For more than two years, countries of the world have worked together towards one historic and generational goal – to ensure we are better prepared for the next pandemic by learning lessons from the devastation caused by COVID-19.
At a time when conflicts, politics and economics have wrought destruction, discord and division, sovereign governments have found a way to work collaboratively to forge a new global agreement to protect the world from inevitable future pandemic emergencies.
This essential effort, being driven by hundreds of negotiators tasked by over 190 nations, was launched in the middle of the most devastating event in our lifetimes.
Based on official counts, COVID-19 left more than 7 million dead. But the real death toll is likely much higher. The coronavirus pandemic also wiped billions, if not trillions, from the global economy. Social upheaval – from job losses to school closures – scarred communities worldwide.
At the height of this disaster, with hospitals around the world crowded with patients being cared for by overstretched health workers, more than two dozen world leaders came together to issue a global call for unity.
They said the world must never again be left so vulnerable to another pandemic. They concurred that governments must never again fail to cooperate in sharing vital information, medical equipment and medicines. And they stressed that never again can the world’s poorest countries and communities be left at the end of the queue when it comes to access to life-saving tools like vaccines.
Equity, we said then, and continue to say now, must be our guiding light.
What was needed, the presidents and prime ministers said then, was a historic compact that commits countries to work together, across frontiers, recognising that deadly viruses do not respect the borders, do not see race, and do not recognise wealth.
This spurred a decision, by the 194 Member States of the World Health Organization, to undertake two landmark, parallel efforts: to start negotiating a first-ever pandemic agreement to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics, while at the same time making a series of targeted amendments to the existing International Health Regulations, the global playbook which countries use to detect, alert and respond to public health emergencies.
These efforts were launched during a time when social and political division and polarisation were creating seemingly impenetrable barriers between many countries.
But rather than succumb to geopolitical pressures, these government-led efforts have brought nations together to make the world safer from the next pandemic.
The outcomes of these vital negotiations are scheduled to be considered at the 77th World Health Assembly that will open in Geneva on May 27.
With the finishing line so close, the stakes facing the world have never been higher. Key issues remain to be resolved, above all, how the pandemic agreement will ensure equity for all countries when it comes to making them ready to prevent or respond to the next pandemic.
“Operationalising” equity has been a regular refrain during the talks.
This entails ensuring countries have assured real-time access to the capacities needed to protect their health workers and communities from a pandemic threat, so that we do not see a repeat of the inequities in access to vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics, personal protective equipment and other vital tools.
Operationalising equity is also about making sure all countries have strong health systems that are prepared to respond to future pandemics, wherever they may emerge.
Global health security depends on ensuring there are no weak links in the chain of defence against pathogens with pandemic potential. Global health equity is key to ensuring that every link in the chain is strong.
All of this requires collaboration between countries to share what is needed, from pathogens and diagnostics, to information and resources. And this can be secured only if political leadership focuses on global cooperation, not narrow nationalism.
The pandemic agreement provides the foundation on which to build the world’s future collaborative approach to prevent the next pandemic threat.
It is not a piece of paper. At its heart, it is a life-saving instrument that will set out how countries will engage with each other to protect their populations, strengthen public health and avoid unnecessary disruptions to societies and economies.
At a time of such global friction and tension, I salute all efforts by the international community to grasp this unique opportunity to make the world safer from pandemics. The weight of this shared responsibility is matched by the benefits that a strong agreement will provide for the health and security of all.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
For months now, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an independent military force, together with allied armed groups, have been besieging the city of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. If the city falls, this would likely kick off yet another wave of killings. This is happening in the total absence of any UN or other international or regional presence mandated to protect the civilian population there.
RSF forces and affiliated armed groups have already killed thousands of mostly Massalit people in el-Geneina, West Darfur, and surrounding areas, forcing more than half a million people, mostly Massalit, to flee into neighbouring Chad. The risk now is that they will take aim at the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who, fleeing the violence in other places in Darfur, have found refuge in el-Fasher.
Reading horrifying new developments in Darfur draws my mind back to July 2023, when my colleagues and I travelled to eastern Chad to gather evidence of mass killings in el-Geneina.
On a hot day in July, my interpreter and I were walking in the arid outskirts of the small town of Adré in eastern Chad, where hundreds of thousands of people, mostly ethnic Massalit women and children, were staying, having fled the violence in West Darfur. Men were noticeably absent. Families were living in makeshift shelters consisting of four sticks and a piece of tarp, which hardly protected them from the scorching sun or torrential rains. There was almost no access to electricity, running water, or regular food provision.
My interpreter, a leading member of the Massalit human rights community in el-Geneina, knew practically everyone. Every few minutes our walk through this enormous makeshift settlement was punctuated by the chirp of greetings that sounded almost cheerful.
But the raw pain that every family was experiencing crystalised when we reached her close friend, Zahra Khamis Ibrahim. When the women saw one another, they each held their hands up, palms up and started whispering prayers for the dead. Then they collapsed into each other and started sobbing.
Zahra’s 17-year-old son was brutally executed by armed Arab militiamen as he and his friends were trying to escape the horrific mass killings in el-Geneina on June 15, the same day tens of thousands of civilians fled to Chad.
Despite Zahra’s searing loss, she was still documenting instances of sexual violence, a job she had been doing for years as the founder of an organisation supporting survivors. In the camp, she introduced me to a slim, shy, 28-year-old economics student, who asked not to be named.
In a sweltering tent, she sat across from me on a mattress. Beads of sweat gathered on her forehead as she told me that eight armed men, two in RSF uniform and six in civilian clothes, entered her family’s home on June 8. They beat her relatives, shot her mother in the leg and one of them raped the student. When she got to that part of the story, it looked like her whole body was collapsing onto itself, like she was trying to disappear. She physically recoiled when I ask if she thought she might ever return to el-Geneina, and vigorously shook her head.
I interviewed her 24-year-old cousin, who also asked not to be named. An armed man raped her when she tried to retrieve her three children’s clothing from her home that had been ransacked by RSF and Arab militia forces several weeks earlier. Her hands were shaking as she told me that she had not gotten her period yet, “I can’t be pregnant again, please help me find a solution,” she implored. When she was able to finally access health services the next day, she was told she was indeed pregnant.
A few days later we interviewed the best friend of Zahra’s son. He was with her son when armed men aligned with the RSF forced everyone fleeing with them to lie on their chests on the ground. One man said to them, “I have 10 bullets. I am ready to shoot whoever I want to.”
The man killed Zahra’s son with a bullet straight to the head and killed two more of their teenage friends, the 17-year-old friend told me, his eyes cast down. At the end of the interview, I asked him how he was coping. “I don’t think I am OK,” he said. “I am not able to sleep at night, I just keep remembering all the things I saw.”
The scale of the pain among the Massalit population in Adré was palpable, and at times almost unbearable. I saw people smiling and laughing with each other and then falling silent and staring off into the distance as if they were remembering a horror they had witnessed.
I had seen this kind of grief before – when I interviewed Yazidi survivors of ISIS murders and sexual slavery in Iraq in 2014, Rohingya survivors of widespread killings and rapes at the hands of the Myanmar military in 2017, and Palestinians at a hospital in northern Egypt last month, who had been wounded amid atrocities committed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
These three crises have received global attention and outrage, as they should, and yet the abuses witnessed by the Massalit over the last year have been barely mentioned in the news.
From my current base in Ukraine, I also have a front-row seat to the stark contrast between the global outrage at Russian forces’ atrocities here, and the muted response to what is happening in Sudan.
The UN fund for the crisis in Sudan has been woefully underfunded even though the victims in this conflict are as vulnerable as one could possibly imagine. As a result, in Adré there are limited medical services, and even more limited psychosocial services despite the immense need for them among the displaced.
Attention from foreign governments, the media and nongovernmental organisations is important. It is needed in order to secure life-saving humanitarian support and bring more scrutiny and ultimately justice to those who commit mass atrocities.
Late in the afternoon torrential rain suddenly began but people did not rush off to their tarp and stick shelters worrying about their possessions being washed away, as one might have expected. Most people did not have anything. RSF fighters and their allies had stolen what little people had as they fled Darfur.
Zahra sent me a message a few days ago, as people fleeing el-Fasher were surging across the border into Adré. She said the situation in the refugee camp has gotten worse as numbers are swelling, and resources dwindling.
As we urge in a report on Darfur we recently published, the UN and African Union need to send a peacekeeping mission to Darfur, mandated to protect civilians, monitor human rights and humanitarian law violations, and lay the groundwork for the safe returns of those displaced. The real risk is that without forces there to prioritise the protection of civilians, the terrors that Zahra and hundreds of thousands of others have suffered will be repeated not only in el-Fasher, but in other towns and cities in Darfur.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Today we mark the 15th anniversary of the bloody end of Sri Lanka’s three-decades-long civil war. This anniversary comes around at a critical historical juncture, amid the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The global response to Gaza, across many states, peoples and international institutions, shows that there is a strong will to uphold international norms on protecting civilians and a strong will to address the underlying political injustices of the conflict itself, rather than seeing it merely as a problem of security and terrorism. The international failure to translate this will into concrete action is appalling but sadly not unprecedented.
The state of Sri Lanka, 15 years after the end of the armed conflict there, shows what happens when mass atrocities are unaddressed and the political fault lines that led to them in the first place remain unresolved and are arguably exacerbated. There are also striking and unavoidable similarities between the events still unfolding in Gaza and those that took place in the Vanni, the area of northern Sri Lanka where the war ended.
In the final months of the conflict, the Sri Lankan military besieged and bombarded a civilian population of 330,000 along with an estimated 5,000 Tamil Tiger fighters, corralling them into ever thinner strips of land in the Vanni. The offensive was brutal and unconstrained. It destroyed and defeated the Tamil Tigers’ armed group LTTE but also made a raging bonfire out of international humanitarian law, the laws of war and basic norms of civilian protection.
The Sri Lankan military bombed and shelled food distribution centres, hospitals and civilian shelters even though it had received the precise coordinates of these from the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross. It ordered civilians into ever-shrinking “no-fire” zones that it would then relentlessly attack using unguided artillery shells and multi-barrelled rocket launchers, firing hundreds and sometimes thousands of shells a day.
The last of the no-fire zones was a mere 2-3 square kilometres and the death toll often reached 1,000 civilians a day, sometimes more. Sri Lanka also limited the supply of food and essential medicines including anaesthetics in moves calculated to compound and exacerbate the humanitarian distress.
Subsequent UN investigations concluded that the Sri Lankan military’s campaign amounted to the “persecution of the Vanni population”. At least 40,000 people were reported killed in the fighting, but some estimates based on population figures suggest the death toll could be as high as 169,000.
At the end of the war, the Sri Lankan authorities summarily executed LTTE cadres and others who surrendered and herded the remaining civilians into barbed wire-ringed internment camps, allegedly for “processing”. The government only released them after immense international pressure.
Sri Lanka justified its campaign as the only way to defeat “terrorism” and proclaimed its “victory” over the LTTE as a military model that other countries could follow. It has consistently and vehemently rejected international demands for meaningful accountability and has also refused to implement political changes that would ensure real political equality for the Tamils and address the root causes of the conflict.
Yet, Sri Lanka’s trajectory after 2009 shows that mass atrocities and the “victory” they secure entail consequences that rebound and not just for the Tamil population. After the war ended, Sri Lanka simply doubled down on its repression of Tamils.
The high-intensity bombardment turned into a suffocating and all-pervasive de facto military occupation that continues to this day. Five out of seven of the army’s regional commands are stationed in the northern and eastern provinces and in some districts, there is one soldier for every two civilians.
The military is also participating in the ongoing process of “Sinhalisation” and “Buddhisisation” of the northeast. Military personnel accompany Buddhist monks and Sinhala settlers as they violently seize Tamil lands and places of worship so that they can be converted into Sinhala ones.
Finally, military personnel exercise a constant surveillance of everyday Tamil social, cultural and political activities that has a chilling effect on everyday life and makes meaningless any talk of “reconciliation” or even a return to “normalcy”.
Yet Tamils in the former war zones and the now extensive diaspora have not been cowed into submission. They have worked to keep alive the struggle for justice and accountability. These efforts have kept Sri Lanka on the back foot internationally with repeated UN investigations and resolutions at the UN Human Rights Council. Sri Lankan officials also have to live with the ever-present danger of sanctions and possible prosecutions for their involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The war and its aftermath empowered the Rajapaksa family and their unvarnished form of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. From 2005 until 2022, they dominated the Sinhala electorate, lauded as the leaders who had finally vanquished the Tamil separatists. Yet, their reckless and nepotistic approach to the economy and international politics brought financial ruin and increasing isolation.
Colombo sought to play off the geopolitical rivalries of India, China and Western states but this failed to secure any tangible material benefits and also could not avert the escalating debt crisis. In April 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt amid acute shortages of food, fuel and essential medicines. The outrage and roiling protests triggered by the economic meltdown ousted the last Rajapaksa president but Sri Lanka is yet to find a viable or stable post-Rajapaksa settlement.
Meanwhile, the same militarisation and repression used against Tamils are now being deployed against other communities. Sri Lanka has used “high security zones” extensively in the Tamil-speaking areas to confiscate land, displace civilians and militarise public space. This same tactic has now been deployed to restrict protests in the capital city of Colombo. The anti-terrorism measures that were normally reserved for use against Tamils are now being deployed against other dissidents and critics.
In the years after the end of the war, Muslim and Christian communities have also become targets of violence and hatred. Buddhist monks have led attacks on Muslim homes and businesses and on churches. They have led campaigns against Halal meat and the headscarf. During the pandemic, Muslims who had died as a consequence of COVID-19 infection were forcibly cremated for spurious “public health” reasons.
The impunity with which Sri Lanka’s security forces operate is now a threat to all communities on the island. There is no better illustration of this than Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith’s ongoing campaign calling for an international investigation into the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks that killed 250 people.
Cardinal Ranjith had previously been a staunch Rajapaksa ally and had opposed Tamil demands for international accountability for the crimes committed at the end of the war. He is now calling for an international investigation because he is convinced, like many on the island, that elements of Sri Lanka’s security state were aware of the plans for the appalling Easter Sunday attacks but did not take action in order to bolster the eventually successful 2020 presidential campaign of Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
The effects of Sri Lanka’s massacres have extended well beyond May 2009 and the killing fields of the Vanni. They are evident in the ongoing de facto occupation of the Tamil-speaking areas by a military that eats up the scarce resources of a now effectively bankrupt state. They are evident in the political instability and growing repression in Colombo. They are also evident in security forces who have become such a power unto themselves that they have been accused by a formerly loyal cardinal of allowing brutal terrorist attacks to take place to secure electoral victory for their preferred candidate.
Israel’s assault on Gaza has rightly brought international attention and focus on the need to uphold and defend humanitarian law. Sri Lanka shows what happens when states that commit mass atrocities are allowed to go scot-free.
Remembering and effectively addressing the Vanni atrocities is not just about the past, it is also about the future. Most immediately, it is about Sri Lanka’s future. But it is also about re-building and securing the viability and integrity of international humanitarian law and the possibility of securing genuine and lasting peace, security and prosperity.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Shortly after the October 7 attacks on Israel, Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a statement on social media, extending sympathy to Israelis without mentioning the Palestinians. Other tech executives – including from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM – offered their gushing support for Israel as well.
Since then, they have remained largely silent as the Israeli army has massacred close to 35,000 Palestinians, including more than 14,500 children, destroyed hundreds of schools and all universities and devastated Palestinian homes, healthcare infrastructure, mosques and heritage sites.
To execute this shocking level of destruction, the Israeli military has been assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) programs designed to produce targets with little human oversight. It is not clear to what extent foreign tech giants are directly involved in these projects, but we can say with certainty that they supply much of the core infrastructure required to build them, including advanced computer chips, software and cloud computing.
Amid this AI-assisted genocide, Big Tech in the United States is quietly continuing business as usual with Israel. Intel has announced a $25bn investment in a chip plant located in Israel, while Microsoft has launched a new Azure cloud region in the country.
None of this should come as a surprise. For decades, Silicon Valley has been supporting the Israeli apartheid regime, supplying the advanced technology and investment needed to power its economy and occupy Palestine.
Just as they did in 20th-century South Africa, today’s largest US-based technology corporations see an opportunity to profit from Israeli apartheid – a by-product of US-driven digital colonialism.
AI-assisted genocide
Big Tech has been complicit in Israel’s occupation, dispossession and abuse of Palestinians in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most well-known one is its support for pervasive Israeli surveillance of the occupied Indigenous population.
In March 2021, Google, along with Amazon, signed a $1.2bn contract for cloud computing services for the Israeli government and defence establishment. The two companies provide Israel with the capacity to store, process and analyse data, including facial recognition, emotion recognition, biometrics and demographic information in what is known as Project Nimbus.
The deal received considerable attention in the mainstream media after Google and Amazon workers demanded an end to the contract by launching the campaign No Tech for Apartheid. Anticipating this response, Google and Amazon signed a contract with Israel guaranteeing the continuation of services in the event of a boycott campaign. To date, they have held firm and continue to supply Israel with cloud computing services.
Details around Nimbus are concealed from the public, but Google employees have raised fears that it may be servicing Israel’s AI-infused military massacres. These concerns were amplified by reports that the Israeli army is using a new AI-powered system, such as “Lavender” and “The Gospel” to decide on targets for its bombardment of Gaza. According to one former Israeli intelligence official, The Gospel facilitates a “mass assassination factory” where “emphasis is on quantity, not quality”.
Meanwhile, recent reports have revealed that Google is working directly with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, despite the ongoing genocide. The company also allows Israeli forces to use its Google Photos facial recognition service to scan the faces of Palestinians across Gaza for its dystopian “hit list”.
Silicon Valley and apartheid surveillance
Yet AI-assisted genocide is just the tip of the iceberg. For decades, American tech corporations and investors have been quietly aiding and abetting Israel’s system of digital apartheid. One of the most egregious examples is IBM, which was also the major supplier of computers for the South African apartheid regime’s national population registry and the upgraded passport system used to sort people by race and enforce segregation.
According to Who Profits, an independent research centre dedicated to exposing commercial involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land and population, “IBM designed and operates the Eitan System of the Israeli Population, Immigration and Border Authority [PIBA]… where personal information on the occupied Palestinian and Syrian people collected by Israel, is stored and managed.” The system contains information collected through Israel’s national population database and at the border and major checkpoints.
PIBA is also a part of Israel’s permit system which requires Palestinians over the age of 16 to carry “smart” cards, containing their photograph, address, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers. Much like in apartheid South Africa’s passport system, the cards double as permits which determine Palestinian rights to cross through Israeli checkpoints for any purpose, including work, family reunification, religious rituals or travelling abroad.
Microsoft for its part has supplied cloud computing space for the Israeli army’s “Almunasseq” app used for issuing permits to Palestinians in the occupied territories. In the past, it also held a stake in surveillance firm AnyVision (renamed Oosto) which provides real-time facial recognition services to Israeli authorities. Other companies, such as Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Dell, supply technology to service Israeli military and carceral authorities.
Building Israel’s tech superiority
Apart from assisting the Israeli surveillance apparatus, Silicon Valley also provides critical support to the Israeli business sector, helping it maintain and develop a high-tech modern economy.
For example, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all launched major cloud computing centres in Israel, offering businesses infrastructure critical to data-driven products and services. Intel is the largest private employer in the country, having commenced operations in 1974.
Along with hundreds of other multinationals, Microsoft hosts its own research and development (R&D) centre in Israel, and it launched a chip development centre in Haifa. Nvidia, the trillion-dollar chip behemoth powering the AI revolution, has also announced it is expanding its already large R&D operations in Israel. The list goes on.
Venture capitalists are also critical to growing Israel’s local tech sector, which houses 10 percent of the world’s unicorns (companies worth at least $1bn), accounts for 14 percent of jobs and generates about 20 percent of the country’s GDP. Since 2019, $32bn has been invested in Israeli companies, with 51 percent led or co-led by US-based investors.
Social media companies have also lent a helping hand to Israeli apartheid and occupation. In 2022, an outside report commissioned by Meta found that Facebook and Instagram’s speech policies showed bias against Palestinians. These longstandingpractices of blatantcensorship against Palestinians are continuing into the present.
In December, Human Rights Watch reported that Meta continues to crack down on pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram. Of 1,050 cases reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful content supportive of Palestine that was censored or suppressed – despite allowing a substantial amount of pro-Palestine content – and one removal in support of Israel. The company is even considering censoring the word “Zionist”.
Other organisations stand accused of censoring pro-Palestine voices, including X (formerly Twitter), YouTube and even China-owned TikTok. Western governments, including the US and the European Union, have been pressuring Big Social Media companies to review and censor content deemed “terrorist” or supportive of Palestine.
Big Tech censorship extends beyond everyday users. Political organisations like Hamas are banned by Big Social Media giants. Meanwhile, the Israeli military, government and other organs of Israeli state terror post freely, with widespread support.
Digital colonialism
It is no surprise that US-based Big Tech companies are partnering with and investing in Israel, supporting its genocidal and apartheid activities.
Big Tech corporations are modern-day East India companies; they are an extension of American imperial power. They colonise the global digital economy and reinforce the divide between the North and the South. As a result, the US profits from the ownership of digital infrastructure and knowledge and the extraction of resources from the Global South.
Digital colonialism is hardwired into Big Tech’s DNA. Its close relationship with the Israeli army is not only lucrative, but it serves the broader geopolitical interests of the American Empire, from which it benefits.
Tech corporations’s support for Israel exposes their fake image as companies espousing antiracism and human rights. In reality, they are complicit in Israeli crimes, much like other organs of American imperialism. What we are witnessing is US-Israeli apartheid, colonial conquest and genocide, powered by American tech giants.
But just as the US and other Western governments are feeling the heat of legal action taken against them for the role they are playing in the genocide in Gaza, so are Western companies. US tech giants bear clear responsibility for what is happening in Palestine. They are on the wrong side of history, just as they were in apartheid South Africa. With enough popular pressure, Big Tech collaborators will find their day in court soon.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
War is horrific for people, communities and nations. The abuses they suffer demand our immediate attention, compassion and action. While some violations are clear and there are mechanisms and institutions to investigate them and offer recourse, others are not so apparent. One example of the latter is environmental war crimes.
We are only beginning to understand the full extent of wars’ impact on air, water and the natural environment; on soils and agriculture; on energy and water infrastructure; and ultimately, on public health and safety. The challenge is that much of this cannot be easily seen and has not yet been sufficiently studied, and it is likely that the victims of this less visible side of war may be far greater in number than imagined.
Where there are crumbled buildings, there may be deadly asbestos and silica dust dispersed into the air. Where there are landmines and unexploded ordnance, or damaged industrial sites, there may be leaks of heavy metals and other potent pollutants, some of which last for generations. Where lakes and farm fields are poisoned, food security suffers.
Today’s international law already includes tools to prosecute war crimes that do disproportionate damage to the environment, but prosecutions for such crimes have been rare in either local or international courts. Reparations for this damage has also been far too limited, with claims in international tribunals meeting evidentiary roadblocks.
There are some positive signs that this could change. The UN General Assembly brought attention to this issue in an important resolution in 2022 on the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts, which notes the responsibility of states to provide full reparations for environmental damage due to wrongful acts in war. On March 1, the UN Environment Assembly passed a consensus resolution that called for better data collection on the environmental damage associated with armed conflict.
The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, also recently announced that his office is developing a comprehensive policy on environmental crimes, with a firm commitment to advance accountability for these crimes.
A real challenge is to track environmental damage even while a conflict is under way. But this is essential in order to protect public health and take urgent measures to limit damage, such as stopping active leaks of deadly pollutants into rivers or farmland. Documenting the damage is also important in order to ensure full reparations are eventually paid, as is required if it is caused by illegal acts of war, and so that individual perpetrators can be held to account.
An important contribution in this area is emerging in Ukraine.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has had a terrible impact on the natural environment. Ukraine is a country with impressive biodiversity and important nature reserves, but the war has devastated many areas. Soils and waterways have been polluted with chemicals, while farmland, forests and green spaces have been ravaged by shelling, fires and floods.
The destruction of the Kakhovka dam a year ago, presumed to have been an intentional act by the occupying Russian forces, flooded villages and farmlands and caused widespread ecological damage all the way to the Black Sea.
On top of this, one-third of Ukraine’s territory is now suspected to be contaminated with landmines or unexploded ordnance, surpassing any other country in the world, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
We have been part of an effort to bring these environmental concerns to the world’s attention by joining a bold initiative by the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The president created the High-Level Working Group on the Environmental Consequences of the War in Ukraine, of which we are pleased to be members, and included environmental security as a core element of the Peace Formula that he proposed as a framework for ending the war.
This working group recently published a broad set of recommendations in an “Environmental Compact” (PDF) which points to three priorities.
First, there is a need to establish clear guidance for documenting environmental damage, employing modern technologies. By working with international partners to establish such standards, Ukraine can help guide how environmental damage is documented in all conflicts.
Second, with this data and evidence in hand, we must ensure criminal accountability and full reparations. There are important efforts already under way at the national and international levels, but there is space to expand them.
A national strategy for environmental justice, currently being developed by the prosecutor general in Ukraine, is a step in the right direction. At the international level, there should be more attention paid to these crimes in foreign courts, including through cases that apply universal jurisdiction.
Investigators and prosecutors should adopt a victim-centred approach to understanding environmental damage and the redress needed. Human rights investigations in Ukraine should give special attention to environmental damage and the risks to public health, as they assess rights violations.
Finally, the working group points to the imperative of sustainable reconstruction, incorporating development strategies that are friendly to the climate and to the environment. Efforts to apply these principles must begin now, as rebuilding is already under way in some parts of Ukraine.
Green justice and green recovery in Ukraine will be to the benefit of all countries affected by conflict around the world. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the Kremlin put the international legal order at risk. Its actions are a clear violation of international law and the UN Charter. The future of this international order, and the expectation of justice for such flagrant violations, will be determined by how the world continues to respond to this aggression, including the terrible and disproportionate attacks on the environment.
We all know that environmental threats do not stop at borders. The risk of a significant nuclear radiation disaster that hangs over Ukraine – due to the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhyya Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest – is one worrying example of the regional threat. Another is the war’s impact on the Black Sea, where environmental damage is having deadly effects on sea life and impacts all countries bordering this important body of water.
Now that the world is awakening to the scale of environmental crimes in conflicts, we must work to ensure that accountability follows, addressing both individual crimes and the responsibility to repair the harm by the perpetrator state.
Justice is due in Ukraine. And justice is due equally in all conflicts where force exceeds agreed legal limits. Let us work together for a green, just and peaceful future for those nations now suffering such attacks.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
On May 10, all member states should vote to admit the State of Palestine as the 194th member of the United Nations.
On May 10, the United Nations’ 193 member states can end the Gaza war and the longstanding suffering of the Palestinian people by voting to admit Palestine as the 194th UN member state.
The Arab world has repeatedly declared its readiness to establish relations with Israel within the context of the two-state solution. This goes back to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and has been reiterated in the 2023 Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit. On May 16, leaders of the region will gather for the 33rd Arab League Summit, where yet another plea for peace and stability will likely be made.
The way to end the war and normalise relations in the Middle East is clear. Admit the State of Palestine to the UN, on the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem and with control over the Muslim holy sites. Then, diplomatic relations will be established and mutual security of both Israel and Palestine will be assured. The vast majority of the world certainly agrees on the two-state solution as it is enshrined in international law and UN resolutions.
Today, 142 of the 193 countries officially recognise the State of Palestine, but the United States has so far blocked Palestine’s membership to the UN, where statehood really counts. Israel continues to harbour its dream – and the world’s nightmare – of continued apartheid rule. Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago have very recently established diplomatic relations with the State of Palestine, and the General Assembly is poised to vote an overwhelming endorsement of Palestine’s membership. The unity of the global community for Palestine’s political self-determination is also reflected on college campuses across the US, United Kingdom and the rest of the world. Students know the torment of apartheid and plausible genocide when they see it; and are actively demanding an end to the torment.
According to Article 4 of the UN Charter, admission is effected by a decision of the General Assembly following a recommendation of the Security Council. On April 18, the Security Council’s vote on Palestinian membership was vetoed by the US, but with 12 out of the 15 council members voting in favour. The UK abstained, as if it’s not already made enough of a mess in the region. Because of the US veto, the General Assembly will take up the issue during an Emergency Special Session on May 10. This vote will show an overwhelming support of Palestine’s membership. It will then be taken up again by the Security Council.
Our point is to put UN membership upfront. Peace will never be achieved at the end of another “peace process,” as with the failed Oslo process, nor by the whims of imperial powers who have perpetually devastated the region. Israel’s leaders today are dead set against the two-state solution and the US and UK have been dead set in defence of Israel’s rejection of it. The US and UK have repeatedly destroyed the two-state solution by always being for it, but never just now. They have favoured endless negotiations while Israel pursues its apartheid system, a war constituting a plausible case of genocide, and illegal settlements as “facts on the ground”.
In welcoming Palestine as a UN member state, the UN would also take crucial steps to ensure the security of both Israel and Palestine. Peace would be enforced by international law, and the backing of the UN Security Council, the Arab States, and indeed the world community.
This moment has been more than a century in coming. In 1917, Britain declared a province of the Ottoman Empire, which did not belong to it, as the Jewish homeland. The next 30 years were wracked by violence leading to the Nakba and then to repeated wars. After the 1967 war, when Israel conquered the remaining Palestinian lands, it administered an apartheid state. Israeli society became increasingly hardened to its rule, with extremist Israelis and Palestinians on each side of the bitter divide that only widens. The US and UK have been brazenly and cynically dishonest brokers. The politics in both countries has long been Zionist to the core, meaning that both countries almost always side with Israel regardless of justice and law.
We have arrived at a truly historic moment to end decades of violence. No more peace processes to be undermined by political manipulations. Peace can come through the immediate implementation of the two-state solution, with the admission of Palestine to the UN as the starting point, not the end. Diplomatic recognition should build in and invite further crucial steps for mutual security. It is time, on May 10, for all UN member states to uphold international law and vote for justice and peace.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Across the United States, universities have become the epicentre of student-led movements opposing Israel’s war on Gaza. Local authorities and university administrations have unleashed intense crackdowns on these demonstrations under the false pretences of protecting campuses and fighting anti-Semitism. But in the face of violence and threats, students have stood their ground, and protests are not showing any signs of subsiding.
What we are witnessing from student protesters is not new. In fact, students have historically been at the forefront of resisting and denouncing colonialism and imperialism.
In the 1530s during the violent colonisation of the Americas, a group of Spanish students at the University of Bologna publicly rejected waging war, deeming it contrary to the Christian religion. The antiwar protest worried the Catholic Church so much that the pope dispatched Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda – a renowned Spanish priest and scholar, who held the strong conviction that the enslavement and dispossession of Indigenous Americans were justified – to deal with the pacifist students.
This kind of dissent and activism has reverberated throughout history. From the students demonstrating against segregation and racism in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, to the protests of the 1960s against the war in Vietnam and the sit-ins against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, to today’s encampments calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, student movements have challenged colonialism, militarism and injustice.
From the perspective of the coloniser, such student mobilisation is dangerous. This explains the ongoing violent crackdown against the student protests in the US and some European countries, and it might also explain why all 12 universities in the Gaza Strip have been bombed and destroyed.
But it would be naive to think that universities are only sites of dissent. As student protests have insisted, institutions of higher education actively facilitate and support colonial projects. Places like Harvard, Columbia and many other universities continue to increase their endowments by investing in the likes of Airbnb, Alphabet (the parent of Google) and other companies that conduct business in illegally occupied territory or that have ties to the Israeli military. It is hardly surprising that young people’s mobilisation spurred by the Israeli war in Gaza has also spread into some of these companies with protests being held recently at Google offices.
Beyond their investment choices, universities also contribute to the colonial project by educating students to devise, justify and implement the means and mechanisms of colonialism. The pipeline that delivers recent graduates to the defence industries is well-documented and has been in existence for a long time. And because wars are becoming more reliant on data technologies, new pipelines are being created.
Think about the recent graduates working in companies like Anduril, which recently earned a contract with the US military to develop artificial intelligence-driven unmanned combat air vehicles. These weapons will use data to determine where and what to strike, which the war in Gaza has already shown can result in massive civilian casualties.
The Israeli army has been using Lavender, an AI system designed to produce targets for fighter jets and drones to bomb. Researchers have said the system is using various data sets, including people’s use of messaging apps, to decide on targets, which is leading to many innocent lives lost.
We have to wonder what kind of university education – or rather, miseducation – results in someone being able and willing to design and use an AI system like Lavender. We don’t want students in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to graduate with a worldview similar to that of Sepúlveda, who saw the colonised as nothing more than barbarians and slaves whose lives were disposable.
I don’t believe most of my colleagues in STEM are intentionally preparing their students to serve colonial interests. I believe most of them simply don’t see these issues as anything their curricula should address.
As students lead the way in challenging a system of higher education that is complicit in imperial wars and colonialism, we, the faculty, must consider the role we are playing within it. Ethical questions of how science and technology are enmeshed with colonial domination and militarism must be tackled in class.
Universities have long served as a place where students learn to think critically and challenge the status quo; they have also supported and strengthened structures of colonial dominance.
The current campus protests are yet another escalation of the tension between these two roles. The demonstrations may not result in a complete overhaul of the system of higher education, but they are certainly pushing in the right direction.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Inas Abu Maamar wears a plain blue garment and a mustard brown headscarf decorated with a pattern of raised knots. Her arms cradle the shroud covering a small, slumping body, nestled on her lap. Her head and face are bowed into the crook of her left arm. It is as though Abu Maamar is willing the body of her five-year-old niece, Saly, back to life, so that she would be able to sit one more time on her aunt’s lap.
The only visible identifier in this photograph is Abu Maamar’s left hand. Though she has not even reached middle age, the skin on her fingers and the back of her hand is already a little rough. I imagine that her hands have scrubbed pots, kneaded daily bread, come too close to the walls of a scorching hot oven. It is a hand that has been singed by hardship and history. It enfolds her niece’s face, fingers splayed and searching, as if attempting to read her beloved’s features in the dark.
The photograph, taken by Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem on October 17, 2023, was recently awarded the prestigious World Press Photo of the Year by World Press Photo Foundation (WPP), an independent, non-profit organisation based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The jury noted that Salem’s 2024 winning image – which was given the title, “A Palestinian Woman Embraces the Body of Her Niece” – was “composed with care and respect, offering at once a metaphorical and literal glimpse into unimaginable loss”.
Salem took the photograph at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. There, he found families had gathered to search for the bodies of loved ones killed in Israeli bombardment on civilian homes, as families have done since Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza on October 7.
Salem’s photograph emerges from a vast number of images and thousands of minutes of video that Palestinians have been disseminating through social media platforms over the past six months, documenting their own genocide. It has become one of the most well-recognised, much-shared images of the genocide – one of those “iconic” images of war, surfacing again and again on newsreels and social media posts.
Why did this particular photograph of a mourning woman and lifeless child captivate audiences around the world? What drew the members of WPP’s jury to this photograph – rather than other photographs that Salem took of the same woman mourning the deceased child?
Cropping out context
Prestigious awards for photography and the juries that determine what is worthy of exceptional praise tend to favour images that hint at layered, if limited in what layers are permitted, narratives, allowing viewers to engage with just enough complexity. Juries often reward images that provide easy entry for those perceived to be the dominant group of viewers.
In another photograph that Salem took of Abu Maamar, in which her face is visible, her mouth is open in a naked expression of distress. This image gives her an individual identity; her grief is a screaming, uncontainable horror.
A plastic chair can be seen to the left of her, white body bags piled up on it. The leg and shoe of a man wearing all blue – a medical professional, perhaps – stands to the far side, the unidentified witness to her grief, perhaps to thousands of such griefs.
Inas Abu Maamar embraces the body of her five-year-old niece Saly, who was killed in an Israeli air raid, at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 17, 2023 [File: Reuters/Mohammed Salem]
The body bags would have alluded to genocide. Audiences would not be able to reduce the narrative to a singular loss, to an isolated, ahistorical moment of Orientalised grieving.
But in this “winning” frame, Abu Maamar’s face cannot be seen, her personhood is subsumed, passive, and accepting of divine dictates. Her emotions would be too powerful, her grief too inelegant in its lack of containment, should they be seen by the public.
As long as the suffering is tidy, and coded through Western art historical references to innumerable paintings and sculpture of Mary grieving the death of her son, Jesus, viewers may project a range of narratives onto the woman. This way of framing her does not provoke fear of an other’s rage – it is not an unwordable, uncontained, roaring suffering. Rather, it is a safe, consumable display of grief and suffering.
WPP’s selection for World Press Photo of the Year was cropped to remove any contextual material that surrounds Abu Maamar and her niece. The photograph is also cropped, in more metaphorical terms, of the conditions and history that led to this specific child’s death and this living relative’s unbearable suffering. The materiality of that history – and the millions displaced and starving under siege, the tens of thousands dead and the many under bombed buildings without even the dignity of being shrouded and buried – is strategically made absent.
Such cropping reinforces the reproduction of a particular type of liberal politics, and a specific methodology of framing “conflict” essential to liberal ways of grieving. It allows one to continue to insist on “both sides” of the argument, and situate oneself in a location where it is possible to mourn and – unconsciously, perhaps – celebrate one’s ability to feel sympathy, without having to truly recognise the genocidal horror playing out in real-time. To recognise it would mean that one would be forced to act.
Cropped images aid the continuation of cropped politics. This dynamic is especially evident in the power imbalance between an army supported by the US and equipped with billions worth of weaponry and armed groups without such support; “those without” are people that the geopolitical West regards as an “Oriental other”.
Demanding the elimination of context has been essential to Israel’s justification of genocide in Gaza. Excising the context – including any reference to 75 years of dispossession, occupation, imprisonment without trial, torture, daily brutality, and slow genocide – has, in turn, shaped the narrative.
That has been apparent in US media across print, TV and radio. Mainstream media outlets announce, repetitively, at the beginning or end of reports, that “Israel began its bombardment of [Gaza] in response to the attack by the militant group Hamas on October 7.” It is as though Israel’s violent exercise of power began on October 7, and only because of a provocation by a Palestinian party.
Gaza photographers as ‘Hamas sympathisers’
Asim Rafiqui, a photographer and photography scholar, told me in an interview, that one of the main reasons that this image – “out of a mountain of photographs” – was deemed worthy of an award, is that “winners” must silence far more than they reveal. A winner must be “a cleansed, commodified, social media appropriate image, evaluated and filtered for ‘sensitive content’ as we’ve become so accustomed to seeing.”
A photo editor with a prominent news agency who wishes to remain anonymous also reminded me that Israel’s foreign ministry used scare tactics to discredit Palestinian photojournalists as Hamas sympathisers and collaborators.
After Yousef Masoud, another Palestinian photojournalist based in Gaza, won an award in February, the spokesperson for the Consulate General of Israel in New York claimed, in a letter, that he had “links” to Hamas and had prior knowledge of the October 7 attack, which “mortally compromise[ed] the integrity of his reporting”.
Masoud was one of several photojournalists whose images of the attack were, according to Israeli claims, used by the AP, Reuters, The New York Times and CNN.
However, the photo editor told me this was a “cheap tactic by Israeli forces to delegitimise [the journalists’] work”; after all, “photojournalists went alongside the [Israeli military], using their cameras to produce ‘poetic’ black and white photographs in the aftermath of destruction.”
And photojournalists infamously embedded with the US army, as it invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, producing images that celebrated and legitimised the brutal actions of armies and contractors hired by participating states.
The photo editor also pointed out that when a photographer is a white European like Italian Massimo Berruti, who lived long term in Pakistan’s Swat valley, embedded with Lashkars – a civilian militia, not an army associated with a state – they are praised. But Gaza’s photojournalists who are just as daring and committed to producing documentary visuals are seen as “Hamas sympathisers”.
The pressure that Israel applied had immediate effect. Rafiqui states that wire services like the AP and Reuters, as well as other global news outlets that uphold and reproduce the power structures of the geopolitical West quickly made the decision to work only with those who have been incorporated by corporate media, “thereby garlanding authority and credibility” solely to themselves as dependable sources of news.
While “the visual archive was being produced in real-time by the people of Gaza, their witnessing was refused [by Western corporate media] … effectively erasing and discrediting all Gazans who are independently documenting what is happening to them,” Rafiqui said.
Awarding consumable images
To state what should be obvious: the visual narratives that make up what we imagine to be “the news” – supposedly impartial, balanced, and accurate – are created through processes that reflect existing power structures, which benefit from history being portrayed in favour of those in power.
Prestigious awards such as World Press Photo, which elevate certain images above others, instruct generations of photographers from around the world. Photographers, photo editors, and jurists of photography awards bring with them their moral views, ties to powerful people in the industry, and structures that support their ecosystem – other photo editors, photojournalists, donors, and ever-shrinking global media houses owned by a handful of powerful owners. Some may be consciously critical of the origins of their viewpoints; others not so much.
The original photo of Inas Abu Maamar photographer Mohammed Salem took at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 17, 2023 [File: Reuters/Mohammed Salem]
Awards are thus structured in ways that favour easily commodifiable images. “Winners” need to be consumed; and to be consumed easily, they must allow for metaphorical interpretations, so that a broad range of meanings may be thrown at the surface, and stick.
To be consumed easily, winners cannot include too much dangerous, difficult-to-digest context. That would only alienate audiences. Better to stick with a woman whose face and visceral, raging grief is contained within “safe” Orientalist tropes that only signal to many in the geopolitical West her supposed oppression under her own culture.
It is important to recognise that the reinforcement of well-known tropes of Orientalist ways of looking, seeing, and reading do not arise, in this case, from the photographer’s callousness or lack of embeddedness within the community that they are documenting.
Salem is from Gaza, and clearly working under horrific, dangerous conditions. There is no need to undermine his work. Some may criticise Salem for photographing a grieving woman at one of the most vulnerable moments in her life. Such photographs usually evidence vast imbalances in power. It brings about attendant questions about why anyone should have the right to photograph a person without their consent, if consent is even possible at such a moment.
Shielding one’s face is a sign that a person is attempting to maintain some privacy and agency, even as the camera intrudes. But in this case, she may not be “hiding” her face solely to shield herself from the camera in front of her; rather, it is one of many of the ways in which Abu Maamar arranges and rearranges herself in grief.
Salem’s response to the recognition by WPP is telling. According to Reuters Global Editor for Pictures and Video, Rickey Rogers, the photographer reportedly “received the news of his WPP award with humility, saying that this is not a photo to celebrate but that he appreciates its recognition and the opportunity to publish it to a wider audience.”
It is an arresting image. Mohammed Salem is more than deserving of the recognition that an award from WPP brings. But asking the question, “Why this photograph, among the millions of others?” reveals a far more uncomfortable set of truths about the ecosystem that rewards and elevates decontextualised, ahistorical images.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
A few months ago, I found myself in a forum with German colleagues discussing European media. The conversation was lively and quickly moved from industry issues to broader topics such as German memory culture and the 2008 financial crisis.
Surprisingly, my German colleagues found it inappropriate to criticise the Greek political stance at the time of the crisis, and they also found it inappropriate for me to talk about issues relating to German history, such as the Holocaust. They explained that “you cannot enter into the subjective experience and history of the other, so it is better to avoid it”. I couldn’t disagree more.
If we don’t engage in critical discussion, we can’t align ourselves with what we think is morally right or hold power to account – we end up simply affirming our ethnic, religious, ideological or national alliances. To paraphrase Edward Said’s famous quote, we can’t show true solidarity if we don’t criticise. And we cannot afford not to criticise a power when it is blatantly attacking the very values and principles it is supposed to uphold and protect.
I thought of this discussion I had with German colleagues as I read about the police raid on the Palestine Congress in Berlin on April 12.
The violent interruption and eventual cancellation of the pro-Palestine conference was a worrying escalation in the repression of the Palestinian solidarity movement that has been under way in Germany and across the West for the past six months. German police invaded the venue of the Palestine Congress, organised by Jewish Voice for Peace together with DiEM25 and civil rights groups, and shut it down by cutting off electricity, confiscating microphones, and detaining some of the participants.
Then, in an unprecedented move, it issued a “Betätigungsverbot” (ban on activities) against Yanis Varoufakis, Ghassan Abu-Sitta, and Salman Abu-Sitta – three of the keynote speakers. As a result, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, a vocal figure in the global progressive movement, will not be allowed to speak about Palestine in Germany, not even via a Zoom call, and it is unclear whether he will be able to stand with the German party DiEM25 in the run-up to the European elections in June.
The intervention made it crystal clear that these days in Germany any and all criticism of the State of Israel and its conduct in Gaza is considered anti-Semitism and treated as such. Juxtaposed with the newfound acceptance of far-right figures with documented histories of anti-Semitism due to their defence of Israeli policies against Palestinians, it paints a depressing picture for freedom of speech in one of Europe’s most powerful democracies.
The contrast here is stark. Pro-Israel politicians from the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), including those who are under trial for using literal Nazi slogans, can freely speak on the Israeli war on Palestine under the guise of “fighting anti-Semitism”, but Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the Palestinian surgeon and rector of Glasgow University who worked in Gaza hospitals and documented war crimes during this latest Israeli assault on the Palestinian enclave cannot give his testimony to the German public.
As Udi Raz, the Jewish activist arrested at the Palestine Congress, said after his arrest, it seems that these days in Germany you can fight anti-Semitism only if you support genocide.
The raid on the Palestine Congress was just the latest in a series of escalating incidents. Under the pretext of security and with vague accusations of anti-Semitism, the German authorities have been suppressing the freedom of expression of everyone showing solidarity with the Palestinians and demanding a ceasefire in Gaza since October 7. Here are a few examples:
In November, poet Ranjit Hoskote was forced to resign from the Selection Committee of Documenta 16, one of the most contemporary art exhibitions in the world, after it was revealed that he signed a letter comparing Zionism to Hindu nationalism in 2019. Just a few days after Hoskote’s resignation, the remaining members of the committee also resigned, citing the lack of free speech about Israel-Palestine in Germany as the reason.
“In the current circumstances we do not believe that there is a space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas and the development of complex and nuanced artistic approaches that Documenta artists and curators deserve,” they said in an open letter announcing their resignation.
In December, In a symbolically revealing move, Germany’s Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Boll Foundation withdrew the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought from Masha Gessen, citing Gessen’s New Yorker essay titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” as the reason for the decision. In the essay, Gessen criticised Germany’s Israel policy and politics of remembrance, comparing the situation in besieged Gaza to the plight of Jews in Nazi-occupied ghettos in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.
Then in February, the Berlin Film Festival, one of the biggest and most respected in Europe, faced backlash for awarding a prize to a film by Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham which charted Israel’s destruction of Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank. German Culture Minister Claudia Roth faced calls for her resignation after being filmed clapping at the end of Adra and Abraham’s speech. Rather shockingly, she later claimed that she was applauding only the Israeli filmmaker and not his Palestinian partner. After this incident, politicians threatened to cut funding to cultural institutions for perceived anti-Israel bias, sparking fears of censorship.
Within the same month, Ghassan Hage, a renowned anthropologist, was fired from the Max Planck Institute after a right-wing newspaper accused him of making “increasingly drastic statements” critical of Israel following the Hamas attack and the Israeli assault on Gaza in October. A few weeks later, political theorist Nancy Fraser was stripped of her professorship at the University of Cologne due to her support for the Palestinian cause.
As the world’s second-largest arms exporter, Germany has consistently supported Israel, both politically and militarily. In 2023, some 30 percent of Israel’s military equipment purchases came from Germany.
After South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing it of committing genocide in Gaza, Germany offered to intervene in the case on behalf of Israel. In response, Namibia – where Germany committed the 20th century’s first genocide as the colonial ruler between 1904 and 1908 – publicly urged Berlin to “reconsider” its “untimely” decision.
Then-Namibian President Hage Geingob said Germany could not “morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia” and at the same time support Israel.
In the meantime, Nicaragua brought a separate case against Germany at the same court, accusing it of breaching the UN genocide convention by sending military hardware to Israel.
With these moves, these two countries from the so-called Global South exposed the hypocrisy of Germany’s claims that it is standing with Jewish people and fighting anti-Semitism by supporting – politically and militarily – Israel’s war on Gaza. Furthermore, they showed how Germany is threatening to bankrupt the values and principles at the very core of the European project – human rights, human dignity, freedom, equality and the rule of law, among others – by continuing to arm, fund and diplomatically support Israel as it commits genocide against a people living under its occupation.
This hypocritical stance has domestic as well as international consequences.
Indeed, while German authorities claim to be fighting anti-Semitism by censoring pro-Palestinian speech, civil liberties groups warn that the German state’s conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish bigotry is enabling a xenophobic crackdown within Germany, with migrants and refugees from Muslim-majority countries being accused of bringing “imported anti-Semitism” to the country for their support for the Palestinian cause and being unjustly targeted for deportation. Meanwhile, the German far right, which is gaining support ahead of the European Parliament elections in June, is using the state’s conflation of anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel as cover for its Islamophobia and is doubling down on its intimidation and targeting of Muslims and Arabs in the country.
This hypocritical stance on anti-Semitism and Israel is of course not unique to Germany. Across the Western world, Palestinians, Jews and progressives of all backgrounds who are opposing the Israeli government’s crimes in Gaza are being branded as anti-Semites. Strikingly, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in the United States, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany appear to be on the same page when it comes to conflating anti-Zionist views and criticism of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism.
The students of Columbia University in New York and other US colleges are being arrested and branded as hateful for protesting Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Earlier, Harvard President Claudine Gay and Penn President Liz McGill were forced to resign after being attacked as anti-Semites for not shutting down pro-Palestinian protests in their respective institutions under the same equation: Critique of Israel equals anti-Semitism.
In the most telling example of the current state of affairs in the West, earlier this month, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, New York, removed tenured professor Jodi Dean from the classroom because of an article in which, echoing Edward Said, she argued that “Palestine speaks for everyone”.
Dean was censured merely for stating the obvious. Said had taught us decades ago that imperialist wars in the Middle East are aimed not only at erasing the Palestinian nation but also at legitimising the formation of imperialist antagonisms against all suppressed people worldwide and within societies. The Palestinian cause, therefore, is the touchstone for human rights worldwide.
Said has also explained in his scholarship, many decades before this latest escalation in Gaza, the grave consequences the Zionist misuse of Jewish suffering to further imperial interests would have for Jews and Palestinians alike.
“I do … understand as profoundly as I can, the fear felt by most Jews that Israel’s security is a genuine protection against future genocidal attempts on the Jewish people,” Said wrote in his 1979 book The Question of Palestine. “But … there can be no way of satisfactorily conducting a life whose main concern is to prevent the past from recurring. For Zionism, the Palestinians have now become the equivalent of a past experience reincarnated in the form of a present threat. The result is that the Palestinians’ future as a people is mortgaged to that fear, which is a disaster for them and for Jews.”
We owe great respect to all those who resist power in the name of humanism, peace, democracy, and universal values at a time when the clouds of war cast shadows over our world. Just as we must never forget the Holocaust, we should do everything to stop the genocide against the Palestinians today. Just as we supported the Iranian revolutionaries who took to the streets for human rights in 2020, today we must support the Jews and Israelis who oppose the genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli government. And we must criticise and resist all efforts to silence Palestinian speech and shield Israel from accountability in the name of fighting anti-Semitism and protecting Jews, in Germany and across the West.
We cannot afford, as my German colleagues suggested during our discussion, to criticise power only when its abuses and excesses fall within the perimeters of our own history and identity.
Only by resisting power and demanding the right to disagree, in every context, we keep the doors open to accountability, democracy, and peace where power is working to close down these prospects. As we are more and more interconnected and engaged in global discussions we need to do the exact opposite of protecting our subjective position, shaped through experience and trauma. As Edward Said once said, “never solidarity before criticism”. Speaking truth to power is the best way to show solidarity with the oppressed, and the only way to build a better world for everyone.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
On April 4, the state legislature in Virginia voted to amend state law, raising the marriage age to 18. A couple of days later, Governor Glenn Youngkin signed this measure into law.
Coming amid Sexual Assault Awareness Month in the US, this vote was an important victory for child rights. Protecting vulnerable minors from sexual assault ought to include banning child marriage across the United States. But Virginia is only the 12th US state to ban child marriage. The other 11 enacted their bans between 2017 and 2024. This means that until the year 2017, child marriage was legal across the US under certain conditions: if the parents or a judge consented, or if the minor was pregnant or had a child. These loopholes effectively kept the practice widespread.
Just 12 states out of 50 having a ban on child marriage is a shamefully low number. Much more needs to be done. We need to ban child marriage nationwide.
Though Americans often view it as a “foreign” problem, child marriage is surprisingly widespread throughout the US, cutting across different regions, religions, and cultures, according to a new Population Institute study titled Behind Closed Doors: Exposing and Addressing Harmful Gender-Based Practices in the United States. Between 2000 and 2018, an estimated 300,000 minors under age 18 were legally married in the US. California, for example, does not specify any minimum age for marriage, and more than 8,000 children are married there each year.
Eighty-six percent of child marriages reported in the US took place between adults and minors, most often girls ages 16 to 17, but sometimes as young as 12. Marrying them to adult men sets up a dangerously imbalanced power dynamic that raises the risk of domestic and sexual violence.
To be clear, child marriage is a form of gender-based violence and a human rights violation. In addition to physical and emotional abuse, it puts minors at higher risk for poverty and exploitation and denies them educational and economic opportunities. It is the leading cause of adolescent girls dropping out of school worldwide. In the US, women who marry before age 19 are 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school, four times less likely to graduate from college, and 31 percent more likely to live in poverty. The consequences reverberate throughout their lives, perpetuating cycles of intergenerational poverty.
But since there is no comprehensive federal law setting a minimum age of marriage, and the patchwork of state child marriage laws is inconsistent and riddled with loopholes, the practice persists. The myth of American exceptionalism, the contrary-to-fact belief that child marriage is someone else’s problem and that it can’t happen here, blocks constructive public discussions and effective legislation.
This misguided belief fuels a cycle of neglect and inaction that keeps states from passing effective measures.
Resistance to enacting child marriage bans also comes from both conservative and progressive groups. Conservatives argue it would interfere with religious freedom. Progressives worry it could take sexual and reproductive choice away from minors.
But child marriage threatens the bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom of a child more than any ban ever could. Ending it is more important to the health and dignity of American children than preserving antiquated traditions. They need protection from entering legal contracts that they do not have the power to escape, and empowerment to make their own choices about their lives.
While the US has vocally opposed child and forced marriage in other countries, laws against it inside the US are patchy, weak, and fail to protect those at risk. In fact, most US states are overwhelmingly noncompliant with international child rights standards.
Ending child marriage in the US will first require recognising it as an urgent, ongoing, domestic problem. Further stigmatising the practice or ostracising affected communities will not help. US policymakers should focus on learning from survivors to understand child marriage’s root causes and real impacts, and work with them to build support for child marriage bans in each state.
Survivor-led advocacy goals include raising awareness, passing effective, implementable legislation, investing in comprehensive sexuality education, and expanding reproductive health support services and resources. State authorities should support such efforts.
All states should work to pass and implement a strong legislative framework setting the minimum age of marriage at 18, with no exceptions. That is the only way to ensure full and free consent. It is incumbent upon policymakers, advocates, and community members to stand up against child marriage and other harmful gender-based practices, and to uphold everyone’s fundamental right to bodily autonomy and dignity.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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