Opinion

Hands off our BBC: Trump’s tug of war over the BBC narrative

Claire Jones 

Today
Left Foot Forward

A sloppy edit turns Trump into a crusader against bias, stepping in to protect us from a broadcasting corporation already leaning his way

The debate over the BBC’s misleading edit of Donald Trump’s Capitol Hill speech is quite a muddle. Trump is performatively posturing with a line about how the BBC has deeply wounded his reputation by wilfully presenting him as a ‘radical, aggressively stirring violence at the White House, when in fact he’s simply a benign, peace-loving moderate’.

Tangled in the rigging

The muddle begins with Trump effectively accusing the BBC of rigging his speech. However, the speech was itself delivered to support protests about the alleged rigging of the 2020 election results to steal victory from Trump.

Furthermore, Trump’s sob story is, arguably, a ruse to conceal his and his UK far-right accomplices’ intentions. Having persuaded the world that the BBC is hopelessly woke, the aim is then to either replace it with a suitable propaganda vehicle for the far-right, or transform it into a full-throttle far-right mouthpiece. So, Trump’s attack on the BBC is evidently also a rigged campaign with a (poorly concealed) agenda.

The BBC has apologised for its careless edit. But, predictably, Trump doesn’t want to lose this golden opportunity to trash an organisation he can present as dangerously insurgent. So he is ignoring the apology and steaming ahead with suing the BBC to the tune of $1bn – $5bn.

Toy throwing

After some debate, the BBC has decided to ‘do a Hugh Grant’ and ‘stand up to the US bully’, rather than backing off and instead perhaps offering an out-of-court settlement for Trump to add to his lucrative collection of extortions from other media organisations.

It’s worth saying that the honourable route is risky because it’s hard to see how a court case could avoid quickly leading to stand offs between the BBC and Trump over whether he was, in fact, instrumental in inciting violence on 6 Jan; also on whether the 2020 election was, in fact, egregiously stolen from him.

If Trump can’t even handle the notion that the BBC misreported him, he definitely won’t cope with this latest bete noir telling the world’s front pages that he incited violence and in service to specious lies about stolen elections.

Even if Trump loses the court case, which is likely, this ‘nasty truth-telling’ could trigger a toy-throwing meltdown, a comprehensive hate campaign that would make a mockery of Starmer’s carefully curated Trump appeasements.

We could find ourselves showered with all manner of punishments including an even bigger BBC penalty for taxpayers, a ceremonial tearing up of the UK tariff agreement, plus anything else this interfering child despot can conjure, from occupying Guernsey to designating our fishing fleets as drug cartels.

Bullies make terrible partners but separation is somewhere between unpleasant and horrendous. A neurotic, spiteful narcissist feeling cruelly spurned by his special friend is a loose cannon. It’s not that one should defer to bullies, only that we should strap in for some outlandish consequences.

The new bias

But aside from the debate over who is doing the rigging, who the real propaganda mouthpiece is here, and how to respond, there’s a further complication.

The UK commentariat has rallied quickly to the BBC’s side, earnestly appealing to its impartiality to counter Trump’s devious far-right onslaught. But the corporation isn’t impartial, at least, not any more.

The BBC news rightly deserves its traditional global reputation as a trusted voice of authority and fine journalism. But over the last 15 years it has lost its prized impartiality status. Why?

Leaning right

The right-wing has a little cache of cases to ‘prove’ that, in fact, the BBC is a left-leaning rag which Trump has rightly observed needs cleaning up. Aside from the editing fiasco, they roll out examples such as the BBC’s alleged anti-Israel bias and pro-Hamas reporting on Gaza.

But there are more compelling reasons for viewing the BBC as leaning the other way.

 Here’s five:

First, BBC bias has to be viewed in the context of the heavily right-wing makeup of its top team. To help deliver Brexit, Boris Johnson infiltrated the corporation with numerous Conservative figureheads. It is completely implausible to insist that key political appointments such as Robbie Gibb and Tim Davie have no influence on output.

Second, the BBC became increasingly vulnerable because of financial difficulties arising from ever-increasing competition with other forms of media and changing public tastes in news consumption. This fuelled a rightward shift because it became increasingly necessary to appease the dominant establishment view. So, journalistic independence began to shrink. As Lewis Goodall notes, BBC journalists were told to write “as if they had the Daily Mail on their shoulder”.

Third, and in line with the above, studies show numerous instances of right-wing bias: the BBC gave 33 times more attention to Israeli than Palestinian deaths in the Gaza conflict. Domestically, right-wing politicians generally receive over 50% more BBC airtime than left-wing politicians. Question Time is a clear example of massive BBC “over-platforming” of Reform.

Fourth, these instances are just part of a relentless daily drip-feed of anti-left commentary across platforms from a whole stable of BBC journalists. This subtle spread of bias is a ubiquitous feature of the BBC’s slanted reporting, setting “a tone across articles, topics and time, that is cumulatively formidable”.

Fifth, in attacking BBC left-wing bias, the far-right, insatiable as ever, is demanding its pound of flesh. The BBC’s attempts to appease the right can never go far enough. Shouting at the corporation for being ‘woke left’ when it’s already manifestly right-leaning is both an exercise in gaslighting and a flogging whip to make the horse canter rightwards even faster.

Newsflash: Trump gets it right

Thus we have a curious and even more complicated situation where we have to acknowledge that Trump’s accusation is partly correct. The BBC is biased, just not typically in the way he claims.

If we accept that the UK establishment’s assiduous defence of BBC impartiality is false then this puts the BBC in further jeopardy. As is so often the case with far-right attacks, they begin with little truths and build on these to create large bodies of lies. So, Trump will exploit this weakness in our defence to strengthen his campaign to destroy the BBC (as we knew it).

What next?

It’s right that the BBC hasn’t acquiesced to Trump’s demands. This would effectively have been to concede that his attack on the BBC as a leftie propaganda mouthpiece is fair. The BBC would then be considerably more vulnerable to being removed or drastically weakened with the floodgates opened to receive GB News style far-right content.

It would also have meant that the BBC is permanently on trial and every step of its reportage minutely examined with gestapo-style vigilance. Its journalists would become chilled to the bone and coerced into truly ugly right-leaning narratives that are far more explicit and extravagent than we’ve seen so far.

But nor should the outcome be that the UK stays resolutely behind a false defence of the BBC as impartial. This cannot stand and is just grist for the far-right’s mill.

A turning point

The Trump episode should provide a turning point. A fortuitous gap has appeared through the resignations of Director General Tim Davie and Head of News Deborah Turness. As Secretary of State for Culture and Media, Lisa Nandy must take this opportunity to fill this gap with independent directors and also replace Gibb with a non-political appointment. The government has to ensure that the top personnel at the BBC are genuinely independent and not guided by partisan interests.

The episode also calls for a public Levison-style inquiry involving government-funded scientific research into BBC reporting. It should cover the last 15 years and provide rigorous and comprehensive analyses of the true extent of bias in BBC news coverage and commentary.

Making the BBC great again

Taking these steps to put our own publishing house in order would be a patriotic reminder to the UK far-right that Trump has no right to interfere with our news corporations.

At the same time, Trump’s absurd attack also provides a long-awaited moment finally to get our most cherished and valuable news institution on a properly independent footing, away from the political intereference which, since Johnson’s tenure, has been steadily corrupting it, and away from the new threat of far-right take-overs.

In this age of disinformation, returning the BBC to its position as a global beacon of trustworthy news reporting would be one of the most worthwhile and democracy-preserving actions the government could possibly take.

Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass

 BBC vs King Con

Mahir Ali 

Published November 19, 2025 

DAWN

NEITHER Donald Trump nor any of his associates expressed any righteous indignation over an episode of BBC TV’s Panorama when it was broadcast more than a year ago. After all, it wasn’t aired in the US.

Now that it has been brought to his attention, the American president has threatened to sue Britain’s public broadcaster for $1bn (perhaps even $5bn) for its editorial audacity in stitching together two tiny segments of his warm-up speech to the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. The words “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol” were separated by more than 50 minutes from the advice: “And we fight. We fight like hell.” By splicing together the 12-second segment, the BBC show is accused of suggesting that Trump explicitly invited the violence that followed.

Frankly, no one who listened to the entire speech or observed Trump’s subsequent actions could have come to a different conclusion. Shortly afterwards, the House of Representatives impeached him for a second time on that very basis. The BBC’s editing could have been more judicious, but it hardly qualifies as a billion-dollar error — or a substantial reason for heads to roll.

Hitherto, Trump has only tried suing US media entities (as part of a broad vendetta that stretches from individuals to universities), for facetious reasons, and corporations such as Paramount and Disney have caved in by donating millions to the future presidential library foundation. Reparations have also been extracted from Meta and YouTube. His $15bn suit against The New York Times for critical coverage has gone nowhere, much like his bid to sue The Wall Street Journal for revealing Trump’s salacious 50th birthday message to the paedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.


The broadcaster is defensible, unlike Trump.

Any defamation case against the BBC filed in Florida (as Trump has indicated) is unlikely to bear fruit, given everything he has said about the events of Jan 6. Trump himself, mind you, is a media owner whose personal Truth Social feed is a relentless stream of pernicious blather (some of it potentially defamatory) alternating with self-aggrandising re-posts.

At the same time, it’s hard to empathise with the BBC, whose claims to independence and impartiality have often been suspect. The silly argument that the broadcaster must be doing something right if it regularly comes under attack from both the left and the far right continues to be occasionally regurgitated. But it can be said that since its inception more than 100 years ago, it has often been seen to be aligned with the British establishment.

Sure, it has every now and then incurred government wrath and faced takeover threats. Such instances mostly flowed from disputes within the ruling elite, rather than reflecting a nod towards popular discontent. For instance, robust reporting on the ‘dodgy dossier’ used to justify Britain’s participation in the 2003 military assault on Iraq followed secret briefings that indicated scepticism among the intelligence agencies about Baghdad posing an imminent threat. The Suez and Falklands wars also stirred a degree of BBC dissent (and a predictable backlash) for similar reasons.

The BBC’s global recognition testifies to its diminishing but still significant role as a conduit for Britain’s soft power. But no one can seriously deny that it has, over the decades, served as a home for many worthy journalists, and still does. Domestically, news operations are only one part of the media behemoth, and it has so far survived the challenges posed by new technologies and changing patterns of news consumption — plus a ser­ies of sex and paedophilia sca­­ndals.

Its biggest current challenge comes from cult­ure warriors such as board member Robbie Gibbs — a “proper That­ch­e­rite conservative” (by his own description), former Tory spin doctor and linked to GB News, who in 2020 rescued the Jewish Chronicle with undeclared resources — and others who wish to turn it another far-right outfit, or destroy it.

Political appointments to its executive cadre are the bane of the BBC, and its licence fee and charter. Among its various other missteps and follies, it has failed to adequately push back against charges of being unfair towards Israel, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary in the face of a genocide that echoes its hostility towards anti-fascist opinions in the run-up to World War II. Its pointless efforts to strike a ‘balance’ are reflected in the airtime offered to Nigel Farage and climate change denialists. Beyond its multifarious inadequacies in the news and current affairs sphere, there is much to cherish among its cultural output.

It remains to be seen whether the BBC can be rehabilitated as a relatively reliable source of news and views, but at least that is a possibility, however remote. Who could honestly make the same claim about King Con’s White House enterprise?

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2025

BBC on the Rack

by Stuart Littlewood / November 17th, 2025

So Trump suddenly threatens to sue the BBC for $1 billion for a misleading splice-up of video clips broadcast over a year ago. A BBC news editor — Raffi Berg — is suing journalist Owen Jones for exposing his biased judgement in reporting Gaza war news. And two top knobs at the BBC, Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of news Deborah Turness, jump before they’re pushed.

The British public are angry enough at having to pay the BBC’s extortionate TV licence fee only to have biased news beamed at them. If Trump were to win his $1 billion claim he’d be paid off with licence payers’ money which would infuriate the public even more.

If Berg were to proceed against Jones it would open a whole new can of worms and magnify what’s already known about pro-Israel bias inside the state broadcaster.

And the departure of the two top post-holders from the BBC leaves too many iffy editors still in place and the bias problem still unresolved.

Mismanaging news standards

When, in November 2023, BBC senior management attended a meeting with at least 100 staffers to discuss coverage of Gaza, Deborah Turness called out, in an attempt to assert control of the meeting: “We’ve got to all remember that this all started on 7 October.” Erasing the decades of Israeli occupation before October 7 was a stunning example of how distorted the mindset of those at the top can be.

As for Berg, Mint Press points to his former employment with the US State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a unit widely regarded as a CIA front.   “Berg is currently the subject of considerable scrutiny after thirteen BBC employees spoke out, claiming, among other things, that his ‘entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel’ and that he holds ‘wild’ amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of ‘extreme fear’ at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’.”

BBC journalists also claimed Davie and Turness stood in the way of change. Both were aware of concerns about Berg but ignored them.

And according to Owen, at a ‘listening session’ meeting between staffers and Tim Davie “they noted Berg’s history and associations as indicative of bias, pointing to instances where journalists’ copy had been changed prior to publication. They made specific requests: that stories should, as a rule, emphasize that Israel had not granted the BBC access to Gaza, that the network should end the practice of presenting the official Israeli versions of events as fact, and that the BBC should do more to offer context about Israeli occupation and the fact that Gaza is overwhelmingly populated by descendants of refugees forcibly driven from their homes beginning in 1948. While Davie told staff that management would ‘look into’ staff objections, to date no response ever came back.”

In response to a request for comment, the BBC said it unequivocally stood by Berg’s work and asserted that the BBC was “the world’s most trusted international news source” and its “coverage should be judged on its own merits and in its entirety. If we make mistakes we correct them.”

But complaints have continued, for example the use of emotional words like ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocities’ to describe Hamas’s attacks but not in reference to the slaughter perpetrated by Israeli forces. A failure to provide historical context, crucial omissions, and a lack of critical engagement with Israel’s claims, were also mentioned.

Staffers acknowledged the pressure the BBC faces from pro-Israel lobbyists and emphasize that their sole objective was to uphold the BBC’s values of fairness and impartiality and to produce content “without fear or favour” — principles they felt had been cast aside in deference to Israeli narratives. The website, headed by Raffi Berg, was considered the BBC’s worst violator of editorial standards. They also raised concerns about Robbie Gibb, one of five people who serve on the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee along with Davie, Turness, the Chairman of the Arts Council Nicholas Serota, and BBC Chair Samir Shah.

Gibb is responsible for helping to define the BBC’s commitment to impartiality and respond to complaints about the BBC’s coverage on Israel and Palestine. But between 2017 and 2019 he’d served as director of communications for Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, and in 2020 he led a consortium to rescue the Jewish Chronicle from bankruptcy. He then joined the BBC board as a non-executive director while continuing his involvement with the Jewish Chronicle, saying in his Declaration of Personal Interests that he was the 100% owner of that newspaper until a venture capitalist took over in August 2024. According the Companies House Gibb was sole director of Jewish Chronicle Media from April 2020 to August 2024 and was succeeded by Ian Austin (Lord Austin of Derby) and Jonathan Kandel. The Jewish Chronicle Ltd was dissolved in February 2023. Gibb’s links to the Jewish Chronicle and its slavish pro-Israel stance were widely known, so it’s puzzling how he could ever have been thought sufficiently impartial for a key position managing the BBC’s editorial standards.

Openness and transparency are not BBC strong points either. Back in March campaigner Deborah Mallender, in a Freedom of Information request, asked the BBC:

(1) Is it true that your Chief of your Middle East desk Raffi Berg has collaborated with Mossad and worked for the CIA as per this widely distributed media report?
(2) How does that affect your claim of impartiality, unspun news and claims of upholding the integrity of professional journalism?
(3) Have you received any complaints from your own journalists about this employee?
(4) Have you received any communication from any politician about this appointment nationally or internationally? How many? Who communicated?
(5) Have you received any complaints from members of the public about this? How many?

The BBC’s reply?

“In response to parts 1 and 2 of your request, please be advised that we do not consider this to constitute a valid request under the FOI Act. The Act gives a general right of access to information that we hold in our records, e.g. in writing. We are not required to create new information to respond to a request, or to give a judgement, opinion or comment that is not already recorded. In response to parts 3, 4 and 5 of your request, please be advised that section 12 of the FOI Act states the BBC to does not have to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ (defined in the Fees Regulations) to comply with the request.”

Meanwhile, Trump has received an apology from the BBC for its “error of judgement”, and that should be enough. It is surely beneath any normal US president to pursue the broadcasting arm of an allied power for such a preposterous sum, though not in Trump’s case. Nor should the BBC even consider stroking this conceited man’s bloated ego and forking out one penny of British public’s licence fee money. On the other hand I would gladly pay that fee if the BBC were to force Trump to bring his action in the UK High Court. My understanding is that it must be done within 1 year and Trump is out of time. Case dismissed.

Stuart Littlewood, after working on jet fighters in the RAF, became an industrial marketing specialist. He served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and a member of the Police Authority, produced two photo-documentary books including Radio Free Palestine (with foreword by Jeff Halper), and has contributed to online news and opinion publications over many years. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

Tony Blair Gaslighting Gaza’s Future

By his own testimony, the former British PM Tony Blair wants nothing more than to resolve conflicts worldwide. Yet, his long interest in the Middle East is ridden with conflicts of interest and tech billionaire donors.

by Dan Steinbock | Nov 10, 2025 | 

The Quest for Gaza’s Energy, Part 3
Read part 1 here
Read part 2 here

As the U.S.-mediated ceasefire is taking hold of Gaza, the Trump administration is pushing its peace plan, which is premised on post-genocide opportunities for infrastructure and property development. In this quest, Tony Blair is the public face; Jared Kushner, the commissioner; and the Trump White House, the architect.

But the other side of the story involves gas – and former British PM’s two-decade long effort to cash on the promising deals, vis-à-vis his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) and its staff of more than 900 people who are advancing his ideas in up to 45 countries.

U.S. administrations and the role/s of Blair in Gaza

As British PM, Blair developed a fascination with the Middle East, including the Bush Jr administration’s 2003 war on Iraq. Swearing by the false allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Blair steered the UK into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis earning him a reputation as a war criminal. Ironically, in Gaza, he will oversee the “Board of Peace.”

Shaking hands with Bush after their press conference in the East Room of the White House, November 2004 – over a year after the misguided and misrepresented Iraq War

In the Middle East, Blair likes to tout his 2009 success of securing radio frequencies from Israel to allow the creation of a second Palestinian cell phone operator (while also allowing JP Morgan to profit hugely). What is left unmentioned is the reality that Israel released the frequencies in exchange for a deal from the Palestinian leadership to drop the issue at the UN of Israeli war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

This was the Gaza War of 2008-09 which served as a prelude to and early test of the Obliteration Doctrine that would account for the Gaza genocide barely two decades later.

Making Gaza safe for American capitalism

When Blair left Downing Street, he initially engaged in lucrative commercial and prestigious philanthropic activities, including advising the U.S. financial giant JP Morgan for $1 million per-year and Zurich Insurance for a six-figure salary, and PetroSaudi on how to do business in China (for a 2% commission), while serving as the Middle East peace envoy for the Quartet of the US, UN, EU and Russia.

As the lines between advising, salaries and politics grew blurry, Blair consolidated his activities in 2017 – including his Faith Foundation, Sports Foundation, Governance Initiative and Tony Blair Associates – into his Institute for Global Change.

In Blair’s view, the extraordinary level of contemporary uncertainty is today addressed by two types of politicians, “reality creators and reality managers.” He saw himself as a “reality creator.” Managing the game was not for him; dominating it, was. That was the key to success and profits.

Blair’s institute was cloned in the image of the Clinton Foundation, another equally controversial operation, initially portrayed as a quasi-philanthropic pursuit, but criticized as a shrewd revenue-machine cashing on the poorest conflict-ridden countries.

By 2022, Blair’s Institute made more than $145 million in revenue. The critics saw TBI as a lobbying organization bankrolled by billionaires and countries, controversial track-record in human rights, and an overall approach dictated by neoliberal corporate interests. Gaza was no exception.

In July, the Institute’s people reportedly participated in a controversial meeting in which post-war Gaza plans were outlined in a presentation led by Israeli businessmen. It used “financial models developed inside Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub.” Featuring plans for a Trump Riviera and an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone, the Great Trust project included a proposal to pay “half a million” Palestinians to leave Gaza, in order to attract real estate investors to the area.

The technology interests

Another side of the TBI is its great interest in technology, presumably to cut costs on the public sector and promote public good. Those efforts are dictated by indirect cash schemes, thanks to one of TBI’s biggest donors, Larry Ellison. Ellison is the co-founder of the global technology company Oracle which has a market cap of $825 billion. It has invested in the Trump administration and its Secretary of State Rubio. Reportedly, Ellison has donated or promised $300 million to Blair’s Institute.

Reimagining Technology for Government: A Conversation with Larry Ellison and Tony Blair

Digitalization of health systems and other public-sector activities is one of Blair’s pet projects and perhaps one to promote in Gaza. This interest seems to originate from the early 2020s, when Oracle bought the healthcare IT company Cerner for $28 billion.

With a secular Jewish background, Ellison has longstanding ties with Israel. Since 2017, with the first Trump administration and its Messianic Israel champions, Ellison has donated increasingly to militant causes, including $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and a controversial archaeological dig in Arab East Jerusalem. In 2019, a $1 billion lawsuit was filed against several Israel supporters, including Ellison, for conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territories, committing war crimes, and funding genocide.

In 2021 Ellison, who had previously hosted Netanyahu in his Hawaiian island, offered the Israeli PM a post at Oracle, while seeking to protect him from corruption charges.

Recently, Ellison’s son David consolidated the Hollywood studio Paramount Skydancd and once-great CBS News under his control, while installing self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. Reportedly, he also participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, including targeting American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

These are the benefactors behind Tony Blair’s Institute and his role as the director of Gaza’s peace and development.

 Creating “new realities” in Gaza

The efforts to develop the Gaza Marine natural gas field have been hindered for almost three decades. With the prospects of ceasefire, these efforts are accelerating.

Irrespective of their official mandates, the “reality creators” that have already positioned themselves in the area – property developers like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, and political intermediaries, such as Tony Blair – are likely to use their current posts to cash on the Gaza opportunities in the future.

After two years of infrastructure destruction and genocidal atrocities in Gaza, the Strip is ecocide-ridden.

Haunted by a series of moral hazards and interests of conflict, Blair will be in charge of an area cleansed of armed conflict. Presumably buzzing with development, it will serve as a “special economic zone” through which foreign capital can flow. It will be overseen by his international “board of peace.”

The quasi-colonial protectorate pledges boldly in the name of “reformed Palestine” in which Palestinians have little or no say – once again.

The author of The Obliteration Doctrine (2025) and The Fall of Israel (2024), Dr Dan Steinbock, a visionary of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/

The original version of this series of commentaries was published by the Informed Comment (US) in two parts on October 16 and 17, 2025.

Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net 

War on Gaza

War and genocide

by Eric Walberg / November 10th, 2025

FOR LEASE OR SALE; KUSHNER REALTY

The struggles for Palestinian liberation and climate justice are one and the same, according to Marwan Bishara. The eastern Mediterranean is one of the most climate-vulnerable places on the planet. Whereas worldwide temperatures have increased by an average of 1.1°C since pre-industrial times, in Israel/Palestine average temperatures have risen by 1.5°C between 1950 and 2017, with a forecast increase of 4°C by the end of the century for the 400 million people living in the region.

Despite the majority of Middle East countries being signatories to the Paris Climate Accords, so far, their leaders have failed to meet the commitments made in the agreement. Moreover, oil-rich countries in the region continue to increase fossil fuel production. The United Arab Emirates chose to appoint the head of its state-run oil company as the president of the 2025 climate conference in Dubai (COP28), though even this farce pales in comparison to the hypocrisy displayed by their western counterparts. The US will be responsible for over one-third of all planned fossil fuel expansion through 2050. President Biden called climate change an ‘existential threat’ and announced the creation of a climate conservation corps at the same time as the US broke a record for oil production.

This hypocrisy perfectly mirrors the long-standing response of affluent, and powerful, western nations to the Palestinian tragedy, which spout words of protest but continue to provide arms and fuel to the genocidaires. On climate change, they came up with deceptive concepts like carbon offset and carbon credit to evade meaningful action and a just, swift transition to renewable energy. On Palestine, they devised unworkable peace plans that only serve to deepen Palestinian oppression. Under President Trump this willful destruction of the environment will get far worse, as he denies there is any climate crisis at all, and chants ‘Drill, drill, drill’. On Palestine, Trump follows the will of Netanyahu, demanding the complete disarmament of Hamas, the surrender of the Palestinians’ legitimate resistance to occupation.

US hegemony rests on two key pillars in the region and beyond. First, Israel as a Euro-American settler colony, which is an advanced imperialist outpost in the so-called Middle East. Israel is the number one ally of the United States and maintains US hegemony in the region and control of its vast oil resources. The second pillar is the reactionary oil-rich Gulf monarchies. The Palestinian cause is not merely a moral human rights issue, but is essentially a struggle against US-led imperialism and global fossil capitalism, i.e., a vital link in the struggle to save the planet. There can be no climate justice, no just transition to a way of life which doesn’t lead to an end to life, without dismantling the racist settler-colonial state of Israel.

Blowback from Israel’s erasure of Palestine

Equally cynical is Israel’s routine confiscation of Palestinian lands under the pretext of environmental conservation. This tactic, known as green colonialism, exposes Israel’s use of environmentalism to displace the indigenous population of Palestine and exploit its resources. Israeli green zones are primarily established to legitimise land seizures and prevent the return of displaced Palestinians, further entrenching a system of apartheid.

There is only one planet Earth. Today, the climate justice movement calls not only for action to mitigate climate change but also for fundamental shifts in social structures that perpetuate the environmental crisis, addressing issues of social equality, distributive justice, and control of natural resources. Israel exacerbates the climate risks facing Palestinians by denying them the right to manage their land and resources, making them more vulnerable to climate-related events.

Israel’s forest fires in recent years are all due to planting invasive species of fast-growing European trees—pines, cypresses, and eucalyptus—that overwrite Palestine’s identity. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) placed blue donation boxes in Jewish homes worldwide, collecting money to buy land (for the Jewish National Fund, which sell only to Jews) and plant these alien trees—claiming it was planting forests on “barren, desolate lands.”After the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist forces destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, the JNF planted forests atop the ruins. Pine trees now grow where homes once stood in Al-Qabo, Allar, and Ein Karem.

These forests are green graves, hiding erased villages and blocking refugees from returning. Fast-growing European pines, covering 40% of JNF lands, are ecological time bombs. Their oily needles ignite easily, fueling wildfires. Native olives and carobs—trees that Palestinians nurtured for generations—make up just 5% of JNF plots. This is not conservation. It is conquest, replacing resilient ecosystems with flammable monocultures. The aim is to efface all traces of Palestinian existence, and without concern for the environmental effects. It is ecocide, and utterly criminal.

In the Naqab desert, the Yatir Forest—funded by overseas donors—displaces Bedouin communities under the lie of fighting desertification. Meanwhile, vineyards guzzling stolen water grow on stolen land, their wine marketed as a revival of ancient Judean roots. The truth? They are symbols of colonial theft, draining Palestinian wells dry.

Even nature reserves serve the occupation. Israel bars Palestinians from farming on 70,000 hectares of ‘protected’ land, while settlers build roads and parks. Bulldozers clear olive trees to create ‘buffer zones’ for settler highways. This is not conservation. It is erasure, disguised as environmentalism.

Some of the key issues

* water, wastewater, and hygiene. Even before 2023, Palestinians in Gaza were restricted to water consumption levels well below the recommended minimum. The World Health Organization recommends 100 liters of water per day per person, yet, before the most recent war, Palestinians in Gaza had access to only 83 liters per day because of the occupation-driven lack of control over their own water resources. Under the current genocidal regime, this means close to no water at all. Even before the 2023 invasion of Gaza, Israel was denying spare parts for sanitation infrastructure. All sanitation facilities have been destroyed in Gaza. As a result, some tens of thousands of cubic meters of sewage are seeping into groundwater and flowing into the Mediterranean Sea every day—resources that are used by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Settlers use 6x as much water as Palestinians on the West Bank.

* chemical and debris contamination from bombings; The debris situation in Gaza is unprecedented in several ways including: i) the extent of damage to the housing stock; ii) its geographic spread and spatial density across almost the entire territory of the Gaza Strip; iii) the quantity of debris generated; iv) the rate at which debris is being generated; and v) the expected extremely high levels of UXO [unexploded ordnance, i.e., military ammunition or explosive that failed to explode] contamination.

Previous attacks involving munitions containing heavy metals, asbestos, and other hazardous materials have already contaminated the soil with high concentrations of cobalt and other metals.36 The bombing and use of bulldozers disrupted soil layers and burned (with temperatures of explosions as high as 2000°C), deteriorated, scattered, or completely destroyed the soil (including soil microorganisms). UNEP estimates that the approximately 40 million tons of debris will take 15 years to clear. Much of the land is poisoned and unusable for agriculture.

* noise pollution; with an average of 1 bomb dropped every 10 minutes in Gaza, continuous drone and jet flights, rockets, bombardment from tanks and ships, and other military activities was noted to result in more than double the allowable limit which is the allowable limit for short periods [of 8 hours] not for months.

* food insecurity; Most of Gaza’s remaining trees, including olive, pomegranate, and citrus orchards—essential not only for food and income but also for air purification and shade—have been completely uprooted. Cutting down olive trees is rampant now in the West Bank.

* traumatic impacts of targeted environmental destruction. 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed in 1948, and millions of olive trees since then—some centuries old—bulldozed or burned. Settlers attack farmers during harvests, turning groves into war zones. This planned genocide is comparable to the genocide against natives an the buffalo slaughter in North America. This loss of connection to land and previous and future generations through olive trees is a traumatic experience, expressed in Palestinian literature and art. For example, Khaled Baraka, a 65-year-old Palestinian who was forced to flee his home, shared his anguish: These trees lived through my moments of joy and sadness. They know my secrets. When I was sad and worried, I would talk to the trees, take care of them … but the war killed those trees.

The whole world suffers

Palestinian climate activists fear that cooperation could be misinterpreted as normalizing relations before the conflict is resolved. It is a situation that Majdalani, of EcoPeace, has frequently faced in her own activism. There’s this pervasive sense of ‘we don’t cooperate with the occupier, it’s not the right political environment.’ But if we wait for the ‘right’ political environment, we will lose more land. We will have more people suffering water shortages, more farmers leaving their farms, and the crisis will continue. Unless something changes, all this is moot for Palestinians, as Greater Israel means they will most likely cease to exist, either through murder, starvation or deportation, and Israel will face all these problems without the people who actually love the land and would work most ‘fanatically’ to heal it. Israelis will use their foreign passports to escape the Hell they have created, leaving Israel to hardcore pseudo-religious fascists, a pariah state spreading its sickness, its poison across the world.

Yes, the world. Genocide of Palestinians is a dress rehearsal for the collective West’s future treatment of climate refugees, argues Hamza Hamouchene, the North Africa programme coordinator at the Transnational Institute. Colombian President Gustavo Petro: genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the South because of the climate crisis. What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.

In the first two months of the genocide in Palestine alone, the CO2 emissions by Israel were greater than the annual emissions of more than 20 nations in the global South…. Half of those emissions are due to the transport and shipping of weaponry by the United States, which shows the deep complicity in genocide and ecocide in that part of the world, and how even the high seas are not immune from Israeli crimes.

Clearly, what is necessary now is implementation of the grassroots world campaign Boycott, Divest, Sanction and an energy embargo of Israel. Colombia has shown the way when they stopped the export of coal to Israel and more recently banned all trade with Israel and expelled all Israeli diplomats. We need the same thing from South Africa. We need the same thing from Brazil, who provides around 10% of crude oil to Israel. We need the same thing from Nigeria, from Gabon, Russia and Azerbaijan that still provide fossil fuels that are being used to massacre Palestinians—to fuel genocide, displacement, to fuel infrastructure of dispossession, to fuel the F35 bombers and AI infrastructure that kills Palestinians every day.

Petro:

Why have large carbon-consuming countries allowed the systematic murder of thousands of children in Gaza? Because Hitler has already entered their homes and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes. We can then see the future: the breakdown of democracy, the end, and the barbarism unleashed against our people, the people who do not emit CO2, the poor people.

It is not just a genocide. A lot of analysts and researchers have been coming up with terms such as urbicide, domicide, epistemicide, ecocide. How about holocide, which means the utter destruction of the social and ecological fabric of life in Palestine?

Asad Rehman from War on Want and Friends of the Earth: We’re seeing now also the same ‘walls and fences’ narrative that Israel has used in terms of the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine, now being exported all over the world… the same technologies are being transplanted all around the world. And already Israel is saying, ‘This is battle-tested weaponry. This is battle-tested surveillance’ and already… selling it to some of ‘our’ despotic regimes. That’s why we need a new internationalism, with the trade union movement at the forefront of building and rebuilding a global anti-apartheid movement.

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

Statehood = Self-determination = No Outside Interference

by Stuart Littlewood / November 10th, 2025

But Trump, Kushner, Witkoff, Blair just don’t get it. And neither do those world leaders who signed up to Trump’s phony ‘Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity’.

Last week a Conservative MP in Westminster submitted a string of written Parliamentary questions about the UK’s recognition of Palestinian statehood:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she plans to withdraw recognition of the State of Palestine in the event that Hamas break any conditions of that recognition.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether the UK will support Palestinian membership of the United Nations, in the context of UK recognition of the State of Palestine.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she made the proscription of Hamas by the Government of the State of Palestine a condition of UK recognition.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what her Department’s policy is on the status of East Jerusalem, in the context of the UK’s recognition of the State of Palestine.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she made continued access for Jewish and Christian communities to holy sites in the State of Palestine a condition of UK recognition.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, if she will make an assessment of the level of (a) human rights and (b) democracy in the State of Palestine.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she has made free and fair elections a condition of the UK’s recognition of the State of Palestine.

They didn’t sound at all Palestine-friendly to me. On the other hand they may have been cleverly drafted to trap the Secretary of State, but that seems unlikely as the MP was not among the 84 parliamentarians who signed the letter calling for sanctions against Israel on the first anniversary of a landmark ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) is “unlawful” and must end “as rapidly as possible”.

And he misses the essential point. Palestinian freedom and self-determination are non-negotiable. It’s a basic right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel, the US or the UK agreeing to it. In short, statehood must not come with conditions attached. So what was the motive behind this MP’s largely irrelevant questions? To inflict even more anxiety on a people who have suffered unspeakable cruelty and injustice not just for the last 2 years but the last 7 decades, and now face extermination by their tormentor while the vultures gather for the rich pickings from their devastated homeland? Or was he just making mischief along with the countless others who should know better?

He is surely aware that a team of 28 independent human rights experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council have warned that any peace plan must absolutely safeguard the human rights of Palestinians, and not create further conditions of oppression. They also advise that key elements of Trump’s so-called peace plan are inconsistent with fundamental rules of international law and the 2024 Advisory Opinion of the ICJ which demands that Israel ends its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The experts’ warnings include the following:

Any peace plan must respect the ground rules of international law. The future of Palestine must be in the hands of the Palestinian people – not imposed in circumstances of extreme duress by outsiders (Trump please note).

The Trump plan does not guarantee the Palestinian right of self-determination as international law requires; and vague pre-conditions put Palestine’s future at the mercy of decisions by outsiders, not in the hands of Palestinians as international law commands.

The ICJ has ruled that fulfilling the right of self-determination cannot be conditional on negotiations.

The “temporary transitional government” is not representative of Palestinians and even excludes the Palestinian Authority, which further violates self-determination and lacks legitimacy.

Who governs is a matter for the Palestinians only, without foreign interference.

An “International Stabilisation Force”, outside the control of the Palestinian people and the United Nations as a guarantor, would be contrary to Palestinian self-determination.

The plan largely treats Gaza in isolation from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, when these areas must be regarded as a unified Palestinian territory and State.

The plan omits any duty on Israel and those who have sustained its illegal attacks in Gaza to compensate Palestinians for illegal war damage.

The plan does not address other fundamental issues such as ending illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, borders, compensation, and refugees.

The plan does not provide a leading role for the UN General Assembly or Security Council, or for UNRWA which is vital to assisting and protecting Palestinians.

The ICJ has been crystal clear: Conditions cannot be placed on the Palestinian right of self-determination. The Israeli occupation must end immediately, totally and unconditionally, with due reparation made to the Palestinians.

The United Nations – not Israel or its closest ally – has been identified by the ICJ as the legitimate authority to oversee the end of the occupation and the transition towards a political solution in which the Palestinians’ right of self-determination is fully realised.

The full list of objections can be found on the UN’s website.

We’re told the MP is a barrister specialising in ethics and compliance. So you’d expect him to know about UN Resolution 37/43 which comprehensively re-affirms previous resolutions and treaties on the universal right to self-determination and the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and all peoples still under foreign domination and alien subjugation – such as the Palestinians. It is hoped he is mindful that Palestinians have been kept waiting for over 100 years for this.

What’s more, 37/43 considers that denying the Palestinian people their inalienable rights to self-determination, sovereignty, independence and return to Palestine, and the repeated acts of aggression by Israel against the peoples of the region, constitute a serious threat to international peace and security.

And, by the way, 37/43 gives Palestinians an unquestionable right, in their struggle for liberation, to “eliminate the threat posed by Israel by all available means including armed struggle”. As China reminded everyone at the ICJ, “armed resistance against occupation is enshrined in international law and is not terrorism”. So who are Trump, Netanyahu and Starmer to insist Palestinians disarm when their neighbour has been illegally occupying them for nearly 78 years and continues genociding them (with US-UK support) as we speak?

As for the MP’s point about “free and fair elections”, there have been no elections to the Palestinian Authority since 2006. As everyone surely knows by now, Hamas won fair and square on that last occasion under the scrutiny of international observers, a result that didn’t suit the Israel-US-UK axis or the ruling Fatah faction. President Mahmoud Abbas indefinitely postponed national elections in April 2021, stating as his reason that Israel refused to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to participate in voting per Israel’s commitment in the Oslo Accords.

Stuart Littlewood, after working on jet fighters in the RAF, became an industrial marketing specialist. He served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and a member of the Police Authority, produced two photo-documentary books including Radio Free Palestine (with foreword by Jeff Halper), and has contributed to online news and opinion publications over many years. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

Holy Spiritual Warfare! Theocratic NEW APOSTOLIC REFORMATION Targets Brazil with Million-Women Rally

by Bill Berkowitz / October 22nd, 2025

Brazil Braces for the Million Women Event: A Huge New Apostolic Reformation Power Play

Calls for million-person marches rarely reach their lofty goals. But when Lou Engle — one of the most outspoken and influential leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) — brings his movement to Brazil on October 25 for the Million Women Event, he may actually succeed in drawing that number. The rally, slated to take place a year ahead of Brazil’s next presidential election, has the potential to be a watershed moment in both religious and political terms.

“It has the potential to be the largest gathering of Christian women in history,” said Virginia Garrard, Professor Emerita of History at the University of Texas, in an interview with Frederick Clarkson for Religion Dispatches.

“I think they may very well exceed a million participants,” she added, noting that unlike many Americans, “Brazilian Pentecostals are very accustomed to attending large rallies.”

In addition to São Paulo’s large Pentecostal population, Garrard pointed out that “people of greater means who can afford to travel to São Paulo and stay in hotels or with friends and family will also travel from around the country to be a part of something so historic.”

So what is the New Apostolic Reformation — and how powerful is it?

This is a media-savvy movement, filling the airwaves with claims that those opposed to them are cultural Marxists, communists and demons that have to be removed from the high places of culture and society. —Rachel Tabachnick

At its core, NAR followers believe that they are waging a spiritual battle for control of the United States. And many see Donald Trump as the vehicle — the perfect leader — to battle demonic forces within the United States.

Writing for Salon, Paul Rosenberg pointed out:

Unlike earlier incarnations of the Christian right, the explicit goal of the widely-discussed but little-understood NAR is to install theocracy with a democratic facade, approximately on the Iranian model. They call it ‘theonomy.’ The movement is led by mutually recognized ‘apostles’ and ‘prophets’ who purport to receive direct guidance from God and see themselves engaged in spiritual warfare — literally, as in fighting actual demons — to gain dominion over the ‘seven mountains of culture’: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government. As in Iran, they wouldn’t just control government but every aspect of society, but would still call it democracy and claim, in the face of America’s ‘Godless Constitution,’ that this was what the founders wanted all along. It’s gaslighting in the name of God.

Last year, journalist Frederick Clarkson, a veteran observer of conservative religious movements, described it this way:

The story of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) lives at the epicenter of the intersection of politics and religion in the US—and reporting about it is as essential as it is challenging.

“The story of NAR is happening in the context of tectonic changes in global Christianity. It’s seldom reported that Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is the second largest sector of global and American Christianity, after Roman Catholicism. It’s also the only major growth sector. … [T]he New Apostolic Reformation comes out of these traditions but doesn’t comprise the whole of the global movement. Rather, it’s a significant organizing element that has also become the edge of the Christian Right in the US and in other countries.

In short, NAR is not a denomination, but a loosely connected network of Christian leaders, churches, and organizations who share a set of theological ideas — particularly around spiritual warfare, prophecy, and the belief that modern-day “apostles” and “prophets” are being raised up to take authority over society and usher in God’s kingdom on earth.

Its reach is difficult to quantify but undeniably global. While it has no formal membership or centralized leadership, its influence can be seen in political movements, culture wars, and massive revival-style rallies — not only in the U.S., but increasingly across Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia.

Late last year, at a webinar titled “The New Apostolic Reformation and the Threat to Democracy in Pennsylvania,” former Political Research Associates researcher Rachel Tabachnick pointed out that The NAR “predates Trump and it will outlast him.” It is  a movement dedicated to “tearing down the establishment, not just in D.C., not just in Harrisburg, but also, and perhaps most importantly … tearing down the traditional religious establishment…. This is not just a religious versus secular movement,” Tabachnick noted, and it should not be framed that way. “This is a movement about reorganizing Christendom under their dominance.”

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Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. Read other articles by Bill.