Who is popular today?

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

GLOBAL public outrage over the savagery and cruelty of Israeli settler colonisation, state military decimation, and ethnic cleansing of generations of innocent Palestinians continues to grow.
Yet, European and US diplomacy defers to trade and military interests, and support for settler Zionism.
The partition of Palestine became a colonial policy position with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, when British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour endorsed “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. 1947’s UN Resolution 181 took most of the land from Palestinians for establishment of an Israeli state.
Enforced mass expulsions by settler paramilitaries, and then Israeli state military, have been occurring since at least the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in present-day Israel with no right of return. After 1967, Israeli policies in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, including settlement expansion, annexation, and military law, appeared to aim for permanent control over all of historic Palestine.
This week, Al Jazeera reports that “Israel is demolishing more Palestinian homes across the occupied West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, at a higher rate in 2025 than any previous year since the occupation began in 1967.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for war crimes, is considering full conquest of the Gaza Strip.
Tens of thousands of children are suffering from malnutrition and dehydration under Israeli occupation. Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, described Israel as building “the most efficient starvation machine you can imagine.”
Food distribution has been eclipsed by the Israeli and US-administered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). It established four aid sites in Gaza, inside Israel's militarised zone, forcing Palestinians into long and dangerous journeys to get food. Hundreds, including aid workers, have been shot at and killed around its distribution sites.
One hundred and seventy charities and NGOs, including Oxfam and Save the Children, are calling for the GHF to be shut down. In the words of UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher: “It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip. It is a cynical sideshow. A deliberate distraction. A fig leaf for further violence and displacement.”
Netanyahu’s war is so horrific that, this week, 600 former Israeli security chiefs, including from the Mossad, Shin Bet, and the Israeli Defence Forces, have called for an end to suffering in Gaza, and negotiated exchange of political prisoners and hostages.
What is the position of the powerful?
The European Union is Israel’s biggest trading partner, receiving about 30 per cent of exports, and Israel is the EU’s third biggest trading partner. There have been small shifts in trade restrictions, particularly in arms exports, but Germany and Italy are Israel’s main European suppliers of arms.
On July 31, 58 former ambassadors of the EU wrote an open letter calling Europe’s silence and neutrality “complicity” with Israel’s crime of “apartheid” and betrayal of the Union’s “every principle.” They called for immediate suspension of all arms exports to Israel, banning of trade with Israel’s illegal settlements, sanctions, and recognition of Palestinian statehood.
Between October 2023 and October 2024, US military assistance was increased to a minimum of US$22 billion – substantially more than annual aid provided to Israel since 1959. Such spending, funded by taxpayers, provides guaranteed revenue or a form of corporate welfare for US defence contractors. By contrast, the US has committed only 30 million to the GHF.
Companies cozy with Israel include Boeing and General Dynamics (bombs used in airstrikes on civilians), Caterpillar (armoured bulldozers used to demolish villages), Ford (armoured pickups), General Electric, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, and Trump financiers Amazon, Google, and Microsoft which provide cloud services.
War profiteering is the Goliath to be defeated. The US and Europe are its biggest bedfellows. Condemnation of their equivocations in the face of genocide is non-negotiable.
Moral conscience is always in a fight for its life against blood money, but ordinary people everywhere are protesting Palestinians’ gunpoint hell of captivity, terror, and dispossession. Civilian flotillas with humanitarian aid, representing 44 countries, are aiming to break Israel’s illegal blockade. Woe to the downpressors for people power is the shifting tide.
Conscientious objection becomes angrier the more bombs are dropped, expands across geographies the more children die, revolts with greater unity the more reprehensible the injustice, and grows more certain the more those in authority lose credibility.
For the Palestinian people, more and more of us must be brave.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 561

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