Conference and Film Screening on News Deserts and Lack of Civic Engagement

While children are gutted by Jewish-American missiles

by Paul Haeder / March 4th, 2026

Below is a commentary for the newspaper I have been publishing my “long-form” commentaries in on a monthly basis, and that newspaper, the Newport News Times, now the Lincoln County Leader, is on the proverbial chopping block.

Here, these people who are buying up what they call “struggling newspapers,” including the Leader:

 

Country Media, Inc., an Oregon-based company, has acquired numerous, often struggling, local newspapers, resulting in some closures and mergers. The firm, led by Steve and Carol Hungerford, has merged publications like The Chronicle and The Chief, while reducing print frequency for others, such as The World in Coos Bay, due to financial pressures.

Key Actions and Closures

• The Umpqua Post: Ceased operations in June 2020 following its acquisition by Country Media.
• Bandon Western World: Printed its final issue in July 2020.
• The World (Coos Bay): Reduced print days from five to two in 2020.
• Mergers: The Chronicle (St. Helens) and The Chief (Clatskanie) merged into The Columbia County Chronicle & Chief. The Lincoln City News Guard and Newport News-Times merged in January 2024.

I had a difficult time getting up the energy to go to this listening session and then the following film screening of the flick:

There were eight student journalists there to assist the listening session, students from the U of Oregon journalism program. I just can’t understand why their faculty mentor, Andrew DeVigal, could not start any session off with a moment of silence for fellow truth seekers:

“Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ began collecting records in 1992,” it said in a statement.

It cautioned that the true number of journalists targeted and killed by Israel could be much higher because some of the killings could be potentially concealed by press restrictions and humanitarian difficulties that complicate conducting investigations during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“With much contemporaneous evidence now destroyed, the true number of Palestinian journalists in Gaza who were deliberately targeted by Israel may never be known,” the CPJ said.

Here’s a small talk in Washington State around local journalism:

Local journalists and supporters of local news gathered at the Edmonds Theater in Edmonds, Wash., on Oct. 25, 2025, for a panel discussion and audience Q&A following the screening of the documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink.” The screening was co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters Snohomish County and the My Neighborhood News Network, which includes My Edmonds News, MLTnews, and Lynnwood Today.

*****

You know, when it comes to “educated” people, those people in the League of Women Voters, and there were mostly retired folk at this Newport, Oregon event, and there were a few “city/county” officials, it’s if there is a bipolar collective psychosis going on. It was noon, Saturday, and I was the only fucker talking about the murdering spree by the Jews of Israel and the Jewish Kosher Nostra in the USA.

Mohammed Shariatmadar stood outside the wreckage of the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran on Saturday morning, unable to process what he was seeing. His six-year-old daughter, Sara, a second-grade student, was among dozens of girls killed when the school was bombed in the first few hours of the war launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, he remained standing in the shade of a cracked wall, staring at the ground and ignoring the commotion around him. He didn’t approach the building, which had been sealed off, but he didn’t move away either. His hands knotted together, then separated, then knotted again, in a repeated motion. Every time a paramedic emerged or an ambulance moved, he quickly raised his head, then returned to staring at the ground. He asked no one a direct question. He was only waiting for his daughter’s name to be called.

When families were finally directed to a gathering point to receive the bodies of their children, he slowly moved forward. When asked if he needed help, he shook his head silently and waited for his daughter’s body to be brought out.

“I cannot understand how a place where innocent children learn can be bombed like this,” Shariatmadar told Drop Site. “We are talking about small children who knew nothing of politics or wars. And yet they are the ones paying the highest price.”

Some 170 students were inside the building, attending morning classes when the missile struck. At least 108 people were killed, according to the public prosecutor’s office in Minab, many of them schoolgirls between seven and 12 years old.

It was unclear if it was a U.S. or Israeli strike. On Saturday, CENTCOM’s spokesperson said they were “looking into” the reports.

*****

The students, college ones, mind you, were given a quick rundown of alternative (sic) sources of news:

Drop Site News, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Monthly Review, Intercept, Palestine Chronicle, Electronic Intifada, Lowkey, Covert Action Magazine, Consortium News, Empire Files, Break Through News, and a few dozen more suggestions to get these J students out of the morass of legacy media, and the manure pile of traditional news gathering and reporting.

Never heard of Truthout, In These Times, The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones?

*****

They hadn’t been exposed to the Hulk Hogan-Peter Thiel-Adelson documentary:

It was diheartening, man, being around the middling crowd, the Democrats, man, so quick to attack Trump, but then, what about . . . ?

There currently exists one legislative vehicle in each chamber through which members can express their position. This month, six new Democratic House members have signed onto a War Powers Resolution aimed at constraining President Trump’s ability to deploy U.S. forces without congressional approval, bringing the total to 82. The legislation, led by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), was first introduced prior to the Trump administration’s unauthorized strikes against Iranian nuclear targets last June. The GOP appears to be largely unified behind a possible war, with Massie being the only Republican House member signed on to the House legislation. Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have introduced a similar effort in the Senate.

Yet despite the resolution’s growing support, Democratic leadership has not clearly rallied behind it. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has issued public concerns about Trump’s rush to war, but has not said whether or not he supports the Khanna-Massie bill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y) statement did not oppose a war, but instead noted the “risks” involved and called for confronting Iran’s “ruthless campaign of terror, nuclear ambitions, regional aggression, and horrific oppression” with “strength, resolve, regional coordination, and strategic clarity” and urged the administration “to consult with Congress and explain to the American people the objectives and exactly why he is risking more American lives.” Following the Trump administration’s Tuesday briefing to the Gang of 8, Schumer added, “This is serious. The administration has to make its case to the American people,” fueling criticism that he was prepared to accept the president’s justifications.

“Leader Schumer’s statements are insufficient. Democratic voters want leadership that’s willing to take a clear stand and oppose the president on major issues like this,” Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs at the Center for International Policy, told RS.

Two recent reports suggest that this lack of pushback could be intentional. A Tuesday story from journalist Aida Chavez’s substack Capital and Empire says top Democrats have worked to block consideration of legislation that would force members to go on record regarding potential military action against Iran.

“The evidence, so far, is that leadership is trying to discourage that vote,” one activist and former congressional staffer familiar with dynamics on the Hill told RS. “And the primary people that serve are the few dozen Democrats whose donors are hawks, but whose voters don’t want regime change war. That’s who the party is trying to protect from having to take a vote, because it’s painful for those members to vote against their donors.”

Drop Site News reported last week that some Democrats on the Hill might support pursuing a military intervention in Iran but, understanding a war would likely be politically catastrophic, would rather not go on the record and instead let Trump and the Republicans bear the responsibility and the costs.

“Cynically, Schumer may also have the midterms in mind,” the Drop Site report says. “If Trump manages to topple the Iranian government, the ensuing chaos could prove a drag on Trump as the country heads into the November elections.”

As a result, party leaders may choose to stand by or tepidly oppose military action as opposed to forcefully weighing in one way or the other. (The Schumer aide who laid out this calculus in the Drop Site story said that the minority leader himself does not subscribe to that logic.)

Alternatives to the dying newspapers?

I’ll be interviewing John Washington on my radio show, and his pieces in Luminaria, well, way beyond what the U of O students are being exposed to:

This three-part series chronicles a Tucson family’s harrowing journey from Venezuela through the heart of the anti-immigrant policies of México and the U.S. The first chapter traces Yesenia’s journey with her kids from Venezuela to the United States and then back to México. The second chapter focuses on her husband Mariano’s escape from authorities. The third chapter focuses on the family’s desperate search for safety in México after being deported from Tucson.

The stories are based on more than a dozen hours of interviews by Arizona Luminaria and La Silla Rota reporters with Yesenia and Mariano in a town outside Mexico City, as well as interviews with their family and friends, public records, audio files and messages exchanged between Yesenia and Mariano over seven months.

 

*****

Here, the thousand-word commentary, a monthly far-from-rant from Haeder, the ranter: More specifically, Spiel, Catharsis, Vomitus, Spitting up the Phlegm of Capitalism, Hyperbole… tirade, diatribe, harangue, invective . . . screed, philippic, fulmination?

Everyone Likes to Complain about the Weather and the News

This could be a requiem for this dwindling newspaper, owned now by Country Media. But the real big boys are called vulture capitalists, and at the end of February, eight U of O journalism students and their mentor, Andrew DeVigal, director of Agora Journalism Center, came to Newport to inculcate a listening and talking session at the Atonement Lutheran Church.

There were about 25 Lincoln County residents engaging in a mini-town hall on the future of local journalism, and the power of printed or digital news to embrace a community’s trust and envelop a deep understanding of the issues that make a city or county work or not work.

The famous Bill Moyers puts us at the 35,000-foot perspective:

“It’s up to you to tell the truth about what’s happening to this country we love. It’s up to you to tell the truth about the struggle of ordinary people. It’s up to you to remind us that democracy only works when citizens claim it as their own. It’s up to you to write the story of America that leaves no one out.”

DeVigal has had 30 years in the trenches at various newspapers like the Contra Costa Times, New York Times, and with the Poynter Institute. He’s now working with aspiring journalists, and these students, representing half his current class, Engaged Journalism, helped participants in facilitated conversations on just what makes a good and vibrant informed citizenry “engage” with news.

We are at a crisis point, that is, crises, in terms of education, participation in governance, political literacy, and finding the news that a community needs to become better citizens.

Andrew’s classes have learned the power of Generative Dialogue Framework – a tool that could “help reimagine the future of engaged journalism.”

We know about food deserts and healthcare deserts, but who reading this knows about news deserts? Go to the website, usnewsdeserts.com, and you will find more than 350 interactive maps allowing the user to drill down to the county level to understand the state of local media in communities throughout the United States.

 

The number of news desert counties rose to 213 in 2025. Research shows that 1,524 counties have one remaining news source. That’s more than 50 million Americans having limited to no access to local news. The rise in news deserts was accompanied by an increase in newspaper closures, which ticked up to 136 this past year, a rate of more than two per week.

Here’s a pivotal point Andrew made in a recent editorial:

“To do better, we must first understand journalism not simply as an industry, but as a form of civic infrastructure that helps communities navigate crises of misinformation, disinformation and democratic instability.”

This listening session stressed the need for businesses to up the ante to strengthen civic health. Holding institutions accountable is one pathway that an engaged citizenry can build trust in news and information ecosystems.

There are four pillars to assessing a community’s civic health, according to the Press Forward organization:

• News and Information: Availability and accessibility of local news outlets.

• Civic Participation Ecosystem: Metrics like volunteer rates and voter turnout.

• Equity and Justice: Structural determinants, including historical racial and economic discrimination.

• Health and Opportunity: Social determinants such as medical debt, housing insecurity, and health insurance coverage.

Andrew stresses that more actors in the business and non-profit communities “can co-invest in community information hubs, local media collaboratives, libraries, nonprofits and cultural organizations that gather, share and contextualize trusted news and expert resources for their communities. They can also sponsor coverage that meets public needs and partner with universities to grow a diverse pipeline of civic media makers and journalists.”

The three-hour event in the early afternoon was centered around a survey that went out to Lincoln County, the same survey that has been conducted in other Oregon communities: Harriston, Salem, Oakridge, La Pine, Rogue Valley and Florence.

The second part of Saturday’s civic engagement was a showing of a 2024 documentary, “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink.”

The film lays bare the crimes of hedge funds, those so-called vulture capitalists buying up newspapers for the real estate they encompass. There have been billions of dollars stripped from some of the more well-known newspapers. Alden is the second-largest newspaper owner in the United States, controlling approximately 200 newspapers through its subsidiaries, MediaNews Group (also known as Digital First Media) and Tribune Publishing.

Imagine 75 percent staff reductions, taking us into a new phase of the “ghost newspaper” – no regular beat reports, just papers running syndicated “news.”

 

• Staffing Levels: An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 of the 7,200 newspapers in the U.S. have lost more than half of their newsroom staff since 2004.
• Content Shift: A 2024 study of 500 papers owned by the largest chains found that over one-third of front-page content originated from non-local sources.
• Ownership Trends: Many ghost papers are owned by large newspaper chains or hedge funds that implement aggressive cost-cutting measures to maintain profit margins.
• Impact on Democracy: The loss of local “watchdog” reporting is linked to diminished voter engagement and higher local government costs due to a lack of oversight.

A third of the 1,800 papers – 600 – that were lost over the past decade slowly faded away. Most were suburban weeklies. Like the frog in slowly boiling water, few people in the community noticed anything different at first. There was no abrupt closure that grabbed headlines. Often, there was merely an announcement that the paper had been purchased by the owner of a nearby, larger daily.

Initially, the paper continued to be published under the same name, and the reporters who worked for the paper continued to aggressively cover local government. However, as circulation declined, the once stand-alone paper became a zoned edition of the larger paper. Over time, the building where the paper had been published for decades – often a landmark in the community – was sold and staffing was dramatically reduced. Increasingly, news coverage focused on noncontroversial topics – lifestyle features on people and events in the community. In the final stage, management at the larger daily paper announced that the zoned edition would become a weekly specialty publication, advertising supplement in the main paper or a TMC (total market coverage) product or shopper, distributed free to all residents in the community.

[Despite being published 20 miles apart, the front pages of Gannett’s papers in Scituate and Plymouth, Mass., are identical. These pages from Dec. 5 carry no stories local to the communities they serve.]

RE: Haunted By Ghost Papers — Can Massachusetts hyperlocal startups reconnect communities to the news–and each other?

In 2024, Alden closed eight weekly newspapers in Minnesota, including the Shakopee Valley News (160 years old) and the Jordan Independent (140 years old).

 

When I started in the newspaper arena, first in college 1974-79, the writing was on the wall: “Don’t expect to get a full-time job with a daily that has a Sunday edition. You’ll have to go to small towns and work for a daily, twice-a-week, or weekly newspaper.” The loss of over 2,100 newspapers between 2004 and 2020 is one reason we have such an uninformed public.

The digital landscape is still evolving. We have the Lincoln Chronicle, a non-profit on-line news outlet. But my contention is we have to support as many hardcopy newspapers in a mid-to-large city. Newport needs at least two newspapers, and this once-a-week Leader just doesn’t cut it.

Cutting jobs, gutting newsrooms, and believing in this so-called creative destruction are the death knell of America.

“Whatever they say about us, they can’t control us. We’re out to serve the public. That’s a red-blooded, virile statement, and by God, it’s true,” Harry Grant, Milwaukee Journal, quoted in a September 25, 1950, TIME Magazine article titled “The Press: No. I.”

More wise proof from 238 years ago why newspapers count? “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1787

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Paul Haeder has been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

Shaming the UN by Ratifying Genocide

Richard Falk

December 29, 2025

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

After October 7

Throughout this period, challenging the adequacy of the UN in the face of genocide, there were reasons to redeem its reputation, including an awareness that its refusal to respect judgments of the leading international tribunals (International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court). It needs to be better understood that when the UN was established 80 years ago the Charter design gave the last word on issues of global security to the five winning states in World War II, and not to international law as believed by its most ardent champions. By clear intention, despite the priority accorded war prevention in the Preamble to the Charter, the capabilities of the UN to act coercively against aggression, apartheid, and genocide were withheld from the Organization. Instead, the winners (that is, the five permanent members of the Security Council of P5) of the recently concluded war against fascism were also given a right of veto that amounted to a limitless entitlement of any one of the five in the only UN political organ with the authority to make binding decisions, and this provision meant not only an opting out of decisions contrary to their will but of preventing Security Council from acting even when the other 14 members were united in voting for the decision. In practice, this meant that prospects for peace and security in major conflict situations were left to the geopolitical calculations and alignments of these most powerful and dangerous members of the new organization.

During the Cold War, which prevailed globally between 1945-1991, the paralysis of the UN in relation to the management of global security was mainly due to the discretion at the disposal of the opposed alliances of the US-led NATO forces on one side of the ideological divide and strategic rivalry and Soviet-led Warsaw forces on the other side. The UN contented itself with being a spectator, or site of opposing propaganda denunciations as regarding the Vietnam War, Moscow’s interventions in Eastern Europe, and other settings of violent conflict involving the strategic interests of the P5. This was partly due to the constitutional framework of the UN, but it also reflected the unwillingness of many leading countries to dilute sovereignty when it came to national security. This refusal was most dramatically illustrated by the rejection of nuclear disarmament and a preferred reliance on deterrence, exhibiting the militarist orientations of foreign policy elites in leading governments. It blends a militarized hard power version of global security with P5 strategic ambitions to reinvent Western domination in a period of collapsing European colonialism.

Against this background, the role of the UN, while disappointing, was not surprising given the strong ties between the white West and Israel in this encounter with a Muslim majority Palestine in the strategically important Middle East. This lent the struggle an inter-civilizational dimension while also posing a challenge to Western hegemony in relation to energy reserves, arms sales, and more generally, trade and investment. This line of interpretation was accentuated by the anti-Western, religiously oriented Hamas, a non-state entity that was characterized in Western media and state propaganda as nothing other than a terrorist organization. Such a posture ignored the 2006 political victory of Hamas in an internationally monitored election and its role as the center of legally grounded Palestinian resistance to an Israeli occupation that consistently violated international humanitarian legal standards as set forth in the 4^th Geneva Convention of 1949 governing ‘belligerent occupation.’ UN members complicit with Israel supported the genocide in Gaza for two years, stepping back from support mainly because of the rise of public protest activity in their countries, as Israel had exceeded all constraints of law and morality in persisting with its genocidal campaign. It should be appreciated that the ICJ by a near-unanimous vote on July 19, 2024, declared continuing Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and even East Jerusalem) to be unlawful, decreeing its withdrawal, an outcome that the General Assembly formally supported and Israel and its support group ignored.

This political agenda explains the six ceasefire initiatives that were vetoed in the Security Council, combined with the failure of complicit states, above all, the United States, to use its soft power leverage to induce Israel to stop its assault on Gaza and satisfy the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. Such a willingness is inhibited by adhering political realism of the pre-nuclear age and the special interests of the arms industries and a long militarized governmental bureaucracy.

The Disgraceful UN Response to the Trump Plan

In my view, the 15 members of the Security Council, disgracefully voted unanimously in favor of the US draft resolution, adopted as SC Resolution 2803 on November 17, 2025, endorsing the Trump Plan for the stabilization of Gaza. The plan emerged with the approval of Israel, significantly unveiled during a Netanyahu visit to the White House at a joint press conference. The core feature of the plan was to reward the perpetrators of prolonged genocide, preceded by apartheid and resulting in making a wasteland of Gaza. Not only were there no references in the resolution to Israel’s defiance of rulings of the International Court of Justice, resolutions of the General Assembly, or the assessments of independent scholars and genocide. Neither Israel nor the United States, nor the other complicit states were even obliged to pay reparations for the unlawful damage caused in Gaza, but this was left to be sorted out by the combined forces of vulture capitalism operating freely as if Gaza reconstruction was a real estate venture and the monetary contributions of Arab governments.

In this process, not only was the diplomatic framework imposed on the Palestinians, but the US was accepted as the legitimate ‘peacemaker’ although it was overtly collaborating with Israel in drafting the plan and pointedly excluding Palestinian participation. Indeed, the US Government went so far as to deny visas to any Palestinian Authority delegate who sought to attend the General Assembly meeting of the UN or to otherwise take part in UN proceedings shaping Palestine. What makes the resolution a step backward if the objective had been what it should have been, arrangements for a peaceful and just future crafted with the participation of proper Palestinian representation and dedicated to a just and durable peace?

Instead, SC Resolution 2803 if considered as a whole, indirectly exonerates the culprits for their past behavior, carrying impunity to an extreme. Beyond this, 2803 visibly acknowledges US total control of the present diplomatic efforts to replace unrestrained Israeli violence with a ceasefire that Israel ignores at its pleasure. The bloody result has been hundreds of lethal violations of the ceasefire killing up to now of over 400 Palestinians by estimates of the Gaza Health Ministry, without Israel even being reprimanded by Washington for so abusing a ceasefire deal. Why Hamas tolerates this Israeli practice of accepting the ceasefire while continuing with genocide at a decelerated rate, and exhibiting indifference to the persistence of widespread severe suffering among the entire Gazan population of two million?

As to the future, 2803 endorses a colonialist transitional arrangement given operational reality by a Board of Peace, of course chaired by none other than Donald Trump and given stability in Gaza by the formation of an International Stabilization Force to be formed by the contributions of troops by UN members endorsing the plan. The US has brazenly acknowledged its own transactional goals by pledging $112 billion to rebuild Gaza as a global hub for trade, investment, and tourism. Governance in Gaza is left in part to Israel which seems to be claiming a permanent security presence in northern Gaza above the so-called yellow line.

Given the highly dubious manner of recovering from the Gaza catastrophe at this late stage, how can we explain its widespread international support and the disappearance of opposition in the Security Council? The five SC members from the Global South (Algeria, Somalia, Guyana, Sierra Leone, and Panama) made some critical comments about 2803 during the formal discussion that preceded the vote, centering on its vagueness as to crucial details and even its one-sidedness, yet all ended up voting in favor. Did such a vote reflect genuine agreement, or more likely, was it a vote that recognized geopolitical primacy when it came to the management of global security? And why would Indonesia and Pakistan, Muslim majority countries, even if not members of SC, go out of their way to express approval of the 2803 path to the future? More understandable was the approval expressed by the European Union, which again served as a reminder that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is part of Judeo-Christian civilizational long game of sustaining Middle Eastern hegemony.

As troubling was the endorsement of 2803 given by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who not only welcomed the resolution but expressed the hope that its momentum would be converted into “concrete action.” Thankfully, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, expressed “serious concern with the Security Council’s adoption of resolution 2803, warning that it runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination, consolidates Israël’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including ongoing unlawful policies and practices, and therefore risks legitimating ongoing mass violence.”  Revealingly, Albanese spoke these words of truth to power after enduring punitive sanctions imposed in July for her courageous willingness to bear official witness to what was becoming all too clear to the eyes and ears of the peoples of the world. It is ironic that the UN’s response to 2803 was somewhat rescued from the taints of complicity by an unpaid appointee not subject to UN discipline. Her words are congruent with those of Craig Mokhiber who resigned from a senior position at the UN because of its failure to deal responsibly with respect to Palestinian grievances, and in the last couple of years emerged as the most informed and incisive critic of the UN approach, reinforcing Albanese’s forthrightness on behalf of law and justice with respect to Palestinian grievances and rights, but the Organization’s own transactional approach in clashed between geopolitical imperatives and compliance with the UN Charter.

It also seems strange that Russia and China, although voicing some criticisms during the discussion, did not use their right of veto to block the passage of 2803, especially given the frequent use of the veto on Israel’s behalf by the US and considering the principles at stake. It is likely that they were impressed by Hamas’ acceptance of the overall approach and did not want to be seen as spoilers held responsible for a breakdown of the Trump Plan that would have undoubtedly meant the end of the already tarnished ceasefire. Additionally, China and Russia both seem to regard global stability as dependent upon a degree of geopolitical reciprocity in relation to their trilateral relations. In this limited sense, Trump seems more in accord with how cooperative relations with these two countries would bring stability and transactional gains than did the Biden approach of fighting Russia by way of Ukraine to preserve US post-Cold War dominance, a path that increased the risk of a third world war fought with nuclear war leading to a lengthening of the Ukraine War with heave casualties on both sides. Trump’s approach, although fragile because of his mercurial style, stressed geopolitical stability if it meant accepting spheres of influence as compromising the sovereignty of smaller states and even, as here, overlooking genocide.

The rejection of 2803 by Hamas was not entirely a surprise. It does not explain why Hamas ever accepted the Trump diplomacy at its outset, except for its ceasefire and IDF withdrawal prospects. Hamas’ acceptance extended to the whole of the Trump plan, but with this stand against 2803 and its announced refusal to disarm it may now be either the basis of a better compromise or at least a stalemate as to further progress. Hamas, and Iran, the other vocal critic of the resolution, also undoubtedly are reacting to the absence on Israel’s part of any willingness to show signs of embracing a politics of reconciliation, even to the extent of conscientiously upholding the early ceasefire, partial withdrawal, and an end to the rigid constraints on humanitarian aid. For Israel to have shown no mercy to a population living without heat, secure shelter, and adequate food and medical supplies is to send the chilling message that Israel has not even considered abandoning its expansionist ambitions that include further ethnic cleansing in Gaza and a surge of settlement growth on the West Bank.

+++

The US representative insisted that “[a] vote against this resolution is a vote to return to war” was part of the ‘take it or leave it’ Trump approach. Nor is it surprising that Netanyahu hailed the endorsement of 2803 by declaring “that President Trump’s plan will lead to peace and prosperity because it insists upon full demilitarization, disarmament, and the deradicalization of Gaza.”^[15] Or that France and the UK sugarcoated their endorsements of the Trump Plan by verbal statements of conditional support for eventual Palestinian statehood as affirmed in its sponsorship of the New York Declaration, envisioning future Palestinian representation under the authority of a reconstituted Palestinian Authority (PA), itself a creature of US/Israel dominated diplomacy that has evaded Palestinian self-determination, but now is being repurposed to implement the Trump Plan. The PA announced support for 2803 is a move calculated to convince Israel and the US that it can be counted upon to go along with their stabilization scenario despite its rejection of Palestinian grievances and denial of Palestine’s right of self-determination. Offering such ‘breadcrumb’ rewards to the PA, while disqualifying Hamas from any role in representing the Palestinian people is emblematic of the next phase of the Zionist end game involving the political surrender of Palestine and the elimination of Hamas and Palestinian resistance.

Concluding Remarks

The maneuvers of states, following their interests rather than the supposedly shared values associated with the UN Charter and the international rule of law, is to be expected given the history of international relations and the political realist orientation of most foreign policy elites. Nevertheless, it is regrettable, given the gross disregard of justice and rights, which pervades the Trump Plan and the diplomatic and hard power muscle at the disposal of the US. It does not augur well for meeting other world order challenges, including climate change, migratory flows, ecological stability, less inequitable distributions of wealth and income to individuals, states, and regions, as well as a more robust commitment to peaceful modes of conflict resolution.

This saga of 2803 is particularly unfortunate because it shows that the geopolitical management of global security extends beyond the veto power of the P5. For the sake of stability, the UN venue implicitly swallows the Israeli genocide to an unseemly extent by unanimously endorsing a neo-colonialist future for Gaza and impunity plus for Israel and its complicit supporters. Symbolic of this unseemly submission by the UN and its membership is the endorsement of 2803 by the UN leader, an individual declared persona non grata by Israel more than a year ago. Israel’s insulting dismissal of the UN as ‘a cesspool of antisemitism’ and the like should have at least led the Organization’s Secretary General to respond with stony silence to 2803 rather than kneel in submission. sending a shameful message to the world that, from the perspective of the UN, even genocide does not disqualify a state from receiving diplomatic and territorial rewards as long as the geopolitical actors or P5 remain on board. In effect, the dynamics of power politics are still making history, despite the disastrous consequences.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.

The Architecture of Extermination: Why the Gaza Genocide Is Premeditated and Repeatable


by Ramzy Baroud | Dec 30, 2025 | 


Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale genocide in Gaza – a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly eighty years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the Nakba of 1948 was “merely” ethnic cleansing rather than genocide – ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilization – we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on October 7, 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?

The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile ceasefire on October 10, Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like eight-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, froze to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.

During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were murdered, accounting for a staggering 30% of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.

The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real-time, broadcast to every handheld screen on earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians endure a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralyzed.

If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitize this criminal discourse.

The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly championed the “encouragement of migration” and demanded that “not an ounce of humanitarian aid” reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that the starvation of two million people could be “just and moral” in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the refrain was the same: “erase Gaza,” “leave no one there.” When military leaders refer to an entire population as “human animals,” they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.

This was preceded by the hermetic siege – a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of ‘security,’ always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’

In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world’s ‘largest open-air prison‘. Whether they utilized armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded ‘terrorists’ and ‘militants’ whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.

Years before the first bomb of this genocide fell, the United Nations declared Gaza “uninhabitable.” Its water was a toxin, its land a graveyard, and its people were dying of curable diseases. Yet, aside from the typical ritual of humanitarian reports, the international community did nothing to offer a political horizon, a just peace.

This criminal neglect provided the vacuum for the events of October 7, allowing Israel to weaponize its victimhood to execute a genocide of sadistic proportions. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly stripped Palestinians of their humanity, launching a collective slaughter directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The stage is being set for the next phase of extermination. The siege is now absolute, the violence more concentrated, and the dehumanization of Palestinians more widespread than ever. As the international media drifts toward other distractions, Israel’s image is being rehabilitated as if the genocide never happened.

Tragically, the conditions that fueled the first wave of genocide are being meticulously reconstructed. Indeed, another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalized unless it is stopped.

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a legal vow to “liberate mankind from such an odious scourge.” If those words possess a shred of integrity, the world must act now to abort the next phase of extermination. This requires absolute accountability and a political process that finally severs the grip of Israeli colonialism and violence. The clock is ticking, and our collective voice – or our silence – will make the difference.

Gaza as the Last Moral Frontier against Israel’s Policy of Annihilation

Ramzy Baroud

 December 29, 2025

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Image by Ömer Faruk Yıldız.

Three dominant narratives contend for the future of Gaza and occupied Palestine, yet only one is being translated into consequential action: the Israeli narrative of domination and genocide. This singular, violent vision is the only one backed by the brute force of policy and fact.

The first narrative belongs to the Trump administration, largely embraced by the US Western allies. It rests on the self-serving claim that US President Donald Trump personally solved the Middle East crisis, ushering in a peace that has supposedly eluded the region for thousands of years. Figures like Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and US-Israel Ambassador Mike Huckabee are presented as architects of a new regional order.

This narrative is exclusive, domineering, and US-centric. It was exemplified by Trump himself when he declared the Gaza conflict “over” and presented a “peace plan” that strategically avoided any clear commitment to Palestinian statehood. The entire vision is built on transactional diplomacy and a dismissal of international legal consensus, positioning US approval as the sole measure of legitimacy.

The second narrative is that of the Palestinians, supported by Arab nations and much of the Global South. Here, the goal is Palestinian freedom and rights grounded in international law and humanitarian principles.

This discourse is frequently shaped by statements from top Arab officials. Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, for example, asserted last April that the two-state solution is “the only way to achieve security and stability in this region”,  adding a warning: “If we disregard international law, (…) this will open the way for the law of the jungle to prevail.” This narrative continues to insist on international law as central to true regional peace.

The third narrative is Israel’s—and it is the only one backed by concrete, aggressive policy. This vision is written through sustained, systematic violence against civilians, aggressive land seizures, deliberate home demolitions, and explicit government declarations that a Palestinian state will never be permitted. Its actors operate with chilling impunity, rapidly creating irreversible facts on the ground. Crucially, the failure to enforce accountability for this pervasive violence is the primary reason Israel has been able to sustain its devastating genocide in Gaza for two full years.

This narrative is not theoretical; it is articulated through the chilling acts and legislative pushes of the highest-ranking government officials.

On December 8, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir appeared in a Knesset session wearing a noose-shaped pin while pushing for a death penalty bill targeting Palestinian prisoners. The minister stated openly that the noose was “just one of the options” through which they would implement the death penalty, listing “the option of hanging, the electric chair, and (…) lethal injection”.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, meanwhile, announced an allocation of $843 million to expand illegal settlements over the next five years, a massive step toward formal annexation. This unprecedented funding is specifically earmarked to relocate military bases, establish absorption clusters of mobile homes, and create a dedicated land registry to formalize Israeli governmental control over the occupied Palestinian territory.

This policy of territorial expansion is cemented by the ideological head of government, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself made it clear that “There will not be a Palestinian state. It’s very simple: it will not be established,” calling its potential creation “an existential threat to Israel.” This unequivocal rejection confirms that the official Israeli government strategy is outright territorial expansion and the permanent denial of Palestinian self-determination.

None of these Israeli officials shows the slightest interest in Trump’s “peace plan” or in the Palestinian vision of statehood. Netanyahu’s core objective is ensuring that international law is never implemented, that no semblance of Palestinian sovereignty is established, and that Israel can contravene the law at a time and manner of its choosing.

The fact is, these narratives cannot continue to coexist. Only real accountability — through political, legal, and economic pressure — can halt Israel’s advance toward continuing its genocidal campaign, destruction, and punitive legislation. This must include the swift imposition of sanctions on Israel and its top officials, comprehensive arms embargoes against Tel Aviv to end ongoing wars, and full accountability at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ).

As long as the pro-Palestine narrative lacks the tools to enforce its principles, Israel and its Western backers will see no reason to alter course. States must replace symbolic gestures and prioritize aggressive, proactive accountability measures. This means moving beyond simple verbal condemnation and applying concrete legal and economic pressure.

Israel is now more isolated than ever, with public opinion rapidly collapsing globally. This isolation must be leveraged by pro-Palestine forces through coordinated, decisive diplomatic action, pushing for a unified global front that demands the enforcement of international law and holding Israel and its many war criminals accountable for their ongoing crimes.

A lasting peace can only be built on the foundation of justice, not on the military reality established by an aggressor that does not hesitate to employ genocide in the service of its political designs. This is the undeniable moral frontier: confronting and dismantling the impunity that allows a state to pursue extermination as a political tool.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net