikipedia Academy,” explicitly aimed at training volunteers to influence Israel-related pages. By 2013, the Israeli government was openly funding programs through the National Union of Israeli Students to compensate volunteers for “editing Wikipedia articles to improve Israel’s image.” NGO-linked projects — such as StandWithUs’s Digital Diplomacy initiative, the Hasbara Fellowships, and the Yesha Council’s media training programs — identified Wikipedia as a strategic arena. These efforts were neither marginal nor clandestine. They were presented domestically as a vital front in the information struggle.

When I taught at al-Quds University, students there and at Birzit University circulated calls for Wikipedia engagement, recognizing it as a key battleground for global narrative authority. They understood that Wikipedia was the default reference for journalists, policymakers, educators, and algorithmic systems. Losing ground there meant ceding narrative power at global scale.

What distinguishes the Israeli case is not participation per se — many states attempt to influence representation — but the degree of institutionalization. Hasbara on Wikipedia has been systematic, multilingual, policy-literate, and patient. It works less by inserting overt propaganda than by mastering procedural leverage: invoking undue weight, demanding attribution, challenging source reliability, reverting early, and exhausting challengers through process.

These dynamics echo a broader scholarly understanding of platform governance. Work by Tarleton Gillespie, Nicolas Suzor, and Nathaniel Tkacz has shown how moderation systems, sourcing hierarchies, and procedural norms shape what becomes publicly knowable. Wikipedia’s own history reinforces this.

Between 2015 and 2024, the platform faced repeated controversies over state-aligned editing campaigns — from Turkey and China to Saudi Arabia — each exposing how political actors exploit procedural gaps. Even the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2022 report on coordinated disinformation highlighted the platform’s structural vulnerability to organized influence. The Bondi Beach dispute sits squarely within this lineage.

Over time, this produces what academics call discursive gravity: a center of acceptable language around which all else must orbit. On pages dealing with Gaza, occupation, or Palestinian political structures, this gravity shows up as tight policing of terminology; rigid demands for “secondary academic consensus” even when international legal bodies have reached clear conclusions; and near-automatic suspicion toward Palestinian testimony, civil society reporting, or human rights documentation unless echoed by state actors.

Seen in this light, the Bondi Beach naming dispute is a window into how meaning is managed when violence intersects with power.

Wikipedia manufactures stability under pressure. And when the subject is Israel/Palestine, that stability has long tilted toward a narrative that treats Israeli state violence as complex, contested, or debatable — while casting Palestinian resistance, protest, or naming itself as inherently suspect.

Each provisional settlement instructs editors — and readers — on the limits of permissible truth: which claims may be stated plainly, which must be softened, and which will be deferred indefinitely — echoing the Oslo framework, where Palestinian statehood was always acknowledged in principle, hedged in practice, and deferred in implementation.

The cumulative effect is a system that controls what counts as knowledge, regulating not only what can be said, but when, how forcefully, and under what constraints. Wikipedia’s procedural culture — deferential to narrowly defined “reliable sources,” wary of structural naming, cautious about motive and intent, committed to symmetrical framing in asymmetrical situations — becomes a way of controlling how violence can be narrated.

When Israeli state actions are under scrutiny, Wikipedia’s norms of caution and attribution activate fully. When Palestinian actions or movements are under scrutiny, those same safeguards often relax, permitting early classification and direct importation of police or governmental language.

This is the predictable behavior of an editing environment structured around procedural asymmetry.

Bondi Beach has simply made this visible again. Because the event touched anxieties deeply embedded in Western political culture — antisemitism, Muslim radicalization, communal vulnerability — editors moved quickly to codify the safest interpretive frame.

The rapid consolidation of “terrorist attack” was unsurprising. Nor were the swift reversions of attempts to contextualize the perpetrators’ background, their possible grievances, or the political uses of the event for political threat policing.

Wikipedia followed its established pattern: settling early on the formulation with the least political risk, anchoring it in official statements, and relocating structural context to sections future editors can prune or dilute. This is how containment works.

And like every containment, much as the Trump ‘Peace to Prosperity’ plan seeks to manage Palestinians through permanent deferral rather than resolution, it will hold only until it no longer can.

As more information emerges — about the perpetrators’ affiliations, motives, networks, or the political uses of the event — editors will revisit the lead, argue, revert, invoke policy, and eventually stabilize a new, equally provisional formulation.

CONCLUSION: How Containment Becomes Knowledge

The Bondi Beach shooting — rapidly framed on Wikipedia as a “terrorist mass shooting” with “antisemitism inspired by Islamic Statism” as motive — exemplifies a deeper structural pattern in Israel/Palestine coverage. Within days of the December 14, 2025, attack, the page stabilized around official Australian and police terminology, while broader contextualization remains marginal or contested.

Wikipedia’s policies, intended to manage volatility, function in this contentious topic area as a regulatory mechanism: deferring structural terms (“genocide,” “apartheid,” “settler colonialism”), demanding exhaustive attribution even amid scholarly or legal consensus, and privileging state-sourced framing. The result is a controlled limit on what can be understood— provisional formulations that endure procedural challenge rather than reflect evidential clarity.

This architecture produces asymmetry: Israeli state actions often receive hedged, contested treatment, while Palestinian actions or related events (like Bondi) see swift classification. Reinforced by extended-confirmed protections, revert limits, and recent arbitration measures (including recent ArbCom topic bans affecting pro-Palestinian editors), the system rewards sticking it out over saying something meaningful.

Consequently, Wikipedia does not merely document the Israel/Palestine conflict; it reproduces it at global scale — through search engines, education, and journalism — by stabilizing narratives that postpone naming power imbalances.

The Bondi Beach naming war, like its predecessors, reminds us that the struggle over Palestine persists not only in territory or courts, but in the digital infrastructures that shape what the world is permitted to know and name as true.

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.

17 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ahmad Sbaih

Mahmoud Alaf, 34, and his wife spent the night of 25 November trying to keep their five children – all under the age of five – dry after heavy rain battered their frayed tent in Gaza City’s al-Sahaba neighborhood.

“The ceasefire changed nothing for us,” Alaf told The Electronic Intifada. “We still live in tents, with sadness and exhaustion as big as a mountain in our hearts.”

When the storm hit, Alaf said, water seeped inside from the roof of the tent and gushed from the ground, carrying sewage, dirt and insects into every corner.

“What should have been a season of cold evenings and warm tea has turned into a season of running, lifting soaked blankets and holding shaking children against the wind,” Alaf said, with his voice breaking.

The family’s provisions of flour dissolved into paste while the smell of sewage choked the air.

As the children slept on the wet ground, with their clothes clinging to their skin, Alaf’s four-month-old daughter grew cold and weak, her breathing shallow.

“I carried her through the night, hoping someone, somewhere, could help,” he said.

Alaf carried his daughter to every medical facility he could reach, he said, including al-Sahaba Medical Complex, but each one was overwhelmed. His daughter’s condition worsened as the hours passed.

Before ending up displaced to al-Sahaba, Alaf and his family were displaced multiple times after losing their home in Shujaiya in the second week of the genocide.

After October’s ceasefire, Alaf couldn’t return to his house as his neighborhood in Shujaiya had become part of what is now known as the yellow line.

The ceasefire, Alaf said, brought little relief – they still live in their tattered tent, made even more ragged by this rainstorm.

“We haven’t received any shelter or food aid since the ceasefire,” he said.

According to the October ceasefire deal, more than 300,000 tents and mobile homes were to be delivered to shelter displaced Palestinians, of whom 288,000 families are still living in the streets and public squares.

But in the first month of the ceasefire, Israel only allowed 3,203 aid trucks to enter Gaza out of the 13,200 that were agreed upon in the ceasefire deal.

Alaf earns a modest living selling cigarettes, and a new tent – costing around $500 – is simply beyond his reach.

“We wait for winter with tight chests, knowing the sky will open not with mercy but with ruin,” Alaf said. “Rain has become more frightening than the sound of bombs for us.”

Rainstorm, son imprisoned

Nisreen Harara, 47, also woke in the middle of the night on 25 November to the sound of rain hammering the thin roof of the tent that shelters her and her five children in Gaza City’s al-Wihda Street.

Harara is a mother of six, but her eldest son, Ahmad, went missing in April 2025 when he refused to leave their home in Shujaiya.

After the October ceasefire, Harara found out that Ahmad had been detained by the Israeli army back in April.

“Every day, I pray for him to come home safe,” she said.

Harara ended up on al-Wihda Street after several displacements.

In October 2023, after fleeing their home in Shujaiya, Harara’s family sheltered in Al-Shifa Hospital until March 2024, when the Israeli army stormed the facility.

After that, they relocated to the central Gaza Strip, first taking shelter in a school in Nuseirat refugee camp before moving to a tent in al-Zawayda.

When the January 2025 ceasefire took effect, Harara’s family returned to Shujaiya only to find that half their house was destroyed, with most of the roofs torn off the remaining rooms.

For a short time, they lived among the broken walls until Israel resumed its attacks on 18 March; Harara and her family then fled to Gaza City’s al-Wihda Street.

Others in the tent camp handed Harara and her five children all that they could offer – a tent, but it was thin, frayed and barely stitched together.

The tent, she said, provided shade but little else.

“I thought the ceasefire would offer us some comfort to at least check our neighborhood, to know if our home was still standing,” she said. “Even if it didn’t, I wanted to put my tent near what was left of it.”

Yet Harara has not been able to check her house again since it is located behind the so-called yellow line.

On 25 November, when the rainstorm came, the fabric sagged with every drop, and parts of the tent collapsed under the weight of the water.

Because Harara’s tent stood at the end of the road, rainwater kept gushing in even after the sky cleared, turning the ground into a pool that refused to dry and soaking their clothes and blankets.

Neighbors brought them spare covers so they wouldn’t sleep directly on the mud.

But, for two days, Harara said, nothing dried – not the clothes, not the blankets, not the air heavy with dampness.

They, she said, received no shelter aid, no clothing and no food parcels.

Harara lives with layered uncertainty about whether her son will come back, about her home in Shujaiya or about whether the tent she and her five children sleep in will survive the next storm.

Tents on Gaza’s port

Saed al-Sabi, 34, took refuge at the beach near Gaza’s port, where he lived in a tent with his wife and two young children.

“Since winter came, the sea has grown restless. The waves rise higher every day,” al-Sabi told The Electronic Intifada.

Al-Sabi once lived a steady life with his family in Beit Hanoun. Alongside his work as a builder, he spent his mornings on his land behind his house, where 300 solar panels stood, powering the submersible well pump that fed his crops.

He would check the citrus trees and run his hands through the soil around the potato, onion and eggplant patches in the fields.

But in October 2023, the Israeli bombings forced al-Sabi and his family to flee Beit Hanoun and shelter in a school in Jabaliya refugee camp before relocating again to Sheikh Zayed area near Jabaliya, where they sheltered in a tent.

During the January ceasefire, al-Sabi moved their tent to a school in Gaza City’s al-Nasr neighborhood.

After Israel unilaterally ended the ceasefire in March, al-Sabi and his family were forced to flee southward until the October ceasefire took effect. They then returned northward and settled at Gaza’s port.

Al-Sabi stayed awake outside the tent the night of 25 November, watching the waves after weather reports warned that heavy rain was on the way.

He was afraid of what would happen to them if the sea itself might rise and swallow what little shelter his family had left or if it rained, which it did heavily that night.

Water pooled beneath al-Sabi’s tent, and the sand turned to mud.

Before the wind could rip up his tent, he and his wife grabbed their children – their clothes soaked and cold – and headed out in the middle of the night to find shelter.

They now share a single classroom with another family of relatives at a school in al-Nasr neighborhood.

Al-Sabi waits for the rain to stop, but every night the sky seems heavier.

His home, al-Sabi said, was demolished and bulldozed along with the fields he farmed days after the November 2023 truce ended.

Only 8.6 percent of Gaza’s cropland remained accessible, and just 1.5 percent was both accessible and undamaged, as of 28 July 2025, according to the United Nations.

Even after the October ceasefire, al-Sabi could not access his neighborhood or his land, as they are both behind the Israeli yellow line.

“Nothing has changed from the ceasefire. Every night we still hear bombing and bullets,” al-Sabi said, describing how Israel is continuing its genocide unabated in the Gaza Strip.

Al-Sabi’s family – desperately in need of financial assistance – has received only one food parcel since the October ceasefire began.

“If it wasn’t for the soup kitchen, my family would starve,” he said.

Ahmad Sbaih is an English graduate and writer based in Gaza.

17 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

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