Archives: Articles

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Donald Trump campaigned on ending endless wars and now boasts that he has resolved eight wars. In reality, this claim is delusional, and his foreign policy is a disaster. The United States remains mired in ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and now Trump is careening blindly into new wars in Latin America.

The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting U.S. foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and “America First” priorities.

The eight wars Trump claims he has ended include non-existent wars between Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo, and the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended in 2023, after Azerbaijan invaded and ethnically cleansed the ancient Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh. Trump stole credit for peace between Thailand and Cambodia, which was actually mediated by Malaysia, while India insists that it ended its war with Pakistan without help from Trump.

Trump recently invited the presidents of Rwanda and the DRC to Washington to sign a peace deal, but it’s only the latest of many agreements that have failed to end decades of war and proxy war that rage on in the eastern Congo.

Trump even claims to have brought peace to Iran, which was not at war until he and Netanyahu plotted to attack it. Now diplomacy with Iran is dead—torpedoed by Trump’s treacherous use of negotiations as cover for the U.S.-Israeli surprise attack in June, an illegal war right out of Rubio’s neocon playbook.

Rubio has undermined diplomacy with Iran for years. As a senator, he worked to kill the JCPOA nuclear agreement, framed negotiations as appeasement, and repeatedly demanded harsher sanctions or militaryaction. He defended the U.S. and Israeli attacks in June, which confirmed the claims of Iranian hardliners that the United States cannot be trusted. He makes meaningful talks with Iran impossible by insisting that Iran cease all nuclear enrichment and long-range missile development. By aligning U.S. policy with Israel’s, Rubio closed off the only path that has ever reduced tensions with Iran: sustained, good-faith diplomacy.

Trump’s eighth claimed peace agreement was his Gaza “peace plan,” under which Israel still kills and maimsPalestinians every day and allows only 200 truckloads per day of food, water, medicine, and relief supplies into Gaza. With Israeli forces still occupying most of Gaza, no country is sending troops to join Trump’s “stabilization force,” nor will Hamas disarm and leave its people defenseless. Israel still calls the shots, and will only allow rebuilding in Israeli-occupied areas.

As secretary of state, it was Marco Rubio’s job to negotiate peace and an end to the occupation of Palestine. But Rubio’s entire political career has been defined by unwavering support for Israel and corrupted by over a million dollars from pro-Israel donor groups like AIPAC. He refuses to speak to Hamas, insisting on its total isolation and destruction.

Rubio even refuses to negotiate with the weakest, most compromised, but still internationally recognized, Palestinian Authority. In the Senate, he worked to defund and delegitimize the PA, and now he insists it should play no role in Gaza’s future, but he offers no alternative. Contrast this with China, which recently convenedfourteen Palestinian factions for dialogue. With a U.S. secretary of state who won’t talk to any Palestinian actors, the United States is only supporting endless war and occupation.

Ukraine is not on Trump’s list of “eight wars,” but it is the conflict he most loudly promised to end on day one. Trump took his first steps to resolve the crisis in Ukraine with phone calls with Putin and Zelenskyy on February 12, 2025. War Secretary Pete Hegseth told a meeting of America’s NATO allies in Brussels that the U.S. was taking Ukraine’s long-promised NATO membership off the table, and that “we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Zelenskyy and his European backers are still trying to persuade Trump that, with his support, they can win back at the negotiating table what Ukraine and its western allies lost by their tragic decision to reject a negotiated peace in April 2022. Russia was ready to withdraw from all the land it had just occupied, but the U.S. and U.K. persuaded NATO and Ukraine to instead embark on this long war of attrition, in which their negotiating position only grows weaker as Ukraine’s losses mount.

On November 21st, Trump unveiled a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine that was built around the policy Trump and Hegseth had announced in February: no NATO membership, and no return to pre-2014 borders. But once Rubio arrived to lead the U.S. negotiating team in talks in Geneva, he let Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and the Europeans put NATO membership and Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders back on the table.

This was a poison pill to deliberately undermine the basic concept of Ukrainian neutrality that Russia insists is the only way to resolve the security dilemma facing both NATO and Russia and ensure a stable and lasting peace. As a European official crowed to Politico, “Things went in the right direction in Geneva. Still a work in progress, but looking much better now… Rubio is a pro who knows his stuff.”

Andriy Yermak, who led Ukraine’s negotiating team in Geneva, has now been fired in a corruption scandal, reportedly at Trump’s behest, as has Trump’s envoy to Kyiv, Keith Kellogg, who apparently leaked Trump’s plan to the press.

Trump is facing a schism in his foreign policy team that echoes his first term, when he appointed a revolving door of neocons, retired generals and arms industry insiders to top jobs. This time, he has already fired his first National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, several NSC staff, and now General Kellogg,

Trump’s team on Ukraine now includes Vice President J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Deputy National Security Advisor Andy Baker and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who all seem to be on board with the basic policy that Trump and Hegseth announced in February.

But Rubio is keeping alive European hopes of a ceasefire that postpones negotiations over NATO membership and Ukraine’s borders for a later date, to allow NATO to once again build, arm and train Ukrainian forces to retake its lost territories by force, as it did from 2015 to 2022 under cover of the MInsk Accords.

This raises the questions: Does Rubio, like the Europeans and the neocons in Congress, still back the Biden-era strategy of fighting a long proxy war to the last Ukrainian? And if so, is he now in fact working to undermine Trump’s peace efforts?

Ray McGovern, the founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, thinks so, writing “…we are at the threshold on Ukraine, at the beginning of a consequential battle between the neocons and Europeans on one side, and Donald Trump and the realists on the other. Will Trump show the fortitude to see this through and overcome his secretary of state?”

But it’s perhaps in Latin America where Rubio is playing the most aggressive role. Rubio has always promotedregime-change policies, economic strangulation, and U.S. interference targeting left-leaning governments in Latin America. Coming from a conservative Cuban familiy, he has long been one of the most hard-line voices in Washington on Cuba, championing sanctions, opposing any easing of the embargo, and working to reverse Obama-era diplomatic openings.

His position on Venezuela is similar. He was a leading architect of the Trump administration’s failed “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela, promoting crippling sanctions that devastated civilians, while openly endorsing failed coups and military threats.

Now Rubio is pushing Trump into a catastrophic, criminal war with Venezuela. In early 2025, Trump’s administration briefly pursued a diplomatic track with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, spearheaded by envoy Richard Grenell. But Marco Rubio’s hard-line, pressure-first approach gradually overtook the negotiation channel: Trump suspended talks in October 2025, and U.S. policy shifted toward intensified sanctions and military posturing.

Rubio’s hostility extends across the region: he has attacked progressive leaders in Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, and Brazil, while supporting authoritarians aligned with U.S. and Israeli interests. While Trump has warmed to Brazil’s president Lula and craves access to its reserves of rare earth elements, the second largest after China’s, Lula has no illusions about Rubio’s hostility and has refused to even meet with him.

Rubio’s approach is the opposite of diplomacy. He refuses engagement with governments he dislikes, undermines regional institutions, and encourages Washington to isolate and punish rather than negotiate. Instead of supporting peace agreements—such as Colombia’s fragile accords or regional efforts to stabilize Haiti—he treats Latin America as a battleground for ideological crusades.

Rubio’s influence has helped block humanitarian relief, deepen polarization, and shatter openings for regional dialogue. A Secretary of State committed to peace would work with Latin American partners to resolve conflicts, strengthen democracy, and reduce U.S. militarization in the hemisphere. Rubio does the reverse: he inflames tensions, sabotages diplomacy, and pushes U.S. policy back toward the dark era of coups, blockades, proxy wars and death squads.

So why is Trump betraying his most loyal MAGA supporters, who take his promises to “end the era of endless wars” at face value? Why is his administration supporting the same out-of-control American war machine that has run rampant around the world since the rise of neocons like Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s?

Is Trump simply unable to resist the lure of destructive military power that seduces every American president? Trump’s MAGA true believers would like to think that he and they represent a rejection of American imperialism and a new “America First” policy that prioritizes national sovereignty and shared domestic prosperity. But MAGA leaders like Marjorie Taylor Green can see that is not what Trump is delivering.

U.S. secretaries of state wield considerable power, and Trump is not the first president to be led astray by his secretary of state. President Eisenhower is remembered as a champion of peace, for quickly ending the Korean War – then slashing the military budget – and for two defining speeches at the beginning and end of his presidency: his “Chance for Peace” speech after the death of Soviet premier Josef Stalin in 1953; and his Farewell Address in 1960, in which he warned Americans against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex.”

For most of his presidency though, Eisenhower gave his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, free rein to manage U.S. foreign policy. By the time Eisenhower fully grasped the dangers of Dulles’ brinksmanship with the U.S.S.R. and China, the Cold War arms race was running wild. Then Eisenhower’s belated outreach to the Soviets was interrupted by his own ill-health and the U-2 crisis. Hillary Clinton had a similarly destructive and destabilizing impact on Obama’s first-term foreign policy, in Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria and Honduras.

These should be cautionary tales for Trump. If he really wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, not a warmonger, he had better make the necessary personnel changes to his inner circle before it is too late. War with Venezuela is easily avoidable, since the whole world already knows the U.S. pretexts for war are fabricated and false. Rubio has stoked the underlying tensions and led this escalating campaign of lies, threats and murders, so Trump would be wise to replace him before his march to war crosses the point of no return.

This would allow Trump and Rubio’s successor to start rebuilding relations with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to finally change longstanding U.S. policies that keep the Middle East, and now Ukraine, trapped in endless war.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

9 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Introduction: Research as a Technology of “Moderation”

As the UK braced itself for another round of Gaza-related culture-war fallout, a British think tank, More in Common, released a report with a deliberately soothing, above-the-fray title: After Choosing Sides: Britain’s Changing Views on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Its publication coincided with headlines warning of rising antisemitism and a society supposedly fracturing under the strain of Gaza and the wider regional war. Framed as an exercise in bridge-building, the report presented itself as a neutral map of public opinion at a moment of national volatility.

Yet neutrality is precisely what the report performs rather than practices. Its authors segment the British public into moralised categories — “rooted patriots,” who affirm Israel’s “right to exist,” and “progressive activists,” whose willingness to name Israeli violence in Gaza is framed as a threat to social cohesion. Within this schema, pro-Palestinian voices appear less as political actors responding to material realities than as indicators of social risk in a nation imagined to be permanently on the brink.

Mandy Turner, a former professor of research methods who confronted the authors at their own webinar, immediately identified the design problem. Why, she asked, does the term occupation — the standard language of international law and UN reporting — barely register in a document running to well over a hundred pages? Why is Israel’s “right to exist” treated as a central test of legitimacy, while Palestinian self-determination is never posed as a reciprocal claim? The survey’s structure, Turner noted, repeatedly frames questions in ways that invite affirmation of one side while casting suspicion on the other. As she put it, with measured precision, “research methods training and ethics tell us that the way questions are framed elicits certain responses.” The effect is a classic bait-and-switch: design choices quietly channel opinion, and the resulting skew is then offered as evidence of dangerous polarisation.

For Turner, this is not a methodological slip, but a case study in how ostensibly neutral research can be engineered to produce specific political effects: normalising occupation by refusing to name it; centring antisemitism while marginalising Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism; pathologising “progressive activists” as destabilising extremists; and sidestepping the legal and policy frameworks — such as the IHRA definition and the UK’s Prevent duty under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 — that already shape and police speech about Palestine.”

Her critique points to a broader genre of “attitudes,” “community cohesion,” and “campus climate” research in both the UK and the United States. These projects claim to measure fear, polarisation, and discrimination, yet in practice they help determine whose fear is legible, which words are rendered unsayable, and which forms of political solidarity are pre-emptively cast as suspect. Far from calming conflict, such research often functions as a technology of moderation: disciplining speech in the name of balance while leaving underlying structures of power intact.

This essay takes Turner’s critique as a lens through which to examine that genre across the UK and the US, focusing on research and policy initiatives addressing Israel/Palestine and the wider regional war discourse. The central question is not simply whether their data are accurate, but what political order they help sustain: who is framed as dangerous, who is deemed in need of protection, and which forms of speech are managed or suppressed in the name of civility. Ultimately, it asks how these reports operate not merely as descriptions of public opinion, but as instruments that regulate speech and press down — materially and discursively — on Palestinian life itself.

I. Knowing by Not Naming: Conflict Without Occupation, Antisemitism Without Islamophobia

Turner begins with what is absent. Across more than a hundred pages, More in Common’s report barely uses the word occupation — the standard term employed by the UN and by international legal bodies to describe Israel’s control over Palestinian territory. Instead, it consistently substitutes the language of “conflict.” That single lexical choice does heavy political work: decades of military rule are flattened into a symmetrical dispute, and law is quietly replaced by mood music.

The same asymmetry governs the report’s treatment of rights. Respondents are asked whether Israel has a “right to exist,” and the text repeatedly affirms a “Jewish right to self-determination.” Palestinians are never granted a parallel claim. In the survey design, one people appears as a sovereign state whose legitimacy must be defended; the other is encountered primarily as a security problem to be managed. The absence is systematic, not accidental.

This selective vocabulary aligns with existing policy frameworks, shaping how Palestine-related speech is classified, scrutinised, and disciplined within institutional settings. In Britain, lecturers have faced suspension or investigation for using terms such as apartheid in teaching, while Palestinian students have been called into disciplinary processes for circulating scholarly material that cites the International Court of Justice.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism, presented as a neutral monitoring tool, has increasingly functioned as a speech-regulating instrument on campuses. In the United States, similar frameworks have been invoked in cases involving faculty discipline and the denial or delay of student graduations. The Knight First Amendment Institute has warned that such policies risk operating as “de facto speech codes,” even when justified in the language of data collection and safety.

Turner also notes the report’s tone when it comes to the word genocide — a term the authors suggest makes “constructive conversation harder.” Yet the survey data they themselves present complicate that claim. A substantial portion of respondents regard the term as at least somewhat appropriate for describing Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while a much smaller minority rejects it outright. By the report’s own earlier logic — where majority views are cast as “moderate” and minority positions as “extreme” — the designation quietly flips. The discomfort, it seems, is not with extremism, but with facts that refuse to stay polite.

This pattern recurs in parallel US research. Advocacy organisations such as the ADL have produced campus “report cards” that penalise universities where students publicly use prohibited language, including chants naming genocide or apartheid, even as those same terms are absent from the organisations’ analytical prose except when quoted as evidence of student misconduct. The words are treated less as descriptors of reality than as markers of deviance.

The effect is consistent. Material violence is recoded as a problem of discourse. Once that transformation is complete, the emergency is no longer mass civilian death, starvation, and displacement, but the discomfort of observers: a British teenager wearing a keffiyeh; an American professor assigning Amnesty International reports. Structural atrocity fades from view; hurt feelings move to centre stage. And the think-tank reports — calm typography, colourful charts, claims of balance — supply the necessary alibi.

II. Asymmetric “Safety”: Eighteen Pages for One Fear, Eight for the Other

Turner counts pages the way a coroner counts bullet holes. Antisemitism is granted eighteen pages of anxious prose in the More in Common report; Islamophobia limps in with eight. Jews make up roughly 0.5% of Britain’s population, Muslims around 6%. Do the maths. The report does not.

The same lopsided ledger appears elsewhere. When several synagogues in Golders Green were vandalised in May 2025, the attacks dominated headlines for days. When a hijab-wearing teacher in Manchester was shoved and cursed as a “Hamas lover” the same month, it barely registered beyond local feeds. The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,658 anti-Muslim complaints in 2024, a record high, many of them triggered by the visibility of keffiyehs or “ceasefire now” signs. One case among thousands illustrates the pattern: a Palestinian-American nurse in New York was dismissed after her employer took issue with an Instagram post citing Gaza’s rising child death tolls. Her case is typical of those documented by CAIR — meticulously recorded, briefly cited, and then quietly sidelined once the immediate news cycle passes.

Meanwhile, politicians and editorialists clutch antisemitism statistics like rosaries. Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative tracked US media framing during the 2025 spring encampments: headlines warned of “Jew-hatred on campus,” while relying on longstanding stereotyped assumptions that conflate pro-Palestinian protest with antisemitism. The trope predates the present moment by decades — and it continues to do political work.

Turner highlights a striking asymmetry in the report’s own data. Pro-Israel respondents are far more likely to attribute hostile motives to their opponents: 65% describe pro-Palestine Britons as driven by Jew-hatred, and 62% say they deny Israel’s right to exist. Pro-Palestine respondents show a different pattern. They are more likely to credit pro-Israel views to sincere beliefs — Israel’s right to defend itself or historical Jewish vulnerability — and are less likely to attribute their opponents’ views to prejudice, with only around 40% citing Islamophobia.

The implication is hard to ignore: the group most inclined to interpret disagreement as hatred is later framed as calm, patriotic, and moderate, while the group that extends greater interpretive charity is classified as extreme.

What appears in the More in Common report as an asymmetry of attribution becomes, in the US context, an asymmetry of consequence. Universities that receive poor marks on the ADL’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card face reputational damage, donor pressure, and — in some states — heightened scrutiny tied to public funding and legislative oversight. Universities that ignore or sideline warnings from CAIR about anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslim harassment, by contrast, face no comparable financial or political cost; the reports are acknowledged, archived, and quietly shelved.

In Britain, the imbalance is felt at the level of students’ daily lives. Palestinian and Muslim students have been referred to Prevent for displaying symbols such as watermelon badges or keffiyehs — forms of political expression treated as potential indicators of extremism — triggering monitoring, interviews, and enduring records. Jewish students, by contrast, displaying nationalist slogans such as Am Yisrael Chai typically encounter responses framed as pastoral or low-level disciplinary matters: a quiet conversation, an administrative note, reassurance rather than surveillance.

Pro-Palestinian expression is routinely coded as a security risk, while pro-Israeli expression is treated as an identity claim. One draws institutional enforcement and disruption; the other attracts institutional protection.

Safety, in these reports, is portion-controlled like siege rations: full bowls for one table, crumbs for the other. The think tanks call it data. Palestinians and their allies experience it as slow suffocation.

III. Who Gets to Speak? Segments, Focus Groups, and the Pathologisation of “Progressive Activists”

Turner dissects the report like a prosecutor cross-examining a biased witness, beginning with a basic question: who gets to speak, who gets labelled, and who disappears. More in Common sorts Britons into seven psychometric segments — “progressive activists” for the keffiyeh-wearers, “rooted patriots” for the flag-wavers — using proprietary survey modelling and attitudinal clustering, while keeping the criteria and weighting largely undisclosed.

The report does not publish the survey questions that generate these categories, nor does it provide full cross-tabulations by age, gender, region, class, or religion. Patterns that would complicate the typology — such as Scotland’s markedly more pro-Palestinian lean, or women’s lower levels of support for Israel — are noted in passing and never integrated into the segmentation model. The result is a black-box sorting exercise that assigns political meaning without disclosing how those meanings were produced.

Those segments then structure the focus groups — and stack the deck. Two groups are drawn from the “progressive activist” category, yet their collective voice is reduced to a small number of quotations, including repeated lines from the same participant clustered late in the report and framed with visible editorial disapproval. One such voice is introduced in language that signals excess or obstinacy, with remarks summarised along the lines of “you can’t talk about this without naming genocide” or “any attempt at balance is complicity” — positions presented less as political arguments than as evidence of emotional rigidity.

By contrast, participants drawn from “rooted patriots” and adjacent categories are quoted frequently, at length, and often without visible labelling. Their comments circulate as common sense: paraphrased statements such as “both sides have suffered,” “it’s too complicated to take a side,” or “activists are making things worse by being so extreme” appear unmarked by category and unchallenged by editorial framing. These views are allowed to stand as reasonable observations rather than as one position among many.

Some comments even mock the segmentation itself, floating above the taxonomy that constrains others. Several participants, quoted without categorical labels, dismiss the entire issue as something activists and the media have “turned into a drama,” or complain that “both sides make it impossible to talk normally” — language that implicitly rejects the premises of international law without ever naming the occupation itself. One respondent shrugs that they are “tired of hearing about occupation, history, who started it,” and would rather “get back to normal life,” a sentiment presented as pragmatic moderation rather than political erasure. Another complains that discussions of Gaza have become “moral grandstanding,” positioning disengagement as a sign of balance and maturity.

What emerges is not a balanced qualitative inquiry but a selective audition, in which denial — whether overt or through cultivated indifference — enjoys the longest airtime, and silence about occupation passes as common sense rather than political choice.

The rigged chorus is not a one-off. In Britain, a 2023 report by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) documented the same silencing pattern across higher education. Examining dozens of cases between 2017 and 2022, it showed how IHRA-related complaints triggered investigations: lecturers questioned for teaching about apartheid, student unions scrutinised over BDS motions, and events cancelled because Nakba appeared in a title. In the overwhelming majority of cases, no sanctions ultimately followed. Yet the damage was already done — months-long investigations, reputational strain, stalled careers, and lost opportunities.

The BRISMES/ELSC report also documented a broader chilling effect. Palestinian and Arab academics described altering syllabi, withdrawing from public events, or shelving research after informal warnings or “monitoring” concerns, even in the absence of any finding of wrongdoing.

In publicly reported cases at UK universities, including Edinburgh and SOAS, staff cited fear of complaints and reputational harm as reasons for scaling back teaching and programming related to Gaza, settler-colonialism, or Zionism. Institutional reviews of antisemitism and racism increasingly relied on external guidance aligned with pro-Israel advocacy, with IHRA functioning less as one definition among others than as a default threshold for scrutiny.

In the United States, the same dynamic appears through administrative compliance mechanisms that prioritise risk management over open inquiry. At Northwestern University, a mandatory antisemitism training module introduced in 2025 — developed in consultation with mainstream Jewish communal organisations, including the ADL — provoked protest from Palestinian, Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish students. Critics argued that the material blurred the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, presented contested political claims as settled fact, and framed Palestinian advocacy primarily through a security lens. When many students delayed or refused completion, the university responded with administrative holds affecting enrolment status and access to funding, reframing a pedagogical dispute as a matter of safety and compliance. Legal challenges followed; the policy remained in force while objections were processed.

Rutgers University’s Center for Security, Race and Rights analysed the architecture behind such measures in its 2023 report Presumptively Antisemitic. The study traced how counter-extremism discourse, donor-funded research, and lobbying networks converge to cast Muslim and Palestinian political expression as inherently suspect — treating speech not as a protected right, but as an early warning signal. Within a short period, the Center itself became a target. In 2024, Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and the House publicly accused it of promoting antisemitism or extremism, initiating inquiries into its funding and programming. The message was unmistakable: scrutinise the system, and you are reclassified by it. The “progressive activist” emerges less as a social category than as a managed threat.

Turner’s demand to “show your workings” is therefore not methodological nit-picking; it is a democratic insistence. Why are those who name occupation, apartheid, or genocide treated as pathological or dangerous, while denial and disengagement are welcomed as maturity? Speech here is not free; it is licensed. Moderation functions as a franchise, with silence as its entry fee. Everyone else auditions for erasure.

As encampments are dismantled and humanitarian access to Gaza remains obstructed, the central danger is not unruly protest but this engineered quiet. It operates through curated quotations, stalled investigations, missing datasets, and sealed reports — one vetted soundbite, one vanished testimony, one locked ledger at a time.

IV. Recommendations That Ignore the Machinery of Repression

Turner saves the scalpel for last: the report’s closing recommendations. They are presented as practical correctives to polarisation: explicit reassurance that criticism of the Israeli government is “legitimate”; encouragement for schools to host “open debate” on Israel–Palestine; calls for educators to distinguish clearly between antisemitism and political disagreement; and appeals for more empathetic dialogue across divided “segments.” Offered as solutions, these prescriptions function like aspirin for a bullet wound. On paper, they sound measured and reasonable. In practice, they read like dispatches from an alternate universe — one in which speech on Palestine is not already regulated by statute, funding leverage, and security doctrine.

This mismatch between prescription and reality becomes clear once the institutional terrain is examined. In Britain, the IHRA definition did not simply drift into policy. After its adoption by the UK government in 2016, universities came under sustained pressure to comply. In 2020, then education secretary Gavin Williamson warned institutions that failure to adopt IHRA could expose them to investigation and potential sanctions by the Office for Students, including financial penalties following antisemitism complaints.

The chilling effects are now well documented: events cancelled over a single word in a title, lecturers investigated for teaching about apartheid, student unions scrutinised for BDS motions. While a small number of universities — including Edinburgh — have periodically revisited adoption, most have opted for pre-emptive compliance and routinised self-censorship. In this environment, appeals to “open debate” that omit the enforcement architecture read less like principle than evasion.

The Prevent duty compounds the contradiction. Since 2023, civil-liberties groups, journalists, and educators have documented increased referrals involving children and students for expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity — badges, drawings, chants, or statements of anger about Gaza interpreted as potential indicators of extremism. Many referrals result in no further action, but the consequences are nonetheless real: interviews, safeguarding panels, family anxiety, and enduring records. Human-rights organisations, including Amnesty International, have repeatedly criticised Prevent for racialised overreach and called for its repeal. By 2025, universities such as SOAS again became sites of controversy over disciplinary measures and intensified scrutiny of Palestinian activism. Recommending “debate” in this terrain is not naïve; it is disingenuous.

Across the Atlantic, the same dissonance appears at scale. Harvard University released two major task-force reports on 29 April 2025 — one on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, the other on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias — together exceeding 500 pages. Both acknowledged fear, harassment, and exclusion across communities and affirmed commitments to inclusion and free expression.

Yet their publication coincided with intensified federal pressure. Under expanded Title VI enforcement tied to campus protests over Gaza, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding were placed under review across US universities. Columbia, Northwestern, UCLA, and dozens of others faced investigations or funding threats by mid-2025. In this context, universities learned quickly that institutional survival depended less on protecting speech than on managing it.

The Knight First Amendment Institute has repeatedly warned that embedding IHRA in disciplinary or compliance frameworks risks violating academic freedom. Yet campus trainings routinely conclude with the same hollow assurance — that legitimate criticism of Israel is permitted — even as students report being labelled extremists, harassed for wearing keffiyehs, or discouraged from pursuing research on Palestine. The contradiction is structural, not accidental.

Turner’s point is devastating precisely because it is modest: show your workings. Name the mechanisms before prescribing the cure. When reports urge moderation without confronting IHRA, Prevent, or Title VI enforcement, they normalise repression. Suspicion becomes procedural. Surveillance becomes common sense.

Addendum: Extending the Frame — Lebanon and Iran

The same research grammar that governs Palestine discourse is increasingly visible in studies and policy reports on Lebanon and Iran. In both cases, structural conditions — foreign intervention, sanctions regimes, occupation by proxy, and economic strangulation — are displaced by the language of “instability,” “sectarianism,” or “radical influence.” Research on Lebanon, particularly following Israel’s repeated military campaigns and the country’s economic collapse, often treats Hezbollah primarily as an extremist pathology rather than as a political actor embedded in a society shaped by displacement and unresolved war. Iran is similarly framed less as a state responding to encirclement and sanctions than as a civilisational threat whose internal dissent must be read through a security lens.

These studies acknowledge civilian suffering but avoid analysing the political forces that produce it. They frame resistance as a problem of radicalisation rather than as a response to violence or dispossession. They largely omit legal questions surrounding occupation, sanctions, and the use of force. Lebanon and Iran therefore confirm, rather than complicate, the argument: the same moderating logic operates across different national contexts.

Conclusion: Reading Research as Part of the Battlefield

In the UK and the United States, research on “social cohesion,” “campus climate,” and “changing attitudes” describe as well as govern opinion. These reports help decide which forms of grief are intelligible, which solidarities are acceptable, and which kinds of speech are reclassified as threats. Read this way, research is not downstream from power. It is one of its quieter instruments.

Across the literature examined here — from After Choosing Sides to campus audits, task-force reports, and security-framed studies — certain patterns recur. Structural realities are displaced by abstract language; antisemitism is positioned as the organising threat; Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism remain secondary; and the legal and policy frameworks that already discipline speech fade into the background. The result is containment.

Turner’s intervention offers a method for reading this genre against itself. Her insistence on transparency asks who sets categories, whose fear counts, and which pressures are rendered invisible. It reframes research as a site of political struggle, rather than neutral mediation.

For scholars committed to justice, it is not enough to measure attitudes towards a sanitised “conflict.” One must also map the conditions under which those attitudes are permitted to surface at all. And for activists and students encountering these reports from the outside, Turner’s critique offers both a warning and an invitation: research is itself a battlefield. Vigilant reading, critique, and counter-research are forms of resistance.

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.

9 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

The core ethos of Humanity is Kindness and Truth but this is grossly violated by genocidally racist, egregiously mendacious and endlessly thieving Apartheid Israel. In its killing of Palestinians in the ongoing Gaza Genocide US-backed Apartheid Israel hugely exceeds all countries in the killing of children and journalists on a per capita basis. Femicide is the intentional killing of women or girls and in the Gaza Genocide Apartheid Israel vastly exceeds all countries in the killing of females.

According to the World Population Review: “Femicide, also known as feminicide, is the intentional murder of women or girls because of their gender. It’s a severe form of violence against women, often occurring within intimate relationships or families, and can be linked to harmful gender roles, religious beliefs, or social practices” [1].

However in actuality the definition is broader and encompasses “intentional” killing of females for a variety of reasons e.g. the extreme narcissism of the psychotic killers, rejection of sexual advances, infidelity, sexist cultural reasons, and likely victim complaint to police about sexual and other violent abuse. Thus in Australia “femicides per year per 100K females” in 2025 is 0.4 [1]. The population of Australia in 2025 is 27.5 million and about 50% (13.75 million) are female, this indicating (0.4 deaths per 100,000 females) x 137.5 = 55 femicides per year. This accords with the Australian Institute of Criminology that estimated 72 female homicides in about 2023 (female population about 13.45 million) for “femicides per year per 100K females” of (72 deaths / 13.45 million females) / 10 = 0.54 [2].

(A). 1.26 “femicides per year per 100K females” for the World.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW): “Females are disproportionately the victims of intimate partner and domestic homicide around the world. A United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report on homicide estimated that globally, while 81% of all homicide victims were male, 82% of intimate partner homicide victims were female and 64% of intimate partner/family-related homicide victims were female in 2017 (UNODC 2019). A UNODC report on femicides estimated that 3 in 5 (60% or 51,100) women and girls who were intentionally killed worldwide in 2023 were killed by an intimate partner or other family member (UNODC and UN Women 2024). For Oceania (which includes Australia), the intimate partner/family-related homicide rate for females was 1.5 victims per 100,000 females in the population. Across global regions, the intimate partner/family-related homicide rate ranged from 0.6 victims per 100,000 females in Europe to 2.9 victims per 100,000 females in Africa (UNODC and UN Women 2024)” [3].

Females represent a bit over 50% of Humanity. Accordingly the world female population in 2023 was about 8,090 million/2 = 4,045 million. 51,100 women and girls killed globally in 2023 means that the femicide rate in 2023 for the World (“femicides per year per 100K females”) was (51,100 females killed/4,045 million females)/ 10 = 1.26.

“Femicides per year per 100,000 females” has been reported by World Population Review for various countries (2025) with the very worst countries being as follows: Paraguay (19.0), Central African Republic (10.6), Jamaica (9.3), South Africa ( 9.0), Botswana (7.6), Myanmar (7.3), and Namibia (6.8) [1]. However as carefully explained below “femicides per year per 100,000 females” is an utterly shocking 18,949 for the Gaza Genocide inflicted by US-backed Zionist Israelis on the Gaza Concentration Camp.

(B). Utterly shocking femicide in the Gaza Genocide by US-backed Apartheid Israel in Gaza – 18,949 “femicides per year per 100K females” in Gaza..

Based on the data of expert epidemiologists published in the leading medical journal The Lancet it is inexorably estimated that after 2 years of the Gaza Genocide deaths from violence and deprivation totalled 875,000 in Gaza, with this including an estimated 325,000 children, 207,000 women and 342,000 men [4]. The females killed over 2 years include 207,000 women plus 325,000/2 = 162,500 female children, for a total of 369,500 females killed over 2 years. . One can thence estimate an utterly shocking 18,949 “femicides per year per 100K females” in Gaza. A detailed and documented analysis is systematically set out below.

An international team of expert epidemiologists published in The Lancet found that 64,260 Gazans had been killed violently by 30 June 2024 (Day 269 of the Gaza Genocide) [5]. Assuming the same rate of killing, this translates to 174,625 Direct (violent) deaths by 7 October 2025 (Day 731 i.e. after 2 years) [5-8].

However other expert epidemiologists published in The Lancet and elsewhere have “conservatively” estimated that deaths from deprivation (Indirect deaths) are 4 times the Direct deaths [9-13], this implying 174,625 x 4 = 698,500 or about 700,000 Indirect deaths and a total of 875,000 “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google this phrase) by 7 October 2025 [6-8].

Euro-Med Monitor: “ The Israeli army killed 42,510 Palestinians over the course of the 200-day attack, 38,621 of whom were civilians, including 10,091 women and 15,780 children”. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has thus estimated that of deaths reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health the breakdown was 37.1% (children), 23.7% (women) and 39.1% (men) [14, 15]. Conservatively assuming that these proportions apply to the total of 875,000 Gaza deaths (and in particular ignoring the extreme vulnerability of infants [16]) indicates deaths of 325,000 children, 207,000 women and 342,000 men after 2 years of the Gaza Genocide [6-8] (for related pertinent articles and sites overwhelmingly ignored by Zionist-perverted Western Mainstream media articles see [17-56]).

The genocidal Zionist “intent to destroy in whole or in part” the Palestinians has been explicitly expressed by Zionist leaders for 140 years (for details see “Zionist quotes re racism and Palestinian Genocide” [57]) and is apparent from US-backed Apartheid Israel having killed 36.5% of the pre-war Gaza population in 2 years, and despite a supposed “ceasefire” is still mercilessly killing them. This is genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [58], and the female part of it is the sustained, continuing and intentional killing of females i.e. femicide.

The females killed in 2 years of the US-backed Zionist Israeli femicide include 207,000 women and 162,500 female children for a total of 369,500 females. The average population of Gaza in this period has been (2.4 million + 1.5 million) / 2 = 1.95 million, of which half (0.975 million) were female

Accordingly the “femicides per year per 100K females” in Gaza over 2 years has been (369,500 females killed /0.975 million average female population)/(2 years x 10) = 18,949. This is 18,949/ 19.0 = 997 times greater than that for the world’s worst country for femicide, Paraguay (19.0) [1] and 18,949/1.26 = 15,039 times greater than that for the whole World [1, 3].

(C). Comparing 18,949 “femicides per year per 100K females” in the Zionist-imposed Gaza Genocide with 17,544 in the Nazi-imposed Jewish Genocide in WW2.

5.1-5-8 million Jews were killed out of a pre-war Jewish population of 8.7 million in Nazi-occupied Europe [59-61]. For simplicity let us use the extremely widely-quoted figure of 6 million Jewish deaths from violence and deprivation in the 6 years of WW2. Of 8.7 million Jews pre-war in the occupied territories about half (4.35 million) were female adults and female children. 1.5 million Jewish children and hence 4.5 million Jewish adults were killed [62]. Assuming that half the adults killed were females (2.25 million) and likewise half the 1.5 million children killed were female (0.75 million) then female deaths totalled 0.75 million + 2.25 million = 3.00 million. The average female Jewish population was (4.35 million + 1.35 million)/2 = 2.85 million. Accordingly Jewish “femicides per year per 100K females” in Nazi-occupied Europe = (3,000,000 female Jewish deaths/ 2.85 million)/ (6 years x 10) = 17,544 – similar to the 18,949 “femicides per year per 100K females” in the Gaza Genocide.

Nazi is as Nazi does. Nazism is as Nazism does, Terrorist is as terrorist does. Terrorism is as terrorism does.

(D). The moral unresponsiveness of Western women, men and journalists.

The West has looked on passively in the face of an ongoing Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust involving 875,000 Gaza deaths from violence and deprivation over 2 years. The Gaza Genocide has involved the killing by Zionist Israelis of an estimated 325,000 children, 207,000 women and 342,000 men in the Gaza Concentration Camp [4]. Yet the women (and men) of the West are silent (except for the humanitarians of the Left) in the face of horrific killing of women, children, men and journalists.

(1). Western silence over horrific Zionist Israeli-imposed mass Femicide. The Australian Labor Party or ALP (presently in government) has commented on its success in promoting women and gender equality: “In addition to leading the major policy changes that have propelled gender equality in Australia, the ALP also leads in the representation of women in parliament. Labor is the first majority woman Federal Government, with women making up 52% of the Labor Caucus. And the Albanese Labor Government’s Cabinet is now the first ever Federal Cabinet to be gender equal – with women comprising 11 of the 22 Ministers” [63]. However the Zionist-perverted Labor Government (52% women) has failed to take any concrete action against the perpetrators of the Gaza Genocide – it rightly imposed sanctions on Russia for its illegal invasion of Ukraine but refuses to take any concrete action against Apartheid Israel over its ongoing Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust. Conversely it has backed a 2 year Zionist campaign of “antisemitism hysteria”, “terror hysteria” and “Zionist McCarthyism” threatening Australian human rights to minimize public discussion of the horrific Gaza Genocide. The only Federal MPs protesting the Gaza Genocide have been the Greens and several decent, like-minded Independents (notably ex-Green Senator Lidia Thorpe, ex-Labor Senator Fatima Payman, Senator David Pocock and decent Independent MPs Dr Helen Haines and Andrew Wilkie). The women of the pro-Zionist Australian Center-Right Labor Government and Right-Far Right Coalition Opposition are silent in the face of the horrific Gaza Femicide. Western women (and men) are silent except for the Left.

(2). Western silence over horrific Zionist Israeli-imposed mass Paedocide (child killing). Even before the Zionazi-planned Gaza Genocide commenced on 7 October 2023, Apartheid Israel was among world leaders in the killing of children. Thus as assessed in June 2022 “children killed per year per million of total territory population” was 25.8 (Occupied Palestinian Territory), 53.6 (Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of Congo), 75.7 (Honduras), 7.6 (the World) and 2.6 (Indian Jammu and Kashmir) [64]. However “children killed per year per million of total territory population” in 2 years of the Gaza Genocide = (325,000 children killed / 2 years)/ (1.95 million average population) = 83,333 versus 7.6 for the World. Western women (and men) are silent except for the Left.

(3). Western silence over horrific Zionist Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide. Western Mainstream media report about “70,000” Gazans killed over 2 years whereas based on data from expert epidemiologists and published in the leading medical journal The Lancet, Gaza “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google the phrase) total 875,000. Western women (and men) are silent except for the Left.

(4). Western silence over horrific Zionist Israeli killing of journalists.On 18 August 2025 I estimated that “In the 7 October 2023 onwards Gaza Massacre “journalists killed per year per million of population” is presently 64.5 , this being a shocking 7,679 times greater than the World average in the same period (0.0084)” [65, 66]. After 2 years of killing [4] the “journalists killed per year per million of territory population” for Gaza was (270 journalists killed/ 2 years) /(1.95 million average population) = 69.2. Cowardly, craven, US-beholden and Zionist-perverted Western female and male journalists (presstitutes) are silent except for the Left.

Final comments and conclusions

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent people must (a) inform everyone they can (Mainstream media, politicians and commentariat presstitutes certainly won’t), (b) demand “all human rights for all”, and (c) urge and apply draconian global Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against genocidally racist and child-, mother-, and women-killing Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, companies and countries complicit in its appalling crimes against Humanity.

References.

[1]. “Femicide rates by country 2025”, World Population Review, 2025: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/femicide-rates-by-country .

[2]. Australian Institute of Criminology, “Australia sees a rise in female intimate partner homicide in new research report”, 30 April 2024: https://www.aic.gov.au/media-centre/news/australia-sees-rise-female-intimate-partner-homicide-new-research-report .

[3]. “Family, domestic and sexual violence”, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), 30 July 2025: https://www.aihw.gov.au/family-domestic-and-sexual-violence/responses-and-outcomes/domestic-homicide .

[4]. Gideon Polya, “ Unforgivable 2-Year Gaza Massacre, Gaza Genocide & Gaza Holocaust By 50 Appalling Numbers”, Countercurrents (and thence perforce re-published in in Mainstream media lying”) , 14 October 2025: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/14102025-msm-ignored-gaza-genocide-by-50-appalling-numbers .

[5]. Zeina Jamaluddine, Hanan Abukmail, Sarah Aly, Oona M R Campbell, and Francesco Checchi, “Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis”, The Lancet, 9 January 2025: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02678-3/fulltext .

[6]. Gideon Polya, “Gideon Polya Rally Speech Demanded Action On 680,000 Gaza Deaths By 25/4/25 – Now 872,000”, Countercurrents, 7 October 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/10/gideon-polya-rally-speech-demanded-action-on-680000-gaza-deaths-by-25-4-25-now-872000/ .

[7 ]. Gideon Polya, “Genocide denialists and apologists must remember the entreaty to ‘bear witness’”, Green Left, 8 October 2025: https://www.greenleft.org.au/2025/1440/analysis/genocide-denialists-and-apologists-must-remember-entreaty-bear-witness .

[8]. “Australian Mainstream media lying & censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/australian-mainstream-media-lying-censorshp .

[9]. UNWRA, “UNRWA Situation Report #184 on the Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem”, 15 August 2025: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/unrwa-sitrep-184-15aug25/ .

[10]. World Food Program, “Risk of famine across all of Gaza, new report says”, 12 May 2025: https://www.wfp.org/news/risk-famine-across-all-gaza-new-report-says

[11]. UNHCR, Refworld, “Geneva. Declaration Secretariat. Global burden of armed violence”, 2008: https://www.refworld.org/reference/research/gds/2008/en/64390 .

[12]. Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential”, The Lancet, Volume 404, Issue 10449, p237-238, 10 July, 2024: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext .

[13]. Devi Sridhar, “Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza”, The Guardian, 5 September 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/scientists-death-disease-gaza-polio-vaccinations-israel.

[14]. Euro-Med Monitor, “Israeli Army Poised to Demolish Beit Lahia, Gaza”, Mirage News, 24 April 2024: https://www.miragenews.com/israeli-army-poised-to-demolish-beit-lahia-gaza-1221354/ .

[15]. Euro-Med Human Rights Watch, “Of the 50,292 Palestinians killed—including those still buried under the debris—33 per cent were children, and 21 per cent were women [and hence 46% men]”, 6 October 2024: https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6494/New-report..-De-Gaza:-A-Year-of-Israel%E2%80%99s-Genocide-and-the-Collapse-of-World-Order .

[16]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, 2nd edition, Korsgaard Publishing, 2021.

[17]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya,Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Australian mainstream media continue to hugely understate Gazan death toll”, Countercurrents, 15 September 2025: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/26625-european-zionist-settler-colonialism-summarized .

[18]. Gideon Polya, “Gaza: Apply Sanctions To Apartheid Israel, US, UK, German, French, Australian & US Alliance State Terrorism”, Just International, 22 August 2025: https://just-international.org/articles/gaza-apply-sanctions-to-apartheid-israel-us-uk-german-french-australian-us-alliance-state-terrorism/ .

[19]. “Gideon Polya”: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/home .

[20]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead”, Arena, 11 July 2025: https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/ .

[21]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Gaza death toll far worse than reported in Western media” Independent Australia, 12 August 2025: https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/gaza-death-toll-far-worse-than-reported-in-western-media,20034 .

[22]. Kevin Maimann, “1.7 million” Palestinians in Gaza? Trump’s statement raises questions about death toll”, CBC, 13 February 2025: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559 .

[23]. John Menadue, “The real death toll in Gaza”, Pearls & Irritations, 5 September 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/09/the-real-death-toll-in-gaza/ .

[24]. Ralph Nader, “Open letter to journalists on the vast undercount of deaths and serious injuries in Gaza”, Pearls & Irritations, 20 August 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/open-letter-to-journalists-on-the-vast-undercount-of-deaths-and-serious-injuries-in-gaza/ .

[25]. Gideon Polya, “10-fold MSM undercounting of 680,000 Gaza deaths”, Pearls & Irritations, 21 August 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/letters_to_editor/2025/08/10-fold-msm-undercounting-of-680000-gaza-deaths/ .

[26]. Gideon Polya, “Chinese, Bengali and Gaza holocausts”, Pearls & Irritations, 2 September 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/letters_to_editor/2025/09/chinese-bengali-and-gaza-holocausts/ .

[27]. Middle East Monitor, “680,000 dead”, 13 September 2025: https://x.com/MiddleEastMnt/status/1966532981058605192 .

[28]. Gideon Polya, “Gaza Genocide By Numbers: Apply BDS Over 0.7 Million Gaza Deaths From Violence And Imposed Deprivation”, 4 July 2025: https://eurasia.ro/2025/07/07/gaza-genocide-by-numbers-apply-bds-over-0-7-million-gaza-deaths-from-violence-and-imposed-deprivation/ .

[29]. Gideon Polya, “Estimated 273,000 Gazans Killed In the First Year Of Oxford Union-Perceived Gaza Genocide By Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 6 December 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/12/estimated-273000-gazans-killed-in-the-first-year-of-oxford-union-perceived-gaza-genocide-by-apartheid-israel/ .

[30]. Gideon Polya, “Reckoning: 553,000 Gaza Deaths From Violence & Deprivation Demand Global Sanctions & Huge Reparations”, Countercurrents, 21 January 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/reckoning-553000-gaza-deaths-from-violence-deprivation-demand-global-sanctions-huge-reparations/ .

[31]. Gideon Polya, “Zionist-perverted, US Lackey Australia Ignores Palestinian Genocide On Anzac Day & Election Day”, Countercurrents, 23 April 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/04/zionist-perverted-us-lackey-australia-ignores-palestinian-genocide-on-anzac-day-election-day/ .

[32]. Gideon Polya, “The Lancet: 64,260 Gaza Violent Deaths Indicating 257,000 Indirect Deaths In 9 Months”, Countercurrents, 14 January 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/the-lancet-64260-gaza-violent-deaths-indicating-257000-indirect-deaths-in-9-months/

[33]. Gideon Polya, “Open Letter To Australian MPs: Mainstream Undercounting 0.6 Million Gaza Deaths”, Countercurrents, 5 April 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/04/open-letter-to-australian-mps-mainstream-undercounting-0-6-million-gaza-deaths/ .

[34]. Gideon Polya, “Australian Elections: Australian Voters Deceived By US- And Zionist-perverted Mainstream Media & Politicians”, Countercurrents, 10 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/australian-elections-australian-voters-deceived-by-us-and-zionist-perverted-mainstream-media-politicians/ .

[35]. Susan Abulhawa, “Math proves that Israel’s stated goals are an epic lie”, The Electronic Intifada, 27 June 2024: https://electronicintifada.net/content/math-proves-israels-stated-goals-are-epic-lie/47371 .

[36]. Gideon Polya, “Estimated 273,000 Gazans Killed In the First Year Of Oxford Union-Perceived Gaza Genocide By Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 6 December 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/12/estimated-273000-gazans-killed-in-the-first-year-of-oxford-union-perceived-gaza-genocide-by-apartheid-israel/ .

[37]. Gideon Polya, “Holocaust Denial Exposed: US, Western & Australian Mainstream Media Lying By Omission Over Gaza Genocide”, 20 October 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/10/holocaust-denial-exposed-us-western-australian-mainstream-media-lying-by-omission-over-gaza-genocide/ .

[38]. Gideon Polya, “335,500 Gaza Dead Ignored By Western Mainstream Media: Input To Special Rapporteur Report To Human Rights Council”, 17 October 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/10/335500-gaza-dead-ignored-by-western-mainstream-media-input-to-special-rapporteur-report-to-human-rights-council/ .

[39]. Ralph Nader, “Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount. 40,000? It’s more like 300,000 – treachery on both sides”, Capitol Hill Citizen, August-September 2024: https://www.capitolhillcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CHC10.August2024WEB2_01.pdf

[40]. “EXPOSING THE GAZA DEATH UNDERCOUNT, BY RALPH NADER; Congressional Record Vol. 170, No. 152: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-170/issue-152/extensions-of-remarks-section/article/E1000-3 .

[41]. Gideon Polya, “Stop The Killing & Occupation: Comparisons Of Jewish Israeli-Imposed Gaza Genocide Deaths With Nazi Atrocities”, Countercurrents, 12 November 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/11/stop-the-killing-occupation-comparisons-of-jewish-israeli-imposed-gaza-genocide-deaths-with-nazi-atrocities/ .

[42]. Gideon Polya, “Why Cowardly & Racist Australian Labor Government Won’t Apply Sanctions To Genocidal Apartheid Israel”, Counteercurrents, 27 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/why-cowardly-racist-australian-labor-government-wont-apply-sanctions-to-genocidal-apartheid-israel/ .

[43]. “Racist & lying Australian Mainstream ignores awful truths”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/racist-lying-australian-mainstream-ignores-awful-truths .

[44]. Gideon Polya, “LeMay, Albright & Trump: 3 US Officials Who Confessed To US Mass Murder Of Civilians”, Countercurrents,17 March 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/03/lemay-albright-trump-3-us-officials-who-confessed-to-us-mass-murder-of-civilians/ .

[45]. Kevin Maimann, “1.7 million’ Palestinians in Gaza? Trump’s statement raises questions about death toll”, CBC, 13 February 2025: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559 .

[46]. Arwa Mahdawi, Trump’s Gaza remarks are no surprise: ethnic cleansing was always the plan”, The Guardian, 6 February 2025: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/05/trump-gaza-ethnic-cleansing

[47]. Jonathan Cook, “Trump Gaza Plan ”, X, 5 February 2025: https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1887109208752918549 .

[48]. Gideon Polya, “Why Cowardly & Racist Australian Labor Government Won’t Apply Sanctions To Genocidal Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 27 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/why-cowardly-racist-australian-labor-government-wont-apply-sanctions-to-genocidal-apartheid-israel/ .

[49]. Quds News Network, “377,000 Missing in Gaza, Half of Them Children, from Pre-Genocide Population of 2.2 Million”, Countercurrents, 25 June 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/06/377000-missing-in-gaza-half-of-them-children-from-pre-genocide-population-of-2-2-million/ .

[50]. Stuart Rees, “A century of deceit: Towards a new understanding of the colonisation of Palestine”, Pearls & Irritations, October 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/10/a-century-of-deceit-the-colonisation-of-palestine-towards-a-new-understanding/ .

[51]. Gideon Polya, “ Gideon Polya Rally Speech Demanded Action On 680,000 Gaza Deaths By 25/4/25 – Now 872,000”, Countercurrents, 7 October 2025: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/7102025-gaza-rally-speech-680000-deaths-2542025-8750002-years .

[52]. “Mainstream media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/home .

[53]. Australian Mainstream lying & censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/australian-mainstream-media-lying-censorshp .

[54]. “Gideon Polya Countercurrents articles”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/gideon-polya-countercurrents-articles .

[55]. “Countercurrents articles by Gideon Polya”: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/countercurrents-articles .

[56]. “Palestine genocide essays”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/ .

[57]. “Zionist quotes re racism and Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/zionist-quotes .

[58]. “UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf .

[59. Gideon Polya, “UK Zionist Historian Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) Variously Ignored Or Minimized WW2 Bengali Holocaust”, Countercurents, 19 February 2015: https://countercurrents.org/polya190215.htm .

[60]. Martin Gilbert, “Jewish History Atlas”, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1969.

[61]. Martin Gilbert “Atlas of the Holocaust”, Michael Joseph, London, 1982.

[62]. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopaedia, “Children during the Holocaust”: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/children-during-the-holocaust .

[63]. Labor, “Labor Government and women”, 16 April 2025: https://www.alp.org.au/our-history/labor-governments-and-women/ .

[64]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel Among World Leaders For Killing Children”, Countercurrents, 15 June 2022: https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/apartheid-israel-among-world-leaders-for-killing-children/ .

[65]. Gideon Polya, “Anas Al-Sharif Died Reporting Gaza Holocaust: Israel Leads World In Killing Journalists”, Countercurrents, 18 August 2025: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/18825-anas-al-sharif-heroic-gaza-journalists .

[66]. Gideon Polya, “Anas Al-Sharif Died Reporting Gaza Holocaust: Israel Leads World In Killing Journalists”, Just International, 28 August 2025: https://just-international.org/articles/anas-al-sharif-died-reporting-gaza-holocaust-israel-leads-world-in-killing-journalists/ .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades.

9 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (QNN)- Israel has violated the Gaza ceasefire at least 738 times in 60 days, killing hundreds of Palestinians since the truce came into effect on 10 October, according to the Gaza Government Media Office on Tuesday.

Attack and Killings

The Office said about 386 civilians have been killed and 980 others injured in the violations, with children, women and the elderly accounting for the majority of the victims.

The Office condemned “in the strongest terms the continued serious and systematic violations of the ceasefire agreement by the Israeli occupation authorities,” adding “these violations constitute a flagrant breach of international humanitarian law and the humanitarian protocol attached to the agreement.”

The Office added that Israel shot at civilians 205 times, raided residential areas beyond the “yellow line” 37 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 358 times, and demolished people’s properties on 138 occasions. It added that Israel has also abducted 38 Palestinians from Gaza during the 50 days.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said over 70,100 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the genocide in Ocotber 2023.

Aid Entry

Israel has also continued to block vital humanitarian aid and destroy infrastructure across the Strip, the Office said.

“The humanitarian situation in Gaza is deteriorating at an unprecedented rate, and the Israeli aggression has destroyed infrastructure and essential services,” Ismail al-Thawabta, director of the office, added.

The Office noted that Israel has failed to meet even the minimum agreed-upon levels of aid: only 13,511 trucks entered the Gaza Strip over the 60 days of ceasefire, out of the 36,000 that were supposed to enter. This amounts to an average of just 226 trucks per day, compared to the 600 scheduled daily. 

“This serious shortfall has prolonged the shortages of food, medicine, water, and fuel, further deepening the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

Over the same period, only 315 fuel trucks entered Gaza out of the 3,000 that were supposed to be delivered, an average of just 5 trucks per day compared to the 50 stipulated in the agreement. 

“This means the occupation met only 10% of the agreed fuel quantities, leaving hospitals, bakeries, and water and sanitation facilities nearly at a standstill, and intensifying the daily suffering of civilians.”

9 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Eric Ross

In recent months, the Trump administration has escalated a decades-long campaign against the Venezuelan government and people. The renewed, intensifying threats of regime change, justified through false or inflated claims that Nicolás Maduro, its president, is directing narco-terrorism against the United States, serve as a convenient pretext for deeper and more direct intervention.

A recent wave of extrajudicial killings at sea, the directing of the CIA to launch covert ops inside Venezuela, the surge of U.S. troops into the Caribbean, the reopening of a long-shuttered naval base in Puerto Rico, and the deployment of the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Gerald Ford in the region represent striking but not surprising developments. These are little more than the latest expression of an ideological project through which Washington has long sought to shape the hemisphere in ways that would entrench U.S. power further and protect the profits of Western multinationals.

That formal project dates back to at least the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, when the U.S. unilaterally claimed Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. Its revival today is unmistakable and distinctly dangerous. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared, echoing the language of that two-century-old policy, “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood, and we will protect it.”

The results of that doctrine have long been clear: immense profits for the few and violence, political upheaval, social dislocation, and economic devastation for the many. While Washington’s imperial desires in the hemisphere have long been met by movements challenging U.S. dominance, these have repeatedly been forced back into the subordinate position assigned them in a global capitalist order designed to benefit their not so “good neighbor.”

It’s no accident that, by the mid-1970s, Latin America had been transformed into a hemisphere dominated by U.S.-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes. Entire regions like the Southern Cone became laboratories for repression, as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay formed a coordinated bloc of military juntas. With direct support from Washington, those regimes oversaw what came to be known as Operation Condor, establishing a transnational network of state terror. Its consequences were catastrophic: 50,000 killed, tens of thousands “disappeared,” and hundreds of thousands tortured and imprisoned for the so-called crime of harboring real or perceived leftist sympathies.

During that earlier period, Venezuela had been largely spared the brutal excesses of direct U.S. interventionism in the region (due in part to the repressive rule of successive U.S.-supported strongmen Juan Vicente Gómez and Marcos Pérez Jiménez). That changed in 1998, when Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s far more popular predecessor, became president and pursued policies of popular sovereignty and resource nationalism aimed at ensuring the nation’s vast oil reserves (the largest in the world) served Venezuelans rather than being siphoned off to enrich foreign corporations. From then on, Venezuela became the latest target of Washington’s efforts to undermine, discipline, and ultimately neutralize “troublesome” progressive governments across Latin America.

To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the U.S. intervened, violently and anti-democratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere. Three cases are especially instructive: Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile. Together, they illuminate the long arc of U.S. imperialism in Latin America and clarify the dangers of the present confrontation.

The Rise of Plattismo in Cuba

Cuba had long been a crown jewel in Washington’s imperial imagination. By 1823, American political elites were already casting the island as essential to the future of the United States. President John Quincy Adams, for instance, described Cuba, then a Spanish colony, as “indispensable” to the country’s “political and commercial interests.” He noted ominously that, should the island be “forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support,” it could “gravitate only towards the North American Union.” Thomas Jefferson similarly maintained that the possession of Cuba was “exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation.” In that spirit, during the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents Polk and Pierce sought to purchase Cuba from Spain, overtures that were repeatedly rejected.

Those efforts unfolded during a period of rapid U.S. territorial expansionism, marking a time when Washington regarded continental conquest as both a “providential destiny” and a political and economic imperative. When ostensibly legal mechanisms like land purchases could be invoked, they were embraced. When military force offered a more expedient path to territorial acquisition, as with the war of aggression that stripped Mexico of half its territory and delivered what became the American Southwest to U.S. control in 1848, it was undertaken with little hesitation.

The opportunity to pursue longstanding ambitions in Cuba and inaugurate the U.S. as an overseas empire arrived with the Spanish-American War of 1898. In that conflict, Washington intervened in anti-colonial uprisings from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, not to champion genuine liberation but to ensure that any subsequent “independence” would be subordinated to U.S. strategic and economic interests. What emerged was a political order deliberately engineered to keep Cuba firmly tethered to the priorities and power of the United States.

That would be codified in the 1901 Platt Amendment, which effectively nullified Washington’s earlier assurances of Cuban sovereignty and granted Washington the right to establish military bases (including Guantánamo), substantial control over the Cuban treasury, and the ability to intervene whenever the U.S. deemed it necessary to safeguard its arbitrarily defined notion of what constituted “Cuban independence” or to defend “life, property, and individual liberty.”

In practice, Cuba emerged from the war as a dependent protectorate, not a sovereign nation. That model was soon codified for the entire hemisphere with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine issued in 1904, which granted the United States a self-appointed mandate to police the region to maintain “order.”

In Cuba, that arrangement would serve Washington’s interests for decades. By 1959, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, U.S. corporations controlled 90% of the island’s trade, 90% of its public services, 75% of its arable land, and 40% of its sugar industry. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Cubans remained landless, disenfranchised, and mired in poverty.

By breeding staggering inequality, Washington’s imperialism rendered Cuba ripe for revolution. In 1959, following years in exile, Fidel Castro returned to the island to overwhelmingly popular support, having launched an armed struggle after attempting to run in the 1952 elections that the Washington-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista cancelled. Rather than confront the policies that had produced the revolution, U.S. officials moved to make an example of Castro, waging an obsessive campaign to undermine his revolutionary government and punish the population whose support had made his ascent possible.

Washington pursued everything from ill-fated invasions to assassinations, plots that, in October 1962, brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. It also imposed a punishing economic blockade designed to choke the island’s economy, render socialism a stillbirth, and deter other nations from challenging U.S. hegemony. Those efforts foreclosed the possibility of constructive engagement, which Castro had initially signaled he was open to, pushing Cuba decisively into the Soviet orbit, and creating the very outcome Washington claimed it had sought to avoid.

The Fall of Guatemala

Castro did not return to Cuba alone. He arrived alongside the Argentinian Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who would become a key ideologue of the revolution, bringing with him a commitment to constructing a global, anti-imperialist movement. The two first met in 1955 in Mexico City, where Castro was organizing in exile and Guevara had resettled after working as a doctor in Guatemala, a country he had entered to support the democratic spring of President Jacobo Árbenz.

The democratic experiment in Guatemala was abruptly and violently extinguished in 1954, when a U.S.-backed coup toppled Árbenz. From that experience, Guevara carried with him an indelible lesson about the reach of U.S. power and Washington’s willingness to deploy force in defense of corporate interests, along with the profoundly antidemocratic and destabilizing consequences of U.S. intervention across the hemisphere.

That coup in Guatemala was carried out in service to that country’s real center of authority, the Boston-based United Fruit Company. Founded in 1899, United Fruit consolidated its foothold there through a series of preferential corporate arrangements, as successive strongmen ceded vast tracts of land and critical infrastructure to the company in exchange for personal enrichment. In the process, Guatemala was transformed into the archetypal “banana republic.”

United Fruit came to dominate Guatemala’s agricultural and industrial sectors, transforming itself into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It secured extraordinary returns through its monopoly power, wage suppression, and the criminalization of labor organizing. Its influence extended into the highest levels of Washington. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit as a senior partner at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had previously served on that company’s board.

Árbenz regarded United Fruit not just as a threat to Guatemala’s sovereignty but also as an engine of injustice. In a country where 2% of the landholders controlled 72% of all arable land (more than half controlled by United Fruit), much of it left deliberately fallow, he sought to challenge a system that denied millions of peasants access to the land on which their survival depended. His land reform program applied only to uncultivated land. The government proposed purchasing idle tracts at their declared tax value (based on the company’s own assessments). Yet because United Fruit had systematically undervalued its vast land holdings to evade taxes, the company refused.

Árbenz’s policies, driven by the fact that he was a nationalist (not a communist), were committed to dismantling Guatemala’s imperial dependency. His objective was to transform, as he put it, “Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state, and to make this transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living of the great mass of our people to the highest level.” Yet, in the ideologically charged climate of the early Cold War years, such New Deal-style reforms were recast by Washington as incontrovertible proof that a “Soviet beachhead” was taking root in Central America.

By 1954, U.S. officials insisted that they had “no choice” but to intervene to prevent the country from “falling” to communism. The subsequent coup relied on an orchestrated propaganda campaign, the financing of a mercenary army, and the aerial bombardment of Guatemala City. The combined pressure of all of that coerced Árbenz into resigning. In his final address, he condemned the attacks “as an act of vengeance by the United Fruit Company” and stepped down in the hope, quickly dashed, that his departure might preserve his reforms.

Power would soon be transferred to the military regime of Carlos Castillo Armas, while U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower triumphantly proclaimed that “the people of Guatemala, in a magnificent effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist direction.” In reality, United Fruit had expanded its influence, while the country descended into decades of state terror. The civil war that followed claimed more than 200,000 lives, including a genocidal campaign against the indigenous Ixil Maya people, carried out with direct U.S. support.

The Crushing of Chilean Socialism

If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism. When the socialist physician Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970 in a democratic election, Washington immediately went on the warpath, launching a covert, sustained campaign to strangle his government before it could succeed.

Allende sought to expand social welfare and democratize the economy. His program called for the nationalization of strategic industries, the expansion of healthcare and education, the strengthening of organized labor, and the dismantling of entrenched monopolistic landholdings. Those initiatives drew support from a broad, multiparty alliance rooted in Chile’s peasants as well as its working and middle classes. Above all, Allende’s agenda aimed to reclaim the nation’s mineral wealth from foreign capital, especially the U.S.-based copper giant Anaconda, whose staggering profits bore few meaningful returns for the Chilean population.

President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger found that intolerable and quickly came to regard Allende not just as a symbolic but a real threat to U.S. power in the region. After all, a successful socialist state achieved through the ballot box risked demonstrating that another political and economic path was indeed possible.

What followed was a coordinated campaign of economic, social, and political destabilization. The CIA funneled millions to Chile’s opposition parties, business associations, and media outlets. It financed strikes and disruptions designed to create and weaponize scarcity, to (in Nixon’s words) “make the economy scream” and erode confidence in Allende’s Popular Unity government. U.S. officials also cultivated ties with reactionary factions in the Chilean military, encouraging coup plots and ultimately directly supporting the overthrow of Allende on September 11, 1973.

What emerged was one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the hemisphere in the twentieth century. General Augusto Pinochet’s regime would carry out widespread torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, while U.S.-trained economists imposed radical neoliberal policies (similar to the failed ones now being implemented by Javier Milei in Argentina with the help of a Donald Trump bailout) that dismantled social protections and opened Chile’s economy to foreign capital.

Hands Off Venezuela

In every instance where the United States intervened in Latin America, leaving tens of thousands dead and entire societies destabilized, it was never really communism that Washington feared. What alarmed policymakers and the corporate interests they served was the prospect that nations in the hemisphere might escape the economic architecture of U.S. dominance.

When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in 2007, he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront U.S. power. In doing so, they committed what Washington considered the “cardinal sin” of asserting sovereign control over national resources within a hemisphere it had long treated as its strategic preserve. These leaders demonstrated, however briefly, that it was possible to stand up to the United States, but that such defiance would ultimately be met with overwhelming force.

Independent powers in this hemisphere going their own way were the threat that Washington and Wall Street could never tolerate. It’s the same reason the United States is once again maneuvering toward open conflict in Venezuela. To proceed down such a path will, of course, mean reenacting some of the most catastrophic chapters of U.S. foreign policy. The lesson of such imperial adventurism in Latin America is unmistakable. When Washington interferes in other nations, the outcome is never stability or democracy but their absolute negation.

Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, and PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

8 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar 

ACT I — The Arab Viewer’s Loop

As an Arab viewer, I don’t turn on the TV or open the news website anymore expecting updates that resemble “normal” war coverage. The loop has changed since Trump’s ceasefire, which has turned out to be “cease” for us and “continue to fire” for Israel.

Each broadcast drips with reports of daily Israeli violations both in Gaza and Southern Lebanon: airstrikes, drone incursions, and ground advances that kill and maim without reprisal, turning what was once a narrative of resistance into a one-sided chronicle of endurance and impotence.

Before the ceasefire, the loop had a bitter symmetry — Israeli aggression met with Hezbollah rockets arcing over the border or Hamas ambushes in the tunnels, offering us a fleeting sense of agency amid the horror, a reminder that the oppressed could still strike back. The well-known Hezbollah military motif used in video communiqués, so comforting to hear, continues to be reorchestrated and played by professional and semi-professional Lebanese bands and circulated on TikTok and Instagram — but not as widely as before, hollowed out without the milita component.

The military retaliation segments in news reports that sustained us are absent, replaced by useless calls for international intervention that never materializes, leaving Arab viewers — across divides of nationality, sect, or politics — to stew in a shared, potent brew of bitterness and rage. For once, the screen offers no factional solace, only a unifying testament to impunity.

ACT II — The Dresden Paradigm

In conducting the war against Gaza, Trump and Netanyahu have used overwhelming force deployed historically primarily to crush civilian morale, render urban life unviable, and shatter the social substrate that sustains political resistance. This logic directly targets the strategic calculus of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which is rooted in the resilience and support of their social base. The strategy assumes that once that base — the society itself — has been flattened enough, its capacity for endurance breaks, and with it, the foundation of the resistance. Only then can it be “stabilized” through promises of aid, reconstruction funds, or reintegration into a U.S.- and Israel-dominated regional order.

The visual parallel between Dresden’s 1945 moonscape and Gaza’s today is immediate — pulverized masonry, erased streets — but history reveals sharper divergences in logic and legacy.

In the annals of modern warfare, the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 stands as a stark emblem of strategic excess, where overwhelming force was deployed not out of strict military necessity but to shatter civilian morale and hasten unconditional surrender — a tactic echoed chillingly in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year, which similarly prioritized psychological devastation over targeted military objectives to compel Japan’s capitulation.

The firebombing campaign reduced much of the historic German city to rubble, killing tens of thousands of civilians and destroying irreplaceable cultural heritage, even as the Nazi regime teetered on the brink of collapse. This operation, part of the broader total war doctrine, was later critiqued — even by some Allied leaders and historians — as disproportionate, a moral overreach that blurred the lines between combatants and non-combatants.

Fast-forward to the contemporary Middle East, and a similar pattern of excess emerges in the Israeli campaigns against Gaza and Lebanon, culminating in Trump’s ceasefire plan. While the historical, technological, and scalar differences between the Allied campaigns of 1945 and contemporary warfare are profound, the functional parallel in strategic logic remains. Trump’s plan appears to be modeled on the Dresden paradigm as a blueprint for leveraging devastation to impose a new regional order.

ACT III — Testimony from the Ground

From the outset of the assault on Gaza in 2023, Israel’s approach embodied total war: relentless airstrikes, ground incursions, and blockade tactics that inflicted widespread civilian suffering, ostensibly to dismantle Hamas but effectively crushing collective morale through famine, displacement, and infrastructure collapse. Trump’s plan, brokered with U.S. sanction and UN endorsement, transitions from this phase of destruction to a fragile ceasefire, hostage releases, and promises of reconstruction — contingent on Palestinian acquiescence to a U.S.- and Israel-dominated framework.

At its core, Trump’s ceasefire initiative hinges on the “defeat” of Gaza and Lebanon not through conventional military victories but via sanctioned civilian devastation, mirroring how Dresden’s ruins symbolized the Allies’ unyielding dominance over a prostrated Germany. In Gaza, the U.S.-backed offensive led to over 70,000 deaths since October 2023, with 360+ post-ceasefire according to Gaza Health Ministry, with entire neighborhoods leveled and essential services obliterated, creating a humanitarian catastrophe that forced Hamas to the negotiating table in October 2025.

The plan’s Phase 1 secured a tentative ceasefire and hostage exchanges, but Phase 2 — envisioning a “Board of Peace” for governance, Hamas disarmament, and international oversight — dangles reconstruction aid as a carrot, while implicitly threatening renewed escalation if terms are rejected.

This reinsertion into a new international order, dominated by U.S. and Israeli interests, echoes the post-WWII Marshall Plan, where rebuilding was tied to alignment with Western spheres of influence. Similarly, in Lebanon, the pressure on Hezbollah intensifies: Trump’s administration, through diplomatic channels, demands the group “trade arms for peace,” disarming in exchange for stability, or face total war and prolonged Israeli occupation of southern territories — a stability that the half-century collapse of “land for peace” since 1967 has already shown to be a cruel mirage, repeatedly offered and repeatedly revoked the moment the weaker side lays down its weapons.

Recent U.S. messages, including warnings about Iranian funding via Turkey, underscore this ultimatum, positioning Hezbollah’s arsenal as the linchpin for broader regional realignment. The fragility of these arrangements is evident in ongoing violations — over 600 reported ceasefire breaches in Gaza alone by December 2025 — highlighting how the initial excess of force sets the stage for coerced compliance rather than mutual resolution.

Yet this precarity is a pattern of false starts and engineered breakdowns, as seen in the plan’s turbulent rollout earlier this year. In July 2025, amid mounting international pressure over Gaza’s famine and stalled aid, Netanyahu and Trump abruptly ditched indirect ceasefire talks in Qatar, withdrawing delegations just hours after Hamas’s response.

Trump declared Hamas leaders would be “hunted down” and that “it’s got to the point where you have to finish the job,” while Netanyahu hardened on troop withdrawals and permanent war-end guarantees, blaming Palestinian “militants who did not want a deal.”

This abandonment — coming after Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff had narrowed gaps to one issue just weeks prior — exposed the plan’s hollowness: a U.S.-Israeli axis more attuned to far-right demands in Tel Aviv (like Itamar Ben-Gvir’s calls for “total annihilation” and Jewish settlements) than to humanitarian or justice imperatives. By October, talks limped back under UN endorsement, securing Phase 1’s tentative truce, but the July rupture lingers as a stark reminder of evolving precarity — where “ceasefire” means pause for regrouping, not peace, and each ditch deepens the Arab viewer’s brew of rage and numbness.

Netanyahu’s upcoming visit to Washington, slated for December 28–31, 2025, amplifies this Dresden-inspired threat, serving as a platform to solidify the plan’s enforcement. Meeting with President Trump at the White House or Mar-a-Lago, Netanyahu is expected to discuss not only Gaza’s Phase 2 implementation but also Syrian buffer zones and Iranian containment, framing the talks as a high-stakes negotiation where refusal invites further devastation. This visit, Netanyahu’s fifth with Trump since the latter’s 2025 inauguration, underscores the U.S.-Israeli axis’s dominance, with Trump personally championing the plan as a “huge success” despite criticisms from mediators like Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who warn of collapse without substantial intervention.

Here, the analogy to Dresden deepens: just as the Allies’ overwhelming force in 1945 paved the way for a remade Europe under their aegis, the Gaza and Lebanon campaigns use civilian ruin as leverage, with reconstruction promised only upon integration into a U.S.-Israeli-led order that prioritizes security guarantees for Israel over Palestinian or Lebanese sovereignty.

Yet, the decisive divergence lies in perception and legacy. The rubble in Dresden was understood as too much, even by those who caused it — Winston Churchill famously questioned the bombing’s necessity, and it fueled postwar debates on the ethics of area bombing, cementing Dresden as a symbol of why civilian cities should not be erased in pursuit of victory.

The rubble in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was understood as too much, even by those who caused it — President Truman expressed profound horror at the civilian devastation, ordering a halt to further nuclear strikes on August 10, 1945, because the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people — including “all those kids” — was too horrible, and describing the decision as “the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings,” which reinforced these events as emblems of the moral boundaries of warfare. In contrast, the rubble in Gaza is defended as not enough — or as endlessly necessary — by Israeli officials and U.S. supporters, who frame the devastation as essential to “root out terror” and prevent future threats, justifying ongoing operations despite the ceasefire.

This difference is decisive: it transforms excess from a regrettable aberration into a repeatable strategy. Dresden and the atomic bombings endure in history as cautions against the erasure of civilian populations, moral boundaries crossed at great cost. Gaza, however, risks becoming something far more dangerous: proof that such cities can be erased repeatedly, openly, and without consequence. The consequential question thus becomes: What does it mean for global norms when a tactic once universally regretted as a moral boundary is re-cast as a defended necessity and repeatable policy? It normalizes total war as a tool for regional hegemony, systematically eroding the post-WWII restraints it once helped to establish.

If Trump’s plan succeeds on these terms, it will not herald peace but a perilous precedent, where devastation is the price of submission and reconstruction the reward for capitulation. It will also fail to achieve the psychological crushing of the Arab population in the Dresden sense of utter defeat. Instead, it renders that population psychologically inflamed, distraught to the point of existential fury — scrolling or switching off in silent protest against a world that normalizes this asymmetry. This is what they are witnessing:

In southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Army has documented 5,198 violations by end of November 2025, including 657 airstrikes. The BBC has documented more than 10,000 air and ground violations total — actions that are splitting Lebanese leadership and Hezbollah on how to respond without inviting total war.

Al Jazeera’s recent analysis reports that Israel has attacked Gaza on 44 out of the past 55 days of the supposed truce, meaning only 11 days passed without bombardment. This statistic underscores the ceasefire as little more than a mechanism to prevent Palestinian pushback while the devastation is “managed” into submission.

Numbers numb. The names and the faces do not.

A Gaza father who goes by @abumazen74 on TikTok posted a 38-second clip that has been viewed 4.7 million times in four days: he wakes his three young daughters at 3:12 a.m. because an Israeli drone is hovering directly above their tent in al-Mawasi. The camera shakes as he whispers “habibi, it’s okay, it’s just the zanana,” using the childish word for drone the way parents once said “thunder.” One little girl asks, sleep-bleared, “Baba, is the ceasefire sleeping too?” He has no answer; he just films the red targeting laser dancing on the tent wall for seventeen endless seconds until the buzzing finally moves on. The caption is one line: “This is what ‘ceasefire’ sounds like in Gaza tonight.”

Two days later in the south of Lebanon, a woman from Blida (@fatima_kh_00) stitched that same Gaza video from inside her own kitchen. She pans across the table where her elderly mother is folding tiny squares of bread because the power is out again after an Israeli strike on the nearby transformer. Her mother keeps folding, mechanically, even after the windows rattle from a second explosion. Fatima’s voice-over is flat, almost bored with grief: “They told us the war stopped. My mother still makes only enough bread for one day. She says, ‘Why waste flour if tomorrow the house is gone?’ This is the ceasefire they celebrate in Washington.”

Quotes from the ground amplify this distress. In a visceral X post, Lebanese journalist Marwa Osman described a recent drone strike in Ain al-Samahiyya that killed civilian Kamel Karanbash in front of his parents. “Do you understand what it does to a family? … This is psychological warfare on every mother, every father, every child in South Lebanon,” she lamented, vowing, “We will scream their names to a world that refuses to listen.” Similarly, AJ+ producer Mohammad Alsaafin captured a sentiment widely echoed in Arab circles: “The ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon simply mean that Palestinians and Lebanese aren’t allowed to fight back as Israel bombs, shoots and kills people there every day.” Even Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun decried the violations as “a complete crime and a heinous political crime,” noting that “since the entry into force of the ceasefire, Israel has not spared any effort to show its rejection of any negotiated settlement.” In Gaza, mediators like Qatar’s prime minister warn that the process is at a “critical moment” and “remains incomplete until Israel withdraws,” with violations tallying around 600 in the last seven weeks. Al Jazeera frames it starkly: “Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues unabated.”

ACT IV — The World That Shrugs At Ruins

For the Arab viewer, this barrage of unavenged atrocities isn’t defeat — it’s a slow-burning incitement that demands rage as the only recourse, lest silence become complicity.

The danger, therefore, is not merely the devastation of cities. It is that the world once looked at Dresden’s moonscape and swore, with remorse, “This must never happen again.” Now it looks at Gaza’s moonscape — identical in its desolation, different only in its moral reception — and shrugs: “This must happen again, and again, until the resistance is broken.” That shrug is the real graveyard of the post-1945 order.

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. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

8 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ida Audeh

LESS THAN TWO MONTHS into the Gaza genocide, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor was asking that an “independent international investigative committee” be established to investigate Israel for possible organ theft from Palestinian corpses. Israeli soldiers were raiding mass graves at Al-Shifa Medical Complex, the Indonesian Hospital and other sites, which struck people as alarming; some bodies were returned and upon investigation by medical professionals, were found to be missing parts.

Because we live in lawless times, we should remind ourselves that there was a time when such acts were considered so heinous that their prohibition was stated in the Fourth Geneva Convention. As the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Customary International Humanitarian Law states: “Each party to the conflict must take all possible measures to prevent the dead from being despoiled. Mutilation of dead bodies is prohibited.” Israel has ratified the treaty but brazenly claims that it doesn’t apply to Gaza.

In the October 2025 prisoner exchange between Israel and the Palestinian resistance (which included an exchange of the dead held by both sides), one Palestinian corpse was returned without a head; others were returned with amputated limbs and other mutilations. In early November, on Al Jazeera Arabic, Palestinian-British plastic surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sitta described the condition of Palestinian corpses that had been returned to Gaza. Some corpses were missing vital organs—including hearts, lungs, kidneys and corneas. “Chest cavities were opened using a medical bone saw, organs were extracted without damage, and skin bore burn marks consistent with preservation chemicals,” Dr. Abu-Sitta said. In other words, bodies were dismembered by medical professionals who understood the requirements of organ transplantation.

The charge that Israel helps itself to Palestinian body parts is not new. But in light of the mountain of evidence that Israel has killed and tortured Palestinian bodies to satisfy the sadistic pleasure of its soldiers, one must consider another possible motive of the Jewish state’s military: the violation of Palestinian bodies for profit. As it turns out, organ trafficking is a lucrative trade that Israel knows a lot about.

AN OBSESSION WITH PALESTINIAN BODIES

Israel is the only country in the world that holds on to the bodies of people it kills. During the first intifada, Israel often seized the bodies of Palestinians it shot dead and then set terms for their release: families had to agree to conduct the burials quickly and at night, attended by only a few family members. People suspected that the reason was not just to avoid funerals that could become political rallies (although that was likely a consideration), but also to deprive the families of the opportunity to examine the corpses too closely.

In the 1990s, Israel was in fact removing organs of Jewish Israelis as well as Palestinians for reuse without seeking permission from families. [Washington Report published an article on this in April 1990.] NBC News reported in 2009 that Jehuda Hiss, an Israeli doctor who worked at Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute, told a U.S. interviewer in 2000, “We started to harvest corneas… Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.” (To conceal the practice from families, the staff glued the eyelids shut; if they had reason to believe the family might want a last look, they refrained from removing the corneas.) In fact, as Israel’s Channel 2 reported, they went well beyond corneas and helped themselves to skin, heart valves and bones of Jews and Arabs. (Israel’s population is not inclined to donate organs and yet the country has the largest skin bank in the world.)

While it is tempting to conclude that the state acted as an equal opportunity plunderer, there is an all-important distinction to remember: the state was unlikely to have been the killer of Jewish Israelis who became unwitting organ donors, whereas it most certainly was the killer of the majority of Palestinians who ended up in Abu Kabir for autopsy and whose organs were then plucked without consequence.

The performance of autopsies on dead Palestinians at the Abu Kabir facility is itself a red flag. As British journalist Jonathan Cook noted in an Electronic Intifada article published in 2009, why perform autopsies if you don’t plan to investigate the circumstances of their murder (at the hands of the Israeli army)?

Abu Kabir is at the center of an illegal Israeli organ trafficking trade. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see dots to connect here.

British investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg revisited this sordid history in an article reporting on the recent arrest of Israeli-Ukrainian organ trafficker Boris Wolfman. Klarenberg observes in his Nov. 17 Substack page Global Delinquents that Dr. Hiss was never punished for his actions, which suggests that they were state sanctioned. Klarenberg cited the 2014 book Over Their Dead Bodies written by former Institute employee Meira Weiss, who described Israeli policy during the first intifada as one in which staff had a free hand “to seize whatever they wished from bodies in their care. Horrifyingly, Institute apparatchiks nostalgically referred to these years as the ‘good days.’”

HACKING AWAY AT PALESTINIAN BODIES

Israel claims the harvesting ended in 2000. But there is no reason to believe that Israel decided to respect the integrity of Palestinian corpses beginning in 2001. A 2009 article published on the website If Americans Knew described how Palestinian corpses have been used for instructional purposes:

In 2005 an Israeli soldier described a military doctor who gave “medics lessons in anatomy” using the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. Haaretz reports: “The soldier said that the Palestinian’s body had been riddled with bullets and that some of his internal organs had spilled out. The doctor pronounced the man dead and then ‘took out a knife and began to cut off parts of the body,’ the soldier said.

“He explained the various parts to us—the membrane that covers the lungs, the layers of the skin, the liver, stuff like that,” the soldier continued. “I didn’t say anything because I was still new in the army. Two of the medics moved away, and one of them threw up. It was all done very brutally. It was simply contempt for the body.”

A LUCRATIVE REVENUE STREAM

There is every reason to believe that Palestinian organs may be used in international organ trafficking. Klarenberg describes Israel as “the world’s center of illegal organ harvesting and trafficking” and adds that “the Gaza genocide may have greatly facilitated this perverse commerce.”

In 2015, the European Parliament published a report about the illicit trade of human organs, describing it as global and “to a large extent driven by Israeli doctors.” The report described Israelis as major customers as well as leaders of the gangs that procure the body parts. Klarenberg observes that Israel is experiencing economic challenges as a result of costly wars (against the Palestinians, Hezbollah and Iran), brain drain, the sharp drop in both tourism and investor confidence, and diplomatic isolation. He writes:

“Grotesquely, organ trafficking might represent one of Tel Aviv’s few dependable profit sources at this stage. With thousands of Palestinians both dead and alive in its custody, Israel certainly has ample resources to fuel the trade. Mainstream blackout on Wolfman’s long-overdue arrest may indicate the entity’s overseas puppetmasters are relaxed about the prospect.”

The network of players spans continents and is unlikely to be affected by one arrest:

“[Wolfman] was but one player in a world-spanning nexus of Israeli traffickers. In the manner of a hydra, Wolfman’s removal will simply lead to others taking his place. After all, the returns are high, and risks mysteriously low.”

The appalling desecration of Palestinian bodies is likely to continue as long as global powers tolerate Israel’s behavior, no matter how vile. And to date, every Western proposal for a post-genocide arrangement for Gaza seems designed to ensure that Israel never runs out of Palestinian bodies to mine.

Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine.

8 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (QNN)- Israel’s top military commander announced Sunday that the so-called yellow line in Gaza will serve as a “new border” between the occupation state and the Gaza Strip. The statement signals clear Israeli intentions to annex 53% of the territory and prevent reconstruction in areas destroyed during the recent genocide, denying hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families their right to go back to their homes.

Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir made the declaration while storming Beit Hanoun and Jabalia with senior commanders from Southern Command, Division 252, and the Carmeli Brigade.

Zamir said Israel will not allow “Hamas to rebuild and maintains control over wide sections” of the Strip. He described the yellow line as a front-line defense and attack zone for Israeli settlements.

Zamir added that the army prepares for a “surprise war scenario” as part of its next multi-year plan.

The statement sparked concern among Palestinians. Mustafa Barghouthi, a Palestinian MP, called the yellow line a sign of “dangerous Israeli intentions.” He said it reflects a plan to annex parts of Gaza and block reconstruction, effectively consolidating long-term Israeli control over the Strip.

The announcement comes in odds with Trump’s ceasefire plan. In the second phase of the plan, Israel should withdraw its forces entirely from the strip.  Israel has already violated Trump’s ceasefire hundreds of times. The latest violations in Gaza killed six civilians, including a 3-year-old girl.

8 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

During the closing plenaries of the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30) in Belém do Pará in the Brazilian Amazon, United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell gave a rousing speech.

Stiell, from Grenada, came to his post after a long career in the corporate sector and then as his country’s environment and climate resilience minister under the pro-corporate New National Party. In his speech he said that “denial, division, and geopolitics [have] dealt international cooperation some heavy blows this year.”

He nevertheless insisted that “climate cooperation is alive and kicking, keeping humanity in the fight for a liveable planet with a firm resolve to keep 1.5°C within reach.”

When I heard Stiell’s speech I thought he was talking about another planet.

In May, the World Meteorological Organisation released a report warning that there is an 86 percent chance that global mean near-surface temperature will exceed 1.5°C above the pre-industrial (1850–1900) average – the threshold set in the Paris Agreement in 2015 – in at least one year between 2025 and 2029; it also warned of a 70 percent chance that the five-year mean for 2025–2029 will exceed 1.5°C above that average.

In late October, just weeks before COP30, the American Institute of Biological Sciences published The 2025 State of the Climate Report: A Planet on the Brink, which found that “the year 2024 set a new mean global surface temperature record, signalling an escalation of climate upheaval” and that “22 of 34 planetary vital signs are at record levels.”

To be fair to Stiell, he did not imply that one should be complacent. “I’m not saying we’re winning the climate fight,” he said. “But we are undeniably still in it, and we are fighting back.”

On that, we agree.

That same month the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) published an alarming report titled Adaptation Gap Report 2025: Running on Empty.

It paints a picture not merely of insufficient climate finance from the Global North but of systematic abandonment of the Global South; it describes a world “gearing up for climate resilience – without the money to get there.”

The issue of money is key. Promises to fund the climate transition first came at COP3 (Kyoto, 1997) through the Clean Development Mechanism, then at COP7 (Marrakech, 2001) through the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund.

But the breakthrough moment came at COP15 (Copenhagen, 2009), when the wealthy countries of the North pledged to mobilise $100 billion per year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020.

Even the Copenhagen promises were hollow: there was no treaty obligation on the wealthier nations to meet this $100 billion goal, no enforcement mechanism to force those who made promises to follow up on their pledges, and most of the money that was pledged came as loans and not grants.

The $100 billion per year pledge from Copenhagen was reaffirmed at COP21 (Paris, 2015) and extended to 2025. At COP26 (Glasgow, 2021) the wealthier nations admitted that they had not met their goals and recommitted themselves to the $100 billion per year target. UNEP’s report provides a severe account of the missed pledges and false statements. Three points are essential to grasp:

Developing countries will require between $310 billion and $365 billion per year by 2035 for climate adaptation alone (setting aside mitigation as well as loss and damage). If inflation is taken at 3 percent per year, then real adaptation needs will reach between $440 billion and $520 billion annually by 2035.
In 2023 adaptation finance flows from developed to developing countries were just $26 billion, less than in 2022, and 58 percent of the money came through debt instruments and not through grants – a kind of green structural adjustment. The countries that are least responsible for the climate catastrophe are the ones that are driven to borrow in order to cope with the impact of the looming disasters.
By a simple calculation, needs are 12-to-14 times larger than current flows, producing an adaptation finance gap of $284 billion to $339 billion per year.
One of the great tragedies of the entire debate around the climate catastrophe is that 172 countries – mostly the poorer nations – have already developed national adaptation plans, policies and strategies.

But as UNEP’s report points out, one fifth of these plans are outdated due to weak institutional frameworks, limited technical capacity, lack of access to climate data and funding that is both unpredictable and delayed. For the poorer nations, the obstacle is less political apathy than resource constraints.

Even when they try to prepare for the worst, they cannot secure the resources needed to do the work properly. This chronic underfunding reduces the whole process to a hollow ritual: documents are produced for compliance.

As climate debt is put on the table, claims are made that green finance will attract private capital. But this, too, is a myth. UNEP’s report shows that private sector investment in adaptation is less than $5 billion, and that even in the best-case scenario private capital will not raise more than $50 billion a year for adaptation (far less than what is needed).

In practice, private financiers only enter adaptation projects when public funds are used to guarantee or subsidise their returns – so-called innovative finance or blended finance mechanisms designed to “de-risk” private investment.

So, in the end, the cost is borne by the treasuries of the poorer nations, whose governments effectively underwrite the money they borrow to fund adaptation projects that private investors consider too risky without such guarantees.

As we argued in dossier No. 93 (October 2025), The Environmental Crisis Is a Capitalist Crisis, this model of green finance entrenches rather than resolves the climate debt owed to the Global South.

This year, members of the institute went to Belém for COP30. They took part in the People’s Summit Towards COP30 — held from Nov. 12 to 16, to confront the official conference — where they shared the findings of dossier no. 93.

After the summit — which brought together over 25,000 participants and more than 1,200 organisations — Tricontinental’s Nuestra América office asked Bárbara Loureiro of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) to write a newsletter on COP30.

In her letter she wrote that the “invisible general” of the proceedings was the Brazilian agribusiness industry, which sought to greenwash its practices, expand its access to public funds, and shift the debate from mitigation to rebranding.

Watching the proceedings inside the hall of the official COP nevertheless raises a simple question: is it worth being part of the process or should we just let the COP regime die? There are three key reasons why it is important to continue to engage with the COP process:

• COP provides a global stage where the Global South can demand reparations, loss and damage finance, and adaptation support. It is at COP that the argument can be made against climate debt finance and against voluntary targets. COP is not a site of salvation, but it can still be a site of struggle.
• COP allows the Global South to maintain the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” established in the Rio Declaration at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992).
• COP forces the wealthy states to negotiate in the open rather than retreat to backrooms, where climate governance would be taken fully into the hands of private capital and the informality of the rich. The fight over the meaning of climate finance (either as debt or as reparations) can remain in the open.

After COP30 I asked Asad Rehman of Friends of the Earth why he thought it was worth fighting in the streets outside the halls of the COP. 

For Asad the first battle is to convince the climate movement to accept that the fight is not about fossil fuel use alone but about a crisis in our economies and societies, which must be transformed. At the same time, he told me, “There is actually some hope.”

This is because the climate movement is saying that the problem is not a lack of finance but a lack of political will. The finance is available (as the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development argues in a new report, All Roads Lead to Reform: A Financial System Fit to Mobilise $1.3 Trillion for Climate Finance).

While COP30 was taking place there was a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, of the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, where the richest countries blocked progress on a fair corporate tax that would make polluters pay for the environmental damage they cause.

If implemented, such a tax could raise $500 billion per year, a good start toward climate reparations. Yet just as the Global North insists that there is no money for climate finance, NATO countries agree to increase military spending to 5 percent of GDP — even as there is clear evidence that militarism is a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions.

“To see the climate movement arguing for debt cancellation, for wealth taxes, and for reforming the trade rules is a positive move,” Asad said. “Now, the climate movement is beginning to understand that this is an economic question. This is a paradigm shift.”

In her letter for the Nuestra América office the MST’s Loureiro described COP30 as a mirror with two sides:

“on one side, the celebration of the so-called ‘market solutions’ and financial decarbonisation; on the other… the growing strength of the popular movement, which made Belém a territory for denunciation, internationalist solidarity, and the construction of real alternatives’.

In her conclusion she calls on us to understand the climate catastrophe as a site of class struggle, one that can only be overcome beyond capitalism:

“There is no real way out of the climate crisis without a rupture with the capitalist model, and there is no possible rupture without popular organisation, without collective struggle, and without confronting the structures that profit from devastation.”

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

7 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

For the first time in the history of the U.S.–Israel relationship, Washington has moved beyond arming, funding, and diplomatically shielding Israeli violence and has instead inserted its own military personnel, intelligence systems, and command structures into Israel’s war machine. It is doing so through a two-center mechanism that places U.S. military coordination on the ground while projecting civilian oversight through an international hub.

This essay traces the transformation across three dimensions: the strategic expansion of U.S. control over Israel’s battlefield decisions, the reduction of Arab and international agency to decorative multilateralism, and the recasting of Gaza from a site of national liberation into a permanently administered humanitarian problem. And yet, even within this daunting architecture of military, diplomatic, and bureaucratic force, Palestinians still retain points of leverage — narrow but real spaces in which to act, disrupt, and reassert political agency. Diagnosis alone is insufficient. The final section sets out concrete counter-moves — legal, diplomatic, institutional, and political — that Palestinians and their allies can deploy to expose the fragility of a trusteeship built without consent.

I. The Ceasefire Oversight Farce

For seventy-five years, the U.S.–Israel military relationship rested on distance: Washington armed, funded, and shielded; Israel acted. That distance has now collapsed. Roughly 200 U.S. personnel operate around the clock inside Israel, and on paper their mandate includes monitoring the ceasefire — watching Israeli conduct in real time. But this presence has neither curbed nor penalized Israeli violations. The shift from enablement to “oversight” is cosmetic; the structure of impunity remains intact.

The Civil–Military Coordination Center (CMCC), a CENTCOM-led hub located in a secure facility inside Israel, is the core of this new arrangement. Equipped with independent drone feeds, satellite imagery, and signals intelligence, it is the first disclosed American military institution built inside Israel with an explicit mandate to track ceasefire compliance and humanitarian access. U.S. reconnaissance flights now generate the primary operational picture around Khan Younis; American officers, not Israeli liaisons, feed coordination data into the battlefield. Every aid convoy, corridor, and “pause” is routed through a U.S.-run room. What is presented as monitoring is, in practice, immersion.

This immersion in Israeli operations is the essence of tutelage. As Palestinian analyst Rami al-Shaqra notes, since October 2023 “the administrative decision over what happens in the occupied Palestinian territories has become American par excellence.” Even the Trump-aligned admission that they are “more careful about Israel’s interests than the Israeli government itself” exposes the logic plainly: Washington sees itself as the responsible adult in the room, supervising a client it refuses to restrain.

Yet this tutelage is performed without the only form of leverage that could alter Israeli behavior — conditioning military aid. Instead of pressure, Washington has chosen proximity. The result is a hybrid in which Israel retains formal sovereignty and the final trigger, but the tempo and political sustainability of its violence are increasingly shaped by American officers watching their screens in Tel Aviv and Tampa.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the management of the ceasefire. Since the nominal 10 October 2025 ceasefire, Israeli forces have repeatedly violated it through drone strikes, raids, and targeted assassinations, killing more than 360 Palestinians, including 70 children. Rather than treating each breach as a violation demanding enforcement, the CMCC folds it into the system as a logistical disturbance to be managed. When an Israeli drone strike kills civilians — as in the 29 November 2025 attack in Beni Suhaila that killed two children gathering firewood — the incident is reclassified as an “operational irregularity.” Aid convoys are rescheduled, corridors rerouted, and diplomatic messaging recalibrated to insist the ceasefire “remains broadly intact.”

For Palestinians, each violation is another layer of deprivation normalized as coordination. For Israel, each violation is politically costless, its consequences absorbed by an American-run system that manages fallout rather than restraining the trigger. Oversight is now the mechanism through which Israeli impunity is reproduced — until the watched begin to watch the watchers, and the managed refuse to be managed.

II. The Multilateral Façade: Forty Nations with No Authority

The International Gaza Coordination and Monitoring Center (ICMC), housed across the border in Egypt near Rafah and al-Arish, is presented as the civilian face of Phase Two of Trump’s ceasefire plan. It is a forty-nation “hub” meant to project multilateral legitimacy. In principle, multilateralism implies cooperation under shared rules and institutions, distributing authority through collective decision-making. In practice here, it has been hollowed out: diplomats from Europe, North America, and a handful of Arab capitals sit in air-conditioned rooms, issuing press releases about humanitarian corridors and security-sector reform, while real authority over borders, airspace, and the use of force remains exclusively Israeli.

On paper, the mandate looks sweeping — supervise aid entry, monitor corridors, liaise with an interim administration, facilitate disarmament. Yet each task assumes conditions that do not exist: low violence, fixed lines of control, a legitimate Palestinian governing partner, and Israeli willingness to accept binding limits. None are present. Israel’s violence never ended in Gaza or the West Bank. Aid trucks cleared by the hub still rot for days at Rafah under shifting Israeli “dual-use” criteria — a moving standard that allows Israel to recast civilian goods and spaces as military threats whenever convenient. Maritime corridors from Cyprus deliver symbolic quantities while land routes — the only ones that matter — remain choked.

Arab states have been deliberately relegated to logistical subcontractors. As one Egyptian diplomat admitted, “We control Rafah, we train police, but we are not consulted on who governs Gaza.” Qatar and the UAE provide funds and mediation but refuse troop deployments; a Qatari official told Reuters, “Our role is financial and political, not military.” Saudi Arabia has withheld engagement until there is a time-bound path to statehood… The region that will live with the consequences has thus been reduced to observer status inside its own crisis.

Egypt’s position exposes the imbalance most clearly. Cairo is operationally indispensable — co-sponsor of negotiations, host of Sinai infrastructure, controller of Rafah, anchor of Gaza’s logistics, and trainer (with Jordan) of Palestinian police units. This gives Egypt leverage, which Egyptian analysts openly acknowledge, yet Cairo remains wary of troop commitments that would entangle it in enforcing an externally designed order and absorbing its political costs. Egypt enables the system; it does not design it.
Qatar’s role is narrower: financier and mediator, not enforcer. Officials in Doha stress that funding has never been the obstacle — access has — and warn against treating Gaza as a technical management problem severed from a political horizon.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states close the circle. Draft U.S. proposals to authorize a stabilization force and Board of Peace have drawn sustained concern over vague sovereignty language and sweeping authority vested in an externally controlled body. The UAE has declined participation without a UN-backed legal mandate, while Saudi Arabia ties any engagement to explicit, time-bound commitments to Palestinian statehood. Gulf capitals are willing to finance reconstruction and provide diplomatic backing, but they withhold troops and enforcement roles by design.

European and non-Arab states mirror this pattern. EU officials have admitted that the CMCC lacks Palestinian representation, stressing that “there’s no Gazans there, there’s no Palestinians” in the monitoring process. The UK, Japan, Canada, and others have signed joint statements demanding Israel comply with humanitarian law and allow sufficient aid, but none have offered troops or binding enforcement. Their role is limited to funding, diplomatic pressure, and symbolic presence inside the forty-nation hub.

Despite their reservations… the forty states said nothing when Trump announced that “phase two is going to happen pretty soon.” No objections. No conditions. No delay. They know there is no ceasefire, no fixed lines, no Palestinian partner, no enforcement. They move anyway.

What ties the CMCC and the ICMC together is a shared political purpose: to convert Palestine from a question of rights and self-determination into a technical problem of governance, security, and humanitarian management. The priority is to confine Palestinian political agency, not to enable it. This is the political essence of the trusteeship: a sequence — stabilization → interim administration → disarmament → reconstruction — in which every phase defers the next, ensuring Palestinian political agency remains perpetually “not yet ready.”

The Board of Peace, the technocratic committees, the vetted police units — all exist to administer Palestinians, not to represent them. If the CMCC is Washington’s war room, the ICMC is its civilian façade — a stage on which international actors perform coordination without authority.

III. Institutional Incoherence in Practice

Institutional incoherence is visible the moment the system begins to operate. Each component — military, diplomatic, humanitarian — moves according to a different logic, producing a structure that generates activity without alignment, authority, or a shared understanding of what the system is meant to achieve.

1. The military track: expansion without strategy
   By late November 2025, the CMCC had grown into a warehouse-sized operations floor, its massive real-time map and daily agenda fed by U.S. drone, satellite, and signals-intelligence streams. Reporters visiting on 20–24 November 2025 described a center that had already expanded to include “nearly 50 countries and organizations,” even as Israeli strikes continued. The military logic is straightforward: expand surveillance, expand coordination, expand presence. It treats volatility as a technical problem to be monitored, not a political crisis to be resolved.
2. The diplomatic track: performance without leverage
   Diplomatically, the system performs consensus it cannot produce. CENTCOM’s 17 October 2025 framing of the CMCC as a hub for “stabilization efforts” presumes conditions — ceasefire enforcement, fixed lines, a Palestinian counterpart — that do not exist. Diplomats continue to speak the language of progress while the military track grows in ways that contradict the very idea of a negotiated settlement. The diplomatic logic is theatrical: maintain the appearance of multilateral agreement while avoiding the confrontations required to build it.
3. The humanitarian track: improvisation under shifting rules
   Humanitarian actors operate under a different logic entirely — one shaped by collapsing institutions and constantly shifting access rules. On 28 November 2025, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation abruptly shut down, deepening the access crisis just as the CMCC assumed control of aid movement. Aid groups described a “severe access gap” as every convoy became dependent on Israeli clearance and rules that changed by the hour. The humanitarian logic is reactive and improvisational, shaped by constraints it cannot influence.
4. The outcome: a system that cannot cohere
   These logics do not converge. The military track expands control; the diplomatic track performs consensus; the humanitarian track struggles to function. Mandates contradict one another, responsibilities overlap, and every actor assumes another is enforcing what no one is enforcing. The system produces motion without direction — an apparatus that manages symptoms it cannot resolve and performs order it cannot impose.

IV. Counter-Moves: How to Break the Trusteeship (Risks & Mitigations)

Refusal remains the most powerful weapon Palestinians have ever had. Now is the time to wield it without compromise and without pause.

1. Legal asphyxiation at the ICC and ICJ
   The strongest lever remains international law, but wielding it invites retaliation. Israel and the United States have already threatened sanctions against ICC personnel and cooperating states, and any new ICJ case on the trusteeship itself would be portrayed as “lawfare” to justify escalation. Mitigation: file through a coalition of 30–40 states so that sanctions become politically and economically impossible. Pre-publish the entire evidentiary package — CMCC drone logs, post-ceasefire victim testimonies, U.S.-approved targeting data — so that any retaliation is immediately seen as obstruction of justice. Quietly secure Chinese and Russian commitments not to veto a future Chapter VII resolution.

Who/How/When: Palestine’s legal team (Ammar Hijazi + Raji Sourani) + South Africa (Minister Ronald Lamola) + Malaysia (PM Anwar’s envoy) coordinate the text in a closed Pretoria meeting January 2026; 35-state joint ICJ request is tabled at UNGA February 2026; Al-Haq/B’Tselem deliver sealed ICC dossiers to Prosecutor Khan simultaneously.

2. Coordinated Arab diplomatic rupture
   An ultimatum from Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia would force Washington to choose between its Arab order and its Israel policy, but the immediate price could be brutal: withheld U.S. arms to Egypt, secondary sanctions, or threats to Camp David funding. Mitigation: the three capitals must move together and publicly. One country alone gets crushed; three acting in concert are untouchable. Frame the rupture as defence of Arab national security against “Iranian chaos.” Riyadh and Doha have already discussed a six-month financial backstop.

Who/How/When: Sisi’s national-security adviser, King Abdullah II, and MBS meet secretly in Sharm el-Sheikh or NEOM January 2026; joint 90-day ultimatum letter is hand-delivered to the White House 1 February 2026; $15 bn Arab Solidarity Fund activates automatically if U.S. retaliates.

3. Total Palestinian institutional refusal
   Blanket non-cooperation risks Israel punishing the entire population by cutting electricity, fuel, salaries, and aid. Mitigation: pre-stockpile three months of essentials, publish collaborators’ names instantly, and activate parallel popular committees from day one.

Who/How/When: Unified National Leadership for Popular Resistance (Hamas + Fatah + IJ + PFLP + unions) issues signed public pledge in Gaza City (livestreamed) 20 December 2025; collaborator lists go live on Telegram same day; popular committees already operating in camps declare themselves sole legitimate authority 1 January 2026; Egyptian/Jordanian Red Crescent warehouses open buffers the moment Israel tightens siege.

4. BDS 2.0 against U.S. contractors
   Targeting Anduril, Palantir, Constellis, etc. will trigger lawsuits and anti-BDS laws. Mitigation: start in Europe and Global South, use shareholder resolutions, pair every campaign with geolocated killing footage.

Who/How/When: BDS National Committee + IfNotNow/JVP + ECCO launch public database cmcc-profiteers.org on 1 February 2026; first divestment demands hit Norway’s $1.7 tn fund and Dutch ABP pension fund 15 February 2026; footage-verification unit run by 7amleh publishes weekly evidence packets.

5. Narrative disruption — the “Gaza Live” platform
   Real-time footage risks bans and “Pallywood” smears. Mitigation: decentralized infrastructure, triple-verification protocol, pre-funded legal defense.

Who/How/When: 7amleh + Syrian Archive tech team + Al Jazeera innovation lab launch the 24/7 platform 1 January 2026 on Mastodon/IPFS + 200 Starlink terminals already inside Gaza; triple-verified clips are pushed by 200 trusted creators who survived 2023–25; London/Dublin legal fund (already seeded by Qatar) activates day one.

6. Exploiting the European fracture
   Suspension of the EU–Israel Association Agreement will hit German-Dutch vetoes. Mitigation: start with unilateral national bans by recognizing states, then force Brussels to follow.

Who/How/When: Spanish PM Sánchez, Irish Taoiseach Harris, Norwegian FM Eide, Belgian and Slovenian counterparts hold joint Madrid press conference 10 March 2026 announcing immediate national bans on settlement goods and CMCC-linked companies; joint letter invoking Article 2 is sent to von der Leyen same day.

7. Poisoning the reconstruction funding pipeline
   Gulf donors could cave under U.S. pressure. Mitigation: lock the money in a Palestinian-vetoed escrow and hold donors publicly to their 2025 pledges.

Who/How/When: Qatar’s Deputy PM Mohammed bin Abdulrahman and Saudi Finance Minister al-Jadaan issue joint written declaration (already drafted November 2025) on 1 February 2026 freezing every dollar; Palestinian-controlled escrow account at Qatar National Bank or Credit Suisse Zürich is activated same week with public disbursement conditions (e.g., Netzarim corridor evacuation).

8. Convening a Third Palestinian National Council in exile
   A democratic PNC including Hamas and IJ will be branded “terrorist.” Mitigation: host in a protected state, invite UN observers, base program on unassailable 1988/2006 documents.

Who/How/When: PLO Executive + Hamas political bureau + diaspora networks choose Algeria or South Africa as venue by 15 January 2026; secure online + in-person voting opens 1 March 2026 across refugee camps and diaspora; 1,000-delegate congress convenes and is livestreamed June 2026; first resolution dissolves all trusteeship bodies and reaffirms PLO sole representation.

Taken together, these eight lines of pressure share one strategic logic: make the occupation’s sophisticated new management structure politically radioactive, diplomatically unsustainable, and financially ruinous.

Trusteeship survives by appearing inevitable. Counter-moves work by turning the trusteeship from ‘inevitable’ into ‘unbearable.’

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.

7 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org