Peace and Justice Post

TRT Arabi Reporter, Reba Khalid al-Ajami, reports from Gaza amid ongoing Israeli attacks in Rafah, Gaza on February 29, 2024.

(Photo by Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Genocide thrives in darkness, so won’t some committed journalists shine a light?

Ralph Nader

Sep 21, 2025, Common Dreams

Some serious readers would like to see mainstream media and independent media cover several events and matters involving the Israeli war in tiny Gaza and the mass slaughter of its defenseless citizens.

1. Israel keeps exaggerating the status and threat of the Hamas government, which is ridiculous. What about an article on what is left of Hamas, never a threat with a few thousand fighters with small arms and limited ammunition, hiding in tunnels, until the mysterious collapse on October 7, 2023 of the super-modern, multi-tiered border security system, all at the same time? What are the Israeli casualty figures in the past year in Gaza besides accidents and friendly fire? WHAT ABOUT THE VAST DEATH AND SERIOUS INJURY UNDERCOUNT? (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses, and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times, Sunday, October 13, 2024; The Lancet, “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential,” my column of March 28, 2025, “The Vast Gaza Death Undercount–Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures,” and my article in the August-September 2024 Capitol Hill Citizen).
2. What is the situation in the Israeli prisons housing many thousands of Palestinians without charges (they are hostages too), and their mistreatment, including torture, documented by some Israeli prison doctors and domestic Israeli reports? Most of the media attention has been on the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
3. What is the nature and scope of the Israeli resistance groups, dissenting reservists, and retired officials, the human rights groups, and others? It takes a lot of courage on their part to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In May of this year, Yair Golan, former Israeli deputy minister of economy, said, “A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime, and does not engage in mass population displacement.”
4. When Netanyahu rarely admits a “mistake” in hitting, for example, the medic team, the World Food Program vehicles, the ancient Catholic Church, and just recently Nasser hospital with a “double tap,” is there any demand for payment of damages to next of kin and property? The US Army in Afghanistan paid families $20,000 when they admitted to a civilian homicide.
5. Why isn’t there a follow-up every time the Israeli government promises an investigation? What are the findings and sanctions of these many official inquiries that are announced to get the media off the Israeli government’s back on the day of the atrocity?
6. What about a story on the sadistic snipers, who operate without rules of engagement, in this Palestinian Holocaust, and savagely kill infants, children, people desperately digging into the rubble to rescue loved ones, etc.? How are they chosen? They compete with one another with the most brutal, touted examples of their executions, their favorite prey being pregnant women, according to Israeli reporters.
7. Why isn’t more made of what is being denied the American public (aka taxpayers) when no US journalists are allowed into Gaza, along with other foreign and Israeli journalists similarly barred? Genocides thrive in darkness.
8. What about some reporting on claims that some Israeli opponents of the Netanyahu regime believe it has a devastating dossier on US President Donald Trump, which accounts for the 100% backing by toady Trump, even more than by toady Joe Biden?
9. Why is so little written about Israel enforcing an illegal embargo on Gaza that became far more savage after October 7—“no food, water, medicine, healthcare, fuel, electricity,” etc.? How come there seems to be an ample supply of shrouds? Some observers in Israel believe there is an underground trade in this product. There is no capacity to produce them in the tens of thousands or more inside Gaza, which is almost totally destroyed.
10. What about long-overdue features on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s power or a feature on Veterans for Peace blacked out by the major newspapers? Go to veteransforpeace.org and see for yourself if they are newsworthy. More coverage of the 50 Flotilla ships, which have passengers from 43 countries, and their safety is in order.
11. Why is the “other antisemitism” totally ignored by the media? This “other antisemitism” is far more violent, with F-16s and other American-built weaponry daily and genocidally mass slaughtering starving civilian Palestinian semites.
    Scholar Dr. Jim Zogby delivered an address years ago at an Israeli University titled “The Other Antisemitism,” and also engaged two Jewish Americans on this topic in a civil exchange seen on the website DebatingTaboos.org.

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Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).

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• Gaza Doctor Corrects CNN Anchor: ‘This Is Not a Humanitarian Crisis… This Is Genocide’ ›
• Even Once Reluctant Scholars Now Agree on Israel’s Gaza Assault: It’s a Genocide ›
• An Indifferent Media Is Failing to Report the 400,000 Dead in Gaza ›
• In Too Much of the US, Israel’s Gaza Genocide Has Been Made Invisible ›
• US Corporate Media Complicit in Demonizing Pro-Palestinian Protesters ›
• The Task of Freeing Palestine Is the Task of Freeing Ourselves ›

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As more Western states recognize Palestine, will they also take the action necessary to make this diplomatic step impactful in bringing a Palestinian state to life?

August 11, 2025

Anas Iqtait

Tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators march with banners through Whitehall towards 10 Downing Street, the official residence and office of the UK Prime Minister, to protest against Israel’s attacks on Gaza in London, United Kingdom on March 15, 2025. (Photo by Rasid Necati Aslim / ANADOLU / Anadolu via AFP)

Against the backdrop of the daily horrors taking place in Gaza, a wave of Western countries have decided to recognize the State of Palestine. After Ireland, Spain and Norway took the step in 2024, France and Australia have pledged to follow suit at the United Nations General Assembly in September. The United Kingdom and Canada have also expressed their intention to do so, albeit with a litany of conditions.  In short, the diplomatic map is shifting. But recognition is not a policy, it is an opening. The real work begins the day after.

Two persistent misconceptions cloud the debate. One is to mistake recognition for a peace plan rather than a tool to spur further action. The other is to imagine that it can revive a two-state formula rendered inoperable by the facts on the ground  Israel has established over decades of military occupation and colonization. More than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Separation walls, settlements, checkpoints and a dense web of military orders fragment both physical space and jurisdiction. In the past year, the Israeli Knesset has voted to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state and to annex the West Bank. If diplomatic recognition is to have a meaningful role in reversing these developments, recognizing governments must align the leverage they possess with the outcome they say they support.

What does that require?

The only way to move the needle on the two-state solution is to take steps that force Israel’s government to reconsider its intransigent path toward annexation and the fulfillment of a “Greater Israel.” First, governments supporting two states must move from symbolic action to enforcing international law. Recognition should be anchored in the judgements of international courts and treaty bodies, not in open-ended “confidence-building” exercises that absorb pressure and deliver little. Governments that recognize Palestine should operationalize that commitment by barring economic support for the settlement enterprise, adopting import restrictions on settlement goods, and applying targeted measures to entities and individuals who enable annexation, settler violence and war crimes against the Palestinians. If recognition is to be followed by more than applause, it must change the incentive structure that keeps the status quo in place.

Secondly, recognizing states must pair recognition with steps that rebalance the vast asymmetry in power between Israel and Palestine, not just revive a deeply flawed peace process. For the past three decades, that process rested on the assumption that negotiations would furnish Palestinians with the bargaining power they otherwise lacked relative to Israel. In practice, the agreed framework made Palestinian rights conditional on successive rounds of talks, while imposing no costs on Israeli expansion. If recognition is to carry any substantive force, it must invert that dynamic.

Thirdly, these states need to support a credible roadmap for Palestinian governance . Many capitals are balancing their decision to recognize Palestine with demands to reform Palestinian governance institutions. However, without a clear policy, they are reaching for familiar but misguided prescriptions: empowering the Palestinian Authority; holding elections; reviving old reform packages. While reform is certainly needed, it cannot be a proxy for creating deeper dependency. A better approach would be to prioritize three elements: (1) Protect the institutional core of Palestinian representation, including, but not limited to, a reformed PLO, and the independent ecosystem of Palestinian civil society, so any transition is political rather than merely administrative; (2) support an accountable financial architecture insulated from donor micromanagement and Israeli control; (3) and back credible tracks for transitional justice, such as documentation, restitution and mechanisms addressing displacement and dispossession. These steps should affirm the rights to Palestinian freedom and self-determination, including the right to choose and renew their political representation, as all free peoples do.

Finally, these states need to be clear and candid about what achieving a Palestinian state means in practice. The current basis for diplomacy is that recognition will somehow “revive” the two-state solution without saying plainly what it entails. This could include reversing settlement expansion and Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, creating a contiguous Palestinian territory, and establishing enforceable timelines for achieving outcomes. If these conditions cannot be met, the international community should abandon the empty rhetoric in support of two states, which only serves to provide cover for the existing colonial reality. Although a single, democratic state grounded in equal rights is not most capitals’ preference, it is the logical and moral alternative if equality rather than ethnoreligious privilege and apartheid is the organizing principle. Either way, clarity is better than evasion.

These steps do not require a reinvention of diplomacy. Governments need only do in Palestine what they claim to do elsewhere: defend the rights of vulnerable people; enforce protections from collective punishment and genocide; protect Palestinian society and its economy from settler-colonial predation; and refuse to bankroll a transnational system of oppression.

The UK, Canada and, increasingly, Australia are hedging their recognition of Palestine to demands for Palestinian Authority reform and elastic security benchmarks. But hedging is politics, not a plan. The quickest way to empty recognition of meaning is to announce it while leaving the fundamental obstacles to realizing a Palestinian state untouched. Recognition that does not change the behaviors of the occupier, the settlers, or Western supporters of Israel is an epitaph, not a breakthrough. It preserves the status quo, which, despite the name, shifts daily in a negative direction.

Given the trajectory of Western policy over the past three decades, it is reasonable to view recognition as a hollow gesture designed to deflect mounting pressure to halt the bloodshed and starvation in Gaza. Little thought is being given to the day after recognition. Put plainly, if state recognition of Palestine is followed by inaction, it is less a genuine diplomatic effort than a certificate of acquiescence to prevailing realities. At best, it registers formal objection to Israeli conduct. At worst, it becomes empty rhetoric that bears complicity in Israel’s immoral and illegal agenda.

 By Jeffrey Sachs* and Sybil Fares* – Article sent to Other News by the authors

Israel has crossed the clear line into the darkest crimes.

Israel, with US complicity, is committing genocide in Gaza through the mass starvation of the population as well as direct mass murders and the physical destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. Israel does the dirty work.  The US Government funds it and provides diplomatic cover through its UN veto.  Palantir, through “Lavendar,” provides the AI for efficient mass murder. Microsoft, through Azure cloud services, and Google and Amazon  through the “Nimbus” initiative, supply core tech infrastructure for the Israeli army. 

This marks 21^st-century war crimes as an Israel-US public-private partnership.  Israel’s mass starvation of the people of Gaza has been confirmed by the United Nations, Amnesty International, Red Cross, Save the Children and many others. The Norwegian Refugee Council, along with 100 organizations, have been calling for an end to Israel’s weaponization of food relief.  This is the first time that mass starvation has been officially confirmed in the Middle East.

The scale of the starvation is staggering. Israel is systematically depriving food to more than 2 million people. Over half a million Palestinians face catastrophic hunger and at least 132,000 children aged under five are at risk of death from acute malnutrition. The scale of the horror is thoroughly documented by Haaretz in a recent article entitled “Starvation is Everywhere.” Those who are able to somehow access food distribution sites are routinely fired on by the Israeli army.

As a former US ambassador to Israel has recently explained, the intention to starve the population has been present from the start.  Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu recently declared, “there is no nation that feeds its enemies.”  Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently stated, “whoever doesn’t evacuate, don’t let them. No water, no electricity; they can die of hunger or surrender. This is what we want.”

Yet despite these glaring declarations of genocide, US representatives at the UN repeatedly deny the facts and cover for Israel’s war crimes. The US alone vetoed Palestine’s admission to the UN in 2024.  The US now denies visas to Palestinian leaders to come to the UN in September, yet another violation of international law. 

The US has used its power and especially its veto in the UN Security Council to abet Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and to block even the most basic humanitarian responses.  The world is aghast but seems paralyzed before the the Israel-US murder machine.  Yet the world can act, even in the face of US intransigence.  The US will stand naked and alone in its criminal complicity with Israel. 

Let’s be clear.  The overwhelming voice of humanity is on the side of the people of Palestine.  Last December, 172 countries, with more than 90 percent of the world population, voted to support Palestine’s right to self-determination.  Israel and the US were essentially isolated in their opposition.  Similar overwhelming majorities are repeatedly expressed on behalf of Palestine and against the actions of Israel. 
Israel’s thuggish government now counts solely on US support, but even that may not be there for long.  Despite Trump’s intransigence and US government attempts to stifle pro-Palestinian voices, 58% of Americans want the UN to recognize the State of Palestine, compared to only 33% who do not. Moreover, 60% of Americans oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Here are practical steps that the world can take.

First, Türkiye has set the correct course by ending all economic, trade, shipping, and air links with Israel. Israel is currently a rogue state, and Türkiye is right to treat it as such until Israeli-created mass starvation ends, and a State of Palestine is admitted to the UN as the 194th member, with the borders of June 4, 1967.  Other states should immediately follow Türkiye’s lead. 

Second, all UN member states that have not yet done so should recognize the State of Palestine.  So far, 147 countries recognize Palestine.  Dozens more should do so at the UN Summit on Palestine on September 22, even over the vociferous objections of the US. 

Third, the Arab signatories to the Abraham Accords, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the UAE, should suspend their diplomatic relations with Israel until the Gaza siege ends and the State of Palestine is admitted to the UN.

Fourth, the UN General Assembly, by a vote of two-thirds present and voting, should suspend Israel from the UN General Assembly until it lifts its murderous siege on Gaza, based on the precedent of suspending South Africa during its Apartheid regime.  The US has no veto in the UN General Assembly.

Fifth, UN member states should stop the export of all technology services that support the war, until the siege of Gaza ends and Palestine’s membership in the UN is adopted by the UN Security Council.  Consumer companies such as Amazon and Microsoft that persist in aiding the Israel Defence Forces in the context of a genocide should face the wrath of consumers worldwide.   

Seventh, the UN General Assembly should dispatch a UN Protection Force to Gaza and the West Bank. Typically, it would be the UN Security Council that mandates a protection force, but in this case, the US will block the Security Council with its veto.  There is another way. 

Under the “Uniting for Peace” mechanism, when the Security Council is deadlocked, the authority to act passes to the General Assembly. After a Security Council session and the almost inevitable US veto, the issue would be brought before the UNGA in a resumed 10th emergency special session on the Israel-Palestine conflict.  There, the General Assembly can, by a two-thirds majority not subject to US veto, authorize a protection force in response to an urgent request from the State of Palestine.  There is a precedent: in 1956, the General Assembly authorized the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) to enter Egypt and protect it from the ongoing invasion by Israel, France, and the United Kingdom.

At the invitation of Palestine, the protection force would enter Gaza to secure emergency humanitarian aid for the starving population. If Israel were to attack the UN protection force, the force would be authorized to defend itself and the Gazans. Whether Israel and the US would dare to fight a UNGA-mandated force protecting the starving Gazans remains to be seen.

Israel has crossed the clear line into the darkest crimes — starving civilians to death and shooting them as they line up, emaciated, for food. There is no further line to cross, nor time to lose. The family of nations is being tested and summoned to action as it has not been in decades.

*Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. 

*Sybil Fares, Senior Advisor on the Middle East and Africa for UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.