Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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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...
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Freezing aid to Gaza: Israel’s international war against the UNRWA
Imperilled, tormented Palestinians in Gaza had little time to celebrate the January 26 order of the International Court of Justice. In a case brought by South Africa intended to facilitate a ceasefire and ease the suffering of the Gaza populace, Israel received the unwanted news that it had to,...
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The ICJ’s provisional orders: The Genocide Convention applies to Gaza
On 26 January, legal experts, policy wonks, activists and the plain curious waited for the order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) while sitting in The Hague. The topic was that gravest of crimes, considered most reprehensible in the canon of international law: genocide. The main participants were...
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It’s all about me: Netanyahu rejects Palestinian statehood
Israel has been given enormous licence to control the security narrative in the Middle East for decades. This is not to say it is always in control of it – the attacks of 7 October by Hamas show that such control is rickety and bound, at stages, to come...
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Cancelling a journalist was a cowardly act by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
What a cowardly act it was. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), a national broadcaster supposedly dedicated to fearless reporting, was cowed by the intemperate bellyaching of a lobby group concerned about coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. An investigation by The Age newspaper demonstrated that the dismissal of broadcaster Antoinette...
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Bypassing the UK parliament; the royal prerogative; and bombing Yemen
There is something distinctly revolting and authoritarian about the royal prerogative. It reeks of clandestine assumption, unwarranted self-confidence and, most of all, a blithe indifference to accountability before elected representatives. That prerogative, in other words, is the last reminder of divine right, the fiction that a ruler can have...
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Israel’s argument at The Hague was that it is incapable of genocide
Israel’s relationship with the United Nations, international institutions and international law has at times bristled with suspicion and blatant hostility. In a famous cabinet meeting in 1955, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously knocked back the suggestion that the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine had been instrumental in creating...
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Futile and dangerous: Bombing Yemen in the name of shipping
What a show. As US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was promoting a message of calm restraint and firm control in limiting the toxic fallout of Israel’s horrific campaign in Gaza, a decision was made by his government, the United Kingdom and a few other reticent collaborators to strike...