Our Wednesday News Analysis | Rubio declared a return to brutal western colonialism – and Europe applauded

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last weekend was another troubling declaration of intent by the Trump administration.

The explicit goal of US foreign policy, according to Rubio, is to resurrect the Western colonial order that persisted for some five centuries until the Second World War.

Old-school, white-man’s-burden colonialism is unapologetically back.

In Rubio’s preposterous retelling, Europe’s colonisation of much of the planet, and the rape and pillage of its resources, was a glorious era of Western exploration, innovation and creativity. The West brought a “superior” civilisation to backward peoples while maintaining global order.

Reflecting on the era before 1945, he observed: “The West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.”

That course went into reverse 80 years ago: “The great western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”

According to Rubio, that decline was accelerated by what he dismissed as the “abstractions of international law”, established by the United Nations in the immediate postwar period. In the pursuit of what he derisively termed “a perfect world”, these new universal laws – ones that treated all humans as equal – served only to hamstring Western colonialism.

Rubio neglected to mention that the purpose of international law was to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War: the extermination of civilians in death camps and the firebombing of European and Japanese cities.

During his speech, Rubio offered Europe the chance to join the Trump administration in reviving “the West’s age of dominance” to “renew the greatest civilisation in human history.”

“What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognises that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance – the alliance that we want is one that is not paralysed into inaction by fear – fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology,” he said...

Read more: Rubio declared a return to brutal Western colonialism – and Europe applauded

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THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY'S NEW CONSTITUTION: A ROADMAP TO STATEHOOD?

Source: The New Arab
https://www.newarab.com/analysis/pas-new-constitution-roadmap-palestinian-statehood

By Aseel Mafarjeh
Published February 17, 2026

With Israel treating annexation of the West Bank as a fait accompli, what role will a new constitution play in bolstering Palestine's bid for statehood?

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has unveiled an ambitious timeline for institutional transformation.

The plan, issued in a presidential decree last week, includes a temporary constitution drafted by October, elections for the Palestine National Council (PNC) in November 2026, and a political system restructured to move from authority to statehood.

While the draft is now public for a 60-day comment period, Palestinian analysts and political figures are sharply divided. Many question whether it represents genuine reform or a tactical response to external pressure that sidesteps a deeper structural crisis.

The legitimacy question

The timing has raised immediate credibility concerns, with Abbas framing the constitutional process as foundational to statehood claims, particularly as international recognition accelerates. Eleven additional countries formally recognised Palestine in September, bringing the total to 159 UN member states, or over 80% of the international community.

However, this also creates an uncomfortable paradox: the Palestinian Authority is drafting a constitution without meaningful democratic input, analysts say, deferring electoral legitimacy to a later stage.

Dr Ashraf Okka, an Israeli affairs analyst, articulates the core problem as one of a Palestinian state constructed through top-down constitutional drafting that cannot resolve what he calls the institutional “duality of representation”.

Article 11 of the draft constitution, for example, mentions that “the establishment of the State of Palestine does not diminish the Palestine Liberation Organisation in its capacity as the sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people.

“This duality has affected and continues to affect the wider national condition, the unity of the Palestinian people, and the unity of Palestinian national decision-making,” Okka explains to The New Arab. “It creates confusion at the level of national references for both factions and citizens.”

For decades, the PA has encroached on PLO institutional prerogatives, fragmenting decision-making authority.

“There has been a clear usurpation by the Palestinian Authority over the PLO and its institutions over the past 15 years,” Okka notes.

“The Palestinian Authority and Foreign Ministry represent us in regional and international forums, but sometimes it's the National Council and sometimes the PA. This contradiction in political and diplomatic work confuses the unity of decisions and the unity of Palestinian public discourse.”

Such fragmentation has tangible consequences. In previous parliamentary elections, 36 competing lists emerged, signalling mass alienation from established institutions.

“The fact that we had 36 electoral lists is a practical indication that the general Palestinian national condition no longer meets the aspirations of the Palestinian people,” Okka observes...

Read more: The Palestinian Authority's new constitution: A roadmap to statehood?

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NO EXPLANATION, NO APPEAL: ISRAEL REVOKING ENTRY AUTHORIZATION OF FOREIGN ACTIVISTS

Source: +972 Magazine
https://www.972mag.com/israel-revoking-eta-foreign-activists/

By Liam Syed
Published February 18, 2026

The government is exploiting the visa-free travel system to clamp down on activists supporting vulnerable Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

Israeli soldiers block the path of international activists in Hebron's Old City, occupied West Bank, November 22, 2025. (Mosab Shawer/Activestills)

When Katya* applied for an Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) to return to the occupied West Bank in June 2024, she did not expect Israel to approve it. Twenty years earlier, the long-time Palestinian rights activist had been deported following her arrest by Israeli forces in the Palestinian village of Bil’in, during one of the weekly demonstrations against the construction of the separation wall.

Katya, a Jewish American who described her experience with the Israeli immigration system in 2005 as “pseudo-legal and Kafkaesque” (it included five weeks in jail waiting for an appeal hearing, which was ultimately set for the day after her visa expired), assumed she would never be allowed to return. Yet when she applied for the ETA — now required of all travelers from visa-exempt countries seeking to enter Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories — her application was granted.

On Nov. 11, 2024, Katya entered the country and returned to the West Bank, where she was immediately struck by the vast expansion of Jewish settlements during the intervening two decades. Three days later, during her first full day of protective presence activism (aiming to document and deter settler violence) in the village of Qusra, soldiers on a routine patrol stopped her and photographed her passport. A week after, she and the three activists who were with her that day received identical emails: “Due to a change of circumstances in your case, the ETA-IL approval for application number [redacted] has been revoked.”

The message offered no explanation for the decision, nor any timeline or avenue for appeal. It meant that once Katya exhausted the 90-day limit of her tourist stay, she would be unable to return for at least two years. Others present who had entered Israel before ETAs became mandatory faced no consequences.

For Katya, the contrast between her ETA revocation and her deportation process 20 years earlier was striking. In 2005, there had at least been a theatrical pretence of due process — hearings, judges, and motions — even if the outcome was largely predetermined. The ETA revocation dispensed with even that performance, reducing the whole process to a single email. The bureaucratic machinery that Katya originally encountered had been streamlined into something more efficient and far more difficult to challenge.

The practice of revoking ETAs is the latest addition to a growing arsenal of tools deployed by Israeli authorities to remove international left-wing activists from the occupied West Bank. It comes after National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir launched a self-described “task force for dealing with anarchists” in April 2024 — a police unit dedicated to detaining, deporting, and gathering intelligence on activists doing protective presence in Palestinian communities...

Read more: No explanation, no appeal: Israel revoking entry authorization of foreign activists