Weekly Briefing: Netanyahu is confronted with Israel’s global isolation at the U.N.

Israel’s Prime Minister used the U.N. stage this week to taunt a world that is finally starting to hold him—and Israel—to account. Benjamin Netanyahu derided the recent wave of recognition for a Palestinian state and vowed to “finish the job” in Gaza. It was a defiant performance to a thinning audience, aimed mainly at Israelis and detached from reality. In Gaza City, al-Shifa Hospital is down to a handful of operating rooms and ICU beds as the ground invasion advances. In the Mediterranean, civilians—including U.S. veterans—are risking their lives to break the siege. In the West Bank, Israel is fast-tracking annexation to erase Palestinian self-determination. A project built on occupation, apartheid, and genocide is isolating Israel on the global stage.

If you read one piece this week, make it Hamza Hamouchene’s “Ecocide, Imperialism and Palestine Liberation.” Settler colonialism destroys people and land together; Israel’s “green” PR cannot mask a campaign that poisons water and air while leveling neighborhoods. Climate justice has a stake in Palestinian liberation—not as charity, but as survival politics.

Our Palestine team shows how Israel is trying to collapse the Palestinian Authority by choking off revenue and threatening the banking system—financial warfare meant to make any future state ungovernable, even as Western capitals offer symbolic recognitions. At the same time, planners push projects to split the West Bank and clear communities for settlement growth. Recognition without sanctions won’t stop this machinery; only material pressure will.

In U.S. politics, Phil Weiss tracks fractures on the right over Israel and the lobby after the killing of MAGA figure Charlie Kirk, while Mitchell Plitnick lays out Netanyahu’s next test: winning a White House green light for continued war and annexation under the banner of a “21-point plan.” When the policy is mass displacement and permanent rule without rights, fewer people will call it peace.

So much is moving at once. Please share our reporting to help your networks cut through the noise with a clear, anti-Zionist, movement-centered perspective.

This month’s Frontline Briefing for donors will unpack where global politics around Palestine may be headed—and what shifting dynamics could mean in the months ahead. Editor-in-Chief Yumna Patel and Palestine News Director Faris Giacaman will lead the conversation. If you’re a donor, send me an email and I’ll send your registration link. If you aren’t yet, become a donor today (below!) and join us for the Briefing—we’d love to see you there.

– Dave Reed, Publisher

Must read: Ecocide, Imperialism and Palestine Liberation

Hamza Hamouchene: The devastation in Gaza is not just genocide but also ecocide – the intentional destruction of the ecology. Israel’s assault shows how settler-colonial violence is tied to environmental harm, and why climate justice depends on Palestinian liberation.

Genocide in Gaza

🏥 Tareq Hajjaj: As the Israeli invasion of Gaza City advances, al-Shifa Hospital is facing severe shortages of essential medical supplies, leaving patients untreated and vulnerable. Staff and patients fear an imminent Israeli attack.

⛵ Michael Arria: Veterans for Peace member Phillip Tottenham speaks to Mondoweiss about why he joined the Global Sumud Flotilla that is sailing to Gaza in protest of the genocide and in an attempt to break the Israeli siege.

Catch-up

🇵🇸 Qassam Muaddi and Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau: As countries around the world recognize a Palestinian state, Israel is doing everything it can to prevent the possibility of any future state. One way it plans on doing that is through financial strangulation.

🇺🇸 Phil Weiss: An unexpected consequence of the killing of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk is the fierce debate among the right about negative attitudes toward Israel and the influence of the Israel lobby in American politics.

🇵🇸 Majed Abusalama: Recent recognitions of a Palestinian state by several European countries are not acts of solidarity but a profound betrayal that undermines our struggle for liberation by legitimizing Zionism.

🇺🇸 Mitchell Plitnick: As Donald Trump touts his “21-Point Plan” to end the war in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu aims to convince the White House to support the ongoing genocide and possible Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Can he persuade Trump?

🌐 Qassam Muaddi: The recognition of Palestine as a state is more of a symbolic gesture than a meaningful act, like imposing sanctions on Israel would be. Still, it shows that even Israel’s allies have been forced to take action as Israel’s genocide in Gaza deepens.

🇮🇱 Zena Al-Tahhan: As several Western nations announce their recognition of a Palestinian state ahead of an upcoming UN General Assembly vote, Israel is accelerating its illegal annexation measures of the occupied West Bank to render a Palestinian state impossible.

✡️ Jamila Levasseur: I couldn’t join my family in honoring our ancestors murdered in the Nazi genocide while Israel uses our history to justify its oppression of the Palestinians. Instead, I honor my family’s lives by doing all I can to stop the Gaza genocide today.