Palestine

PRESS RELEASE – 6 OCTOBER 2025 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMSPEACE PRIZE FOR 2025 is awarded Francesca Albanese The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – as the person who, in accordance with Alfred Nobel’s will, has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations and for the abolition or reduction of standing armies as well as for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Francesca Albanese has forcefully and unwaveringly worked against Israel’s full-scale war on the occupied Palestinian territories, in particular Israel´s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. She has confronted Israel’s systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in a truly global outreach. Further, she has brought governments, international organisations and people’s groups together to underline the responsibility of the world at large to act and to stop arming, enabling, and profiting from Israel’s ongoing criminal actions. But first of all, Albanese...

Professor, Dr, TFF Board member The second of three TFF Appeals This is an example – for your inspiration – of how you can address your head of state, prime minister and other relevant ministers. To urge them to take action and not just use words.Instead of just sending it by email, which may not be read, it makes a stronger impression if you send it by snail mail – and millions do it too. It is urgently important that every citizen does something to stop the genocide on the Palestinian people now. Everybody can write a letter, short or long, and protest the lack of action. See also ideas to what you may constructively suggest in TFF’s first Appeal here. I address you deliberately in the way you prefer—in the feminine form. I write to you professor to professor, woman to woman, mother to mother, grandmother to grandmother. I...

A slightly modified version of a text published on Sept. 1, 2025 in TMS. On August 25 Thomas Friedman, always a weathervane for political and economic establishment thinking in the West, wrote a notable column in the NY Times that was pragmatic in tone, misleading in substance, and regressive in intention. Yet it reflects a growing ambivalence toward Israel’s prolonged genocide even among longtime supporters of Israel that now highlights starvation, famine, and a gross distortion of the delivery of humanitarian aid under emergency conditions. But expressed dangerously without hiding the hope that Israel could even now restore its legitimacy without being held accountable for crimes in Gaza and despite all, still expecting to be rewarded by excluding Hamas from any further governance role in Gaza and continuing to move toward the annexation of the West Bank by formal action or through further settlement expansion. It is notable that the headline of...

Professor emeritus, TFF Associate Oxford (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) The dam has burst. Netanyahu and his far-right regime have gone too far. Public pressure on politicians in Europe and many other countries has become irresistible, forcing them to change course. Most countries, 147 of the UN’s 193 members, have formally recognized a Palestinian state, and last week, France pledged to do so at the UN meeting in September. Fourteen nations, including Canada, New Zealand and Australia, join France in a push to recognize a Palestinian state. The British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, one of Israel’s staunchest allies who even refused to condemn the Israeli blockade of food, water, medicine and fuel to the Palestinians after the terrible events of 7th October, has buckled under the pressure of public opinion. More than 255 MPs of all parties signed a letter addressed to the prime minister in which they urged him to...

Israel has long been renowned for its ability to shape public discourse pertaining to its behaviour toward the Palestinians, particularly in the West. Its greatest triumph is undoubtedly the manner in which it managed the media treatment of its response to October 7 (2023) in North America and Europe. Israel’s response was depicted as purely a matter of defensive security against Palestinian terrorists who staged an unprovoked and barbaric surprise attack by Hamas. This public distortion of the event gave the Western governments the political space needed to justify their closed eyes military, diplomatic, and intelligence support of Israel while genocide unfolded daily in Gaza. This article is drawn from two articles published on October 7, 2024, on the author’s blog. This political manipulation of this incident in the long struggle between Israel and Palestine has several different dimensions. Above all, it absolutizes October 7 to create the false impression...

Liberal democracies remain shamefully complicit with Israel, despite its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people Students of world politics have long understood that when it comes to the strategic interests of leading states, international law is marginalised unless it is useful in waging a propaganda war against adversaries.  Indeed, the United Nations was designed in ways that recognised this feature of international political life. Otherwise, giving the winners of World War II a right of veto would make no sense.  Such an exemption from international law was also evident at the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, at which only the crimes of the losers were scrutinised for legal accountability, and obvious crimes of the victors – such as the indiscriminate bombing of Dresden and the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – were not prosecuted.  To this day, for understandable reasons, many...

Professor emeritus & TFF Associate* The world is in turmoil and perhaps closer to the possibility of a devastating nuclear war than at any time since the Second World War. There are at least three ongoing conflicts that have the potential of expanding into something much more serious that will lead to regional or even global wars. Wars are raging in the heart of Europe, the Middle East and, if some US hawks can get their way, soon there will be another disastrous war between the West and China. Yet, world leaders seem to be asleep and are moving blindly towards the precipice. War in Ukraine On 25 March 2024, in a letter to President Joe Biden, a large number of the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity warned that in the light of the reports that France was preparing to dispatch a force of some 2,000 troops to Ukraine,...

Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash Western media’s reporting of the war in Gaza makes little pretence of impartiality. In French newsrooms and radio studios, unconditional support for Israel is the norm and part of a wider lurch to the right. Serge Halimi & Pierre RimbertLe Monde Diplomatique February 28, 2024 “A period of media frenzy has revealed, and accelerated, a political shift: in the weeks since the Hamas massacres on 7 October, France’s government and mainstream media have managed a double feat. They have expelled from the ‘republican arc’ (the spectrum of the politically acceptable) the leftwing La France Insoumise (LFI) and simultaneously admitted the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) to the fold. The RN, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen as the Front National, was once deemed unworthy of being in government by the ruling classes, who frequently called for a united front against it; now suddenly rehabilitated...

Cole Keister on Unsplash IntroJohan Galtung published a comprehensive peace plan for the Middle East as early as 1971 – in the Journal of Peace Research (JPR). However, today SAGE Publications seems not ashamed to charge you £ 29 to download single articles. So here is a 2015 short summary of Johan’s insights and thoughts on the issue. While everybody is focused on disappointing Israeli election results and the liberals and progressives of this world are justifiably fearful of a future pregnant with “more of the same – or worse”, it may be useful to take a look at the solution-indicative policy proposal below, to muster an idea of what measures may eventually usher in a more desirable future. Whatever the current situation may yield; releasing the peoples of the region from the grips of structurally oppressive, culturally alienating and directly destructive violence for good remains the priority. First: Washington...

Photo: Ash Hayes on Unsplash Tending the fronts of conflict On Wednesday, October 25, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “Our war against Hamas is a test for all of humanity. It is a fight between the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas axis of evil and the forces of freedom and progress. . . We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness. Light will triumph over darkness.”[1] Now where have we heard those lines before? The axis of evil, the forces of light and freedom, the forces of darkness: these prejudiced phrases are so stale they’ve grown moldy. The war in Ukraine, we’re to believe, is against dark, evil Russia. Biden’s National Security Strategy 2022 speaks of the “darker vision” of US adversaries. The Cold War was against the “Evil Empire.” In every single US war for the past two and a half centuries, Americans have been expected to believe...

Action Committee For Call to Conscience About Gaza February 5, 2024 To be updated As mentioned earlier here on The Transnational, the “Emergency London Conference of Global Intellectuals of Conscience Concerning the Genocide in Gaza”, arranged by Turkey’s former PM and former foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu and Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and TFF Associate since 1986 was held January 27-28, 2024. It was based on this Declaration created prior to the conference. The conclusions and planned actions from the London conference “Supporters of the Declaration of Conscience and Concerns to stop genocide in Gaza met in London on January 27, 2024. Participants came from more than 25 countries. The emergency conference was responding to the genocidal catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, and the recent interim order of the International Court of Justice. The Conference was convened by former Prime Minister of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoglu, and Queen Mary...

A Conversation With Miko Peled Miko Peled is one of the most outspoken advocates of justice for Palestinians – but born and raised to a distinguished Zionist family. He is also a TFF Associate. In this conversation, you’ll learn about his background and path to a clearer understanding of his own society and why he has such strong views about the end of Zionism and the end of the talk about a two-state solution. The conversation took place in September, i.e. before Hamas’ horrifying attack on Israel on October 7 and the relentless attempts at genocide by the Israeli government that followed. More about Miko Peled on his homepage here.