Boy George Misses A Golden Opportunity to Remain Silent

 

Richard Mellor

 

I know next to nothing about Boy George except he sang a song titled, Do you Really Want to Hurt Me, or that was a chorus lyric in one of his hits, that’s why, under normal circumstances, I would not bother to comment on him. 

 

But as he’s penned a song sharing his views about Apartheid Israel’s barbaric assault on the Palestinians in Gaza that has been accepted by numerous human rights organizations as well as G*nocide historians, Jewish and non Jewish alike, as a “G*nocide, I feel compelled to say something.

 

In the song that is titled, “We Will Dance Again” we have lyrics like:

“You say genocide, I say war/ When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for/ Does it get ugly? You bet it does/ When I know you wanna kill every last one of us.”. In addition to justifying Israel’s G*encode by describing it as a war, he also attacks the pro-Palestinian movement describing those opposing a crime against humanity as, like “sheep”.

 

Celebrities whose world is a parallel universe detached from the experiences of the vast majority of human beings, would do better to keep their mouths shut. And unfortunately many of them who oppose Israel's G*nocide have,  for fear of retribution, this is particularly the case with actors.

 

It’s hard to imagine that almost three years after the hundreds, perhaps thousands of Palestinians broke out of the confines of what has been described as the largest outdoor concentration camp in the world, under siege since 2007, that anyone can refer to the conflict as a “war”. 

 

Israel has one of the most powerful militaries in the world, backed and funded by the United States and other western allies. The Palestinian people, constantly under guard, have no navy, no air force, no army.

 

In response, to the October 7^th attack, the Israel has destroyed Gaza completely and it is impossible to know how many thousands of innocent people lie beneath the rubble. Some estimates put the death toll as high as 500,000 including more than 60,000 children, though it is impossible to tell and the Israeli’s are still killing off the witnesses and refuse to allow independent journalists it to Gaza. The Zionists have now moved in to neighboring Lebanon and are razing villages there displacing over one million people.

 

The non-Jewish population of Israel, in the occupied territories, Israel proper or Gaza, have been attacked for seven decades. Much of the population of Gaza are refugees or children of refugees from villages the Zionist regime destroyed not miles from the camp’s fence and the resident driven in to the strip.

 

Boy George, whose real name is George Alan O’Dowd, is quite offended at the backlash that his song has generated among the wider public and has responded in a statement given to Britain’s Sun newspaper and published in the Independent.

 

“The suggestion that I feel no compassion for Palestinians is both untrue and absurd. I am devastated for the loss of the innocent lives on both sides of this war and I call for peace.”, he writes.

 

He was very disturbed by the attack on the music festival causing him to feel “deep emotions”,  “I could have been there and we know that there were people from more than 40 countries who were,”

 

Has Boy George wondered for one minute who on earth would attend a rock concert a couple of miles from a concentration camp, and what sort of people and country would allow it. 

 

George vomits out the Zionist line again and again arguing that the motive behind the resistance that broke out of Gaza and attacked their captors that day were motivated by a hatred of Jews. This has been the narrative from the beginning but Israel’s brutality has undermined it significantly. Even Piers Morgan, who spouted this line in the early days can’t avoid the obvious, Israel is committing a genocide.

 

The conflict in Palestine is not a religious war any more than the conflict in Northern Ireland, is. The Palestinians are an occupied people in their own land and have every right to resist occupation. Boy George is of Irish ancestry he should understand that better than most. The colonial people that fought the British in Kenya, Malaya, India, Ireland or any of the colonial possessions were not driven by a hatred of the English or British people; they were fighting their oppressors, the colonizers.

 

“I understand that is uncomfortable to defend your friends when a war like this is raging but the woman who sells me bagels is not to blame, neither is my doctor or publicist, manager, ex-boyfriend or my thousands of Jewish friends. This song is for them.”

 

It’s staggering that three years on and witnessing the prominent role young Jews in particular are playing in the movement against the G*nocide and for Palestinians’ right to self-determination, he can have the opinions he does.

 

The lyrics in his song, he writes,   “…doesn’t mean that I don’t have compassion for Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that I agree with what's going on in Israel, but I am always going to defend the people that I love,” 

 

As I re-read his statement I almost feel sorry for him. You love Zionists? 

 

“I am a Jew loving, trans hugging queer hippy and my mother would be proud of me.”. he writes. 

 

If he cared for Jews he would oppose Zionism and its g*nocidal policies that are a danger to Jews throughout the world and fodder for anti-Semites.

"The Anti-Zionist Left Must Lead the Fight Against Anti-Semitism"

By John Clarke

Toronto

Gail Asper, a noted ‘philanthropist,’ is ‘pausing funding’ to the Canadian human rights museum in an effort to undermine its Palestinian Nakba exhibit. This needs to be denounced and I've already done so but I’ve seen horrible responses from leftists on social media that go over to KKK like notions of ‘Jew money.’ This leads me to once again, address the issue of antisemitism. 

 

I want to focus on the role that antisemitism plays on both the political right and the left and to argue that ignoring it is entirely wrong. I define antisemitism as animosity towards Jewish people because they are Jewish and not as hostility to the political ideology of Zionism. 

 

The racism that developed out of European colonialism held that the colonized were on the low rungs of a hierarchy in the value of human life. When it came to Jews, however, the focus was on malevolence rather than supposedly stunted development. Notions of biologically determined treacherous qualities drew on religiously based myths about the Jewish ‘Christ killer.’

 

Fascist movements used antisemitism because it offered them a conspiring, unduly influential and dangerously powerful ‘enemy within.’ The Great Replacement theory that alleges that Jews are working to flood ‘white nations’ with Black and Brown immigrants is a striking manifestation of this.

 

Virulent antisemitism is by no means incompatible with support for Zionism. This was true of Arthur Balfour and Donald Trump still personifies it. That’s why vicious white supremacists disingenuously accuse the left of Jew hated, while Zionist organizations ignore displays of antisemitism that come from politicians who arm Israel to the teeth.

 

The MAGA movement is experiencing a rift on this issue, with racist isolationists and antisemites like Tucker Carlson arguing that US support for Israel should be curtailed. On the other side, the defenders of an imperialist role for the US value Israel as a garrison state that upholds Western interests, while getting rid of as many Jews as possible. This disagreement is playing out inside a racist movement within which antisemitism occupies an important place.

 

Leftists are hostile to exploitative and powerful elites and the depiction of Jews as such a formation is at the heart of right-wing racist constructions. Sadly, particularly at a time when the left is significantly weaker and less clear-minded than it has been, such illusions can resonate within it.

 

A powerful Zionist lobby, presented as the spokesperson for a supposedly monolithic ‘Jewish community,’ enables Israel’s crimes and exerts very serious influence in the West. Those who don’t properly understand the connection between imperialist interests and the support that is given to Israel can very easily fall prey to conspiratorial disorientation.

 

This leads to distorted ideas, particularly with regard to the question of Palestine. The most obvious of these is the conclusion that the tail wags the dog. Left social media spaces are full of assertions that Western governments are the dupes of a mysteriously influential Israel. 

 

The Zionist project has always been at the heart of an agenda of US led regional domination. Certainly, a settler colonial project is underway that is based on a supremacist ideology and some level of divergence between Western interests and Zionist aspirations occurs but Israel is utterly reliant on its sponsors and the tail doesn’t wag the dog.

 

Once the manipulative power of Israel’s leaders and supporters is seen as the driving force behind Western support, the next step is to focus on collective Jewish guilt. A section of the left has become almost obsessive on this question. Opinion polls are scoured for evidence of Jewish complicity. The fact that leading Jewish institutions, just like all the major institutions of the Canadian establishment, back Israel to the hilt is presented as the most damning evidence. 

 

Those who adopt such views are certain to reject any suggestion that we should challenge antisemitism. Yet there it is an historically rooted prejudice and there are virulently antisemitic and fascistic currents at work in this society. Threats and violence against Jewish people do happen. The notion that responding to them undermines Palestine solidarity is utterly incorrect in my view.

 

I fully understand that, unlike the period before WW2, Jews in Canada today don’t face the kind of discrimination or disadvantage that Black or Indigenous people experience. The threat of violence that hangs over Muslims is much greater than that which confronts Jews. I also realize that a realistic assessment of the scale of antisemitism is hampered by the use of the false conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish prejudice. 

 

Despite these considerations, I reject the notion that challenging real manifestations of antisemitism ‘gives comfort to the enemy.’ Actually, one of the great vulnerabilities of the Zionists is their dogged refusal to deal with real antisemitism. They pretended that Elon Musk’s infamous Nazi salute was an ‘awkward gesture’ and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) peddled incredibly softly as the fascist led ‘Freedom Convoy’ displayed swastikas. 

 

This disgusting selectivity can be more effectively challenged by opposing real antisemitism than by maintaining that it doesn’t exist or that, if it does, ‘The Jews’ have brought it on themselves. Let’s shake off notions of the malevolent Jewish soul and take up a serious, principled and far more effective opposition to all forms of bigotry and hatred, including antisemitism. 

Republished from the US Socialist website, Left Horizons

Israeli society rotting from the inside

30 July 2026

By John Pickard

There is nothing happening to Israelis that can in any way compare to the brutal and genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, where at least 75,000 were killed, overwhelmingly non-combatants, and tens of thousands of them children. The tiny sliver of land, onto which a quarter of a million Palestinians have been herded,  is little more than a camp, where men, women and children have no economy, education, little health care and no future. They exist entirely on humanitarian aid.

Likewise, none of the uncertainties or fears that might be harboured by the population of Israel can compare to the ongoing and continuous pogroms and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. On a daily basis, the smaller towns, villages and farms, are attacked as Palestinian land and farms are seized, homes torched and livestock stolen by Jewish settlers. Not a single settler has been convicted or even charged for the dozens of murders of Palestinians in the West Bank.

Socialists in Europe and elsewhere look on in horror at these developments and the disgraceful lack of action, and even the absence of criticism, from most Western politicians. It beggars belief that so-called ‘Labour’ leaders have for years tolerated and empowered the Israeli government, on the grounds that this state is an ‘ally’ of Britain. The Labour Friends of Netanyahu are a powerful lobby in the Labour Party, even now, in Andy Burnham’s new cabinet.

But as we have explained in previous Left Horizons articles, Israel’s hostility, aggression and barbarity – which sum up its policy towards its near neighbours – will inevitably have repercussions internationally and internally.

The Israeli Defence Force, described by its supporters as ‘the most moral army in the world’, beats up women and arrests children in the West Bank. In Gaza, the West Bank and now in Lebanon, it uses the dynamiting of homes and ethnic clearnsing as prime military tactics. All of this has resulted in international support for Israel withering away. But what is also happening is that it is rotting Israeli society itself from the inside.

Two more Israeli soldiers commit suicide this week

An article this week in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haartez, reports on two more Israeli soldiers committing suicide, bringing the total of active duty soldiers committing suicide to 16 this year. “The figures,” the Haaretz article says, “point to a further rise in the number of suicides within Israel’s defense establishment, continuing a trend that began after the outbreak of the war on October 7”.

There is no parallel in any military establishment anywhere in the world with the psychological mayhem in the IDF. “In the decade before the October 7 war,” Haaretz explains, “the average number of military suicides was 12 per year. Since then, the number of suicides has risen. According to military data, from October 7, 2023, through the end of that year, seven active-duty soldiers died by suicide; in 2024, 21 soldiers died by suicide; and last year, the number stood at 22 – the highest figure in 15 years”.

An earlier article in Haaretz, dealing with suicides also noted the process of psychological decay in Israel. It referred to reservists being traumatised by three years of non-stop war, witnessing events that have driven many to the point of suicide. In recent weeks, it said, Haaretz conducted discussions with mental health officials who paint an “alarming picture”.

“The numbers [of suicideal reservists],” explains Eyal Fruchter, chairman of the Israeli National Council for Post-Trauma, “leave no shadow of doubt…Israel faces a national crisis”. Haaretz then refers to figures from the Israeli defence establishment: “Before the war, the rehabilitation branch dealt with 62,000 injured, of whom 11,000 were dealing with mental health issues. As of last month, the numbers had shot up to 82,000 and 31,000 respectively.”

The problem of PTSD is not something that disappears when the war or the tour of duty is over. “The damage that we’re seeing today constitutes just a small part, even the tip of the iceberg, of what will be coming,” one expert, a world-leading researcher in the field of trauma, told Haaretz. “The research shows significant rates of delayed reactions. It’s precisely periods of quiet that allow traumatic content to erupt. Many discharged soldiers are ticking time bombs.”

Generalised social malaise in Israel

This is not just an issue that is affecting reservists who have seen active service. It reflects a generalised, social malaise, brought on in part by Iranian (and to a lesser extent, Hezbollah) missile and drone attacks. A significant part of the whole population is suffering PTSD, according to the experts.  “Israeli society is exhausted, feeling a sharply intense burnout. It’s grappling with moral questions, with a sense of betrayal by the state and its leaders.”

The generalised impact of forever wars, which is Netanyahu’s primary policy, has meant a recorded rise not only in suicides but also in domestic violence. Referring to a widespread rise in poor patterns of sleep, one of Israel’s leading psychiatrists commented, “This is not surprising; we live in a state of uncertainty. The phone might ring again in an hour, and missiles from Iran could be launched. We’re in survival mode – and this has consequences.”

Since October 7, the report notes, psychiatric hospitals have seen a 30 or 40% increase in self-referrals. The number of those being treated in so-called “resilience centers”, which provide support to Israelis in mental crisis situations has risen from 5,000 in 2022, to 36,000 in 2025.

As Israeli society rots from the inside, its international support has withered. US Vice-president JD Vance made an astonishing dig at the Israeli leadership this month, when he commented on the reluctance of Netanyahu to go along with the first ceasefire agreement with Iran. The USA, at least to an extent, is trying to force Israel into an agreement with Hezbollah and into accepting that its long-term aim of destroying the Iranian regime is not possible. Vance’s speech was a part of that process, as he reminded the Israelis who was ‘boss’.

“Donald J Trump”, he said, according to CNN, “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.” That is not strictly correct, given the craven support given to Israel by the like of Starmer and other European leaders. But nonetheless, Vance was letting the cat out of the bag.

“We are your only friends” – JD Vance

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance continued, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Here, Vance is acknowledging that world opinion has swung massively against Israel since its onslaught on Gaza was started, then to be followed up by ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

On a global scale, the thousands of demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza, involving tens of millions of protesters, often week after week, we have seen the biggest political protest movement on a single issue in the whole of history. It has had a profound effect on Western politics, although not yet on the majority of the political leaderships and governments.

Even in the United States, where the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) once bought Democratic and Republican politicians with its extremely deep pockets, public opinion has swayed massively against Israel.

According to the magazine +927 (January 2026), over Israeli 150,000 citizens have left the country in the past two years, many of them with one-way tickets and no plans to return. It is taking a long time – far longer than most on the left would want – but the policy of the Israeli right wing is going to be demonstrable proven, even to Israelis themselves, to be unsustainable.

Military hegemony over the whole region, with a constant round of wars, occupations and aggression is not a route to a ‘safe and secure’ homeland for Jewish people. It is a road to psychological, political and social decay. 

With Karim Khan's dismissal, the elimination of the war crimes court is near-complete

Millions of people around the world will now find themselves even more exposed to the criminal actions of predatory states. Unlike Khan's accuser, they are unlikely to ever get their day in court.

Johnathan Cook July 30 2026.

Johnathan Cook on Substack

The most important question we should be asking after Karim Khan’s dismissal last week as chief prosecutor of the ICC – the international war crimes court in The Hague – is not whether he is guilty of “sexual misconduct” against another staff member, identified as “Sarah”.

That can only be decided through a legal process – one, let us note, that has already taken place. A fact-finding body carried out a lengthy investigation of Sarah’s allegations over more than a year; its thousands of pages of evidence were then evaluated in detail by three senior judges.

Though you would not know it from the media coverage, they concluded that there was no evidence to suggest any kind of misconduct by Khan, sexual or otherwise.

Strangely, that determination was largely confirmed by an extraordinarily deferential “exclusive” CNN interview with Sarah, aired earlier this month.

She declined to give any meaningful details of what Khan had allegedly subjected her to, and celebrity interviewer Christiane Amanpour delicately avoided pressing her for any clarification.

No matter. The purpose of the CNN interview was never about excavating facts. It was designed to offer face-saving cover as an entirely political body called the Assembly of States Parties, comprising diplomatic representatives of the 125 states signed up to the ICC, entirely ignored the legal findings and dismissed Khan.

Paradoxically, it was the Assembly of States Parties that appointed the judges who had concluded that there was no evidence of misconduct or breach of duty by Khan. That inconvenient judgment was simply reversed, despite the Assembly members being in no position to weigh the evidence themselves. 

We should not forget that many of these states have an investment in weakening the only international court that can bring their own senior officials to trial for war crimes. 

In May 2024 – shortly before Sarah made her allegations – the ICC demonstrated that it was finally ready to prosecute western leaders for war crimes, not just those from the Global South or from the West’s official enemies, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Khan finally issued an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Both are accused of crimes against humanity for starving the people of Gaza through a prolonged blockade of food, water and power.

Were Netanyahu ever to face trial – and found guilty, as he almost certainly would be – a lot of other leaders would have good reason to fear they might be found culpable next, not least for their complicity in Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. 

The question that needs answering now is not whether Khan is guilty of misconduct – that has been decided at a political level, not a legal one. No, we need an answer to an equally political, and far more troubling, question.

“Cui bono?” Or “Who benefits?”

The evidence is hiding in plain sight. The evidence is revealed both in the deeply politicised process that led to Khan’s downfall, and in what that process means for the future of the court.

Covert war

Khan is not the first ICC chief prosecutor to face extreme pressures – and, as with Khan, those pressures surfaced at the very moment Khan’s predecessor tried to take on Israel over its war crimes.

Fatou Bensouda faced a “covert war” waged against her by Israel for the best part of a decade, according to an investigation by the Guardian in May 2024, just as Khan issued his arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

The Guardian’s report, published nearly three years after Bensouda had completed her nine-year term at the ICC, revealed that, during that time, she had faced threats to herself and her family, the monitoring of her communications, and an intimidating visit to her home. 

More recently, Bensouda has confirmed these accounts in an interview with Al Jazeera. Bensouda notes that she repeatedly reported Israel’s campaign of intimidation to the Dutch authorities, but they did nothing to investigate the threats or protect her. 

She also says certain “authorities” – she does not name them – warned her that she was going too far in investigating Israeli crimes and that “you could be harmed or you could be killed, or family members could be harmed in some way.”

The campaign of threats – instigated by Yossi Cohen, then the director of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad – intensified as Bensouda considered whether to open a formal investigation into Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, we should remember, predate – by decades – Hamas’ attack on 7 October 2023. In fact, though no one is supposed to mention it, Israel’s sustained crimes of occupation are the self-evident cause of that Hamas attack.

An Israeli source told the Guardian that “the Mossad’s objective was to compromise the prosecutor or enlist her as someone who would cooperate with Israel’s demands”– that is, scrap the ICC’s investigation into Israeli crimes. Another source admitted that Cohen was acting on Netanyahu’s instructions.

During one contact, Cohen reportedly issued a Mafia-style threat to Bensouda: “You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

The Guardian reported that the Mossad “took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Israeli officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor”.

The paper also noted that there were fears among senior ICC officials that “Israel had cultivated sources within the court’s prosecution division” – the division Khan would inherit from Bensouda.

Cohen was described as “stalking” Bensouda, and personally “ambushed” her in a hotel room in New York in 2018. Afterwards he repeatedly phoned her, in a threatening manner that was said to have escalated over time. When Bensouda asked Cohen how he had obtained her phone number, he reportedly replied: “Did you forget what I do for a living?”

According to the Guardian: 

On one occasion, Cohen is said to have shown Bensouda copies of photographs of her husband, which were taken covertly when the couple were visiting London. On another, according to sources, Cohen suggested to the prosecutor that a decision to open a full investigation would be detrimental to her career.

Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members.

The spy agency obtained a cache of material, including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against her husband.

Israel used the materials to mount a “smear campaign” against her, but one that ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Concerted backlash

When Khan took up the role of ICC chief prosecutor in June 2021, he proved reluctant to pick up where Bensouda had left off on the Palestine case. Presumably, he was only too aware of the retaliation from Israel against her.

Bensouda had announced in December 2019 that she had grounds to open a full criminal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

However, in the face of a concerted backlash from western states, she delayed opening the investigation. She first sought a ruling from a pre-trial chamber of ICC judges – presumably in the hope that it would serve as some kind of insurance policy – on whether the court had jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories.

By February 2021 the judges confirmed what was already self-evident. The court did have such jurisdiction because Palestine had been signed up to the court since 2015.

Bensouda stepped down a few months later.

The door was now open for Khan to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes. However, the new chief prosecutor gave every appearance – perhaps understandably – of preferring to sit on his hands.

It was not just Israel that had been fearsomely opposed to its officials being tried for war crimes. Washington was equally incensed at the prospect – sometimes, it seemed, more so than over the possibility that US officials might also face arrest warrants for crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Between 2019 and 2020, during Trump’s first presidency, the US imposed severe visa restrictions and financial sanctions on Bensouda. Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions to the Palestine case: “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes.” 

Khan might well have avoided pursuing Israel indefinitely had it not been for the events that followed October 7 2023.

Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, its devastation of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure, and its starvation of the entire population were actions so criminally abhorrent that UN agencies, major human rights groups and Holocaust scholars were soon all in agreement that they amounted to genocide.

In May 2024, Khan announced arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders subsequently killed by Israel.

Tsunami of threats

Shortly before Khan made that announcement, 12 senior US Senators had sent a threatening letter to the ICC: “Target Israel and we will target you.” The letter ended: “You have been warned.” 

Describing Israeli and US sovereignty as inseparable, the senators reminded Khan that Washington had demonstrated “the lengths to which we will go to protect [our] sovereignty.”

A 2002 law, popularly known as “The Hague Invasion Act”, authorises the US president “to use all means necessary and appropriate” to bring about the release US persons and any allies imprisoned or detained by the ICC. Those allies, it goes without saying, include Israeli leaders. 

Such threats, it should be noted, are a violation of Article 70 of the Rome Statute.

Following the issuing of the arrest warrants, there followed a tsunami of similar threats – and presumably more that have yet to become public – against Khan and the ICC.

A British-Israeli lawyer within the ICC – one known to have ties to Netanyahu’s legal adviser – warned Khan "they will destroy you and they will destroy the court" if the warrants were not rescinded. He urged Khan to “climb down the tree" and drop the case.

The UK’s foreign secretary of the time, David Cameron, phoned Khan to tell him Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute that founded the ICC if Khan did not back down.

Cameron warned Khan that he was “on the brink of making a huge mistake” and urged him to “take a step back and consider things”. He added that applying for arrest warrants for Israeli officials was tantamount to “dropping a hydrogen bomb”.

Meanwhile, Trump issued an executive order imposing aggressive financial sanctions against Khan and other ICC officials, including several of its judges.

Khan himself received warnings that Israel’s Mossad was continuing its operations in The Hague, where the ICC is located, to monitor and compromise the court’s investigators as they compiled evidence on Israel – just as it had done earlier under Bensouda. 

Khan publicly stated that retaliatory threats and intimidation were explicitly targeting members of his own family.

Untouchable criminals

What conclusions should we draw from all of this?

Quite aside from the matter of whether Sarah’s allegations of “sexual misconduct” are true or not, it is clear that Israel and the US have been digging for dirt – and apparently ready to fabricate such dirt – on any chief prosecutor who tries to hold them to account for their crimes.

Both have indicated that they are ready to manipulate legal and political processes to ensure the outcome they desire: that they remain untouchable .

We have a template for how this plays out. Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, published details in 2010 of US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost immediately he found himself entangled in accusations of sexual misdemeanours – in his case in Sweden – that were similarly amplified by an uncritical western media. 

Assange faced years in various forms of confinement while the US and UK pressured Sweden to keep alive an investigation against him Swedish prosecutors at least twice sought to drop for lack of credible evidence. 

In fact, the US and UK never wanted the evidence tested – they were quite happy with a permanent, unresolved “investigation” – precisely because they knew it would have been unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny. 

The point was simply to generate constant headlines about “rape”, turning Assange into a pariah, justifying his effective disappearance from public life, severely weakening Wikileaks as a whistleblowing platform, deflecting attention from the all-too-real crimes committed by the US and Britain, and paving the way to a political show trial to extradite him to the US on entirely confected “espionage” charges. 

This has been repeated in the case of Khan and the ICC. In Khan’s case, the evidence was tested and found inadequate. So the legal process has been replaced by a flagrantly political one. 

Khan has been turned into a legal pariah, even stripped of his right to work as a lawyer in the UK by the British Bar Association. 

The ICC has been further weakened, just as Israel and the US have expressly stated they wanted it to be. Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, has recently launched an official campaign to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick”. 

He says: “Now they [the ICC] are going to see the consequences”. Consequences of what? Of seeking to enforce international law against a key US client state. 

Meanwhile, accountability for the all-too-real crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank – and actively supported by western states like the US, Germany and Britain – recedes yet further into the background. 

Subscribed

As each brick protecting the ICC is dismantled, a brick is added to the wall of protection around Netanyahu and Israel’s genocidal war machine. 

Israel, meanwhile, is barely concealing that it has been masterminding the effort to destroy the ICC. 

According to Guy Azriel, the diplomatic correspondent for i24 News, Israeli foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar “oversaw a dedicated task force and employed intensive diplomatic efforts aimed at securing Khan’s removal from office”.

Hillel Neuer, director of the Israel apologist group United Nations Watch, cheered what he called “our campaign to remove” Khan, and warned Francesca Albanese, the UN’s legal expert on the occupied Palestinian territories, “you’re next”. 

Like Khan, Albanese has been searching for practical, legal ways – not just rhetoric – to hold Israel and its western allies to account for the crimes in Gaza. 

Predatory states

The ICC claims its work will not be affected by Khan’s removal and that the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant will still be pursued under new stewardship. That seems doubtful. 

Israel and the US are cranking up the intimidation of the ICC, which has no tools to enforce its rulings or protect itself from the hostility of a rogue superpower.

Currently the court appears paralysed, allowing Israel to muddy the waters with interminable, and vexatious, appeals against the arrest warrants. 

Any lawyer who takes up the post of ICC chief prosecutor will be only too aware of the fate that befell Khan and the campaign of intimidation against Bensouda as soon as each tried to enforce accountability on Israel and its western patrons. 

It will take a very brave individual indeed to renew that task. Khan’s successor will understand that, in any further confrontation with Israel and Washington, the US will not hesitate to crush the ICC and, with it, remove the only effective restraint on criminality by powerful states. 

More likely, however, the Assembly of States Parties – the political body that ousted Khan – will privately require from his successor reassurances that the new chief prosecutor reliably defer to the principle of Israeli and western impunity. Only someone less willing to ruffle feathers stands any chance of being appointed. 

That was the clearest of messages sent by the Assembly when a majority of member states voted to be rid of Khan. The short-lived experiment in creating a mechanism for enforcing international law is over. We are back to the law of the jungle. 

Hundred of thousands of people around the world – more likely millions – will now find themselves even more exposed to the criminal actions of predatory states. Unlike Khan’s accuser, they are unlikely to ever get their day in court 

Israel: Religious Mythology and Settler Colonialism

John Clarke

Toronto

7-23-26

 

Herzog's claim to be a proven descendant of King David is completely absurd. He has a name that originated in Europe and any cursory check will show that the existence of David is debatable. Just as significantly, the historical role this king is supposed to have played is unsupported by any evidence outside of the scriptures. Indeed, Herzog's own claim is based on rabbinical writings.

This use of religious myth as if it were serious historical evidence is something that the Zionist movement and the Israeli educational system has concentrated on to a huge degree. Moreover, while Herzog's claim would be met with hoots of derision throughout the Global South, such has been the level of support for the Zionist political ideology in the West that he is taken seriously when he lets fly with this nonsense.

 

Such irrationality isn't the unique preserve of Zionism and its colonial project of course. All forms of settler-colonialism have based themselves on a claim (often divinely mandated) to take someone else's land on the basis of alleged superiority. The co-option of religious tradition created particular notions of return to a God given homeland but these ideas aren't fundamentally different to those used to justify dispossession in other places, including Canada.

 

It is inherently futile to debate religious ideas and, if the groundless belief that he is descended from a mythical ancient King who worked closely with the Supreme Being gets Herzog out of bed in the morning, good luck to him. 

 

The problem arises when such ideas are put into effect at the expense of others. Herzog's role in the Gaza Genocide and the broader dispossession of the Palestinians show very clearly that he has crossed this line with terrible results.

 

The issue, then, isn't to focus on refuting the distorted and mythical elements of the Zionist ideology but to directly challenge the ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide that have resulted from their application. We need to take into our efforts to end Western sponsorship and material support that is so essential for Israel, a clear opposition to the criminal injustices that have arisen when this ideology has been put into practice.

The West won't punish the settlements. Its two-state solution was always a sham

 The West won't punish the settlements. Its two-state solution was always a sham

For decades, the EU has devised ever more convoluted ways to avoid penalising Israel's illegal settlements, even as they devour a two-state solution it claims is the only path to regional peace.

Johnathan Cook July 14, 2026  Johnathan Cook on Substack

If I asked you to cut off your arm, would you do it? 

What if I pointed out that that your arm regularly punched a neighbour in the face so violently that it broke their nose and teeth, and left them unconscious? Would you cut your arm off then?

I’m guessing the answer to both questions is a firm, “No.” 

Which is exactly why the European Union, Britain and the United States have precisely no intention of severing their support for Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however violent the Jewish colonisers who live on stolen Palestinian land prove to be.

For decades, settler militias – backed by Israeli soldiers – have beaten up Palestinians, shot them, poisoned their wells, chopped down their olive groves, torched their homes, all in an attempt to ethnically cleanse them from their historic homeland.

The relentless expansion of these illegal settlements has left any hope of a two-state solution in tatters. The West Bank is now an archipelago of Palestinian villages and towns isolated from one another by marauding violent settlers, apartheid roads only for Jews, steel and concrete barriers, and army checkpoints. 

All of this has happened in full view of western states over many decades. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, ruled back in 2004 – nearly a quarter of a century ago – that these Jewish settlements violated international law and needed to be dismantled. 

It reiterated that demand in a decision two years ago in which it identified Israel as an apartheid state ruling over Palestinians. It warned states to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory”. 

And yet the West has done nothing meaningful year after year as the settlements have stolen more land from Palestinians, made their lives there ever more miserable, and trashed any chance of the West’s supposed ambition of two states living alongside each other.

Remember this when Israel’s apologists tell you to wait for the same court’s definitive ruling – in a year or two, or maybe three – on what it deemed in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, just three months into Israel’s mass slaughter there. 

Not only will any such ruling be far too late to make any difference to the victims of the genocide, but the US, Britain and Europe will do precisely no more to punish Israel for this crime of crimes – one we can see for ourselves without an ICJ ruling – than they have done in punishing Israel for the settlements. 

Punching fist

Why? Because most western states no more wish to impose a penalty on Israel for its crimes than you would want to amputate a healthy arm. 

If they refuse to lift a finger to stop a live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, why on earth would anyone imagine they are ready to do anything to stop Israel’s violent settlers ethnically cleansing the West Bank? 

The settlements are as deeply integrated into Israel as your arm is attached to your shoulder. And in turn, Israel is as much the punching fist of the imperial West’s war machine as the City of London – and its former tax-haven colonies – are the beating heart of the imperial West’s financial machine.

Western elites cannot imagine a world without Israel as their military thug in the oil-rich Middle East any more than you can imagine life without your arm. 

That explains why no one really believed that EU foreign ministers, meeting once again this week to discuss banning settlement products – the bare minimum they have long been obligated to do under international law – would reach an agreement. 

More than 100 legal scholars had earlier written to the European Commission’s top trade and foreign policy officials stressing the EU’s “international legal obligation”.

But as everyone predicted, EU ministers kicked the can down the road – until at least October, when they agreed to more talks about talks. 

The EU has been delaying meaningful action on dealing with the settlements since at least 2004, when the ICJ ruled them illegal. 

A year after that ruling, the EU issued a Technical Agreement that removed preferential trade tariffs of the kind Israeli goods enjoy from any items produced in the illegal settlements. Israel agreed only because there were so many loopholes and workarounds it had no practical effect whatsoever. 

It was another seven years – in 2012 – before the EU started to express concern about these loopholes, including the fact that Israel was routinely mislabelling settlement products as “Made in Israel”. 

Fast forward another three years and the EU finally got around to pretending to be closing the loopholes. In November 2015, 11 years after the ICJ ruling, the EU issued an “interpretative notice” requiring labels on settlement goods stating: "Product from the West Bank (Israeli settlement)." 

Again, Israel simply ignored the notice and continued mislabelling products, or blended them with products made in Israel, making it hard to determine the provenance. 

Pure pantomime

Remember, these lengthy, meaningless battles were not about banning settlement products or even imposing punitive tariffs. They were simply about labelling them correctly. 

To this day, the overwhelming majority of consumers across the EU have no idea, even if items are correctly labelled, which they almost never are, that they are buying products supporting Israel’s violent campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland. 

It was because of this utter farce that civil society organisations started to noisily accuse the EU of complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and demand instead the outright banning of all settlement products. 

These critics have now been banging their heads against a brick wall for over a decade. They have still achieved nothing, as this week’s EU meeting once again confirms. 

Even were they to win a victory a year or two hence on banning settlement products, Israel would still be able to use the same workarounds it has been for the past 22 years to avoid any meaningful impact. European consumers would still be directly subsidising the violence of Jewish settler militias and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. 

All of this has been pure theatre – or more accurately, pantomime – to suggest that some kind of administrative process is in hand, that legal avenues are being pursued, that Israel will one day pay a price for its decades-old programme of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. 

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And yet nothing ever actually happens. The most the EU is prepared to do is throw a sop to its critics by imposing symbolic sanctions on a couple of dozen of the most violent settlers – out of a total settler population of nearly 700,000. 

Those settlers did not end up in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by accident. Most were encouraged there by the Israeli state with offers of cheap housing, lower mortgage rates and higher funding of educational and other municipal services. 

Note too that this abject failure relates to Israel’s explicit goal in expanding its settlements: to eviscerate the two-state solution the West says it craves as the only way to bring peace to the region. 

The fact is Europe, Britain and the US have no interest in the two-state solution. If they did, they would have used the ICJ ruling in 2004 as grounds to ban settlement products, give that ban real teeth, and threaten Israel with a loss of all preferential trade with the West until it abided by international law and removed all obstacles to Palestinian statehood, including the settlements.

They did none of this because that was never their intention. 

Their only concern is keeping Israel – their pit bull in the Middle East – fed and watered. 

If Israel wants the settlements to continue expelling Palestinians off their lands until there are no Palestinians left on those lands, then the West is not going to naysay it. 

Just as if Israel wants to continue deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza for death, as a United Nations inquiry recently determined, then the West will turn a blind eye to that too. 

If Israel’s soldiers and Jewish settler militias want to take a US Congressperson hostage in the West Bank, as they briefly did to Democrat politician Ro Khanna last week, no western leader is going to make a fuss about it.

Israel may be a rogue state but it is a rogue state made entirely in the western elite’s image. The West’s only real concern is in ensuring its own publics don’t realise, as they watch a genocidal state disappear the Palestinians, that they are looking into the mirror.