Our Friday News Analysis | What the World THINKS Now!

Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass on Letná Plain in Prague | Photo: Stanislav Peška / ČTK

Living Words of Saint Pope John Paul II | “Freedom”

Prague 1990: From my heart, I proclaim the great word of ‘freedom’ with love and zeal.

I pronounce the word ‘freedom’ as a confession of my faith.

I express ‘freedom’ in sincere solidarity
with all those for whom freedom has long been prohibited.

I declare ‘freedom’ as evangelist and pastor of the Church,
of which human dignity is an integral part of my ministry.1

…

Havana 1998: Cuba has a Christian soul, and this has brought her a universal vocation. Called to overcome isolation, she needs to open herself to the world, and the world needs to draw close to Cuba, her people, her sons, and daughters, who are indeed her most significant wealth.

This is the time to start on the new paths called for by the times of renewal

we are experiencing at the third millennium of the Christian era!

Saint Pope John Paul II

1. Viaggio Pastorale Nella Repubblica Federativa Ceca E Slovacca, Incontro Di Giovanni Paolo Ii Con Il Mondo Della Cultura «Galleria Rodolfo» Del Castello Di Praga (Repubblica Federativa Ceca E Slovacca), Sabato, 21 Aprile 1990.

2. Apostolic Journey of His Holiness John Paul II to Cuba (January 21-26, 1998), Homily Of John Paul II, José Martí Plaza (Havana), Sunday, 25 January 1998

This week’s reflection: “Freedom!”

Building the Bridge Foundation

                Saint Pope John Paul II spoke to billions over six decades, to young people, to presidents and peacemakers, and to the forgotten and the powerful alike.

                John Paul II was a theologian, world leader, statesman, poet, and pastor, revered by billions.

                He addressed war and peace, human dignity, mercy, and the deepest longings of the human heart.

               Those words did not stay in the past. They are living words. And they speak now.

               Even more alive in our times, the Pope's Message invites readers to pause and reflect.

               evangelicalpope.org

               There is no cost. There never will be.

OUR WEDNESDAY NEWS ANALYSIS | THE WEST WANTS NETANYAHU GONE - SO PALESTINIANS CAN BE KILLED MORE QUIETLY AGAIN

Trump, nosediving in the polls and bristling over a disastrous war on Iran, needs a scapegoat – and the Israeli prime minister best fits the bill

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks away after addressing the 81st United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York City, US on 24 September 2026 (Reuters)

By Jonathan Cook
Middle East Eye
1 October 2026

Benjamin Netanyahu’s whirlwind visit to the United States last week to address the United Nations General Assembly was further evidence that the Israeli prime minister is now a universal pariah.

Even his closest allies are abandoning him.

It was perhaps not surprising that 77 nations, including a handful of European states, walked out of the chamber in protest that a wanted war crimes suspect - a fugitive from the International Criminal Court (ICC) - was being given a platform to speak on the world’s largest stage.

Far more notable was what happened - or rather, didn’t - away from the podium. Netanyahu spent just eight hours in the US before heading back to Israel. It is hard to believe that that was his choice.

Please continue reading ...

FROM THE BRIDGE | Build the Bridge Before the River Rises

By Abraham A. van Kempen
Founder and Chairman
09 October 2026

Last Monday, 5 October 2026, I shared with you:

               “Trust me, I know what I’m doing. The Building the Bridge Foundation, a Dutch tank with some international recognition, nominated Europe’s most demonized characters ever invented by humankind—Presidents Trump, Putin, and Xi, in that order—to share the Nobel Peace Prize, certainly not in 2026, but inevitably in 2027.

This is the type of response we’re receiving from those who feel good about our raison d’être:

               ... Building the Bridge Foundation's push for crisis talks between Trump, Xi, and Putin shows a bold, diplomacy-first approach that's rare in today's geopolitical landscape.

               ... your call for Trump, Xi, and Putin to open crisis talks shows real diplomatic courage.

               ... we've matched your press release, "Stichting Building the Bridge Foundation: Dutch Foreign Policy Think Tank Urges Trump, Xi, Putin to Open Crisis Talks Now," with 4 of our publications, and it's now with their editorial teams.

I’ll continue with where I left off from last Monday:

               I still believe they’re the only ones who can and will end the global conflict, based on the axiom “If you can’t beat them, join them,” reinforced by “Destroy your enemies by becoming friends.” After all, building bridges rather than burning them is a practical foreign policy strategy. We’re clear on that, right? It will take a cup of kindness and even more humility for them to walk through one door.

               I’ve reached the point where I don’t even bother figuring out who’s saying what. The wars are more or less over. All sides possess roughly equal deterrence. So do we choose Forever Wars, combating mutual deterrence, or pursue cooperation built on shared economic interests? Is there really a choice? Will we tear each other down, or help one another grow? Will we choose a path of mutual destruction, or build something better together?

               Let’s aim for a BOOM instead of doom and gloom.”

Today, we continue this effort in the same spirit. Washington, Beijing, and Moscow are beginning to notice our behind-the-scenes work urging the world’s three most powerful leaders to reject Western unipolar autocracy that feigns liberal democracy. The question is whether they can rein in the elitist, neocolonial mindset that fuels global conflict. President Trump couldn’t stop the NATO–Russia war on his own or bring an end to the war between the ‘free world’ and Iran. The mindset I’m referring to is what many people call the Deep State. As I have often said, the Deep State isn't that deep. It is a thought form, a mindset deeply ingrained in Western society. Everything they do and want is published, discussed, and debated in the West’s top echelons. They’re obsessed with:

               What is ours is ours.

               What is yours is ours also.
               You’re either for us or against us.
               It’s either our way or the highway.
               You either do it our way or you're dead meat.

The world wants a boom for all to share, not more doom and gloom.

So here’s the test: “Presidents Trump, Xi, and Putin, how can you defeat this outdated, repulsive mindset?” I have some ideas, which I’ll share with my group this Monday.”

Okay, class! Who wants to earn an ‘A+’? “What geopolitical policy do you think Building the Bridge should advocate to counter the neocolonialists (the neocons)?”

An OPEN LETTER to President Donald J. Trump, President Xi Jinping, and President Vladimir V. Putin

Dear President Trump, President Xi, and President Putin,

I’m writing to you from The Hague, a city that has learned—often amid history's ruins—that peace is no weakness. Peace is architecture: built beam by beam, call by call, treaty by treaty, corridor by corridor, until frightened people can make their way from danger into daylight.

I am NOT writing from a balcony overlooking the world. I am writing among the people who wake beneath the weight of your decisions: at a kitchen table where the tea has gone cold, in a hospital corridor where footsteps slow before bad news, at a border crossing, in a classroom, and in the quiet room where a family keeps one chair empty. Across languages, flags, and faiths, people ask for the same modest miracles: bread without a blockade, sleep without sirens, disagreement without disappearance, and a future no longer held hostage by an old wound, a weapon, or one terrible miscalculation.

The river is rising.
It is time to build the bridge.

Three Men, One Shared Horizon

President Trump, you speak of putting America first. You could show that national strength doesn’t have to come at the expense of humanity. Use American power not just to extract concessions, but to build rules that outlast the people in the room. Let strength guard the bridge, law anchor it, verification test it, and human dignity decide where it leads.

President Xi, you speak of a multipolar world and shared development. You could show that multipolarity need not devolve into a landscape of fortified silos. Keep channels for trade, science, health, climate, military, cyber, and space open even as rivalry sharpens. Let development be a road nations can choose—not a corridor that closes behind them.

President Putin, you speak of security and strategic balance. Although NATO has contributed to tensions between Ukraine and Russia, you and Russia committed yourselves to resolving your nation’s security concerns diplomatically from 2001 to February 2022. Rekindle that fire, Mr. President. As you have pleaded, reciprocity need not mean domination, recognition need not diminish the sovereignty of neighboring states, and negotiation need not shape another people’s future without their consent. Please continue to encourage the people of Ukraine to once again serve as an economic bridge between East and West. I know farmers in North Macedonia who are excited about exporting their apples, cherries, and tomatoes—some of the best-tasting in the world—on the planned nonstop flights from Skopje to Moscow, which were canceled when NATO provoked the war.

Either the great powers learn to keep humanity alive together, or we may all lose together.

Presidents Trump, Xi, and Putin, you do not need to like one another, though I know intuitively the three of you respect each other. You do not need to erase history or pretend that interests suddenly align. You need only recognize the hard truth: a world kept on permanent hair-trigger alert is not strong. It is sick. We are living in a gas-filled house while powerful men argue over matches.

A Forum Built for Work, Not Theatre

The world is asking you to establish a permanent Great-Power Bridge Forum for Peace—not another grand photo-op beneath chandeliers, but a practical working table with clear deadlines, dedicated technical teams, public measures, and a seat for the people who will live with the consequences.

The forum should begin with five commitments:

1. Keep communication lines open. Test military, nuclear, cyber, space, and public health hotlines every month, report whether they worked, and fix any failures promptly.
2. Let’s put negotiators to work. Within 30 days, appoint empowered teams to tackle nuclear weapons, missiles, drones, hypersonic systems, cyber operations, battlefield artificial intelligence, and space security.
3. Put human lives ahead of politics. Establish permanent humanitarian corridors for medical evacuations, prisoner and hostage exchanges, searches for missing people, and deliveries of food, grain, medicine, and energy.
4. Keep people connected through meaningful encounters. Protect student visas and exchanges across religious, scientific, journalistic, sporting, cultural, and youth fields. Make space for scientists to meet when governments disagree, and for musicians to cross borders where armies cannot.
5. Let’s make the table wider and ensure affected states, smaller nations, aid workers, victims, peacebuilders, young people, displaced families, and frontline communities have a meaningful, sustained voice.

Keep things transparent and fair: no surprises, no hierarchy, and no hidden agenda for regime change. There will be no blank checks or agreements made over smaller nations’ heads, and no irreversible first move. Any rewards will come only after proof.

Build the process around reciprocal limits, equal procedural standing, phased and reversible commitments, independent verification, and shared standards for protecting civilians. A bridge works best with matching lanes: disclosure for disclosure, access for access, and restraint for restraint.

From Promises to Proof

Trust need not arrive like the sunrise before cooperation begins. It can be forged like a bridge cable—strand by strand, under tension, proven by the weight it bears.

Please provide advance notice of major exercises, missile launches, unusual troop movements, strategic-bomber flights, and dangerous cyber activity. Agree on minimum separation distances for aircraft, ships, drones, and ground units. Work together to protect nuclear command systems and essential civilian infrastructure from attacks. Establish inspection teams that both sides accept, secure data exchanges, satellite-supported monitoring, and a standing panel to investigate alleged violations.

Then keep a public peace ledger that tracks hotline reliability, timely notifications, completed inspections, dangerous encounters prevented, humanitarian deliveries made, prisoners released, disputed movements resolved, and weapons kept within verified limits. The clearest measure of success isn’t applause at a summit—it’s the lives protected when the cameras are off.

A stretcher should not have to wait for consensus.

Mercy must not wait at a checkpoint for politics’ permission.

Europe, Asia, and the Space Between

In Europe, peaceful coexistence cannot mean NATO members surrendering their security, Russia resigning itself to permanent encirclement, or Ukraine and other states caught between them compromising their sovereignty. A lasting bridge must rest on both banks: mutual deterrence against aggression and credible reassurance to prevent miscalculation. Every state directly affected must have a full seat at every table where its security, territory, or future is discussed.

In Asia, deterrence should be paired with permanent military, cyber, space, trade, health, and climate channels. Asian states are not pieces on a U.S.–China chessboard; they are co-authors of their own regional future. Begin with tested hotlines, air and maritime encounter rules, launch notifications, safeguards for artificial intelligence in nuclear decision-making, and protections against cyberattacks on hospitals and critical civilian systems.

Across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the wider Global South, partnerships should empower people and give them a meaningful voice. Work through regional institutions and make infrastructure financing transparent about costs, debt, ownership, procurement, environmental impact, and local employment. Let countries engage with Washington, Beijing, and Moscow without being forced to choose sides. A bridge should serve the community—not become a tollgate controlled by the most powerful bank.

Trade, Not Collective Punishment

Reopen commerce where it can lower costs, diversify supply chains, support livelihoods, and give people a reason to keep talking. Trade should be fair, reciprocal, transparent, and resilient. At the same time, food, medicine, energy, payment systems, and civilian technology must never be used as weapons to impose collective punishment.

President Trump, fair trade can strengthen American communities without dividing the world into rival economic camps.

President Xi, development can remain open to scrutiny without being deemed illegitimate by definition.

President Putin, indeed, sanctions have worked against the West.

The People Outside the Palace

Peace isn’t built by palaces alone. Each of us has a part to play—citizens, faith communities, scholars, diplomats, veterans, journalists, students, parents, artists, and peacebuilders alike. The media can turn strangers into enemies, or offer us a window through which unfamiliar faces begin to feel like neighbors. Words can reinforce a wall, but they can also help lay the first plank across a divide.

The Building the Bridge Foundation is here to help create these spaces. Based in The Hague since 2015, we bring people, communities, faiths, cultures, and nations together to listen with humility, explore the stories we’ve inherited, stand against dehumanization, and make room for mercy, truth, responsibility, and hope.

We stand with all humanity. No one should have to choose between one people’s safety and another’s dignity. We are people before flags, neighbors before narratives, and fragile lives sharing the same weather, atmosphere, and brief inheritance of the Earth.

Let us build bridges wide enough for truth to cross,
strong enough for justice to stand,
and humble enough for mercy to walk beside them.

A Contract With History

On January 28, 2026, the Building the Bridge Foundation nominated the three of you for the Nobel Peace Prize. This nomination wasn’t a coronation—it was an invitation to make history, and an opportunity to turn the power that can frighten the planet into a force for calm and peace.

President Trump, please show that putting your nation first can also go hand in hand with helping prevent the world from reaching a last resort.

President Xi, please show that a multipolar world can still feel like a shared human neighborhood, not a maze of guarded compounds.

President Putin, thank you for your vigilance, patience, and chutzpah in showing that security can be negotiated in ways that spare another generation the burden of sleeping beside packed bags.

History will remember more than territory held, arguments won, or opponents outlasted. It will remember the moments when turning away was easy, yet someone chose to stay. It will remember wars brought to a halt, prisoners welcomed home, grain arriving at a hungry port, and children celebrating their birthdays because someone chose restraint.

Build bridges, not bunkers. Open channels, not graves. Choose catalytic diplomacy before cataclysmic war chooses for us.

Let’s organize massive plebiscites in Ukraine and West Asia to determine the people's will.

Meet in the Middle

Presidents Trump, Xi, and Putin, I’m asking you personally: please sit down and work to lower tensions. Appoint envoys, test the hotlines, open the corridors, and publish the agenda. Protect civilians, welcome smaller nations into the process, verify every promise, and report any failures.

It’s okay to start over when pride makes giving up feel easier than carrying on.

Do not wait to rebuild from ashes.

Build the bridge for everyone who needs it: those carrying photographs through the rubble, the soldier hoping to return whole, the medic working beneath a failing lamp, and the negotiator who stays at the table past midnight. Build it for the living and for those yet to be born.

Build it so that one morning, a child awakened by birdsong asks what a siren sounded like. May the adults in the room search for an answer, only to discover that the sound has faded from memory; because, at the edge of ruin, three powerful men finally chose not to claim the bridge as their own, but to meet in the middle and help the world cross together into the light.

The river is rising. Please build the bridge now.

With hope, vigilance, and faith in our shared humanity,
Building the Bridge Foundation
The Hague

With every good wish to you, President Trump, President Xi, and President Putin, and to all the people who are affectionately connected to me in my three favorite countries, the United States, China, and Russia (not in that order), I remain,

Sincerely yours,
BUILDING THE BRIDGE FOUNDATION
Bridging Differences to Heal a Broken Humanity

Abraham A. van Kempen

Founder and Chairman

Now, Presidents Trump, Xi, and Putin must step up to help heal our broken humanity, guided by the enduring axiom: “Destroy your enemies by becoming friends.” If they do, each deserves to share the 2026 or 2027 Nobel Peace Prize.

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta brokering peace that turned out to be make-believe

To be continued on Monday, 05 October 2026.

With Every Good Wish to you, I am,

Sincerely yours,

Abraham A. van Kempen
Founder and Chairman

Building the Bridge Foundation, The Hague
A Way to Get to Know One Another and the Other

Remember! Diplomacy is catalytic—transformative —while military action is cataclysmic—destructive and catastrophic.

When faced with the options to be good, bad, or ugly, let’s build bridges, not burn them. After all, mutual deterrence reigns.

EQUALITY, EQUALITY, EQUALITY – FEARED IN THE LAND OF ‘ZIONISM’ …

When the Palestinians are Freed, SO ARE WE.

Walls Lock-In, Too … Originally published on BTB and in The Times of Israel on 14 September 2018

By Abraham A. van Kempen
The Times of Israel
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/equality-equality-equality-feared-in-the-land-of-zionism/

14 September 2018

In my letter to President Barack Obama, dated January 29, 2015, I asked: “Instead of heading toward a Native American model with Palestinians confined to reservations amid a sea of Israeli settlements and security zones, why not [authenticate Israel’s democracy with] open borders and freedom of movement? Mr. President, many people around the world would like to hear you say: ‘Mr. Netanyahu, tear down those walls.’”

Extreme isolation means eventual national death in the modern world. Israeli historian and author Schlomo Sand points out, “Israel is connected to its Western lifeline only by way of the political influence of pro-Zionist lobbies in the diaspora.” That influence is eroding. “Israel,” says Sand, “is an ‘ethnocracy.’” An ethnocracy is Apartheid. Apartheid undermines democracy. Most of the 7.8 billion people in the world detest Apartheid.

It is a no-win game for the Ultra-nationalists, but they cannot see it through their myth-inspired blinkers. As it turns out, the most potent wall the Ultra-nationalists have built is the one that holds up the myth of who they are supposed to be. There are many a 'king who wears no clothes' in Modern Israel.

The wall aims to keep non-Jews out. However, until the world shouts, "Mr. Netanyahu, tear down that wall,” the barrier continues to lock Jews inside their military fortifications. (*Kindle Locations 1818-1824). Often, I’ve said that most Jews and Israelis have never ‘been’ to the Middle East. They’re caged in their own pens. Most disavow the existence of another world beyond theirs. Few have met people like themselves beyond their own blockades.

And the 70 million Evangelicals in the United States, with their 600+ million followers around the world, are waking up. Ultra-nationalism is anti-Christian. Two thousand years ago, Jesus reportedly opposed the Holy Trinity of Ultra-nationalism – One People, One Land, One God – to the Holy Trinity of Christianity – ALL people, ALL nations, One God. The New Testament ‘in-gathers’ and redeems ALL people, not just one tribe; ALL the nations, not just one state; indeed, glorifying the ONE ‘I Am’ with Many Names – in Hebrew: Hayah asher Hayah, ‘I Will Be Who or How or Where I Will Be’ or just Eloah; or, its Arabic sound-alike, Allah.

The true Christian Faith, as written in their New Covenant, 1) frees Modern Jews from their Jews-only, ancestry-ghetto mentality; 2) renounces Modern Israel's obsession with possession of a Land once promised and fulfilled; and 3) refutes the Israeli edict: "What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine also."

Christians view themselves as the true Zionists. ‘Zionism,’ as taught by Jesus Christ in the New Testament and by the Prophets in the Old Testament, is diametrically opposed to the Zionism branded by the Ultra-nationalists – the Party of the Pharisees – in Modern Israel. Most Christians believe that God's Spirit resides in their souls and that Christians 'reside' spiritually in Zion, defined as God's Spiritual Kingdom. Ideally, Christians are to live on Earth as in Zion (“on earth as in heaven,” Matthew 6:10). Many Christians also believe they must live 'side by side' with Jews and Muslims, according to the Prophetic Ideals in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – to make this world a better world, a heaven on earth. The Sacred Texts depict the biblical Ishmael and Isaac standing side by side at the funeral of their father, the biblical Abraham. The Bible does not say they share a meal, dance, or talk. They stand side by side. They do not fight. They are brothers. Their destiny -- to live side by side -- is biblically preordained.

Mohamed Mohamed, executive director of The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center in Washington, D.C., opened his article ‘Two State Hypocrisy” with:

               “Imagine the following scenario: In response to the peaceful African-American civil rights movement in the United States, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s, a large segment of white Americans figured that the best solution to the issue would be to form a new country on a small part of US territory in the north, where African-Americans would be segregated and live on their own.

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THE NEW ISRAELI IS FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER

We have created a new creature. We are the creature that pushed aside Frankenstein, smashed the gate, and left the laboratory to wreak havoc in the neighborhood

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and Interior Minister Arye Dery attending a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. Rami Shlush (originally published January 25, 2018)

By Yossi Klein
Haaretz Israel
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/the-new-israeli-is-frankenstein-s-monster-1.5765414

1 February 2018

Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay are right. We’ve forgotten how to be Jewish. We are Israeli first, only slightly Jewish. Our Israeliness is arrogant, impatient, and violent, a blend of MK Bezalel Smotrich’s fanaticism and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s aggressiveness. Our Judaism is not that of pre-Holocaust Europe or pre-state North Africa. As Jews, we wrote, studied, and taught; as Israelis, we conquered, expelled, and abused. I’m proud of Judaism and ashamed of Israeliness.

Why are we like this? This is what we learned from the Holocaust. Our Holocaust lesson is that cruelty pays off and that racism is rewarded. That’s the lesson of our fake Judaism. That is not the Judaism from which we came, neither in the West nor in the East. After the Holocaust, Jews helped Black people in South Africa and fought racism in the United States. Here, we deport people.

The Holocaust is not responsible for our disengagement from Western liberalism. The wars against the Arabs are not responsible for our disengagement from Mizrahi tolerance. This disengagement stems from the transition from the ruled to the rulers. Power went to our heads. Sovereignty and independence saved the body but destroyed the spirit. Brawn replaced brain. We are the new Jew. After 70 years of planning and building, we can say we succeeded. We have created a new creature. We are the creature that pushed aside Frankenstein, smashed the gate, and left the laboratory to wreak havoc in the neighborhood.

When you destroy, you forget. We’ve forgotten what it means to be Jewish, yet we’ve always made sure we had God. Our God is a hostage. Our God sits before the camera, reading what the kidnappers dictate. In his name, we expropriate land and deport refugees. In his name, the land is ours forever.

This is not the God of Einstein and Freud. It is the God of Shlomo Aviner of Beit El and Arye Dery of Har Nof, a God subject to coalition discipline who measures skirt lengths and closes stores on Shabbat; a God who prefers to pay idlers in yeshivas and to deport work migrants who support themselves and don’t ask for favors.

The Judaism that holds God hostage is a good “closer”: state funds in exchange for support for the settlements, and canceling the draft in exchange for ignoring corruption. It’s Judaism for rent to the highest bidder, the Judaism of the Sicarii, a Judaism that will lead to civil war.

We’ve forgotten how to be Jewish, but some Jews remember. We are vultures that hover above them, pouncing on every anti-Semitic incident. Anti-Semitism hurts Jews there but serves us here. It justifies our Judaism. We build on it. We count every hate crime. We hope anti-Semitism will prove to Jews that the era of the old Judaism has passed and that it’s time for a new Torah, that of Dery. We need suffering Jews. Why suffer in Paris? Come suffer with us here.

What kind of Jews are we? Have we not eyes, hands, senses, affections, and passions? Do we not cry at movies? Does the immigration police officer not have a heart? Does the pilot who bombs Gaza not have children? Does the cry of a small child not pierce their hearts? Of course it does, and still we deport, bomb, and imprison. How do we do this with such a big heart?

Judaism would not do this, but Israeli Judaism does. Israeliness is an insular religion that wears “a people that stands alone” as a badge of honor. It is a Judaism that fights its children’s departure and invalidates everyone else. Secular people are a nuisance; Arabs are drugged cockroaches; and refugees are a cancer. It is easier to trample on others when refugees are seen as cancer, disabled people as exploiters, Arabs as inferior, and poor people as lazy.

It’s not Jews who expel, oppress, and abuse; it’s Israelis. Judaism is not to blame; Israeli Judaism is. We are Israelis, and this is our Judaism.

Why “we?” We don’t expel or bomb; we demonstrate, protest, and write. But that won’t clear our conscience. What will we tell our children and grandchildren? That it wasn’t in our name? We are partners. As long as we obey undemocratic laws passed democratically, we remain partners. Turning our backs won’t help. It’s all in our name, and how.

GUEST EDITORIAL | A REVELATION OF EVIL

Israel’s Gaza Genocide has exposed our world’s depravity

By Tarik Cyril Amar
Substack.Com
7 October 2026

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations launched an attack from the Gaza Strip into Israel under the code name “Al-Aqsa Flood.” Israeli and Western mainstream media and politicians quickly labeled it a massive act of terrorism and flooded the world with tales of horrific atrocities allegedly committed by Palestinians, including the sadistic murder of children and women and mass rape.

We now know that these atrocity tales were lies intended to generate domestic and international outrage against the Palestinian resistance and Palestinians in general. They were part of the same poisonous Israeli narrative that labeled them “Amalek” – a reference to a perversely “exemplary” genocide in the Old Testament – and denied their humanity. They were, in other words, part of starting a genocide.

These atrocity propaganda lies were fabricated and spread by, for instance, Israel’s Zaka activists and Western mainstream journalists, such as those at the New York Times; high public officials, such as the UN’s Pramila Patten; and activists, for instance, former Meta cadre Sheryl Sandberg, who acted as a Zionist propagandist and chose to rely on Israeli disinformation.

In reality, there were no mass rapes; there were no sadistic baby murders by beheading or in microwave ovens; no pregnant woman was found killed by a headshot, with her baby stabbed and still attached to the umbilical cord. It “simply didn’t happen,” according to a detailed investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

What happened on 7 October 2026 was not a savage, sadistic rampage but a daring military resistance operation. It was also a mass breakout from the Gaza Strip, which had been under a long Israeli siege so brutal that Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called the Strip the “world’s largest concentration camp ever” almost a quarter-century ago.

The core of this offensive targeted Israel’s Gaza Division, which, according to high-ranking Israeli officers, was “overpowered.” In the process, Palestinian resistance fighters killed and captured Israeli military personnel. Despite Israel’s propaganda efforts to obscure this fact, these actions were neither “terrorism” nor hostage-taking but legitimate acts of armed resistance under international law.

The Palestinian fighters also attacked a music festival and several settlements. According to an Amnesty International summary from early 2024, they committed crimes there, including the deliberate killing of civilians and the taking of hostages, that is, civilians, not soldiers, whose capture makes them POWs and not hostages. A crime, in any case, is a crime, even if it’s only realistic to recognize many mitigating circumstances in the immense injustice, dispossession, and often sadistic and humiliating violence Palestinians have suffered from Israelis over decades.

Honesty also requires taking three key facts into account: First, the leader of the pro-Israeli UAE has revealed that he personally warned Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, of Hamas’s plans. In a similar vein, Qatar’s leader claims that Hamas was ready to free all civilian hostages immediately after the attack (which would have left it with only military prisoners). Yet the Israeli leadership ignored the warning and rejected the offer to free all civilians.

Almost as if it wanted the attack to happen, as a pretext to initiate a massive ethnic-cleansing-by-genocide campaign, and the civilian hostages to remain in Gaza, as a pretext to continue that campaign.

Second, it has long been clear that Israeli authorities activated an expanded “Hannibal Directive”: usually prepared to kill their own soldiers rather than let them be captured, on 7 October Israeli forces also killed Israeli civilians and, most likely, in large but unknown numbers, deploying tanks as well as helicopter gunships to – in the words of an Israeli officer - “mass Hannibal” their own. Of the roughly 1,200 casualties on 7 October, hundreds were likely due to Israeli-on-Israeli violence; others were soldiers and, as such, legitimate targets.

And finally, a simple point all too often drowned out by Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda: A legitimate military force does not lose its overall legitimacy – or that of its goals – even when some of its members commit crimes. If that were the case, most armies in the world would have to be dissolved, because none have histories entirely free of crimes. Armed Palestinian resistance is fundamentally legitimate under international law – and morally, too, obviously – and remains so. In fact, the outnumbered, outgunned, and abandoned Palestinian defenders of Gaza will be remembered as heroes in the future, as they should.

Things are different, as a matter of fact, if we look at the actions of the Israeli military since 7 October. Unlike anything individual Palestinian resistance fighters may have done, in the case of Israel’s euphemistically mislabeled Defense Forces – a “citizen army [and] representative sample” of Israeli society – we are looking at a clear case of a large organization deliberately and enthusiastically dedicated to committing every war crime and crime against humanity in every book, including ethnic cleansing and genocide.

That is a precise description of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians of Gaza – and not only – since October 7, 2023. It is now the consensus among honest observers, including the global community of genocide experts. This, indeed, has been the most public genocide in human history, despite Israeli attempts to seal off Gaza and to mass-murder its journalists under false pretexts.

Israeli perpetrators – high and low – have proudly advertised their crimes. Israeli society as a whole, as virtually continuous polling has shown, supports the genocide. In a world of real-time and social media, the reality of Gaza could not be hidden. Only recently has Google adjusted its maps to reflect it.

The nature and extent of Israel’s crimes are obvious and exceedingly well documented, and that is very important. Humanity owes an enormous debt of gratitude to those, Palestinians and others, who have undertaken the harrowing task of compiling and analyzing the evidence, such as, to name only a few, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and the tireless staff of the Electronic Intifada.

What needs at least as much attention is what the Gaza Genocide says about our world as a whole: namely, that genocide is not only possible – it was before – but can unfold over years and in full global view, with the active support of most of the establishments of virtually the entire West and the passive acquiescence of the elites of most other countries.

In a more or less sane world, the Israeli perpetrators of genocide would long have been stopped by a combination of diplomatic, economic, and, of course, military intervention, fulfilling its obligations under the short and clear UN Genocide Convention of 1948 – it bears recalling. That would have been the minimum demanded by both international law and basic ethics.

Yet we live in a world where – apart from the Palestinian resistance itself – only a handful of states and political organizations have done anything at all to interfere with Israel’s mass murder campaign: Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansarallah – the “Houthis” – in Yemen.

Think about the above. What you want, like, or dislike about their politics is beside the point. It is a fact that no one else has even remotely tried to apply the Genocide Convention in practice. If that is irritating, don’t blame Ansarallah, for instance, but blame the many who have failed to act.

But failure to act has been only part of this real-life horror story. In the West, many governments and mainstream establishments, including those in the media and academia, have proactively supported Israel-while-genociding. This is a shameful history of criminal collaboration and complicity that remains to be written. Indeed, in the worst cases, such as the elites of the US, the UK, and Germany, complicity seems too weak an expression: they are better described as genocide co-perpetrators.

The obvious inference from this state of the world is that international law does not matter. There is no more devastating attack on the very idea of international law and a law-based order than the impunity enjoyed by Israel and its accomplices. Benjamin Netanyahu, with an International Criminal Court warrant to his name, has brazenly denied his and his country’s crimes at the recent UN General Assembly and even repeated the Amalek reference, as Craig Mokhiber has pointed out. Outside, meanwhile, his critics were being arrested.

Annalena Baerbock, who, during her tenure as one of Germany’s most embarrassing foreign ministers, also justified, shielded, and supported Israel, has just finished her ill-begotten sinecure as the UN General Assembly’s president and made a lateral move to another absurdly undeserved position at Columbia University. The examples could be multiplied endlessly: the elites of the West, including the American presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have devastatingly compromised themselves through their complicity with Israel. And yet, they keep thriving.

So, not only has international law been discredited more than ever before, but international institutions have as well, particularly those in that part of the world that still has the arrogance to claim global leadership as if it were some kind of birthright, the West.

Now add the fact that Israel has not “only” been committing the Gaza Genocide but has also escalated ethnic-cleansing terror in the West Bank, invaded Syria and Lebanon, attacked Yemen, participated in and triggered brutal assaults against Iran that have also tanked the world energy economy, and, in general, has followed its usual modus operandi of assassination, subversion, torture, rape, and relentless aggression. And yet: no discernible consequences beyond ludicrously inappropriate, purely symbolic measures at best and, of course, massive continued support.

Meanwhile, those in the West who dare to be human and show their solidarity with the Palestinian and other victims of Israel and its accomplices and co-perpetrators are harassed, beaten by police, arrested, and blacklisted.

What the Gaza Genocide has shown about the world as a whole is simple: Those who rule us will go much farther, much more shamelessly and openly, than most of us, even the pessimists, used to imagine. More importantly, they will get away with it, and they will let each other get away with it. Gaza is not an exception. It is a harbinger of a world of horrors. Resistance is not an option; it is the only one.

Tarik Cyril Amar, PhD, is a historian and expert on international politics. He has a BA in Modern History from Oxford University, an MSc in International History from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in History from Princeton University.

Dr. Amar has held scholarships at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and directed the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Ukraine. Originally from Germany, he has lived in the UK, Ukraine, Poland, the USA, and Turkey.

His book 'The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists' was published by Cornell University Press in 2015. A study of the political and cultural history of Cold War television spy stories is forthcoming, and he is currently working on a new book on the global response to the war in Ukraine. He has given interviews on various programs, including several on Rania Khlalek Dispatches and Breakthrough News.

His website is https://www.tarikcyrilamar.com/; he is on Substack under https://tarikcyrilamar.substack.com, and tweets under @TarikCyrilAmar.

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By Abraham A. van Kempen
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Updated 19 January 2024

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Making a Difference – The Means, Methods, and Mechanisms for Many to Move Mountains

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