“Sayed Rahim Saeedi has been sentenced to three years in prison without access to a lawyer or due process in the Taliban’s courts, while also suffering from serious health complications,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately release Saeedi and ensure that he receives necessary medical support and treatment.”

Saeedi has been transferred to Kabul’s central Pul-e-Charkhi prison. He is suffering from lumbar disc disease and prostate complications, the journalist source told CPJ.

The Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence detained Saeedi, his son, journalist Sayed Waris Saeedi, and their camera operator, Hasib, who goes only by one name, on July 14, 2024, in Kabul and transferred them to an undisclosed location. While the younger Saeedi and Hasib were released two days later, Saeedi remained in detention.

According to the exile-based watchdog group Afghanistan Journalists Center, Saeedi was arrested for his work criticizing the Taliban, including a screenplay he wrote about a girl denied an education by Taliban authorities.

According to the Afghanistan Journalists Center, restrictions on the country’s media are tightening.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Mahdi Ansary’s unjust sentence is indicative of the Taliban’s continued brutality and suppression of press freedom in Afghanistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately release Ansary and Sayed Rahim Saeedi, the other known detained journalist, as well as all anyother Afghan journalists imprisoned by the group without public knowledge.”

The start of Ansary’s prison term was set as October 5, 2024, when he was apprehended while returning home from his office in Kabul.

The General Directorate of Intelligence confirmed Ansary’s detention but withheld information regarding his whereabouts or the reasons for his arrest. Ansary, who is a member of Afghanistan’s persecuted Hazara ethnic minority, had been reporting on killings and atrocities against the community under Taliban rule.

On October 8, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told CPJ via messaging app that the journalist was working with “banned [media] networks” and had engaged in “illegal activities.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Saeedi, an editor and producer with ANAR Media YouTube channel, was detained along with Sayed Waris Saeedi, a reporter at the outlet who is also his son, and cameraperson Hasib, who only goes by one name, according to the elder Saeedi’s former colleague Khushal Asefi who spoke with CPJ from exile.

Hasib and the younger Saeedi were released after two days but Saeedi remains in detention for unknown reasons in an unknown location. ANAR Media reports on culture, travel, religion, and social issues.

“Taliban intelligence officials must free Sayed Rahim Saeedi and cease their brutal crackdown on journalists in Afghanistan,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “The media has been decimated since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, forcing journalists to work in a climate of fear and robbing the Afghan people of the right to access information. This harassment must stop.”

Restrictions on Afghan media are intensifying, according to the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center watchdog group, which recorded 89 media freedom violations since the start of 2024.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the ruling Awami League party returned to power for her fifth term amid an opposition boycott and low voter turnout. The U.S. State Department said the elections were “not free or fair.”

Mujib Mashal, South Asia bureau chief for The New York Times, told CPJ that the newspaper was denied prior approval by the Bangladesh government to report on the polls.

Separately, on Saturday, January 6, the day before the election, the Daily Manab Zamin newspaper’s website was blocked in Bangladesh following its critical reporting on the government, according to Matiur Rahman Chowdhury, the outlet’s editor-in-chief.

Chowdhury said the outlet did not receive a government notice detailing why the website was blocked, and access was restored on Monday, January 8.

At around 1 p.m. on election day, around 15 to 20 men wearing Awami League badges attacked seven journalists– MA Rahim, a correspondent for the broadcaster Ananda TV, Rimon Hossain, a camera operator with Ananda TV; Masud Rana, a correspondent with the online news portal enews71; Sumon Khan, a correspondent with the broadcaster Mohona TV; Elias Bosunia, a correspondent with the broadcaster Bangla TV; Minaj Islam, a correspondent with the newspaper Daily Vorer Chetona; and Hazrat Ali, a correspondent with the newspaper Dainik Dabanol, during their coverage of an assault on independent candidate Ataur Rahman outside a polling station in northern Lalmonirhat district, according to Rahim and Rana.

The men beat several of the journalists with iron rods and bamboo sticks, beat and pushed others, and broke and confiscated multiple pieces of equipment including cameras and microphones—according to those sources and a complaint filed at the Hatibandha Police Station by Rana, which alleged the perpetrators were led by brothers Md. Zahidul Islam and Md. Mostafa, nephews of the incumbent parliamentarian contested by Rahman.

Md. Zahidul Islam told CPJ that he denied involvement in the attack. Islam did not respond to CPJ’s follow-up question about Mostafa’s alleged involvement in the attack.

Saiful Islam, officer-in-charge of the Hatibandha Police Station, did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment.

Separately, at around 2:40 p.m., around 25 men surrounded Sirajul Islam Rubel, a correspondent for The Daily Star newspaper, and Arafat Rahaman, a reporter for The Daily Star, as they tried to leave a polling station in the capital Dhaka after covering an alleged ballot stuffing attempt by Awami League supporters, Rubel told CPJ.

The men grabbed the journalists’ phones, deleted their video footage and photos of the incident, and blocked their exit from the center along with Daily Star reporter Dipan Nandy, who subsequently joined Rubel and Rahaman to report from the station. The trio managed to leave with the assistance of police at around 3:05 p.m., Rubel said.

Separately, at around 2:45 p.m., around 20 to 25 men beat Mosharrof Shah, a correspondent for the daily newspaper Prothom Alo, after he photographed and filmed alleged ballot stuffing by Awami League supporters at a polling station in southeast Chittagong city, the journalist told CPJ.

Shah said that while speaking to an electoral officer about the incident, the men approached the journalist, took his notebook where he wrote what he observed, and deleted footage from his mobile phone in the presence of police. The men repeatedly slapped and punched Shah before he managed to flee the scene after around 30 minutes, the journalist told CPJ, adding that he received his phone back around one hour later with the assistance of his journalist colleagues.

Shah identified one of the perpetrators as Nurul Absar, general secretary of a local unit of the Chhatra League, the student wing of the Awami League. Absar did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment.

Previously, on September 24, alleged members of the Chhatra League attacked Shah on the University of Chittagong campus.

Separately, at around 4 p.m., a group of 20 to 30 men surrounded and assaulted Saif Bin Ayub, a sub-editor for the Daily Kalbela newspaper, and took his laptop, phone, other personal items while he was photographing alleged ballot stuffing by Awami League supporters inside a polling center in Dhaka, the journalist told CPJ.

The men pushed Bin Ayub against a wall and punched him, kicked him in the abdomen, and scratched him while forcibly removing his press identification card from around his neck. The perpetrators then dragged him out of the building as he requested help from police present at the scene, the journalist said. 

Officers did not intervene and the beating continued outside for around 15 minutes, the journalist said, adding that he received his phone and broken laptop back later that day but not his wallet, wristwatch and other items.

Separately, at around 4:30 p.m., around eight to 10 men—including electoral officials and teenagers wearing Awami League badges—pushed Sam Jahan, a Reuters video journalist, out of a vote counting room in a polling station in Dhaka. Two of the teenagers then chased Jahan out of the station, he told CPJ.

Separately, Awami League supporters surrounded and obstructed the work of four journalists with the New Age newspaper—correspondent Muktadir Rashid, photojournalist Sourav Laskar, and reporters Nasir Uz Zaman and Tanzil Rahaman—during their coverage of polling stations in Dhaka, Rashid told CPJ.

Separately, unidentified perpetrators threw bricks from behind at Mohiuddin Modhu, a news presenter and correspondent for the broadcaster Jamuna Television, after the journalist tried to speak to a young teenager who attempted to cast a ballot in the Nawabganj sub-district of Dhaka district.

Biplab Barua, Awami League office secretary and special aide to Prime Minister Hasina, told CPJ that law enforcement took swift action regarding all attacks on journalists on election day. Barua added that the government is committed to launching investigations into all such incidents and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On December 4, Mohammadi, a reporter for the independent broadcaster Tamadon TV, responded to a summons by Taliban provincial intelligence officers in the southern city of Kandahar and has not been heard from since, according to local media support group the Afghanistan Journalists’ Center and an Afghan journalist familiar with his case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, due to fear of Taliban retaliation.

As of Tuesday, CPJ could not determine why the journalist was summoned, the reason for his detention, or his whereabouts.

“The Taliban must immediately release Afghan journalist Abdul Rahim Mohammadi and end the intimidation and detention of journalists in Afghanistan,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “After more than two years in power, the Taliban and its intelligence agency continues to crack down on Afghan journalists on a daily basis, hampering reporting and the free flow of information.”

Mohammadi, who has been working as a journalist for 10 years, reports on local current affairs in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city. In February, armed Taliban members raided the headquarters of Tamadon TV in the capital, Kabul, beat several staff members, and held them for a half hour.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told CPJ that he was not aware of the detention and declined to elaborate.

Since the Taliban retook control of the country on August 15, 2021, the Taliban’s repression of the Afghan media has worsened. On the second anniversary of the group’s return to power, CPJ called on the Taliban to stop its relentless campaign of intimidation and abide by its promise to protect journalists in Afghanistan.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Malak Mattar (Palestine), A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun, 2023.

The indecency of the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’ is obvious. There is nothing humanitarian about a brief interlude between bouts of horrendous violence. There is no true ‘pause’, merely the calm before the storm continues. We are witnessing the bureaucratisation of immorality, the use of old words with great meaning (‘humanitarian’) and their reduction to new, empty phrases that betray their original meanings. Before the debris from the first rounds of Israeli bombs could be cleared, the bombing resumed just as viciously as before.

The word ‘humanitarian’ has been severely bruised by the West. You might remember another phrase, ‘humanitarian intervention’, that was used as cover for the destruction of Libya in 2011 after the legitimacy of Western military intervention had been eviscerated by the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003. To rehabilitate this legitimacy, the West pushed the United Nations to hold a conference that resulted in a new doctrine, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which, while purporting to ‘ensure that the international community never again fails to halt the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’, instead provided the West with a UN Security Council mandate (under Chapter VII of the UN Charter) for the use of force. The attack on Libya in 2011 took place under this doctrine. The guise of humanitarianism was used to destroy the Libyan state and throw the country into what appears to be a permanent civil war. There has never been even a whiff of R2P when it comes to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza (not in 2008–09, not in 2014, and not now).

It does not seem to matter that more Palestinians have been displaced and killed by Israel since 7 October than were displaced and killed in the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948. If the word ‘humanitarian’ meant something in 1948, it certainly does not mean much now.

Hanaa Malallah (Iraq), The Looting of the Museum of Art, 2003.

As the numbers of the dead and displaced increase, a sense of numbness grows. It began with a hundred dead, then a hundred more, and is rapidly escalating into the tens of thousands. In Iraq, approximately a million people were killed by the US onslaught, the sheer scale of death and the anonymity surrounding it forcing a sense distance from the rest of the world. It is difficult to wrap one’s head around these numbers unless there are stories attached to each of the dead and displaced.

Part of the problem here is that the international division of humanity makes for unjust accounting of human life: were the Palestinians killed in Gaza treated with as much dignity as the Israelis killed on 7 October? Are their lives, and deaths, assigned equal worth? The uneven response to these deaths, alongside the uncritical acceptance of this unevenness, suggests that this international division of humanity remains in place and is not only accepted, but also perpetuated, by Western leaders, who make allowances for the killing of more brown bodies than white ones, the latter seen as precious, the former seen as disposable.

Abdel Rahman al-Muzayen (Palestine), Untitled, 2000.

During the ‘humanitarian pause’, a hostage transfer took place through which Hamas and the Palestinian factions released 110 Israelis while Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children. The stories of the Israeli casualties, many of them residents of settlements near the Gaza perimeter fence, and other hostages such as the Thai and Nepalese fieldworkers are now well-known. Less frequently discussed and much less understood are the stories of the Palestinian casualties. Equally disregarded is the fact that after 7 October, Israel launched a mass campaign to detain over 3,000 Palestinians, including nearly 200 children. There are more Palestinians in Israeli prisons now than before 7 October. During the first four days of the truce alone, Israel arrested almost as many Palestinians as it released through the hostage transfer.

It is of note that most (more than two-thirds) of the Palestinians released from Israeli prisons are never charged with any crime and have been held in ‘administrative detention’ in the military’s legal system, meaning that they are held without a time limit, ‘without trial [and] without having committed an offence, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future’, as defined by the human rights organisation B’tselem. Some of them have been lost in the maze of the Israeli incarceration system indefinitely, unable to exercise even the most basic right of habeas corpus, with no court appearance, no access to a lawyer, and no access to the evidence against them. Israel currently holds more than 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners, many of them associated with left-wing factions (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). More than 2,000 of these prisoners are being held in administrative detention.

Many of these Palestinian prisoners are children. Many of them spend years in the Israeli system, often under administrative detention, unable to make a case for their release. The Defence for Children International (Palestine) reports that 500–700 children are detained each year, and a chilling report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2015 showed that Israel is in full violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990). Article 37 of the convention says that the ‘arrest, detention, or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time’. As multiple cases show, Israel uses arrests as a measure of first resort and holds children for long periods of time.

Defence for Children International studied sworn affidavits from 766 child detainees from the occupied West Bank arrested between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2022. The following data emerged from their analysis:

75% were subjected to physical violence.
80% were strip-searched.
97% were interrogated without a family member present.
66% were not properly informed of their rights.
55% were shown or made to sign a paper in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not understand.
59% were arrested at night.
86% were not informed of the reason for their arrest.
58% were subjected to verbal abuse, humiliation, or intimidation during or after their arrest.
23% were detained in solitary confinement for interrogation purposes for a period of two or more days.

Sliman Mansour (Palestine), Prison, 1982.

There are thousands of untold stories of the brutality inflicted upon Palestinian children. One of them, Ahmad Manasra, was arrested on 12 October 2015 at the age of thirteen in occupied East Jerusalem on the charge that he stabbed two Israelis: Yosef Ben-Shalom, a twenty-year-old security guard, and Naor Shalev Ben-Ezra, a thirteen-year-old boy, who survived the attack. The Israeli courts initially found Ahmad guilty of the stabbing but then changed their opinion to say that his fifteen-year-old cousin Hassan Khalid Manasra, who was shot dead at the scene, had stabbed the two Israelis. There was no evidence of Ahmad’s complicity, yet he was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison.

Still in prison, Ahmad Manasra (now 21) has been held in solitary confinement for months on end. Khulood Badawi of Amnesty International said in late September that Ahmad ‘was taken to the mental health unit at Ayalon prison after spending the better part of two years in solitary confinement. The Israeli Prison Service has requested an extension of Ahmad’s isolation for another six months in brazen violation of international law. Prolonged solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days violates the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment’.

Ahmad’s case took place during a wave of what were called ‘knife attacks’, when young Palestinians were accused of rushing at Israeli military posts with knives and were then shot dead. At that time, I investigated several of these attacks and found them to be based on little more than the word of Israeli soldiers. For instance, on 17 December 2015, Israeli soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint shot fifteen-year-old Abdullah Hussein Ahmad Nasasra to death. Eyewitnesses told me that the boy had his hands in the air when he was fatally shot. One of them, Nasser, told me that there was no knife, and that he ‘saw them kill the boy’. Kamal Badran Qabalan, an ambulance driver, was not allowed to retrieve the body. The Israelis wanted control over the body and the story they would tell about it.

Another story is that of twenty-three-year-old Anas al-Atrash in Hebron. Anas and his brother Ismail returned home from a week of work in Jericho, their car filled with fruits and vegetables. At a checkpoint, Anas got out of the car when instructed to do so and an Israeli soldier shot him dead. The next morning, Israeli media reported that Anas tried to kill the Israeli soldiers. The journalist Ben Ehrenreich, who reported the story with a fierce determination for the truth, sought out the family’s version. Anas had no interest in politics, they told him. He was studying accounting and hoped to get married soon. The Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials kept asking Ismail if his brother had a knife. There was simply no knife. Anas had been killed in cold blood. ‘This is a savage country’, an eyewitness told Ehrenreich. ‘They have no shame’. He meant the Israeli soldiers.

Hakim Alakel (Yemen), from the series The Eye of the Bird, 2013.

The grammar of the Israeli occupation is to put pressure on Palestinians until an act of violence takes place – a knife attack, say, or even a fabricated knife attack – and then use that event as an excuse to deepen the displacement of Palestinians with more illegal settlements. The events that have followed 7 October maintain this logic. Israel has used people like Anas, Abdullah, and Ahmad, and the fabricated narratives surrounding their alleged crimes, as the raison d’etre to increase the demolition of Palestinian homes and expand illegal Israeli settlements, accelerating the Permanent Nakba.

Ten years ago, I met with Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shaloub-Kevorkian studies how the occupation produces an everyday form of victimhood that stretches from the streets to Palestinians’ most intimate of spaces. Her book Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear (2015) provides a glimpse into the industry of fear that is produced and reproduced in the everyday violence inflicted upon Palestinians by settlers and the military, including the difficulties that Palestinians face in giving birth and burying their dead. The depth of the violence and uncertainty, Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes, moves Palestinian women to speak of ‘being choked, suffocated, or gagged’ and has led many of their children to lose their will to live. There is widespread social trauma in Palestine or what Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls ‘sociocide’: the death of society.

More than fifty years of an occupation and war have created a strange dynamic. Both Ehrenreich and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work offer windows into this madness. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who lives in Jerusalem, told me that she is part of a group of women who walk Palestinian children to school each day, since it is too dangerous for them to confront the police and the settlers on their own, or even in the company of their Palestinian family and friends. ‘Bikhawfuni!’ (‘They scare me!’), one girl, Marah (age 8), told her.

The children draw pictures at school. One of them drew a clown, a Palestinian clown. When Shalhoub-Kevorkian asked the child (age 9) what a Palestinian clown is, he explained, ‘This is a Palestinian clown. Clowns in Palestine cry’.

Abdul Rahim Nagori (Pakistan), Sabra and Shatila, 1982.

The poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who moved to Beirut to edit the magazine Lotus in the aftermath of the 1977 military coup in Pakistan, wrote with horror about the plight and struggles of the Palestinians:

Tere aaqa ne kiya ek Filistin barbaad
Mere zakhmon ne kiye kitne Filistin aabaad.

Your enemies destroyed one Palestine.
My wounds populated many Palestines.

Faiz’s poem ‘A Lullaby for a Palestinian Child’, written during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, reflects the reality facing Palestinian children today:

Don’t cry children.
Your mother has just cried herself to sleep.

Don’t cry children.
Your father has just left this world of sorrow.

Don’t cry children,
Your brother is in an alien land.
Your sister too has gone there.

Don’t cry children.
The dead sun has just been bathed and the moon is buried in the courtyard.

Don’t cry children.
For if you cry,
Your mother, father, brother, and sister
And the sun, and the moon
Will make you cry ever more.

Maybe if you smile,
They’ll one day return, disguised
to play with you.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

In the short term, the offensive by Hamas looks like a spectacular bloodying of Israel’s strangulating forces and any number of restrictive labels you might wish to apply to the bully that holds the reins over any prospect of Palestinian sovereignty. It is particularly bruising given the rag-tag status of previous Palestinian military efforts to breach the security barriers of the Israeli state, not to mention showing up its hubristic security and intelligence services, caught entirely napping.

This is not to suggest that Hamas, and its various Islamist iterations, is ideal as a governing or prosecuting body for the Palestinian cause; it is merely to observe that, as a reality, retributive or retaliatory counters to Israeli power, the no-change-in-hope-of-Palestinian-extinction message, was bound to happen. As it will happen, again.

In August 2019, Shlomo Ben-Ami put it with crisp grimness. With the two-state solution essentially condemned to moribund retirement, “there is little to stop Israel from cementing the one-state reality that its right-wing government has long sought, regardless of whether it leads to a permanent civil war.”

The violence is the apotheosis of what happens at the end of a road of exhausted options, a terminus where negotiations no longer matter, when the government in power, itself corrupted and spoiled and facing opposition from its own citizens, finds itself at sea as to how to defeat an enemy it refuses to acknowledge, except in violence. In April, the Times of Israel reported that fighter pilots in the volunteer reserves had threatened to withdraw their labour, agitated by Netanyahu’s legislative efforts to hobble the judiciary. Leaders had warned that the country faced civil war.

From outside the conflict, the ongoing debate rages on who has a monopoly on violence and its decent uses. Depending on who exercises it, it constitutes a terroristic act warranting justified massive retaliation. For others, it’s justified self-defence. “There is never any justification for terrorism,” stated US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, ignoring the obvious point that many states tend to be born in the convulsing labours of terrorism, not least Israel itself. The EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen “unequivocally” condemned “the attack carried out by Hamas terrorists against Israel.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also regarded such “acts of violence” as “completely unacceptable,” insisting that civilians had to be protected.

Laced with a delicious, smacking irony, were remarks made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a man who claims little by way of restraint in fighting invaders and occupiers (Russians, would you know?) and seems to ignore the states of occupation that stain other parts of the world. “Today’s terrorist attack on Israel was well-planned, and the entire world knows which sponsors of terrorism could have endorsed and enabled its organization.” Dare we even bother to ask?

“Decency,” as George Bernard Shaw tells us in Maxims for Revolutionists, “is indecency’s conspiracy of silence.” Palestinians are to be conspiratorially decent before the killing of the two-state solution and the impoverishment of their lands. (The blockade in Gaza has left 80% of the population dependent on international aid, facing a contaminated water supply and persistent power outages.) They are to be decent and well-mannered before bulldozing policies of collective punishment. They are to be decent before discriminatory administrative detention and segregationist policies that have been said by Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem to satisfy the conditions of apartheid.

The reality, as Raz Segal punchily declared, has been etched “into the landscape of the occupied Palestinian territories,” a policy of colonisation manifested “through walls, fences, other barriers, and roads intended only for Jews or only for Palestinians.” Writing in 2002, former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair merely confirmed that, “We established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories.”

When allegations of apartheid are made, along with accusations that Israel’s policy towards Palestinians conforms to a long tradition of colonial oppression and displacement by the dominant power, defenders arc up in defiance, seeing antisemitism everywhere. On February 8, 2022, Deborah Lipstadt, in testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in confirmation hearings for the role as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, did just that. She rejected any claims of apartheid, notably by Amnesty International, as “unhistorical,” a crass act of delegitimising a proud democratic country.

And what of the comments from those engaged in planning the assaults of October 7? Mohammad Deif, leader of Hamas’s military wing, claimed that the operation was launched as a direct response to Israeli provocations towards the sanctity of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, notably by Jewish nationalist settlers. “They [Israeli forces] consistently assault our women, the elderly, children and [the] youth; and prevent our people from praying in the Aqsa Mosque while allowing groups of Jews to desecrate the mosque with daily incursions.”

Support has been forthcoming from various predictable quarters, though this is hardly to suggest that the plight of Palestinians will not, given the right moment, be bargained away. Yahya Rahim Safavi, an advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, declared that Tehran would “stand by Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem.” Liberation causes can titillate when embraced hundreds of miles away.

As the battle rages, Israeli politicians can reflect on some common ground with their counterparts in the United States who fund them well. Both have endeavoured to embrace models of existence that caricature peace even as they ennoble the conditions of war. The United States and Israel share that same tendency that had defined their power for decades: the conditions of peace are always underwritten by a permanent, warlike impetus. The expression from historian Charles Beard, expressed in 1947, never seems to date: “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.