Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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Intentional policies: Dystopian killing fields and starvation in Gaza
Starvation as a way of life. Starvation as a way of death. Starvation as policy, justification and vengeance. As the state of Israel hums along frittering, scratching and violating international human rights conventions, the chroniclers are kept busy on the morgue’s relentlessly growing inventory and peace’s loss. Of late, a…
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Caught in Belgium: Universal Jurisdiction and the IDF
Two soldiers find themselves in Belgium attending the Tomorrowland festival in Boom, Belgium. Entertainment beckons. The festival, held near Antwerp, attracts somewhere in the order of 400,000 guests over the course of two weekends. The two in question are members of the Israeli Defence Forces, said to be waving a…
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Impotent effusions: The joint statement on Gaza
Impotence takes various forms. Before the daily massacres, incidents of starvation and dispossession of Palestinians taking place in the Gaza Strip with primeval cruelty, international impotence in the face of actions by the Israeli state has become a mockery of itself. The calls to end the war in Gaza grow…
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Ominous plans: Making Concentration Camp Gaza
The odious idea of a camp within a camp. The Gaza Strip, with an even greater concentration of Palestinian civilian life within an ever-shrinking stretch of territory. These are the proposals ventured by the Israeli government even as the official Palestinian death toll marches upwards to 60,000. They envisage the…
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Gunfire Communication with “Zombie Hordes”: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the IDF
It’s made to order. First, eliminate the aid system after creating circumstances of enormous suffering. Then, kill, starve, vanquish and displace those in need of that aid. Finally: give the pretence of humanity by ensuring some aid to those whose suffering you created in the first place. As things stand,…
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The fanatic’s gaze: Louis Theroux and the West Bank settlers
He has made it his bread and butter for years: finding society’s kooky representatives, the marginal, the crazed and the touched. But what makes Louis Theroux’s The Settlers troubling is its examination of a seemingly inexorable process in the West Bank, one that has, at its core, a religious, nationalist…
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An economy of genocide: Israel and the Albanese Report
It makes for stark and dark reading. The report for the UN Human Rights Council titled From economy of occupation to economy of genocide makes mention of “corporate entities” who have been enriched by “the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide.” Authored by the relentless Francesca Albanese,…
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Operation Midnight Hammer: Were Iran’s nuclear facilities damaged?
The aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, a strike by the US Air Force on three nuclear facilities in Iran authorised by President Donald Trump on 22 June, was raucous and triumphant. But that depended on what company you were keeping. The mission involved the bombing of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment…
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The five percenters: NATO’s promise of war
The confidence trickster was at it again on his visit to The Hague, reluctantly meeting members of the overly large family that is NATO. President Donald Trump was hoping to impress upon all present that allies of the United States, whatever inclination and whatever their domestic policy, should spend mightily…
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Skewed diplomacy: Europe, Iran and unhelpful nuclear nonsense
Farce is a regular feature of international relations. It can be gaudy and lurid, dressed up in all manner of outfits. It can adopt an absurd visage that renders the subject comical and lacking in credibility. That subject is the European Union, that curious collective of cobbled, sometimes erratic nation…
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Shelling the aid seekers: Israel’s ‘Humanitarian’ project in Gaza
It’s official. If not, it ought to be. Israeli forces freely butcher Palestinians in Gaza of all stripes, standing and states of desperation. They do so casually or indifferently or maliciously. True, they might get the odd militant here and there, but the supposedly professional Israeli Defence Forces is rather…
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Self-defence and acceptable murder: Netanyahu dreams of regime change
These are the sorts of things that tend to be discussed in bunkered facilities and grimy locker rooms. Now, very much in the open and before the presses, the head of state of one country is openly advocating murdering another head of state before news outlets with little reaction. Lawbreaking…
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Condemning the Right to Self Defence: Iran’s Retaliation and Israel’s Privilege
There is a throbbing complaint among Western powers, including those in the European Union and the United States. Iran is not playing by the rules. Instead of accepting with dutiful meekness the slaughter of its military leadership and scientific personnel, Tehran decided, promptly, to respond to Israel’s pre-emptive strikes launched…
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Rogue states and thought crimes: Israel strikes Iran
Pre-emptive attacks in international law are rarely justified. The threat must evince itself through an obvious intent to inflict injury, evidence preparations that show the threat to be what Michael Walzer calls a “supreme emergency”, and arise in a situation where risk of defeat would be dramatically increased if force…
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The morality of small means: Sanctioning Israel’s ministers
They really ought to be doing more. But in the scheme of things, the sanctioning of Israeli’s frothily fanatical ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich by New Zealand, Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and Australia is a reminder to the Israeli government that ethnic cleansing, mass killing and the destruction…
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Catching Israel Out: Gaza and the Madleen “Selfie” Protest
The latest incident with the Madleen vessel, pictured as a relief measure by celebrity activists and sundry accompaniments to supply civilians with a modest assortment of humanitarian aid, is merely one of multiple previous efforts to break the Gaza blockade. It is easy to forget that, prior to Israel’s current…
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The inevitable souring: Elon Musk falls out with Donald Trump
Sandpit politics is rarely edifying and grown toddlers taking their fists to each other is unlikely to interest. But when they feature US President Donald Trump and the world’s wealthiest man, the picture alters. Disputes are bound to be on scale, rippling in their consequences. No crystal ball was required…
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Off to war we go: Starmer’s Strategic Defence Review
Unpopular governments always retreat to grounds of lazy convenience. Instead of engaging in exercises of courage, they take refuge in obvious distractions. And there is no more obvious distraction than preparing for war against a phantom enemy. That is exactly where the government of Sir Keir Starmer finds itself. Despite…
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Humanitarian camouflage: The debut of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
What a nasty thing it has turned out to be. It involved subversion – Israel’s desire to ignore international tenets of humanitarian aid in favour of expediency and security – and the naked show of violent desperation. Via the shoddy US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation company, distribution of necessaries…
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Squabbling Siblings: India, Pakistan and Operation Sindoor
On 22 April, militants from The Resistance Front (TRF), a group accused by Indian authorities of being linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group, slaughtered 26 tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam in the Indian administered portion of Kashmir. This came as a rude shock to the Indian military establishment,…
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The Killing of Israeli Embassy Staffers: Netanyahu’s Antisemitism Canard
Here was another chance – at least as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw it – of threading one set of events with another. It’s all part of the Israeli security state’s playbook: any killing of Jews or its citizens, wherever they might be, will have a causal link to…
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The ethnic cleansing of Gaza: Israel’s Operation Gideon’s Chariots
The latest phase of slaughter and seizure on the part of Israeli forces in Gaza has commenced. Following relentless airstrikes that have left hundreds of Palestinians dead, Operation Gideon’s Chariots is now in full swing, begun even as Israel and Hamas concluded a second day of ceasefire talks in Doha. …
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Trump, planes and the Arabian Gulf tour
They seemed made for each other. A former reality television star, with dubious real estate credentials, a freakish alienation from the truth, and the various leaders of the Gulf States, who never found truthful assessments that worthwhile anyway. This was certainly no time to be frugal and modest. Many a…
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Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan
Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in international law. When it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, this approach is seen as necessary politics, unalloyed by the…