The sociologist and intellectual Shkëlzen Gashi, author of “Massacres in Kosovo 1998–1999”, has long been aware of the price to be paid for challenging the dominant narrative of those in power. 

According to the Special Prosecutor’s Office of Kosovo, his offence is “distorting the truth about the Kosovo War of Liberation”. Gashi, however, believes that the reason for the persecution is that he has written “the first book on this subject that avoids hate speech and addresses all victims on all sides, regardless of their ethnicity, religion or political ideology”. 

Gashi’s book lists names, numbers and locations, totalling 10,333 bodies across 83 massacres, arranged in chronological order. “In total I counted 105, but there are 22 about which nothing is known,” he says as he turns the pages featuring photographs of piles of bodies, funerals and mass graves, “and the most significant thing is that, for the majority of these killings, no one has been convicted. 90% of the massacres I recount in the book end with this sentence: to date, no one has been tried or convicted for these crimes.” 

Regarding the identity of the victims, he explains that “90% are Albanians killed by Serbian police, military or paramilitaries. Crimes committed by Albanians account for only 10%; they took place after the war, as acts of unorganised revenge, and were not carried out by Albanian military or police.”

Gashi dared to break the taboo surrounding the war crimes committed by Kosovo Albanians against Serbian communities; at the same time, he honours the memory of other ethnic and religious groups—Roma, Ashkali or Catholics—who have been marginalised from the official narrative and are difficult for both Serbian and Albanian nationalism to come to terms with.

The Albanian writer and dissident Fatos Lubonja has written a scathing article in which he argues that “this lynching speaks volumes about the kind of state that is in danger of being built in Kosovo (…) History teaches us that tragedy, in the form of war or dictatorship, begins when the parties identify with the truth and seek to impose it on everyone by any means”. 

For their part, representatives of the veterans’ associations of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), the guerrilla group that fought the Serbs, are calling for “a law to be enacted to protect the history of the UCK, and for anyone wishing to write on the subject to obtain evidence from the relevant authorities”. Or, in other words, from those who do not question their version of events. 

“Peacebuilding also involves establishing the truth and creating shared narratives about what happened, as well as reconciliation and letting go. In Kosovo, we haven’t had that, and it’s a serious problem. The Albanian and Serbian communities continue to live within their own constructions of reality, so there are competing narratives about the past,” laments Ramadan Ilazi, head of research at the Kosovar Centre for Security Studies.

Whilst this was happening in Pristina, thousands of kilometres away, in a cell at The Hague prison, Hasim Thaci, the former leader of the UCK and the West’s main ally in NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, awaits sentencing following the trial that concluded last February. 

The Prosecution at the Special Court for Kosovo is seeking 45 years’ imprisonment for Thaci and three other guerrilla commanders for war crimes, crimes against humanity, kidnapping, torture, cruel treatment of prisoners and murder in 102 cases. 

Whatever the jury’s verdict, which is expected by the end of July 2026 it will have a major impact on Kosovo’s politics: “If he is convicted, it will have consequences for the UCK and would give Serbia a weapon to use against Kosovo and oppose its independence. If they are found not guilty, I believe it would have a major impact on domestic politics, because they would return as heroes,” explains analyst Emir Abrashi. 

Disinformation and Hybrid Warfare

On 24 April, a court in Pristina found three Kosovo Serbs guilty of terrorism and “serious acts against the constitutional order and security of Kosovo” for their involvement in an attack carried out by a Serbian-backed group of armed men in the Kosovo village of Banjska in September 2023, which resulted in the death of a Kosovo police officer.

According to the judge’s verdict, this was a “well-trained” group that “in an organised manner, entered the Republic of Kosovo illegally from the Republic of Serbia with dozens of vehicles, some armoured”. “The aim was to destabilise and destroy the basic political, constitutional, economic, and social structures of the Republic of Kosovo, through a well-organised plan. They attempted to secede parts of the territory in northern Kosovo, which have a majority Serbian population, and join them with Serbia”, the judge argued. 

Furthermore, it claims that the attackers were trained at a military camp in Serbia, and that Serbia provided all the military and logistical infrastructure needed to carry out the attack, in which up to 44 people are implicated. According to a journalistic investigation by BIRN, the grenade launchers seized by the Kosovar police had passed through Serbian state maintenance centres; and the ammunition used by the attackers matches that manufactured in 2022 by a Serbian state arms producer. 

“Serbia continues to harbour hegemonic ambitions over Kosovo,” says Arben Fetoshi, a professor at the University of Pristina and director of the Octopus Institute for Hybrid Warfare Studies, “but it is waiting for a favourable geopolitical context to reclaim Kosovo. Right now they cannot invade Kosovo, which is why they are resorting to hybrid warfare: disinformation, propaganda and acts of aggression to destabilise Kosovo as an independent country.”

“In the months leading up to the attack in September 2023, we detected a large amount of disinformation originating from Serbia and focused on northern Kosovo,” confirms Fitim Gashi, executive director of SBunker, a media organisation dedicated to monitoring and combating disinformation in Kosovo, “and the main argument behind all that disinformation is that the Kosovo government wants to expel the Serbs. The message conveyed by these campaigns, many orchestrated by the Serbian government, is that Serbs are not safe in Kosovo and must take action to defend themselves.” 

According to Ilazi, this is a misguided view of the nature of Kosovo’s political system. “Kosovo wasn’t designed to be a state of a single ethnic group,” he argues, “but I think social media is amplifying these kinds of messages that seek to perpetuate this sense of permanent conflict because certain politicians stand to gain from it. You can win elections by selling dreams or selling nightmares, and I think politics has a lot to do with maintaining this atmosphere of fear and hatred.”

To Question the Narrative is to Question the Elites 

Jeton Neziraj has devoted much of his literary work and his role as a public intellectual to the very opposite: to breaking down taboos, bringing people of different backgrounds together, and telling stories that overcome fear and hatred. This playwright knows well the feeling of being the one who challenges the prejudices of the majority and the demands of the powerful. 

He was one of the promoters of POLIP, the first literary festival to bring together Serbian and Albanian authors. Furthermore, his plays explore the most uncomfortable aspects and blind spots of his country’s culture, politics and society: corruption, the LGBT community, the role of guerrilla veterans, relations with Europe and post-war reconciliation. 

For his plays, he has been branded ‘unpatriotic’, ‘Yugonostalgic’ and a ‘traitor to national interests’. His latest play is “Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept”, a co-production with a South African theatre company exploring forgiveness between communities.

“I don’t know if I’ve been very stupid or very brave,” says Neziraj as he looks back on all the times his words have proved controversial or divisive. “But I believe that is the role of an artist, to be critical. And I think it’s been useful. I believe there is now more freedom of expression in Kosovo than there was fifteen years ago. There are still problems, of course, but I think that now we wouldn’t have to call the police at a theatre premiere because there are people protesting outside, as happened to us on one occasion, or because veterans wanted to boycott the play which, allegedly, defamed the UCK.” 

It is precisely this problem with veterans that has placed Gashi at the centre of the storm in recent weeks. Gashi, like Neziraj, knew that questioning the heroic narrative of the war was ultimately tantamount to questioning the system of power that has governed the country ever since. 

The former guerrilla leaders and affiliated organisations, explains the sociologist, took control of all spheres of public life: “The university, the judiciary, television, the administration, the political parties and the media are under the control of this so-called elite that has ruled Kosovo for two decades.” In these circumstances, “the UCK has manipulated the war and its memory to stay in power. Since they supposedly liberated the country, they claim the right to rule it and justify their corruption through terror”.

In 2020, Gashi received threats and lost his job as an adviser to President Kurti for stating on television that “some senior officials in the UCK committed war crimes and should be punished for them”. The focus of his historiographical work centres on civilian victims and on the peaceful resistance against Serbian oppression, which, in his view, has been overlooked by official historians intent on highlighting the role of the guerrillas. 

“My aim with this book was to clarify what had happened in each of the massacres. A book like this should be written about every single violation of humanitarian law that took place during the war. First we must know exactly what happened, then there must be reparations, and it is very important that the history textbooks used in schools are revised.” 

The Views of Veterans

Gazmend Syla joined the UCK at the age of 16 and today, at 45, he is the vice-president of the National Veterans’ Association, an organisation with branches in virtually every municipality in the country. Syla speaks with pride of the sacrifices made by his comrades, which, in his view, have not been sufficiently recognised by his compatriots.

We are at the organisation’s headquarters in Peja, one of the main guerrilla strongholds during the conflict, and the walls are covered with flags, emblems and photographs of the martyrs. “Nobody likes war. But you have to go if someone wants to kill you,” he explains after recounting the exploits of some of the “3,000 martyrs” recognised by the organisation.

Syla explains that the organisation’s mission is, at its core, like that of an NGO: “We help veterans when they have a need and mediate with the government to convey their demands.” And what about its influence in politics? “We don’t have a party of our own, but we do have relations with many different parties,” he replies. 

Asked about the trial in The Hague against Thaci and other guerrilla leaders, Syla replies indignantly: it is a set-up against innocent men, the witnesses have been bribed to testify against the UCK and it all boils down, in essence, to “a political issue”. 

The veterans’ association has organised mass demonstrations in Pristina, Tirana and The Hague to demand the acquittal of the accused. He does not wish to conclude the matter without pointing the finger at Western nations: “We fought alongside the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. They helped create the UCK, fought with us and supplied us with weapons. If we are guilty, then NATO is too.”

Syla is unwavering in his defence of the UCK’s political and military role in Kosovo’s independence, and regards the guerrilla movement as one of the pillars of national life. “We are free now and my children go to school,” he explains, “before, in Yugoslavia, we had nothing and the police and the military would beat us for speaking our own language. We had to fight to be free, and now we are doing well. Perhaps we’re not like Switzerland or Spain, but this is our country and we’re happy here.” 

However, his view on relations with Serbia and the Serbs of Kosovo is not what one might expect from a former guerrilla fighter. “The Serbs are citizens of Kosovo just like anyone else. They’re not to blame. They are my neighbours and I get on with them just fine. Their freedoms and political rights are recognised by the Constitution, and that is how it should be.” 

Syla is highly critical of Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s attempts to exclude Lista Sprska, the main Serbian political party in Kosovo, from the elections or to outlaw it: “They should be left in peace.” 

“The things I think and am telling you now, I can’t say them at meetings with the veterans,” Syla laments, sadly, “there, they only want strong, more aggressive rhetoric. And it’s a shame.”

The post To Question Memory is to Question Power: The Narrative of Violence is Shaking up Political Life in Kosovo appeared first on Untold.

“You know, Diana, we are in Germany. We can’t use words like genocide or apartheid. We don’t know who will be in the audience, and I want to protect you. If an extreme right person interrupts, I’ll have to interfere and control the conversation. I am totally with you, I understand you, but you know the history here, the culture of memory. Someone might be offended, or not understand you.”

With these words, a German scholar, well established and working in a reputable institute, tried to convince me to choose my words.

It was October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Lebanon was also under attack.

And I had just realized that the panel I was invited to, addressing Beirut’s history, would talk about the city without addressing the war Israel was waging against it. So I told him it made no sense for me to speak only about history or music while ignoring the ongoing destruction, erasure, and genocide in Palestine and Lebanon.

He then invited me for a coffee to “discuss” my intervention.

The panel was meant to celebrate Beirut as a city always on the edge, a city that loses itself year after year. The city of intellectuals and culture, the city of cafés and books. A city worth mourning, but only in its metaphors.

Not the suburbs. Not the South. Not the Bekaa. Not that Lebanon.

Not the people whose histories disturb. Their ways of mourning, their rituals of grief, their resistance, are not worthy of their attention, nor part of this story. Maybe they are too mournful, too religious, not refined enough for their taste, for this imagined Beirut, cleaned, curated and made to fit a certain language.

So of course, better to leave aside the ongoing destruction by Israel, the ethnic cleansing, the dehumanization of an entire community. The stories of entire villages in the south being erased. The noise of the histories and memories I would bring into the conversation.

On that same day, a rocket hit Ras el-Nabaa, less than 200 meters from my parents’ home, where my aunts and their families were staying. Just meters away, seconds away… yet a million lifetimes away from me. Bombs, erasure, families gone, memories shattered.

The silence goes on, relentless.

And yet, here I was, sitting there, safe in Berlin, listening to him asking me to watch my words. To be careful with my language, not to disturb the fragility of German history.

He kept reassuring me that he would “protect” me, in case some “extreme right wing” guy, the usual monster everyone fears, would interrupt the panel. Because my words would offend him. Would offend them.

Our words scare them. Our history still unsettles them.

But for him, there was no problem using this fear. No problem disciplining me through his own imagined violence. His history, his memory, was something I was expected to accept. To carry.

***

Since October 7, I have heard so many European scholars, people who built their careers on our region, tell me quietly, in private, that they are “with Palestine”, or that they are ashamed of their government.

Quietly. Always so quietly.

But when it comes to speaking publicly, to standing against what is happening in their own institutions, their silence is so loud. They speak about freedom of expression. They love that phrase. But when it comes to Israel, or to questioning German memory and the structural racism it created in their institutions, suddenly it disappears.

Since I became German, some even laugh about it. They come to me, joking, almost hysterically, creepily: “Now you are part of it. Our German guilt. Our memory.”

They laugh and laugh. And my world turns upside down. They laugh while my memories shatter, piece by piece. They laugh while everything around me loses meaning. They laugh while I live this constant dissonance. Here, in Berlin, everything is calm, yet so disturbing. There, everything is collapsing, yet it makes so much sense.

They laugh and laugh, in silence, living their everyday lives, convinced they are safe in their own small, individual worlds. As if safety was natural. As if it was not built on distance. On silence. On what is not said.

***

It is 9am. A peaceful, sunny day in Berlin. March 2026.

I am sitting in the office. I hear a sound.

Drones.

I feel it in my body. I move in my chair, and I look around. Does anyone else hear it? No one reacts. I look again. I am in Berlin.

I have told myself, with a lot of guilt, that the sound of drones is something new to me. That I wasn’t used to it, nor internalized it. Not yet. Not like my family and friends there. They had become hunted by that sound. I kept telling myself this was not my trauma.

But my body tells me otherwise.

It reminds me that it has already absorbed this fear, the fear of something hunting us from above. It didn’t forget the shiver it creates. Fear travels with us. It does not stay there, nor respect borders. It sits in the body, quiet sometimes, then suddenly very loud.

My body has carried this for years. The fear of planes haunting the sky. We used to call it umm kāmel. It watched us. Today they call it zanāni. Now it hunts, speaks, erases you like a bug.

My heart starts beating fast. I look outside. I am still in Berlin. It’s just the neighbor cutting the grass in this nice, fancy and quiet neighborhood. But in my body, it is a drone. Following me here. Into this calm, safe life.

I ask my colleague: do you feel something?

She says yes.

For a second, I think maybe she feels it too. Maybe she understands something of this. Maybe I am not that hunted.

Then she says: yes, this weather… this long winter in Berlin. It’s so depressing.

Yes, I say. The winter.

***

It always comes back to the same moment. The same questions. The same hunted memories.

February 2024. Sitting at a table with German scholars. More than 20,000 people already killed in Gaza.

One of them, a specialist of the region, was speaking loudly, almost proudly. He was talking about the Israeli war on Gaza, its repercussions in Europe, and the pro-Israel stance of universities. He criticized those who expected more from German scholars.

Then I said: “But German scholars are not really fighting back, nor willing to take a clear stand. Maybe this is the moment to give something back to the places you build your carriers on. Even a little.”

Something changed.

His eyes turned red, his face tightened. He looked straight at me and asked me:

“But do you condemn Hamas?”

The post “Now You Are Part of It. Our German Guilt. Our Memory” appeared first on Untold.

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.

Since 2013, Albania has been governed by the Socialist Party under Rama, who secured a fourth consecutive term in 2025. His leadership has been marked by strong executive power and centralized decision-making. At the same time, civil society groups and international organizations have raised concerns about democratic standards, including pressure on independent media and political influence over state institutions. According to Transparency International, Albania continues to struggle with corruption, ranking 91st globally in 2025 and relatively low compared to other European countries.

Against the tide

More than two years have passed since the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza began. This first live-streamed genocide has sparked widespread popular support for Gaza, particularly in Western European countries. While academic, cultural, and tourist engagements with Israel are increasingly viewed as ethically and morally corrupt, the Albanian government has pursued the opposite trajectory. Instead of distancing itself from Israel, Albania has deepened its ties. 

Albania is cultivating closer political and economic relations, signing new bilateral agreements, and aligning itself with Israeli interests across a wide spectrum, including defense, cybersecurity, culture, and finance. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Edi Rama, now in his fourth consecutive term, this trajectory appears undeterred and indifferent to both the immense civilian suffering in Gaza and the growing pro-Palestinian sentiment within Albania.

Against the backdrop of the International Court of Justice’s assessment that a plausible case for genocide exists in Gaza, many governments have grown increasingly cautious about the optics and ethics of (openly) deepening ties with Israel. Some have recalled ambassadors, suspended arms exports, or quietly shelved bilateral agreements. Others, such as Ireland, Norway, Spain, Canada, UK, Australia and France issued formal recognitions for the state of Palestine. 

Albania has charted a strikingly different course. Not only has it continued to expand cooperation with Israel across multiple domains, but it has done so openly and without hesitation. Moreover, it has treated these partnerships as achievements to be celebrated rather than associations with a state apparatus suspected on charges of genocide with its most senior leader warranted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. 

To understand Albania’s current relations with Israel and Palestine, it is helpful to consider the long history of Albanian foreign policy. As a small, economically weak country, Albania has often aligned itself with more powerful states to protect its interests.

Making sense of an unusually close relationship 

Albania gained independence in 1912 after five centuries of Ottoman rule. From 1925 to 1939, the country was ruled by President, later King, Zog. During this time, the country became an unexpected refuge for Jews. This period has even been described as “a golden era” for Jews in Albania. Beginning in 1933, Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany and Austria began arriving, many using Albania as a temporary stop on their way to the United States or Latin America. 

The Albanian Embassy in Berlin continued to issue visas until late 1938, and King Zog personally supported efforts to protect Jewish refugees. As a result, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jews passed through Albania before 1939.

The situation changed when Italy invaded Albania in 1939. Emigration became difficult, leaving many Jews unable to leave the country. They remained relatively safe under Italian rule until 1943, when Nazi Germany took control. Even then, Albanian authorities refused the Germans’ demands for lists of Jews. Many Jews were sheltered by officials and ordinary citizens alike. 

Albania was the only European country that had more Jews after World War II than before it. After the war, about half of the Jewish population—around 300 people—left for Israel or other countries. The rest were not permitted to leave and remained in Albania until the communist regime collapsed in 1991. 

When Albania stood with Palestine

In 1949, Albania officially recognized Israel, partly because it agreed with the Soviet view that Israel could weaken British influence in West Asia. However, this did not lead to full diplomatic relations. From 1955 to 1967, Albania ignored Israel’s repeated attempts to establish diplomatic relations, though it maintained contact with the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI). 

Following events such as the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967, Albania adopted an anti-Israel stance. The country’s leaders portrayed Israel as a tool of imperialist Western powers, particularly the United States.

At the same time, Albania’s communist leader, Enver Hoxha, aligned the country with the Palestinian cause, viewing it as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle. Albanian leaders viewed Palestine as resisting what they saw as an “imperialist proxy” in Israel. In turn, the PLO’s alliance with Albania was based on anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics. 

Relations between Albania and Palestinian groups began in 1967 and were influenced in part by shared ties with China. Albania eventually recognized Fatah, partly because of its international profile and its critical stance toward both the United States and the Soviet Union.

However, relations became strained after the 1972 Munich Olympic attack, which Albania condemned as detrimental to the Palestinian cause. As Fatah developed closer ties with the Soviet Union, Albania became suspicious of the Soviet influence within the Palestinian movement. Although the PLO continued to seek closer ties, including opening an office in Tirana, Albania remained cautious. 

In the early 1980s, relations depended largely on Albania’s broader West Asia strategy and the PLO’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Following Hoxha’s death in 1985, his successor, Ramiz Alia, introduced a more flexible foreign policy, enabling closer international engagement. During this period, a PLO embassy was finally established in Tirana.

A wall fallen, a map redrawn

A few years later, following the collapse of communism, Albania shifted its focus toward the West and established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1991. That same year, most of the remaining Jewish population moved to Israel. 

Under the new Democratic Party government, Albania initially reduced its ties with the PLO. However, after joining the Organization of the Islamic Conference, now known as the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, in 1994, Albania renewed relations with Arab countries. In 1996, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat visited Albania, even as it continued to strengthen its relationship with Israel. In 1998, Albania opened its embassy in Tel Aviv.

Today, Albania recognizes the Palestinian Authority and supports a two-state solution. However, in 2011, Prime Minister Sali Berisha opposed Palestine’s bid for full UN membership, arguing that a negotiated agreement with Israel was preferable.

During his visit to Israel that same year, Berisha emphasized the historical connections between Albanians and Jews, and voiced his concerns about regional security, especially regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Israel opened its embassy in Tirana in 2012.

Deals, drones, and abstentions

Over the past two years, Albania and Israel have signed numerous agreements, covering sectors such as agriculture, education, energy, culture, tourism, defense, and drone technology. Trade between the two countries has also grown quickly. According to Albania’s Institute of Statistics, Israeli exports to Albania increased by over 150% between May 2023 and May 2024.

Israeli investment in Albania is expanding, especially in finance. In early 2025, reports indicated that investors associated with Israel’s One Zero Digital Bank were considering entering the Albanian banking market. Later that year, JET Bank, the country’s first fully digital bank, was established and is owned by British-Israeli businessman Idan Avishai. Other figures of Israeli origin in its leadership include Oliver Hemmer and Rami Solomon.

Meanwhile, Albania has come under scrutiny from human rights researchers. Reports tracking global fuel shipments to Israel during the war in Gaza list Albania as one of 11 countries supplying fuel. These exports are officially presented as commercial, not military. 

However, critics point out that fuel is essential for military operations, including for vehicles and aircraft. According to international humanitarian and criminal law, states and private actors are expected to ensure that their activities do not directly or indirectly contribute, to serious human rights violations, including genocide.

There has also been an increase in military cooperation between Albania and Israel. In late 2025, Albania signed a multimillion-euro arms deal with Israeli defense companies, including Elbit Systems. The agreement includes artillery systems, mortars, and tactical drones, as well as plans to develop domestic production in partnership with KAYO, Albania’s state-owned company. 

Since June 2023, the two countries have officially cooperated in cybersecurity and training, building on the assistance Israel offered Albania following the Iranian cyberattack in July 2022, which targeted Albanian government digital services and websites. 

On 12 May 2026 the Albania-Israel Summit was held in Tirana, for ‘strengthening cooperation in innovation, technology and cybersecurity’ and brought together 40 Israeli companies. Also in May 2026, Elbit registered its Albanian branch with the National Business Center, which will carry out the same activity as in Israel. Earlier in 2025, Elbit and KAYO agreed to reopen the Albanian aviation academy to train military and civilian pilots. 

Political ties have deepened as well. In November 2025, Albania established an “Israel Allies Caucus” in its parliament as part of an international network linked to the Israel Allies Foundation. The group is co-chaired by representatives from both major parties, reflecting broad political support for closer relations with Israel. Israeli sources described the initiative as an example of “faith-based diplomacy,” citing Albania’s history of protecting Jews during World War II as the basis for this relationship.

Between 2022 and 2023, Albania served as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. During this period, Albania’s position on Gaza received significant attention. In October and December of 2023, the UN General Assembly voted on resolutions calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Albania abstained from voting on both resolutions. 

This pattern continued into 2024 and 2025. Albania abstained from several key votes, including those on ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, advancing Palestine’s status at the UN, and a French-Saudi initiative outlining a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

The price of belonging

Albania’s growing alignment with Israel is part of a broader foreign policy pattern. Since the fall of communism in 1991, Albania has positioned itself as a close ally of Western powers. The country has sought NATO membership, achieved in 2009, as well as European Union integration and strong ties with the United States. Closer relations with Israel fit within this strategy. Some analysts argue that strengthening ties with Israel is also a way of strengthening connections with Washington.

This approach was further illustrated in February 2026 when Albania joined four other countries in committing troops to an international security force for Gaza. The initiative is part of a new organization, the “Board of Peace,” which is backed by U.S. President Donald Trump. The organization focuses on post-war governance in Gaza. Its charter was signed at the World Economic Forum in Davos and was later tied to the UN Security Council Resolution 2803 as part of the Gaza Plan. However, its structure has raised questions. Trump holds a lifetime leadership role with veto power, and permanent membership requires a $1 billion contribution. Critics argue that this “pay-to-play” model is unusual for a peace initiative and reflects U.S. political and economic interests.

Prime Minister Rama’s policies highlight a long-standing feature of Albanian foreign policy: close alignment with powerful Western states, sometimes at the expense of independent decision-making or consistent application of international law. High-profile economic deals reinforce concerns about this approach. For example, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump, is leading a $1.4 billion luxury resort project on Sazan Island. Approved with limited public debate, the project aims to transform a former military base into a high-end tourism destination, according to reporting by The New York Times. Critics argue that such projects, coupled with Albania’s pro-Israel stance as a predominantly Muslim country, serve to whitewash and boost Israel’s international image while obscuring its domestic governance issues.

Rewarded for loyalty

In September 2024, Israeli President Isaac Herzog became the first Israeli head of state to visit Albania. He was warmly welcomed by Prime Minister Edi Rama and senior officials. The visit marked a clear step forward in strengthening ties between the two countries. Some analysts argue that such visits also serve Israel’s broader goal of achieving international legitimacy, particularly in regions like Southeast Europe. According to Rexhepi “[t]he Israeli president is travelling to Europe’s peripheries to exert legitimacy, showcasing at home that their leaders can still travel abroad.” Others note that engaging with a Muslim-majority country like Albania helps Israel project a more favorable image in the wider Muslim world.

Albania’s diplomatic positioning at the UN has coincided with closer political ties to Israel. In April 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama received Israel’s Presidential Medal of Honor. He was praised for his “moral clarity” and steadfast support of Israel during what President Isaac Herzog called “our darkest hour.” This was a reference to the October 7 Hamas attack and the ensuing war. Rama has repeatedly condemned Hamas in public statements, at times comparing the group to the Nazis, and arguing that peace is not possible while Hamas remains active.

Cooperation has also expanded at the ministerial level. In October 2025, Albania’s foreign minister visited Israel, and both countries signed agreements to strengthen cooperation in diplomacy and culture. These agreements include training opportunities for young Albanian diplomats. The visit received significant publicity on social and mainstream media platforms, including stops at Holocaust memorial sites and locations associated with the October 2023 attacks. However, critics point out the absence of public statements addressing the high number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel.

On the road to Brussels

For countries like Albania, whose EU membership bid remains contingent on goodwill from Brussels and Washington, endorsing, or at minimum not challenging Israeli actions serves as a form of political currency. Albania’s economic, political, and diplomatic moves point to a wider foreign policy strategy characterized by coloniality by proxy. 

This is most clearly manifested through Albania’s absurd participation in the deeply problematic “Board of Peace,” which reflects its willingness to engage in frameworks shaped by larger powers. It also reflects a deeper, often implicit expectation embedded in the architecture of European integration: that aspiring members on the periphery must demonstrate their worthiness through institutional reforms, economic benchmarks, and geopolitical alignment with core Western powers. 

Scholars such as Piro Rexhepi argue that countries in the Balkans, shaped by a history of external imperial domination — from the Ottoman Empire to European colonial interventions — often seek security and recognition by aligning with dominant powers and navigating contemporary global hierarchies. For countries on the political fringes of the “core West,” access to the Western-backed liberal order is also conditioned by silence, oblivion, or, at worst, complicity in the genocide in Gaza. 

In this context, Albania is not merely an eager partner of Israel. It is also performing the role that Western geopolitical expectations have prescribed for it. In this role, Palestinian suffering is not treated as a moral emergency demanding a response. Rather, it is treated as an inconvenient variable to be managed, minimized, and ultimately ignored on the road to Brussels.

The post Coloniality by proxy: Albania’s road to Brussels runs through Tel Aviv appeared first on Untold.

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

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

Episode 3: “Prove you Are Human”

The post Abu Calypse, Episode 3: “Prove you Are Human” appeared first on Untold.

Then he told the room what SpaceX is actually for: “We want to make Star Trek real. We want to make Starfleet Academy real.” 

This was not an aside. It was a mission statement, delivered to the people who sign US defense checks. He went on to describe a future of “big spaceships” exploring alien civilizations. “That is the goal!” he said. “And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!”

The speech was revealing – not for what it promised, but for what it concealed. It was the clearest example yet of a pattern that has been building for decades: Silicon Valley’s tech elite borrowing the ideas, images, and authority of science fiction while throwing out everything that made those stories politically meaningful. 

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, in their recent book Muskism, argue that the right question is not “who is Musk?” but “what is Musk a symptom of?” – treating him not as an individual but as the representative of a whole worldview, just as we speak of “Fordism”. That worldview is expressed through science fiction: not as decoration, but as the medium that makes its accumulation strategies feel natural, necessary, and inevitable. This is not to say that Science Fiction precedes or causes these projects – it is part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions become thinkable and certain power grabs feel like common sense.

No example makes this clearer than Musk’s own words. Because Star Trek, the franchise he claims to be bringing to life, stands for almost everything he and SpaceX are not.

In Gene Roddenberry’s vision, the future is not built by billionaires or defense contractors. The United Federation of Planets has abolished money. Humanity has left capitalism, nationalism, and militarism behind. The Enterprise does not explore space for profit or military advantage; it explores for knowledge, diplomacy, and shared understanding. Starfleet is not an army; it is a peacekeeping and science organization. This is not background detail. It is the whole point of Star Trek.

Strategic Looting

What Musk is doing – what Silicon Valley has perfected – is what I call “strategic looting.” They take the look and feel of science fiction while throwing out its politics. They want the Enterprise, but with defense contracts. They want the warp drive, but not the equal society that made it possible. They want the adventure, but not the social change that gave it meaning.

Musk is not alone in this. It is how the whole tech industry operates. These companies have learned that science fiction’s hopeful imagery can be put to work while its warnings are quietly ignored.

Peter Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir after the all-seeing stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – objects used by those hungry for power. Tolkien wrote them as instruments of corruption; Thiel turned them into a brand for a company whose main early investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and whose business is selling mass surveillance to governments and militaries. The goal, as Slobodian and Tarnoff show, was never to escape the state but to vassalize it: to make the government’s exercise of power dependent on purchasing services from a private monopoly. The look is borrowed. The warning is thrown away. The contract is signed.

A Manifesto for Silicon Valley

The depth of this project has now been made explicit. In April 2026, Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto on X – a condensed version of CEO Alex Karp and head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska’s book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, which racked up 35 million views in days. 

The document calls for reinstating the military draft, declares that Silicon Valley owes a “moral debt” to the United States, argues that the “engineering elite” must build AI weapons rather than “obsession-driven apps,” and dismisses non-Western cultures as “middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” 

As I argue at length in a recent article in Science as Culture, the book is not really philosophy. It is a sales pitch. Establish that Silicon Valley owes a debt to the American state. Call out Google, Amazon, and Meta as companies that wasted that debt building social media. Present Palantir as the one company that actually paid up. The conclusion follows: Palantir is not just a tech firm – it is the rightful heir to state power. 

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat put it plainly: 

“Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration and police agencies. These 22 points aren’t philosophy floating in space; they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.” 

The Tolkien name provides the mythology. The manifesto provides the politics. The defense contracts provide the money.

In each case, the pattern is the same: take the technology, the imagery, the sense that the future is inevitable. Throw out the warnings, the criticism, the politics that gave those stories their meaning. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) invented the word “cyberspace” and imagined it as a corporate battleground where human beings are just another resource to be mined – that vision becomes a product demo. Foundation’s galactic civilization becomes a justification for private space colonies. And now, Star Trek’s dream of humanity working together becomes a pitch to generals.

Materialized Science Fiction

The setting of Musk’s speech matters. He was not at a fan convention or a tech conference. He was speaking to the people who run the US military and decide where its money goes. When he said Space Force should make people think of Star Trek, he was not talking about exploration. He was pitching a military vision wrapped in the language of a show millions of people love.

This is “materialized science fiction”: the process by which science fiction stories are turned into real projects, with their original meaning stripped out and replaced with something that serves those already in power. These tech billionaires do not misread their source material by accident. They understand it well enough to know exactly which parts to keep and which to discard. The distortion is deliberate.

Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism offers the most rigorous account yet of what this political project looks like in practice. By 2025, they show, SpaceX accounted for 95 percent of all orbital launches in the United States – a position that made the Pentagon and NASA “deeply reliant on Musk,” making SpaceX the de facto gatekeeper for government access to low Earth orbit. They call the endpoint of this logic “sovereignty-as-a-service”: “the logic of the modern internet platform, scaled up to the level of the nation state”. 

The wager of Muskism, they write, is that “sovereignty, going forward, will be infrastructural before it is territorial — defined by access to bandwidth, compute, launch cadence, and orbital real estate as much as by borders and bureaucracies”. What is sold as independence through technology is, in practice, entry into Musk’s walled garden – to which he holds the master key. 

Their analysis is indispensable. But my argument here goes one step further. For Slobodian and Tarnoff, science fiction functions primarily as what they call “financial fabulism” – “science fiction in the mouth of the right entrepreneur could conjure capital from thin air”. That is true as far as it goes. The argument here is that Science Fiction does not only conjure capital at the pitch stage; it continues to accompany and amplify the accumulation strategies as they unfold – part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions remain thinkable, certain power grabs feel like common sense, and certain futures get built while others get closed off. 

Muskism names the symptom. Materialized science fiction explains one of the mechanisms by which it reproduces itself. 

A Tool for Grabbing Power

In a recent essay, Slobodian and Tarnoff push the argument further: where Fordism offered mass consumption and post-Fordism offered financialized aspiration, Muskism offers something qualitatively different. Not a social contract but what they call a “fan contract” – loyalty rewarded with amplified reach and a share of the attention economy, combined with the threat of expulsion for those marked as outside the walls. If Fordism and post-Fordism were, in different ways, organized to secure social peace, Muskism, they argue, is oriented toward social war.

What connects Thiel’s surveillance business, Zuckerberg’s digital world, Andreessen’s push against regulation, and Musk’s military space programme is not just a love of science fiction. It is a shared political goal: replacing democratic control with tech industry control, and using borrowed science fiction prestige to make that look acceptable. In their hands, science fiction stops being a literature of hope and becomes a tool for grabbing power.

Star Trek’s Federation was not built by tech billionaires or defense contractors. It came from humanity choosing, together, to cooperate rather than compete, to share rather than exploit. That choice came after humanity nearly destroyed itself. The Enterprise does not fly to escape Earth’s problems. It flies because those problems have already been solved.

Musk’s version turns this inside out. His spaceships are not a reward for fixing things here. They are a way to avoid fixing them. Why tackle climate change when you can go to Mars? Why fight inequality when you can promise abundance in space? Why repair democracy when you can build a private kingdom on another planet? 

A Guest List for the Few

As Slobodian and Tarnoff observe, Mars functions in Muskism as a “failover mechanism” for the civilizational collapse Musk learned to expect from science fiction – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens with the destruction of Earth; Asimov’s Foundation begins with the collapse of a galactic empire. 

As the Argentine novelist Michel Nieva argues, the appeal of Mars to Musk is not solving the problems of capitalism but relocating its logic to a new address. And as The Atlantic has reported, the question of who boards the Starship is not rhetorical – it runs directly through Musk’s pronatalist politics, his amplification of eugenicist accounts, and his dismantling of USAID while children died in South Sudan. 

Slobodian and Tarnoff go further: Musk is an indicator species for a broader Silicon Valley vision of a post-human future in which humans merge with machines, are gradually supplanted by AI, and the colonization of space is carried out not by people but by “cyborgified” organisms that are only distantly human. The guest list for the Starship, it turns out, may not include humanity at all. 

There is an additional irony here. The historian Jill Lepore has shown that Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the BBC in 1977 with an explicit target in mind: the mega-rich and their privately owned rockets, settling colonies on other planets because no world was ever quite good enough. The typewriter Adams used had a sticker on it. It read: “END APARTHEID.” Musk grew up in Pretoria listening to the same BBC broadcast, claims the book as a formative influence, and is now building exactly what Adams was satirising. 

The science fiction story gives cover for walking away from the present. It also, it turns out, comes with a guest list.

From Utopia to Pitch Deck

When the world’s richest man stands before military leaders and says he wants to make Star Trek real, he is not being a fan. He is doing politics – winning contracts, shaping policy, building support for a vision that has very little to do with Roddenberry and everything to do with power. The audience was not the public. It was the people who control the defense budget.

Musk used Star Trek’s imagery because it carries weight: it makes privatized space exploration sound like a shared human adventure rather than a billionaire’s project. It makes working with the military sound like boldly going where no one has gone before. The same logic governed DOGE. To explain his approach to dismantling the federal bureaucracy, Musk cited Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: in the film, Captain Kirk wins an unwinnable training simulation by reprogramming it. “The only way to achieve success,” Musk said, “is to reprogram the matrix such that success is one of the possible outcomes. That’s what we’re doing”. The same logic runs across the whole industry.

The irony is that Star Trek saw this coming. The Ferengi – a species that puts profit above everything – were written as a warning, not a model. The Borg – a collective that strips away individual freedom – were the opposite of everything the Federation stands for. Corporate-run worlds were shown as places to be feared.

None of this means pretending Star Trek had no flaws. Critics, most notably the media scholar Daniel Bernardi, have rightly pointed out that the Federation’s vision of universal values often looked like American values in disguise – that its “we come in peace” approach echoed the language of the very colonialism it claimed to have left behind, and that alien cultures were usually judged against a human, Western standard. 

That criticism is fair. But even a flawed utopia contains more political imagination than a defense contractor’s pitch deck. The question is not whether Star Trek was perfect. It is what gets lost – and what gets used as a weapon – when even its imperfect values are stripped away.

This is what materialized science fiction looks like from the inside: not the utopia the stories promised, but the infrastructure of a political project that has no use for utopia. And yet here we are: a tech elite pitching Star Trek to defense contractors while running companies that harvest data like a natural resource, treat workers as replaceable, and fight every attempt at oversight. They have cut these stories open, taken the parts that suit them, and thrown away everything else.

Until the politics catch up with the aesthetics, what we are getting is not science fiction made real. It is a small group of very powerful people using science fiction’s authority to close off the futures it once imagined – billionaires in borrowed costumes, acting out the adventure while gutting the story that made it worth telling.

The post Billionaires in Borrowed Costumes: How Silicon Valley Loots Science Fiction to Justify Its Power Grab appeared first on Untold.

Enable, Rinse and Repeat

Just as they did last year, EU Foreign Affairs Ministers considered the suspension of the Association Agreement with Israel for its flagrant violations of human rights. And just like last year, Spain, Ireland and Slovenia pointed out that the Agreement should be suspended for evident violations of human rights. And just like last year, there was no majority for any concrete action.

Most governments and major media outlets shrugged the whole thing off as just another vote. After all, until there is a clear majority if not unanimity among EU governments, how could the Union act? 

Meanwhile, the media and political debate lost themselves in discussions of complex EU voting procedures or reading tea leaves of possible shifts in key European governments.

This, however, misses the point. Whether such a majority exists or not has nothing to do with the legal obligations of the EU and its member states. These obligations require the EU to act.

Breaking its Own Rules

The European Union is under two major kinds of legal constraints: internal and international.

Internally, the EU’s legal commitment to human rights is hard-wired into all aspects of policy and action by the Lisbon Treaty. This ‘constitution’ says the Union is founded upon “democracy, human rights and fundamental values” and that these must be upheld in every dimension of the EU’s policies and practices. 

In fact, precisely for this ‘hard-wiring’, some argue that Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria means that the Association Agreement never ought to have been signed at all.

In addition, Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement says all links are subject to “respect for human rights”. The evidence of Israel’s massive and systematic violations of human rights internally, internationally and of course in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is so well-known and so overwhelmingly vast that it cannot be summarised here. 

Save to say that it has been necessary to invent new terms for what is being done in Palestine (and elsewhere like in Lebanon and Iran): domicide, urbicide, medicide, scholasticide, ecocide, econocide, unchilding, and journocide killing the most journalists worldwide in each of the last three years running – a combined total greater than all journalists killed in the U.S. Civil War, both World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars (including Cambodia and Laos conflicts), the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 Afghanistan war. Not to mention the use of ‘double tap’ or ‘triple tap’ attacks in all these cases: targeting civilians/non-combatants, protected categories (medics, journalists), aggravated by perfidy.

All this is an incontrovertible matter of public record. Even an internal review by the EU’s own External Action Service found Israel had violated international law in Gaza.

For those violations alone, the Agreement ought to have been suspended years ago.

There is no room for interpretation: by the EU’s own internal rules, it should already have suspended the Agreement if not cut relations with Israel entirely.

Breaching International Law

The European Union’s obligations under international law are if anything even stronger.

Take the duty to prevent genocide as an example.

The Genocide Convention establishes a duty to use “all means reasonably available” to prevent genocide. This obligation was confirmed in January 2024 by the International Court of Justice, which also accepted that Palestinians’ right to be protected from genocide ‘may’ be being violated.

As its largest commercial partner, the EU patently has the leverage to act. The European Union and Israel are linked by defence and security contracts and collaborations, and through academic and commercial research relations. The EU has the obligation not to continue any such ties which in any way support those violations.

The same goes for individual states. Two of Israel’s top three arms suppliers are key EU Member States: Germany and Italy. Like any other government, both have a duty not to sell weapons used in the devastation of Gaza, in the colonization and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and in the unprecedented destruction of South Lebanon.

Hiding Behind Procedures

Yet the European Commission and many Member States in the Council fail to act. Year after year, they hide behind voting regulations to avoid acting on those obligations.

How?

Human rights assessments ought to be routine, but in practice must be requested by Member States which then need to obtain that such reviews be tabled for a vote by the Foreign Affairs Council. As in 2025, reports are usually not tabled on the basis that there is no perceived consensus for suspending the Agreement, or a ‘qualified majority’ to suspend portions of it or agree on sanctions. So, in practice, breaches of Article 2 are never openly discussed or voted on.

For the EU’s rhetorical commitment to human rights to be taken seriously, the assessments of, and votes on, human rights should be transparent, routine and compulsory.

Instead, for decades, the EU has avoided saying how it defines “human rights conditions” or specifying how these should be measured and assessed. It has failed to make reviews regular or transparent. It has made sure that whether those reviews come to a vote or are even tabled is not automatic but is at the Council’s discretion.

It is impossible not to conclude that the self-proclaimed paladin of human rights and fundamental values never intended to take its human rights commitments seriously.

Rules Unfit for Purpose

The fact that there are too few member states willing to vote for suspending the agreement with Israel is entirely irrelevant.

What these votes mean is simply that a majority of EU governments are happy to continue to break their own rules and international law.

The obligation to prevent genocide or crimes against humanity doesn’t suddenly disappear, it cannot be dismissed or deferred just because the EU’s internal procedures are unfit for purpose. If the EU’s procedures result in illegal outcomes, those rules must be changed. They certainly don’t absolve EU leaders of their legal responsibilities.

What is astonishing is not only that the EU is failing to uphold international law or its own principles, it is also damaging itself geopolitically.

The EU’s reputation as a ‘normative actor’ – its influence from promoting universal human rights and democracy – lies in tatters. Its self-proclaimed role as paladin of the rule of law has been reduced to little more than a bitter irony.

European representatives failed to condemn the evident violation of the UN Charter when the US and Israel attacked Iran or when Israel invaded Lebanon just as they failed to support the cases brought against Israel before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Ignoring international law in this way helps undermine the international institutions of the ‘United Nations system’.

Consigning Europe to Irrelevance

Europe has nothing to show for all this damage. It is not even sacrificing principle for power. It is weakening and isolating itself.

For the last few decades, European governments have lost political and strategic autonomy by increasingly aligning themselves with the US. The failure to set clear political distance from the US and to use what leverage Europe has, only worsens this isolation and irrelevance. Europe is taken for granted in Washington and is diplomatically irrelevant for China, Russia or Iran, which might have found a respected but relatively independent  interlocutor useful to facilitate diplomacy. 

One example of this is the EU’s striking absence from any negotiations over the conflicts in the Persian Gulf and the East Mediterranean.

Instead, by ignoring the rule of law on Israel while increasing sanctions on Iran and Russia, barely hours before the Iran/US ceasefire deadline, the EU added instability to an already exceptionally volatile and dangerous moment in world history.

In other words, by disregarding its self-proclaimed values, international law and its own self-interest, the EU is consigning Europe to global irrelevance.

The post Hiding Behind Procedure: How the EU Attempts to Sidestep Obligations on Israel – and Why They Fail 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.

Through free-form writing and illustration, the contributors reflect on what divestment can mean for academics of color within knowledge-producing institutions across the Global North. Grounded in the urgency of documenting the present moment and its reverberations in academia, the series reveals how the dehumanization of the “other” has always been structural and systemic.

This story is by Watfa Najdi, with illustrations by Pascale Ghazaly. 

What does it mean to think beyond extractivism in times of war?

I was invited to speak at an event. At the time, I was feeling vulnerable and constantly worried about the situation in Lebanon, and I rarely felt like leaving the house. 

However, it was an important event, so I said yes.

That night, as I was sitting on the stage speaking, a strike hit al-Nuweiri neighborhood in Beirut. Among the martyrs, there was a family with the same last name as mine: Najdi. I didn’t know, and I kept talking about the importance of moving beyond the North/South paradigm that casts certain populations as perpetual beneficiaries or aid recipients in need of Western expertise… I remember saying something about care, holding space, and listening to voices from the majority world. I didn’t look at my phone until the panel ended.

When I finally did, I saw several messages about the strike, the victims, the names.

“Israeli air strikes on central Beirut have killed 22 people and wounded at least 117, Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health said… The strikes appear to have hit densely populated residential areas as flames and smoke rose from two residential blocks.” (Al Jazeera, October 2024)

For a few minutes, everything inside me froze until my dad finally answered his phone and said they were okay. I then texted a friend who lived close to the targeted area. She replied briefly that they were still trying to process what happened, but they were okay.

After that, I put on a smile and said I needed to leave early. So, while everyone went upstairs to continue the conversation, I slipped out and rushed back home. That day I realized that academic conversations feel impossibly small during war, and the world you come from suddenly becomes too heavy to carry into these spaces but also too real to just put on hold.

Excerpt from Megaphone’s X account posted the following day (October 11, 2024):

“Hussein (51) and Lara (40), along with their twins Bassam and Zakaria (15) and Fatima Najdi (4), were laid to rest on Friday in their hometown Srifa, as well as their grandmother Inaam Saqlawi, her brother, and his wife. The death toll from the Noueiri massacre has now reached 22 martyrs, with over 117 others injured.”

How are you doing? How’s your family?

A professor asked me how I was doing. Over the past months, I’ve learned not to answer those questions fully. Most people ask because (I assume) it would be impolite not to, and what they expect is a short confirmation that your family back home is “doing okay,” even while surviving a war. So, I usually say exactly that: “they’re okay” then I smile and nod.

But this time there was something in his tone that made me believe he actually wanted to know more about what’s happening. So, I let myself say a little more. “It’s terrible,” I said. “Last night I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up following the news… watching which buildings were being bombed…”

I was tired and angry, so the words kept coming. “They hit a building close to my neighborhood in Beirut. It’s just…”

I don’t remember what I said after that, only the moment he gently cut in: “Can you walk with me? I need to grab my coffee from inside.”

I froze for a second but then nodded and walked beside him towards the class. It took me a minute to put a smile back on… I stood there as he grabbed his cup and checked something on his desk.

He then turned back to me and said, “…you were telling me about the situation in Beirut?”

I felt ridiculous sharing, even if for a few seconds, something very personal to me with someone who preferred to listen to a conversation about war while sipping coffee. I smiled again and said, “oh, that was it. The situation is difficult. Hopefully it will end soon.”

He smiled back, warmly. I don’t think he was pretending. But this is probably as far as he could go. Not because of lack of empathy, but because news about war, suffering and pain from the other side of the world can only be acknowledged briefly, never long enough to interrupt the rhythm of (academic) life.

The post Diaries of an Academic of Color: On the Limits of Academic Spaces, and Life in Two Places appeared first on Untold.

For the better part of the past two years, we have read study over study detailing the manifold forms of violence inflicted on the population of this tiny strip of land – maybe to compensate for the screaming silence on or relativization of these horrors by so many colleagues and institutions. 

Yet most of these readings only reiterate to what we already know. We know the casualty counts, the satellite images, the story of Hind Rajab. We all know them and what they are symptoms of. At least, those of us who want to know. 

There is an exhaustion that is not only emotional but epistemic: the sense that Gaza’s archive of horrors has become so heavy, so routinised, that it no longer clarifies anything. It merely accumulates. And in that accumulation, the place and its people risk dissolving into function – into a screen for moral and political performances and a symbol for the erosion of rights-based global order that, let’s be honest, never truly served those now paying its highest price.

Abdalhadi Alijla’s Fearful in Gaza does not accept this economy. It does not offer Gaza as piecemeal material for a political lesson. It refuses the familiar rhetorical contract in which the reader is permitted to feel only if the text supplies the requisite volume of shock, and in which the writer is expected to translate lived reality into the idiom of an international audience. 

I finished Fearful in Gaza with the distinct feeling one sometimes has after reading a work that is neither “extraordinary” nor “representative”, and yet more unsettling than either category. In fact, the book stays with me to date precisely because it does not contain something shocking in the way the world expects writing on Gaza to shock. Instead, it trusts in being taken seriously in its own, very quiet way. 

Alijla insists, with remarkable discipline, in the irreducible seriousness of the ordinary. He writes about growing up in Gaza with an honesty that is strikingly frank and unsparing. “Ungeschönt” (unvarnished?) we say in Germany, where we seem to have a precise word for everything but for the brutal Israel occupation and the genocidal violence deployed in Gaza. 

Contrasting with the semantic acrobatics of German officials or media in trying to avoid certain terminologies, Fearful in Gaza comes with a sobering clarity. In fact, its language is almost plain and precisely for that reason it is deeply affecting. Everyday routines, small pleasures, and moments of intimacy and care are described with the same clarity and in the same breath as moments of shame, humiliation, and the slow sedimentation of fear into the biographies of every protagonist of the book. 

But most importantly they are presented without moral staging for a specific audience. Unlike so many recent publications, Gaza appears here not as a metaphor or a case study, but as a real place of home, with all the contradictions that implies.

Two Voices, One Childhood, No Setting

Formally, the book is written in two voices: “The Son” and “The Mother.” While the son, Ayk, carries the main line, his mother interrupts, mirrors, adds weight, and often presses down on the same memory from another angle. What results from this structure is a family memoir that does not seek harmony but remains fragmentary dissonant. 

The son’s narrative registers the world through the eyes of a child and without full comprehension, the mother’s narrative registers the same world as a horizon of responsibility and vigilance. However, the mother’s interventions do not function as explanatory commentary. Alijla does a great job portraying the mother as an authority in her own right, with her exhaustion, anger, tenderness, and practical intelligence. Through her testimony, he makes visible the labor of keeping a child alive in Gaza, without ever romanticizing or lionizing this task.

Violence enters into this relationship of mother and son not as a spectacular event that can be easily morally consumed, but as a persistent atmospheric condition that reorganizes the child’s and the mother’s cognitive and emotional architectures. 

As a pressure that seeps into the logic of childhood and quietly deforms it. There is the children’s fascination with military jeeps, and their instinct to domesticate them by giving them animal names, as if naming could tame the terror. The gesture is, on the surface, playful, a small act of imagination. But it is also a way how a child makes fear manageable by giving it a known shape. 

Effectively it is also a technique of survival in a context of constant uncertainty: In one moment, school is school. In the next, it is no longer just school – when the teacher distributes pieces of onion because its smell helps against tear gas or when children are marched across the schoolyard at gunpoint and with their hands up. 

This scene that illustrates the carceral nature of a child’s life under occupation is described without theatrical punctuation, which is precisely why it becomes difficult to forget. One feels, reading it, the thinness of the wall that is supposed to separate childhood from coercion and harm, and how quickly that wall is pierced. In another passage, the mother describes waking her son at the first sound of military engines, because she is afraid his heart could stop during a nightly raid. 

There are passages that are even more difficult because they do not offer interpretive scaffolding. A scene of sexual violence against children is observed through the eyes of a six-year-old who cannot yet name what he sees but carries the fear from this incident for years, as if the body understood something that language could not yet organize. The description does not force emotion, though. Alijla refrains from converting the scene into a moral exhibit. He merely describes, and the description itself is what unsettles.

Home, Not Symbol

The comparison to other recent books produced under conditions of war and siege is unavoidable, not because they are the same, but because they share an ethic of focusing on the ordinary. That is what makes Fearful in Gaza feel closer, in spirit, to books like Tijan Sila’s Radio Sarajevo or Tony Doherty’s This Man’s Wee Boy than to much of what is marketed as “Middle East” conflict literature. 

This kinship that has less to do with geography than with scale. Sila’s Sarajevo is not presented as a grand theatre for questions of belonging amid ethnic conflict. It is a toilet where the family sleeps, crude jokes, and the brittle bonds of boyhood. Likewise, Doherty’s Derry at the onset of civil war in Northern Ireland is made intelligible by being rendered small and specific through the joys and tribulations of childhood and a son’s fragmentary recollections of his father, shot dead on Bloody Sunday. 

Alijla does something similar, but with his own temperature. Through his recollections of everyday kitchen situations, quarrels over schoolwork, neighbourhood routes, and the stubborn persistence of habits even when these habits become risky, he gives the domestic and the routine a dignity that public talk about Gaza rarely allows. That matters because so much writing and commentary in Europe and North America treats Gaza as a symbol first and as a lived world second. 

Since 7 October 2023, this symbolic reflex has only intensified. Gaza is increasingly made to carry debates that are, in practice, not about Gaza at all, and more about the moral self-positioning of distant audiences: about legitimacy, about the right vocabulary, about whose grief is permissible and what forms of violence are justifiable. 

In Germany, where public debate has largely concentrated on a self-referential struggle over the country’s historic responsibility, this dynamic has been particularly stark, with the effect that Palestinians appear, at best, as a footnote to someone else’s ethical drama. In this climate, Gaza functions like a floating signifier, a symbolic container filled with meaning ascriptions that harden moral frontiers, prevent empathy, and criminalise solidarity, policing what can be said and who is cast as decent or dangerous. 

Alijla’s refusal to write Gaza as allegory matters here. By returning again and again to the small things, to the mother’s vigilance, to the child’s strategies of coping, to routines disrupted and reassembled, Fearful in Gaza withdraws Gaza from the role of rhetorical object and gives it back its status as a place where people live, remember, disagree, and endure. 

Gaza is presented as home in the literal sense, that is, a place where your life happens, where you learn tenderness and cruelty in the same day, where you absorb contradictions because you have no choice. In the end, this is how the book becomes political: It trusts the reader to feel the humanness of its protagonists without being pushed to do so. 

This is, for me, the central reminder the book carries: Sometimes the most powerful political writing is precisely that which simply tells what it is like, without the implicit bargain that the reader will only pay attention if suffering is presented at maximum volume.

Exile as Aftersound

The frame of the book is also a story of later, of what comes after the spectacle. Towards the end of the book, Alijla describes his cumbersome relocation Sweden, where he lives and writes today. From this exile, he was forced to witness from afar Israel’s destruction of the very home he remembers so affectionately and the death of the people who populate his memories: Of the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, located East of the so-called “Yellow Line” drawn by Israel straight across the Gaza Strip, where nothing but rubble remains. Abdalhadi’s mother, whose voice structures the book and anchors many of its most intimate passages, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in May 2025. 

Against this backdrop, Fearful in Gaza has become something it never meant to be: A record of places and voices that have been violently disappeared. The book’s closing movement thus performs a subtle shift. What started as memory becomes preservation. In this sense, the memoir holds a powerful truth. Namely that neither geographical nor temporal distance, neither occupation nor physical destruction can erase what we hold dear. They only alter the modalities. 

Sleeplessness, sensory echoes, the sea as an unexpected trigger may puncture the author’s everyday life in exile. But these punctuations are not just reverberations of trauma. They testify to the continued presence of a world that did not end simply because the narrator left it. In Fearful in Gaza, the mother’s voice offers the vocabulary of Ghourba, longing and estrangement, and with that the sense that “after” is not a clean temporal category but a different kind of living with the same thing.

When I closed the book, I did not feel better informed. Nor did I feel morally validated in my political position. Instead, there was a quieter recognition, bordering on embarrassment, of how often we mistake information for understanding. And so the introductory question returns, but changed slightly in tone: Why do I still read books like this?

Because every now and then a book refuses the roles assigned to it and, by doing so, leaves an even deeper mark.

The post Gaza, Not a Metaphor: Childhood, Memory, and the Refusal of Spectacle appeared first on Untold.