Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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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)...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The straw man of ‘anti-Semitism’ is used to ban anti-Israel protests in Australia
A spate of incidents in Australia recently delighted Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who has shown himself to be merrily divisive in attacking protestors acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza over their horrific suffering since October last year. “If you allow these lunatics to continue their protests at university...
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Bombing Syria is never likely to do anything except feed the chaos
The justifications are always the same. We are moving into territory for security reasons. We are creating a temporary buffer zone from which tactical advantage can be gained against potential dangers. We have heard and seen this all too often. Over time, these buffers become strategic fixtures, de facto...
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Finding the unmentionable: Amnesty International, Israel and Genocide
It was bound to happen. With continuing operations in Gaza and increasingly violent acts against Palestinians in the occupied territories, human rights organisations are making progressively severe assessments of Israel’s warring cause. While the world awaits the findings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on whether Israel’s campaign,...
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The sectarian risk: Turkiye’s Syrian mission
Turkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan must be delighted about what is unfolding in Syria, though it is a feeling bound to be tempered by swiftly changing circumstances. Iran’s Shia proxies have been weakened by relentless Israeli targeting and bombing. Russia’s eyes and resources are turned towards war in Ukraine. With...
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Gallic Stubbornness: France, Netanyahu and the ICC Arrest Warrants
The comity of nations, at least when it comes to international humanitarian law, took a rather curious turn with the announcement by France that it would regard Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s immunity as unimpeachable even before an arrest warrant approved by the International Criminal Court. This view was...
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Arrest warrants from the Hague: The ICC, Netanyahu and Gallant
The slow, often grinding machinery of international law has just received a push along with the issuing of three arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court. They are for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and, rather incongruously, Hamas figure Mohammed Deif. The last...
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Natural Resources and Palestinian Sovereignty: Israel’s Further Isolation
Two more United Nations committee resolutions. Both concerning the conduct of Israel past and current. While disease, hunger and death continue to stalk the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank remains under the thick thumb of occupation, deliberations in foreign fora continue to take place about how to address...
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Blinken, atrocious in a dangerous world
It is hard to credit one of the least impressive secretary of states the United States has ever produced with any merit other than being a plasterwork that, from time to time, moved with caution on the world stage for fear of cracking. On the stage, Antony Blinken’s brittle...