The big men are all deaf; they don't want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street in cleated boots (Sylvia Plath, 11 September 1950)
This is a complete list of reviews of my books The Coasts of Bohemia (1998), Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century (2013), and Postcards from Absurdistan (2022), including of translations, that are known to me. If anyone knows of any others I’d be glad of the information. Some of the links no longer work (or are paywalled) but the references are, I hope, accurate.
5. Times Literary Supplement (Steven Beller, “The Shadow on the Pavement,” review essay, 1 January 1999, lead review)
6. New Republic(Tony Judt, “Freedom and Freedonia,” review essay, September 1998, reprinted in his When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010, London: Penguin, 2015, pp. 85-104)
50. Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1), pp.223-233(Veronika Košnartová. „Hadrář“ Prahy dvacátého století? Kulturní dějiny jako postmoderní freska/A “Ragman” of Prague of the Twentieth Century? Cultural History as a Postmodern Fresco)
8. Česká televize, Kultura section of website, reports FT listing under headline “Financial Times doporučuje: Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století”
—reprinted on IHNED.cz, 3 December 2013 with comment: “Kniha o českém surrealismu patří podle Financial Times mezi nejlepší letošní publikace. České výtvarné umění, design, architekturu, literaturu a hudbu v období 1918 až 1945 zpracoval profesor historie kultury Derek Sayer ve své knize Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. Za ni si vysloužil ocenění prestižního deníku Financial Times”
9. Česká literatura/Czech Literature (Vol 73, issue 5, pp. 650–653, 2025. Františka Schormová, “Prague, postcards, palimpsests: Derek Sayer’s Czech histories”)
10. iLiteratura.cz (Jan Lukavec, 16 May 2026, “Sayer, Derek: Pohlednice z Absurdistánu: Dějiny vyprávěné klíčovou dírkou”)
We warned you: the wholesale destruction of Gaza was not an exception, it was a blueprint to crush anyone who opposes the plutocratic imperialism embodied by US/Israel and their global allies. Act now: defend int[ernational] law from lawlessness, before the rupture becomes irreversible.
A bloodstained backpack left after the Israeli-US missile strike on Minab elementary girls’ school, Iran, February 28, 2026. BDS.
On February 28, Mark Carney issued a statement on what he delicately termed the “Iran-related hostilities throughout the Middle East.” He did not call them the “Israel-initiated hostilities” or the “US-initiated hostilities,” despite the fact that the hostilities originated in a so-called “preemptive strike” on Iran by Israel and the US earlier that day.
“Canada,” the PM’s statement proclaimed, “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security” (my emphasis). This was a clear endorsement not only of the (purported) political objectives of the US military action, but of the action itself.
Preemptive massacres
So what, exactly, is Canada supporting? Equally to the point, what is it opposing?
During the first round of strikes, Israeli and US missiles assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with his daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law. Khamenei’s wife died from her injuries on March 2. The IDF boasted of taking out 40 top Iranian commanders “in the first minute” of the attack, including armed forces chief of staff Maj.-Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi.
So successful were these targeted assassinations that on March 3 Donald Trump told reporters that “Most of the people we had in mind [to succeed Khameini] are dead … And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So, I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”
Military and political leaders were not the only casualties. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, the first day of the war left 555 dead across Iran. Bombings have continued every day since, with the capital Tehran being especially hard hit. By March 5 the death toll had reached 1,230—more than the number of people killed in the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October 2023, which appalled the world and precipitated Israel’s Gaza “war.”
Thousands of kilometers away off the coast of Sri Lanka “an American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.” I quote US secretary of war—he’s no longer called secretary of defense—Pete Hegseth. Eighty-seven bodies were recovered.
The war has meantime spread to Lebanon, where Israel is carpet-bombing and has ordered more than half-a-million people to evacuate Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Most horrifically, a missile attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab in southern Iran killed at least 165 people, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12.
Israel disowns the Minab massacre, stating that it has not “found any connection to our operations.” The Pentagon is “investigating,” but Pete Hegseth has assured the world that “we of course never target civilian targets” and US secretary of state Marco Rubio protests “The United States would not deliberately target a school.”
Neither Carney nor foreign minister Anita Anand have yet uttered a word of regret about the Minab slaughter. In fact, they haven’t mentioned it at all. But while remaining silent on what—at the least—is a tragic instance of collateral damage, they rushed to condemn the “strikes carried out by Iran on civilian infrastructure across the Middle East.”
According to Anand, it is Iran’s retaliatory strikes, not the the Israeli-US aggression that Canada supports, that “represent an unacceptable escalation and a blatant attempt to further destabilize the region.” The first European leader to publicly react to the war, EU commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, also denounced Iran’s “reckless and indiscriminate strikes” as “a blatant violation of … sovereignty and a clear breach of international law,” without mentioning, still less condemning, the Israeli-US actions that provoked them.
This is self-evidently absurd. Asked by NBC News why Iran was attacking US bases in neighboring Gulf states, the Iranian foreign minister gave the only appropriate response: “Um, because you’re bombing us from those bases? What do you want me to say?”
Value-based realism?
Carney’s backing for the Israeli-US strikes on Iran came as a nasty shock to many in Canada and abroad in light of his widely-acclaimed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos little more than a month earlier.
Carney began his Davos speech by acknowledging “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality where geopolitics—where the large, main power—is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” But, he argued,
the other countries, particularly intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the various states.
The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.
Invoking former Czech president Václav Havel’s parable of the Prague greengrocer who places a sign in his window every morning reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it but “to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along,” Carney urged: “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
Middle powers like Canada should adopt “value-based realism” in foreign policy. He presented this approach as
both principled and pragmatic—principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.
Carney’s value-based realism seems to have crumbled in the face of its first test.
Odious as the ayatollahs’ regime may be when judged from the standpoint of human rights as proclaimed—though not always honored—by the West, the Israeli-US attack has unquestionably violated Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and is manifestly not consistent with the UN Charter or international law.
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states categorically that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” However evil a regime may be, force may only be used in pursuit of regime change if the UN Security Council has authorized it.
While Article 51 permits the use of force in self defence, this has been understood to mean “in response to an actual or truly imminent armed attack.” Preemptive defensive action is admissible only when the risk of attack is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” (the so-called Caroline Test).
This was not the case here. Notwithstanding White House press secretary’s Karoline Leavitt’s assertion that “The president had a feeling … based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States,” administration officials told congressional staff in private briefings on March 1 that “U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to launch a preemptive strike against the U.S.” Do Trump’s feelings now override international law?
A war of choice
Whether the US action was undertaken to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, as Carney says, must also be seriously doubted. It is more likely a pretext for war, just like George W. Bush’s false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction during the lead-up to the 2003 Gulf War. The difference in this case is that the US has not even gone through the motions of seeking UN support for the attack.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities when it bombed them back in June 2025. This may just be typical Trumpian bluster, but on March 3 Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said his inspectors had not uncovered any evidence of “a systematic and structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.”
Before the attack, negotiations on the nuclear issue were well underway between Iran and the US, and seemed headed for a favorable outcome. The Omani foreign minister, who was mediating the talks, told CBS News “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan on February 27 that he was confident “a peace deal is within our reach.”
Iran, he explained, was prepared to agree to a deal in which it “will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb”; its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium would be “down blended to the lowest level possible … and converted into fuel”; and there would be “full and comprehensive verification by the IAEA.”
Asked whether he feared that “Israel is planning to take a first strike, even though the U.S. and Iran are agreeing to talk,” Albusaidi replied “I hope that is not the case.”
This fear likely explains why the Omani minister went public in the first place. As Triti Parsi points out, he wanted to make clear to the world that although “what has actually been achieved in the negotiations is quite unprecedented … everything indicates that Trump won’t take yes for an answer. That he will start a war of choice very soon.”
Marco Rubio later let the cat out of the bag when he told the press that the “imminent armed attack” that led the US to launch its so-called “preemptive defensive strike” was in fact Israel’sstrike on Iran. The logic is straight out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:
The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action [against Iran], we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.
Stung by the suggestion that he could possibly be Bibi Netanyahu’s puppet, Donald Trump subsequently denied that the US was “pushed into war” by Israel (“I think they [Iran] were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So, if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand”). But this only confirms that this indeed was a war of choice.
The fault line in our foreign policy
Carney’s support for the Israeli-US attack has copped a lot of flak in Canada and beyond. Lloyd Axworthy—no “radical left lunatic,” but a well-respected former foreign minister in Jean Chrétien’s government—called out the glaring hypocrisy:
Canada’s response to the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a fault line at the heart of our foreign policy.
We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans—whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat—doing the bombing.
Axworthy is only echoing Carney’s own admission in Davos “that international law [was] applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
“The double standard is obvious,” Axworthy goes on: “when Russia uses force without lawful grounds [as in the invasion of Ukraine], it is condemned as an outlaw; when the U.S. does something legally analogous, we kowtow in an effort to curry favour.”
More importantly, in the context of this article, Axworthy questions whether supporting the US in this illegal war is remotely in Canada’s national interest—precisely because of the new world disorder (or as Sandra Kendzior dubs it, the “no world order”) described by Carney, within which “the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu … ”
“We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if we choose to wield them together,” Carney continued. This means, among other things, “acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals” (my emphasis).
Not only, then, is Canada’s support for the Israeli-US war on Iran unprincipled. It is also, on Carney’s own premises, unpragmatic. “For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security,” Axworthy concludes, “that is not realism; it is recklessness.”
If Canada condones the US attack on Iran, then what will we say if Trump decides to make good on his repeated threats to absorb Greenland (“I think we’re going to have it”) and make Canada “a cherished and beautiful 51st state”? Who will be there for us?
Putting the signs back up
Mark Carney is far from stupid, and though he may be a novice in politics his experience of moving in the top circles of international governance is unrivalled among Canadians. He knows that—as he later admitted to a Toronto Star reporter—”the United States and Israel have acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting allies, including Canada” and that the attack is “prima facie inconsistent with international law.”
He must also be well aware that his endorsement of the US action will dismay many of his supporters—not just among the progressive left, but more centrist Canadian opinion—not least because what allowed him to overturn the enormous lead Pierre Poiliévre had in opinion polls and win the federal election was his perceived willingness to stand up to American bullying. His slogan “Elbows Up!” was a stroke of genius, summoning up the shades of Gordie Howe and Terry Fox to come to the aid of the nation in its hour of need.
The first Canadian opinion poll since the Israeli-US strike on Iran, from Angus Reid, does not bode well for Carney: 35% supported the attack, 48% opposed it, and 17% were unsure. Most worrying for the Liberal government was the finding that just 17% of past Liberal voters—in other words, those who elected Carney—supported his position.
Carney’s support for the Israeli-US attack also manifestly does nothing for our standing with the middle powers with whom he sought to cooperate in “building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored … something bigger, better, stronger, more just …” So what gives?
Carney didn’t have to endorse Trump’s attack on Iran. So the inevitable question arises: why did he?
For Spain read spine
Carney is not the only one to find himself impaled on the horns of this dilemma. The US-Israel attack on Iran led to uncertainty as to how to respond across western capitals.
Though Norway’s PM Gahr Støre complained that “The attacks this morning and the spreading of the conflict to Iran’s neighbouring countries is not in line with international law,” Spain was the only EU member to condemn the US-Israeli attack outright.
Prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused the US permission to use jointly-operated bases for launching strikes on Iran, leading Trump to threaten “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.” Sanchez was unbowed, stating thathis country “will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world—and that is also contrary to our values and interests—simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.”
On March 4 Karoline Leavitt assured reporters “I think [Spain] heard the president’s message yesterday loud and clear. It is my understanding over the past several hours they’ve agreed to cooperate with the US military.”
Whether this is a sign of American insecurity or just another regular White House Lie™ I can’t say, but José Manuel Albares soon set the record straight:
The Spanish government’s position on the war in the Middle East, the bombings in Iran, and the use of our bases has not changed one iota. Our ‘no to war’ stance remains clear and unequivocal … She may be the White House press secretary, but I’m the foreign minister of Spain and I’m telling her that our position hasn’t changed at all.
Take note Mr Carney. This might be what “value-based realism” looks like. As Václav Havel knew better than most, when the going gets tough living in truth takes cojones.
The devil or the deep blue sea?
Other EU leaders were more circumspect. In the immediate aftermath most denounced the Iranian regime and several welcomed the death of Khamenei. Needless to say, there was widespread condemnation of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. But it is noteworthy that while nobody followed Sánchez in rejecting the Israeli-US action, nobody followed Carney in voicing support for it either. For that he had to wait for Australia and New Zealand.
Even Germany, whose Middle Eastern policy seems to comprise atoning for its part in the Holocaust by facilitating genocide in Palestine, prefers not to jump too visibly on Trump’s bandwagon. Pressed on the legality of the Israeli-US operation, Chancellor Friedrich Merz diplomatically evaded the question: “Categorizing the events under international law will have relatively little effect. This is not the moment to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of their objectives.” He again dodged the issue when questioned after meeting with Trump on March 4.
Britain, France, and Germany issued a joint statement on March 1 condemning “the indiscriminate and disproportionate missile attacks launched by Iran against countries in the region” in which they promised “to work together with the US and allies in the region … potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source.” Again, they stopped short of expressing support for the Israeli-US attack itself, on which the statement was silent.
The next day France’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot began to distance France from Israel and the US. Asked by a journalist whether “France today believes this war is justified, because you haven’t condemned it,” he responded: “we weren’t informed and didn’t take part in the military operations launched by the United States and Israel … only by facing the Security Council could such operations have had the legitimacy of international law.”
Addressing the nation on the Middle Eastern situation on French TV on March 3, President Emmanuel Macron flatly stated that the Israeli-US attacks were “outside of international law” and France “cannot approve of them.” Italy’s foreign minister Guido Crosetto likewise told his parliament on March 5 that the US-Israeli attack was “in violation of the international law” and confirmed that Italy had no prior knowledge of it.
Caught between not wanting to provoke the wrath—and economic or other retaliation—from “Daddy” (as NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte called Trump), and being dragged into an illegal war that could easily spiral out of control, the Europeans are squirming.
And that “special relationship”?
Perhaps the most entertaining contortions have come from UK prime minister Keir Starmer. Keir cannot have been happy with Trump and Netanyahu putting him on the spot less than a week after his hammering in the Gorton and Denton by-election by the Green Party, whose leader Zack Polanski is a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Walking a tightrope between appeasing Trump and fending off his domestic critics to both the right and the left, Starmer predictably ended up satisfying neither. Speaking in the House of Commons on March 2, he made clear that “The United Kingdom was not involved in the initial US and Israeli strikes on Iran” and “That decision was deliberate.”
Indeed, Starmer denied US requests to use British military bases for its initial attack on Iran. Furious, Trump complained that “we are not happy with the UK” and “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” “He should be giving us, without question or hesitation, things like bases,” he told the New York Post on March 5.
However, Starmer continued, “it is now clear that Iran’s outrageous response has become a threat to our partners, to our interests, and to our allies.” For this reason, he was now prepared to modify Britain’s stance to allow the US to use British bases “to destroy the [Iranian] missiles at source, in their storage depots or at their launchers.”
“To be clear,” he emphasized, “the use of British bases is strictly limited to agreed defensive purposes. The UK has not joined US offensive operations.”
A lawyer by trade—once upon a time a civil rights lawyer, as well as the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions—Starmer was certainly, as Trump suggested, “worried about the legality.” He told MPs that government would publish its legal advice (it did), explaining
We all remember the mistakes of Iraq, and we have learned those lessons. Any UK actions must always have a lawful basis, and a viable thought-through plan. That is the principle that I applied to the decisions that I made over the weekend.
Unlike Macron, nowhere in his speech—or, as far as I am aware, anywhere else—did Starmer comment on the legality of the Israeli-US attack on Iran itself.
On March 5 German foreign minister Johann Wadephul told reporters in Berlin that “Germany is not participating in this war. And that will remain the case,” and on March 6 Macron was reported as assuring a social media user that “France is not part of this war. We are not in the fight and we are not going to get involved in this war.”
By contrast, Britain’s deputy PM David Lammy caused consternation when he told BBC Breakfast viewers the same morning that “there was a “legal basis” for the Royal Air Force to participate in strikes on Iranian missile sites” (as distinct from the UK merely allowing the US to use British bases to launch them). Mark Carney, too, has refused to“categorically rule out participation. We will stand by our allies when it makes sense.”
Britain and France have meantime moved ships, planes, and troops into the Middle East, ostensibly for the purposes of aiding the US in its “defensive” strikes on missile facilities or protecting their citizens and allies. It is not hard to see how things might go south.
Why?
Whatever else this circus might be, it is certainly not middle powers banding together to fight power with value-based realism. The abandonment of principles (while paying lip-service to international law) is undeniable.
But as Lloyd Axworthy observed in relation to Canada, this is hardly good pragmatics either. What do Canada, Australia, the UK, or the EU countries have to gain from getting drawn into an Israeli-US war which if previous experience (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria) is anything to go by will only create further chaos in the Middle East and floods of new refugees?
So we must ask, once again, why are they doing this? No doubt there are a multiplicity of reasons, including fear of US tariffs and sanctions, strength of Zionist lobby groups, and (for some) the prospect of money to be made out of armaments, oil, or postwar reconstruction of bombsites into rivieras.
We also cannot ignore the deep racism underlying Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump’s framing of these wars as “a battle of civilization against barbarism.” If there is one thing that unites the US, Canada, Australia, and the Europeans, it is whiteness. Europeans found it easier to stand up to Trump when he took a fancy to Greenland.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Marco Rubio laid out an unashamedly imperialist agenda for “a new Western century”:
We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir … And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.
But if we ask how any of this was possible—how the western world got to where it is now—I believe the answer lies under the rubble in Gaza.
For more than two years, during much of which Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, was in the White House, the West participated in, endorsed, or at best turned a blind eye to overt war crimes in Gaza. While the UN, ICJ, ICC, and every major human rights organization on the planet warned of genocide, the Western democracies supplied Israel with arms, gave it diplomatic protection at the UN, and punished dissenters at home, while from the BBC to the New York Times an obliging media became a mouthpiece for Israeli hasbara. The US and other governments recklessly shredded international law and sabotaged its key institutions—the UN and its agencies, ICJ, and ICC—in the process.
This is a deeply corrupting process for everyone involved. If you don’t believe me, read Václav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless.”
Asked in February 2025 why he thought the Democratic Party was powerless to resist Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, the writer Ta-Nahisi Coates replied: “I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.” His point applies more generally.
Note. A lightly edited version of this was article published in Canadian Dimension on January 22, 2026.
Donald J. Trump via Truth Social
I’ll speak today about the rupture in the world order, the end of the pleasant fiction and the dawn of a brutal reality in which great-power geopolitics is unconstrained.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, opening his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026
Before dawn on January 3, the US launched “a large-scale strike against Venezuela” during which its president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were kidnapped and flown out of the country. They were subsequently arraigned in a New York court on drug and weapons charges. Though there were no American deaths, at least 100 people were killed in the assault, including Venezuelan civilians and 32 Cubans.
Four days later, in Minneapolis, MN, a masked ICE agent, Jonathan E. Ross, fatally shot a 37-year-old American woman, Renée Nicole Good, three times in the face at point-blank range. Video analysis by the New York Times of “bystander footage, filmed from different angles, appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired.” Contrary to the claims put out by the Department of Homeland Security within two hours, this was a brutal murder—not self-defense.
What has any of this to do with Gaza? The short answer is: everything. For it was above all in Gaza that the New World Order of which these are symptoms was forged.
The Donroe Doctrine
Later on January 3, Trump told journalists that “We’re going to run the country [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”
With a nod to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (which he has modestly renamed the “Donroe Doctrine”), Trump warned that “Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force,” vice-president J. D. Vance posted on X, “but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that. The United States, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, is a great power again. Everyone should take note.“
By “steal our stuff” he meant Venezuela’s nationalization of foreign oil companies in 2007 under Hugo Chávez.
When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 aiming to depose president Gamal Abdel Nasser following his nationalization of the Suez Canal, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower pressured them to accept a United Nations ceasefire and voted for UN resolutions publicly condemning the invasion and approving the creation of a UN peacekeeping force. That was under the old post–WW2 “rules-based” order.
Today, according to Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller,;
We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.
Move fast and break things
As Maya Angelou once said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Trump made his determination not to have American hands tied by involvement in multilateral organizations, treaties, or agreements very clear from the get-go. On his first day in office, he withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Agreement.
Two weeks later he pulled the US out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, prohibited any future US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and ordered a review of US funding and involvement in the UN, including what he called the “anti-American” UNESCO (from which he would withdraw the US in July 2025).
Following that review, which was led by secretary of state Marco Rubio, on January 7 this year Trump withdrew from a further “35 non-United Nations organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty” and “advance globalist agendas over U.S. priorities.”
One of these was the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which all other countries in the world belong. This frees up the US from any future international obligations regarding action on carbon emissions and global warming. Trump has long made it clear to the world that he proposes to “Drill, baby, drill!”
More recently (and very ominously), in the words of former UK prime minister Gordon Brown Trump has made “the momentous decision to constitute an alternative” to the United Nations, a so-called “‘board of peace’, with a remit for interventions far beyond Gaza, and with membership offered to about 60 favoured states, including Russia.”
That the UN opened the road for this when it cravenly endorsed Trump’s “Gaza Peace Plan” on November 17 is indicative of just how moribund the old order has become.
Triumph of the will
The invasion of Venezuela is not a one-off. Despite running on an anti-war platform, the use of force (or threat thereof) has been a defining feature of Trump’s presidency.
Notwithstanding his petulant lobbying for a “Noble Peace Prize” (like Obama) and his specious claim to have “ended eight wars,” in 2025 Trump bombed Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and the US has killed at least 112 people in strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Asked whether “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” J. D. Vance responded: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
On December 16 Trump declared “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela … Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” As of January 13, the US Navy had seized five tankers. Asked what would happen to the oil, Trump responded “We’re gonna keep it.”
Trump has now extended the blockade to Cuba, warning “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY [from Venezuela] GOING TO CUBA — ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He has also threatened to take military action in his quarrels with Mexico and Colombia. Nothing like showing them who’s boss.
Asked in a lengthy interview for the New York Times in January 2026 whether there was any limit on his powers, Trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me … I don’t need international law.”
A global protection racket
In a sharp reversal of the free trade consensus that has governed the world economy since World War II, Trump has imposed tariffs ranging from 10–41 percent on imports from all US trading partners, and certain goods (e.g. steel, aluminum, critical minerals, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber) face higher levies. As I write, the legality of Trump’s use of tariffs is being litigated before the US Supreme Court.
On February 1, 2025 he imposed 25 percent tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico, supposedly because neither country was doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl (and in Mexico’s case immigrants) across the US border. On March 24 he imposed 25% tariffs on all goods from countries that import Venezuelan oil—a tactic he extended on January 12, 2026 to “any country doing business with” Iran.
On July 30, 2025, Trump put tariffs on various goods from Brazil “due to Brazil’s actions regarding the prosecution of former President Bolsonaro, the regulation of online platforms, and other issues.” In August he imposed a whopping 50 percent tariff on India, which included a 25 percent punishment for continuing to buy Russian oil. In October he made a $20 billion line of credit to Argentina contingent upon his rightwing ally Javier Milei’s party winning the upcoming parliamentary elections.
On January 17 he threatened a 10 percent tariff, rising to 25 percent, on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland, which would “be due and payable until … a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”—despite having signed recent trade agreements with the UK and EU. Following pushback from European powers he backed down, announcing that talkswith NATO chief Mark Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal.”
When French president Emmanuel Macron declined to join his Board of Peace, Trump threatened to impose 200 percent tariffs on French wine and champagne.
It is clear is that irrespective of prior agreements or treaties, Trump will not hesitate to use economic means to achieve political ends. He’s running a global protection racket.
Strongarming the courts
Not only has Trump flouted international law. He has gone out of his way to discredit international legal institutions, including the world’s two highest courts.
Accusing South Africa of taking “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice” (ICJ) the Trump administration instituted a series of measures intended to discredit South Africa’s moral authority to bring the case, pressurize South Africa to drop it, and discourage other countries from joining it.
In February 2025, Donald Trump imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for indicting Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes. ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan was the first victim. The US sanctioned four more judges on June 5, adding two more judges (one of them was Canadian justice Kimberly Prost) and two assistant prosecutors on August 20. Rubio sanctioned two more judges in December, and the administration is now leaning onthe court to amend its guiding documents to exempt US citizens from its jurisdiction.
Such sanctions include an asset freeze, a prohibition on Americans doing business with sanctioned individuals, and a ban on their entering the United States. Unable to access the world banking system, victims—who also include UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese—cannot even use credit cards or book a flight or a hotel online.
“The purpose is clear,” Prost told the Irish Times:
Effectively, they are interfering directly with the independence of a judge. I can’t think of any other way to describe it but an attack on the independence of the judiciary and the International Criminal Court’s independence as an institution.
Securing the home front
Trump has moved just as fast on the domestic front, in ways that test the legal limits of his executive power. His actions have resulted in at least 583 challenges in the courts. While lower courts have overturned many of his orders, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court—which previously gave him immunity for “actions relating to the core powers of his office”—has so far generally proved more compliant.
The administration took an axe to the federal government and its programs, with the loss of 317,000 jobs by the end of 2025. Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was created by executive order on Trump’s first day outside the normal machinery of government, was responsible for much of the early carnage. The now-defunct DOGE has been widely criticized as “illegal and unconstitutional.”
From removing over 8,000 government web pages related to DEI initiatives, “gender identity, public health research, environmental policy, and various social programs,” to excluding transgender soldiers from the military and athletes from women’s sports, waging a “war on science” and whitewashing how history is presented in the nation’s museums, Trump has used his executive powers to advance MAGA’s culture wars.
He also found time on his first day to unconditionally pardon almost all 1,600 rioters convicted in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and commute the sentences imposed on Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia members for seditious conspiracy. While this was within his powers as president, it shows scant respect for the courts. House Democrats are now asking how many of the rioters have joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which increasingly looks like Trump’s Gestapo.
The same contempt for the rule of law is shown by the fact that nearly a month after Congress set a deadline of December 19 for the release of all files relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, Trump’s Department of Justice has made public only 12,285 out of over 2 million relevant documents, and many of these have been heavily redacted.
I am your retribution
Not content with stacking the governing bodies of public institutions from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—now renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center—to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with loyalists, Trump has good on his promise to his MAGA supporters that “I am your justice … I am your retribution.”
The president has purged the US military, the justice department, immigration judges, and at least 17 inspectors general (the independent watchdogs who oversee federal government departments). The list of those whose security clearances been revoked in retaliation for past actions deemed hostile to Trump is growing very long indeed.
Trump has sanctioned big law firms (e.g., WilmerHale, Jenner and Block, Covington & Burling) because they represented clients of which he disapproved. Rather than face being shut out of business with federal agencies, excluded from federal buildings (including courtrooms), and losing security clearances, several firms have caved to Trump’s demands and promised millions in pro bono work to causes he supports.
Silencing speech
The administration has dismantled Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia and defunded PBS and NPR on grounds that the former has “a “leftist bias” and fails to project “pro-American” values and the latter do not offer “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
Trump removed Associated Press from the White House press pool and stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its traditional power to decide which journalists have access to the president. In October, reporters from all but one news organization—including even the regime-friendly Fox News—turned in their Pentagon access badges rather than agree to new rules from secretary of defence (now styled “secretary of war”) Pete Hegseth restricting what they were allowed to report.
CBS canceledThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert after Colbert criticized Trump. The next month, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel commented on the assassination of rightwing darling Charlie Kirk, leading Trump to muse: “They’re giving me all this bad press, and they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” This is hardly a climate conducive to free speech.
From executive orders and memos, to investigations, the withholding of funds for research and financial aid, and efforts to detain, deport, or deny visas to international students and academics, the federal administration has weaponized every imaginable lever to bring the higher education sector to its knees.
The report instances 90+ Title VI investigations, $3.7 billion in cuts from federal research dollars from previously awarded grants, and NIH and NSF funding cuts with an estimated annual cost of $10-15 billion in decreased US economic output.
The federal government has proposed suspending 38 universities including Harvard and Yale from a research partnership program because they engage in DEI hiring, fined UCLA $1.2 billion, and required that it not enroll “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment.” Since January 2025 the State Department has revoked over 8,000 student visas, targeting in particular those who have taken part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Faced with these pressures many schools, including New York’s Columbia University, have traded academic freedom for federal dollars and accepted unprecedented political oversight of their hiring practices and the content of their research and teaching.
Others have resisted—up to a point. Though Harvard is suing the administration, it has suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
The cruelty is the point
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act allocated a mindblowing $75 billion over four years (in addition to $10 billion already appropriated for 2025) to ICE to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. The law provided $45 billion to increase ICE detention capacity and $46.6 billion for the construction of border barriers and surveillance systems.
Advertising “You do not need an undergraduate degree,” a generous pay and benefits package, and a $50,000 signing bonus, ICE recruited 12,000 additional agents during 2025, expanding its workforce by 120 percent. Mobilizing “Uncle Sam” imagery, the ads are crafted to attract MAGA supporters, if not outright white nationalists.
DHS boasts that in 2025 “nearly 3 million illegal aliens … left the U.S. … including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations and more than 675,000 deportations.” The conditions in Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and other ICE detention centers are grim. A record 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025. The cruelty is the point—to strike fear.
An unknown number of those deported have not been given due process and in some cases have been sent to third countries with which they have no connection. In what is perhaps the most notorious case of denial of legal rights, the administration defied court orders and summarily deported 238 Venezuelan men to the CECOT prison in El Salvador, which is notorious for torture and “life-threatening prison conditions.”
ICE has conducted large-scale raids across the US aiming at 3,000 arrests per day. Though DHS claims its targets are “criminal illegal aliens across the country, including gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers,” ICE’s goons have rounded up people from factories, farms, meatpacking plants, restaurants, churches, schools, and even immigration courts. In Minnesota Trump’s Gestapo are going from house to house, breaking down doors and arresting people. Seventy-five percent of those held by ICE in December had no criminal convictions. This is a reign of terror.
Trump has deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, in the latter case to support ICE. He has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to dispatch troops to end the protests in Minnesota. “If I feel it’s important to invoke the Insurrection Act,” he told the New York Times, “I have the right to do pretty much what I want to do.” L’état, c’est moi.
Signs in the window
What has any of this to do with Gaza?
Invoking Václav Havel’s parable of the Czech greengrocer who places a sign in his window reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it, but to signal his conformity—and thereby helps reproduce the system that oppresses him—Mark Carney’s 2026 Davos speech showed rare honesty from a western political leader.
“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order,” he begins. But
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful … So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
Then came Gaza. When the gaps became chasms.
When George H. W. Bush went to war with Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he sought and got authorization from the UN Security Council. When his son, George W. Bush, wanted to fight Saddam again in 2003, he and UK PM Tony Blair—the same Blair that is now on Trump’s “Board of Peace”—used fake intelligence to get support for going to war from the US Congress and UK parliament. The UN was unpersuaded by their claims, but they went through the motions of playing by the rules before going ahead with a “coalition of the willing” anyway. When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2024, western powers, including the US, EU, UK, and Canada, responded with ever-escalating rounds of sanctions.
But with Gaza, it is different. As I have documented in more than 25 articles over the last two years, not only have western governments, with the support of mainstream political parties and mass media across the political spectrum, armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for the genocide. They have thrown international law out of the window and perhaps fatally undermined the institutions that support it—the UN and its agencies, the ICJ, and the ICC. And they have sacrificed human rights and civil liberties at home, persecuting Israel’s critics under the specious banner of “combatting antisemitism.”
This was not Donald Trump’s doing. The responsibility lies squarely with Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Kamala Harris; with Rishi Sunak, David Cameron, Keir Starmer, David Lammy, and Yvette Cooper; with Justin Trudeau, Mélanie Joly, Anita Anand, and—it must be said—Mark Carney; with Emmanuel Macron, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong, Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, not to mention Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. They dealt the final blows to the old order. Trump is just picking up where they left off.
Gaza’s revenge
Asked by Democracy Now on December 26, 2025, to comment on “what’s happening in Gaza,” the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy replied:
What is there to discuss when you’re murdering children, destroying hospitals, destroying universities, murdering journalists, and boasting about it, boasting about it? And everybody’s sort of ambiguous—I mean, what we are witnessing also is, I think, there are surveys that say that almost 90% of the population of the world wants this to stop, but there is no connection between democratically elected governments and the will of the people. It’s ended. So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Trump’s triumph might be seen as Gaza’s revenge. Revenge for the West’s complicity in the worst crimes of the century. Revenge for its repeated trampling on international law. Revenge, above all, on the American Democrats who demanded everyone’s vote despite Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel and Kamala Harris’s refusal to break with his legacy—and told protestors against genocide to shut up because “I’m speaking!”
She is not speaking any more. Donald Trump is Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. The imperial chickens are coming home to roost.
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid wait to cross into Gaza from Egypt through Rafah. Photo by Eskinder Debebe/UN.
On September 29, 2025, standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House, Donald Trump announced his 20-point Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan to the world. Over the next few days the US president put heavy pressure on Hamas to sign up to his deal, threatening that Israel “would have my full backing to finish the job” of destroying the group if they didn’t.
Though neither Hamas nor any other Palestinian organization had been involved in drawing up Trump’s 20 points, Hamas signed an agreement with Israel at noon on October 9 to implement the first phase of the plan, which came into effect the next day.
This agreement—which, let us be absolutely clear, is all that Israel and Hamas have signed up to so far—committed both sides to a ceasefire in Gaza, following which Israel would withdraw its forces to an agreed-upon “yellow line” and “not return to areas it has withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”
In the 72 hours following the IDF withdrawal, all Israeli hostages in Gaza (or their remains) were to be exchanged for “250 life sentence prisoners [in Israeli jails] plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after October 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context.”
“Full aid” would also “be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip… at a minimum in consistence with the January 19, 2025 agreement regarding humanitarian aid.” The latter stipulated the entry of at least 600 trucks, including 50 fuel trucks, per day.
Though this aspect of the October 9 agreement received less media attention than the release of the Israeli hostages, it was critical for the Palestinians. The world’s top authority on food supply, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), had declared the “irrefutable” existence of famine in Gaza more than a month earlier.
The Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit
The ceasefire officially began on October 10. Hamas released its last 20 living hostages, and Israel began to release Palestinian prisoners on October 13.
At the Sharm el-Sheikh “Peace Summit” in Egypt that same day, Donald Trump declared that “the war in Gaza is over.” His audience included over 30 world leaders, among them Mark Carney, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Giorgia Meloni, as well as leaders from Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Middle Eastern and Muslim states and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
The “president of peace” (as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio baptized his boss) was praised on all sides. Elbows up as ever, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered “congratulations to President Trump for his essential leadership” in delivering this “historic peace plan… opening a new chapter for Israelis, Palestinians, and the world.”
Their enthusiasm is comprehensible—though totally unfounded. For months, Western leaders outside the US had been facing mounting public opposition over their support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, as well as growing concerns over their own potential liability for complicity in what was increasingly widely being recognized as a genocide. Tensions between the US and its allies peaked when (to Israel’s fury) Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and several other Western countries recognized a Palestinian state at the 80th UN General Assembly session in September in New York.
Trump’s Gaza plan provided them with an off-ramp. As I wrote at the time, “One can almost hear the huge collective sigh of relief that went up in Western capitals as soon as the Trump plan was announced. The cracks are papered over, the delinquent allies are back in the US fold, and our craven leaders are off the genocide hook.”
The end of the war?
The reality, however, is less rosy—as everybody present in Sharm el-Sheikh must have known.
To begin with, the October 9 agreement did not commit either Israel or Hamas to accepting the rest of Trump’s 20-point plan. Hamas had always been ready to engage in prisoner exchanges—that was, after all, the reason they took hostages on October 7—Israel rather less so. Other issues have proved more intractable.
Several members of the Israeli government stridently opposed the ceasefire, and Netanyahu himself likely only entered into it under pressure from Donald Trump (who was openly campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize). Challenged by the opposition to endorse Trump’s plan, Netanyahu’s coalition boycotted a Knesset vote on the issue.
In the ensuing days and weeks, Israeli leaders made it clear that they remained opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state now or ever and had no intention of pulling the IDF out of Gaza anytime soon. Fifty-three percent of the strip, including almost all of its arable land, lies in the area the IDF now controls behind the yellow line.
For its part, on October 24 Hamas communicated that while it was willing to “hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a temporary Palestinian committee composed of independent ‘technocrats’” as the Trump plan envisaged, it was not prepared to disarm without serious negotiations on establishing a Palestinian state.
Very far from the Gaza “war” being over, the thorniest issues—Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territories, disarmament of the Palestinian resistance, and the realization of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state—have yet to be resolved. So does the fate of Gaza’s surviving civilian population of over a million people, trapped in appalling conditions between the yellow line and the sea.
Two earlier ceasefires had enabled exchanges of hostages, in November 2023 and January 2025. Israel multiply breached and finally unilaterally ended both. There was—and is—no good reason to think the outcome will be any different this time around.
UN Security Council Resolution 2803
Notwithstanding these serious obstacles to a real peace, in a landmark resolution of November 17, which passed by a vote of 13-0 (with Russia and China abstaining), the UN Security Council welcomed Trump’s plan and endorsed its key provisions.
Resolution 2803 “authorized” a “Board of Peace”—whose composition is not specified in the resolution, but which will be chaired by Donald Trump himself—to:
Set up “a transitional governance administration, including … a Palestinian technocratic, apolitical committee of competent Palestinians from the Strip”
Establish “a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF)… with forces contributed by participating States”
Create a “newly trained and vetted Palestinian police force,” which will work with the ISF to ensure “the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, including… the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”
“As the ISF establishes control and stability, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will withdraw from the Gaza Strip… save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” the text goes on. The “standards, milestones, and timeframes” will be “agreed between the IDF, ISF, the guarantors [the US, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar], and the United States.”
Astonishingly, there is no provision for any Palestinian input into this most important of issues—for both sides. If the Palestinians give up their arms with no internationally backed guarantee of eventual statehood, they are defenceless in the face of an army that has repeatedly proved its ruthlessness. But so long as Hamas is not disarmed, Israelis fear a repetition of the dreadful events of October 7, 2023, which triggered the present so-called “war” and have been invoked to justifyevery Israeli action since.
The deal of the century?
These transitional arrangements, says the resolution, will remain in place “until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020… and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”
Both the PA and Hamas denounced Trump’s 2020 plan (which he modestly called “the deal of the century”) at the time, with Hamas describing it as an attempt “to liquidate the Palestinian national project.” Among other things, the plan would have allowed Israel to annex much of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, leaving behind a demilitarized Palestinian “state” made up of a series of Bantustans.
Only “after the PA reform program is faithfully carried out and Gaza redevelopment has advanced,” Resolution 2803 continues, “the conditions may”— note it says “may,” not “will”—be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood. The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.”
The postponement of establishing even a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood to the indefinite future—while effectively giving Israel and the US a veto over the process—is particularly ironic, coming so soon after Canada, the UK, and all the rest purportedly “recognized” the state of Palestine.
Unsurprisingly, Hamas and the other factions in Gaza rejected Resolution 2803. In their view, Trump’s plan is no more than a “form of deep international partnership in the war of extermination waged by the [Israeli] occupation against our people.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump during the introduction of the Gaza ceasefire proposal, September 29, 2025. Photo courtesy the White House/Wikimedia Commons.
The legal background
It is difficult to overstate just how major a departure Resolution 2803 is from the UN’s previous policies on the Palestinian question—and from the body of law established by the world’s two highest international courts.
After the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Security Council Resolution 242 called for:
Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict [and]… Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area…
Israel ignored Resolution 242, as it has ignored literally hundreds of UN resolutions since—usually with the support of the United States, which has frequently employed its veto to shield Israel from sanctions or other UN action. The US has vetoed no less than six United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions in the course of the current “war” alone.
Responding to a request from the UN General Assembly, on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and it must “end its unlawful presence… as rapidly as possible,” “cease immediately all new settlement activities,” and “evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
The justices went on to stress that “all states,” as well as international organizations (including the UN), were “under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance” in maintaining the occupation.
Recalling the ICJ ruling as well as earlier resolutions, on December 3, 2024 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution requiring Israel to “comply with international law, including ceasing all settlement activities and evacuating settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The vote was 157 in favour, eight against, and seven abstentions. Though both the US and Israel opposed the motion, the overwhelming majority of Western democracies, including Canada and the UK, backed it.
On November 21, 2024 the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established by the Rome Statute in 1998 as “an independent, permanent court of last resort… to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression,” issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
Though not recognized by the US or Israel, this is the same court that convicted Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadzic for their part in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and—with US approval—indicted Vladimir Putin in 2023 for war crimes in Ukraine.
The Trump administration’s response to the ICC indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant has been to impose sanctions on both the court and several of its individual officials and judges.
The UN betrays Palestine—and itself
The Security Council’s acceptance of the Trump “peace plan” is a watershed moment for the postwar international order. It marks the definitive abandonment of attempts to resolve the Israel-Palestine dispute within this framework of international law, and their replacement by obeisance to the imperatives of great power realpolitik.
Though Russia and China both criticized the Trump plan, they conspicuously did not veto Resolution 2803. Russia has no more interest in upholding international law than Israel or the US, given its invasion of Ukraine, while China would welcome a free hand in Taiwan, which it has always insisted is an integral part of its national territory (and therefore not governed by international law regarding relations between states).
In a blistering response to Security Council Resolution 2803 Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, got to the heart of the matter.
“Despite the horrors of the last two years and the ICJ’s clear jurisprudence,” she wrote:
the Council has chosen not to ground its response in the very body of law it is obliged to uphold: international human rights law, including the right of self-determination, the law governing the use of force, international humanitarian law, and the UN Charter.
Instead, “the resolution risks entrenching external control over Gaza’s governance, borders, security, and reconstruction” and “betrays the people it claims to protect.”
Specifically:
A military force answering to a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ chaired by the President of the United States, an active party to this conflict that has continually provided military, economic and diplomatic support to the illegal occupying Power, is not legal. It is a brazen attempt to impose, by threat of continued force against a virtually defenceless population, US and Israeli interests, plain and simple.
Essentially, it will leave Palestine in the hands of a puppet administration, assigning the United States, which shares complicity in the genocide, as the new manager of the open-air prison that Israel has already established.
In abnegating its legal responsibilities and outsourcing Gaza’s future to Trump’s “Board of Peace,” she charges, the UN has betrayed not only the Palestinian people but its own founding principles as embodied in Articles 1 and 2 of the UN Charter.
You cease, I fire
Nearly three months have passed since the Gaza “ceasefire” came into effect. Israel has repeatedly stalled progress on moving to phase two of Trump’s “peace plan” until all the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages have been returned—no small task, given the difficulty of recovering them in Gaza’s devastation. By December 4 the remains of all but one hostage, police officer Ran Gvili, had been recovered. Israel is still stalling.
Though both sides have accused the other of multiple violations of the ceasefire, the monstrous asymmetry of casualties suggests the fault lies overwhelmingly with Israel.
Since October 10, at least 416 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,110 wounded in Israeli attacks. Over the same period, just three Israeli soldiers lost their lives in Gaza. According to Palestinian sources, two of them died when their vehicle ran over unexploded ordinance, and not, as Israel claimed, in a Hamas ambush.
While there hasn’t been a single reported incident of Hamas firing rockets into Israel, the Gazan authorities claim that between October 10 and December 28 “Israel shot at civilians 298 times, raided residential areas beyond the ‘yellow line’ 54 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 455 times, [and] demolished people’s properties on 162 occasions.”
In total, Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 969 times from October 10 to December 28. To describe Trump’s ceasefire as “fragile,” “precarious,” or “tested,” as mainstream Western media habitually do, is to stretch the meaning of words beyond all credibility. On the Israeli side, at least, this has been a ceasefire in name only.
Restriction of aid
Let me finally turn to the only other provision in Trump’s Gaza Plan aside from the exchange of prisoners that was actually agreed in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas on October 9, the resumption of “full aid” into Gaza.
Israel has failed to open the Rafah crossing into Egypt, as is explicitly mandated in the Trump plan, and has severely restricted and on occasion completely stopped traffic at other crossing points throughout the ceasefire. While the number of humanitarian aid trucks that have been allowed into Gaza since the ceasefire is disputed, it is clearly far fewer than the agreed minimum of 600 per day.
Per the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, “Due to Israeli restrictions, as of December 16, only 57 percent of the 556 aid missions planned by the UN and its partners were carried out, including the delivery of vital aid and equipment, medical evacuations, and infrastructure repairs.”
Since the current ceasefire began on October 10th, Israeli authorities continue to arbitrarily reject scores of shipments of life-saving assistance into Gaza. Almost $50 million worth of food, water, tents, and medical supplies is still being held up at border crossings and warehouses. Oxfam alone has $2.5 million worth of aid sitting in Jordan, including 4,000 food parcels.
Expressing “serious concerns about the renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which remains catastrophic,” on December 30 the foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement calling upon Israel to fully open all the crossings and “lift unreasonable restrictions on imports considered to have a dual use… includ[ing] urgently needed medical and shelter equipment.”
Hobbling of INGOs
The statement further demanded that international NGOs “are able to operate in Gaza in a sustained and predictable way,” and that “the UN and its partners can continue their vital work.” It emphasized that “this includes United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], which provides essential services, such as health care and education, to millions of Palestinian refugees.”
This last point matters because Israel banned UNWRA—the single most important agency for coordinating aid efforts in Gaza—from operating in Israel from January 2025, on the basis of accusations (for which it provided no evidence) that some of its employees participated in the Hamas October 7 attack. That ban remains in place.
Tightening the screw further, on December 29 the Knesset passed a law cutting off electricity and water supplies to facilities owned by or operating on behalf of UNRWA in the occupied Palestinian territories, and banned provision of telecommunications, banking, and other financial services to the agency.
Under rules introduced in March 2025, Israel required aid organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to submit lists of their Palestinian staff by December 31 for vetting by intelligence services. Fearful that this would put their employees in danger of targeting by the IDF, many refused. Their fears are well founded. In 2024 alone, 125 UNRWA aid workers were killed in Gaza, the highest death toll in UN history.
Despite the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel has insisted on implementing this so-called “security” measure. As a result, 37 INGOs have now lost their accreditation and will have to cease operating by March 1. These include Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Vision International, ActionAid, International Rescue Committee, CARE, Medico International, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and the Norwegian Refugee Council.
These restrictions on aid entering Gaza are too numerous and systematic to be an accident. The guns may have temporarily quieted, but Israel is continuing its ethnic cleansing and genocide by other means.
As winter bites, the old, the infirm, and above all the children will continue to die. In these circumstances the survivors may be that much more willing to abandon their homeland for “voluntary” exile. In another press conference with Netanyahu on December 29, Donald Trump suggested that more than half the population would like to take advantage of such an offer (“To me it’s common sense”).
Coincidentally or otherwise, on January 2 Israel became the first country in the world to recognizethe breakaway state of Somaliland, an enclave strategically situated on the coast of the Gulf of Aden. The government of Somaliland has denied agreeing to host Israeli bases or accept displaced Gazans, but suspicions remain.
What comes next?
Three months on, the prospects for Donald Trump’s “comprehensive peace plan” are looking decidedly shaky. Having got all its hostages back, and secure in its military occupation of 53 percent of the Gaza Strip, Israel may decline to move on to phase two and find some excuse to resume the conflict as in the previous ceasefires.
Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarm in the absence of guarantees of eventual statehood that Israel will never give—what more, after all, do Palestinians have to lose by keeping their weapons? Meantime the states that were mooted as contributors of troops to Trump’s proposed international stabilization force, including Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia, are reportedly getting cold feet about being dragged into the quagmire.
But in a sense none of this matters. The Trump plan has done its job. Gaza is out of the headlines, the allies are back on board, and the US is calling the shots—with the imprimatur of the United Nations Security Council, which has accepted the inevitable.
The “rules-based order” established at the end of World War II is over. The world is entering “a new era of great power competition; a generational struggle to maintain peace through strength”—to quote US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, speaking after the US invasion of Venezuela—an era in which right gives way to might.
Resolution 8302 is the embodiment of that capitulation. Gaza is the future. And not just for Palestinians.
Volvox Globator, who previously published the Czech translation of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, has now brought out a Czech translation of the third volume in my “Prague trilogy,” Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History. I am most grateful to Jindřich Veselý for undertaking this translation, which cannot have been the easiest of assignments given the length and character of the book.
This is the Czech publisher’s blurb. English translation follows.
Kniha Pohlednice z Absurdistánu, napsaná britsko-kanadským bohemistou Derekem Sayerem, představuje jedinečný vhled do českých dějin dvacátého století. Ve své předchozí knize autor nazval Prahu hlavním městem 20. století (Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století, Surrealistická historie Volvox Globator, 2021) a tento pohled zůstává výchozím bodem i pro tuto knihu.
Derek Sayer se podrobně zabývá kulturním a společenským děním, odhaluje absurdity, které 20. století provázely, a zároveň poukazuje na křehkost demokratického systému. Podtitul knihy Praha na konci dějin odkazuje ke slavnému dílu, které napsal Francis Fukuyama v devadesátých letech dvacátého století, ale zároveň v sobě nese nadhled, který je Dereku Sayerovi vlastní.
V knize se prolínají dějinné, politické události spolu s osobními dějinami českých osobností, které si v nehostinných podmínkách velké části dvacátého století vydobývaly vlastní svobodu. Velká pozornost je věnována vývoji umění, které bylo nuceno, ať už jakýmkoli způsobem, na danou politickou situaci reagovat. Kniha nese veškeré parametry vědecké práce, autor však není spoutaný akademickým jazykem, naopak, jedná se o velice čtivý text, který je doprovázen více než sedmdesáti dobovými fotografiemi.
Z angličtiny přeložil Jindřich Veselý.
Postcards from Absurdistan, written by British-Canadian Czech scholar Derek Sayer, offers a unique insight into Czech history in the 20th century. In his previous book, the author called Prague the capital of the 20th century (Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století, Surrealistická historie, Volvox Globator, 2021), and this remains the vantage point for this book as well.
Derek Sayer takes a detailed look at cultural and social events, revealing the absurdities that accompanied the 20th century, while also pointing out the fragility of the democratic system. The subtitle of the book, “Prague at the End of History,” refers to the famous work written by Francis Fukuyama in the 1990s, but at the same time carries Derek Sayer’s characteristic perspective
The book intertwines historical and political events with the personal histories of Czech personalities who fought for their freedom in the inhospitable conditions of much of the 20th century. Much attention is paid to the development of art, which was forced, in one way or another, to respond to the political situation. The book has all the parameters of a scientific work, but the author is not bound by academic language; on the contrary, it is a very readable text accompanied by more than seventy period photographs.
I was delighted to belatedly discover that my potted history/guidebook Prague: Crossroads of Europe, published by Reaktion Books (London) in their Cityscopes series in 2018, was published in Chinese translation in October 2021 by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House. Here are the Chinese publication details and blurb—English translation follows, courtesy of DeepL.
金天，口笔译硕士。先后获伦敦国王学院及诺丁汉大学一等荣誉学位、伦敦圣三一学院对外英语教学证书。峰会口译员；曾任剑桥国际之友（Friends International Cambridge）领队，为当地语言学校开设有多场英语学术讲座。共计有英汉互译作品约七十万字。译有《孟买：欲望丛林》《巴黎：光影流动的盛宴》等。
目 录
003 序
昔日布拉格
003 我见一城俊伟
011 普舍美斯王朝
027 查理四世的黄金时代
041 反对一切！
055 金杯毒酒
077 白山之后
099 为了祖国，为了艺术
119 我们说斯拉夫语
145 十字路口
161 阴云笼罩
175 来自东方的共产主义
191 重回欧洲
今日布拉格
197 布拉格咖啡馆
211 啤酒实乃琼浆玉液！
221 立体主义者的塑造梦
231 当之无愧现代风
241 旧貌新颜查理镇
253 小河内
263 跳舞的房子
275 附录
315 译后记
319 大事年表
325 索引
Translation
Prague: Crossroads of Europe Author: Derek Sayer Publisher: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House Publication Date: October 2021 ISBN: 9787532178353 Price: ¥108.00
Synopsis As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Derek Sayer chronicles Prague’s turbulent past while detailing its vibrant present. Dubbed “Europe’s most beautiful capital,” Prague boasts breathtaking natural scenery along the Vltava River and a kaleidoscope of architectural wonders—from Romanesque rotundas to Gothic towers, Renaissance palaces to Baroque cathedrals, Art Nouveau cafés to Cubist apartment buildings. Situated at the crossroads of Europe, Prague has been a crucible where diverse ideologies and cultures have collided for over a millennium. By revisiting Europe’s intricate historical tapestry, Sayer unfolds a sweeping panorama of Prague’s past for readers. His exploration delves into the minutiae, leaving the narrative rich with meaning beyond its words.
Author Biography Derek Sayer, an expert on Bohemian history and former professor of cultural history at Lancaster University, UK, is the author of numerous works including The Bohemian Coast: A Czech History, Capitalism and Modernity: An Introduction to Marxist and Weberian Thought, Prague: A Surreal History of the Twentieth Century, and Trouble in the Making: Surrealism and the Social Sciences. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Sayer currently resides in Calgary, known as “Cowboy City,” and is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Social Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta.
Translator Profile Jin Tian holds a Master’s degree in Interpreting and Translation. She earned First-Class Honours degrees from King’s College London and the University of Nottingham, along with a Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA) from Trinity College London. She has served as a conference interpreter and previously led groups for Friends International Cambridge, delivering numerous academic English lectures for local language schools. Total English-Chinese translation output exceeds 700,000 words. Translations include Mumbai: Jungle of Desire and Paris: Feast of Light and Shadow.
Table of Contents 003 Preface Prague of Yore 003 I Beheld a Magnificent City 011 The Přemyslid Dynasty 027 The Golden Age of Charles IV 041 Against Everything! 055 The Golden Cup of Poison 077 After White Mountain 099 For the Fatherland, For Art 119 We Speak Slavic 145 The Crossroads 161 Dark Clouds Gather 175 Communism from the East 191 Return to Europe Prague Today 197 Prague Cafés 211 Beer Is the Nectar of the Gods! 221 The Cubists’ Dream of Form 231 Undeniably Modern Style 241 Charles Town: Old Faces, New Looks 253 Malá Strana 263 The Dancing House 275 Appendix 315 Translator’s Afterword 319 Chronology 325 Index
I have added a new section to this website called MY TEXTS. You can navigate there from the main menu. This is why.
For at least a decade now, like many other academics, I have used Academia.edu as a repository for my writings and a place where others can easily and freely assess them, consistently with terms of copyright. While I have never used the (monetized) “premium” features of the site, I always thought the basic idea of such an open repository an inspired one that I was very happy to support.
I found the site especially useful for posting complete texts of books that were out-of-print to which I had regained the rights, including Marx’s Method, The Violence of Abstraction, and my 1985 book with Philip Corrigan The Great Arch, which has so far had 7,535 views. I also find the site useful for posting drafts, articles published in out-of-the-way places, and occasional unpublished materials.
Reluctant as I am to remove texts from this facility, I am deeply disturbed by and feel duty-bound to resist Academia.edu’s recent unilateral change in terms and conditions. The relevant clause reads:
By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu’s Services.
I had a disconcerting example of this when the company proudly informed me that it had “made a podcast” from one of my articles without my knowledge, involvement or permission.
Like many others, I am contemplating discontinuing my Academia.edu account or at least drastically cutting the amount of material I leave on the site for its corporate management to plunder “in any manner” as they see fit.
Until I find an alternative repository that provides the services Academia.edu used to offer without asserting effective ownership over member content and personal information, I am making my work freely available—consistently with publishers’ rights—on my personal website at coastsofbohemia.com.
Most of what was formerly available for download at Academia.edu can now be downloaded from My Texts. I will be adding new materials as time goes on.
United States envoy Morgan Ortagus casts the lone veto against a UN Security Council draft resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire, aid access, and hostage release. The measure, supported by 14 members, failed due to the US veto. Photo by Laura Jarriel/United Nations.
It will soon be two years since Hamas launched its “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack on southern Israel. Israel’s retaliatory “war” has since reduced Gaza to an uninhabitable wasteland and caused—at a very conservative minimum—more than 66,000 Palestinian deaths, with some 83 percent of them, according to Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) data, being civilians. Since Israel broke its January ceasefire agreement and resumed its offensive in March, 15 of every 16 out of the 16,000 Palestinians the IDF has killed have been civilians.
In the aftermath of October 7 there was enormous support for Israel, especially in the West. But as the “war” ground on, with no apparent end in sight and ever-mounting civilian casualties, the tide of Western public opinion turned. Recent pressure led several Western governments to reluctantly berate Israel for its “intolerable and unacceptable” and “utterly reckless and appalling” actions—while doing precious little to stop them.
Despite the chorus of condemnation, we have seen nothing approaching the battery of sanctions that played such a large part in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa, not to mention the swingeing economic, political, and cultural sanctions imposed on Vladimir Putin’s Russia immediately following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
This paralysis on the part of the “international community” is remarkable, given that what is at issue is increasingly being recognized as a genocide—the worst of all crimes under international humanitarian law. But it is not, perhaps, surprising. Given their previous support for Israel, not to mention their vulnerability to economic bullying by Trump’s US, Western leaders found themselves tossed on the horns of an impossible dilemma.
The genocide dilemma
As far back as January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a “plausible risk” of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take several measures to avert this outcome. At that point the official death toll stood at 27,500—less than half of what it is now. Israel ignored these and further ICJ orders of March and May 2024.
It will likely be years before the ICJ reaches a final verdict on whether or not Israel is guilty of genocide. The world’s highest court on war crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has however already issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for using “starvation as a method of warfare” and other war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On September 16, 2025, an authoritative new report by a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, based on two years of investigation, concluded that:
Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.
It takes some chutzpah to contend that all of these are part of some global antisemitic conspiracy to discredit Israel. Denying the genocide—the US position—is becoming less and less credible, while refusing to take a stance until the final ICJ verdict is in, which the British and Canadian governments are doing, simply looks evasive.
The problem for Western politicians is that the 1948 Genocide Convention—to which all members of the G7 apart from Japan are parties, as is Israel—requires them not only to refrain from committing genocide themselves, but “to prevent and to punish” genocide “whether [its perpetrators] are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”
The argument made by Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and others against the ICC warrants that “there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas“ has no standing in international law. A war crime is a war crime and a genocide is a genocide, no matter who is committing it, guerrilla “terrorists” or the elected leaders of a democratic nation state.
Complicating things further, “complicity in genocide” is also a punishable offense. If Israel is committing genocide, then it is a genocide in which Western governments have been complicit throughout the last two years, by supplying arms, providing diplomatic cover, ignoring their own intelligence assessments that Israel has been obstructing aid, and suppressing protest. No wonder some politicians are beginning to get cold feet.
A rift in the West?
On September 18 all members of the UN Security Council except the United States voted to adopt a resolution calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, and for Israel to immediately and unconditionally lift all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid. The US vetoed the measure. This is the sixth time in the last two years that the US has (ab)used its veto power to block a ceasefire in Gaza.
Though France and the UK voted for the resolution, no Western government has yet been prepared to defy America and trigger the nuclear option, which would be to put a United for Peace resolution to the General Assembly. If passed by a two-thirds majority, this would override any Security Council veto and could pave the way for armed UN intervention in Gaza. This procedure was invoked 13 times between 1951 and 2022.
There were nevertheless straws in the wind suggesting that some Western governments were more prepared to risk Israeli and (more importantly) US wrath and take baby steps toward pressuring Israel to end its genocide than at any time during the present “war”—if only to retrospectively cover their collective asses and avoid indictments from the ICC.
The EU Commission has finally proposed to strip Israeli goods of privileged access to European markets, with new tariffs imposed on billions of euros of exports, as well as sanctioning extremist individual Israeli ministers—though such a measure may still not pass, given continuing support for Israel by Germany and some other EU states.
Recognition of Palestine—an empty gesture?
Canada, the UK, Australia, France, and several other Western countries announced with great fanfare at the 80th UN General Assembly session in September in New York—or the day before it, “out of respect for the Jewish new year”—that they were recognizing the State of Palestine. They were very late to the party. One hundred and forty seven states had recognized Palestine prior to their move, including Spain, Ireland, Norway, and Slovenia in 2024.
While it would be wrong to dismiss the legal significance of recognition out of hand, in the absence of other measures it will likely have limited practical impact on the ground. That does not mean it is insignificant. It underlines the tensions between the US and some of its most important Western allies (as well as splits within Europe itself).
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was refreshingly candid about why his government was changing tack:
The current Israeli government is working methodically to prevent the prospect of a Palestinian state from ever being established. It has pursued an unrelenting policy of settlement expansion in the West Bank, which is illegal under international law. Its sustained assault in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced well over one million people, and caused a devastating and preventable famine in violation of international law. It is now the avowed policy of the current Israeli government that ‘there will be no Palestinian state’.
Netanyahu responded with predictable fury—and in the process confirmed that Carney’s charges were amply justified:
I have a clear message to those leaders who are recognizing a Palestinian state after the horrendous October 7 massacre: You are rewarding terror with an enormous prize.
And I have another message for you: It’s not going to happen. There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River.
For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad.
We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank], and we will continue on this path.
In the face of such clarity on the part of Israel, we have to ask why Western leaders are still peddling the fantasy of a “two-state solution” at all. The suspicion must be that it is yet another evasion, designed to cover up their unwillingness to tackle the role played by ethnic cleansing and genocide in Israel’s Zionist project head on.
Trumpery at the UN
The US, by contrast, has made its opposition to recognizing Palestine at this point in time crystal clear. Interviewed recently by Tony Dokoupil of CBS Mornings, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio insultingly dismissed recognition as “almost a vanity project for a couple of these world leaders who want to be relevant, but it really makes no difference.”
In between gratuitously insulting America’s Western allies (“I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law”) and trumpeting his own imaginary achievements (“I have ended seven unendable wars… Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements”), Trump found time to briefly mention Gaza in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 23.
His concern was not the ongoing genocide:
Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body [the UN] is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities. This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including October 7th…
Three days later, in his own address to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu accused Carney and company of capitulating “under pressure of a biased media, radical Islamist constituencies, and antisemitic mobs.”
The Israeli prime minister said little that did not repeat what he had told the same body in 2023 and 2024. What was different this time was that Netanyahu’s plane was forced to take a circuitous route to New York in order to avoid the airspace of countries that were legally bound to enforce the ICC arrest warrant. And he spoke to a largely empty hall.
On his entry, over 100 delegates from over 50 countries walked out in protest. Of those that remained, the UK and even the US filled their seats with junior staff instead of senior diplomats. The majority of those who left were from the Global South.
This is the background against which, on September 29, Trump and Netanyahu jointly unveiled the latest US “peace plan” at a White House press conference. Netanyahu had reportedly made several last-minute changes to the draft drawn up by Trump’s team, all to Israel’s advantage.
The 20-point plan calls for immediate suspension of all military operations, followed by the release of all Israeli captives within a 72-hour period. Israel will then release “250 life sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after Oct. 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context.”
This is only a fraction of more than 10,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails, 3,600 of whom are held without charge or trial in “administrative detention”—many more hostages, as they are, than the 251 Israelis captured by Hamas in the October 7 attack.
It is grim testimony to the disproportionality of this “war” that “For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.”
After the hostages are released, an amnesty will be extended to Hamas members who “commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons,” while any who wish to leave Gaza “will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.” Hamas will disarm and “all military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt.” Hamas and other factions “agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.”
Once the agreement has been accepted, full aid “will proceed without interference from the two parties through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent,” as well as unspecified third parties (likely a reference to the US-based private so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians queuing for food).
Though this provision is likely to play badly in Israel, which has banned the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA from operating within its boundaries, this is is the only role envisaged for the UN in the entire document.
The plan stipulates that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza” and promises that “No one will be forced to leave Gaza,” while “those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.” As “a temporary International Stabilization Force” put together by “The United States… with Arab and international partners” trains “vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza,” the IDF will gradually withdraw from the Strip to a perimeter “security zone.”
Gaza will meantime be governed by “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee… of qualified Palestinians and international experts, with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body… headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of State… including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.”
This “Board of Peace” will “set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program… and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”
As Patrick Wintour has perceptively noted in the Guardian, though it is not explicitly stated in the document, this “reform program” requires that the Palestinian Authority ends its participation in legal proceedings against Israel at the ICJ and ICC. (The text refers to the reform programme “as outlined in various proposals, including president Trump’s peace plan in 2020,” and the latter demands this.)
The Board of Peace will oversee a “Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza”—is Trump’s dream of a “Riviera of the Middle East” about to come true?—and “A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.”
Surrender or annihilation
It is significant that Hamas—whose negotiators Israel had attempted to assassinate in a September 9 air strike on Qatar—was not involved in drafting the plan or even provided with an advance copy. Palestinians are being presented with an ultimatum reminiscent of the one the Germans gave Rotterdam in 1940: surrender or your city will be destroyed.
And indeed, even while Hamas is considering the plan—for which Trump has demanded their answer “within three or four days”—Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz has issued a “final warning” on October 1 that “This is the last opportunity for Gaza residents who wish to do so to move south and leave Hamas operatives isolated in Gaza City,” making clear that “Those who remain… will be considered terrorists and terrorist supporters.”
If the Palestinians reject the plan, then in Donald Trump’s words at the White House press conference:
Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas.
But I hope that we’re going to have a deal for peace, and if Hamas rejects the deal… Bibi, you’d have our full backing to do what you would have to do.
Netanyahu added: “If Hamas rejects your plan, Mr President, or if they supposedly accept it and then do everything to counter it, then Israel will finish the job by itself. This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way, but it will be done.”
The only positives in the Trump plan for the Palestinians are that it offers a possible road to ending the genocide—as is desperately needed—without Israel annexing Gaza or expelling its people, as the extreme rightwing ministers in Netanyahu’s government have demanded. In his earlier musings on a “Riviera of the Middle East” Trump too had envisaged “cleaning out” all of the Palestinians.
But even these modest consolations for the loss of Palestinian lives, homes, and hopes over the last two years are very far from guaranteed.
The plan requires Hamas to hand over all of the Israeli hostages before any Palestinian prisoners are released and to disarm on the basis of promises of amnesty while the IDF remains in Gaza. The timetable for withdrawal, by contrast, is vague and dependent on transfer of power to new security forces whose composition remains undetermined.
Once Hamas has given up its hostages and its weapons, there is nothing to stop Israel from reneging on the agreement—as it previously did with the January 2025 ceasefire—and “finishing the job” of genocide and ethnic cleansing against a defenceless Gazan population.
It is scarcely reassuring that after his return from Washington, Netanyahu put out a video reassuring Israelis that “the IDF stays in the majority of the Strip.”
Asked in the same video whether he had agreed to a Palestinian state, the Israeli prime minister replied: “Not at all, and it is not written in the agreement. One thing was made clear: We will strongly oppose a Palestinian state.”
This gives the lie to Emmanuel Macron’s claim—echoed by among others Antony Albanese and Mark Carney—that the Trump plan provides a foundation “to build a lasting peace in the region, based on the two-state solution.”
If Bibi has anything to do with it, there will be no such thing. Ever.
The plan does in fact mention Palestinian statehood, only to locate it firmly in the realms of the never-never:
While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the P.A. [Palestinian Authority] reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people. (My emphasis)
A week is a long time in politics
Little more than a week ago, Canada, Australia, Britain, France, and other Western allies broke ranks with Israel and the US and recognized a Palestinian state. Mark Carney and others made it clear that they were taking this step, in part, to forestall Israel’s attempts—about which Benjamin Netanyahu has been quite open—to sabotage any possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Today, those same states are falling over backwards to lean on Hamas to accept a deal that disarms the Palestinian resistance, requires it to forgo any legal recourse for Israeli war crimes and/or genocide through the ICJ and ICC, hands Gaza over to an unelected foreign junta headed by Donald Trump and Tony Blair—onetime cheerleader of the Iraq War that left over a million Iraqis dead—to “redevelop,” and indefinitely postpones any prospect of Palestinian statehood. The word for this is betrayal.
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen, and EU Foreign Minister Kaja Kallas, have all hastened to issue statements lauding “President Trump’s leadership” (Starmer) and hailing the plan as “the best immediate chance to end the war” (Kallas). “Elbows up” Mark Carney was the most sycophantic of them all, welcoming the deal as “historic.”
All agree that “Hamas has no choice but to immediately release all hostages and follow this plan,” with only Macron adding “I expect Israel to engage resolutely on this basis.”
One can almost hear the huge collective sigh of relief that went up in Western capitals as soon as the Trump plan was announced. The cracks are papered over, the delinquent allies are back in the US fold, and our craven leaders are off the genocide hook.
If Hamas fails to “seize this opportunity” (von der Leyen), we must infer, it has only itself to blame for the consequences.
The rewards of terror
Hamas senior leader Mahmoud Mardawi is bang on when he characterizes the Trump plan as offering “an end to this criminal war in exchange for ending the Palestinian people’s right to their state and their rights to their land, homeland, and holy sites.”
Mardawi is adamant that “no Palestinian will accept that,” but genocide is a powerful persuader.
Whether, out of desperation, Palestinians will buy this sordid “deal” remains to be seen. If they do, Israel gets its hostages back and it’s game over for the Palestinian resistance.
If they don’t, Israel will “finish the job” with full US backing and blame Hamas for forcing it to kill yet more Palestinian babies in order to ensure its security. Either way this is a win–win situation for Israel.
If, as Netanyahu says, a purely symbolic recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state is “an enormous prize” for the terror of Hamas’s October 7 attack, then how much greater are the rewards for the IDF’s two years of live-streamed genocide in Gaza?
The flag of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Photo by Tony Webster/Wikimedia Commons.
A long time ago
“It was an extraordinary moment,” remembered Stephen Lewis, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988. “I was at the UN for four glorious years. I had never seen anything like it before, and I never saw anything like it afterwards…”
On October 23, 1985, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney gave an “electrifying” speech to the UN General Assembly, in which he not only denounced the evil of South African apartheid but promised Canada would to do everything in its power to end it:
Canada is ready, if there are no fundamental changes in South Africa, to invoke total sanctions against that country and its repressive regime. More than that, if there is no progress in the dismantling of apartheid, relations with South Africa may have to be severed absolutely.
At the next year’s Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver, Mulroney famously faced down British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over her opposition to sanctions, pointedly asking her whether she would respond in the same way “if she was dealing with a country with a population of 25 million whites that was ruled by four million blacks.”
Less than four years after Mulroney threw down the gauntlet at the UN, South African President F.W. de Klerk, under heavy international pressure from sanctions, began to dismantle the odious edifice of apartheid, legalizing the African National Congress and releasing its leader Nelson Mandela after 27 years imprisonment on February 11, 1990.
Mandela and de Klerk jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and Mandela went on to become South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994. That did not stop the US listing him as a “terrorist” until a few days before his 90th birthday in 2013, weeks before his death.
“On the 10th anniversary of our democracy,” Mandela wrote in a personal letter to Brian Mulroney in 2004:
one recalls the momentous time of our transition and remembers the people involved both within and outside South Africa. As prime minister of Canada and within the Commonwealth, you provided strong and principled leadership in the battle against apartheid. This was not a popular position in all quarters, but South Africans today acknowledge the importance of your contribution to our eventual liberation and success.
In a galaxy far, far away
A few months after his release, Mandela addressed the Canadian Parliament. Introducing his guest, Mulroney recalled “with pride, the stand taken by Canada’s prime minister, John Diefenbaker, at the Commonwealth Conference of 1961, which resulted in South Africa’s withdrawal from that body”:
Prime Minister Diefenbaker brought the Commonwealth to declare unequivocally that racial discrimination was totally contrary to its fundamental principles and that, if South Africa did not change, Mr. Diefenbaker said then South Africa must leave. He did so against some considerable opposition, but with the strong conviction and the certain knowledge that it was right. Mr. Diefenbaker’s action marked the beginning of international pressure on the apartheid regime.
The opposition came principally from the UK, together with Australia and New Zealand—countries that were once collectively referred to, alongside South Africa, Canada, and Newfoundland, as the British Empire’s “White Dominions.” The US was also not happy with Canada rocking the apartheid boat, since it saw South Africa as an important ally in the global fight against communism and the ANC as dangerously pro-communist. Not for the first or the last time in American history, geopolitics trumped any moral concerns.
Both Diefenbaker and Mulroney were Conservative politicians, and Mulroney had campaigned on a platform of improving relations with the US after the tensions of the Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau years—a promise that was to give us NAFTA. But this did not stop either of them from defying the United States when they believed it was necessary. They did not regard Canada’s membership of NATO (or the “Free World”) as requiring automatic deference to Washington’s priorities, or overlooking palpable evils like apartheid in the interests of maintaining a united Western front in the Cold War.
Canada’s Liberal governments, too, agreed on the need for an independent Canadian foreign policy, and were not afraid to break with the “elephant to the south” (as Pierre Trudeau characterized the US) when called for either. This might even be seen as a hallmark of Canadian identity—an essential one, if we must sleep next to the beast.
Diefenbaker refused to station US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil and gave only lukewarm backing to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. Lester Pearson criticized America’s Vietnam War (allegedly leading Lyndon B. Johnson to grab him by the lapels and yell “Don’t you come into my house and piss on my rug!”) and Pierre Trudeau provided sanctuary to American draft dodgers. Jean Chrétien declined to follow the US-led “Coalition of the Willing” into the Iraq War without approval by the UN.
This is not to say that Canada’s conduct on the world stage was above criticism. As Yves Engler and others have pointed out, Canada is a settler colony whose treatment of its Indigenous population—now as well as then—leaves much to be desired. Canada’s pivot to opposing apartheid in South Africa came late in the day, and its enforcement of sanctions was half-hearted. Thousands of Canadians were allowed to enlist in the US military and fought in Vietnam, while Canadian governments of both parties provided the US with multiple forms of covert support even while not officially joining the war effort.
All the same, there is a yawning moral gulf between Canadian policies then and now.
Canada and the ICC—then
The guiding principle of Canadian foreign policy during the latter part of the twentieth century was multilateralism. Governments of both parties portrayed Canada’s role in the world as advancing universal human rights rather than defending narrowly conceived national interests. Their preferred self-image was of Canada as a global peacemaker.
At times—as in the case of apartheid—the human rights agenda called for intervention, and the proper vehicle for this was international organizations like the UN, because they alone could alone provide legitimacy for such actions. The corollary was solid Canadian support for the institutional and legal framework established after the Second World War, above all the UN and its agencies, the Geneva Conventions, and international humanitarian law.
An important addition to this legal framework was the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established by the Rome Statute in 1998, in part in response to the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. The ICC was intended to be “an independent, permanent court of last resort with jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression.”
Canada played a “pivotal role”—I quote the Canadian government official website here—in the ICC’s foundation.
Canada chaired the “Like-Minded Group,” a coalition of states “that helped to motivate the wider international community to adopt the Rome Statute.” A senior Canadian diplomat, Philippe Kirsch, was chosen to chair the conference in Rome that negotiated and drafted the statute “under Canada’s leadership.” Kirsch was subsequently elected as an ICC judge in February 2003 and served as the ICC’s first president until 2009.
Canada became “the first country in the world to adopt comprehensive legislation implementing the Rome Statute” in the form of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act passed by the Canadian parliament in June 2002. This law for the first time “officially criminalizes genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes based on customary and conventional international law, including the Rome Statute.”
In December 2017 a second Canadian, Kimberly Prost, was elected an ICC judge for a nine-year term. Prost’s previous experience had included 18 years at Canada’s justice department and positions with the Commonwealth Secretariat and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. In 2006, she was appointed as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in a major trial related to the Srebrenica genocide.
Opposition to the ICC
Not all states welcomed the establishment of the ICC. At the end of the 1998 Rome conference, 120 countries (including almost all of the United States’ allies) voted in favor of the treaty. Seven countries opposed it—the US, China, Libya, Iraq, Qatar, Yemen, and Israel. Twenty-one countries abstained.
One hundred and twenty-five countries have signed and ratified the Rome Statute and as such are legally bound to co-operate with the court, including in arresting and transferring indicted persons or providing evidence and witnesses for ICC prosecutions.
All member states of the EU are ICC members (though Hungary has now signalled its intention to withdraw from the court), as are Australia, New Zealand, and all G7 members—apart from the United States. The US signed but did not ratify the Rome Statute under Bill Clinton, and John Bolton informed the UN in May 2003 on behalf of the George W. Bush administration that “the United States does not intend to become a party to the treaty,” and “has no legal obligations arising from its signature on December 31, 2000.”
Other states that have never signed up to and/or ratified the Rome Statute include Russia, China, and India—existing or aspiring regional superpowers who, like the US, are unwilling to let a multilateral court intrude on their sovereignty—and Israel. Among the reasons Israel gives for opting out is the ICC’s definition of “the transfer of parts of the civilian population of an occupying power into occupied territory” as a war crime.
Bush, Obama and Trump
US relations with the ICC remained fractious during the Bush administration. The American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA) passed in January 2002 prohibited US cooperation with the ICC, blocked US funding of the ICC, and required the US “to enter into agreements with all ICC signatory states to shield American citizens abroad from ICC jurisdiction” under pain of sanctions if they did not comply.
That same year, the US threatened to veto renewal of all UN peacekeeping missions unless its troops were granted immunity from ICC prosecution. It withdrew this demand in 2004, after pictures emerged of US troops abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
The Obama administration cooperated with the ICC in various ways, including supporting the UN Security Council’s referral of Libya to the court in 2011 and sharing intelligence on ICC-indicted fugitives. But it never ratified the treaty—or repealed ASPA.
The first Trump administration reverted to hostility. When the ICC prosecutor’s office requested in March 2019 to open a probe into possible war crimes in Afghanistan, the US responded by threatening to revoke visas for any ICC staff seeking to investigate not only Americans, but also Israelis and other US allies.
The ICC wished to “look into methods that the US military and CIA used to interrogate detainees” in Afghanistan, because:
There is reasonable basis to believe that, since May 2003, members of the US armed forces and the CIA have committed the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape and other forms of sexual violence pursuant to a policy approved by US authorities.
The US responded by taking the unprecedented step of individually sanctioning two top ICC officials, prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and head of jurisdiction Phakiso Monochoko.
Biden and the ICJ
On April 2, 2021, US President Joe Biden wrote to Congress announcing that he was ending Trump’s visa restrictions and sanctions on ICC officials. When the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin in March 2023 for war crimes in Ukraine, Biden commented “Well, I think it’s justified… I think it makes a very strong point.”
Despite these signs of détente, the Biden administration’s “ironclad” defense of Israeli actions in Gaza increasingly brought the US into open conflict again with both the ICC and the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, which is regarded as world’s highest court in matters of international law.
On December 29, 2023 South Africa brought an application to the ICJ charging the State of Israel with committing genocide in Gaza, and requested the court to order provisional measures to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention.”
On January 26, 2024 the court ruled that the risk of genocide in Gaza was “plausible,” and ordered Israel to take immediate steps to prevent the situation deteriorating further. These and further measures ordered by the ICJ on March 28 and May 24 were flouted by Israel and essentially ignored in Washington and other Western capitals. The US meantime used its UN Security Council veto to forestall any binding ceasefire motion.
Responding to the January 26 judgment, the US State Department emphasized that “Israel has the right to take action to ensure the terrorist attacks of October 7 cannot be repeated” and reasserted its belief that “allegations of genocide are unfounded.”
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly issued a statement that paid lip service to “the ICJ’s critical role in the peaceful settlement of disputes and its work in upholding the international rules-based order,” while emphasizing that “Our support for the ICJ does not mean that we accept the premise of the case brought by South Africa.” Like the US, Joly spent more time discussing “Israel’s right to exist and defend itself” and Hamas’s brutalities on October 7 than addressing the ICJ orders, on which she had little to say.
The ICC arrest warrants
Relations between the international courts and the US reached their nadir on November 21, when the ICC issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare” and “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
Western politicians erupted. “The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” thundered Biden. “Let me be clear once again: whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”1
Though he undertook to abide by the ICC ruling, Justin Trudeau found “the sense of an equivalency between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the bloodthirsty terrorists that lead up Hamas” “troubling.”
The point both seem to have missed was that the equivalency lay in the war crimes both sides were alleged to have committed, which were equally contrary to international law.
0n February 6, 2025, just two weeks after he began his second term as US president, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.”
The first person to be individually sanctioned was ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan, the man who was responsible for preparing the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Four more judges were sanctioned on June 5. Two more judges and two ICC assistant prosecutors were sanctioned on August 20. One of them was Canadian Kimberly Prost.
Canada and the ICC—now
The ICC denounced this latest US move as “a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates under the mandate from 125 States Parties from all regions.” Belgium, Denmark, France, Finland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Senegal, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden all condemned the US sanctions, as did Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Bar Association, and the European Parliament Subcommittee on Human Rights.
But from Canada—crickets. Well, to be precise, on August 20 Canada’s UN ambassador Bob Rae, responding to a CTV News report on the sanctions, angrily posted on X:
This US attack on the International Criminal Court and its judges is disgraceful. Judge Kim Prost are [sic] carrying out their public duties. Attacks on them by Russia, Israel and the US are intended to weaken and intimidate the international legalsystem. They must not succeed.
But for whatever reason—some have suggested that he was pressurized into doing so by the Canadian government—Rae quickly deleted the post. And that was that.
Ten days have passed since the US sanctioned Canada’s senior international judge, and there has been no official response from the Government of Canada.
Mark Carney supposedly had “a productive and wide-ranging conversation” with Trump on August 21 in which “We focused on trade challenges, opportunities, building a new economic and security relationship between Canada and the US, and supporting long-term peace and security for Ukraine and Europe.” Neither his post on X nor the official readout from the call contains any reference to Kimberly Prost. Carney has since made public pronouncements on the economy, Canada–US trade, Ukraine, and a new Canada–Poland Strategic Partnership, but he has remained silent on the issue of the ICC.
Foreign minister Anita Anand, whose brief this surely is, was reported to have expressed disquiet about Prost’s sanctioning in her meeting with Marco Rubio on August 21, but her own account of the meeting makes no mention of it. Her brief X post reads, “Today, I had a productive meeting with Secretary @SecRubio in Washington. We discussed collaboration on shared priorities, including: supporting Ukraine, advancing Arctic security, addressing the security crisis in Haiti and continuing to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza.”
So far as I am aware, no other statement regarding American strongarming of the ICC—the court Canada worked so hard to establish back in the day—or the sanctioning of Kimberly Prost has been issued by any Canadian government agency or senior officials.
Elbows down
On Friday August 22, two days after Marco Rubio sanctioned Kimberly Prost, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world’s hunger watchdog, declared a state of famine in and around Gaza City. Its report emphasized that “This famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed.”
This seems highly unlikely since Israel is now in the early stages of a new offensive to recapture Gaza City, and is in the process of clearing out an estimated 1m inhabitants.
If not yet a truth universally acknowledged, it is certainly a truth that is increasingly recognized that since 1967, Israel has enforced a cruel apartheid regime within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and that since October 8, 2023, the IDF has been engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and probable genocide in Gaza.
Many Palestinians would argue that the genocide is merely the culmination of a Zionist program of ethnic cleansing that began with the establishment of the state of Israel and the attendant Nakba in wars of 1947-8.
It would be nice, even at this very late stage in the day, if some Western leader were to electrify the UN with a speech calling for total sanctions against Israel and its repressive regime and threatening absolute severance of relations with Israel—or even a UN-led peacekeeping military intervention—if there is no progress in dismantling the apartheid regime or halting the ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Of one thing we can be sure. That leader will not be Mark Carney. We can be equally confident that Anita Anand will not emulate Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp and several of his cabinet colleagues in quitting the government in protest at its refusal to implement stronger sanctions against Israel.
I hold no particular brief for Brian Mulroney—or John Diefenbaker, or Lester Pearson, or Pierre Elliott Trudeau, or Jean Chrétien. They all had their faults. But they were Titans compared with the moral Lilliputians who govern Canada today. I can’t imagine any of them would have thrown Kim Prost under the bus to get “the best trade deal with the United States… better than that of any country.” Even the language echoes Trump.
Nor, I suspect, would they have stood by for two years while Israel obliterated Gaza and bombed, shelled, and finally starved hundreds of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children to death—whatever the reason. Never again means never again.
coasts of bohemia 