Archives: Articles

By Jane Goodall Institute

Scientist. Conservationist. Humanitarian.

Jane Goodall, a remarkable example of courage and conviction, working tirelessly throughout her life to raise awareness about threats to wildlife, promote conservation, and inspire a more harmonious, sustainable relationship between people, animals, and the natural world, passed away on 1 Oct 2025 at the age of 91 of natural causes. RIP

Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, UN Messenger of Peace and world-renowned ethologist, conservationist, and humanitarian, was known around the world for her 65-year study of wild chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania. However, in the latter part of her life she expanded her focus and became a global advocate for human rights, animal welfare, species and environmental protection, and many other crucial issues.

Jane was passionate about empowering young people to become involved in conservation and humanitarian projects and she led many educational initiatives focused on both wild and captive chimpanzees. She was always guided by her fascination with the mysteries of evolution, and her staunch belief in the fundamental need to respect all forms of life on Earth.

Born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall, Jane was the eldest daughter of businessman and racing car driver Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall and writer Margaret Myfanwe Joseph.

Jane was passionate about wildlife from early childhood, and she read avidly about the natural world. Her dream was to travel to Africa, learn more about animals, and write books about them. Having worked as a waitress to save enough money for a sea passage to Kenya, Jane was advised to try to meet respected paleontologist Dr. Louis Leakey. Louis employed her as a secretary at the National Museum in Nairobi, and this led to her being offered the opportunity to spend time with Louis and Mary Leakey in at the Olduvai Gorge in search of fossils.

Having witnessed Jane’s patience and determination there, Louis asked her to travel to Tanzania, to study families of wild chimpanzees in the forest of Gombe. Looking back, Jane always said she’d have “studied any animal” but felt extremely lucky to have been given the chance to study man’s closest living relative in the wild.

On July 14th, 1960, Jane arrived in Gombe for the first time. It was here that she developed her unique understanding of chimpanzee behaviour and made the ground-breaking discovery that chimpanzees use tools. An observation that has been credited with “redefining what it means to be human.”

Knowing Jane’s work would only be taken seriously if she was academically qualified, and despite her having no degree, Louis arranged for Jane to study for a PhD in Ethology at Newnham College, Cambridge. Jane’s doctoral thesis, The Behaviour of Free-living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve, was completed in 1965. Her three-month study evolved into an extraordinary research program lasting decades and it is still ongoing today.

Jane was married twice. Her first husband, Hugo van Lawick, was a Dutch baron and wildlife photographer working for National Geographic when they met. Jane and Hugo divorced in 1974, and Jane later married Derek Bryceson, a member of Tanzania’s parliament and a former director of Tanzania’s National Parks. Derek died in 1980.

During her life Jane authored more than 27 books for adults and children, and featured in numerous documentaries and films, as well as two major IMAX productions. In 2019, National Geographic opened Becoming Jane, a travelling exhibit focused on her life’s work, which is still touring across the United States. Her latest publication, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Her awards and accolades span the scale of human achievement. In 2002, she was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Two years later, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) at Buckingham Palace. Jane was also awarded the United States Presidential Medial of Freedom, French Légion d’honneur, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Ghandi-King Award for Nonviolence, The Medal of Tanzania, and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. In addition, she has been recognized by local governments, educational establishments, and charities around the world.

Jane founded the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in 1977, initially to support the research at Gombe. There are now 25 JGI offices operating diverse programs around the world.

In 1991, Jane founded Roots & Shoots, her global humanitarian and environmental program for young people of all ages. The initiative began with just 12 high school students in Dar es Salaam. Today, Roots & Shoots is active in over 75 countries. Roots & Shoots members are empowered to become involved in hands-on programs to affect positive change for animals, the environment, and their local communities.

In 2017, Jane founded the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation, to ensure the ongoing stability of the core programs she’d created – her life’s work.

Throughout her life and remarkable career, Jane inspired generations of scientists, brought hope to countless people from all walks of life, and urged us all to remember that “every single one of us makes a difference every day – it is up to us as to the kind of difference we make.” Her legacy continues with the ongoing research at Gombe, the community-led conservation program Tacare, the work of the sanctuaries Chimp Eden in South Africa and Tchimpounga in the Republic of the Congo, and Roots & Shoots empowering young people to become involved in hands on programs for the community, animals and the environment.

Though Jane travelled 300 days a year, her home was in Bournemouth, United Kingdom, in the house her grandmother and mother had lived in before her. Her sister Judy Waters and her family played a huge role in supporting Jane’s work over the decades, providing a warm welcome whenever she returned home. Jane is survived by her son Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick (affectionately known as Grub) and her three grandchildren, Merlin, Angel, and Nick.

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

(Image by social nets)

By Claudia Aranda

4 Oct 2025 – Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir arrived at the port of Ashdod on October 2 as if staging a scene carefully designed for public humiliation. In front of cameras and microphones, he stood before dozens of international activists seated on the ground, exhausted after the long voyage and hours of interrogation, and shouted at them indiscriminately: “terrorists.” The gesture was not isolated: it was a display of power and contempt that evoked for much of the world the image of a Nazi officer receiving a trainload of prisoners arriving at Auschwitz. The difference is that here, in the twenty-first century, the perpetrators themselves chose to disseminate the scene, fully aware of its symbolic impact, confident in the impunity that shields them.

From that port began the transfer of more than four hundred activists kidnapped in international waters toward an equally infamous destination: Ketziot prison, in the heart of the Negev desert. This facility is not new to reports by international bodies. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners have been held there, and its name appears repeatedly in human rights organizations’ reports for inhumane conditions, overcrowding, psychological torture, and systematic medical neglect. Now, that same site holds doctors, journalists, parliamentarians, and human rights defenders from more than forty countries who took part in the flotilla.

Accounts circulating since the first day of their capture converge on a central point: interrogations lasted more than fifteen hours, without offering detainees water or food. It was punishment disguised as procedure, a way to break the resistance of those who dared to challenge the blockade and deliver humanitarian aid directly to Gaza. Nevertheless, several of the kidnapped —and that is the only accurate term, since their violent capture in international waters does not correspond to any legitimate legal procedure— are believed to have resisted, refusing to sign deportation documents that would amount to self-incrimination. Others, pressured by exhaustion and isolation, reportedly signed in exchange for the promise of a swift expulsion. Israel remains silent: it has not yet provided a complete list of those transferred to Ketziot, nor has it clarified under what legal status they are being held.

What has emerged, already reported by Arab and European media and solidarity organizations, is that inside the prison a group of the kidnapped have begun a hunger strike. The measure, desperate yet consistent with the flotilla’s spirit of resistance, recalls the historic fasts of political prisoners confronting a power intent on breaking them. The hunger strike echoes the voyage itself: a body willing to embrace extreme fragility in order to assert the dignity that is being stripped away.

Ketziot, like Auschwitz in the inevitable parallel it evokes, thus becomes both symbol and witness. There, among the dunes and the walls, the same eternal question repeats itself: what is the world doing while hundreds of human beings are humiliated, deprived of their most basic rights, and turned into political hostages? The answer, once again, seems to be complicit silence.

---

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ADALAH UPDATE ON THE GSF PARTICIPANTS KIDNAPPED AND DETAINED

October 3, 2025

This statement was originally published on Adalah’s WhatsApp channel.

Over the past 24 hours, Adalah’s lawyers met with 331 participants of the Global Sumud Flotilla at the port of Ashdod, where they are facing hearings before Israeli immigration authorities. Several participants were processed without Adalah’s legal counsel, as access to our lawyers was initially denied. This process took place after the flotilla was forcibly towed following illegal interceptions in international waters, where dozens of boats were seized in their mission to break the illegal siege of Gaza amidst ongoing genocide, mass atrocities, and famine.

The flotilla participants are in relatively stable condition, and Adalah continues to closely monitor their situation.

After their abduction in international waters, the participants were forced to kneel with their hands bound with zip ties for at least five hours, after some of them chanted slogans in support of Palestine’s liberation. During the lawyers’ visits, Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, made an appearance in what was clearly an act of humiliation and intimidation. The flotilla participants were filmed and exploited in a degrading display of control. This demonstration of humiliation took place alongside the smear campaign by Israeli officials, who falsely labeled flotilla members as “terrorists” in an attempt to discredit their peaceful mission and legitimize the repressive tactics used against them.

The entire process is illegal from beginning to end. The interception itself violated international law, amounting to an abduction in international waters. Israel’s attempt to justify these actions through the enforcement of its blockade does not stand: the blockade itself is illegal, constitutes collective punishment, and serves as a central tool of the ongoing genocide, including the deliberate use of hunger as a method of war.

The rights of the participants were systematically violated throughout this process. In addition to being denied access to water, bathrooms, and medication, they were denied access to lawyers, which violated their fundamental rights to due process, an impartial trial, and legal representation. Yesterday, while the whereabouts of the flotilla volunteers remained unknown, the lawyers were forced to wait about nine hours outside the port of Ashdod and were not informed when Israeli immigration authorities began to process and hold hearings. They only learned of these illegal proceedings after the detainees themselves called them directly.

Despite repeated denials of entry by Israeli police, Adalah’s lawyers finally managed to access the port and provide legal assistance to the 331 participants. Several participants reported having been subjected to assaults, threats, and harassment, including being violently awakened every time they attempted to sleep.

Subsequently, the authorities transferred the participants from Ashdod to Ktzi’ot prison in the Negev and began judicial hearings without informing the legal team, proceeding with no legal representation whatsoever. Adalah’s lawyers are now present at these judicial hearings, where detention orders are being reviewed.

Adalah is taking legal measures to ensure that each and every participant is accounted for, while continuing to carry out prison visits. Adalah also demands their immediate release from illegal detention and the return of their personal belongings and humanitarian aid supplies.

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad 

After his White House speech, Netanyahu said Israel will never withdraw from Gaza and promised to resume the genocide if Hamas does not disarm.

30 Sep 2025 – Three weeks after Israel attempted to assassinate Hamas’s lead negotiators in a series of airstrikes on the group’s offices in Doha, Qatar, President Donald Trump hailed the public announcement of his 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza as “potentially one of the great days ever in civilization.” The framework was drafted in coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top adviser, Ron Dermer, and spearheaded by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Several Arab and Muslim states also contributed. No Palestinian officials from Hamas or any other faction, including the internationally-recognized Palestinian Authority, were consulted in crafting the plan.

The proposal, which Netanyahu agreed to after meeting with Trump at the White House on Monday, links the delivery of food and other life essentials and the withdrawal of Israeli forces to the demilitarization of Gaza and includes several loopholes that would permit Israel to resume the genocide. It also would impose a foreign-led authority on the demilitarized Gaza Strip, backed by Arab and international troops, and allow the Israeli army to indefinitely encircle the enclave by maintaining positions inside Gaza’s territory. The plan requires Hamas to release all Israeli captives held in Gaza before any Palestinians would be freed. While the proposal includes a series of apparent concessions to Arab and Muslim countries in return for their endorsement, it makes no mention of how Israel would be prevented from violating the agreement. The plan also includes a nebulous mention of possible future Palestinian “self-determination and statehood” after Gaza “re-development advances” and the Palestinian Authority is reformed.

“If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end,” the framework’s text, released on Monday, states. “Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed upon line to prepare for a hostage release. During this time, all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment, will be suspended, and battle lines will remain frozen until conditions are met for the complete staged withdrawal.”

In his White House remarks, Netanyahu affirmed his acceptance of the framework, but made clear Israel stands poised to resume the genocide. “If Hamas rejects your plan, Mr. President, or if they supposedly accept it and then basically do everything to counter it—then Israel will finish the job by itself,” he declared. “This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way, but it will be done. We prefer the easy way, but it has to be done.”

Trump also underscored this point. “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas,” he said. “But I hope that we’re going to have a deal for peace, and if Hamas rejects the deal… Bibi you’d have our full backing to do what you would have to do. Everyone understands that the ultimate result must be the elimination of any danger posed in the region. And the danger is caused by Hamas.”

On Tuesday, Trump reiterated this and said he would give Hamas “about three or four days” to respond. “We’re just waiting for Hamas, and Hamas is either going to be doing it or not, and if it’s not, it’s going to be a very sad end,” he said, adding that if Hamas rejects the deal, “I would let [Israel] go and do what they have to do.”

Hamas was not given any details on the proposal prior to Trump and Netanyahu unveiling it at the White House, a senior leader told Al Jazeera Mubasher. “Not a single Palestinian has reviewed this plan, and what was recounted … represents a tilt toward the Israeli vision—an approach close to what Netanyahu insisted on and pleaded for—to continue the war and the annihilation. Nothing more, nothing less,” said senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Mardawi immediately following the Trump–Netanyahu press conference. “To negotiate an end to this criminal war in exchange for ending the Palestinian people’s right to their state and their rights to their land, homeland, and holy sites—no Palestinian will accept that.”

Mardawi said that Hamas and other Palestinian factions would need to study the proposal, adding that, “the official position must be issued after reading the proposal and then stating our position and making amendments that conform with our right to self-determination.” The last time Hamas leaders gathered to discuss a U.S. proposal, on September 9, Israel attempted to assassinate its negotiators.

Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari said Tuesday that Egypt and Qatar had delivered the plan to Hamas and, along with Turkish officials, would be holding a “consultative meeting.” Al-Ansari added, “We are optimistic that Trump’s plan is comprehensive, and the Hamas delegation is studying it responsibly, and we continue to consult with them.”

While Trump praised his own plan as a landmark opportunity for “eternal peace in the Middle East,” the exclusion of all Palestinians from the process is an extension of decades of Western colonial dominance of decision-making surrounding the future of Palestine. At the heart of Trump’s plan is a thinly-veiled ultimatum to Palestinians: bend the knee to Israel, renounce the right of armed resistance, and agree to indefinite subjugation by foreign actors.

“This plan is a malicious attempt to achieve through politics what the war of extermination could not achieve on the ground,” said Sami Al-Arian, a prominent Palestinian academic and activist and the director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University. “This includes ending the resistance, withdrawing weapons, releasing [Israeli] captives without a complete withdrawal, maintaining security, political, and economic control over Gaza, and imposing international tutelage.” He said the Trump framework is aimed at “perpetuating the Israeli narrative that the challenge is a security one related to Israeli security needs, not to ending a military occupation, Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and ongoing aggression.”

Al-Arian told Drop Site, “There is no negotiation here. There is an American plan. It was modified by some Israeli points and possibly some Arab points. And it’s given to the resistance as a ‘Take it or leave it’ thing.”

In the lead-up to the announcement, the Trump administration pushed a familiar narrative to friendly media outlets that he pressured a resistant Netanyahu into the agreement. In reality, Israeli officials were deeply involved with crafting the proposal right up to the moment the White House released the text.

In a video address in Hebrew following his event with Trump, Netanyahu portrayed the plan as a coup for Israel’s agenda, saying it effectively placed an Arab and international stamp of legitimacy on his genocidal plans. “This is a historic visit. Instead of Hamas isolating us, we turned the tables and isolated Hamas. Now the entire world, including the Arab and Muslim world, is pressuring Hamas to accept the terms we set together with President Trump: to release all our hostages, both living and deceased, while the IDF remains in most of the Strip,” Netanyahu declared. “Who would have believed this? After all, people constantly say, the IDF should withdraw… No way, that’s not happening.”

In previous “ceasefire” negotiations, when Hamas has sought to propose amendments or even to clarify phrasing in draft texts, Israel and the U.S. denounced Hamas, falsely accusing it of rejecting peace, and then Israel intensified the military assault on Gaza. Israel, meanwhile, has offered the public perception it agrees to draft deals, while at the same time securing “side letters” from Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, authorizing Israel to resume the war if it determines the agreement is no longer in its interests.

“There is no negotiation here. There is an American plan. It was modified by some Israeli points and possibly some Arab points. And it’s given to the resistance as a ‘Take it or leave it’ thing.”

And after it signed the January 2025 ceasefire agreement, Israel repeatedly violated it, regularly striking Gaza and ultimately blowing up the agreement entirely after the first of what was supposed to be a three-phase deal. Netanyahu has made clear that he wants not only Hamas’s surrender, but the decimation of all Palestinian resistance in Gaza.

“What was announced at the press conference between Trump and Netanyahu is an American-Israeli agreement, an expression of Israel’s entire position, and a recipe for continued aggression against the Palestinian people,” said Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the secretary general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second largest armed resistance group in Gaza, in a statement. “Israel is trying to impose, through the United States, what it has been unable to achieve through war. Therefore, we consider the American-Israeli announcement a recipe for igniting the region.”

In crafting this plan, Trump deployed his son-in-law, Kushner, to shore up support from Arab nations ahead of the announcement. Kushner is often touted by Trump as the mastermind of the so-called Abraham Accord “normalization” agreements with Israel. Kushner has extensive business dealings in Gulf countries and his investment firm, Affinity Partners, is backed by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

Trump boasted that he has the full backing of all major Arab nations. “The level of support that I’ve had from the nations in the Middle East and surrounding Israel and neighbors of Israel has been incredible. Incredible. Every single one of them,” Trump said, highlighting the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. “These are the people that we’ve been dealing with and who’ve been actually very much involved in this negotiation, giving us ideas, things they can live with, things they can’t live with.”

Embedded within the plan are several terms that Arab nations pushed for and which certainly were key to getting their buy-in. “The conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people,” the plan states. Arab and Muslim countries also certainly advocated for including a provision that Israel will cease its military assault and “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.” No Palestinians, the outline states, “will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”

An earlier leaked draft of Trump’s plan, as reported in Hebrew media, included a commitment that Israel would not annex the West Bank. That term does not exist in the text distributed Monday by the White House.

Nonetheless, the foreign ministers of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt issued a statement saying they “welcome President Donald J Trump’s leadership and his sincere efforts to end the war in Gaza, and assert their confidence in his ability to find a path to peace.”

During his appearance on Al Jazeera after the plan was announced, Mardawi repeatedly emphasized the exclusion of Palestinians from the drafting of the Trump plan. “How can an Arab state refuse to allow the Palestinian people, with all their current political forces and over past decades, to participate?” he asked, rejecting the premise. “In everything put forward there is no affirmation of the Palestinian people’s rights.” He added that Hamas “will examine the proposal, discuss it with the factions, amend it, and consult the countries—all the countries that were willing and ready among those that met with Trump—and review their positions.”

Abu Ali Hassan, a member of the General Central Committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine denounced the plan as giving diplomatic cover to a continuation of Israel’s broader agenda. “Trump gave the occupying state sufficient time to achieve its goals to no avail. The plan is a political intervention to achieve the military objectives of the war,” he told the Palestinian Sanad news agency. The plan, he said, “is an expression of a conspiracy involving international and Arab parties to undermine the rights of the Palestinian people and defeat their resistance.”

Privatizing and Colonizing Gaza

The Trump plan is riddled with ambiguities, loopholes, and proposals that leave a multitude of paths for Israel to resume its genocidal assault on Gaza.

Within 72 hours of an agreement, the plan says, Hamas must release all Israeli captives held in Gaza. There are believed to be 20 living Israelis and the bodies of 28 deceased remaining in the Strip. In return, Israel would subsequently release 250 Palestinians sentenced to life and 1,700 Palestinians from Gaza taken captive after October 7, 2023, including all women and children. The bodies of 15 Palestinians, according to the plan, would be returned for the remains of each deceased Israeli held in Gaza.

The plan states that deliveries of food and other life essentials to Gaza will resume in quantities consistent with the January 2025 ceasefire agreement that Israel unilaterally abandoned. “Entry of distribution and aid in the Gaza Strip will proceed without interference from the two parties through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent, in addition to other international institutions not associated in any manner with either party,” it says, adding that this will include “rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads.” The plan also pledges that the Rafah crossing along the border with Egypt—what was once Gaza’s only gateway to the world beyond Israeli control—would be opened in both directions under the rules established in the January ceasefire deal. But a map of the proposed Israeli withdrawals would allow Israeli forces to remain deployed across southern Gaza, including along the Philadelphi corridor that runs along the border with Egypt, until an international force met standards approved by Trump.

The maps for a proposed phased Israeli withdrawal are consistent with those proposed by Israel in July—and rejected by Hamas—with the added term that any Israeli troop withdrawals will be linked to the verified disarmament of Palestinian resistance groups. The plan says that Israeli forces would “progressively hand over the Gaza territory it occupies” to an international security force, but that Israeli troops would maintain “a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat.”

“The resumption of the aid is extremely important in light of the fact that there is starvation and famine taking place,” said Al-Arian. “But I think the thorniest of issues would be the disarmament and the [Israeli] withdrawal. These could be the two issues that can make this whole deal unravel.”

The Trump framework also states that if Hamas “delays or rejects this proposal,” aid distribution will only proceed in areas under Israeli control or those handed over to the international force after disarmament of Palestinians in the area.

The plan also contains terms that Hamas has explicitly defined as “red lines,” namely a demand to strip Palestinians of their right to armed resistance against Israeli occupation. “All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt,” it states. “There will be a process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors, which will include placing weapons permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning, and supported by an internationally funded buy back and reintegration program all verified by the independent monitors.”

Mardawi, the Hamas official, said the U.S. and Israel were engaged in a propaganda campaign to rebrand the Palestinian right to self defense as a justification for Israel’s genocidal war. “To confiscate these weapons without a horizon, without a roadmap, without steps that lead to the establishment of the Palestinian state that the world recognizes is an attempt to bury the international consensus—except for America and the rogue Israel—on recognizing the Palestinian people’s right to establish their state,” he told Al Jazeera. “This international diplomatic and political momentum—especially from Europe, which used to support, back, and provide all forms of assistance to the state of the occupation—this recognition and this shift toward affirming the Palestinian people’s right to establish their state on their homeland is being undermined.”

The Trump plan says that the U.S. will work with Arab and international partners to create “a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF) to immediately deploy in Gaza” to establish “control and stability.” In addition to providing security in Gaza, the plan says the ISF would also “work with Israel and Egypt to help secure border areas, along with newly trained Palestinian police forces.” The concept outlined in the plan is that as the ISF takes control of areas occupied by Israel, Israeli forces would withdraw. But the entire plan is predicated on the disarmament of Palestinian factions in areas the Israeli military would agree to withdraw from. It states that Israeli withdrawal would be “based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization… with the objective of a secure Gaza that no longer poses a threat to Israel, Egypt, or its citizens.”

“I think there will be huge reservations from all Palestinian factions, that they will not surrender their weapons,” Al-Arian said. “People have the right to defend themselves, particularly when dealing with an enemy that does not respect any law, any international law, any humanitarian law whatsoever.”

At the White House on Monday, Trump claimed he had secured commitments from Arab and Muslim countries “to demilitarize Gaza, and that’s quickly. Decommission the military capabilities of Hamas and all other terror organizations. Do that immediately. We’re relying on the countries that I named and others to deal with Hamas.”

Al-Arian said he was skeptical Israel would actually agree to the deployment of a foreign force, particularly an Arab one. But even if it did happen, he said it would not be capable of achieving the stated aim of disarming Palestinian resistance factions. “They’re not going to bring Arab and international troops to go and fight the resistance. The resistance will not voluntarily give up its arms,” said Al-Arian. “Which makes the Israelis say, ‘If that doesn’t happen, we’re not withdrawing.’ So you end up with a frozen conflict that could actually unravel and return back to genocide. But this time the Americans will say, ‘We tried, we failed.’ And then the Israelis have a free hand to resume their genocide.”

Hamas has repeatedly said that it would relinquish governing authority in Gaza to an independent technocratic committee of Palestinians. On several occasions, Hamas proposed including the term in previous ceasefire proposals and the U.S., and Israel removed it. The Trump plan states, “Hamas and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.” It does not clarify which factions this would include.

While the Trump plan states that “Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee,” it requires that it be overseen by another newly created entity that would be headed by Trump and reportedly managed by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The document references the potential future involvement of the Palestinian Authority, but offers no timeline.

Hossam Badran, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, denounced the involvement of Blair, an unrepentant war monger who has spent his years since leaving office cashing in by peddling his influence to dictators and despots. “I could call him ‘the devil’s brother’—that’s Tony Blair. He has brought no good to the Palestinian cause, to the Arabs, or to the Muslims. His criminal and destructive role since the war on Iraq, in which he had a central role both theoretically and in practical participation, is well known,” Badran told Al Jazeera Mubasher on Sunday. “Tony Blair is not a welcome figure in the Palestinian cause, and therefore any plan associated with this person is an ill omen for the Palestinian people.” After resigning as British Prime Minister, Blair served as the official Middle East envoy for the Quartet—consisting of the U.S., the UN, the EU, and Russia—from 2007 to 2015 and was widely criticized for achieving little.

Al-Arian said that while Hamas has agreed that it would not be a part of an interim governing body for Gaza, Israel and Trump seem to be trying to preemptively strip Palestinians of the right to choose their leaders democratically. “Eventually there will have to be some sort of a democratic transition, democratic elections in which Gazans have the right to rule themselves,” he said. “I don’t think any Palestinian would agree to have a foreign power governing them. That imperialist, colonialist mentality is not acceptable to any Palestinian.”

The Trump plan calls for the establishment of an “economic development plan” that would be managed by a “panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.” The language is consistent with the praise Trump heaped on the rulers of Gulf nations when he visited Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE in May. While Trump made no mention of his oft-repeated threat to turn Gaza into a U.S.-run “Middle East Riviera,” the plan indicates he sees massive private investment opportunities in the rubble of Gaza.

During the Monday press conference, Trump addressed Dermer—Netanyahu’s chief strategist—in the front row with a rambling digression referring to Gaza as the most beautiful real estate in the region and offered a staggeringly false history of Israel “giving it” to the Palestinians in 2005. “They [Israel] said, ‘You take it. This is our contribution to peace.’ But that didn’t work out. That didn’t work out. It was the opposite of peace,” Trump said. “They pulled away, they let them have it. And I never forgot that because I said, ‘That doesn’t sound like a good deal to me as a real estate person.’ They gave up the ocean, right? Ron, they gave up the ocean. They said, ‘Who would do this deal?’And it still didn’t work out. They were very generous, actually. And they gave up the most magnificent piece of land in many ways in the Middle East. And they said, ‘All we want to do now is have peace.’ That request was not honored.”

“Every move on Trump’s part, he gets someone in the back door, whether it’s his children, his son in law, or friends, to take a piece of the act,” said Al-Arian. “So he sees big dollar signs coming in and that’s why he got in Tony Blair, because that is the medium by which he’s going to be able to control the money and control what’s happening in Gaza.”

While Trump and Netanyahu can forge ahead with their attempt to impose this plan on Gaza, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad still hold nearly 50 Israeli captives, living and dead. Hamas knows this is the only leverage it holds in any negotiation. “The only thing that Hamas can reject really is the hand over the captives,” said Al-Arian. “Hamas doesn’t want to be stripped of this card and then end up with another war in which they have zero leverage after that.” Should Netanyahu and Trump attempt to entirely circumvent Hamas and recover the captives through military force, it is certain that many, if not all of them, would be killed. Hamas’s armed wing, Qassam Brigades, has issued several warnings to Israel against such plans.

The Trump plan states that, “Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.” This clause portrays Hamas as akin to a small group of foreign fighters, rather than a political movement that has won democratic elections, governed Gaza for two decades, and which still enjoys a sizable amount of support in public polls across Palestine.

While the Trump proposal contains some elements that the Palestinian resistance has long demanded, including the resumption of life essentials and humanitarian aid, the exchange of captives and a framework, albeit deeply skewed toward Israel, for withdrawal of occupation forces. But Al-Arian said these terms do not outweigh the traps embedded within the plan’s text.

“We may get the first phase of the plan. What happens to the rest of the plan is going to depend pretty much on other dynamics, but more importantly on the Trump administration, which is Zionist to the core. So I don’t have much hope that this is going to be carried out,” Al-Arian said. “And what comes after that is going to be a renewed effort to establish Greater Israel, which will also precipitate greater effort to resist this. That means that the whole region will stay unstable.”

Killing Negotiations

Some terms of the plan appear to be rooted in the terms of a 13-point U.S.-Israeli-drafted plan that Hamas agreed to on August 18. Israel never formally responded to Hamas’s acceptance of the so-called Witkoff framework, which the U.S. publicly characterized as the deal that would end the war. By that point, Israel was finalizing preparations for a sustained ground invasion of Gaza City aimed at expelling one million Palestinians. On August 20, two days after Hamas made major concessions and accepted the Witkoff plan, Israel forged ahead with its invasion of Gaza City.

As Israel intensified its air strikes and ground operations against Gaza, Trump bombastically announced on September 3 that he was making a final offer to Hamas. Ignoring the fact that Hamas had already conceded to what Trump had also called the last chance for a deal, the U.S. delivered to Hamas via Qatari mediators a 100-word document that called for the unconditional release of all Israeli captives, living and dead, in Gaza in return for a 60-day ceasefire and an opaque commitment to end the war. As the U.S. initiated backdoor communications with Hamas, claiming to want to make a deal, Israeli army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir publicly threatened to assassinate Hamas leaders outside of Gaza if the group did not surrender.

As Hamas officials convened in Doha on September 9 to discuss how to respond to the paragraph-long document from Trump and messages it received through intermediaries, Israel carried out what it called Operation Day of Judgement, bombing Hamas’s offices and the Qatar residence of its chief political leader and negotiator Khalil Al-Hayya. While the strike failed to kill any Hamas leaders, Israel’s missiles took the lives of Al-Hayya’s son and four Hamas administrative staff as well as a Qatari security guard. The attack also wounded Al-Hayya’s wife, daughter-in-law, and some of his grandchildren.

Qatar is the home of U.S. Central Command, the premiere American strategic military facility in the region. Israel was able to conduct its attacks without encountering any apparent resistance from the U.S.-provided air defense systems in Qatar, raising serious questions about the extent of U.S. involvement in the strike. While the Trump administration claimed it was only alerted by Israel soon before the Israeli air strikes and tried to warn Qatar’s leader, the contention defies common sense. No country in the world has a more extensive military and intelligence apparatus in the region than that operated by the U.S.

Whether by Israeli design or the product of a U.S.-Israeli plot, the series of events—most prominently the U.S.-enabled sabotage of yet another ceasefire agreement—paved the way for weeks of wanton killing, forced displacement and mass destruction in northern Gaza.

Arab leaders gathered in Doha for an emergency summit on September 15 to discuss Israel’s bombing of Qatar. In the end, they issued only a strongly worded statement and declined to engage in any military response to Israel’s attack. Trump claimed he was not happy with the Israeli bombing of Qatar and claimed it would not happen again. But two Arab diplomatic sources told Drop Site that on his recent visit to Qatar, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told officials in Doha that the U.S. could make no such guarantee as long as Hamas was allowed to operate in Qatar. A State Department spokesperson declined to confirm or deny what the sources told Drop Site.

During his meeting with Trump on Monday, Netanyahu offered an apology to the emir of Qatar on a phone call made from inside the White House and promised not to violate Qatari sovereignty again. But the apology was narrowly focused on the killing of the Qatari security guard and not for bombing the Hamas office in an effort to kill its negotiating team in the midst of negotiations which Qatar was mediating at the request of the U.S.

On Monday, Qatar’s foreign ministry released a statement acknowledging Netanyahu’s apology and stated that it would resume its mediation efforts in support of Trump’s plan. Since Israel’s attempt to assassinate Hamas’s external leadership, several of the group’s senior leaders have been held in safe houses in Qatar with limited access to communications. While this has created challenges for the group to maintain contact with commanders on the ground in Gaza, sources have told Drop Site they have developed alternative methods.

As Hamas and other Palestinian groups debate their response to the Trump plan, the final word will lie not with those in Doha, but inside Gaza.

“That proposal will come to the leaders in exile. They will look at it, they will make some decisions. These decisions would also be consulted with the people in the field in Gaza. They will have to be heard at the end. They are the ones who control the [Israeli] captives,” Al-Arian said. “It doesn’t even matter what the people say outside. It’s only going to be an opinion and they hope that that opinion would be accepted by the people inside [Gaza]. But the people who are leading in the field in Gaza will have to make that decision. But I believe, all in all, that Hamas and the resistance have shown that they have tremendous discipline, that they are capable of communicating and having a unified position.”

Jeremy Scahill – Journalist at Drop Site News, co-founder of The Intercept, author of the books Blackwater and Dirty Wars.

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

The great threat to Israel’s survival is not the Arab nations, the Palestinians, or Iran, but the policies of Israel’s extremist government.

***********************************

H.E. Gideon Sa’ar, Foreign Minister, Government of Israel

August 9, 2025

Dear Mr. Minister,

I write to you following your speech at the United Nations Security Council on August 5. I attended the session but did not have the chance to speak with you following the session. I want to share my reflections on your speech.

In your speech your failed to recognize why almost the entire world, including many Jews such as myself, are aghast at your government’s behavior. In the view of most of the world, with which I concur, Israel is engaged in mass murder and starvation; you would not have known it from your speech. You failed to acknowledge that Israel has caused the deaths to date of some 18,500 Palestinian children, whose names were recently listed by The Washington Post. You blamed all the mass murder of civilians by Israeli forces on Hamas, even as the world watches video clips every day of Israeli forces killing starving civilians in cold blood as they approach food distribution points. You lamented the starvation of 20 hostages but failed to mention Israel’s starvation of 2 million Palestinians. You failed to mention that your own prime minister worked actively over the years to fund Hamas, as The Times of Israel has documented.

Whether your oversights are the result of obtuseness or prevarication, they would be a tragedy for Israel alone were it not for the fact that you attempted to rope me and millions of other Jews into your government’s crimes against humanity. You declared at the U.N. session that Israel is “The sovereign state of the Jewish people.” This is false. Israel is the sovereign state of its citizens. I am a Jew, and a citizen of the United States. Israel is not my state and never will be.

Your language about Jews in your speech betrayed the gulf between us. You referred to Judaism as a nationality. This is indeed the Zionist construct, but it runs counter to 2,000 years of Jewish belief and Jewish life. It is an idea that I and millions of other Jews reject. Judaism for me and for countless others outside of Israel is a life of ethics, culture, tradition, law, and belief that has nothing to do with nationality. For 2,000 years, Jews lived in all parts of the world in countless nations.

The great Rabbinic sages of the Babylonian Talmud in fact explicitly proscribed a mass return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem, telling the Jewish people to live in their own homelands (Ketubot 111a). Sadly, the Zionists undertook massive campaigns including financial subsidies and scare tactics to induce Jewish communities to leave their own homelands, languages, local cultures, and relations with their fellow inhabitants to draw them to Israel. I have traveled throughout the world visiting nearly empty synagogues and vacated Jewish communities, with only a few elderly Jews remaining, and where these few remaining Jews insisted that their communities once lived in peace and harmony with the non-Jewish majorities. Zionism has weakened or put an end to countless vibrant communities of our co-religionists around the world.

It is an ironic fact that when Zionists convinced the British Government in 1917 to issue the Balfour Declaration, the one Jew in the Cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu, strenuously objected, stating that he was a British citizen who happened to be Jewish, not the member of a Jewish nation: “I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion.”

In this context, it’s also worth recalling that the Balfour Declaration states clearly and unequivocally that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Zionism has failed that test.

Your government is committed to the permanent occupation of all of Palestine and stands in violent, unrelenting opposition to a sovereign State of Palestine. The founding platform of Likud in 1977 hides nothing in this regard, declaring openly that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” To accomplish this, Israel demonizes the Palestinian people and crushes them physically, through mass starvation, murder, ethnic cleansing, administrative detention, torture, land seizures, and other forms of brutal repression. You yourself shamefully declared that “all Palestinian factions” support terrorism.

Your counterpart at the U.N. Security Council session, Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour, declared just the opposite. He stated clearly: “The solution is ending this illegal occupation and ending this disastrous conflict; it is the realization of the independence and sovereignty of the Palestinian state, not its destruction; it is the fulfillment of our rights, not their continued denial; it is respect for international law, not its trampling; it is the implementation of the two-state solution, not a one state reality with Palestinians condemned to genocide, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid.”

Israel stands against almost the entire world in its endeavor to block the two-state solution. Already, 147 countries recognize the State of Palestine, and many more will soon do so. One-hundred and seventy U.N. member states recently voted in support of the right of the Palestinian people to political self-determination, with only six opposed (Argentina, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Paraguay, United States).

Your presentation utterly neglected the powerful “New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State solution,” issued by the world community at the High-Level International Conference on Implementing the Two-State Solution held on July 29, 2025, just one week before your own speech at the U.N. Security Council. Saudi Arabia and France co-chaired that high-level conference. Arab and Islamic nations all over the world called for peace and normalization of relations with Israel when Israel abides by international law and decency in line with the two-state solution. Your government rejects peace, because it aims for domination over all of Palestine instead.

Israel holds on to its extremist position by a slenderest of threads, backed (until now) by the United States but by no other major power. We also should acknowledge a major reason for the U,S. backing until now: Christian Evangelical Protestants who believe that the gathering of the Jews in Israel is the prelude to the annihilation of the Jews and the end of the world. Those are your government’s allies. As for overall American public opinion, disapproval of Israel’s actions now stands at 60%, with only 32% approving.

Mr. Minister, the global revulsion you cited is against the actions of your government, not against Jews. Israel is threatened from within by zealotry and extremism that in turn bring worldwide disapprobation of Israel by Jews and non-Jews alike. The great threat to Israel’s survival is not the Arab nations, the Palestinians, or Iran, but the policies of Israel’s extremist government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The two-state solution is the path—and the only path—to Israel’s survival. You may believe that nuclear weapons and the U.S. government are your salvation, but brute power will be evanescent if Israel’s grave injustice toward the Palestinian people continues. The Jewish Prophets taught again and again that unjust states do not long survive.

Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey D. Sachs
New York City

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Craig Murray

26 Sep 2025 – Yesterday saw two announcements. Starmer is to introduce compulsory digital ID cards in the UK, and Tony Blair is put forward by the White House to be the colonial administrator of Gaza for five years.

The political economy of the world appears locked in a vertiginous downward spiral. You don’t have to scratch very hard to find that Tony Blair’s hand is also behind the compulsory ID plan. He has been pushing it for nearly thirty years, and now it comes with added links to Larry Ellison, Palantir and Israel.

The government will be able to garner and centralise knowledge of everything about you. Every detail of your financial transactions, your DNA, your family, your medical records, your education, employment and accommodation. It will be a very short time before the digital ID is linked to your social media accounts and your IP access to monitor your browsing.

There is already the intention to control us through our access to financial services. I have spoken with one of the women charged for protesting outside the Leonardo factory in Edinburgh. She has had her bank accounts cancelled – simply losing the money in them – and cannot open a new account. You may recall they tried to debank Nigel Farage. The campaign to defend Julian Assange suffered multiple banking cancellations.

The desire of the state to control people politically through their ability to carry out ordinary transactions is not in doubt. It is demonstrated. Once you have a compulsory digital ID linked to transactions – which will follow very swiftly, I am quite certain – they will be able to simply switch off your ability to pay for anything. Add this to a digital currency which tracks all of your expenditure – all the key elements of which are already installed – and total control will be in place.

Starmer is trying to dress up a digital ID as an immigration control – whether you support immigration control or not, the notion that it will make a significant difference is nonsense. Landlords, employers, banks and lawyers already have to check the ID and status of their clients. For those bent on evasion, one more piece of bureaucracy will make little difference. It is the law-abiding who will be enmeshed in the system of control.

Increases in state surveillance and restrictions on personal freedom are always falsely framed as protection against a terrible threat – paedophiles or fraudsters or immigrants or Russians. Yet despite an ever-shrinking area of personal freedom, none of these real or invented threats ever actually recedes.

Starmer is the most unpopular PM in history. Attempting to force through this deeply unpopular measure is going to cause him real difficulties in parliament. The calculation is that Reform will oppose the measure on libertarian grounds, and that this will allow Starmer to show himself as tougher on immigration than Reform. The breathtaking cynicism of this is typical of the Starmer government, which believes in nothing except their own power.

As for Blair being made effectively Governor of Gaza, this is so sickening as to be beyond belief. The man who killed a million Iraqis on the basis of lies about WMD, who has made hundreds of millions of pounds through PR services to dictators, whose Tony Blair Institute has drawn up “Gaza Riviera” plans for Trump, and who has been discussing with western oil companies the takeover of Gaza’s gas field, is touted to administer the mass grave which Gaza has become.

In any reasonable world this would be impossible. The degeneration of western society is profound. There are no ethics in play beyond the dominance of power, wealth and greed. Blair manages to embody these in one person.

Craig John Murray (born 17 Oct 1958) is a Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist, and former diplomat for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Dr. Maung Zarni

TRANSCEND Media Service is having a fund drive to keep its valuable service – tailored to those of us who want in-depth and critical analyses – not sensationalist corporate media reportage with its shallow “Trumpish-All-sides” “balance”.

In most cases of realities that involve blood, invasion, genocides, war crimes, exploitation, systematic acts of state propaganda, “all sides” and “balance” in journalism, are not simply acts of moral cowardice, but the total absence of intellectual substance. Peace, nonviolence, social justice, are TMS ideologies rooted on basic human rights and needs, non negotiable principles.

Noam Chomsky, the author of Manufacturing Consent, would agree if I make an “outlandish statement” such as there are no ‘Gold Standards’ in journalism. The idea of Gold Standard is itself propaganda.  Ask James Bond’s real world employer – Military Intelligence Unit 5 or “MI5”, which has been vetting the BBC’s hiring since the “Master Class” Propaganda Industry’s inception when the broadcast technology was the cutting edge.

So, I’d rather throw TRANSCEND a lifeline than watch BBC and pay the license fee.  Who in their right mind would pay to be brainwashed by yet another military-industrial complex?

Think about it and Please Act making your financial contribution TODAY! Thank you.

Donate – Please Choose Your Option to Support TMS

A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Prof. Richard Falk

29 Sep 2025 – My responses to a Brazilian journalist to questions about the recent diplomatic surge of recognitions of Palestinian statehood, as provisionally represented by a PLO coalition of political actors, chaired Mahmoud Abbas, and in the 1990s given the supposedly temporary, ambiguous title of the Palestinian Authority with its capital in the West Bank city of Ramallah. This political development resulted from the Oslo diplomacy that allowed the PLO to represent the Palestinian people although within a pro-Israeli partisan framework that empowered the US to serve as intermediary without requiring Israel to freeze settlement activity or to comply with international humanitarian law during ‘the peace process.’ The central expectation of this process was that a Palestinian state would emerge from a complex series of bilateral negotiations, but what occurred was an evident lack of political will on the part of Israel and Washington to produce such an outcome. The whole undertaking was contradicted and discredited by the continuous expansion of unlawful Israeli settlements on the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The Palestinians were advised at the time by the US to withhold their objections to Israeli behavior until the final stages of statehood negotiations were reached (which never happened), and the Palestinian team foolishly heeded the advice, and itself lost credibility for consenting to take part in a diplomatic exercise that did not even acknowledge the Palestinian right of self-determination.

At the outset a certain skepticism seems prudent. It suggests a cautious response to this foundational question: Should this new surge of internationalist enthusiasm for ‘two-statism’ be viewed as a buildup for a replay of the Oslo process or as something new? Underlying conditions are different as  

Israel’s military operations Gaza are now normalized, even in most of the previously complicit liberal democracies of the West and in most influential venues of political discourse as ‘genocide.’ This has resulted in Israel’s delegitimation and emergent identity as a rogue or pariah state that has become the target of hostile civil society initiatives ranging from BDS to rising pressures to impose arms embargoes, suspension of diplomatic relations, and expulsion or suspension from the UN.  It has also produced pushback by the US in the form of sanctioning UN appointees by barring entry and freezing assets, denying visas to PLO members, including the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, and classifying Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. Israel has reacted defiantly to calls for Palestinian statehood and to the boycott of Netanyahu’s speech at the 80^th anniversary session of the General Assembly. To date, France and the US have put forward peace proposals, with some cooperation and encouragement from Arab governments, that end the genocide, but reward Israel by excluding Hamas from any future political role in Gaza, and dubiously presupposing the adequacy of the PA to represent the struggle for Palestinian rights, including the establishment of a functioning state. My responses below are based on a strong conviction that until the Palestinian people are given the choice as to their political representation by way of an internationally monitored free elections in Gaza and the West Bank or through a reliable referendum allowing for the selection or ranking of political representation options, no peace process should be accorded legitimacy by the UN or civil society assessments.

**************************************

1. How can the recognition of the State of Palestine by Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Belgium, and others help in a plan to officialize the creation of the State of Palestine?

The push toward Palestinian recognition will probably has now extended to at least 157 of the 193 members of the UN, representing a large majority of the world’s peoples. The only major opponents being Israel and the United States, along with s Hungary, Paraguay, and Argentina, autocratic middle powers. The longer-term undertaking of the states bestowing statehood recognition is a two-state solution of the underlying conflict. This objective has been most influentially articulated so far by France, and somewhat separately by the US although it has not yet openly challenged Israel’s refusal to allow the emergence of a Palestinian state in any form. It is based on the belief that the only way to end the conflict and achieve regional stability is by promoting a solution that provides an alternative to Israel’s One-State Plan (Greater Israel) but also by a Euro/Arab packaging of Palestinian statehood to preclude a genuine Palestinian liberation. Israeli one-statism is structured in accord with Israel’s 2018 adoption of a Basic Law institutionalizing Jewish supremist dominance in Israel and the OPT according to an unacknowledged adoption of a settler colonial approach to apartheid control imposed on the subjugated and dehumanized native population of historic Palestine. President Trump’s assertion that he would not allow Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory may depict a middle ground of permanent Israeli occupation and gradual Israelization without a Palestinian state of any sort coming into existence.

The French-backed solution, now competing with the Trump US proposal along somewhat similar lines, is centered on endorsing the establishment of a Palestinian state following the release of hostages held captive in Gaza since October 7 and the gradual dismantling of Hamas by an International Stabilization Force with an armed Arab administrative presence in Gaza. Palestinian governance of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem would be eventually entrusted to what is generally referred to as a reconstituted Palestinian Authority, originally brought into existence within the framework of Oslo Diplomacy of the 1990s. Mahmoud Abbas, the longtime, quasi-collaborationist President of the Palestinian Authority told the General Assembly speaking online as barred entry to the US, that he favors a demilitarized Palestinian state, the demilitarization and exclusion of Hamas from a governance in role , and opposed the October 7 attack, while indicting Israel for ‘genocide’ in shaping its response. Abbas has not so far insisted that Israel be required to implement the right of return enjoyed by an estimated 8 million Palestinian refugees living in the OPT and neighboring countries.

A handful of states apparently oppose this approach, most unambiguously, Israel, as it is inconsistent with Israel’s firm commitment to a one-state solution, and refusal to accept any form of Palestinian statehood. Israeli state propaganda opposes these recent Global West recognitions of Palestine by its former allies, several earlier complicit in supporting the genocide diplomatically, and some of these governments continuing their material support. Israel condemns these diplomatic moves as somehow ‘rewarding’ Hamas and its allegedly ‘terrorist’ assault of two years ago, but it hard to fathom how Hamas gains from this variation of two-state advocacy that includes the punitive exclusion of Hamas from any future role in the administration of Gaza. In other words, this variant of the two-state approach appears to reward the perpetrator of genocide and punish the victim. In fact, it may reopen the road to political and economic normalization and acceptance within the Arab Middle East.

The seeming majority Palestinian approach rejects both Israeli one statism and the two-statism as delimited by Emanuel Macron as set forth in the New York Declaration, arising from summit on Palestine co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, as well as the 21 Point Program for conflict resolution put forward by Trump in consultation with Arab countries. The most independent and trustworthy Palestinian voices are calling for the selection of a new more legitimate mechanism than the PA for the pursuit of national liberation objectives. This would be expected to require mechanisms for a meaningful exercise of the Palestinian right of self-determination by the Palestinian people including those Palestinians and their descendants living in neighboring countries or the OPT as refugees. Authentic Palestinian representation would likely take the form of a fully unified sovereign secular state (presumably renamed and deZionized) encompassing Palestinians and Jews in viable, ethnically neutral governance structures and integrated with guaranteed rights of return for Palestinians living as exiles or in refugee camps and of Jews living in the diaspora. Palestinian statehood could take the form of a viable, fully distinct, equal, and sovereign Palestinian state co-existing with a post-Zionist Israel that embodied the principles of ethnic equality, implying either the revision of Zionist ideology or its complete abandonment, reflecting approval by authenticated Palestinian representatives.

The recognition diplomacy of former supporters of Israel’s response to and characterization of October 7, even though vigorously repudiated by Israel, does not bring the conflict closer to a just and durable outcome. In effect, despite Israel’s apparent rejection, if the Palestinian statehood proposals is ever implemented along these proposed lines would not only reward Israel for genocide, and additionally have the perverse effect of extending the conflict rather than ending it. If ending was the true objective then Israel would be required to reject the practice, policies, and ideology of Zionism as the basis of Israeli governance and to refrain from establishing new settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, if not called upon to remove some or all of the settlements. As of the present, Israel is strongly opposed to the Franco/American approaches as has been made clear in words, and also by its actions, particularly threats  of partial or complete annexation of the West Bank and new provocative expansions of settlements, including a new particularly controversial settlement in E1 where a proposed settlement would bisect occupied the West Bank effectively ending any prospect of a viable Palestinian state.

2. Israel has criticized the recognition of a Palestinian state, claiming that it will strengthen Hamas. Netanyahu has said there will never be a Palestinian state. How do you see this?

Netanyahu signaled by the Doha attack of September 13 seeking to assassinate the Hamas negotiating team that Israel’s priorities remain the extermination of Hamas as a source of resistance, a discrediting of the PA as capable of being ‘a partner of peace,’ and an overall, unshakable commitment to Greater Israel, which implies opposition to any form of Palestine statehood, however limited. As suggested it also implies total extermination of Hamas as the organized center of continuing Palestinian resistance. Israel as now constituted remains currently unwilling to end the genocide, and seeks political rewards as measured by land and the removal of Palestinian residents to offset its political loss of legitimacy. As noted, Israel is now a politically isolated pariah state that is  economically subject to an increasing variety of civil society harassments. The underlying conflict between the two peoples remains frozen with no horizon of durable peace visible to informed eyes.

3. With so many nations recognizing Palestinian state, what will be necessary to make the transition from a symbolic reality to a sovereign territorial reality with recognized borders and governmental authority?

As the foregoing seeks to make clear, this sequence of diplomatic recognitions at this point seems to produce a diplomacy of futility, acceptable to neither side, and lacking the will and capabilities at the UN and elsewhere to overcome the ongoing stalemate created by Israel’s refusal to consent to coexist with a viable, and fully sovereign Palestinian state, or even a willingness to accept a Palestinian state with ghost characteristics. Israel seems poised to prolong the agony pushing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Back to leave or die. In effect, to create a third mass dispossession of the sort that in 1948 and 1967 led to the mass expulsion of Palestinian residents to obtain and preserve a Jewish majority population. Israel to fulfill the apparent goals of the Zionist Project must not only claim and exercise territorial sovereignty over the land and ethnic dominance with an apartheid matrix of control over remaining Palestinian but continuously act to defuse the demographic bomb resulting from Palestinian fertility rates being higher than that of their Jewish oppressors and from the persisting legally based claims of Palestinian refugee communities to implement their long deferred right of return.

The likely outcome of increasing international pressure to end the genocide and settle the conflict by a diplomatic compromise is currently taking the mainstream shape of a two-state outcome has little prospect of realization, given the opposition of both Israel and Palestine (if legitimately represented). If a Palestinian demilitarized statelet should be accepted by a weak and dependent PA leadership, that is, not of Palestinian choosing, it will at best recreate a pre-October 7 set of conditions of de facto Israeli one-statism periodically challenged by resistance violence. It may also lead to creative efforts by Palestinian activists and countries in the Global South to gain enough international backing for a justice-driven solution to produce a new conflict-resolving diplomacy. Two-state advocacy would likely be discredited and soon superseded by Palestinian advocacy and civil society activism that will increase over time pressures within Israel to contemplate ways to restore national legitimacy and overcome the perceptions and practices of being a pariah state. This would be, as was the case in racist South Africa, a transactional adjustment rather that a reevaluation of priorities and identity.

In conclusion, the French-Arab-American led diplomatic approaches should be critically analyzed on grounds of their misleading and concealed allegiances with many of the underlying tenets of Israel and Zionism that amount to a continuing denial of fundamental Palestinian rights. Until Palestinian representation is determined by Palestinians rather than by external political actors, whether the US, the UN, or others. Only when Palestinian international representation is reliably established will it become credible to embark upon a truly genuine effort, with integral Palestinian participation and truly neutral intermediation to devise a durable and desirable solution based on a mutually acceptable governance arrangements and agreed boundaries either of a binational single state or of two coexisting equal sovereign states.

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

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Jonathan Yerushalmy, Carmela Fonbuena, Sam Jones and Lisa O’Carroll

Thousands demonstrate around the world after flotilla was stopped and activists including Greta Thunberg detained.

Follow latest updates live

2 Oct 2025 – Israel’s long-anticipated interception of the pro-Palestinian aid flotilla has prompted criticism and condemnation around the world, triggering mass demonstrations, diplomatic rebukes and retaliation, and the threats of massive labour strikes.

In Italy, where there was a general strike in support of the Global Sumud flotilla last month, thousands turned out in cities across the country to back the group of more than 40 civilian boats carrying about 500 parliamentarians, lawyers and activists, including Greta Thunberg.

Hundreds of people gathered in front of Termini station in Rome, chanting: “Let’s block everything.” This led authorities to limit access and close some metro stops. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched in Milan, Turin and Genoa, while protesters in Naples and Pisa briefly occupied station platforms and blocked trains. Thousands also gathered in Bologna carrying banners and flags.

Italian media estimated 10,000 protesters had taken to the streets of Rome in support of the flotilla, while local television networks speculated on the fate of the several Italian parliamentarians who were part of the flotilla.

Demonstrators chanted slogans such as “Free Palestine” and called for the resignation of the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, with the spontaneous protests garnering wall-to-wall coverage across Italian news channels. Two of the country’s largest unions called a general strike for Friday.

“The aggression against civilian ships that were carrying Italian citizens is an extremely serious matter,” the CGIL union said, calling the strike, which other smaller unions said they would join. The USB union said it intended to block the port of Genoa. Over the past two weeks, protesting Italian dockworkers have prevented various ships from docking and loading, targeting vessels they say are involved in trade with Israel.

Protests were also reported in Brussels, Athens, Buenos Aires and Berlin.

The boarding of the boats and detention of the activists on Wednesday evening set off a wave of angry reprimands from around the world.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, tore into Israel for the military action, saying the country “has once again shown the madness of its genocidal leaders trying to hide their crimes against humanity in Gaza”.

Spain’s labour minister and deputy prime minister, Yolanda Díaz, described the attack as “a crime against international law” and demanded that Israel immediately release those it had detained. Writing on Bluesky, she added: “The EU needs to break off relations with Israel right now.”

Spain’s foreign minister said he had summoned Israel’s top diplomatic representative in Madrid to discuss the situation, adding that there were 65 Spaniards travelling with the flotilla.

The Irish deputy prime minister and foreign affairs minister, Simon Harris, convened a meeting of senior officials on Thursday morning to discuss the evolving situation.

“This is a peaceful mission to shine a light on a horrific humanitarian catastrophe,” Harris, the tánaiste, had said hours earlier. “Ireland expects international law to be upheld and all those on board the flotilla to be treated in strict accordance with it.”

The Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, expelled all remaining Israeli diplomats from the country on Wednesday over what he called “a new international crime” by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The leftist Petro severed relations with Israel last year but four diplomats remained posted in the country, a source at the Israeli consulate in Bogotá told Agence France-Presse.

Brazil’s foreign ministry said it “deplores the Israeli government’s military action, which violates rights and endangers the physical wellbeing of peaceful protesters”, while Mexico demanded the rights of its citizens on the flotilla be respected.

The Malaysian prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, condemned the interception, saying: “These vessels carried unarmed civilians and life-saving humanitarian supplies for Gaza, yet they were met with intimidation and coercion.”

Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said his country strongly condemned the “dastardly attack” by Israeli forces. “This barbarity must end,” he said. “Peace must be given a chance and humanitarian aid must reach those in need.“

The British Foreign Office said it was very concerned by the interception, adding that it was in touch with the families of the British nationals on the flotilla.

“The aid carried by the flotilla should be turned over to humanitarian organisations on the ground to be delivered safely into Gaza,” it said.

Australia said on Thursday it was aware of reports of “detainments” by Israeli forces and stood ready to provide consular assistance to its affected citizens onboard.

Israel’s navy had previously warned the flotilla it was approaching an active combat zone and told it to change course. It had said it would transfer any aid peacefully through safe channels to Gaza, denouncing the mission as a stunt.

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Akshita Singh

On the occasion of Gandhi’s anniversary, here is an excerpt from the renowned historian-biographer’s book that lays out the main arguments on the contemporary relevance of the Mahatma (2 Oct 1869 – 30 Jan 1948).

2 Oct 2025 – On Gandhi Jayanti every year, it has been a tradition to ask: Is he relevant today? His lessons of truth and non-violence sound sagely, other-worldly. His method, Satyagraha, seems impractical at best. For the sake of progress, development and order, a little bit of brute force, some economy of truth is indispensable, it is argued. His world was different, and his approach won’t work today.

But in the long history of humanity, a century has not drastically changed the ways of the world. In attempting to do what is required for peaceful co-existence, he also met many challenges in his time. And the problems he faced are as age-old as the means he devised to solve them. Gandhi is, if anything, more relevant for today’s strife-torn world than in the world back then.

How? Excerpted from Why Gandhi Still Matters: An Appraisal of the Mahatma’s Legacy, a book by Rajmohan Gandhi, renowned biographer of the Mahatma and historian, published by Aleph in 2017.

Why Gandhi Still Matters

Is Gandhi of interest to India and the world of today? The year 2017 mark[ed] the hundredth year of the Champaran satyagraha, and 2019 [saw] the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. Do these dates establish Gandhi’s relevance for a polarised nation and a violent world?

If Gandhi was all that persons like Einstein and Tagore, Gokhale and Nehru and Patel and Martin Luther King, Jr said he was, and what Barack Obama says he was, then why (it may be asked) was India besmirched by Partition and carnage in 1947?

Also, why do corruption and animosities mark India in 2017? As for non-violence, can anyone look at Syria and still talk of its applicability?

It says something for a person when his relevance is measured by success or failure in leaving behind a perfect world. In India, Gandhi has been criticised not only for not overcoming all the challenges of his time, including the partition demand, but also for not solving all the problems of our age!

In fact, this interest, two entire generations after his time, in what Gandhi failed to accomplish, speaks of what he inspired India to expect of him, which was everything, miracles included. He, too, on his part, claimed that if he were perfect, the world around him would change to his liking. Since it did not, we have proof that he was not perfect. Which is exactly what Gandhi always tried to say.

This short book hopes to present a relevant, fallible, amazing and accessible Gandhi. We can agree that perfection and relevance are not the same thing. A person becomes relevant not by solving all contemporary and future problems (which even God seems unable or unwilling to do) but by offering hints for making life more bearable or interesting, or by showing a way out of a forest.

Gandhi showed Indians how to demand freedom without humiliating themselves as petitioners, and without inviting reprisals on fellow Indians, which was the outcome, often, of the pre-Gandhian method of assassinating the Raj’s functionaries. Relevant or not, Gandhi remains interesting. If nothing else, his contradictions give him appeal. As one of his American friends, E. Stanley Jones, remarked, Gandhi was of East and West, the city and the village, a Hindu influenced by Christianity, simple and shrewd, candid and courteous, serious and playful, humble and assertive. ‘While the savour is sweet,’ added Jones, ‘the preponderating impression he leaves is not sweetness but strength.’

In his final years, a close associate of this lover of the name of Rama was the staunch atheist and fighter for caste equality, Gora (Gopalraju Ramachandra Rao), a Telugu Brahmin. To give another example of Gandhian irony, when Gandhi arrived in Delhi in September 1947 (on the way, so he thought, to carnage-hit Punjab), he stayed in the home of his wealthy friend Ghanshyam Das Birla, but one of the first men he talked with on the day of his arrival—to obtain a true picture of what was happening on the streets of Delhi—was the Communist leader, P. C. Joshi.

Gandhi was to then travel by train from Delhi to Wardha before making another journey, agreed to by Jinnah, to Pakistan. Earlier in the day, the historian Radha Kumud Mookerjee had given Gandhi a copy of his latest book.

This man of action—the man who turned down a plea for a treatise by him on non-violence by saying, ‘Action is my domain’— told his close aide Brij Krishna Chandiwala on the last day of his life, ‘Ask Bisen [another aide] to pack Professor Mookerjee’s book with my things.’

From both sides of bitter divides, politicians continue to invoke Gandhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi does so all the time even as opponents charge Modi with driving nails into Gandhi’s age-old coffin. Palestinians regularly recall Gandhi’s warnings from the late 1930s against flooding Palestine with European Jews, while Israeli Gandhians back Palestinians in non-violent resistance.

Old Indians can recall the support, surprising to many, given in October 1947 by Gandhi, the non-violence advocate, for flying Indian soldiers to defend Srinagar, which is what both Sheikh Abdullah and Maharaja Hari Singh had urged. Pakistanis remind India that Gandhi wanted the people’s will to prevail in Kashmir too, not merely in Hyderabad and Junagadh.

On the subcontinent or indeed anywhere else, few individuals from the first half of the twentieth century are remembered as frequently as Gandhi. A few years ago, Syrians unhappy with their regime spoke of three Gandhian principles they wanted their resistance to stick to: no sectarianism, no foreign involvement, no violence.

The wisdom of those abandoned principles was emblazoned, in letters of blood and fire, in Syria’s subsequent grief-laden story. Gandhi’s flaws too may be seen in this book, including a failure to give sufficient attention to the wishes of his wife, sons and numerous other relatives. This failure was connected in part to the ethos of his times, and in larger part to the all-demanding struggle to which Gandhi felt called. Still, the pain felt by Kasturba, Harilal, and other close ones was all too real.

That the imperfect Gandhi was an utterly astonishing human being also emerges from this book, which seeks to present the historical Gandhi, a Mahatma released from myth and also from the slander provoked by his positions, some of which were decidedly unpopular in orthodox circles.

Can a man as complex as Gandhi, and possessing more than one interesting dimension, be presented in a limited number of pages? This too was a question and a demand which this book seeks to answer.

Excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.

6 October 2025

Source: transcend.org

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei strongly condemned the Israeli regime’s attack on the Sumud humanitarian flotilla in international waters and the violent arrest of the activists supporting the Palestinian people as terrorist act aimed at perpetuating the famine imposed on Gaza.

Referring to the participation of citizens of 47 countries in Sumud humanitarian campaign aimed at breaking the cruel siege of Gaza and confronting the genocide of Palestinians, Baghaei stressed the need for all governments and the United Nations to support this campaign, hold the Zionist regime accountable, and immediately release those detained.

Referring to the transfer of the detainees of the Sumud Flotilla to the infamous Katziyot prison, which is known as a symbol of the occupation regime’s torture and inhumane treatment of Palestinian prisoners, Baghaei said: “The arrest of pro-Palestinian activists and their transfer to this prison, along with the insulting behavior of the Zionist regime’s Minister of Internal Security towards them, is another sign of the regime’s moral decline.”

Expressing disgust at the continued support of the United States and some other Western countries for the genocide of the Palestinians, he said, “All governments have a legal and moral responsibility to stop the genocide and to try and punish the criminals.”

IRNA

5 October 2025

Source: nournews.ir