Really? Had to think today of an interview I had some time ago with Mohamed @ElBaradei, former IAEA Director General and ex-Egyptian Vice President. He said about the failure of the ‘Arab Spring’: the people of Egypt had no experience with democracy, people actually did not know what democracy means. Yes, democracy was a dream, a deeply felt wish. But what was needed, what should happen after the successful demonstrations, was unclear. Large-scale demonstrations led to the overthrow of the leadership. Infrastructure and expereinced leadership to effectively fill the gaps, lacked. At the same time, the deep state was supreme, according to ElBaradei: so, faces were simply replaced by other faces. And then the Arab Spring died a silent death. The protests imploded, people were harrassed, violently punished, and voices silenced. Think for example of #Libya, #Iraq, #Iran. What’s the difference after 50 years of theocratic oppression with the situation in Egypt in 2011.. ? The bombing by Israel and the US is not only illegal, but extremely risky as well, endangering regional stability and costing many additional civilians’ lives. And also think about the influence on oil prices.

Today is Naksa Day. It commemorates Israel's expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians & 130,000 Syrians from their homes in 1967. This is a brief history of Israel's Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians and Syrians in 1967, my latest: open.substack.com/pub/zachar…

Thank you President 🇸🇮. Palestine is the moral compass of our time. From Spain to Slovenia there is hope for Europe. A Europe that puts people above banks and markets, rights above profits, and respects int'l law regardless of political calculus.

Genocid nad Palestinci ni ustavljen in ljudje v Gazi in na Zahodnem bregu ne živijo v miru in dostojanstvu. Danes izobešena zastava Palestine na pročelju Predsedniške palače, ki bo tu ostala en teden, potem pa bo, kot opomin vsem, ki obiščejo moj urad, stala v notranjih prostorih, pa pomeni še mnogo več. Je simbol grobih kršitev mednarodnega humanitarnega prava in človekovih pravic ne samo v Palestini, pač pa tudi drugod po svetu. Je preprost klic k spoštovanju temeljnega civilizacijskega načela: človekovega dostojanstva - za vse.

On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a war of aggression against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and came to occupy the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, territory intended to form part of a future Palestinian State. Within weeks, a young legal adviser at Israel's Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, set out the legal consequences with remarkable clarity. In a memorandum I recovered during archival research in 2019, he affirmed the applicability of the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention to the newly occupied territories, and recalled the prohibition on annexation. Two months later, writing to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Meron advised that the establishment of civilian settlements in the occupied territories would be, in his words, in "contravention of explicit provisions" of international humanitarian law. History has a habit of leaving breadcrumbs. Meron would later become President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and decades later advised the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on atrocity crimes committed by Netanyahu and others in Gaza. The legal position he articulated in 1967 has not changed. What has changed is that nearly six decades later, the warnings were ignored, the occupation entrenched and metastasized into unlawful presence, and the consequences are before us all.

CORRECTION: Israel plans major settlement push across occupied West Bank reut.rs/4uZ5Fsr We will delete a post that referenced Israel’s latest settlement push as being seen by many as illegal; Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank are deemed illegal under international law

'We were ordered to kill': The 1967 Nakba that Israelis don't know about haaretz.com/israel-news/isra…

'Iran and Gaza Are ONLY THE BEGINNING - powerful speech by @ChrisLynnHedges at @Princeton. #genocide #Israel #Palesinians #lebanon #Iram #Syria @MinPres @NLatICC @NLatCoE @ajboekestijn @robdewijk @BNR @Nieuwsuur @Buitenhoftv @TheRightsForum youtu.be/TV9dkU2E8j0?is=X0QL… via @YouTube

Important boundaries set by @UN member states. In the absence of a properly functioning UNSC, one that takes its role amd responsibilities seriously, It’s time the #UNGA steps up and becomes the leading force in promoting peace and justice. @UPEACE @yppdorg @UNDPPA @UNPeacebuilding

On the #GlobalSumudFlotilla: "Israel is attacking Palestinian life; it is attacking those who are trying to save it and preserve it; those trying to sustain it; those trying to protect it; those trying to record it. In the last few days alone an Israeli Minister, Smotrich, announced on live TV the ordering of forced displacement of the Palestinian community in Khan Al-Ahmar. We have seen another Israeli Minister, Ben-Gvir, parading the humanitarians who came in solidarity on the Gaza flotilla, from several countries including your own, were being ill-treated and facing degrading treatment, and filmed himself bragging about this treatment. We have seen another Israeli Minister, Katz, who decided that UNRWA compound in Jerusalem will be transferred to facilities for his own Ministry. We have seen the Israeli Prime Minister today tweet actions that will entrench the unlawful annexation of Palestinian land. We have seen the Israeli Knesset pass laws for unlawful annexation and a discriminatory death penalty for Palestinian prisoners who have been subjected to abuse and rape, including in videos filmed. All of this is on record for all of you to see.”

Fyi @AmsterdamNL alle vuilnisbakken bij Metro station Heemstedestraat zijn opengebroken….

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?" Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything? Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it! And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else. Francesca Albanese is that someone. She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen." Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name. And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity. Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people. There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased. There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled." There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.” Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks. She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape". Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence. What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik. These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named. Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable. We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know." Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise. So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that. A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything. Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky. Let us stand with her. Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now. [Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

Most European leaders rule regardless of the will of the people, forgetting their are political appointees - not kings! Palestine is a textbook case of the failure of European democracy, resulting in continuous support to an Apartheid state- in its third year of genocide.

Imagine being a Lebanese ambulance driver who must wait while people may be bleeding to death from an Israeli air strike to avoid being killed themselves in a "double tap" strike -- a war-crime pattern of Israeli forces. x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/2…

This is objectively extraordinary: x.com/clashreport/status/203… Jake Sullivan, one of the most senior former U.S. officials, says that the U.S. is in a war aimed solely at destroying Iran, one of humanity's oldest civilizations, against the U.S.'s own interests, at the behest of Israel, a 76-year-old state. Listen to the video: he says that Israel's objective in the war "is just break Iran -cause chaos," basically destroy the country, "because as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel." Which he says is not in the US's interests "because a broken Iran means a broken global economy, as they continue to threaten the Straits of Hormuz. It means a potential refugee flow, like we saw after the war in Syria into Europe." He also says the Trump administration cannot answer what their own objective is in the war "because they don't know why they're there in the first place," implying that they're there mainly at the behest of Israel (otherwise they'd be able to articulate at least one reason). The curse of the "former official" strikes again... This is the same Jake Sullivan who, as National Security Advisor, oversaw the unconditional U.S. support for Israel's destruction of Gaza. Apparently breaking a people at the behest of Israel is only bad when a different administration does it...

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has said the world gave Israel a ‘licence to torture Palestinians’ as she presented her latest report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. She criticised governments for allowing violations to continue with impunity.

Dear UN Member States, As I prepare to deliver my 8th report to the UN, I reiterate: Israel poses a threat to international peace and security. I have documented its most egregious crimes. Now the obligation to act, and stop it, sparing innocent lives, rests with you.

BREAKING❗️ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan cleared of all charges of misconduct/breach of duty by a panel of 3 judges unanimously, beyond any reasonable doubt. The pro-Apartheid camp is already working to remove him ANYWAY: those who stand for justice must ensure this attempt fails.

Aruba viert vandaag 40 jaar status aparte! Van harte gefeliciteerd @MikeGEman! 🇦🇼 nos.nl/l/2606800

Israel launched a fresh wave of attacks on Iran on March 20, a day after President Trump told it not to repeat its strikes on Iranian natural gas infrastructure, which sharply escalated the US-Israeli war on Iran reut.rs/4sq2uJ8

23 years ago tonight, in an Oval Office address, George W. Bush announced the start of the Iraq War. 4,492 American service members were killed in the years that followed. 32,292 were wounded. At least 200,000 Iraqi civilians died. The humanitarian impact was immense. America wasted 9 years and 3 trillion dollars on a war that never should have happened—a war predicated on a lie, pushed by warmongering neocon politicians, and paid for by everyday people. Imagine what that $3 trillion could have bought here at home. Imagine the decade we could have spent focusing on America, our people, our place in the world. Imagine the lives our service members, stolen from us, would have lived. But instead, the president took us to war. Yet another costly quagmire in the Middle East. I voted against the Iraq War. I knew the White House would lie to Members of Congress and voters alike to manufacture the pretext for a conflict—and they did. Now, Iran is shaping up to be Iraq 2.0—new lies, new bloodthirsty politicians, still paid for by American families. Yesterday, we learned that Trump wants another $200 billion for his war. That's after Congress already gave the Pentagon more money than it even asked for in the budget. Enough is enough. It is not too late to learn from the past. Stop this madness. Bring our troops home. End this war.