Middle East Press On: Antisemitism Canard, Terrorist, Trade, Jakarta, PUIC: New Age Islam's Selection, 26 May 2025
New Age Islam Edit Desk
26 May 2025
The Killing of Israeli Embassy Staffers: Netanyahu’s Antisemitism Canard
Trump in Riyadh: Saudis Shift the Storyline
The Washington Attack: Israeli ‘Defence Forces’ Kill 60,000, A ‘Terrorist’ Kills Two
International Law and Israel’s Reign of Terror in Gaza
Israel’s Shin Bet Needs Stability, Not Political Drama
Netanyahu’s Self-Serving Press Conference: A Display of Deflection and Distortion
UK Freezes Trade with Israel — And Integrity with It
Once Again, Netanyahu Plays the Victim Card
Jakarta’s May PUIC Summit Spoke for Palestine. What Comes Next?
Compiled by New Age Islam Edit Desk
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The Killing Of Israeli Embassy Staffers: Netanyahu’s Antisemitism Canard
May 25, 2025
Here was another chance – at least as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw it – of threading one set of events with another. It’s all part of the Israeli security state’s playbook: any killing of Jews or its citizens, wherever they might be, will have a causal link to rabid, drooling antisemitism. To protest ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, dispossession, starvation as a tool of war, and the conscious infliction of humanitarian catastrophe on a population is equivalent to believing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These accusations and charges are seen as blood libels on the Jewish people, rather than rebukes and condemnation of the Israeli State and its policies.
The killing of Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum located in downtown Washington, D.C. was such a chance. According to Yechiel Leitner, the Israeli ambassador to the US, the couple were to be engaged.
The suspect gunman, Elias Rodriguez, was arrested at the scene and taken away shouting: “Free Palestine!” In court documents submitted by the FBI, the suspect, in handing himself to the officers, stated his rationale for the shootings: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed.” He also professed admiration for US Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in February 2024 declaring that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” Rodriguez has been charged by the US attorney’s office in Washington with two counts of first-degree murder.
A grave, reflective response might have been in order. But the Netanyahu government has always been on the hunt for the political justification, and the political expedient. Given Netanyahu’s own political travails, be they corruption charges and his own unpopularity, this quest has become habitual. So it came to pass that Milgrim and Lischinsky could become a convenient platform to attack countries allied to Israel yet taking issue with the levelling and starving of Gaza.
The mood was set during a press conference given by Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on 21 May. The slaying of Milgrim and Lischinsky was “the direct result of toxic antisemitic incitement against Israel and Jews around the world that has been going on since the October 7 massacre.” Israel’s missions and representatives across the globe had become “targets of antisemitic terrorism that has crossed all red lines.”
In suggesting “a direct line connecting antisemitic and anti-Israeli incitement to this murder”, Sa’ar accused “leaders and officials of many countries and international organizations, especially from Europe”, for being central instigators. They had resorted to “modern blood libels” in accusing Israel of “genocide, crimes against humanity and murdering babies”.
While not expressly mentioning them, the Foreign Minister was clearly referring to France, Britain and Canada and their joint statement of 19 May warning about the murderous implications of Operation Gideon’s Chariots. The statement affirmed the trio’s opposition to “the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.” Israel’s permission of “a basic quantity of food into Gaza” was condemned as wholly inadequate, while denying essential humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population in the Strip was “unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law.” The three countries further condemned “the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate.”
The statement went on to warn that, were Israel not to cease pursuing such “egregious actions”, cease the ongoing military operation, and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid, “we will take further concrete actions in response.”
On 20 May, in his address to the House of Commons, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy noted the “abominable” situation of threatened “starvation hanging over hundreds of thousands of civilians.” He grimly noted the words of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who had spoken of “cleansing Gaza” and “destroying what’s left”, with the intention of relocating Palestinians to third countries. Such measures, for Lammy, were “morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counter-productive.”
In light of such developments, negotiations with Israel over a new free trade agreement were to be suspended. A further three individuals and four entities involved in Israel’s illegal settler program in the West Bank were also to be sanctioned.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry was dismissive of the British position, calling the sanctions “regrettable”. “If, due to anti-Israel obsession and domestic political considerations, the British government is willing to harm the British economy – that is its own prerogative.”
It was Netanyahu, however, who pulled out all the stops. In a video address, he noted the words uttered by Rodriquez as he was taken away: “Free Palestine.” Finding such a statement obscene, he recalled that it was “the same chant we heard on October 7 [2023]”, when “thousands of terrorists stormed into Israel from Gaza”, proceeding to behead men, rape women and burn babies. To take “Free Palestine” as a serious proposition was “today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler.’” It was a “simple truth” that had evaded “the leaders of France, Britain, Canada and others.” In their proposals for establishing a Palestinian state, they were rewarding “these murderers with the ultimate price.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney were roundly condemned for being on “the wrong side of justice”, “humanity” and “history”. They had been praised by “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”. The PM’s objective was simple: avoiding the establishment of any Palestinian state, as it was bound to be vulnerable to seizure by “radicals”. It was axiomatic that such an entity would wish for the destruction of the Jewish state. The picture becomes complete: Israel’s operations, totally justified on national security grounds; critics, abominated as hateful antisemites; the Palestinians, radicals current or in embryo needing to be rubbed out.
No one doubts that the reserves of antisemitism run deep, clouded by miasmic, millennial hatreds. Few can also doubt that a dislike of policies driven by ethnoreligious fanaticism contemptuous of human rights is a valid ground of protest. That this should end up in killings of individuals attending an event about humanitarian aid that would have otherwise appalled Netanyahu, Ben Gvir et al, is another, disturbing irony. Fanaticism diminishes the horizon, leaving human beings bare, and hollow, and naked. And that baring is currently underway with remorseless intensity in Gaza.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250525-the-killing-of-israeli-embassy-staffers-netanyahus-antisemitism-canard/
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Trump In Riyadh: Saudis Shift The Storyline
Dr. Hatem Alzahrani
May 25, 2025
As US President Donald Trump’s plane descended toward Riyadh on May 13, escorted by Saudi F-15 fighter jets, preparations on the ground evoked a quiet cultural confidence. Across the tarmac stretched the lavender ceremonial carpet, officially adopted in 2021, inspired by the desert khuzama flower and bordered with the geometric patterns of the UNESCO-inscribed traditional sadu weaving. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, “the visionary leader who never sleeps,” as Trump described him, welcomed his guest into the reception hall, where Saudi coffee was served in traditional Arabian style. And within two days, perceptions built up over decades began to shift.
Riyadh was once again Trump’s first foreign trip in office, this time coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the 1945 Quincy meeting between King Abdulaziz and President Franklin Roosevelt. Back in 2017, Trump’s first summit in Riyadh had introduced a new political chemistry between a Saudi leadership with an ambitious vision and an outsider American administration driven more by deal-making than by bureaucratic routine.
The 2025 meeting, however, took place between two well-acquainted partners, at a rare moment of symmetry: an American president returning to power after a sweeping victory, and a young Saudi leader who is the architect of regional transformation and the subject of global fascination, thanks to a vision that repositioned his country as a rising force on the global stage.
While analysts were preoccupied with the headlines of political understandings, investment deals, and bilateral economic agreements, the deeper meaning of this visit lay in how the Saudis chose to present themselves, and how the Americans responded.
For decades, visits by Western, especially American, leaders to the region followed a familiar script: security cooperation in exchange for energy stability, filtered through a condescending outsider’s gaze and quiet assumptions of superiority. But this time, something fundamental had changed. The inspiring Saudi reality on the ground turned old expectations on their head and signaled a new way of seeing.
The visit became an opportunity for Saudi Arabia to reintroduce itself to the world through its most authentic symbols, to reshape the storyline through which it has long been seen — the lavender carpet; dallah pots pouring Saudi coffee into finjan cups; Arabian horses escorting the presidential motorcade through Al-Yamamah Palace; and the samri dance that greeted Trump in At-Turaif, the UNESCO-listed district in Diriyah, birthplace of the Saudi state that restored the Arabian Peninsula’s central role after a millennium away from the geopolitical spotlight.
This was a live act of meaning-making from a nation that knows its own cultural weight. On air, in real time, the Kingdom projected a narrative of itself as confident, visionary, ambitious, and economically powerful. A country shaping how it wants to be seen. Western media captured the symbolism with awe, while Saudi digital majlises erupted with pride. The message was unmistakable: Welcome to the new Saudi Arabia, a nation proud of its roots, open to the world, and carrying a heritage unfolding toward the future.
Beyond symbolism, the perception shift was clearest in Trump’s own speech. In one of its most striking moments, he delivered a sharp critique of “Western interventionists ... giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs ... intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.” Then he declared that “the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not built by so-called nation-builders, or neocons, or liberal nonprofits. They were built by the people of this region themselves, developing their own sovereign countries, pursuing their own visions, and charting their own destinies.”
This echoed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s 2018 remarks at the Future Investment Initiative, two years after Vision 2030 was launched: “The new Europe is the Middle East” and that achieving this vision is “the Saudis’ war, my war personally. I do not want to die without seeing the Middle East at the forefront of the world. This goal will be achieved 100 percent.”
Some at the time saw those words as a visionary promise still far from reach. Even Trump acknowledged that: “Critics doubted whether what you achieved at home was even possible.” But what once sounded like a distant ambition is now an undeniable reality, and the US leader’s remarks were a direct response to that.
Moreover, these remarks marked a shift in how Washington perceives its relationship with the region. They pushed back against the “Western savior” narrative, returned credit to local agency, and acknowledged that real change is now coming from within. The outcomes of the visit reflected this shift as well, culminating in a strategic economic partnership covering vital sectors.
For years, the Middle East figured in American discourse as a problem to fix, a threat to contain, or a place waiting to be saved. These portrayals were largely imagined constructs, shaped by entrenched Western frameworks built on outdated assumptions and ideological baggage. As historian Zachary Lockman reminds us in “Contending Visions of the Middle East,” much of the Western scholarly engagement with the region was historically tied to the priorities of foreign powers, rather than a genuine intellectual quest for understanding. The Middle East was treated as the “Other,” an object to be studied and explained in service of Western strategy.
Now, the lens is changing. The developmental models taking shape in the wider region are not imported templates, but strategies born from lived experience and cultural depth. Now reality leads perception, after decades in which perception shaped reality. Thanks to countries like Saudi Arabia, the region is reclaiming its voice as a fully engaged actor, redefining itself from within what was long considered an “exotic” or “mysterious” part of the world.
Saudi Arabia is redrawing its global image with clarity of vision and tangible results. Through self-assessment, data-driven governance, and large-scale reforms, the Kingdom has done in a few years what Trump called “a modern miracle, the Arabian way.” This shift echoes a broader global rebalancing. As Fareed Zakaria outlines in “The Age of Revolutions,” we are witnessing the rise of “new powers,” countries that combine bold economic reform with cultural self-confidence and geopolitical ambition. Saudi Arabia stands as a leading example of these emerging global actors.
With strategic clarity, Saudi Arabia is reclaiming its place in the global imagination, not as a petro-state anomaly, but a civilizational force rooted in the Arabian Peninsula. For centuries, this land served as a crossroads of trade and a hub of cultural exchange. It gave rise to a language that became a global medium of learning and philosophy. From its historic cities, the people of Arabia, alongside peoples from Asia, Africa, and Europe, helped synthesize ancient knowledge and forge new ideas in science, law, literature, and spirituality. Vision 2030 calls back to this legacy as a strategic resource, reinvesting it to forge global partnerships, articulate a confident Saudi identity, and position the Kingdom as a key player in shaping the future.
In that spirit, the 2025 Riyadh Summit marks a new chapter in the Saudi-US story, one defined by mutual respect and a new understanding of the region from within, rather than through borrowed frameworks. “All of humanity will soon be amazed at what they will see right here in this geographic center of the world and the spiritual heart of its greatest faiths,” Trump declared in his Riyadh address. It was a shift in perception, a recognition that the West will now understand the region through its own successful models. And at the center of those models stands Saudi Arabia as a force actively shaping the narratives of tomorrow.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2602124
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The Washington Attack: Israeli ‘Defence Forces’ Kill 60,000, A ‘Terrorist’ Kills Two
May 25, 2025
The killing of two Israeli embassy staff in Washington was clearly an act of retribution, not antisemitism. Elias Rodriguez pulled the trigger but the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv cocked the pistol.
The atrocities it has committed with the active support of the US government finally pushed a young man with no known criminal record into committing this one violent act against two young people in the prime of their lives, just like the thousands of young people Israel has killed in Gaza.
Had Netanyahu and his fascist gang been stopped long ago, this never would have happened. And why weren’t they stopped? Because the governments that could have stopped them are fully complicit in their crimes.
Under the direction of their politicians and military commanders, Israeli soldiers, pilots, and drone operators have murdered nearly 60,000 civilians. They have launched hundreds of attacks on health centres, destroying hospitals or putting them out of service. They have murdered or wounded thousands of health and aid workers. The true death toll is undoubtedly much higher because of bodies that cannot be recovered from the tons of rubble over them.
Since the beginning of March this year, when Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza, 50-100 or more Palestinians have been murdered every day by its military.
The Gaza Health Ministry has just released figures on the 16,503 children known to have been killed since October 2023: 916 under one year of age, 4365 aged one to five; 6101 aged 6-12; and 5124 aged 13-17. Again, the true toll will be higher because of bodies unrecoverable from under rubble.
Dr Ala al Naja’a, a pediatrician working in the emergency department of Al Tahrir hospital in Khan Yunis, has just had the horrifying experience of receiving in shrouds the charred remains of nine of her ten children, all under the age of 12, killed in an Israeli missile strike on her home. The tenth child survived but was injured. Her husband is in the hospital, seriously wounded. A British volunteer doctor at the hospital said the children’s bodies were “charcoaled to a crisp.”
Entire families have been wiped out in missile attacks on civilians. Thousands of children have not just been orphaned because their parents have been killed, but have been left without any immediate or extended family to look after them, because all relatives have been killed.
UN Women estimates that 28,000 women and girls have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Malnourished women are unable to breastfeed their children. Miscarriages are up 300 per cent, including miscarriages as a direct result of Israeli air attacks.
Following Israel’s destruction of hospitals, obstetric care is available at only seven out 18 partly functioning hospitals, four out of 11 field hospitals, and one health centre. Women are forced to give birth in tents without any access to medical support. Children are at risk from the moment they are born, from missile attacks or the lack of medicine and equipment to give them proper care. A doctor in Rafah reported that five babies were sharing one incubator.
Mass starvation is imminent, but hundreds of Gazan civilians – including children – have already been starved to death. This is not ‘collateral damage’ in war but the result of a decision taken by the barbaric regime in Tel Aviv.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, says the entire population of Gaza is facing famine. In its attempt to drive the UN out of Palestine, Israel has hired US contractors to provide food aid, but only in the south. The Palestinians will be driven out of the north if they want to eat, and will not be allowed back. This is food used as a weapon of war, a gross violation of international law.
Just before the two Israeli embassy employees were killed, the UN’s chief humanitarian coordinator said that 14,000 babies were at risk of imminent death unless food was allowed into Gaza. Perhaps this is what finally triggered Elias Rodriguez’s decision to go into the street and shoot the two Israeli embassy staffers attending a ‘young diplomats’ conference.
The Bible says, “Thou shall not kill.” The Bible is right, but when the Bible is used to justify mass murder, we are living in a moral swamp. The rules and moral exemplars apply only to the weak, not the strong. Out of the eight billion people living on the planet, someone was bound to strike back on behalf of the weak.
As part of the genocide, Israel – and Trump – continue to plan the mass expulsion of Palestinians to impoverished countries. They have the Israeli public behind them. A Penn State University poll carried out in March this year, reported in Haaretz and Palestine Chronicle, found that 82 percent of Israelis polled supported the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and 56 percent the expulsion of Palestinians still living in their pre-1967 occupied land.
Ninety-three percent believed the Biblical command to ‘erase Amalek’ applies today, and 47 percent thought all Palestinians in occupied Gaza’s cities should be killed, following the Biblical example of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho and the massacre of its people.
These exterminationist desires would naturally apply to the West Bank, where life for Palestinians amounts to a pogrom that has continued for 58 years, compared to the pogroms carried out more than a century ago by Cossacks in the Russian Pale of Settlement that lasted for a few days.
While eyes are focused on Gaza, Israel is carrying out a second-level genocide on the West Bank. Hooligans, vandals, and murderers in uniform authorized by the criminal collective in Tel Aviv run riot across the West Bank. The 25,000 residents of the Jenin refugee camp have been ethnically cleansed, buildings have been destroyed, and the camp has been turned into a military base. D-9 bulldozers rip up the streets of the town and destroy electrical cables and other utilities.
The public around at the world is aghast at the barbarity of what it is seeing both in Gaza and the West Bank yet the Israeli regime reacts with fury when just two of its embassy staff are killed – two compared to close to 60,000 Palestinians butchered in Gaza – as if there could be no possible reason for someone wanting to do this. This is surely a sign of just how crazy these people are.
“Hatred and radicalism have no place in the USA,” wrote Donald Trump. The message needs to be addressed to Israel, apart from Trump’s own complicity in the genocide. Were there a genuine ‘international rules-based order’, Netanyahu, Saar, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, the whole rotten bunch constituting the Israeli ‘government,’ would have been slung into prison long ago.
The genocide would have been stopped, and the sign that the international ‘rules-based order’ was actually working would have prevented the Washington attack. Unfortunately, Israel’s partner in crime, the US government, has the power to make sure the ’rules-based order’ does not work.
The manifesto posted online by Elias Rodriguez makes it clear that Israel’s atrocities were the reason for the Washington attack. “The atrocities committed by Israel defy description and defy quantification,” he wrote. “I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the (death) toll at 100,000 or more. What more at this point can one say about the population of mangled and exploded burnt human beings who were children?” He referred to how Israelis themselves “boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians.”
In Paris in 1927, Sholem Schwarzbard assassinated the Ukrainian fascist Symon Petliura in retaliation for the massacre of his family in the 1919 pogroms. At his trial, he was acquitted because it was understood why he took his revenge.
In Paris again, in 1938, a Polish-German Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, assassinated the German diplomat Ernst Eduard vom Rathis His HIS in retaliation for the deportation of his family from Germany to Poland.
No-one except the Nazis called him a terrorist. The influential American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote that this “boy” would soon go on trial, but “who is on trial in this case? I would say we are all on trial. I say the men of Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities … whether Herschel Grynszpan lives or not won’t matter much to Herschel. He was prepared to die when he fired those shots. His life was already ruined.”
Grynszpan said that “being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to live on exist on this earth. Wherever I have been, I have been chased like an animal.
Palestinians have the same rights and have also been “chased like animals,” or “human animals,” as Yoav Gallant called them. The Nazis called their Jewish victims rats, Zionist fanatics call their victims cockroaches and snakes. The Nazis wanted to destroy the Jews, Zionists want to destroy the Palestinians.
Adding to the public calls for their extermination, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, recently called for Palestinian men and women to be separated so the men can be ‘executed’ en masse.
Dropping a nuclear bomb on them is another solution, suggested two years ago by Amichai Eliyahu, an equally murderous party colleague of Itamar Ben-Gvir. Taken up by US senator Lindsey Graham when drawing a parallel with what the US “had to do” when dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this ‘solution’ has now repeated by Florida senator Randy Fine, who said the US had ‘nuked’ Japan twice to get unconditional surrender “and that needs to be the same here.”
Nazis called the assassination of Vom Rath an attack on the German people, not what it was, an attack on a senior figure in a genocidal Nazi state. The government of Israel and its lobbyists everywhere are responding in the same way to the Washington attack, by describing it as an ‘antisemitic’ attack on the Jewish people and not what it was, a blow struck against a state committing genocide.
‘Western’ politicians and their media are complicit in the genocide. Over nearly eight decades, they have continued to fund and arm Israel despite the crimes it was regularly committing.
Their intelligence agencies helped Israel to assassinate Palestinians around the world. They allowed it to run wild for nearly 80 years, and only now, after more than 18 months of sustained savagery, do they seem to be waking up to what they have done. Finally, they are starting to feel the heat.
“Israel is not the Messiah but the Golem,” Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote long ago (1983) in The Fate of the Jews. In Jewish folklore, the golem is the animated spirit created from inanimate material, usually clay, generally obedient but also capable of causing hubris. “Created to save the Jews, it has turned on its creators, corrupting and destroying them by its very success at making them a nation like all others …. The Israelis are surviving but not as Jews.” In fact, the world Jewish mainstream regarded Zionism as a corruption of Judaism from the beginning.
Finally, there is this from the Zionist architect of assassination and mass murder, Benyamin Netanyahu, following the decision by three governments to suspend trade relations with Israel:
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-washington-attack-israeli-defense-forces-kill-60000-a-terrorist-kills-two/
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International Law and Israel’s Reign Of Terror In Gaza
May 25, 2025
As the world watches, one of history’s greatest crimes has taken form. Inaction, complicity, and silence in the face of genocide have caused profound suffering to the Palestinian people. No final reckoning or redress would be equivalent to the scale and magnitude of Israel’s depraved criminality.
Inevitably, there will be a final accounting for those who advanced an environment in which a member of the Israeli parliament felt emboldened enough to boast: “Everyone got used to the idea that you can kill 100 Gazans in one night … And nobody in the world cares.”
The time is past due to state unequivocally that Israel has, since it declared statehood in 1948, been terrorizing the Palestinian people and that the US and its Western allies have, because of their overwhelming support for Israel, been active participants in that terror.
Israeli violence clearly fits America’s own definition of “domestic terrorism.”
Washington’s leading law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, defines it as: “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups [regimes] to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences such as political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”
Palestinians have suffered incomprehensible horrors because US politicians, political influencers, public and corporate media have failed to provide the historical context that gave rise to the insurrection of October 7, 2023. Absent that history and discussion of Palestinian resistance grounded in international law, they have made Israel’s indefensible response appear warranted.
The failure to inform has essentially given Israel a license to commit genocide and all manner of atrocities in Gaza and has enabled US authorities to suppress opposition to the war on American college campuses.
The media, for example, has accepted without question the government’s illegitimate designation of Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation as “terrorism” and national liberation groups like the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) as terrorist organizations.
In so doing, by equating Palestinian resistance with terrorism, they have eased the way for authorities to use the “support for terrorism” accusation to crush dissent and to arrest pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Scholars and activists, like Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, held without due process for over two months in a Louisiana detention center, have been arrested on the grounds that they pose a threat to US foreign policy and security. In reality, Khalil’s “crime” was standing up for the truth and Palestine.
With some basic fact-finding, the media would have learned that resistance to occupation is legally reinforced under international law. And that the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and Additional Protocol I explicitly affirm the legitimate right of the occupied to resist occupation as part of the right to self-determination. Resistance includes armed struggle in situations of colonial domination, foreign occupation and against racial regimes. The 1977 Additional Protocols to the Convention also gave legal legitimacy to the “resort to arms by national liberation movements.”
In addition, they would have discovered that the UN General Assembly has passed numerous resolutions recognizing the legitimacy of armed resistance as a means of oppressed peoples to achieve self-determination and independence.
Israel is a colonial, foreign, and racial regime that has brutally dominated Palestinian lives for eight decades, and according to international law, resistance to it is justified.
The Palestinian rebellion could also have been understood differently if the media had presented comparable cases, like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943—an historical act of Jewish resistance against their Nazi occupiers during World War II. We would be hard pressed today to find anyone who would question the righteousness or legitimacy of that rebellion, as they have regarding the uprising of October 7.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939, for instance, German authorities began to concentrate Poland’s Jews, estimated at three million, into a number of crowded ghettos located in cities throughout the country. The sealed-up Warsaw ghetto warehoused approximately 350,000 people in a densely packed two-mile area of the city.
Jews who had not died of disease, starvation or deportation to extermination camps fought back against Nazi Germany’s final effort to transport them to death camps. Although they recognized that victory and survival were unlikely, they refused to surrender. After 29 days of fighting, 13,000 Warsaw Jews and 17 German soldiers were killed. After the Nazi occupiers destroyed the entire ghetto, their final act was to blow up the historical 1878 Warsaw Synagogue.
The Jewish fighters knew full well the outcome of their defiance. They chose, however, to determine how they would die—Treblinka or resistance.
After years of degradation, Palestinian resistance forces also made a choice to break out of the dehumanizing ghetto in which they had been held hostage for 58 years. Although they, too, knew they were up against a powerful, brutal army, they chose a “Gaza Ghetto Uprising” over unending oppressive confinement.
As Israel moves closer each day to completing its long-cherished goal of killing as many Palestinians as the “civilized world” will permit, it is critical to magnify the fact that, according to international law, people under colonial or foreign occupation have a legitimate right to armed struggle to obtain their freedom and sovereignty.
Had the October insurrection been placed within the context of international law, perceptions may have been different, and the violence of the last 19 months might not have happened. Most importantly, 68,000 Palestinians would not have been massacred, and ancient Gaza would not now be an environmentally devastated wasteland.
It is essential to recognize that Palestine is one of the few countries in the world remaining under direct military occupation and colonial rule. Using the auspices of the newly established United Nations, the British officially handed off their colonial mandate in Palestine to the Tel Aviv regime in 1948. Since then, Israel’s plan to seize and control all of historic Palestine and forcibly remove the indigenous population, has never ceased.
In addition, attention should be focused on the July 19, 2024, International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion ruling that Israel is unlawfully occupying and is not entitled to sovereignty over any of the Palestinian territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza). The Court also mandated that Israel end its occupation, desist from creating new settlements, evacuate existing ones, and provide full reparations to Palestinian victims; and once again affirmed the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
Israel has, however, only intensified its violence since the ICJ ruled and after the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution that gave effect to the Court’s Advisory Opinion.
In Resolution ES-10/24, the General Assembly demanded that within 12 months from the adoption (September 18, 2024) of the resolution that Israel end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory without delay and meet its obligations under international law.
The United States and its European allies have joined Israel in giving the ICJ and the UN General Assembly the “digitus impudicus,” as they ignore the Court’s mandate that all states must recognize the unlawfulness of the occupation and refrain from aiding Tel Aviv in maintaining the occupation.
International law is unmistakably on the side of Palestine. Until now, it has been primarily a textual representation, not action. Legalities have not stopped Israel from murdering Palestinian resistance leaders, dropping thousand-pound bombs on non-combatants to kill one man.
Resistance is a right of the oppressed. Mahmoud Kahlil, in a letter to his newborn son, has eloquently given voice to that right and to the Palestinians who were, who are, and who will be:
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/international-law-and-israels-reign-of-terror-in-gaza/
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Israel’s Shin Bet Needs Stability, Not Political Drama
By Jpost Editorial
May 26, 2025
Were the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) not so essential for Israel’s everyday security, the debacle involving the appointment of a new Shin Bet chief could be shrugged off with a dismissive cluck of the tongue and a resigned shake of the head.
But the Shin Bet is essential – every week, every day, every hour. When it succeeds, terrorist attacks designed to kill dozens are foiled. When it fails, as it did on October 7, tragedy strikes.
Israel needs a Shin Bet that is effective, focused, and above political gamesmanship. This is especially true now, as thousands of the country’s sons and daughters are on the verge of a new offensive in Gaza – an operation that depends heavily on accurate, timely intelligence from the Shin Bet.
Precisely because the organization is so vital, the farcical way in which its next leader is being chosen – following the firing/resignation of current head Ronen Bar, set to take effect on June 15 – is deeply troubling and deserves widespread condemnation, not just a dismissive shrug.
On Thursday evening, after the High Court of Justice – in what we believe was an odd and misplaced decision – ruled that Netanyahu’s dismissal of Bar was unlawful, and after the attorney-general declared that Netanyahu cannot be involved in selecting Bar’s successor due to a conflict of interest, the prime minister announced his choice: Maj.-Gen. David Zini.
Remember, this is already the second candidate he has named after picking and withdrawing former naval chief V.-Adm. (ret.) Eli Sharvit two months ago.
Why was the court’s decision problematic? Because Bar had already resigned, whether he should have been fired was, at that point, academic. The court waded into a moot issue, unnecessarily fanning the already high flames regarding court overreach and appearing to settle a theoretical dispute just to make a point.
The court ruled Netanyahu should not have fired Bar; it did not say, however, that he couldn’t appoint a successor.
That was left to Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, already in a dysfunctional relationship with the government, who said that Netanyahu’s conflict of interest – stemming from a Shin Bet investigation into the Qatargate scandal involving his senior advisers – disqualified him from making the appointment.
So what did Netanyahu do?
Naturally, he appointed someone anyway. Despite the court weighing in to show who’s boss and the attorney chiming in to assert her own authority, Netanyahu upped the ante to prove that, in the end, he calls the shots — regardless of how it looks or what damage it may cause to public confidence in the process.
And whom did he appoint? David Zini, an active IDF major-general who, because of his national-religious worldview and the statements he made prioritizing defeating Hamas over bringing the hostages home, is a natural political lightning rod.
Without knowing much about him, some have already branded him “messianic,” while others are cheering him as “one of us” and just what the Shin Bet needs. Either way, at a moment when the Shin Bet urgently needs to restore public trust and credibility, Netanyahu chose a figure likely to deepen division and polarization.
And that’s not the half of it.
How was Zini chosen? Not through a structured vetting process, a professional search, or a careful round of interviews – but during a visit by the prime minister to his base earlier this month, during which the two reportedly had a short conversation in Netanyahu’s car.
To make matters worse, Netanyahu bypassed accepted protocol barring politicians from engaging generals without prior coordination with the IDF chief of staff.
The current chief, Eyal Zamir, reportedly learned of the appointment only three minutes before it was made public. Feeling blindsided and undermined, he dismissed Zini from the army the very next day, further aggravating tension between the military and the government.
If the situation weren’t so grave, it might be laughable – a comedy of errors by everyone, fit for a political satire. But this is no joke. It is deadly serious. And because it is so serious, the only appropriate response is not laughter but a cry of frustration directed at all those involved: the court, the attorney-general, the prime minister, his top advisers, and the IDF chief of staff.
For the sake of the country, get the house in order.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-855391
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Netanyahu’s Self-Serving Press Conference: A Display Of Deflection And Distortion
By Susan Hattis Rolef
May 26, 2025
Last Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to hold a full press conference, which included a statement on the state of the nation, as he perceives it, followed by questions from the various media outlets. He has not held a press conference since December 2024, which gave rise to the question why May 21 had been chosen to hold the event.
Several guesses emerged. One was that Netanyahu’s practice in recent weeks of preparing videos in which he is “interviewed” by his communications adviser, Topaz Luk, had proven to be ineffective.
These “interviews” purported to answer criticism from within his political camp – for example, on the renewal of the humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, which had been stopped at the beginning of March – and offered Netanyahu an opportunity to attack his opponents and critics. The news conference followed the same concept, but in a different format.
Others saw it as an opportunity for Netanyahu to react to the declaration by the High Court of Justice, and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, that Netanyahu had conflict of interests when his cabinet fired Shin Bet head Ronen Bar, whose agency is investigating two of Netanyahu’s close aides, in what has become known as “Qatargate.”
Baharav-Miara added that, for the same reason, Netanyahu is prevented from appointing a new Shin Bet head. Netanyahu reacted by stating that it is the attorney general who has conflict of interests because she is closely related to persons connected to the prosecution in his trial, and is on friendly terms with Bar – both false claims – and that Qatargate is a pack of lies.
I do not know what Netanyahu’s supporters felt about the press conference. Media personality Yaakov Bardugo, one of Netanyahu’s closest advisers and confidants, commented that it was one of Netanyahu’s best appearances before the press. On the other hand, Netanyahu’s political opponents felt the exact opposite about the event – that it had been an annoying disaster.
Netanyahu's self-centered conference
It cannot be denied that Netanyahu was coherent and sharp during the conference. However, a lot of what he said was either inaccurate or incorrect. His presentation was completely self-centered and self-lauding, and the only other person who was given credit for anything was US President Donald Trump, with whom Netanyahu claimed to still have excellent relations.
Netanyahu kept taking full credit for various decisions adopted before and after October 7, 2023, even though many of them had been taken by the security forces. For example, building an underground obstruction along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip in 2017, to prevent Hamas from crossing into Israel underground.
Netanyahu claimed last Wednesday that he had initiated the project. In fact, the project was initiated by the IDF and the Defense Ministry; Netanyahu had merely brought it to the government for approval.
He raised this so he could take credit for the fact that in October 2023, Hamas was unable to cross the border into Israel underground. However, the ease with which Hamas’s terrorist-fighters, and accompanying civilian looters, had crossed into Israel through the aboveground obstruction, and committed horrendous crimes against Israeli civilians, turns Netanyahu’s claims into a pathetic sham.
Netanyahu raised this issue because he tried to defend his rather ambivalent policy toward Qatar. Besides claiming that he had regularly criticized Qatar, and had warned against its motives, he pooh-poohed the accusation that by letting Qatar deliver vast sums of dollars in cash to Hamas, he had in fact helped the terrorist organization finance its October attack.
Netanyahu argued that Hamas used Toyota vans and Kalashnikov assault rifles, and that the terrorists were wearing flip-flops, as proof that the attack had not been costly to implement. In fact, they were dressed in military attire, their arsenal of arms was diverse and sophisticated, and some of them arrived on drones. In addition, they were backed by vast numbers of sophisticated rockets and missiles. The flip-flops were worn by the accompanying civilians.
True, they did not have F-35s and tanks. Israel did, and yet the disaster of October 7 was no justification for Netanyahu’s verbal arrogance.
Problematic claims
Another problematic claim made by Netanyahu was related to the conditions under which he would be willing to end the war in the Gaza Strip, after the total defeat of Hamas – “the implementation of the Trump Plan.”
He did not explain which plan he had in mind: the establishment of a Middle Eastern Riviera in the Gaza Strip, after two million Gazans will be transferred voluntarily to other countries? Or the “freedom zone” which Trump spoke about during his recent visit to the three Gulf states? Does Netanyahu really believe that either of these half-baked plans is feasible, or was he merely implying that he has no intention of ending the war in the foreseeable future?
The question-and-answer segment of the press conference was no less chaotic. The first question came from Moti Kastel, the political correspondent for Channel 14. While asking his question, Kastel hurled caustic criticism against the High Court, and referred to the law enforcement system as a “bunch of criminals who had lied and polluted the investigations against the prime minister obsessively.”
Kastel asked Netanyahu under what circumstances he would “refuse to abide by the High Court’s rulings.” Netanyahu pulled out a written document before replying, thus suggesting that the question had been planted by him.
Yaron Avraham, the political correspondent for Channel 12, asked when new elections would be held, implying that Netanyahu might choose to delay elections or avoid holding them altogether. Netanyahu refused to answer, asking Avraham in return whether he wants elections in wartime, adding that a majority supports his policies.
Indeed, the majority he received in the November 2022 elections undoubtedly supports his policies. But does a majority today support them – including the current fighting in the Gaza Strip and the avoidance of a new hostage deal, to save the remaining 20 live hostages?
These are but a few examples of the annoying content of the press conference, as perceived by Netanyahu’s critics and opponents. Besides, all the TV channels that Netanyahu refers to as the “panic channels” – except Channel 14 – stopped broadcasting the news conference half way through.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-855330
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UK Freezes Trade with Israel — And Integrity with It
By Neville Teller
May 26, 2025
Last week, David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, rose to his feet in the House of Commons and read out a statement condemning how the war in the Gaza Strip was being conducted by the Israeli government.
“Netanyahu’s government is planning to drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the Strip to the south,” he said, “and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need.... The planned displacement of so many Gazans is morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate, and utterly counterproductive.
“We cannot stand by in the face of this new deterioration,” said Lammy. “Therefore, today I am announcing that we have suspended negotiations with this Israeli government on a new free trade agreement.... The Netanyahu government’s actions have made this necessary.”
Clearly, Britain’s Labour government has little sympathy with Israel’s Likud-led coalition. Nevertheless, it condemns Hamas’s bloodthirsty incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023. UK ministers, from the prime minister down, reiterate time and again their support for Israel’s right to defend itself, and continue to demand that Hamas release all the hostages it snatched during its pogrom.
Beyond this, however, there seems little, if any, empathy with the formidable problems that Israel faces, or with its efforts to deal with them.
Discrimination against Jews
The left wing of Britain’s Labour party is notoriously anti-Israel – a euphemism, many believe, for frank antisemitism. This was demonstrated during the five years the party was led by the radical Jeremy Corbyn (2015-2020). In May 2019 the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a body legally charged with promoting and enforcing the UK’s equality and nondiscrimination laws, launched a formal investigation into whether Labour had “unlawfully discriminated against, harassed, or victimized people because they are Jewish.”
The legacy Corbyn bequeathed to Sir Keir Starmer, who succeeded him as Labour leader and is now Britain’s prime minister, was the EHRC report, published in October 2020. In it the EHRC determined that the Labour Party had indeed been “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination” against Jewish people. As a result, the party was legally obliged to draft an action plan to remedy the unlawful aspects of its governance.
But pro-Palestinian sentiment was too deeply embedded in the party for the leadership to ignore it. The manifesto on which Starmer’s Labour Party fought the July 2024 general election declared: “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people.” It went on to commit a future Labour government to recognize a Palestinian state “as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution, with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.”
Following the Hamas attack of October 7, Starmer stood shoulder to shoulder with then-UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, then-US president Joe Biden, and most Western political leaders in proclaiming Israel’s right to defend itself. His stance was not acceptable to two entities he faces on his own political terrain, and this remains his problem today. One is the powerful hard-left element within his party; the other is the strong Muslim presence in some traditionally Labour constituencies.
Four years ago there were some four million Muslims in the UK, representing about 6% of the population. The figures are almost certainly higher than that today, and in certain areas represent a significant proportion of the voting electorate.
Labour’s pro-Palestine component began to assert itself on October 7 itself, with scattered voices approving the Hamas attack. The collateral civilian deaths and casualties arising from the IDF campaign were enough for the party’s support for Israel to begin to slide.
The first test of electoral opinion
Then came the first test of electoral opinion in the UK since October 7. On May 2, 2024 local elections took place across the country. The results, no doubt to Starmer’s dismay, indicated that Labour’s position on the Israel-Hamas war had dented its support in Muslim areas. A BBC analysis found that in areas with a substantial Muslim presence, Labour’s share of the vote had slipped by 21% compared with the last time the seats were contested.
Ali Milani, chairman of Labour Muslim Network, said Labour’s positioning on Gaza “is going to have a serious electoral consequence.”
He was not wrong. In the general election in July 2024, which Labour won with a landslide, five independent pro-Palestine candidates unseated Labour incumbents in key constituencies. Four were Muslim; one was Jeremy Corbyn.
In the aftermath, Corbyn announced plans to form a parliamentary alliance with the four independent Muslim MPs. This permanent anti-Israel bloc in the House of Commons, supported by many radical Labour MPs, has resulted in increased advocacy for Palestinian rights and increased pressure on the UK’s foreign policy decisions related to the Middle East. It has contributed to the decision announced by Lammy to suspend the negotiations aimed at securing a comprehensive free trade agreement (FTA) between the UK and Israel.
As the UK left the EU, it signed a continuity agreement with Israel to ensure uninterrupted trade between the two countries. Coming into effect on January 1, 2021, it coincided with the end of the Brexit transition period and maintained the terms of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. On July 20, 2022, the UK and Israel embarked on the negotiations for an FTA. With both parties world leaders in hi-tech, the negotiators aimed particularly to enhance collaboration in technology, innovation, and digital services.
The talks were conducted against the backdrop of flourishing UK-Israel bilateral trade. There had been year-on-year growth from 2014 to 2018, when the figure reached $10.5 billion. Subsequently both Brexit and COVID caused the figure to fluctuate. The best estimate of UK-Israel bilateral trade in 2024 is $7.2b.
The suspension of negotiations for a UK-Israel FTA will not necessarily have a major impact in the short term. Trade between the UK and Israel will continue under the UK-Israel Trade and Partnership Agreement, concluded at the time of Brexit. Businesses will still be able to trade with relative certainty, and supply chains will remain intact. What might be affected is investor confidence.
If the suspension is maintained, however, the consequences for both parties could be significant. The half-formalized FTA aimed to modernize and expand the bilateral trade framework to cover areas such as digital trade, cybersecurity, med-tech, green energy, artificial intelligence, intellectual property rights, fintech, optics and lasers, aerospace and defense, sustainability, and government procurement.
Without the developmental boost that the FTA was calculated to provide, growth in these hi-tech areas, in which Israel is a world leader, will certainly slow down. The UK, no less than Israel, will lose out. And so will the world at large.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-855313
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Once Again, Netanyahu Plays The Victim Card
By Ibrahim Hewitt
May 25, 2025
Once again, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played the victim card, claiming that Hamas wants to “destroy the Jewish state” and “annihilate the Jewish people”. His comments came in response to criticism of the “plausible genocide” that Israel is carrying out in occupied Palestine, criticism that arose not in the Arab world — where Arab Zionists are dominant— but in the UK, France and Canada. “I could never understand how this simple truth evades the leaders” of these three countries, added Netanyahu.
His “simple truth” is, of course neither simple nor the truth. It is an attempt to divert attention from the fact that ever since it surfaced at the end of the 19th century in Theodor Herzl’s book The Jewish State, political Zionism has always depended on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, leaving the land free for Jewish settlers to take over and create a nominally Jewish state, which is in fact a “bastion of European civilisation in a sea of barbarism”. It has been sustained by Western neo-imperialists.
Moreover, Netanyahu turns reality on its head with his claims about the Islamic Resistance Movement seeking to “destroy the Jewish state” and “annihilate the Jewish people”, because it has been Israel’s objective from even before the date of its “independence” (from whom?) on 15 May, 1948 to destroy any possibility of there being a viable Palestinian state (or “Arab state”, as the 1947 UN Partition Plan described it). And, as we have seen over the past 77 years and counting, Israel has been trying to annihilate the Palestinian people constantly, either by killing them or driving them out of the land.
It has done this through state terrorism, for which it basically wrote the handbook. Terrorist acts committed by Zionist terror groups led by the likes of Menachem Begin (Irgun) and Yitzhak Shamir (the Stern Gang), both of whom became prime minister of the settler-colonial, Zionist state, targeted first the British Mandate authorities and UN officials, before turning full on against the people of Palestine. A list of some of the atrocities committed by Zionist terrorists since the 1940s is contained in my article here.
For Netanyahu to make his claim even as his army, air force and navy are engaged in slaughtering Palestinian civilians in Gaza (while his occupation forces and illegal Jewish settlers carry out terrorist acts against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the so-called “silent genocide”) is outrageous, but we shouldn’t be surprised. He is a seasoned liar, accusing Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of “emboldening Hamas to fight for ever”, and describing the resistance fighters as “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”. And yet it is Israeli soldiers who have killed at least 17,500 Palestinian children — including countless babies — over the past 18 months or so (Israel has actually killed a Palestinian child on average every 2.5 days for the past 25 years); Israeli soldiers who are raping and assaulting Palestinian prisoners sexually, male and female alike; and the occupation state which is holding thousands of Palestinians with neither charge nor trial.
Furthermore, he leads a country which has never stated where its borders are, and has pushed the nominal borders ever outward into Arab and Palestinian territory; it’s a country which is aiming for the Zionists’ dream: Greater Israel controlling territory across a huge swathe of the Middle East, including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Netanyahu and his predecessors have been emboldened in this by successive US presidents and other Western leaders, including those whom he now berates.
By playing the victim card, Netanyahu hopes to convince people that it is the Palestinians who are trying to steal Israeli land and “annihilate” Israelis when, in fact, the opposite is true. Numerous statements by members of his far-right coalition government confirm their genocidal intent, as if further evidence was needed. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be. Ethnic cleansing has always been the Zionist modus operandi. The 1948 Nakba — Catastrophe — wasn’t a one-off event; it is ongoing. What happened on 7 October was a symptom of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine, not the catalyst for Israel’s brutal, genocidal offensive in which at least 54,000 Palestinians have been killed and an estimated 11,000 are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by Israel.
Genocide has been happening in plain sight for decades in all but name; the whole apparatus of occupation has been established and developed with one purpose in mind: to steal as much Palestinian land as possible, and kill or expel as many Palestinians as possible. The ongoing events in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza, demonstrate that.
Claims that Israel is merely acting in “self-defence” would be laughable if not so serious. Apart from anything else, an occupation state has no right to make such a claim about its actions against the people suffering under its military occupation.
An International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Netanyahu is still in force for “war crimes” in the Gaza Strip. But you don’t need to be killing and starving people to death in order to be committing a war crime. Every Israeli settlement on Palestinians territory is a war crime; every Jewish settler living in a settlement is a war crime; every Palestinian detained in the occupied territories but held in an Israeli prison is a war crime. Israel has been committing war crimes for decades; the current genocide has been livestreamed on social media. Netanyahu and his Zionist apologists can’t hide that brutal reality. That, not his spurious claims about Hamas, is the “simple truth” that he wishes we would all evade. But we won’t.
With Israel also facing charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice, the end of both Netanyahu and his racist, apartheid state can only be a matter of time. He has surely played the victim card once too often. Nobody with any credibility believes a word that he says.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250525-once-again-netanyahu-plays-the-victim-card/
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Jakarta’s May PUIC Summit Spoke For Palestine. What Comes Next?
May 25, 2025
This month in Jakarta, as Israeli bombs continued to devastate Gaza, more than 400 lawmakers from across the Muslim world gathered for the 19th Conference of the Parliamentary Union of the OIC Member States (PUIC). The timing could not have been more urgent. For Palestinians, it was another chapter in a long and brutal history of siege and occupation. For the PUIC, it was another opportunity—perhaps the last for a while—to prove that Muslim solidarity can translate into meaningful action.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy and the summit’s host, assumed the PUIC presidency with moral clarity and diplomatic ambition. Mardani Ali Sera, chair of Indonesia’s Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation Agency, proposed a boycott of companies complicit in Israel’s military operations. He called for the creation of a Permanent Caucus for Palestine to coordinate aid and maintain pressure on the global stage. These were not vague declarations. They were concrete ideas aimed at shifting the needle from symbolic outrage to real consequences.
But we’ve been here before. Rhetoric is plentiful; results are rare. The Palestinian struggle has long united Muslim countries in principle, while dividing them in practice. Internal rivalries, competing national interests, and dependence on Western alliances have often turned collective declarations into little more than diplomatic theater. Can this moment in Jakarta be different?
The stakes have never been higher. Israel’s assault on Gaza has escalated to unprecedented levels, with entire neighbourhoods flattened and tens of thousands killed or displaced. At a time when much of the international community, particularly in the West, continues to enable or ignore the violence, the Muslim world has both a moral obligation and a strategic opportunity to lead.
Indonesia has positioned itself as a potential catalyst for this shift. House Speaker Puan Maharani—the first woman to lead both the Indonesian Parliament and the PUIC—emphasized in her remarks that rebuilding Gaza must extend beyond infrastructure. “It must also be rebuilt with dignity, justice, and hope,” she said. Her leadership, both symbolic and substantive, reflects a broader push for inclusive and effective diplomacy from the Global South. But speeches alone cannot shelter Palestinians from bombs or restore their stolen rights.
To matter, this summit must generate momentum that outlasts the closing ceremony. It must set into motion mechanisms that can operate independently of political cycles and individual leaders. A permanent Palestinian caucus, for example, should be established immediately and equipped to track human rights violations, coordinate aid, and build international alliances. PUIC member states must adopt synchronized foreign policy measures, including sanctions and boycotts, and stop waiting for Western capitals to give them permission to act.
This also means moving beyond traditional diplomatic channels, which have repeatedly failed Palestine. Recognizing Palestinian statehood en masse would not be merely symbolic—it would be an assertion of political will and a strategic act of defiance against international double standards. Coordinated recognition would increase pressure on global institutions to treat Palestine not as a humanitarian cause but as a sovereign political entity.
The summit’s broader theme—“Good Governance and Strong Institutions as Pillars of Resilience”—wasn’t just a nod to domestic reform. It was a recognition that political legitimacy at home enables moral leadership abroad. Indonesia, through its democratic evolution, is well-positioned to model this approach. But governance is not enough. What the Palestinian people need most right now is protection, political justice, and the end of an occupation that has robbed them of their future.
The OIC’s history of missed opportunities looms large. Time and again, it has condemned Israeli aggression only to retreat into silence or division. Jakarta must not join that list of forgotten summits. The PUIC has a chance to reframe the conversation—away from the language of victimhood and toward the language of rights, accountability, and agency. For that to happen, its member states must embrace risk. Economic ties may suffer. Diplomatic backlash is inevitable. But without these sacrifices, Palestine remains nothing more than a rallying cry.
Jakarta showed us what moral leadership could look like. It gathered Muslim voices not just in mourning, but in determination. The next step is action—bold, coordinated, and sustained. Because every delay emboldens the occupation, and every silence is complicity.
The world is watching. More importantly, Palestinians are waiting. This time, let’s not fail them.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250525-jakartas-may-puic-summit-spoke-for-palestine-what-comes-next/
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