That silence has enveloped south Lebanon, and it is becoming yet another moral failure of an era defined by live streamed genocides, the death of international law, and pride in war crimes.

What is happening in south Lebanon is not, by any serious measure, a proportionate military campaign. It is the systematic hollowing out of a people from their ancestral land, and an eradication of life from that land itself.

To date, Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October 2023 have killed more than 7,000 people and injured more than 24,000, according to conservative numbers by the Lebanese Health Ministry, with the majority civilians. More than one million people – a fifth of the population – are displaced, while medical workers, journalists, and civilian infrastructure have been systematically targeted.

This mass displacement is not a byproduct of the war. It is its stated objective. Israeli officials explicitly stated in late March 2026 that they were demolishing south Lebanon houses and villages “in accordance with the model as Gaza,” and that 600,000 displaced people would not be allowed to return “until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed.”

Despite a ceasefire agreed in November 2024, over 15,000 Israeli violations were recorded by UNIFIL, with Amnesty International documenting near-daily Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon throughout the 15 months period, until March 2, 2026, when Israel formally resumed full-scale war.

A Civilizational Wound

South Lebanon is not simply territory. It is among the most layered, historically dense regions in West Asia. The villages of Jabal Amel carry centuries of Islamic scholarship, poetry, and legal tradition. This is a land that has outlasted empires. Tyre (Sour) is one of the oldest continuously populated cities on earth, an ancient Phoenician port that gave the world its purple dye and the alphabet’s early spread. It has been sacked, rebuilt, and survived Alexander the Great, the Crusaders, and every empire that passed through. On October 23, 2024, Israeli airstrikes destroyed large swathes of the city, with one strike landing 50 metres from the ancient ruins, today the city is under evacuation orders by the Israeli army. 

Then there is Nabatieh,  the beating heart of Jabal Amel, and another city under evacuation orders. Its name is tied to the Nabataean traders who moved between Sidon and Damascus. For centuries it has connected the mountains to the coast, the inland villages to the sea, a crossroads where the whole of the south converged. 

At its centre, the Monday Market stretches back 500 years, a weekly ritual that survived Ottoman rule, civil war, and years of Israeli occupation. By late 2024, roughly 85 percent of the city’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, along with some 300 businesses. Israel did not stop at the ceasefire, what remained was struck again when fighting resumed. A UNDP assessment found that “58 percent of agricultural assets in the Nabatieh district had been destroyed”, the highest proportion anywhere in the south. 

Nabatieh, like other towns and villages in the South, has been destroyed before, in 1978, in 1982, and in 2006. People rebuilt each time. 

What Israeli airstrikes and ground incursions are doing to this landscape is beyond the mass murder of people. It is destroying a world, systematically flattening architecture that predates the state of Israel itself, obliterating millennial olive groves and family homes, forcing the flight of entire communities whose roots run deeper than most nations. When heritage sites, mosques, and village squares are reduced to powder, something is lost that no reconstruction can return.

This is ethnic cleansing: the forced displacement of a population from its ancestral land through systematic terror.

Killing the Land Itself

But Israel’s war on Lebanon does not stop at human communities. It extends into the soil, the forests, the water, the animals, and the very biological substrate of the south. This is not collateral damage. It is a deliberate strategy, and it is documented.

During the 2024 Israeli war, Lebanon lost around 1,910 hectares of prime farmland, 47,000 olive trees, and roughly 1,200 hectares of oak forests, some of the last remaining native woodland in the region. Among the casualties was Harj al-Raheb, the Monk Forest, on the southern edge of Ayta ash-Shaab, a 16-hectare woodland of ecological and cultural richness that had endured for centuries. Satellite images now show white craters where green canopy once stood, alongside extensive bulldozing that stripped the terrain bare. Fire and phosphorus erased in months what has lived there for millennia.

The weapon of choice for much of this destruction is white phosphorus, a chemical substance that ignites on contact with oxygen, burns at up to 800 degrees Celsius, and releases thick toxic smoke. Human Rights Watch verified its use in at least 17 municipalities across south Lebanon. In at least five of those, the munitions were used in populated areas, landing on the roofs of residential buildings. The stated rationale is to burn down fields for visibility. Trees, in other words, are a threat. Forests must be destroyed. Nature itself is the enemy, just as the US military had done in Vietnam using napalm to burn life during their murderous imperial campaign against the country’s national liberation movement. 

More than 918 hectares were hit in 191 documented white phosphorus attacks from October 2023 until the 2024 ceasefire alone, according to data collected by Lebanese researcher Ahmad Baydoun and the environmental group Green Southerners. The long-term consequences remain unknown, but easy to predict. 

Even though Israel shelled Lebanon with white phosphorus repeatedly between 1982 and 2006 in its various wars of aggression, there have been no local studies on its long-term environmental impact, due to lack of resources, political inaction, or the difficulty in accessing samples. The poison persists in the soil; but the science to measure it has been mostly unused.

Then, as if to ensure that whatever survived the bombs and fire could not sustain life, came the herbicides. In early February 2026, Israeli planes sprayed toxic chemical substances across Lebanon’s southern border, covering approximately 8.5 square kilometres of agricultural land, forests, and livestock grazing areas with glyphosate at concentrations up to 50 times higher than standard agricultural use. Lebanon’s agriculture and environmental ministries found glyphosate levels 20 to 30 times above average in soil samples from the affected area. Glyphosate is banned in Lebanon and classified by the World Health Organization as potentially carcinogenic to humans.

The targeted area contained ancient oak, terebinth, and laurel forests that provide habitat for wildlife, alongside olive groves that produce oil and soap, tobacco plantations, and grazing land. As environmental researcher Hisham Younes, founder and president of Lebanese environmental group Green Southerners, puts it: “This spraying does not take place over an intact ecosystem or healthy soil. It occurs over land already severely stressed and degraded by the intensive use of white phosphorus, incendiary munitions, and the accumulation of heavy-metal residues from sustained bombardment.” 

The glyphosate is not the beginning of the destruction. It is the finishing blow, applied to a landscape already burned, bombed, and poisoned, ensuring that even if people are allowed to return, there is nothing left to return to. That life will no longer be possible, for humans, plants, and animals alike.

Lebanon’s agriculture minister described the spraying as “consistent with known practices along the border, where such substances are used to create vegetation-free zones, effectively resulting in systematic desertification.” Lebanon’s government-backed environmental report has gone further, formally accusing Israel of ecocide and documenting damage to forests, agricultural lands, marine ecosystems, water resources, and atmospheric quality, concluding that the scale and intentionality of the destruction “constitute what must be recognized as an act of ecocide.”

Israel’s war, as is the case with previous colonial wars across the world, is one on the land as a living system, on the biological heritage of a civilization, on the ecosystems that sustain human and non-human life alike, waged with chemical weapons, incendiary munitions, and bulldozers, in full view of the world.

The US War Machine

The south of Lebanon is home to communities that have lived in this region for over a thousand years. Entire villages have been evacuated by force and erased. Families have been killed in their homes, in their cars, on roads marked for civilian evacuation.

This is not incidental. Striking the predominantly Shia population of south Lebanon, and Lebanon in general is the goal. When a religious community becomes a military target in the eyes of the aggressor, and in the narratives of much of the regional and international media, we have crossed into the now too common space of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

None of this happens in a vacuum. The bombs falling on Lebanese villages are, in a direct and documented sense, US bombs. The aircraft delivering them are US aircraft. The intelligence enabling the targeting has, by multiple credible accounts, has US fingerprints.

The United States has not merely failed to restrain Israel, it has actively armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for a campaign that has drawn condemnation from human rights organizations, UN officials, and international legal bodies, both in Palestine and in Lebanon. Each time a resolution calling for accountability has come before international bodies, the US position has been to obstruct, or sanction international judges, rapporteurs, and any organization that dares speak the truth.

This makes the United States not a neutral broker or a concerned ally urging restraint, but a co-belligerent (together with various other Western and Arab countries). When cluster munitions, bunker-busting bombs, and incendiary weapons are supplied to a military deploying them in densely populated civilian areas and ecologically sensitive forests, the supplier shares responsibility for what follows, including the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and ecocide.

One Unhinged Logic

It is impossible to understand Lebanon in isolation from Gaza. What we are witnessing is a single operational and ideological logic playing out across two theaters. In Gaza, the world has watched the near-total destruction of a civilian population with hospitals bombed, aid blocked, famine used as a weapon, with mounting horror and mounting futility. The patterns have become undeniable: this is not warfare constrained by the laws of armed conflict. It is warfare that has discarded those laws entirely and proudly.

Lebanon is the expansion of that logic northward. The same targeting of civilian, medical, and vital infrastructure. The same displacement of hundreds of thousands. The same deliberate erasure of agricultural and ecological life. The same impunity. Having encountered no meaningful international consequences in Gaza, the methods were exported. Why wouldn’t they be? The world demonstrated, repeatedly, that there would be no price.

This is what unchecked military power looks like when it is also diplomatically shielded: it grows, and it finds new applications for the same tools, from bombs to bulldozers to crop-killing herbicides.

The Silence of States and People

What is most disorienting and perhaps most dangerous about this moment is not just the actions of Israel and the United States. It is the silence of everyone else.

For Gaza, Arab states have issued statements of concern that function as moral performance without consequence while they maintained trade and security cooperation as the genocide was ongoing. For Lebanon, it was mostly silence. Most Arab governments offered barely even the performance.

European governments, with a handful of exceptions, oscillated between performative concern and active complicity over Gaza, and extended that into near-total silence on Lebanon. 

Solidarity movements outside the region have fractured along political, sectarian, and national lines. The Shia identity of the majority of the victims has meant limited solidarity in the sectarian environment plaguing the Arab world. Hezbollah’s violent role in Syria has complicated it further. But these are not explanations. Across the globe, Palestine solidarity networks have been almost entirely absent in opposing the ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon. Very few, if any, have mobilized.

Apparently this is not an important story, not compared to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. International media has been comfortable looking away while an entire civilian ecosystem is chemically sterilized and an ancient people are expelled from their land.

The principle that civilians deserve protection from collective punishment does not carry an asterisk that reads “unless their politics or sectarian identity are disagreeable.” 

Beyond Lebanon.

We are watching, in real time, the collapse of the international legal order – with all its deficiencies – that was constructed after 1945 precisely to prevent this kind of impunity. The Geneva Conventions, the Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, these institutions exist because the world looked at the ruins of the Second World War and said: never again, and we will build structures to ensure it. Those structures are not being eroded. They are being actively demolished, with US and Western diplomatic tools serving as the wrecking ball.

If a nuclear-armed, Western-backed state can conduct what legal scholars describe as ethnic cleansing and genocide, with full documentation, in real time, broadcast on every platform, and face no meaningful consequences, then the message is clear: the rules do not apply to the powerful. They never did, perhaps. But the pretense that they did was itself a form of protection, however limited, for the vulnerable. That pretense is gone now.

For Lebanon specifically, the consequences may be generational. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from the south creates demographic and psychological wounds that will shape Lebanese politics for decades. A country already broken by corruption, economic collapse, and sectarian divisions is being further hollowed out. The question is not only whether south Lebanon can be liberated and rebuilt, but whether the Lebanese state, such as it is, can survive another existential blow.

What is being asked of the world is not complicated. It requires the application of consistent principles: that civilians may not be collectively punished, that ancient communities may not be erased from their land, that the laws of war apply to all parties equally, and that silence in the face of documented atrocity is itself a moral choice.

The south of Lebanon is burning. Its people are scattered and left alone to face a ruthless war machine. Its forests are ash. Its soil is poisoned.

The world knows. And the world, for the most part, has decided to look away.

History will not be kind to this moment. The question is whether we wait for history’s verdict, or whether some of us, states, institutions, ordinary people with a voice, choose to act before there is nothing left to save.

The post Bombed, Poisoned, and Ignored: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of South Lebanon appeared first on Untold.

Calypse is us and at the same time she speaks to us: the conscience of a generation that is condemned to resist and survive.

The comic has been created by the UntoldMag collective together with artist Francesca Cogni.

Episode 2: “Rights We Can’t Afford”

The post Abu Calypse, Episode 2: “Rights We Can’t Afford” appeared first on Untold.

This was not merely a rhetorical flourish. It signaled the final abandonment of a diplomatic convention that had guided Indian prime ministers for decades: the practice of visiting both Israel and Palestine on the same trip. Every previous prime minister who traveled to Tel Aviv also made the journey to Ramallah, a tangible demonstration of India’s commitment to a two-state solution. Modi broke that tradition. His lone visit to Israel, without any stop in Palestine, cast serious doubt on whether New Delhi still supports the creation of a Palestinian state.

The implications of this shift have grown only starker since the war on Iran began. While the Indian government has issued tepid calls for restraint, it has offered condemnation neither for the killing of Iranian leaders nor of the unfolding catastrophe in Iran. This silence is particularly striking given the deep ties between the two countries. Iran, a fellow BRICS member, remains one of India’s largest trading partners and has offered crucial diplomatic support on Kashmir in international forums—standing with India against Pakistan when it mattered. Indian investment in Iran grew substantially throughout the 2010s, including the development of a strategic port that promised significant benefits for both economies.

Despite its deep investments in the relationship with Iran over decades, India’s unequivocal positioning with Israel and the United States in this war signals a meta-shift in its foreign policy—one increasingly guided by the BJP’s Hindu nationalist worldview. To understand the magnitude of this shift, we must first understand what Indian foreign policy was, and where it came from.

Idealist Foreign Policy

India’s foreign policy was shaped by the crucible of anticolonial struggle, and its contours were drawn long before independence was actually achieved. The first stirrings came as early as 1927, at the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression in Brussels, where Indian leaders and activists played a pivotal role. 

During the Second World War, even as Indian leaders intensified their campaign against British rule, they never wavered in their commitment against antisemitism and fascism. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Indian volunteers traveled thousands of miles to fight for the Republicans. Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India’s first prime minister, raised funds in Britain and India to support the Republican war effort. 

At the very moment when Modi’s ideological predecessors were delivering speeches in the streets of Bombay cheering the persecution of Jews in Europe, Nehru was facilitating the arrival of Jewish refugees in India from Europe.

This idealism—forged in anti-imperial struggle and tempered by a commitment to human dignity—shaped independent India’s foreign policy from its inception. In the postwar world, divided between two hostile camps, India joined with other newly independent states in refusing to choose sides. The Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Belgrade Conference of 1961 gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which became the most powerful foreign policy doctrine in the decolonized world. India was not merely a participant but a principal architect, both of the movement itself and of its implementation.

Anticolonial Principles

Crucially, NAM was never the “pragmatic neutrality” its critics caricatured it as. It was an idealistic stance that firmly advocated for peace, nuclear disarmament, and decolonization. This was not abstract rhetoric but lived policy. India headed the international committee that brokered a ceasefire in the Korean War. It opposed the Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. It condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It stood against the Vietnam War. It played a mediating role in the Congo crisis. It refused all diplomatic recognition to apartheid South Africa.

The finest hour of Indian foreign policy, however, arrived in 1971. When civil war erupted in Pakistan following East Pakistan’s declaration of independence, India—then one of the poorest countries in the world—sheltered ten million refugees for nearly nine months. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi traveled across the globe, pleading for international attention to the crisis and the unfolding genocide in East Pakistan. When diplomacy failed and the threat of US intervention on behalf of its Pakistani ally loomed, the Indian army intervened alongside the Bangladeshi liberation forces. In a swift thirteen-day war, they broke the Pakistani military’s grip, and the new nation of Bangladesh was born.

But the truly remarkable feat was not the military victory—it was what came after. India withdrew its forces and left Bangladesh to its people and its chosen leaders. It made no attempt to occupy or annex its neighbor. At a moment when it could have pursued expansionist ambitions, it chose restraint. This was foreign policy as an anticolonial principle in action.

Sympathy for Palestine

India’s approach toward Israel-Palestine was not an exception to this foreign policy outlook—it was its logical extension. The anticolonial tradition expressed itself naturally in sympathy for Palestine. Mahatma Gandhi himself drew a direct colonial analogy, declaring that Palestine belonged to the Arabs just as England belonged to the English—recognizing the national sovereignty of Palestinians over their land. Nehru, the committed antifascist who understood intimately the agony of European Jewry after the Holocaust, nevertheless refused to see the occupation of Palestine as a just solution to that crisis. His sympathy for Jewish victims did not translate into support for Palestinian dispossession.

This principled stance found concrete expression at the United Nations in 1947, when India voted against the partition of Palestine—defying both the United States and the Soviet Union in the process. The vote was not merely a foreign policy calculation but a reflection of the ideological position the anticolonial leadership had staked out during the independence struggle: a principled opposition to the division of lands and peoples on the basis of religion. India opposed partition in Palestine for the same reasons it had opposed the partition of its own subcontinent.

India formally recognized Israel in 1950, but this diplomatic gesture did not signal an abandonment of its commitment to the Palestinian people. Nehru visited Gaza in 1960, over Israeli objections and despite security threats. In 1974, India became the first non-Arab state to formally recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization. Full diplomatic relations followed in 1980, and when the PLO declared independence in 1988, India extended immediate recognition. Yasser Arafat was a frequent visitor to New Delhi, received with state honors at a time when the West still designated him a terrorist.

The Unipolar World

The 1990s brought two simultaneous transformations that would strain this tradition. First, India finally opened its markets to the global economy, abandoning the democratic-socialist framework that had guided economic policy since 1947. The repercussions for foreign policy were immediate: idealism gradually gave way to the logic of economic pragmatism. Second, the fall of the Soviet Union rendered the Non-Aligned Movement seemingly obsolete in a unipolar world. 

These twin shifts found their clearest expression in the warming of India-US relations. After decades of Cold War distance, Washington began courting New Delhi as a trusted regional partner, supplanting Pakistan, which had served as the US outpost since the 1950s. China’s rise as an economic and military power only accelerated this realignment.

The Israel-Palestine issue could not remain insulated from these pressures. In 1992, India established full diplomatic relations with Israel—a step it had resisted for four decades. The Oslo Accords, which followed shortly after, seemed to vindicate this shift: the PLO itself had now agreed to a two-state solution, the very framework India had endorsed for a while. But India’s understanding of what two states might mean differed markedly from the West’s. 

Where the United States and its allies deployed the two-state formula as a mechanism to contain Palestinian aspirations—creating an appearance of movement toward justice while facilitating continued Israeli expansion in the West Bank—India continued to view it as a genuine compromise in the service of peace. This is why, even after Oslo, even after establishing relations with Israel, India remained firmly aligned with Palestine until quite recently. While the West bankrolled occupation and looked away as Gaza was bombarded, New Delhi maintained its traditional stance until 2014.

Blueprint of Ethno-Democracy

In 2014, India elected its first majority BJP government with a sweeping mandate. For the first time, a prime minister had both the ideological conviction and the political capital to fundamentally reshape Indian foreign policy according to Hindu nationalist priorities. Since the late 1980s, Hindu nationalist forces began gaining larger mass support, a trend that ultimately culminated in the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992. The rise of Hindu nationalism coincided with the neoliberalization of the Indian economy, initiated by the Indian National Congress. Inequality in Indian society increased manifold following the opening of the market, which, as in other parts of the world, fueled right-wing politics. In 2014, after a brief stint in power from 1999 to 2004 as part of a coalition with regional centrist parties, the BJP returned to power—this time with a clear majority on its own and a clear agenda to transform the political discourse and social fabric of India.

The BJP’s affinity for Israel can be understood through two interlocking factors. The first is ethnonationalism. The BJP’s longstanding project is the transformation of India into a Hindu state—a nation in which religious identity determines belonging, and minorities are rendered permanently subordinate. 

In this project, Israel serves as both inspiration and model. What the BJP admires is the architecture of what has been called an “ethno-democracy“: a state that formally guarantees the supremacy of one religious group while tolerating the presence of others only on condition of their political marginalization. Israel grants Jewish citizens superior status within a self-defined Jewish republic; the BJP wants the same for India’s Hindu majority, with Muslims relegated to second-class citizenship.

The blueprint for this vision is already visible. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 offered a path to citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries—Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians—but pointedly excluded Muslims. The message was unmistakable: in the BJP’s India, religious persecution renders Muslims uniquely ineligible for refuge. 

More recently, the government has begun replicating elements of the Israeli settler-colonial model in Kashmir. By stripping the region of its limited autonomy and its constitutional protections, New Delhi has opened the door for Indians from outside Kashmir to settle there, acquire property, and permanently alter the region’s demographic composition. The objective, pursued systematically, is demographic transformation through internal colonization.

Empire of Islamophobia

The second factor is Islamophobia. It is no coincidence that the perceived enemies of the Israeli state and of the BJP’s India are the same: Muslims. By aligning itself overwhelmingly with Israel, the BJP sends a message to India’s own Muslim population—whose historic solidarity with the Palestinian cause is well known—about where they belong in the new Hindu nationalist order. 

The Palestinian struggle for independence, which the Indian state once supported and celebrated, is now routinely designated as terrorism. This rhetorical move aligns India with Israel’s self-perception as a victim of “Muslim terror”, creating a shared narrative of existential threat. The two states, in this telling, are not aggressors but survivors, not occupiers but the occupied.

This empire of Islamophobia extends well beyond Tel Aviv and New Delhi. It is a global network of ethnonationalist movements and governments. Modi’s bonhomie with Donald Trump and Netanyahu is not, as it is sometimes described, a pragmatic accommodation to the realities of a unipolar world. It is a deliberate ideological choice—an expression of solidarity among right-wing movements that share a common enemy and a common vision of who must be punished in the name of national renewal.

But this shared vision is not merely rhetorical. It is material and operational. Israel has become one of India’s largest suppliers of defense technology, with bilateral military trade reaching into the billions. The Indian government has allegedly deployed Israeli spyware—most notoriously the Pegasus system—to surveil political opponents, journalists, and activists, weaponizing technology supplied by Tel Aviv against domestic dissent. 

And while much of the world has grown hazardous for Israeli soldiers facing prosecution for war crimes committed in Gaza, India has remained a safe haven. Approximately 80,000 Israelis travel to India annually; a significant proportion are active-duty or former IDF soldiers, confident that they will face neither legal consequences nor public accountability on Indian soil.

A New Trinity

Today, Indian foreign policy has traded its foundational principles—anticolonialism, peace, Third World solidarity, justice—for a new trinity: ethnonationalism, Islamophobia, and opportunism. The consequences of this transformation are now visible for all to see. India has failed to take a meaningful moral or political position on any major international crisis in recent years. 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, India did not use its historic relationship with Moscow to press for peace. Instead, it enabled its capitalist duopoly of businessmen Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani to profit handsomely from buying discounted Russian oil and reselling it to European markets—effectively bankrolling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine while claiming neutrality. 

When Israel launched its assault on Gaza, eventually recognized by international jurists as a plausible case of genocide, India offered neither resistance nor even condemnation. When civil war erupted in Sudan, New Delhi’s deepening complicity with UAE elites—major players in the conflict—precluded any meaningful stance. 

When the US effectively kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, India remained silent. And now, as the United States and Israel pursue an unjustified and illegal war on Iran, the BJP-led government has offered passive support while its rank and file actively cheers the destruction on streets and social media.

For a time, it seemed the BJP could sustain this foreign policy misadventurism without consequence. The Iran war has shattered that illusion. The war has created an unprecedented energy crisis, sending oil and gas prices soaring and dealing a severe blow to an already fragile economy. The material costs of aligning with Washington and Tel Aviv against Tehran are arriving ahead of schedule.

But the deeper cost is strategic and moral. India’s foreign minister and his aides repeatedly pitched the country’s approach as a “decolonial foreign policy“—a cynical appropriation of the language of liberation to dress up what is, in practice, pure opportunism. The gap between rhetoric and reality could not be wider. India, which led the Third World in the 20th century, which spoke for anticolonial struggles everywhere, now stands virtually alone on the world stage. It has no genuine allies, no reliable friends or neighbors, no principled partners. It has only the mercy of Trump, the indulgence of Putin, and the embrace of Netanyahu. 

This is not non-alignment. This is not pragmatism. This is the foreign policy of a right-wing movement that has made its peace with empire, ethnic supremacy, the punishment of Muslims everywhere—and in doing so, has left India isolated, diminished, and morally unrecognizable.

The post From Bandung to Bibi: How Modi’s India Abandoned Non-Alignment for Ethnonationalism appeared first on Untold.

Calypse is us and at the same time she speaks to us: the conscience of a generation that is condemned to resist and survive.

The comic has been created by the UntoldMag collective together with artist Francesca Cogni.

Episode 1: “A Complicated War”

The post Abu Calypse, Episode 1: “A Complicated War” appeared first on Untold.

Networks of Violence

It should not surprise anyone that those who take pleasure in sexual abuse can also take pleasure in violent abuse and mass murder in wars and racial domination. This is not merely about individual depravity. It is about the core of a world system governed by these people and celebrated by whole societies — heads of state, politicians, tech moguls, billionaires, diplomats, media personalities, and the networks that sustain their power.

The Epstein files revealed that those who gathered to enjoy the sexual abuse of children and women are the same circles that govern this world. Today, someone like US American Secretary of Sate Marco Rubio can stand in Munich — of all places — and praise the history of Europe’s so-called past greatness: praising five centuries of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and destruction as progress, leadership, superiority and enlightenment. And he receives a standing ovation from today’s European leaders, thirsty for a return to the times when they could so casually dominate and eradicate peoples, cultures, histories, and ecosystems.

These are the same leaders who defend their wars of aggression while condemning any resistance to them as itself the aggression. Those who will condemn dismembered babies while praising the precision rockets that dismembered them. Those who demand that others obey laws they themselves violate daily. Those who speak of diversity while fearing otherness, who preach peace while supplying the weapons that kill millions.

Addiction to Domination

The history of the  so-called West is a history of endless wars — an addiction to violence and an inability to imagine relations other than domination. Domination over nature, over humans, over animals, over knowledge, over everything.

This is why the West constantly projects itself onto others. They fear migrants will occupy their lands — because that is what they do across the world. They accuse anyone seeking equality of wanting domination or destruction — because that is what they themselves pursue.

As the saying goes regarding Israel’s pathological lies about Palestine: “every accusation is a confession.” The same can be said about the West more broadly today.

And now we watch as the specter of another world war is unleashed by the same addicts of violence and domination — the same circles, the same names that appear around Epstein’s island — who now claim that their wars are meant to prevent war. 

The West asks the world to stand behind it, to defend and project it as the morally superior force for good — a camp led by a wanted war criminal accused of genocide and a megalomaniac white supremacist rapist and pathological liar. Anyone who refuses to submit will be eradicated.

Colonial Heritage 

The German chancellor Firedrich Merz — whose senior Nazi grandfather belonged to the generation whose crimes forced the world to create international law in the first place — recently said that “Iran should not be protected by international law,” echoing the same logic his party and allies across Europe sometimes invoke when they suggest that European laws should not protect immigrants. Of course ignoring that the very principle of law is that it applies to everyone, equally.

Of course, Merz — who a year earlier, when Israel and the United States had once again illegally attacked Iran in the middle of negotiations, described the mass killing of civilians as “the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us” — is no stranger to such racist double standards.

What the blatant boasting about plans to commit war crimes by US and Israeli officials — and their public justification by their European counterparts — exposes, once again, is that these powers have never truly broken with their white supremacist heritage. The normalization of racism and the ease with which they can justify mass killing remain deeply embedded in political culture shaped by centuries of colonial violence.

Because they deeply believe in their inalienable right to dominate the world. The world is theirs, and theirs alone. Others should be grateful simply to be allowed to exist within it as servants.

And if they are not grateful, they can be eradicated. Any resistance becomes an unacceptable act of aggression — proof that these “ungrateful” subhumans are violent savages who must be eliminated for the safety of their world. This is the same logic that drove the countless colonial genocides across the continents Europeans claimed as their own — by divine mandate or racial superiority — and it continues to this day.

Two Worlds, One Reality

It is often difficult to explain to those who are not on our side of the equation — us who are objects of various degrees of violence, potential or actual — what living with this violence does to you. How fundamentally different our experience of the world is from that of someone who does not experience the world as a death trap or an endless heartbreak.

Someone who can move through it safely and confidently. Someone born on the other side of that coin — where exploitation elsewhere brings benefits; where borders are lines on maps that one casually crosses; where wars happen somewhere else; where violence is strange and shocking; where racism is a topic of debate over dinner; where colonialism lives in history books; where politics is an interesting subject, and horror a cinematic genre.

For those of us on this side of the coin, however, all of this — and more — is life.

Sometimes I wonder how such a person grows up with the conviction that they are intrinsically a force for good in both history and present. Every film, series, book, and museum tells them a heroic story about themselves while demonizing others.

Selective Outrage, Systemic Hypocrisy

The same powers that proudly announce their readiness to violate international law are also the most enthusiastic defenders of that law when others are accused of breaching it. They are outraged by crimes identical to those they themselves commit.

For these democratically elected forces, not all humans are equal. In fact, not all humans are even worthy of being treated as humans. Laws exist to protect Merz’s “us” — and that “us” alone. Violence counts as violence only when it is directed against “us”, even when it is a reaction to violence initiated by “us”.

If only a fraction of the world’s condemnations, sanctions, and measures were instead aimed at the two outlaw states launching wars and genocide across the world, those hypocritical statements might carry some weight.

The war on Iran began the moment Iran agreed to conditions during negotiations. It opened with a war crime by the US targeting a school for young girls, killing over 150 children—with investigations suggesting this might have been intentional. Hardly surprising when we consider the past two years of mass child murder in Gaza. Yet there were hardly any condemnations, expressions of horror, let alone sanctions from the self-appointed guardians of international law, democracy, and moral superiority in Europe and elsewhere. Instead, condemnation, sanctions, and measures were reserved for Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

For 15 months since a ceasefire agreement was reached between Israel and Lebanon, the Israelis have violated it over 10,000 times, killing more than 500 people. Yet there has been no pressure, no condemnation, nothing from the world. The moment Hezbollah responded—however poorly timed—the condemnations began pouring down, but still with no pressure on Israel to stop its war crimes.

For decades, not a single attempt has been made to pressure the aggressors. To the contrary, their aggressions, humiliations, and injustices have intensified and continued, accompanied by infuriating moralizing postures from the aggressors themselves and their supporters. What do you expect people to do when you offer them no alternatives, when you repeatedly tell them that force is their only way out, that all peaceful avenues are genuinely impossible?

Violence begets violence. It is a basic truth.

The Choice of Complicity

Meanwhile, the aggressors proudly announce their crimes to the sound of silent approval from the self-proclaimed defenders of peace and democracy. An Israeli minister can declare they will do to Beirut what they did to Gaza—where an international court has determined genocide is being committed by his government. A prime minister can state his intention to occupy entire countries to create a Greater Israel. A report can casually mention that that same Prime Minister asked the military to submit additional civilian targets “for approval”.

Meanwhile, the president and his team leading the world’s most aggressive empire can bully nations to steal their resources, bluntly asserting their ancestors’ right to genocide continents. All of this occurs, and the world’s response is to condemn those who choose to oppose or resist the horror—regardless of one’s views on their ideologies or their own brutality.

The only way to confront both forms of brutality is to offer alternatives and create new ways of being that transcend the Western paradigm of domination by force and power.

Until then, condemnations must be directed at those who rule the world, not at those trying to carve out their place within it. 

The post The Colonial Roots of Contemporary Atrocity: Why the West Can’t Stop Making War appeared first on Untold.

In April 2025, Microsoft’s President, Brad Smith, pledged to challenge “any government” that requested his company to suspend its services in specific countries, alluding to threats from the Trump administration within its trade war. However, Smith’s promises were put to the test just one month later. In May, the President of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, and a number of his colleagues discovered that Microsoft had blocked their access to email accounts hosted on its servers. This blockade was implemented in compliance with Trump’s decision to place Karim Khan and all ICC staff on a sanctions list managed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under the US Department of the Treasury.

The United States has long weaponized the OFAC sanctions list to isolate individuals and companies from the global financial system and global internet services. This is done by leveraging the influence and dominance of US-based companies over critical internet infrastructure, including hosting services, data centers, and undersea cables. However, this list expanded after October 7th, as the Trump administration actively targeted institutions and individuals working to document the genocide and prosecute the crimes of the Zionist occupation.

Just as Microsoft froze the email accounts of ICC staff in compliance with OFAC sanctions, other US-based big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta also froze the online accounts of numerous Palestinian institutions after the US administration listed them on the OFAC list— accused of supporting Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 2024 alone, the number of individuals and entities designated by OFAC as “Specially Designated Nationals” increased by 25% compared to 2023. Even the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, was not spared from this list after publishing her report “From an Occupation Economy to an Economy of Genocide,” under the pretext of her relations with the International Criminal Court.

As the internet has become increasingly central to strategic and sensitive national infrastructures worldwide, economists and academics have been sounding the alarm for years about the implications of concentrating the ownership of the network’s infrastructure in the hands of a small number of private US-based companies, governed by US laws. But the allure of easy access to hosting and cloud-computing services, coupled with their low cost, meant that these warnings found little resonance among most governments—until Edward Snowden’s 2014 leaks provided evidence of extensive surveillance programs employed by the U.S. government, leveraging its influence over the network through the fact that US companies owned most of the sensitive infrastructure that powers the Internet. At that point, government discourse in Europe, Asia, and Latin America intensified, calling for the importance of gaining independence and asserting national sovereignty over sensitive layers of the Internet infrastructure.

Following the extensive sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia during its war with Ukraine, and the trade war waged by the Trump administration against countries worldwide to tip the scales in the United States’ trade balance favor, official calls for achieving digital “sovereignty” or “independence” reached their peak, encompassing a diverse spectrum of voices. On the left of these calls are human rights and academic institutions advocating for reclaiming infrastructure ownership from private companies by building “public infrastructure” managed by civil institutions. On the right are national governments calling for the imposition of their digital “sovereignty” to kill multiple birds with one stone: developing their economies and extending their control over their populations’ communications and data.

In this article, I attempt to map the landscape of cloud-computing infrastructure—the most central set of services on the Internet—and to trace the discourse of digital “sovereignty” or “independence,” which has grown steadily in recent years. Despite the way major tech companies portray the Internet as a “cloud” where data floats weightlessly, this cloud is in fact embodied in most physical forms of data centers and servers, most of which are owned by a very small number of companies. Contrary to the immateriality implied by the word “cloud,” this data is bound to those servers and data centers, which ultimately fall under the interests of the states and corporations that manage them. I also seek to identify the available spaces that rights-based organizations can turn to start their journey to “digital independence”.

The Hosting and Cloud-Computing Ecosystem

To imagine the ecosystem of companies that control the web and services hosting infrastructure, we can take as an example the chain of requirements for an organization to establish its online presence—such as creating a website, running email services, and setting up cloud storage.

To create a website, an organization must first rent a domain name from an Internet domain-name registrar, then obtain space to host its webpages, an email service, and possibly storage space for its databases and internal files. It may also choose to create pages on social-media platforms, where most online audiences are concentrated today.

Up until the mid-2000s, all these needs could be met through small companies—most based in the United States, with some in Europe—none of which controlled a dominant share of the market. Costs were reasonable in the industrialized North, though relatively high in the rest of the world. But over the years, the market for the requirements of a cyber presence changed significantly, with new patterns of comprehensive services emerging under what came to be known as cloud services.

These services became increasingly concentrated and monopolized by major corporations. For example, by the end of 2024, two US-based companies—GoDaddy and Namecheap—together owned as registrars one-third of the global domain-name market, which had reached 360 million registered domains. Meanwhile, the six largest US companies in this sector collectively held nearly half of all domain names registered worldwide.

The most famous of these domains were those that started with the internet itself, such as .com and .org, referenced as gLTDs (General Top-Level Domains) were then managed by a private US-based company called Network Solutions under a special contract with the U.S. government, until the non-for-profit organization, ICANN was established in 1998. The responsibility of managing domain names moved to ICANN, and the domain names sector consisting of registries and registrars was privatized and transformed into a profitable market.

This sector has undergone changes between 2019 to 2023, as an increase in domain-name registrations has been observed in Asian and African countries, especially country level top-level domains (cLTDs) such as .cn for China, .in for India, and .za for South Africa, alongside a decline in the growth of .com domains.  One of the drivers of this growth is the enactment of laws and strategies by governments in those countries that encourage local domain markets, the localization of hosting services and data centers on their territory, and the encouragement of local private and public sectors to register domains that end with country codes.

As a result of U.S. sanctions, many human rights organizations around the world lost control of their domain names, especially those ending with .org, .net, .com, which they had previously rented from registrars located in the United States. However, while some registrars claim that they are bound to legally comply with US law, NamesCheap arbitrarily revoked the domain name of the website genocide.live owned by Zionism.observer on January 5, 2026 as the website held a digital memorial honoring the victims of Gaza resulting in the removal of 16,000 videos documenting war crimes. According to NamesCheap CEO, violent content of the website violated their terms of service.

After registering a domain name, an organization needs to provide hosting storage for its website, its files, its email, and its archives. In the early expansion of the internet, companies and institutions used to set up and manage their own servers for hosting purposes. Today, just as U.S. companies dominate the domain names market, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively control about 62% of the cloud computing market.

As for countries under sanctions, they were pioneers in building local cloud-computing hosting infrastructure, such as China, where Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent lead the domestic Chinese cloud market (with shares of 33%, 18%, and 10%, respectively). In recent years, Alibaba’s share of the global cloud market has grown to 4%, due to its provision of regional hosting and domain services across Asia.

Just as with domain names, US cloud-computing companies froze the accounts of individuals, organizations, and countries placed on the OFAC list. Sanctioned organizations are forced to turn to cloud-computing providers outside the United States to continue their operations, and many of them lost access to even backups of their websites and databases. Meanwhile, some organizations proactively secured domain names and cloud storage from companies outside the U.S in anticipation of the risk of being placed on sanctions list.

It is important to note that using a non-U.S. service provider whether a domain registrar or a cloud service computing does not inherently shield an entity from OFAC sanctions enforcement. Many registrars outside of the US source their domains through wholesale agreements with U.S.-based registrars, and their agreements could contain clauses that prohibit from servicing parties designated by OFAC. As for cloud computing providers outside of the US, if they have offices or infrastructure located in the US, they are obliged to abide by the sanctions list.  For example, the Canadian-American company Tucows decided to comply with a request from the organization “Lawyers for Israel UK” to suspend the account of the Palestinian institution “Addameer,” due to the company’s offices and servers being in the United States.

If providers don’t have any presence in the US, the matter is governed by the provider terms of service with regards to conditions of removing content or suspending services.Some service providers may also decide to freeze their clients’ accounts without a court order if they believe, based on their personal assessment, that they are hosting content that may support terrorism or incite hatred. On the other hand, some service providers in Europe are fighting legal battles in local courts against decisions to remove content or suspend services on charges such as terrorism or anti-Semitism, as the Icelandic company “1984” is doing by refusing to remove the website “The Mapping Project” after being sued by a Zionist organization.

A Growing Global Debate

The Snowden leaks marked a turning point in the trust of international and local human rights institutions and governments alike in the internet infrastructure controlled by the United States. Official reactions on these leaks where security-centered where the concentration of ownership allowed governments to spy on one another. One of the most prominent reactions was the announcement by then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff of the construction of a submarine data cable between Brazil and Portugal that bypasses the United States. Named EllaLink and completed in 2021, the cable was intended to secure the data and communications of the Brazilian state and its citizens after it was revealed that Dilma was among the heads of state subjected to US espionage according to the leaks. For its part, the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, which forced global companies to implement controls for using and processing European citizens’ data outside European borders, requiring legal permission.

These secret espionage programs, and the ability of the United States’ government to cut off entire populations from the internet’s ecosystem through sanctions, have driven many countries in Asia and Europe, including those friendly to the US, to enact policies and launch projects to build hosting infrastructure seeking greater sovereignty over their communications and their citizens’ data. Some countries developed laws that compel international cloud computing providers to host their citizens’ data in local data centers subject to the countries’ legal jurisdiction, as in the case of Vietnam and Singapore, or through agreements with foreign companies to build a national cloud, as in the case of Malaysia. these policies did not always mean independence from the US-based companies providing these services, as much as they aimed to generate jobs locally, as in the case of Malaysia.

In Europe, although “digital sovereignty” was at the center of discussions in the European Parliament of the European strategy for data in 2020, the Union became alert of the danger of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google controlling 70% of the cloud computing market within the continent. This awareness grew after Trump signed an executive order at the beginning of 2025, clarifying the by laws of the CLOUD Act passed in 2018, which allows US executive agencies to access – via a court order – data centers located outside the United States if they are owned by US-based companies. This contradicts the controls the European Union established via the GDPR for foreign companies processing European data hosted in their centers. As a result, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon rushed to develop internal policies guaranteeing the “sovereignty” of the host countries over their national data stored in their data centers. Microsoft executives later admitted to the French Parliament that the company could not guarantee France’s – or by extension, any EU country’s – sovereignty over its national data or its citizens’ data stored in the company’s data centers in France if the US government requested access via a court order. In Britain, over 50% of tech company leaders expressed in mid of this year a desire to work with local service providers rather than those in the United States.

Today, serious discussions are emerging in the European Union about adopting digital sovereignty strategies not only to protect its citizens’ data but also to catch up in the artificial intelligence race between the United States and China. In addition to the “Europe Digital Strategy” policy, which gives preference to European service providers in government tenders, calls has escalated to “liberating Europe from the digital siege” or urging the development of a plan to control all layers of the infrastructure, starting from the nationalisation of “semiconductor chips” manufacturing to building local data centers and hosting infrastructure.

Towards a Public Cloud Computing Infrastructure?

In the endeavor to dismantle the concentration of ownership over sensitive infrastructure, some human rights institutions and internet governance organizations are raising concerns about granting greater “sovereignty” and influence to local governments over citizens’ data, communications, and websites. This is particularly worrisome in countries that impose high levels of internet and media censorship and run unaccountable surveillance programs on their citizens’ data. Within a group called the “Democratic and Ecological Alliance for Digital Sovereignty,” a number of institutions, academics, lawyers, and rights advocates proposed a roadmap to “reclaim the concept of digital sovereignty.” The roadmap aims to expand the concept of “sovereignty” beyond state control,  which has historically served the economic and political interests of the ruling class and provided a framework for governments to evade accountability and transparency in governance.

The roadmap’s starting point is to redefine the cloud infrastructure that enables cloud computing as “public, state-ledcloud composed of public data centres interconnected through public infrastructure” that serves the public interest of diverse peoples and communities and distributes its economic returns the wider society. According to this roadmap, digital independence will also be achieved by building public infrastructure and platforms such as “public search engine or a public e-commerce market place”, governed by civil society institutions or international bodies (following the model of telecommunications network governance and global postal services). It also involves investing in open research that provides solutions for building public knowledge online for the benefit of society, rather than serving the profit motives of a handful of companies, and establishing restrictions and accountability mechanisms to dismantle government surveillance tools over their citizens’ data.”

Global movements are also emerging, targeting human rights organizations and small businesses to propose alternatives to the solutions and services of major tech companies. This year, the “Rise Against Big Tech” campaign was launched, calling to move away from big tech tools that have contributed to increasing climate change risks, data militarization, and police empowerment. It also advocates for promoting hosting service providers whose values align with cooperation, transparency, and equality.  In addition, some organizations are offering guidance to reduce independence on Google through reverting to self-hosting open-source tools on their own servers, such as daily communication tools (as alternatives to Slack or WhatsApp), storage administration tools, productivity software suites (as alternatives for Google Workplace), or self-hosted VPNs. Some initiatives also propose an “alternative” to social media companies, based on a decentralized hosting structure where social networks communicate directly with each other in a federation called the Fediverse.

Achieving complete independence from US service providers may be a privilege most human rights organizations cannot afford, especially in the Arab region. However, at the same time, reliance on service providers in the United States, especially for organizations documenting war crimes, or working on holding the Israeli occupation accountable, has become a digital existential risk . Therefore, there is no better political moment than the current one to engage in serious discussions within these human rights institutions, on what does it require to begin moving towards “digital independence” using open-source and self-managed tools.

But if there is one practical thing human rights institutions can start with, it is to move their domain, hosting, and email service outside of the United States with providers with terms of services that protect their right to exist online. Between complete dependence on US service providers and complete independence, there are spaces that can be explored to achieve a measure of gradual independence, until the day comes when initiatives emerge that offer infrastructure governed by an international body.

**Tech activist Ahmad Gharbieh reviewed this article and contributed to developing some of its ideas.

The post “Sovereignty” on the Cloud: Is the World Moving Toward Digital Independence from the United States? appeared first on Untold.

In this conversation, Ozoma discusses her work, the current political situation in the US, how to bring change in the tech industry, and her sources of inspiration. 

Enrico De Angelis: You mentioned in your conversation with Tammarian Rogers that today it would be even more difficult to speak out loud for people who want to denounce cases of discrimination, harassment, or problematic behaviours in the tech industry in the US. Can you elaborate on that, and tell us about the general atmosphere today in your country? 

Ifeoma Ozoma: The reason why I said that is because of what we’ve seen already in the US with our federal government, the State Department, and the White House, taking very targeted retaliatory measures against even green card holders, threatening citizens with the revocation of their passports. So none of the retaliation from the government is hypothetical anymore. We’re seeing it happen all the time. And we’re only hearing about the cases with people who have access to media. 

There are so many more cases that I’m sure we haven’t heard about and we may never hear about because they’re people who are less resourced, which is exactly what authoritarian regimes do: They go after the people who have the least ability to fight back or have their stories told. 

And then, on the tech company side, both anecdotally and in the data, we’re seeing tens of thousands and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of people laid off. I have no doubt that many of those folks who are being laid off are people who have spoken up at some point, and they’re just added to the numbers of folks who are let go as part of a reduction in force. 

And so, especially in a society with zero social safety net, when your job is tied to your health insurance, tied to your ability to live, your ability to pay your rent or your mortgage and to provide for your family, what we’re seeing are not theoretical risks for people speaking up. They’re real immediate and long term risks for people. And so I think just overall, it’s so much harder for people to speak up. 

EDA: The situation is getting worse despite some substantial legal improvements you also advocated for (in 2022, in California the “Silenced no More Act”, a law that places restrictions to confidentiality provisions in work agreements, was approved). How do you explain these developments? Is it the general political atmosphere, or rather other factors more related to the tech industry? 

IO: It’s all of it. The law that I worked on was at the state level. We still don’t have federal protections that actually cover people to the same extent that the law in California and in Washington and a number of other states do. So, in the event that you’re working for a company, and you happen to be in one of those states, you have some legal protections. But of course, they hire people all over the country and all over the world. So unless you are in a jurisdiction where you are covered, you are totally left on your own. 

Moreover, the few measures that we used to have in the United States, like the “Equal Employment Opportunity Act” (EEOC), the Commission and other federal agencies that are supposed to deal with labor issues are now much weaker, as many of their lawyers have been fired by this administration. 

The people in charge are not folks who are aligned with workers anymore. And so you have a much worse case even if your situation is heard or taken up. If you file at the federal level now, you’re just as likely to have them make a ruling in favor of your employer. 

And I think from our perspective as advocates, we have to be understanding of that and careful not to ask people to martyr themselves. 

EDA: During the last two years, the role of tech companies in wars, as we have seen particularly in Gaza, has come to the surface as never before. Is there a direct connection between your work in terms of protection of workers’ rights in tech companies and this aspect in particular? In other words, does protecting the rights of tech workers in the US have an impact on tech companies’ complicity with human rights violations abroad? 

IO: It’s absolutely connected because those who are working in the kinds of positions that I used to work in, in these tech companies, are the most privileged folks in the tech worker ecosystem. And so if companies are successful in silencing their ‘white collar’ workers in the United States who have the most means, the most money, and the most access to lawyers,  then what of the folks who are doing labeling in East Africa and in Southern Europe and in Southeast Asia? 

And what of the folks even further down the chain who are in mines and basically in slave labor conditions in Congo and in other areas? So it’s all very, very connected to me. If you’re able to silence people in your offices on issues that are already settled in law, then you’re making sure that no one is able to speak up about what they’re seeing when they’re being told to program things for drones that will end up killing people in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan, and wherever else, because all of it is connected. 

EDA: You mentioned the importance of adopting pragmatic approaches in order to bring change and avoid what you call the typical analysis/paralysis many activists suffer from. In the context of the US, you say you were inspired by the strategies of the environmental movement, like exerting pressures on shareholders in order to force companies to change their behaviours. You stressed also that we should accept that we live in a capitalist society and recognise its power balances, and act accordingly. Do you think this type of approach is effective also when it comes  to addressing the relationships between tech giants and weapons industries? I ask this especially since you said that in your case the leverage was money (as shareholders have to pay  lawsuits for example) and not racism or gender discrimination. In other words: what if that economic leverage doesn’t exist? Or, as you mentioned, when the wider political atmosphere is particularly hostile, as it is today? 

IO: I think it depends on where you are, but certainly in the United States, in Germany, in the UK, you’re not going to be very successful when the government is also supportive of arming folks who are carrying out genocide. And so if you don’t even have leverage with your own government, then you’re not going to have the kind of leverage you need with shareholders. 

You certainly aren’t going to have leverage inside the companies with the individuals who are making money off by arming attackers in a genocide and arming those like the Israeli government, like the Russian government, like the UAE that is operating in Sudan. 

Yeah, it’s all really terrible and so I think part of why there has to be global engagement and global connections between activists is that even though we’re not able to do much in the US, our folks who are in Ireland and able to put pressure on a government that actually agrees that genocide is wrong is then able to leverage pressure. Because many of these companies have international headquarters in Dublin. All of it is connected and so we have to be working together to figure out where there’s the ability and where’s the political space to put pressure on the companies, even if it’s not directly from the US, directly from the UK, directly from Germany. 

EDA: You said that one of the lessons we should learn in Europe while observing the US is that things can indeed get worse from one day to another. But trends are quite clear. Things are already getting worse here too: far right parties are winning or at least gaining consensus; freedom of speech is being repressed, and welfare eroded. In this context, how would you think your practical approach should be adapted? 

IO: The answer is always the same: to diversify the approach. And I think it also means working with different types of activists. So I think in the advocacy space, we’re so good at siloing ourselves. Like: ‘oh, I’m the group that works on human rights’, ‘I’m the group that works on immigration issues’, ‘I’m the environmental advocate’, when all of these things are connected. 

And so folks need to be working together. If a labor action is able to get things moving in France, then that’s the type of action you need to do. If environmental issues are more salient in Germany, then you can use different parts of the activism ecosystem to target the same companies and to target the government in different ways. 

You know It’s so interesting that World War II was not that long ago. So in theory, it shouldn’t be curious to people that fascism can take over in Europe in general, country by country and very quickly. History is not that separated from us and yet two generations past people completely forget what happened in their own countries, even if some of the people who witnessed those events are still alive. 

And so for me it is really infuriating that we can be so close to it and people can still act like, oh, there’s no way that it could happen here. 

EDA: During the conversation with Tammarrian Rogers, I really liked when you said that change in tech companies doesn’t pass only through those who are strictly “tech workers” but also other worker figures, with smaller wages and rights. So here are two separated questions: where are we in terms of organising across different types of workers in the tech industry? And, second: across different countries?

IO: I think the companies understand exactly how important it is, and that’s the reason why they’ve worked so hard to silo groups. So that, even in one company, you may literally not be able to reach out to and communicate or engage with folks who are doing work for the same company because they’re using countless different contracting agencies. 

The primary mechanism that they’ve used was to ensure that their engineers aren’t able to be in communication with even the data labelers who are ensuring that they’re able to feed all of this information into a large language model. So it is incredibly important that folks working on the coding of these systems understand that their work would be impossible without the people making cents a day, cents an hour in Kenya and in Bangladesh and in other places to label the information. 

But the companies have ensured that there isn’t the ability to directly communicate. And that’s where I think journalists actually have a huge role to play because they’re the ones who help to tell these stories. Like Time Magazine did a huge series on the Kenyan data labelers who have been doing both content moderation for companies like Meta and then the ones who are now doing a lot of the labeling for Large Language Models (LLMs). 

And the same for folks in Venezuela and in South America who are doing a lot of the labeling for these systems and looking at really horrific content because the companies know that no one would be willing to do it in Western Europe or in the United States, and certainly not at the pay that they’re able to exploit people with in these other countries. 

EDA: Are there no more traditional initiatives from below, like labor unions? 

IO: Not organizing, unfortunately, but I do know that there are a number of organizations like Tech Equity in the United States and others who have been doing reports. And they actually worked with a large labor union in the United States to do a report on how people in this chain of work are being exploited. 

But it’s next to impossible to do old school organizing because they’re not even at the same company. So the way that the companies have set up this work is you may work for OpenAI, but the people doing the data labeling are at 10 different contracted agencies so that the company can state legally that they never actually hired these people. They were just hiring the work through a contract with X, Y, Z agency. 

EDA: I want to finish the interview asking you about sci-fi writer Octavia Butler. In 2020 you founded a consulting firm, Earthseed, whose name is inspired by a political-religious movement in the novel “Parable of the Sower”. What place does she have in your work? 

IO: When you read Octavia Butler, it looks like she knew it all. I mean, if I believed in time traveling, she is surely an example of someone who has time traveled because she knew exactly what would happen and how it would happen. And that’s why her work moved me so much. But the core tenant of Earthseed in the books is that God is ‘change’. If anything is true, it is that things will change and we have our own role to play in changing things. 

And so that really is what I have believed in, that like so many of us can feel overwhelmed by the fact that so many horrible things are happening all of the time and what power do we have as individuals to change it. And what I really took away from her writing and what I try to live with day to day is that I can’t change absolutely everything but I can change small things that I have the ability to touch. 

So in my case, I have a background in political science and public policy and I know how laws are made. That is one thing that I can do. Can I change Hollywood? No. I have no experience in that. Can I go and change who becomes the president? I don’t have billions of dollars, so I don’t have the ability to buy the next president, unlike someone else. 

But where I can, in my own small space with my own expertise and my own networks, make changes, that is what I’m committed to. 

We all need to step up because I feel a lot of the power of authoritarians is in making people feel powerless. That there’s absolutely nothing that individuals have the ability to do, so they might as well just go along with what is happening to them and around them. 

The post Breaking the Code of Silence: Workers Rights and Systemic Change in Tech – A Conversation with Ifeoma Ozoma appeared first on Untold.

Albert Camus, the great intellectual who loved “Algeria,” wrote that same year that independence was “a purely passionate formula.” 

He saw the sea of ​​Algiers, the colors of Tipaza, the Mediterranean sun. He didn’t see us. He didn’t want to see us.

He saw his Algeria. The one where enlightened Europeans would teach the “Algerians” how to live together, under the French flag, of course. Because, of course, we weren’t ready. We had no state structures. We didn’t have an autonomous economy. We would have fallen into chaos.

Today I watch Italian news talk about Greenland. They talk about Donald Trump. They talk about Denmark. They talk about NATO, the Arctic strategy, rare earths. 

They don’t talk about the Inuit. Just as they didn’t talk about us then. The colonized are always absent from conversations about their own land.

Then I read Björk—an Icelander, who comes from a people who experienced Danish rule, who saw their language and culture survive centuries of interference—who simply writes: 

“Dear Greenlanders, declare independence!”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Björk (@bjork)

And immediately the explanations arrive. Italian intellectuals who explain history, geopolitics, economic sustainability. They explain that the Inuit could not have preserved their language without Danish scholars. They explain that independence is “political romanticism.” They explain that we must be “realists.”

The same arguments. Word for word. As if they had copied from the French colonial posters of 1958.

What these explanations don’t understand—can’t understand, don’t want to understand—is that Björk isn’t making a geopolitical analysis. She’s doing what we colonized people have always done among ourselves: recognizing each other. Seeing each other.

When Björk says “declare independence,” she’s not presenting a five-year economic plan. She’s saying, “I see you. I know what it means when someone decides what’s best for you. I know what it means when they explain to you that your freedom is ‘too complicated.'” 

The colonized sees the colonized.

We see each other across centuries, across oceans. The Algerian sees the Inuit. The Icelander sees the Greenlander. The Palestinian sees everyone. We recognize ourselves in the gaze of those who have always told us: “You’re not ready, not yet, maybe never.”

And then there are other Italians who write, “I’m on the sled.” As if being “on the sled” were a political option. As if the Inuit were picturesque folkloric accessories and not a people with political will. Even solidarity becomes paternalism when it comes from those who have never suffered.

Camus chose his mother over justice. Italian intellectuals choose “complexity” over self-determination. They always choose something—stability, realism, geopolitics—as long as it’s not the simplest thing: letting people decide for themselves.

We, the colonized, know something they will never know: that independence is not a formula of passion. It’s the only formula. The only one that restores dignity. The only one that allows you to wake up in the morning and not have to ask permission to exist in your own land.

Björk knows it. The Inuit know it.

The rest is just the noise of those who have always been able to decide, who now explain to those who never could why they should keep waiting.

We, the colonized, have learned a truth that the Camuses of the world will never learn: you are never “ready” for freedom in the eyes of those who dominate you. You are ready only when you stop asking permission and take it.

I’m sure the Greenlanders will understand this too, when their time comes. And we, the colonized of the world, will be there to see them. Because we always see each other.

The post From Algeria to Greenland: Why Colonized Peoples Recognize Each Other appeared first on Untold.

But as AI becomes more embedded in governance and security, its role in border enforcement and immigration control has grown rapidly. These technologies often reproduce and intensify racial discrimination, particularly through algorithmic bias. This is no less relevant in the U.S. government’s utilization of the so-called “smart border”. 

What happens when AI is deployed to decide who can move, who is detained, and who is excluded at the border? 

A Human Rights Framework

In response to a 2023 meeting with United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and the Immigrant Rights Clinic and International Justice Clinic at UC Irvine (UCI) School of Law submitted a report detailing how AI disproportionately harms Black migrants and migrants of color and giving suggestions for change in the future. 

There are already legal frameworks governing how states should use AI under international human rights law. Chief among them is the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), ratified by the United States in 1994.

ICERD requires states to: Prevent racial discrimination in all forms (Art. 2(1)(a)) ; amend policies and laws that perpetuate racial discrimination (Art. 2(1)(c)) ; guarantee equal treatment before the law (Art. 5) ; ensure remedies for victims (Art. 6) ; and hold private actors accountable (Art. 2(1)(d)).

By these standards, the U.S. is legally bound to ensure that AI does not reinforce racial inequities.

Surveillance Before the Border

In reality, however, BAJI and the UCI Clinic detail how the U.S. AI Border Enforcement Policy violates many of these rules at every stage of the immigration process. 

Even before migrants reach any land  border, AI systems track their movements. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) deploys autonomous surveillance towers and drones to identify “objects of interest,” replacing human patrols.

The rapidly expanding use of surveillance towers and Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) at the U.S.-Mexico border raises grave concerns about racial equity. To begin with, those under surveillance include large numbers of people fleeing violence, persecution, and even torture, who are entitled to seek protection in the U.S. under domestic and international law. However, due to their more limited access to formal immigration procedures, migrants of color are forced to risk their lives to cross the border. 

Second, the use of Anduril Towers, sUAS, and other forms of AI-powered surveillance systems at that border perpetuates discrimination by marking those migrants as lawbreakers and threats to national security rather than people seeking safety and security. 

The disproportionate surveillance on migrants of color translates to a disproportionately high death rate for those same groups as they get pushed into more dangerous terrain.

CBP claims new AI-powered systems are more humane than physical border walls. According to CBP, the smart border can help deter irregular crossings and increase migrant safety by having the capability to detect, capture, and safely deport migrants who find themselves lost in the desert or mountains. 

Yet, the data has shown the opposite is true—increased implementation of “smart border” technology has led to historically high rates of migrant deaths. 

AI at the Port of Entry

Formal entry routes are also shaped by algorithmic bias. The CBP One app, once required for entry applications, demanded a selfie to verify applicants. Yet the system frequently failed to recognize darker skin tones, misidentifying Black faces at a rate 10 to 100 times more often than white faces, according to legal scholar Priya Morley in AI at the Border: Racialized Impacts and Implications.

The app was also inaccessible for many communities: it lacked translations in key languages spoken by Black migrant populations, adding another barrier. Although CBP One is no longer available, debates about its reinstatement continue under the current administration.

Algorithmic Risk Scoring

Even if migrants pass the first stages, they face the Automated Targeting System (ATS), which compiles domestic and international databases to predict who might overstay a visa.

Though risk assessments are commonplace in immigration systems, the ATS system perpetuates already existing bias. For example, when Nigeria was added to a list of countries facing heightened travel restrictions in 2020, Nigerians became disproportionately flagged as high risk by the ATS.

Officials claim these systems are preventive, not punitive. Yet their very design perpetuates structural racial discrimination, contradicting U.S. commitments under ICERD.

Inside the U.S.: ICE Enforcement

Once inside the U.S., migrants encounter further AI-driven discrimination from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during detention and interior enforcement.

ICE uses predictive algorithms such as a “Hurricane Score” to determine who merits heightened surveillance. There is a lack of transparency on the factors that affect one’s Hurricane Score. Because the algorithm is provided by a private company, B.I. Incorporated, which has strong ties to the prison industry, the government has not had to disclose the factors of this score. 

ICE also uses the Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn) platform to analyze trends and patterns across a series of data sources to further assess the risks migrants may pose in the U.S. RAVEn draws from biased local law enforcement data and international databases from offices across 56 countries. Migrants cannot opt out or even consent to data collection.

The lack of transparency and possibilities of redress in these systems has raised more grave concerns about compliance with ICERD articles and anti-discrimination regulations. 

AI in Immigration Relief

Finally, under immigration relief systems, AI is being used by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to sort evidence and detect fraud in applications. The training model Asylum Text Analytics (ATA), is a system responsible for identifying fraud by reading asylum application text. 

Oftentimes, ATA may prejudice non-English speaking applicants. This is especially true for those who speak more niche languages and translate through the same providers, because ATA may weed out those with legitimate claims whose applications contain similar phrases or narratives as other applications. 

Rather than simplifying its application process, USCIS also uses an AI-powered Evidence Classifier to “review” millions of pages of evidence ranging from birth certificates to medical records and photos for USCIS adjudicators. These AI reviews can negatively impact migrants who may have atypical documentation, oftentimes exacerbating racial discrimination. 

Decolonizing AI at the Border 

BAJI and UCI argue that addressing these harms requires a decolonial approach to AI. They invoke Cosmo uBuntu, an African philosophical framework rooted in collectivism and shared humanity rather than individualism. This involves the voluntary embracing of uBuntu (personhood) as “a foundational value system in our participation in planetary conviviality, without forcing universality.” 

In contrast to the Western-centric, individualistic views on humanity, African cosmology embraces the humanity of all humans. 

To align with ICERD and truly decolonize AI, African and diaspora communities must be actively involved in conceptualizing, inventing, innovating, and operating AI systems.

The AI systems currently used by DHS fail to incorporate any decolonial perspectives, perpetuating and exacerbating racial biases rooted in colonialism, extraction, suffering, and death.

Policy Recommendations

Individuals who may be negatively impacted by the use of AI must be promptly notified about such decisions, and provide them an option to opt out of AI systems where appropriate.

Federal laws governing DHS’s use of AI must prohibit and prevent any AI use that would result in racially discriminatory results or exacerbate structural racial discrimination. They should mandate effective discrimination-prevention measures,  independent oversight on implementation, robust public disclosures, stakeholder consultation with diverse populations, and access to effective remedies by those who are negatively impacted by DHS’s use of AI.

City policies must include an explicit pledge not to share information with DHS if it is expected to be used for AI development or deployment by DHS or its vendors.

Embedded in each of these calls is one that resounds: Until AI systems can be free of discrimination and until diverse perspectives are meaningfully included in their development and use, they must not be allowed to be used on any border.  

The post Decolonizing AI at the Border: When Algorithms Decide Who Can Move appeared first on Untold.

Editor’s Note: On September 27, 2025, more than 100,000 people took to the streets of Berlin under the slogan ‘Together for Gaza’. This was possibly the largest Palestine solidarity demonstration in Germany’s history. It was organised by a broad coalition of actors: the Left party, Amnesty International, Medico, Palestinian community organisers and Communist groups. 

Despite the contradictions in their political programs, these groups converged on common demands of ending German military cooperation with Israel, restoring humanitarian aid to Gaza, ending the occupation of Palestinian territories, fulfilling Germany’s obligations under international law, supporting Palestinian self-determination and upholding civil freedoms of assembly and expression in Germany. 

An organiser reports that the mass turnout enabled by such a coalition marked a turning point, “pushing the Palestine solidarity movement out of isolation by activating wide sections of the working class for concrete, collective action”. 

In contrast to the unprecedented scale and relatively few arrests of ‘Together for Gaza’, an autonomous demonstration on the same day and other subsequent protests saw smaller turnouts and ever-escalating police repression. This occurred even in large protests that were not backed by a broad coalition. Most recently, at the “United4Gaza” demonstration on October 11, where organizers counted some 50,000 participants, police targeted youth, families, and even children: at least three minors were arrested for trivial reasons, and two separate incidents saw small children caught up in brutal arrests.

Germany has become notorious for its harsh repression of Palestine solidarity — rivaled perhaps only by the United States. The solidarity movements in both these contexts have also been weakened by tactical differences and the lack of a common theory of change. To explore these parallels, we are publishing an analysis piece written by Cameron Jones – a student organiser at Columbia University who has been active both in New York and during a semester abroad in Berlin this year. Cameron’s refrain ‘ugh, agita’ in response to incidents of repression and state violence is also the inspiration for our column’s name.

***

A brick thrown by a Zionist hits a protestor’s face, blood streams down. Animal feces rains from luxury high-rises. University security kneels on the neck of a Palestinian student. A rabbi rams his car into protesters on the streets of New York. These are just a handful of the incidents that have taken place at pro-Palestine demonstrations in New York City. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Berlin, faceless militarized police in riot gear knock young protesters unconscious, raid cafés in Neukölln, and ban Arabic chants and songs at demonstrations, on top of deporting Palestinians from Gaza who had escaped the ongoing genocide.

This is not a comprehensive list of the violent incidents that protestors have faced, but rather a glimpse into constant and worsening repression imposed by the state and institutions. The Palestine movement in both Berlin and New York reveals what many already know: that the so-called ‘rights’ guaranteeing protest and free speech under Western liberalism are hollow promises—rights that have always excluded marginalized communities, particularly People of Color, immigrants, and Queer people. 

Rather than signaling a universal moral awakening, recent responses to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians have exposed fractures within Western liberal discourse. For example, public resignations from mainstream news organizations, political shifts with the ascension of candidates like Zohran Mamdani, and unprecedented campus mobilizations suggest that segments of the West are beginning to question the narratives that have long justified Zionism. This shift is not uniform nor fully realized, but it marks a discernible break from decades in which Palestinian dispossession was either denied or framed as necessary. 

What Palestinians, Arabs, and their allies have long asserted—that liberal democracy in the West is predicated on the exclusion and dehumanization of certain populations—is now being forced into public consciousness through images of mass death, famine, and systemic repression from Gaza to the West Bank. 

Impunity and repression 

The last few years have laid bare the consequences faced by those who dare to resist the Zionist narrative: the high risk of arrest, the constant threat of assault by police or Zionists, and, for those with precarious immigration status, the life-shattering possibility of deportation. 

Worse than the attacks that we face is the impunity of those who commit them. Reuven Kahane, the rabbi and real estate developer, who drove his car into a crowd of protestors at a picket last May, injuring one person who was hospitalized with leg injuries, faced no legal consequences. He was charged with assault, but the district attorney’s office dismissed the case, citing speedy trial limitations. The victim and community members, however, argued that prosecutors deliberately stalled the proceedings. 

Just a month after the incident, last June, a judge also denied the victims request for a temporary order of protection against Kahane. This kind of violent, blatant disregard for the law—met with silence or dismissal by the very systems meant to safeguard against such violence—reveals exactly who the state deems worthy of protection. 

It is not those who speak out against genocide, and certainly not those who are living through it. In this way, the state does not merely fail to protect dissenting voices, it actively mobilizes legal and political power to structure whose lives are safeguarded and whose resistance is rendered criminal, revealing repression not as a breakdown of liberal democracy, but as its very mechanism of preservation.

 The Berlin police who brutalize demonstrators face no consequences for their actions, because their violence comes directly from the state. And the media, instead of exposing this violence, emboldens it by ignoring or vilifying those of us who speak out against what has become the first live-streamed genocide. 

This lack of accountability is not incidental, but a deliberate strategy enacted through police directives, media narratives, and state policies, each working in concert to demoralize dissent, criminalize solidarity, and ensure that attention is diverted away from the real violence: the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Climate of fear

This climate of disillusionment is not accidental, it is by design. The repression of the movement in the West is meant to quell resistance, to instill fear, and to lower attendance at demonstrations, teach-ins, and solidarity events. The raid of the Palestine Congress in Berlin in 2024 showed that the state does not only target protests, but any form of Palestinian political expression. 

These raids, lawsuits, and endless court hearings function as tools of repression, meant to overwhelm and exhaust activists until their work feels impossible. To some extent, these tactics have worked. Protest numbers have steadily declined since October 2023. 

In New York, demonstrations I attended that once drew thousands—especially around events like the UN General Assembly—now rarely reach 500 participants. And in Berlin, the weekly protests I attended in summer 2024 often brought out over 400 people, but more recently they struggle to surpass the same 200 or so participants, with larger mobilizations happening only on a monthly basis. At the same time, student movements have faced immense challenges as universities clamp down on organizing through disciplinary sanctions, suspensions, and expulsions, alongside growing threats of deportation in both the U.S. and Germany.

At Columbia University, repression has been especially severe. Last spring, the one-day occupation of Hinds Hall led to multiple expulsions and even the revocation of degrees, despite the peaceful nature of the action. Since then, the university has deepened its cooperation with the Trump administration, going as far as aiding in the detainment of Palestinian student activists like Mahmoud Khalil. 

Following a $200 million deal with the administration, Columbia escalated its crackdown, suspending and expelling over seventy students simply for holding a teach-in at the main library. As one of the most high-profile universities in the world associated with the Palestine solidarity movement, Columbia quickly became a primary target of the Trump administration. And given its deep institutional ties to the Zionist state, including a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University and a global center in Tel Aviv, the university ultimately chose to protect its financial and political interests over the well-being of its students.

This pattern of repression has produced a climate of fear across campus, where students know that even symbolic or educational forms of protest can result in the loss of their academic future. Organizing has become increasingly difficult as more and more student activists are banned from campus, cutting them off not only from their peers but also from the very institution they are trying to hold accountable. 

The result is a university that publicly claims to value free speech and debate while, in practice, punishing dissent with extraordinary severity. The protests on Columbia’s campus after October 7 drew nearly a thousand attendees, and student mobilization only grew during the encampments. Today, it would be a surprise if 200 students turned out for a Palestine action.

A history of protest 

Looking at the trajectory of the movement in both cities, a similar story emerges. Unlike places where Palestine solidarity was almost nonexistent before October 2023, both New York and Berlin had long-standing, robust movements with recognizable figures and protests that regularly drew hundreds. 

New York is home to one of the largest Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S., with more than 20% of the country’s Muslims living in the city. I attended many protests there before October 2023, demonstrations sparked by Israeli bombings of Gaza, visits by high-ranking Israeli officials, or escalations in East Jerusalem. Similar protests took place in Berlin as well, often sparked by the same cycles of violence in Palestine that brought people into the streets in New York. 

What makes Berlin particularly significant is that it is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe. Germany’s Palestinian population is estimated at up to 200,000, many of them from Gaza. Their personal ties to the ongoing violence give the movement a personal sense of urgency. This long-standing presence, combined with already active networks of solidarity organizations, meant that Berlin, like New York, had the infrastructure and community base to rapidly mobilize after October 2023. 

The rapid mobilization in both cities, and the subsequent repression it provoked, reveals how the state perceives its Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim populations not as constituents to be protected, but as internal threats whose political visibility must be contained.

Both cities saw dramatic increases in protest turnout and influence, with thousands flooding the streets. Unlike earlier demonstrations, which were primarily Arab and Muslim communities, the protests after October 2023 brought together students, workers, Black and brown coalitions, as well as anti-Zionist Jewish allies, reflecting the diversity of the cities themselves. 

This surge was fueled by a broader shift in public opinion: the genocide in Gaza shocked a generation of young people, who responded with outrage and solidarity, attending protests, organizing teach-ins, and engaging online. Social media amplified the violence and brought these stories into public view, making support for Palestine more visible and widespread than ever before. 

It was precisely this expansion of support and participation, cross-generational, cross-racial, and highly mobilized, that threatened those in power, provoking the harsh crackdowns we witnessed.

A threat to power

In Berlin, chanting “From the river to the sea” became grounds for violent arrest. Arabic chants and songs were banned outright at some demonstrations, and even symbols like the upside-down red triangle were criminalized—I myself was arrested for wearing one. In New York, authorities banned sound amplification at many demonstrations, wiped Palestine groups off social media, and targeted movement leaders with arrests and harassment.

These tactics were designed to break us down, and to an extent, they did: organizing became more difficult, more dangerous, and more draining. The protests shrank—not simply out of apathy—but because the risks kept multiplying. 

We know that as the conditions for organizing grow more difficult, leftist movements inevitably begin to fracture. As our efforts stalled both on the streets and across university campuses, I began to witness growing fractures within the movement. In both New York and Berlin, I participated in discussions among solidarity groups, where organizers clashed over whether to cooperate with police, how to navigate media narratives, and even what political direction the movement should take. 

These differences often spill into the streets: instead of unified mass actions, separate groups call for separate protests for the same cause. The result is smaller turnouts, a diluted presence, and, crucially, greater risk. Organizing is always safer and more powerful in numbers; fragmentation does not silence the movement, but it does make it easier to suppress and far more dangerous to sustain.

This is not to say that we should give up or that the movement is weak: rather the opposite. States do not repress people and movements at random. They target those who threaten their power, those they fear, and those with the capacity to shift public opinion. The repression we face is thus a testament to the strength and resilience of the Palestine movement. Even as protests dwindle in New York and Berlin, the spirit of resistance persists, captured in chants like “disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” created at Columbia and reminding us that solidarity endures even under pressure. 

The dwindling numbers are not evidence of apathy, but of how effectively states have made solidarity dangerous. Yet silence is precisely what they want from us. As I continue to march in both cities, even in smaller crowds, I am reminded that each voice still matters and that the greatest victory of repression would be to convince us otherwise.

***

*Academic Opposition is an activist group of students and researchers active across German universities. We organize internationally to expose and end German academic complicity in the Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestinians. Our activism comprises militant research, political analysis and focused campaigns. Locating an urgent need to build long-term power and train student activists, we bridge gaps between cycles of activism and inter-generational handovers of political work. With Agita we are getting the word out on Germany’s turn towards militarism, domestic authoritarianism and a foreign policy that operates outside of international law. Linking these shifts to imperial violence elsewhere, Agita brings you reports and analyses about the global Palestine solidarity movement based on our learnings on the ground as organisers in Germany.

The post We Will Not Stop, We Will Not Rest: Repression and Resistance from Berlin to New York appeared first on Untold.