But, speaking to RNZ Midday Report, Clark said New Zealand needed to come on board.
“We are watching a catastrophe unfold in Gaza. We’re watching starvation. We’re watching famine conditions for many. Many are using the word genocide,” she said.
“If New Zealand can’t act in these circumstances, when can it act?”
Elders call for recognition “The Elders, a group of world leaders of which Clark is a part, last month issued a call for countries to recognise the state of Palestine, calling it the “beginning, not the end of a political pathway towards lasting peace”.
Clark said the government seemed to be trying avoid the ire of the United States by waiting until the peace process was well underway or nearing its end.
“That is no longer tenable,” she said.
“New Zealand really is lagging behind.”
Even before the recent commitments from France, Canada and the UK, 147 of the UN’s 193 member states had recognised the Palestinian state.
Clark said the hope was that the series of recognitions from major Western states would first shift the US position and then Israel’s.
“When the US moves, Israel eventually jumps because it owes so much to the United States for the support, financial, military and otherwise,” she said.
“At some point, Israel has to smell the coffee.”
Surprised over Peters Clark said she was “a little surprised” that Foreign Minister Winston Peters had not been more forward-leaning given he historically had strongly advocated New Zealand’s even-handed position.
On Wednesday, New Zealand signed a joint statement with 14 other countries expressing a willingness to recognise the State of Palestine as a necessary step towards a two-state solution.
However, later speaking in Parliament, Peters said that was conditional on first seeing progress from Palestine, including representative governance, commitment to non-violence, and security guarantees for Israel.
“If we are to recognise the state of Palestine, New Zealand wants to know that what we are recognising is a legitimate, representative, viable, political entity,” Peters told MPs.
Peters also agreed with a contribution from ACT’s Simon Court that recognising the state of Palestine could be viewed as “a reward [to Hamas] for acts of terrorism” if it was done before Hamas had returned hostages or laid down arms.
Luxon earlier told RNZ New Zealand had long supported the eventual recognition of Palestinian statehood, but that the immediate focus should be on getting aid into Gaza rather than “fragmenting and talking about all sorts of other things that are distractions”.
“We need to put the pressure on Israel to get humanitarian assistance unfettered, at scale, at volume, into Gaza,” he told RNZ.
“You can talk about a whole bunch of other things, but for right now, the world needs to focus.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A former senior UN aid official has condemned the bloodshed at the notorious US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s aid food depots, describing the distribition system as having turned into a “catastrophe”.
The number of aid seekers killed continues to climb daily beyond 1000.
Martin Griffiths, director of Mediation Group International and the former Under Secretary General of the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office, said: “I think when many of us saw the first plans of the GHF to launch this operation in Gaza, we were immediately appalled by the way they were proposing to manage it.”
“It was clearly militarised. They’d have their own security contractors,” he told Al Jazeera.
“They’d have [Israeli military] camps placed right beside them. We know now that they are, in fact, under instructions by [the Israeli military].
“All of this is a crime. All of this is a deep betrayal of humanitarian values.
“But what I at least did not sufficiently anticipate was the killing and was the absolutely critical result of this operation, this sole humanitarian operation allowed by Israel in Gaza,” Griffiths added.
“The 1000 killed are an incredible statistic. I had no idea it would go that high and it’s going on daily. It’s not stopping.
“I think it’s a catastrophe more than a disappointment,” he said. “I think it’s a great sin. I think it’s a great crime.”
Humanitarian aid advocate Martin Griffiths . . . We know now that [GHF] are, in fact, under instructions by [the Israeli military]. All of this is a crime.” Image: Wikipedia
Commenting about US envoy Steve Witkoff and US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s planned visit to GHF-run aid distribution sites in Gaza, he said this was “likely to be choreographed”.
However, he acknowledged it was still an “important form of witness”.
“I’m glad that they’re going,” Griffiths said.
“Maybe they will see things that are unexpected. I can’t imagine because we’ve seen so much. But I don’t see it leading to a major change.
“If I was one of the two million Gazans starving to death, this is a day I would like to go to an aid distribution point,” Griffiths added.
“There’s slightly less risk probably than any other day.”
Protesters demonstrated outside several major US media outlets in Washington this week condemning their coverage of the genocide in Gaza, claiming they were to blame over misinformation and the worsening catastrophe.
Banging pots and pans to spotlight the starvation crisis, they accused the media of “complicity in genocide”.
Banners and placards proclaimed “Stop media complicity in genocide” and “US media manufactures consent for Israel’s crimes”, as the protesters demonstrated outside media offices that included NBC News and Fox News.
But the irony was that while the protests appeared to have been ignored or overlooked by national media in the US – and certainly in New Zealand, they were strongly reported by at least one global news agency, Turkey’s Anadolu Agensi.
The protests echoed a series of statements by various news media organisations, such as Agence France-Presse concerned about the safety of their journalists from both under fire and the risk of starvation, and media freedom advocacy groups.
The Doha-based global television news network Al Jazeera, that has been producing arguably the best and most honest news coverage of Gaza and the occupied West Bank – which earned it being banned last year by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority from reporting inside their territory — called for global action to protect Gaza’s journalists.
It said in a statement that Isael’s forced starvation of the besieged enclave that threatened Gaza’s entire population, including those “risking their lives to shed light on Israel’s atrocities”.
Death toll passes 60,000 On Tuesday this week, the world noted a grim milestone in Gaza, with the Health Ministry announcing that the death toll had surpassed 60,000 (this does not include the tens of thousands of people buried under the rubble and missing, presumed dead).
Put in perspective, that is one in every 36 people in Gaza killed, and more than 90 people on average slaughtered every day.
Also, 1157 people have been killed near the notorious Israel and US-backed Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation food depots condemned as “death traps”, while 154 people have died from starvation, 89 of them children with the numbers rising.
Israel’s genocide – ‘Everyone in Gaza is starving’ Video: Al Jazeera
An episode of the weekly media watch programme, The Listening Post, took up the theme as well, criticising the failure of many high profile Western news services from adequately reporting the horror of Israel’s devastating and cruel policies.
“When trying to stave off starvation becomes part of the job. What it means to be a Palestinian journalist in Gaza. The stories they are determined to tell, the incredible risks they are prepared to take,” said host Richard Gizbert when introducing the programme. He wasted no time firing a few caustic shots.
Metropolitan police on watch for the pro-Palestinian protesters outside Fox News offices in Washington DC this week. Image: AA screenshot APR
“What is unfolding in Gaza now has the appearance of a final solution, orchestrated by Israel and the United States, Israel’s other ally: The transformation of parts of the Gaza strip into starvation and concentration camps, a place where famine has been turned into a weapon of war,” he said.
“Reporting on the reality of this genocide can amount to a death sentence. Palestinian journalists can easily identify with the suffering they are documenting since they too are going hungry.
“They have been targeted because for [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, like other genocidal leaders before him, starving a population is much easier to do when no one is watching.
An Al Jazeera reporter ducks for cover as bombs hit a building behind her in a live broadcast from Gaza . . . featured in The Listening Post’s starvation report. Image: AA screenshot APR
Perpetrator ‘left out’ “Across Western mainstream media, news outlets have been unable to ignore this story of mass starvation in Gaza. But in report after report, they have made a habit of leaving out a key detail – naming the perpetrators of the famine, Israel.
“The missing actors, the sanitised language, the use of the passive grammatical voice, it is all part of the playbook for far too many international news outlets and that is exactly what the few Palestinian journalists still standing are out to tell the world.”
Gizbert explained that “journalists in Gaza already have the world’s toughest assignment”: “Job one for almost 22 months now has been survival; job two, telling heartbreaking stories; documenting a genocide while under fire.”
Hossam Shabat reports on his colleague Anas al-Sharif’s experience at Al Shifa hospital and the starvation of babies in Gaza. Image: Instagram/@hossam_shbat
Like, for example, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Anas al-Sharif who was reporting live from outside Al Shifa medical complex when a woman behind him collapsed at the hospital’s gate.
Al-Sharif, who had reported on the genocide of his own people for more than 650 days without rest or complaint, through Israeli occupation airstrikes, drone attacks, and countless “scenes resembling hell”, suddenly could not take it anymore.
He broke down: “People are falling to the ground from the severity of hunger,” al-Sharif said through his tears. “They need one sip of water. They need one loaf of bread.”
Al-Sharif has also been threatened by the Israeli military, accusing him of being a “Hamas militant”, an accusation strongly denied by Al Jazeera, denouncing what it called Tel Aviv’s “campaign of incitement” against its reporters in the Gaza Strip.
Discredited for bias Many Western mainstream media – including BBC, CNN, Sky, ITN, and Australia’s public broadcaster ABC — have been repeatedly discredited for their “pro-Israel bias” by scores of journalists who have acted as whistleblowers about the actions of their own news organisations.
According to a Declassified UK report, for example, the journalists working for a range of outlets from across the political spectrum have “painted a consistent picture of the obstacles faced by reporters who want to humanise Palestinians or scrutinise Israeli government narratives”. The US media is also under attack and has been putting up a lame defence.
Last week, more than 100 aid groups warned of “mass starvation” throughout Gaza — predictably denied by Israeli government in the face of overwhelming evidence — with their staff severely impacted by shortages and serious implications for journalists already being threatened with targeting by the Israeli military.
Israel faces growing global pressure over the enclave’s dire humanitarian crisis, where more than two million people have endured 22 months of war. UN Security Council member France has led a group of countries announcing that they plan to recognise the Palestinian state at the UN in September, with United Kingdom, Canada, Malta and Finland among those following with the total number now almost 150 of the 193 UN member states.
A statement with 111 signatories, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam, warned that “our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away”. The groups called for an immediate negotiated ceasefire, the opening of all land crossings and the free flow of aid through UN-led mechanisms.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh reported from Amman that the Israeli government had accused the UK of supporting the establishment of a “jihadi” state and of derailing efforts to reach a ceasefire.
“But really,” she said, “the Israeli media, for example, is describing this as a political tsunami, a realisation of how significant the tide is, and how improbable it is to turn it back to countries withholding recognition because Israel said it doesn’t want it.”
Calling for sanctions She also noted how 31 high-profile Israelis, including the former speaker of the Knesset, a former attorney general, and several recipients of Israel’s highest cultural award, were calling on world governments to impose crippling sanctions on Israel to stop the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and their expulsion
“This was taboo just a few days ago and has never really been done before, certainly not at this level of prominence of the signatories,” Odeh added.
“Israel is starving Gazan journalists into silence,” says the CPJ. Image: CPJ screenshot APR
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) added its voice to the appeal by aid agencies to call for an end to Israel’s starvation of journalists and other civilians in Gaza, backing the plea for states to “save lives before there are none left to save.”
In a statement on its website, the CPJ accused Israel of “starving journalists into silence”.
“Israel is starving Gazan journalists into silence. They are not just reporters, they are frontline witnesses, abandoned as international media were pulled out and denied entry,” said CPJ regional director Sara Qudah.
“The world must act now: protect them, feed them, and allow them to recover while other journalists step in to help report. Our response to their courageous 650 plus-days of war reporting cannot simply be to let them starve to death.”
As Israel partially eased its 11-week total blockade of Gaza that began in May, CPJ published the testimony of six journalists who described how “starvation, dizziness, brain fog, and sickness” had threatened their ability to report.
Among highlights cited by the CPJ: • On June 20, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif — the journalist cited earlier in this article — posted online: “I am drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment . . . Gaza is dying. And we die with it.” • Sally Thabet, correspondent for Al-Kofiya satellite channel, told CPJ that she fainted consciousness after doing a live broadcast on July 20 because she had not eaten all day. She regained consciousness in Al-Shifa hospital, where doctors gave her an intravenous drip for rehydration and nutrition. In an online video, she described how she and her three daughters were starving. • Another Palestinian journalist, Shuruq As’ad said Thabet had been the third journalist to collapse on air from starvation that week, and posted a photograph of Thabet with the drip in her hand. • During a live broadcast on July 20, Al-Araby TV correspondent Saleh Al-Natour said: “We have no choice but to write and speak; otherwise, we will all die.”
Little of this horrendous state of affairs has made it onto the pages of newspapers, websites of the television screens in the New Zealand mainstream media which seems to have a pro-Israel slant and rarely interviews Palestinian journalists or analysts for balance.
“Stop media complicity in genocide” says the protest banner in Washington DC. Image: AA screenshot APR
The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji has sharply criticised the Fiji government’s stance over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, saying it “starkly contrasts” with the United Nations and international community’s condemnation as a violation of international law and an impediment to peace.
In a statement today, the NGO Coalition said that the way the government was responding to the genocide and war crimes in Gaza would set a precedent for how it would deal with crises and conflict in future.
It would be a marker for human rights responses both at home and the rest of the world.
“We are now seeing whether our country will be a force that works to uphold human rights and international law, or one that tramples on them whenever convenient,” the statement said.
“Fiji’s position on the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestinians starkly contrasts with the values of justice, freedom, and international law that the Fijian people hold dear.
“The genocide and colonial occupation have been widely recognised by the international community, including the United Nations, as a violation of international law and an impediment to peace and the self-determination of the Palestinian people.”
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would formally recognise the state of Palestine — the first of G7 countries to do so — at the UN general Assembly in September.
142 countries recognise Palestine At least 142 countries out of the 193 members of the UN currently recognise or plan to recognise a Palestinian state, including European Union members Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia.
However, several powerful Western countries have refused to do so, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.
At the UN this week, Saudi Arabia and France opened a three-day conference with the goal of recognising Palestinian statehood as part of a peaceful settlement to end the war in Gaza.
Last year, Fiji’s coalition government submitted a written statement in support of the Israeli genocidal occupation of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, noted the NGO coalition.
Last month, Fiji’s coalition government again voted against a UN General Assembly resolution that demanded an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Also recently, the Fiji government approved the allocation of $1.12 million to establish an embassy “in the genocidal terror state of Israel as Fijians grapple with urgent issues, including poverty, violence against women and girls, deteriorating water and health infrastructure, drug use, high rates of HIV, poor educational outcomes, climate change, and unfair wages for workers”.
Met with ‘indifference’ The NGO coalition said that it had made repeated requests to the Fiji government to “do the bare minimum and enforce the basic tenets of international law on Israel”.
“We have been calling upon the Fiji government to uphold the principles of peace, justice, and human rights that our nation cherishes,” the statement said.
“We campaigned, we lobbied, we engaged, and we explained. We showed the evidence, pointed to the law, and asked our leaders to do the right thing.
“We’ve been met with nothing but indifference.”
Instead, said the NGO statement, Fiji leaders had met with Israeli government representatives and declared support for a country “committing the most heinous crimes” recognised in international law.
“Fijian leaders and the Fiji government should not be supporting Israel or setting up an embassy in Israel while Israel continues to bomb refugee tents, kill journalists and medics, and block the delivery of humanitarian aid to a population under relentless siege.
“No politician in Fiji can claim ignorance of what is happening.”
“Many more have been maimed, traumatised, and displaced. Starvation is being used by Israel as weapon to kill babies and children.
“Hospitals, churches, mosques,, refugee camps, schools, universities, residential neighbourhoods, water and food facilities have been destroyed.
“History will judge how we respond as Fijians to this moment.
“Our rich cultural heritage and shared values teach us the importance of always standing up for what is right, even when it is not popular or convenient.”
Members of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights are Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Programme, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji.
Also, Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.
The NGO coalition said it stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people out of a shared belief in humanity, justice, and the inalienable human rights of every individual.
“Silence is not an option,” it added.
Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network said it supported this NGO coalition statement.
No New Zealanders were on board the Handala in the latest arrest and abductions of Freedom Flotilla crew on humanitarian siege-busting missions to Gaza. However, two Australians were and one talks to The New Arab just before the attack on Saturday.
INTERVIEW:By Sebastian Shehadi
The Handala, a 1968 Norwegian trawler repurposed by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), set sail for Gaza from southern Italy on July 20, carrying around 21 people and a cargo of food, medical kits, baby formula, water desalination units and more.
The ship is named after the iconic Palestinian cartoon figure, Handala, who symbolises Palestinian identity, resilience and the ongoing struggle against displacement and occupation.
Just hours before departure, the crew uncovered deliberate sabotage: a rope tightly bound around the propeller and a sulfuric acid swap mistaken for water, leading to chemical burns in two people.
Despite this alarming start, the mission continued, echoing the defiance of past flotilla efforts such as the interception of the Madleen in June and the Israeli drone strike on the Conscience in May.
However, contact with the vessel was reported lost on July 24, with coalition officials warning that communications have been jammed and drones have been seen near the ship, raising concerns about interception or further hostile action.
The mission resumed following the brief two-hour communications blackout. “Connection has now been re-established. ‘Handala’ is continuing its mission and is currently less than 349 nautical miles from Gaza,” the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) announced on Telegram on July 25.
Then on Saturday, the Israeli military attacked the ship and violently detained and “abducted” the entire crew and issued a statement saying they were “safe” and on their way to Israel.
‘Handala’ was illegally boarded by Israel military in international waters, around 40 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza.
Before interception the 21 crew made this statement: if attacked they will join the global hunger strike for Gaza.
— Freedom Flotilla Coalition (@GazaFFlotilla) July 27, 2025
The New Arab spoke to one of Handala’s crew, Lebanese-Australian filmmaker, human rights activist and journalist Tan Safi, before the arrest to find out more about the mission and why she chose to be on board this mission:
The New Arab: How’s the mood on the ship at the moment? Tan Safi: The morale of everyone at the moment is high, as everyone is happy to be here. Of course, different emotions come up, and we talk them out, but as a collective, we’re all looking out for one another. Everyone is very caring and kind.
We are a group of 21 people from 10 different countries. We have a very proud grandmother, as well as MPs, nurses, a human rights lawyer, a comedian, an actor, human rights activists and more. We’re from many different walks of life, and we pose absolutely no threat to anyone.
We’re simply trying to challenge something illegal. Like previous Freedom Flotilla actions, we will be sailing through international waters into Palestinian territorial waters.
Australian Handala crew member Tan Safi . . . “Back in 2010, we sent a flotilla that was caught in a deadly raid. The Israelis came in a helicopter, boarded the ship and killed nine people instantaneously, while another person died from a coma years later.” Image: FFC
How are you preparing for the very real threat of Israeli violence? Back in 2010, we sent a flotilla that was caught in a deadly raid. The Israelis came in a helicopter, boarded the ship and killed nine people instantaneously, while another person died from a coma years later.
So we know very well that Israel poses a real threat.
More importantly, we’ve seen what they’re capable of over the last two years. The most horrific things imaginable. Israeli soldiers are committing endless crimes against Gazan children, and then going into the homes of the Palestinians they’ve murdered and taking selfies in women’s lingerie. We know what they’re capable of.
Any interception of our vessel would violate international maritime law. The ICJ [International Court of Justice] itself ordered Israel not to interfere with any delivery of international aid. Of course, we know that Israel gets to exist in this world by hopping over international law, without any accountability, without any real sanctions.
In terms of processing, what might happen to me? I’ve had to do it time and time again whenever I’ve joined FFC missions over the last two years. I’ve had to say goodbye to my friends and family, but also try to keep them reassured.
Sometimes I feel like I’m lying, to be honest. I tell them that “everything will be okay”. But it’s psychologically impossible to explain.
Are you worried that Handala is less protected than the last ship, Madleen, which had the global media attention (and protection) of having Greta Thunberg on board?
A Gaza Freedom Flotilla Instagram poster. Image: Instagram/@loremresists
No matter how many Instagram followers you have, your life is just as important as the next person’s. We have people on this boat who have Instagram. We have people who do.
The lives of all these people are as valuable as everyone else’s. I would just try to focus on the fact that we’re all human beings, just as every Palestinian in Gaza is. I’m more worried that Israel’s violence will expand until it’s too late, and people wish that they had done more. The time is now.
What is your message to global or Australian leaders? I’m Lebanese, but I grew up in so-called Australia, a country that has such a dark history. What our politicians forget is that so-called Australia was not theirs to begin with. Australia was, and will always be, Aboriginal land. They can try to hide their dark truths, just like Israel used to as well. But the truth will become exposed in time.
To this day, Aboriginal people are abused and discriminated against by the state. My message to Australia’s leadership is: how can you watch tens of thousands of men, women and children being slaughtered and still be enabling Israel’s siege and genocide?
The Australian embassy in Israel sent me a message urging me to “please reconsider your decision to join a humanitarian aid trip to Gaza”. If they’re so concerned about the two Australians on this boat, I would urge them to be more concerned with the millions of Palestinians who are suffering daily.
The Palestinian cartoon character Handala . . . reimagined with deliberate starvation by the Israeli military forces. Image: X/@RimaHas
Can you tell us more about daily life and organisation on the ship? We all put our hands up to volunteer for various tasks throughout the day. Some of us are more skilled in certain areas than others. For example, we have someone here from France who is a nurse, and they’re helping anyone who is feeling sick.
We have the proud grandmother, Vigdis from Norway, who loves to cook. And then someone will put their hand up to do the dishes. No one is too good to clean the toilets.
We’re all helping out to keep this ship organised. We also do shifts, helping out with the crew when needed. No one is sitting around. And if someone is, it’s because it’s really hot or the seas are rough.
What do you hope Handala will achieve, beyond potentially breaking the siege? I hope this action will encourage all forms of solidarity and, more importantly, inspire direct action. I know that protests and non-direct actions serve a purpose, but we have talked and talked and talked at length. I don’t know how people are finding the strength.
Sometimes when I’m asked to talk at events, I just don’t know what to say, because if you need me to explain this, maybe you will never understand.
But what we clearly need to do is disrupt the financial flow that enables and fuels this genocide. The BDS movement is huge. People used to look down on it and question its efficacy. But now we’re able to quantify that it’s actually affecting real, big business.
I’ve always been advocating for that and asking people to be aware of the companies they consume from, such as Unilever, Nestle and Coke. This is having a real impact on these companies that are profiteering from unethical practices to begin with, that extends far beyond the genocide in Gaza.
Direct action could also involve blockading shipments of weapons from ports and docks, as seen in Greece. It’s amazing to see more countries step up. However, we often see a lot of lip service as well. It takes everyday people to actually stand up and say: “I’m able-bodied. I’m sick to my stomach. I’m gonna listen to my instinct and explore other options”.
If protesting is not working, explore other options. If there is no direct action group, create one. All it takes is one person to begin.
Are there any final or other messages you’d like to convey? The Handala ship is the 37th boat from the FFC to travel to Gaza. There are thousands of people behind each of these journeys who make these voyages happen.
The FFC has existed for as many years as Israel’s siege on Gaza has. The FFC exists only because of Israel’s illegal siege.
We are people from around the world who are united in our shared consciousness and care for Palestine. We pose no threat. I’m looking at a bunch of toys and baby formula. We have as much food as we can carry, but our main goal is to break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza because you need to fix a problem at the root of the cause.
Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman. This article was first published by The New Arab.Follow Shehadi on X: @seblebanon
In the new weekly political podcast, The Bradbury Group, last night presenter Martyn Bradbury talked with visiting Palestinian journalist Dr Yousef Aljamal.
They assess the current situation in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what New Zealand should be doing.
As Bradbury, publisher of The Daily Blog, notes, “Fourth Estate public broadcasting is dying — The Bradbury Group will fight back.”
Gaza crisis and Iran tensions. Video: The Bradbury Group/Radio Waatea
Also in last night’s programme was featured a View From A Far Podcast Special Middle East Report with former intelligence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan and international affairs commentator Selwyn Manning on what will happen next in Iran.
Martyn Bradbury talks to Dr Paul Buchanan (left) and Selwyn Manning on the Iran crisis and the future. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Political Panel: Māori Party president John Tamihere, NZ Herald columnist Simon Wilson NZCTU economist Craig Renney
Topics: – The Legacy of Tarsh Kemp – New coward punch and first responder assault laws — virtue signalling or meaningful policy? – Cost of living crisis and the failing economy
Protesters against the Israeli genocide in Gaza and occupied West Bank targeted three business sites accused of being “complicit” in Aotearoa New Zealand today.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa’s “End Rocket Lab Genocide Complicity” themed protest picketed Rocket Lab’s New Zealand head office in Mt Wellington.
Simultaneously, protesters also picketed a site in Warkworth where Rocket Lab equipment is built and Mahia peninsula where satellites are launched.
In a statement on the PSNA website, it was revealed this week that the advocacy group’s lawyers have prepared a 103-page “indictment” against two business leaders, including the head of Rocket Lab, along with four politicians, including Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
They have been referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for investigation on an accusation of complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Rocket Lab chief executive Sir Peter Beck is one of the six people named in the legal brief.
“Rocket Lab has recently launched geospatial intelligence satellites for BlackSky Technology,” said PSNA co-chair John Minto in a statement.
High resolution images “These satellites provide high resolution images to Israel which are very likely used to assist with striking civilians in Gaza. Sir Peter has proceeded with these launches in full knowledge of these circumstances”
A “Genocide Lab” protest against Rocket Lab in Mt Wellington today. Image: PSNA
“When governments and business leaders can’t even condemn a genocide then civil society groups must act.”
The other business leader named is Rakon Limited chief executive officer Dr Sinan Altug.
“Despite vast weapons transfers from the United States to Israel since the beginning of its war on Gaza, Rakon has continued with its longstanding supply of crystal oscillators to US arms manufacturers for use in guided missiles which are then available to Israel for the bombing of Gaza, as well as Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran with consequential massive loss of life,” Minto said.
“Rakon’s claims that it has no responsibility over how these ‘dual-use’ technologies are used are not credible.”
Rocket Lab and Rakon have in the past rejected claims over their responsibility.
Speakers at Mount Wellington included the Green Party spokesperson for foreign affairs Teanau Tuiono; Dr Arama Rata, a researcher and lecturer from Victoria University; and Sam Vincent, the legal team leader for the ICC referral.
Law academic Professor Jane Kelsey spoke at the Warkworth picket.
In the new weekly political podcast, The Bradbury Group, last night presenter Martyn Bradbury talked with visiting Palestinian journalist Dr Yousef Aljamal.
They assess the current situation in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what New Zealand should be doing.
As Bradbury, publisher of The Daily Blog, notes, “Fourth Estate public broadcasting is dying — The Bradbury Group will fight back.”
Gaza crisis and Iran tensions. Video: The Bradbury Group/Radio Waatea
Also in last night’s programme was featured a View From A Far Podcast Special Middle East Report with former intelligence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan and international affairs commentator Selwyn Manning on what will happen next in Iran.
Martyn Bradbury talks to Dr Paul Buchanan (left) and Selwyn Manning on the Iran crisis and the future. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Political Panel: Māori Party president John Tamihere, NZ Herald columnist Simon Wilson NZCTU economist Craig Renney
Topics: – The Legacy of Tarsh Kemp – New coward punch and first responder assault laws — virtue signalling or meaningful policy? – Cost of living crisis and the failing economy
On June 22, American warplanes crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped 14 massive bombs.
The attack was not in response to a provocation; it came on the heels of illegal Israeli aggression that took the lives of more than 600 Iranians.
This was a return to something familiar and well-practised: an empire bombing innocents across the orientalist abstraction called “the Middle East”.
That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice-president and two state secretaries, told the world: “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace”.
There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion.
But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers?
In the 12 days that Israel’s illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers.
Victimhood serving narrative Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative.
And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands.
Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.
Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV.
Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel’s unending violence in an active voice.
Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as “human shields”.
Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as “the truth”.
Bias over Palestinian deaths A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media.
Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat — not a people, but a problem.
The word “Islamic” is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished.
Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order.
Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission.
It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken.
And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just “weeks away” from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise.
Fear over false ‘nuclear threat’ But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say “nuclear threat” often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.
This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms.
Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about “The New Middle East” with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago.
But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war.
After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment
The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed.
They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq.
Low social justice spending At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance.
And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world.
Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live.
They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli “self-defence”.
The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat.
The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war.
‘Don’t drop bombs’ And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, “the ceasefire is in effect”, telling Israel to “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.
Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on.
But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky.
Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror.
Ahmad Ibsaisis a first-generation Palestinian American and law student who writes the newsletter State of Siege.
BEARING WITNESS:By Cole Martin in occupied Bethlehem
Kia ora koutou,
I’m a Kiwi journo in occupied Bethlehem, here’s a brief summary of today’s events across the Palestinian and Israeli territories from on the ground.
At least 79 killed and 391 injured by Israeli forces in Gaza over the last 24 hours, including 33 killed and 267 injured while seeking aid at the US-Israel “humanitarian” centres.
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Three killed and 7 injured by settler pogrom on the town of Kafr Malik, northeast of Ramallah; setting fire to houses and cars, and protected by soldiers. Israeli forces shot and killed 15-year-old Rayan Houshia west of Jenin as they retreated from resistance fighters, after using a civilian home as military barracks; also invading several towns across the West Bank, firing teargas into al-Fawar refugee camp south of Hebron, sound-bombs near the Jenin Grand Mosque in the north, and arresting several Palestinians.
Al Quds/Jerusalem’s old city faced low visitor numbers even after restrictions were lifted by the Israeli occupation. Jerusalem Governate reported 623 homes and facilities demolished by Israel since October 2023.
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Palestinian political prisoner Amar Yasser Al-Amour was released after 2.5 years without charge or trial in Israeli prisons. Thousands remain detained illegally in this way. Another freed prisoner Fares Bassam Hanani mourned his mother who passed away while he was imprisoned. Mohammad al-Ghushi, also freed, was taken to hospital to have his kidney removed due to torture and medical neglect he faced in Israeli prisons.
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The unexpected ceasefire between Israel, America, and Iran appears to be holding for now. Iranian officials say the US “torpedoed diplomacy” and have passed a bill to halt cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
BEARING WITNESS:By Cole Martin in occupied Bethlehem
Kia ora koutou,
I’m a Kiwi journo in occupied Bethlehem, here’s a brief summary of today’s events across the Palestinian and Israeli territories from on the ground.
Sixty nine people killed in Gaza, 12 while seeking aid, and 221 injured (172 seeking aid). 11 killed by Israeli airstrike on a house in central Gaza. Qassam Brigades carried out a “complex” ambush against Israeli forces in southern Gaza. Israel are preventing humanitarian organisations from accessing fuel storage sites in the enclave, hospital supplies last for just three days.
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Iranian authorities report five hospitals damaged in targeted Israeli strikes, have arrested 16 agents allegedly linked to Israel, and offered Israeli “collaborators” a pardon if they surrender their drones by July 1.
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Two US destroyers have arrived in the eastern Mediterranean, bringing the total to five in the region and two in the Red Sea.
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An Israeli drone targeted a car in southern Lebanon, violating the existing ceasefire and Lebanese sovereignty yet again.
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Israeli leaders double down on their accusations that Iran is developing nuclear bombs, despite the international watchdog, IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], saying there is no sufficient evidence. 18 injured by Iranian missile in the southern Israeli territories, 17 in Haifa. Strikes targeted Israel’s Channel 14 news stations as threatened, after Israeli forces struck Iran’s state broadcaster two days ago. 100 million shekel pledged by Israeli regime to build 1000 new bomb shelters in some areas; the regime is known for under-investment in Palestinian neighbourhoods.
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More checkpoints and barriers installed across the West Bank. Ambulance movement continues to be disrupted by gas shortages in Bethlehem. Despite the war, Israeli occupation forces continue extensive home demolitions in Nour Shams refugee camp in the northern West Bank. Settlers crush and uproot Palestinian olive trees near Sinjil, north of Ramallah. Occupation bulldozers dug up roads south of Jenin. Palestinian residents were shot at by settlers while trying to extinguish fires west of Bethlehem.
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Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza continues, with minimal political intervention to prevent it.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Ali Kazak: born Haifa, 1947; died May 17 2025, Thailand
By Helen Musa in Canberra
Former Palestinian diplomat and long-time Canberra identity Ali Kazak died on Saturday en route to Palestine.
Sources at the Canberra Islamic Centre report that he was recovering from heart surgery and died during a stopover in Thailand.
Kazak was born in Haifa in 1947 and grew up in Syria as a Palestinian refugee. He and his mother were separated from his father when Israel was created in 1948 and Kazak was only reunited with his father in 1993.
In 1968, while at Damascus University, Kazak had been invited to join the Palestine National Liberation Movement (Fateh) and joined its political wing.
He migrated to Australia in 1970 where he became the founder, publisher and co-editor of the Australian newspaper, Free Palestine, also authoring among many books, The Jerusalem Question and Australia and the Arabs.
Kazak was the driving force behind the establishment in 1981 of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and was appointed by the PLO executive committee as the PLO’s representative to Australia, NZ and the Pacific region.
In 1982, he established the Palestine Information Office, which was recognised by the Australian government in 1989 as the office of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and then further recognised in 1994 as the General Palestinian Delegation.
As Palestinian Ambassador, Kazak initiated the establishment of the NSW State and Australian Federal Parliamentary Friends of Palestine, as well as the Victorian, South Australian and NZ Parliamentary Friends of Palestine.
Always a passionate advocate, in 1986 he became the first person to call for adjudication by the Australian Press Council of stereotyped reporting of Palestinians.
After retiring from diplomacy, he became the managing director of the consultancy company Southern Link International, but continued to comment on Palestinian affairs and Gaza.
Donald Trump is committing genocide for Israel after publicly admitting to being bought and owned by the Adelsons.
All the worst shit happens right out in the open. You don’t need to come up with any elaborate conspiracy theories to see it. It’s right there, completely unhidden.
It’s not hidden, it’s just spun. Disguised by the propaganda of the mass media which frame this holocaust as a war of defence in response to a terrorist attack while constantly diverting our attention to other far less significant issues.
It says so much about the power of the imperial propaganda machine that Trump could openly admit to having been fully controlled by Adelson cash on the campaign trail, get elected, and then facilitate a blatant extermination campaign in Gaza while aggressively stomping out free speech that is critical of Israel throughout the United States — and somehow not have this be the main thing that everyone talks about all the time. It is only because our minds are being forcefully manipulated by the powerful at mass scale that this has been the case.
All the worst evils . . . Video/Audio: Caitlin Johnstone
The narrative spin is greatly aided by the fact that Trump isn’t doing much different from the previous president here. A public which has been indoctrinated from childhood into seeing everything in Democrat-vs-Republican binaries is conditioned to focus far more on the differences between the two parties than the similarities.
But you can learn a whole lot more about real power and what’s actually going on in the world by paying less attention to how US presidents differ from each other, and more attention to the ways in which they are the same.
Take note of which Trump comments provoke controversy, and which don’t. Trump said this week that he “gave” the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, his top funders, who came to the White House “almost more than anybody.” Not a peep about this brazen admission of graft pic.twitter.com/MaJLFnH7oi
The mass-scale psychological manipulation is so pervasive and ubiquitous that only a small minority are reacting to history’s first live-streamed genocide with an appropriate level of horror. If Americans could see what their government is doing in their name with fresh eyes and uncallused hearts, the nation’s capitol would be burnt to the ground within days.
But because their vision is clouded by propaganda indoctrination they can’t see it, so they overlook what’s right in front of them while awaiting a gigantic Epstein bombshell or UFO disclosure or some other Big Reveal that never comes.
Consider the possibility that the Big Reveal has already happened. That it’s been right here staring you in the face this entire time, but you haven’t noticed its significance because it has been constantly normalised for you throughout your life since you were small. That the truth behind all your most sparkly conspiracy theories could be published online tomorrow, and it still wouldn’t tell you as much about what your rulers are doing and how evil they are as what’s already happening in plain sight.
This is the dystopia we were warned about. It’s not some ominous threat looming on the horizon. It’s here. We are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into consenting to the most nightmarish atrocities imaginable.
Children’s bodies are being shredded to bits right in front of us. And when you turn on the TV you see famous people laughing and making jokes with fake plastic grins, babbling about vapid nonsense. This is the dystopia. It isn’t on its way. It’s here.
They’re ripping kids in half right in front of us and telling us we need to be mad at Kneecap and Ms Rachel.
We don’t need a Big Reveal. If the Big Reveal happened next week, the public would be indoctrinated into overlooking and dismissing it by the imperial spin machine by the weekend. We don’t need new information, we need people to truly see the information that’s already here. To see it with eyes that are free from the cataracts of propaganda conditioning, with hearts that are free from the calluses of desensitisation.
Waking the public up is less about whistleblowers, FOIA requests and investigative journalism at this point than it is about finding creative and artistic ways to get people noticing the information that’s already public.
And the good news is that we can all help do this. We can all help our fellow members of the public to see what’s really happening with fresh eyes. Using our creativity, our humour, our insight and our compassion, we can find new ways every day to open a new pair of eyelids to the truth of our present circumstances.
Our rulers do not have creativity. They do not have humour, insight or compassion. These are not tools that they have in their toolbox, and they have no weapons to counter them.
All they have is manipulation, and manipulation only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Our task is to keep finding new and creative ways to help more people see and understand the ways in which they have been manipulated.
If there is one thing we can thank US President Donald Trump for, it is this: he has decisively stripped away the ridiculous notion, long cultivated by Western media, that the United States is a benign global policeman enforcing a “rules-based order”.
Washington is better understood as the head of a gangster empire, embracing 800 military bases around the world. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been aggressively seeking “global full-spectrum domination”, as the Pentagon doctrine politely terms it.
You either pay fealty to the Don or you get dumped in the river. Last Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was presented with a pair of designer concrete boots at the White House.
The US president looked like a gangster as he roughed up Zelensky. But he wasn’t the one who stoked a war that’s killed huge numbers of Ukrainians and Russians. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
The innovation was that it all happened in front of the Western press corps, in the Oval Office, rather than in a back room, out of sight. It made for great television, Trump crowed.
Pundits have been quick to reassure us that the shouting match was some kind of weird Trumpian thing. As though being inhospitable to state leaders, and disrespectful to the countries they head, is unique to this administration.
Take just the example of Iraq. The administration of Bill Clinton thought it “worth it” – as his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, infamously put it — to kill an estimated half a million Iraqi children by imposing draconian sanctions through the 1990s.
Under Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, the US then waged an illegal war in 2003, on entirely phoney grounds, that killed around half a million Iraqis, according to post-war estimates, and made four million homeless.
Those worrying about the White House publicly humiliating Zelensky might be better advised to save their concern for the hundreds of thousands of mostly Ukrainian and Russian men killed or wounded fighting an entirely unnecessary war — one, as we shall see, Washington carefully engineered through Nato over the preceding two decades.
Henchman Zelensky All those casualties served the same goal as they did in Iraq: to remind the world who is boss.
Uniquely, Western publics don’t understand this simple point because they live inside a disinformation bubble, created for them by the Western establishment media.
Henry Kissinger, the long-time steward of US foreign policy, famously said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
Zelensky just found that out the hard way. Gangster empires are just as fickle as the gangsters we know from Hollywood movies. Under the previous Joe Biden administration, Zelensky had been recruited as a henchman to do Washington’s bidding on Moscow’s doorstep.
The background — the one Western media have kept largely out of view — is that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US tore up treaties crucial to reassuring Russia of Nato’s good intent.
Viewed from Moscow, and given Washington’s track record, Nato’s European security umbrella must have looked more like preparation for an ambush.
Keen though Trump now is to rewrite history and cast himself as peacemaker, he was central to the escalating tensions that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In 2019, he unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That opened the door to the US launching a potential first strike on Russia, using missiles stationed in nearby Nato members Romania and Poland.
He also sent Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, a move avoided by his predecessor, Barack Obama, for fear it would be seen as provocative.
Repeatedly, Nato vowed to bring Ukraine into its fold, despite Russia’s warnings that the step was viewed as an existential threat, that Moscow could not allow Washington to place missiles on its border, any more than the US accepted Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba back in the early 1960s.
Washington pressed ahead anyway, even assisting in a colour revolution-style coup in 2014 against the elected government in Kyiv, whose crime was being a little too sympathetic to Moscow.
With the country in crisis, Zelensky was himself elected by Ukrainians as a peace candidate, there to end a brutal civil war — sparked by that coup — between anti-Russian, “nationalistic” forces in the country’s west and ethnic Russian populations in the east. The Ukrainian President soon broke that promise.
Trump has accused Zelensky of being a “dictator”. But if he is, it is only because Washington wanted him that way, ignoring the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians.
Reddest of red lines Zelensky’s job was to play a game of chicken with Moscow. The assumption was that the US would win whatever the outcome.
Either Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluff would be called. Ukraine would be welcomed into Nato, becoming the most forward of the alliance’s forward bases against Russia, allowing nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to be stationed minutes from Moscow.
Or Putin would finally make good on his years of threats to invade his neighbour to stop Nato crossing the reddest of red lines he had set over Ukraine.
Washington could then cry “self-defence” on Ukraine’s behalf, and ludicrously fearmonger Western publics about Putin eyeing Poland, Germany, France and Britain next.
Those were the pretexts for arming Kyiv to the hilt, rather than seeking a rapid peace deal. And so began a proxy war of attrition against Russia, using Ukrainian men as cannon fodder.
The aim was to wear Russia down militarily and economically, and bring about Putin’s overthrow.
Zelensky did precisely what was demanded of him. When he appeared to waver early on, and considered signing a peace deal with Moscow, Britain’s prime minister of the time, Boris Johnson, was dispatched with a message from Washington: keep fighting.
That is the same Boris Johnson who now breezily admits that the West is fighting a “proxy war” against Russia.
Hmm, maybe someone can help me.
How was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine entirely ‘unprovoked’, when the British leader in charge at the time, Boris Johnson, now admits Nato viewed Ukraine as the battlefield for a ‘proxy war’ against Russia? 🤯 pic.twitter.com/VS6jRE03gH
His comments have generated precisely no controversy. That is particularly strange, given that critics who pointed this very obvious fact out three years ago were instantly denounced for spreading “Putin disinformation” and Kremlin “talking points”.
For his obedience, Zelensky was feted a hero, the defender of Europe against Russian imperialism. His every “demand” — demands that originated in Washington — was met.
Ukraine has received at least $250 billion worth of guns, tanks, fighter jets, training for his troops, Western intelligence on Russia, and other forms of aid.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men have paid with their lives — as have the families they leave behind.
Mafia etiquette Now the old Don in Washington is gone. The new Don has decided Zelensky has been an expensive failure. Russia isn’t lethally wounded. It’s stronger than ever. Time for a new strategy.
Zelensky, still imagining he was Washington’s favourite henchman, arrived at the Oval Office only to be taught a harsh lesson in mafia etiquette.
Trump is spinning his stab in the back as a “peace agreement”. And in some sense, it is. Rightly, Trump has concluded that Russia has won — unless the West is ready to fight World War III and risk a potential nuclear war.
Trump has faced up to the reality of the situation, even if Zelensky and Europe are still struggling to.
Trump’s overt ‘genocidal’ warning over Gaza. Video: TRT World News
But his plan for Ukraine is actually just a variation of his other peace plan — the one for Gaza. There he wants to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and, on the bodies of the enclave’s many thousands of dead children, build the “Riviera of the Middle East” — or “Trump Gaza” as it is being called in a surreal video he shared on social media.
In telling the “people of Gaza”, they will be “DEAD” if the hostages aren’t released – something they can’t decide – Trump is expressing clear genocidal intent. He’a also sending the arms to make that genocide possible.
Similarly, Trump now sees Ukraine not as a military battlefield but as an economic one where, through clever deal-making, he can leverage riches for himself and his billionaire pals.
He has put a gun to Zelensky and Europe’s head. Make a deal with Russia to end the war, or you are on your own against a far superior military power. See if the Europeans can help you without a supply of Washington’s weapons.
Not surprisingly, Zelensky, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron huddled together at the weekend to find a deal that would appease Trump. All Starmer has revealed so far is that the plan will “stop the fighting”.
That is a good thing. But the fighting could have been stopped, and should have been stopped, three years ago.
Money, not peace It is deeply unwise to be lulled into tribalism by all this — the very tribalism Western elites seek to cultivate among their publics to keep us treating international affairs no differently from a high-stakes football match.
No one here has behaved, or is behaving, honourably.
A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately.
An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.
Zelensky now understands this. He knows that he, and the people of Ukraine, have been scammed. That is what tends to happen when you cosy up to the mafia.
If anyone doubts Washington’s insincerity over Ukraine, look to Palestine for clarity.
In his earlier presidency, Trump tried to bring about what he termed the peace “deal of the century” whose centrepiece was the annexation of much of the Occupied West Bank.
The hope was that the Gulf states would ultimately fund an incentivisation programme — the carrot to Israel’s stick — to encourage Palestinians to make a new life in a giant, purpose-built industrial zone in Sinai, next to Gaza.
That plan is still simmering away in the background. At the weekend, Israel received a green light from Washington to revive its genocidal starvation of Gaza’s population, after Israel refused to negotiate the second phase of the original ceasefire agreement.
The Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are now spinning their own bad faith as Hamas “rejectionism”.
They and the echo chamber that is the Western media are blaming the Palestinian group for refusing to be gulled into an “extension” of what was never more than a phoney ceasefire — Israel’s fire never ceased. Israel wants all the hostages back, without having to leave Gaza, so that Hamas has no leverage to stop Israel reviving the full genocide.
The people of Gaza are still being fed into the Washington mafia’s meatgrinder, just as the Ukrainian people have been.
Trump wants them out of the way so he can develop a Mediterranean playground for the rich, paid for with Gulf oil money and the so-far untapped natural gas reserves just off Gaza’s coast.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t pretend that Ukraine and Gaza are anything more than geostrategic real estate for Washington.
The big shakedown Zelensky’s shakedown did not come out of the blue. Trump and his officials had been flagging it well in advance.
Two weeks ago, the industrial correspondent for Britain’s Daily Telegraphwrote an article headlined “Here’s why Trump wants to make Ukraine a US economic colony”.
Trump’s team believes that Ukraine may have rare-earth minerals under the ground worth some $15 trillion — a treasure trove that will be critical to the development of the next generation of technology.
In their view, controlling the exploration and extraction of those minerals will be as important as control over the Middle East’s oil reserves was more than a century ago.
And most important of all, the US wants China, its chief economic — if not military — rival excluded from the plunder. China currently has an effective monopoly on many of these critical minerals.
Or as the Telegraph puts it, Ukraine’s “minerals offer a tantalising promise: the ability for the US to break its dependence on Chinese supplies of critical minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to iPhones and stealth fighter jets”.
A draft of the plan seen by the Telegraph would, in its words, “amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity”.
Washington wants first refusal on all deposits within the country.
At their Oval Office confrontation, Trump reiterated this goal: “So we’re going to be using that [Ukraine’s rare earth minerals], taking it, using it for all of the things we do, including AI, and including weapons, and the military. And it’s really going to very much satisfy our needs.”
All of this means that Trump has a keen incentive to get the war finished as quickly as possible, and Russia’s territorial advance halted. The more territory Moscow seizes, the less territory is left for the US to plunder.
Self-sabotage The battle against China over rare-earth minerals isn’t a Trump innovation either — and adds an additional layer of context for why Washington and Nato have been so keen over the past two decades to prise Ukraine away from Russia.
Last summer, a Congressional select committee on competition with China announced the formation of a working group to counter Beijing’s “dominance of critical minerals”.
The chairman of the committee, John Moolenaar, noted that the current US dependence on China for these minerals “would quickly become an existential vulnerability in the event of a conflict”.
Another committee member, Rob Wittman, observed: “Dominance over global supply chains for critical mineral and rare earth elements is the next stage of great power competition.”
What Trump appears to appreciate is that Nato’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has, by default, driven Moscow deeper into Beijing’s embrace. It has been self-sabotage on a grand scale.
Together, China and Russia are a formidable opponent, and one at the centre of the ever-growing Brics group — comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They have been seeking to expand their alliance by adding emerging powers to become a counterweight to Washington and Nato’s bullying global agenda.
But a deal with Putin over Ukraine would provide an opportunity for Washington to build a new security architecture in Europe — one more useful to the US — that places Russia inside the tent rather than outside it.
That would leave China isolated — a long-time Pentagon goal.
And it would also leave Europe less central to the projection of US power, which is why European leaders — led by Keir Starmer — have been looking and sounding so unnerved over the past few weeks.
The danger is that Trump’s “peacemaking” in Ukraine simply becomes a prelude to the fomenting of a war against China, using Taiwan as the pretext in the same way Ukraine was used against Russia.
As Moolenaar implied, US control over critical minerals — in Ukraine and elsewhere — would ensure the US was no longer vulnerable in the event of a war with China to losing access to the minerals it would need to continue the war. It would free Washington’s hand.
Trump may be behaving in a vulgar manner. But the gangster empire he now heads is conducting the same global shakedown as ever.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Markela Panegyres and Jonathan Strauss in Sydney
The new Universities Australia (UA) definition of antisemitism, endorsed last month for adoption by 39 Australian universities, is an ugly attempt to quash the pro-Palestine solidarity movement on campuses and to silence academics, university workers and students who critique Israel and Zionism.
While the Scott Morrison Coalition government first proposed tightening the definition, and a recent joint Labor-Coalition parliamentary committee recommended the same, it is yet another example of the Labor government’s overreach.
It seeks to mould discussion in universities to one that suits its pro-US and pro-Zionist imperialist agenda, while shielding Israel from accountability.
The UA definition comes in the context of a war against Palestinian activism on campuses.
The false claim that antisemitism is “rampant” across universities has been weaponised to subdue the Palestinian solidarity movement within higher education and, particularly, to snuff out any repeat of the student-led Gaza solidarity encampments, which sprung up on campuses across the country last year.
Some students and staff who have been protesting against the genocide since October 2023 have come under attack by university managements.
Some students have been threatened with suspension and many universities are giving themselves, through new policies, more powers to liaise with police and surveil students and staff.
Palestinian, Arab and Muslim academics, as well as other anti-racist scholars, have been silenced and disciplined, or face legal action on false counts of antisemitism, merely for criticising Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine.
Randa Abdel-Fattah, for example, has become the target of a Zionist smear campaign that has successfully managed to strip her of Australian Research Council funding.
Intensify repression The UA definition will further intensify the ongoing repression of people’s rights on campuses to discuss racism, apartheid and occupation in historic Palestine.
By its own admission, UA acknowledges that its definition is informed by the antisemitism taskforces at Columbia University, Stanford University, Harvard University and New York University, which have meted out draconian and violent repression of pro-Palestine activism.
It should be noted that the controversial IHRA definition has been opposed by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) for its serious challenge to academic freedom.
As many leading academics and university workers, including Jewish academics, have repeatedly stressed, criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism is not antisemitic.
UA’s definition is arguably more detrimental to freedom of speech and pro-Palestine activism and scholarship than the IHRA definition.
In the vague IHRA definition, a number of examples of antisemitism are given that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but not the main text itself.
By contrast, the new UA definition overtly equates criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism and claims Zionist ideology is a component part of Jewish identity.
The definition states that “criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic . . . when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel”.
Dangerously, anyone advocating for a single bi-national democratic state in historic Palestine will be labelled antisemitic under this new definition.
Anyone who justifiably questions the right of the ethnonationalist, apartheid and genocidal state of Israel to exist will be accused of antisemitism.
Sweeping claims The UA definition also makes the sweeping claim that “for most, but not all Jewish Australians, Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity”.
But, as the JCA points out, Zionism is a national political ideology and is not a core part of Jewish identity historically or today, since many Jews do not support Zionism. The JCA warns that the UA definition “risks fomenting harmful stereotypes that all Jewish people think in a certain way”.
Moreover, JCA said, Jewish identities are already “a rightly protected category under all racial discrimination laws, whereas political ideologies such as Zionism and support for Israel are not”.
Like other aspects of politics, political ideologies, such as Zionism, and political stances, such as support for Israel, should be able to be discussed critically.
According to the UA definition, criticism of Israel can be antisemitic “when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions”.
While it would be wrong for any individual or community, because they are Jewish, to be held responsible for Israel’s actions, it is a fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former minister Yoav Gallant for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But under the UA definition, since Netanyahu and Gallant are Jewish, would holding them responsible be considered antisemitic?
The implication of the definition for universities, which teach law and jurisprudence, is that international law should not be applied to the Israeli state, because it is antisemitic to do so.
The UA’s definition is vague enough to have a chilling effect on any academic who wants to teach about genocide, apartheid and settler-colonialism. It states that “criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions”.
What these are is not defined.
Anti-racism challenge Within the academy, there is a strong tradition of anti-racism and decolonial scholarship, particularly the concept of settler colonialism, which, by definition, calls into question the very notion of “statehood”.
With this new definition of antisemitism, will academics be prevented from teaching students the works of Chelsea Watego, Patrick Wolfe or Edward Said?
The definition will have serious and damaging repercussions for decolonial scholars and severely impinges the rights of scholars, in particular First Nations scholars and students, to critique empire and colonisation.
UA is the “peak body” for higher education in Australia, and represents and lobbies for capitalist class interests in higher education.
It is therefore not surprising that it has developed this particular definition, given its strong bilateral relations with Israeli higher education, including signing a 2013 memorandum of understanding with Association of University Heads, Israel.
All university students and staff committed to anti-racism, academic freedom and freedom of speech should join the campaign against the UA definition.
Local NTEU branches and student groups are discussing and passing motions rejecting the new definition and NTEU for Palestine has called a National Day of Action for March 26 with that as one of its key demands.
We will not be silenced on Palestine.
Jonathan Strauss and Markela Panegyres are members of the National Tertiary Education Union and the Socialist Alliance. Republished from Green Left with permission.
A View from Afar – In this episode of A View From Afar political scientist Paul Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning analyse how the state of Israel has gone rogue, attacking United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. At this juncture it is clear this is an intentional attack.
Over the past week Israel Defense Force troops have repeatedly attacked UN peacekeepers who were authorised and deployed to the region by the United Nations Security Council.
Also last week; the Government of Israel issued a statement notifying the United Nations Secretary General that he was now banned from Israel and was persona non grata. Within a day of that statement, IDF troops had fired on UN peacekeeping positions in Southern Lebanon.
Since then, the IDF has continued operations that threaten the UN’s presence. And Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now issued a directive to the UN peacekeeping force to withdraw from the area north of its borders in Southern Lebanon.
Also, despite the United States Biden Administration cautioning Israel on its attacks on UN personnel, overnight New Zealand time, the United States has deployed 100 US troops on the ground in Israel to operate missile defence systems.
Paul and Selwyn consider:
Why Israel has begun to attack United Nations peacekeepers in the region?
Why has the United States deepened its involvement in Israel’s so-called defence?
What of Hezbollah, Hamas; are their attacks on Israel a defence or an attacking offensive?
What of Iran, what is its position and will it engage in a full-scale war with Israel and what are the consequences should it do so?
INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:
Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.
RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.
You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
Podcast: A View From Afar with Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning.
In this episode of A View from Afar political scientist and former Pentagon Analyst, Paul G. Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning discuss: The Murky World of Israel’s Booby-Trapped Pagers and Walkie-Talkies.
Paul and Selwyn reveal Israel’s long-form planning that led to it sabotaging hand-held communication devices that Hezbollah used to communicate with.
This episode’s questions include:
Who was behind the manufacturing of the booby-trapped devices?
How long has Israel been planning last week’s attack – an attack that saw thousands injured and many killed in Lebanon after Israel remotely pulled the virtual-pin and exploded the devices indiscriminantly?
And why now? Presumably the devices were also programmed to be tracked. So why did Israel decide to abandon tracking Hezbollah and to attack?
Was it to cause chaos among its enemies in a preemptive move immediately prior to its widespread bombing and targeting of communities in Lebanon?
And what of international law? Has Israel gone so far beyond the Rubicon with Gaza that it senses international law no longer applies to Israel?
And, finally, has the United Nations abandoned its right to protect principles, its peacemaking and peacekeeping responsibilities in favour of aid, development and an overly bureaucratic institution?
INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:
Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.
RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.
You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.