Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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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…
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Euphemistic practices: The IDF, killing aid workers and self-investigation
Few armed forces have managed to make murder and executions the stuff of procedural aberration rather than intentional practice. Killing civilians and unarmed personnel is the stuff of misreading and misunderstandings, albeit arrived at with good conscience. And so it was that the killing of 15 aid and emergency workers…
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Killing paramedics is part of Israel’s war on the Palestinian healthcare system
It was a massacre. Fifteen emergency response workers, butchered in cold blood by personnel from the Israel Defence Forces in southern Gaza on 23 March. The massacre came to light in a video that the IDF did not intend anyone to see, filmed by Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) paramedic…
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Addressing hate speech and incitement: Holding Meta accountable in Africa
It was yet another unwelcome development for Mark Zuckerberg’s technology titan Meta, the parent company of Facebook. The High Court of Kenya has found that the US-based entity can be sued over its alleged role in disseminating content that incited violence in neighbouring Ethiopia. While the case can be heard…
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Closed for business: The oddities of Trump’s tariffs
Liberation Day, as 2 April was described by US President Donald Trump, had all the elements of reality television perversion. It also had a dreamy, aspirational hope: that factories would spring up from rust belt soil in a few months across the United States; that industries would, unmoored from the…
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Secrecy and virtue signalling: Another view of Signalgate
There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Condemnation of the error spans the spectrum from clownish to dangerous. There has been virtually…
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Authoritarian politics: Netanyahu’s war on Israeli institutions
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts. He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in a spectacularly bloody fashion and has resumed bombing of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Missiles fired at Israel from the Houthi rebels in Yemen also risk seeing…
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Aggrieved speculation includes the Trump illness hypothesis
The critics are utterly beside themselves in trying to understand the bruising twists and turns of Donald J. Trump, the reality showman and business tycoon who has become US president twice. One particular group that have become prominent are the aggrieved and estranged. Former employees who were given their marching…
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More guns, less butter: Starmer’s defence spending splash
The urge to throw more money at defence budgets across a number of countries has become infectious. It was bound to happen with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, given his previous insistence that US allies do more to fatten their own armies rather than rely on the largesse…
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Zelenskyy was the victim of Colosseum politics
There was a revolting tabloid quality to the Oval Office reception given to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on 28 February, but then his US counterpart Donald Trump is a tabloid brute, a man incarnated from the nastiest, shallowest precepts of yellow press clippings and, ultimately, the reality television empire that…
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Israel’s annexation drive: The West Bank and expelling Palestinian refugees
It has the feeling of a ghastly ending, one pushed along by desperation and eagerness. First, levelling Gaza and turning it to an uninhabitable moonscape, with the promise of a territory free of Palestinians. Then, displacing and destroying the already precarious holdings of Palestinian residents in the occupied West Bank…
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Cowardice and Cancellation: Creative Australia and the Venice Biennale
Cowardice is the milk that runs in the veins of many event organisers, especially when it comes to those occasions that might provoke the unmanaged unexpected. The same organisers will claim to be open minded, accommodating to stirring debate, and open to what is trendily termed in artistic lingo as…
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A thief’s mentality: Trump, real estate and dreams of ethnic cleansing
US President Donald Trump likes teasing out the unmentionable, and the Israel-Palestinian situation was never going to be any different. With a touch of horror and the grotesque, he offered a solution to the issue of what will happen to Gaza at the conclusion of hostilities. In a White House…
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Detained without Charge: 11 Yemenis leave Guantanamo
On 6 January, the Pentagon announced that it had “resettled” 11 Yemeni men to Oman after detaining them over two decades without charge at the US naval facility of Guantanamo Bay. Notice of this repatriation was given on 15 September, 2023 to Congress by Secretary of Defence Austin. Their removal…
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Frail egos and sandpit colonialism: Australia, the US and invading Iraq
Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard is in the news again. The release of Australian cabinet documents from 2004 – a supposed treat for historians of Australian history each new year – has been given a typically modest, calm and boringly anodyne treatment in media outlets. One topic featured should…
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Far from ignorant: The European Union, arms exports and Israel
While international law can, at times, seem an ephemeral creature, vulnerable to manipulation, neglect and outright dismissal, its strictures can surprise. The evolving body of law stripping back the immunity of heads of state for gross human rights abuses, and the potential complicity of third parties and powers in aiding…
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Jimmy Carter, Israel and the apartheid question
The late centenarian, Jimmy Carter, occupied a difficult position in the line of imperial magistrates we know as US presidents. Coming to power in the aftermath of murderous US adventurism in Indochina and the debauching of the presidency by Richard Nixon (“when the president does it, it means that it…
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Suing Antony Blinken: The US State Department, Israel and the Leahy Law
On 17 December, a number of Palestinians filed a federal lawsuit pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) against the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, alleging human rights violations by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. Their contention: that the US State Department has failed to implement the…
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Catching Pegasus: Mercenary Spyware and the Liability of the NSO Group
The NSO Group, Israel’s darling of malware infection and surveillance for the global security market, was the brainchild of three engineers drawn from that busiest of cyber outfits in the Israeli Defense Forces known as Unit 8200. Niv Carmi, Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, have certainly made an impression since…