This week, the world began to grapple with the Trump administration’s abduction of Venezuela’s sitting president, Nicolás Maduro. Israel continued to tighten its grip across Gaza and the West Bank through measures that are often presented as technical or administrative, but are a sustained campaign to make life unlivable for Palestinians. And in the United States, the state is escalating repression against Palestinians and their allies, while normalizing forms of violence and detention that have become familiar features of the war on Palestine.
What ties these developments together is the accelerating erosion of the international legal order that emerged from the post-World War II era. While far from perfect and too easily dismissible by so-called “great powers” like the U.S., it provided a framework for the growth of global stability. When powerful states decide they can act outside the limits of law, people living under occupation, apartheid, or facing genocide will pay the price first, but eventually we’ll all suffer. To borrow a phrase from Astra Taylor, international law may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Here’s the roundup of our coverage this week.
📹 Video
Israeli occupation forces have issued a demolition order for the Aida Youth Center playground, to be carried out anytime this week.
This decision will deprive hundreds of children from Aida Youth Center Academy and surrounding areas of their right to play and learn, as part of ongoing targeting of sports, civic facilities, and Palestinian hope, in attempts of forced displacement.
🇻🇪 VENEZUELA
The U.S. attack on Venezuela was not only illegal, it was theatrical, meant to show that Washington can invade a sovereign country, kill civilians and soldiers, seize the head of state, and treat a courtroom as a stage for regime change. Officials offered multiple justifications, from drugs to terrorism, but the clearest explanation was also the most familiar: control over oil, and control over a region.
Several of our writers tracked what this means beyond Latin America. When Washington demonstrates that adherence to international law is optional, Israel reads that signal too. It is hard to separate this moment from the broader collapse of accountability around Gaza, or from the long project of hollowing out legal constraints that were supposed to limit wars of conquest.
READ MORE → What was Trump’s illegal attack on Venezuela and the abduction of Nicolás Maduro really about? – Michael Arria
READ MORE → What the U.S. attack on Venezuela means for the Middle East – Mitchell Plitnick
READ MORE → Ushering in the age of impunity: Venezuela, Palestine, and the end of international law – Craig Mokhiber
🇵🇸 GAZA
Israel’s banning of dozens of international aid organizations is being sold as regulatory, but the effect is to cut critical lifelines in Gaza. Palestinians describe the impact in terms of survival, not policy.
We also published an important piece on Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Gaza pediatrician detained without charges for a year, and on what it means that major U.S. outlets have refused to cover his case with any seriousness. The disappearance of Palestinians from elite media attention is not an accident. It is part of how a genocide becomes manageable for a political class that wants the issue to fade away.
READ MORE → How the banning of 37 international aid organizations in Gaza is being felt by Palestinians – Noor Alyacoubi
🇵🇸 WEST BANK
In the West Bank, Israel is moving against refugee camps, which are not only population centers but living reminders of the Nakba and the right of return. And it is pushing settlement expansion forward with new confidence, including the return of settlements evacuated in 2005. If even those evacuations can be reversed, then nothing is temporary. The colonial goal, as always, is permanent annexation and displacement.
READ MORE → Israel is quietly erasing Palestinian refugee camps from existence in the West Bank – Shatha Hanaysha
READ MORE → The West Bank settlements Israel evacuated in 2005 are back – Majd Jawad
🇺🇸 THE UNITED STATES
Two stories this week show how Palestine solidarity is being handled inside the United States. One reports on the killing of a Renee Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis and compares it with the murder of Ahmad Rajabi in Hebron by Israeli soldiers. Another features Leqaa Kordia, the last Columbia student protester in ICE detention, describing months of captivity that are meant to isolate, frighten, and break people who refuse to be quiet about Palestine.
READ MORE → From Palestine to Minneapolis, ICE and Israel use the same violent playbook – Ahmad Ibsais
🌍 HORN OF AFRICA
Finally, we published a sharp analysis of Israel’s move in Somaliland and how it fits into a longer strategy for regional dominance. It is worth reading alongside the Venezuela pieces. In both cases, powerful states are working to reshape regions through military leverage, client relationships, and the creation of new facts on the ground.
READ MORE → How Israel’s move in Somaliland fits in its broader strategy for regional dominance – Abdaljawad Omar
Some of our colleagues at Hasbara U still do not perceive any connection between events in Israel, ICE snatching people off the streets in the U.S., the rise of right wing parties in Germany, France and Hungary and so on. The key idea that connects all these phenomena is nativist fascism. Go to Google and type in “examples of nativist fascism in Israel”. Go to Google News and type in “the rise of nativist fascism”.
The Rise of Border Fascism – Dissent Magazine
The Ugly Origins of Trump’s “America First” Policy – FPIF
The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism – The New York Times
etc.
Re Israel in particular –
Germany’s anti-antisemitism has failed to achieve its purported aim. Instead it has given license to proxy Israeli nationalism, fueled a rise in xenophobia, and compounded the challenge of addressing genuine antisemitism.
The Cost of Germany’s Guilt Politics
“And in the United States, the state is escalating repression against Palestinians and their allies, while normalizing forms of violence and detention that have become familiar features of the war on Palestine.+
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