Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Ranjan Solomon
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Israel’s is surreptitiously gaining control over East Jerusalem
Israel considers Jerusalem its “complete and undivided” capital, a position solidified by the 1980 Jerusalem Law (WIPO Lex), which serves as the seat for its Knesset (parliament), Supreme Court, and government ministries. While Israel holds full control over the city, particularly after capturing East Jerusalem in 1967, this status is deeply…
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Israel’s food crisis – blowback from the economic costs of perpetual war
Israel’s prolonged conflict has produced an internal crisis that receives far less attention than its military or diplomatic fallout: a deepening problem of food insecurity. According to estimates compiled by Israeli food-security organisations, nearly 39 per cent of food produced or consumed in the country is wasted, a systemic failure…
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Iran, China and Russia sign trilateral strategic pact
In a dramatic geopolitical development this afternoon, Iran, China and Russia formally signed a comprehensive strategic pact, marking one of the most consequential shifts in 21st-century international relations. While the full text of the agreement is being released in stages by the three governments, state media in Tehran, Beijing and…
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Palestinians create the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) – Gaza’s technocratic turn to genocide management
This document is largely based on a document written by Yara Hawari who is co-director of Al-Shabaka’s, and a policy member in the organization. She previously served as the Palestine policy fellow and senior analyst. Yara completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter. Al Shabaka…
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Buying peace, selling Gaza: Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ and the monetisation of ruins
The language of peace has rarely sounded as hollow as it does in the draft charter of Donald Trump’s proposed “Gaza Board of Peace.” Circulated quietly to nearly sixty countries and accompanied by a demand of up to one billion dollars for extended membership, the proposal strips peace of its…
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NATO’s Arctic bluff: How Greenland exposed Western hypocrisy
The hysteria surrounding Greenland over the past few years tells us far more about NATO’s insecurities than about any supposed Chinese or Russian threat. When Donald Trump floated the crude but revealing idea of “buying” Greenland in 2019, the world laughed. Denmark rejected it outright, Greenland’s leadership asserted its autonomy,…
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The Gaza Board for Peace is Humpty Dumpty diplomacy -Assembled for spectacle not for restoration
The idea of constituting a “Board of Peace” for Gaa may sound benevolent, even urgent, to those watching the carnage from a distance. It appeals to the liberal imagination: technocrats around a table, former leaders with gravitas, global figures invoking reconciliation, reconstruction, and stability. Yet beneath this humanitarian vocabulary lies…
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The new mandate: Recolonisation, “peace” boards, and the architecture of erasure
In the lexicon of modern geopolitics, language is rarely used to describe reality; more often, it is used to camouflage it. The emergence of proposals such as a “Gaza Board of Peace” represents a sophisticated linguistic pivot—a transition from the raw violence of military occupation to the sterile, bureaucratic violence…
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The civilisational shield: Rebutting the architecture of chaos in Iran
In 2026, the global discourse on Iran remains trapped in a binary of “regime” versus “revolt,” a reductionist lens that ignores the profound civilisational and anti-imperialist currents defining the Persian state. Below is an analytical rebuttal of the “architecture of chaos” currently being deployed against Iran, written from a perspective…
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When a state bans compassion, the underground grows
What Israel is doing now is not strength. It is panic dressed up as sovereignty. When a state begins to ban humanitarian organisations en masse—many of them globally respected, medically neutral, and active in conflict zones across the world—it signals something deeper than “security concerns.” It signals a collapse of…
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Beyond ruin – One state, liberation, and the grim work of reconciliation in Palestine
The one-state solution for Palestine has been spoken of for decades—sometimes as a moral ideal, sometimes as a technocratic fix, and at other times as a convenient abstraction that avoids confronting the brute realities of settler colonialism. Today, after 7 October 2023, and the ensuing genocide in Gaza, the idea…
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Maduro’s capture and the return of empire: Why Venezuela is not a ‘rescue mission’ but a colonial reprise
The US “capture” of Nicolás Maduro is being celebrated in Western capitals as the fall of a tyrant and the restoration of democracy. The language is familiar, almost ritualistic: a strongman removed, a nation “liberated,” history supposedly nudged back onto the right track. Yet this narrative is not merely misleading—it…
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After Gaza, no alliance is permanent: Justice and the reordering of West Asia
The Gaza war has altered West Asia not merely by unleashing another cycle of destruction, but by exposing the fragility of the region’s political and justice architecture. What collapsed in Gaza was not only restraint, but the credibility of a global order that claims fidelity to international law while suspending…
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Arms, silence, and alignment: The moral and geopolitical cost of India-Israel military ties
India’s emergence as one of Israel’s most reliable arms partners is not merely a story of defence procurement or strategic pragmatism. It marks a deeper moral and geopolitical shift—one that signals how India’s foreign policy has moved away from ethical positioning and non-alignment toward transactional power alignment, even when that…
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Europe’s condemnation of Israel’s settlements and the poverty of international law: When words replace will
A rare joint statement by fourteen countries condemning Israel’s decision to establish nineteen new settlements in the occupied West Bank has briefly punctured the international silence surrounding one of the longest and most systematic violations of international law in modern history. Co-signed by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Iceland,…
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US power, Israeli settler colonialism, and the UN: The political economy of impunity
Breaking from most members of the UN Security Council on Tuesday, the United States declined to condemn illegal Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank and opposed briefings on Resolution 2334 — the legal instrument affirming the illegality of Israel’s settlement project under international law. This was not an…
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When ruins are inconsiderately marketed as futures
The idea of turning Gaza into a Riviera has few open buyers today. It is too obscene, too exposed, too closely shadowed by mass death to be sold in daylight. For now, it lies concealed – set aside, muted, awaiting a moment when outrage dulls, memories fade, and the world’s…
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Justice alone can be the basis for a ceasefire – Understanding Hamas’s rejection of Israel’s terms
The latest round of ceasefire negotiations in Gaza has collapsed under the weight of impossible terms, tightening Israeli violations, and a humanitarian catastrophe that is worsening by the hour. Media headlines treat Hamas’s rejection of the ceasefire proposal as obstinacy or political posturing. But the reality is more intricate, more…
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Gaza ceasefire – A pause by name, while atrocities continue unabated
The world has acknowledged and observes yet another blank ‘ceasefire’. To the people of Gaza, the word has no meaning. Ceasefires in Gaza do not stop the killing; they merely rearrange it. They reduce the noise but not the cruelty. They temper the headline, not the suffering. Israel’s operations continue…
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The exodus of faith: Israel’s internal reckoning
Israel today is grappling not with the battlefield alone, but with a far subtler, far more consequential collapse: the evaporation of confidence among its own citizens. Recent data from the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) paints a disquieting picture. According to the April 2025 survey, more than a quarter of Israelis…
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Abstentions and the arithmetic of power: Reading China and Russia’s silence on Gaza
At a moment when Gaza is being pounded into dust — entire families erased, neighbourhoods flattened, starvation engineered — every gesture at the UN carries the weight of consequence. The expectation among many was simple: China and Russia would vote “yes” as a clear denunciation of Israel’s assault. Their abstention,…
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No more custodians and colonialists, Palestinians will reject even a benign western control
The recent vote in the UN Security Council on Gaza – with Russia and China pointedly abstaining and the West once again attempting to choreograph the outcome – marked a moment that history may one day identify as a subtle but decisive shift. Not because the resolution itself alters the…
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Iran, the West, and the hypocrisy of civilization
Iran is more than a state; it is a civilisation — ancient, self-aware, and seasoned by centuries of philosophical, artistic, and spiritual refinement. Its civilisational character has always informed its political and moral choices, even in the turbulent landscape of modern geopolitics. Unlike the West, Iran does not wear hypocrisy…
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Rafah’s fighters will not surrender, when disarmament means extinction
Rafah stands today as the battered yet unbroken frontier of Palestinian resistance — a landscape scarred by bombardment, starvation, and betrayal. Israel calls for disarmament, Egypt proposes to mediate, and the world, as always, expects the occupied to trust their occupier. Yet Rafah’s fighters refuse to surrender their arms —…