When the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024 ruled that South Africa's claims that Israel is violating the 1948 Genocide Convention were sufficiently plausible to justify a full hearing of the case, Israel and its apologists responded as they always do when criticism is levelled at the genocidal apartheid state: condemn the accuser, scream blood libel, work themselves into a frenzy about anti-Semitism, and play the aggrieved victim. Once the initial hysteria passed, anyone concluding that Israel is perpetrating genocide in the Gaza Strip was roundly denounced on the grounds that no such determination can be made unless and until the ICJ rules that Israel is indeed guilty of genocide. This was, of course, nothing but a disingenuous delaying tactic. If anyone seriously believes Israel and its flunkies will accept a ruling by the ICJ that does not absolve it of the genocide charge, the response was provided today. In a devastating ruling for Israel, the ICJ today issued an Advisory Opinion on Israel’s obligations as an occupying in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, international organisations, and foreign states in the territories it occupies. Since my purpose is not to analyse the ICJ verdict itself, for those interested a link to the full document is provided below, followed by a summary produced by the Court and a newspaper article on the matter. Suffice it to say that the Court rejected every single claim by Israel, and specifically refuted Israel’s unsubstantiated claims about UNRWA. It also made short shrift of Israel’s GHF project. It was also for all intents and purposes a unanimous ruling. The sole dissenter, Julia Sebutinde, will never let international law get between her and support for Israel. And how have those who claim we must wait for an ICJ ruling on the genocide case before drawing any conclusions responded? Entirely predictably: The ICJ got it all wrong, the judges don’t understand international law and have no clue what they’re talking about, the Court ignored the evidence that really matters, and so on. Israel, of course “categorically rejects” the ruling and announced it won’t implement a single one of its obligations as specified by the Court. True to form, Washington chimed in with similar language, denouncing not only the ruling but also the Court itself. For good measure Israel’s parliament the same day pushed forward legislation to formally annex the illegally-occupied West Bank. If the ICJ in several years defies expectations and finds that Israel is not guilty of genocide, Israel will trumpet the ruling as the definitive, unassailable conclusion of the matter. But if, as widely anticipated, the ICJ finds either that Israel’s entire campaign, or specific policies and atrocities conducted during this campaign constitute genocide, expect Israel and its flunkies to condemn the accuser, scream blood libel, work themselves into a frenzy about anti-Semitism, and play the aggrieved victim. Because Israel is always right, and it is always the victim, particularly when engaging in genocide. 📄.pdf 📄.pdf

the Guardian

ICJ orders Israel to allow aid into Gaza and says restrictions breached international obligations

UN’s top court also finds Israel failed to justify blocking Unrwa and other relief agencies

"The Ceasefire Illusion: Deaths, Denials and Diplomatic Spin". The latest episode of @npub1xgy2...umem Palestine This Week with @Mouin Rabbani and @npub1e98z...6gfr

Credit to the Trump White House. This would have never happened under Biden.

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Soon after the explosion in Rafah, I’m told by a source familiar, the White House and Pentagon knew that the incident was caused by an Israe...

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During the 2008 US presidential election campaign, and for the eight years of the Obama administration, President Barack Obama was constantly criticized for his attitude towards Israel. Obama did at least as much for Israel as any of his predecessors, and handed the genocidal apartheid regime USD 38 billion of taxpayer-funded weaponry in one of his final acts in office. As many Israeli analysts noted at the time, the amount would have been substantially higher if Binyamin Netanyahu had not gone behind Obama’s back and addressed the US Congress in a transparently direct attempt to undermine him. Because of Netanyahu’s insubordination, Israel walked away with a mere USD 38 billion courtesy of the US taxpayer. The criticism of Obama wasn’t really about what he did or did not do for Israel. The constant refrain was that “he doesn’t love Israel”. US politicians, in other words, were expected to have an emotional if not erotic attachment to a foreign state. I know of no other instance in which a national leader is considered unsuitable for office because he lacks a passionate devotion to a country other than his or her own. That was then, this is now. There are multiple reasons Kamala Harris lost the 2024 US presidential election to Donald Trump. But it is also increasingly clear that her campaign’s decision to engage in public and visible displays of contempt towards the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities, specifically on the issue of Palestine and Israel, cost her dearly in key states. More importantly, her exorbitantly-paid campaign managers and consultants convinced themselves this would play well with the rest of the electorate because other constituencies were either indifferent to Palestinian rights or supported Israel. It is today clear she could not have won without singing a very different tune on the Gaza Genocide, and that her refusal to do so probably cost her the election. In other words, what was presumed to be an “ethnic” issue turned out to be a national one, cutting across multiple constituencies and particularly the youth vote. More recently, in the Democratic Party primary for the New York mayoral race, Andrew Cuomo’s campaign did everything within their power to transform it into the Likud Party primary. They succeeded, and in significant part because of this Zohran Mamdani wiped the floor with Cuomo and forced him to run as an independent. I anticipated that Cuomo and his billionaire backers would draw the appropriate conclusions and change their line of attack against Mamdani, claiming that he is a communist determined to impose Khmer Rouge rule in New York City. I was only partially correct. While indeed denouncing Mamdani as a commie pinko and all the rest of it, Thursday’s debate confirmed they are still doing everything within their power to portray the 4 November election as a contest for the mayor of Tel Aviv. All indications suggest their herculean efforts will produce the same result. Never underestimate the self-confident hubris of nepo-babies or billionaires. We live in a different world. The public repudiation of AIPAC by a growing number of candidates for office, a development inconceivable even a year ago, demonstrates that Israel is no longer the electoral asset or requirement for success it has been for so long. The “love for Israel” demanded of Obama is today increasingly the preserve of freaks. By contrast, support for Palestinian rights, previously a political death sentence if not one-way journey to obscurity, is rapidly being normalized.

According to this 2017 article in The Independent, allied governments were already receiving information about the unprecedented scope of the Holocaust in late 1941. By late 1942 they were fully aware that several million Jews had already been killed, that millions more were at risk, and that Germany, in the words of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that December, was waging a war of extermination against Europe's Jews. There has been ongoing debate about why nothing was done in direct response to this information. Explanations range from anti-Semitism, to an allied assessment that bombing the railroad tracks leading to the extermination camps (or the camps themselves) would have an only temporary and limited impact, to the conviction among relevant governments that they should focus their resources on defeating Germany's Nazi government, because their priority was military victory and this would also be the most effective way to end the atrocities. What is not debatable is that these governments could have spared large numbers of Jewish lives by offering them refuge but made a deliberate choice not to. It was the previous incarnation of "there's a reason nobody wants them", so popular among Israel flunkies these days when discussing Palestinians. In contrast to today's Middle East, during the 1940s there were no fears expressed that refugees would be prevented from returning to their homes after war's end. The article also reveals that allied governments, acting on the information at their disposal about Germany's slaughter of the Jews, which was far from complete, began drafting war crimes indictments against German leaders in 1942. This was several years before Soviet soldiers entered Majdanek, the first camp to be liberated in mid-1944. There was opposition to such legal prosecutions, but then as now this was for political rather than legal reasons. In those days, no one in their right mind claimed we should ignore the overwhelming evidence at our disposal, and first obtain a legal ruling definitively establishing that crimes were committed, before indicting those responsible. By contrast, in 2025 any talk of the Gaza Genocide is denounced as "blood libel" because the International Court of Justice has not issued a final ruling on the matter. And if, as widely expected, it finds that Israel has indeed committed genocide in Gaza, that too will be denounced as a "blood libel", only more loudly.

The Independent

Secret documents reveal allied forces knew about Holocaust long before they discovered Nazi camps

Archive shows Adolf Hitler was indicted for war crimes in 1944

For immediate release: A Statement from Professors at McGill who Support the Boycott and Proposed a Resolution to their Faculty Association, MAUT On Friday, October 10, 2025, McGill professors and librarians voted in favour of a historic resolution to endorse the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel at a Special General Meeting of the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT). An  overwhelming majority of the professors and librarians who are members of MAUT expressed that they fully endorse the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. As a quorum was met, this resolution is now binding. In joining the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, MAUT joins at least twenty other academic associations in Canadathat have passed similar resolutions, as well as countless others around the world. We are now participating in the long history of boycott and divestment at McGill, which among other examples, was the first university in Canada to fully divest from apartheid South Africa–a fact stated proudly on our university website. With this vote, the professors and librarians of McGill have taken a strong stand against the genocide in Gaza. By pledging our support for the boycott of Israeli institutions, MAUT members stand in solidarity with Palestinian colleagues who have called for this boycott for more than twenty years. In doing so, we also honour those colleagues and others murdered during this genocide. The adoption of the resolution to boycott Israeli institutions complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people shows that McGill professors and librarians will not stand by idly as Israel murders and abducts our colleagues in healthcare, libraries, and universities. MAUT members condemn the destruction of the health system, the total obliteration of academic institutions, the theft and destruction of cultural heritage, and the systematic scholasticide, one element of the genocide that the State of Israel is waging against the Palestinian people. Our resolution states that we: “call upon McGill’s administration to take all necessary steps to implement the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, while ensuring that the boycott applies to institutional partnerships and agreements, not individual Israeli academics.” The support of this resolution by professors and librarians at McGill represents the will of a large and growing number of people who are standing up for an end to the genocide in Palestine, an end to the occupation, along with an end to McGill University’s complicity. McGill professors and librarians vow to keep working within all of our professional associations and unions to hold our complicit academic and cultural institutions accountable.

Israel insists one of the corpses it received from the Gaza Strip yesterday is not one of its own. Its DNA matches neither a soldier brutally kidnapped from a tank nor any other captive known to Israel. Hamas insists the body was seized, in military uniform, in Jabaliya in May 2024. Some have speculated it could be the body of a foreign mercenary or collaborator. My guess is that it is the corpse of a Palestinian. Not of a collaborator but one of the numerous human shields forcibly conscripted by the Israeli military.

Excellent article by Patrick Cockburn: For two years, Gaza became a theatre of cruelty in which the horrified audience was the rest of the world. As Israeli airstrikes pounded the homes, hospitals and schools of Gaza into rubble, they also pounded sympathy and support for Israel. Today, polls show that more Americans support the Palestinian people than they do the Israeli government. This week some 38 percent of Britons told YouGov they feel more sympathy for the Palestinians, whereas 12 per cent have more for Israel. Yet Israeli failure goes far beyond international obloquy and isolation. As in past wars with the Palestinians, Israel showed great tactical military expertise combined with self-defeating political blindness, deluding itself that long term success can be won by force alone: Israelis must have 100 per cent security, even if this means 100 percent insecurity for Palestinians. The only possible relationship it would consider between the seven million Palestinians and seven million Israeli Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is what Human Rights Watch calls apartheid, or expulsion. The very great superiority of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) became a liability because it tempted Israelis into convincing themselves that all problems with others can be solved by military means – though this approach has a track record of bloody failure stretching back three quarters of a century. Israel put great resources into propaganda at home and abroad, but then made the huge mistake of believing too much of it itself. All opponents are demonised as deadly enemies to be physically eliminated. Once this demon was the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) while today it is Hamas, yet if the latter vanished tomorrow it would inevitably be replaced by some other Palestinian movement. In conscious or unconscious recognition of this fact, Israel’s attack on Gaza was from the beginning a merciless assault on all its 2.4 million Palestinians inhabitants. In the six months since Netanyahu broke the ceasefire on 18 March, a detailed report by the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) reveals that nearly 15 out of every 16 Palestinians killed in Gaza was a civilian.

The i Paper

Trump is the only winner of the Israel-Gaza war

Netanyahu has deluded himself and deluded Israel

After slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, including approximately 20,000 children, and celebrating every one of those deaths as if they won the lottery, Israel groupies continue to insist that what separates the genocidal apartheid regime from those it slaughtered with such glee is that "we value life".

Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have formally rejected Project Blair. Other Palestinian factions can be presumed to share this position. The Palestinian Authority, which has formally accepted the Trump proposal without reservations, doesn't support Blair's installation as colonial viceroy, seeking his role for itself. Additionally, those of its leaders who have dealt with Blair previously thoroughly detest him on a personal level. This means Project Blair can only be imposed by armed force. The only military with the resources in place to do so is Israel. Yet Israel is not particularly committed to its great British champion's pet project, and is unlikely to seek or obtain US permission for a full-scale occupation of the Gaza Strip to enable it. Or succeed if it does. It looks like the Blair Witch Project is dead in the water.