Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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Dodging the issue: The Biden administration report on Israel’s use of US weapons
It truly is pushing the envelope of lunacy to assume that this latest revelation was revelatory. US weapons, the wonks in Washington find, are being used by the Israeli Defence Forces to kill their opponents, many of them Palestinians, and most of them civilians. These are detailed in a...
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Palestine’s case for full UN membership
“I find it rather difficult to make it clear to my children why we are not eligible, for from one point of view it isn’t quite clear to me,” wrote an anonymous individual in “The Jew and the Club” published in The Atlantic, October 1924. Such quotations must surely make...
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Israel has attacked free speech by closing Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem bureau
“Politics,” claimed the harsh, albeit successful, 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, “is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” To that we can add the stark awareness of being prudent, gingerly wise and appropriately cautious. And mind how you go...
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Every university should divest from the military-industrial complex
The rage against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza since 7 October has stirred students to protest at a number of US university campuses and, indeed, in other countries. Echoes of the anti-Vietnam War protests are being cited. All-too-often docile consumers of education are being prodded and found to be...
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Anzac Day and the pageantry of deception
On 25 April every year, the military parade can be witnessed along Melbourne’s arterial Swanston Street with its banners and crowds bedecked in medals, ribbons and other decorations. Many will have been on their feet since the Anzac Day dawn service, keen to show that they “turned up”. Service...
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Israel’s Anti-UNRWA Campaign Falls Flat
The Israeli authorities, in their campaign of remorseless killing, doctoring and adjusting the numbers of the Palestinian populace for whatever future awaits, have been found wanting on accusations that Hamas terrorists packed, stacked and filled UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near...
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Suspending the rule of tolerable violence: Israel’s attack and Iran’s retaliation
The Middle East has, for some time, been a powder keg where degrees of violence are tolerated with ceremonial mania and a calculus of restraint. Assassinations can take place at a moment’s notice. Revenge killings follow with dashing speed. Suicide bombings of immolating power are carried out. Drone strikes...
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Secret Agreements: The Australian-Israel Defence Memorandum of Understanding
While the Australian government continues to pirouette with shallow constancy on the issue of Israel’s war in Gaza, making vacuous utterances on Palestinian statehood even as it denies supplying the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) with weapons (spare parts, it would seem, are a different, footnoted matter), efforts made to...
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Death by Algorithm: Israel’s AI War in Gaza
Remorseless killing at the initiation of artificial intelligence has been the subject of nail-biting concern for various members of the computer-digital cosmos. Be wary of such machines in war and their displacing potential regarding human will and agency. For all that, the advent of AI-driven, automated systems in war...
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Germany, Gaza and the World Court: Broadening the scope of genocide
Can it get any busier? The International Court of Justice, aka the World Court, has been swamped by submissions alleging genocide. The site of interest remains the Gaza Strip, the subject of Israel’s unremitting slaughter since 7 October last year and the cross-border incursion by Hamas. The retaliation by...
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Killing aid workers: Australia’s muddled policy on Israel
The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was distraught and testy. It seemed that, on this occasion, Israel had gone too far. Not too far in killing over 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a staggering percentage of them being children. Not too far in terms of using starvation as a weapon...
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Israel’s war on aid workers in Gaza
Eulogies should rarely be taken at face value. Plaster saints take the place of complex individuals; faults transmute into golden virtues. But there was little in the way of fault regarding Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom’s purpose, and her tireless work for the charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) in northern Gaza...
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Starvation in Gaza: The World Court’s latest intervention
Rarely has the International Court of Justice (ICJ) been so constantly exercised by one topic during such a short space of time. On 26 January, the World Court, considering a filing made the previous December by South Africa, accepted Pretoria’s argument that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment...
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Distinctions without difference: The UN Security Council and the Gaza ceasefire
The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power within the international system. On the one hand vested with enormous latitude in order to preserve international peace and security, it remains checked, limited and, it can be argued, crippled by an all too regular use of...
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Holding US foreign policy accountable for complicity in the genocide in Gaza
The next stage of an intriguing legal process seeking to hold the Biden administration accountable for its failure to prevent, as well as being complicit in, alleged acts of genocide taking place in Gaza, was taken on 15 March. It all stems from a lawsuit filed last November in...
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Australia, the National Security Committee and invading Iraq
Archivists can be a dull if industrious lot. Christmas crackers are less important than the annual New Year announcement in Canberra, when the National Archives of Australia releases documents like a new born in the information world. The event is not without irony, given that such documents are often...
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Aid wars over Gaza: resuming donations for UNRWA
The steady and ruthless international campaign by Israel to defund the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is unravelling. The lynchpin in the effort was a thin, poison-pen dossier making claims that 12 individual UNRWA employees (out of 13,000 working in Gaza)...
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Aiding those we help to kill: US ‘humanitarianism’ in Gaza
The spectacle, if it did not say it all, said much of it. Military aircraft dropping humanitarian aid to a starving population in Gaza — the UN warns that 576,000 are “one step from famine” — with parachuted pallets veering off course, and some falling into the sea. Military...
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Conscious and unconscionable: The starving of Gaza
The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip. One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from the risk of genocide by...
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When courts intervene: halting the transfer of vital military equipment to Israel
Legal challenges regarding the Israel-Palestine War in Gaza are starting to fill lawyers’ briefcases and courtroom proceedings. South Africa got matters underway with its December application before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in its campaign against the Palestinians. While determining whether genocide has taken place,...
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Absence of evidence: Israel’s case against UNRWA
Statistics are often given lanky legs that take their user far. But how they are used, and how they are received, is striking. The current figure of 27,500 dead is a blighting, grotesque fact. But as they are Palestinians, the issue is less significant to certain parties than, say,...
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When times were better: Australia’s ties with Israel’s defence industry
Times were supposedly better in 2022. That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two. That view is premised on the notion that what...
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The US courts, Gaza and genocide expose the dangers of complicity
Holding the foreign policy of a country accountable in court, notably when it comes to criminal matters, can be insuperably challenging. Judges traditionally shun making decisions on policy, even though they unofficially do so all the time. The Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a New York-based civil liberties group,...
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The drone killings at Tower 22 should be an incentive to leave such US outposts
The BBC’s characteristically mild-mannered note said it all: What is Tower 22? More to the point, what are US forces doing in Jordan? (To be more precise, a dusty patch on the Syria-Jordan border.) These questions were posed in the aftermath of yet another drone attack against a US...