Cohen understood something fundamental about modern power: it neutralizes opposition not by suppression, but by absorption. The system does not punish its reformers with exile; it rewards them with relevance. It hands them an office, a staff, a schedule, and gradually converts conviction into administration. Now I have no doubt in the good intentions of Mayor Mamdani but this is the first lesson for any insurgent who finds himself in charge — and it applies now to him. The danger begins not when you lose, but precisely when you win. The Ring of Power, to borrow Tolkien’s most durable metaphor, does not conquer by coercion; it seduces. It whispers, it flatters, it rewards your competence. It tells you that you can use it “for good,” and in doing so, it teaches you its logic and it controls you.
In The Lord of the Rings, the tragedy is not only that the Ring corrupts; it is that its corruption proceeds through moral intention. Frodo the Hobbit never wishes to dominate; he wishes to redeem. Yet the very attempt to wield the Ring for benevolent ends leads to enslavement. Tolkien’s insight — often lost in popular readings — is that certain structures of power cannot be instrumentalized. They must be renounced, not reformed.
Cohen, working in a different idiom, arrived at the same conclusion.
His “twenty years of boredom” was not personal despair; it was the spiritual cost of believing that institutional power can be repurposed.
For Cohen, boredom was not lethargy — it was a form of moral anesthesia, the slow numbing of dissent.
The challenge facing Mamdani is precisely this: how to govern without being governed by the grammar of the institution. The temptations are subtle. The mayor’s calendar will begin to fill. The language of “stakeholders” and “deliverables” will start to replace the language of justice. Gradually, the movement that made victory possible will be reclassified as a “constituency.”
The first commandment, then, is defensive: do not trust the Ring.
Do not mistake process for progress.
Do not confuse fluency in the system’s language with mastery of its power.
But there is a second, less romantic truth that must accompany this one: you cannot overthrow the machine from one desk.
Not even from New York’s City Hall. The skills required to win office are not the same as those required to transform the conditions that make such offices corrupt. Governing and transforming are different arts. The fantasy of the “exemplary reformer” — the idea that personal integrity can redeem a corrupt institution — is itself a symptom of the Ring’s seduction.
But now the good news.
A mayor’s office cannot dismantle Empire. But it can be used as a laboratory of counter-hegemony, a place where the instruments of government are quietly retooled for different ends. The trick is to act as a hacker, not a missionary.
That means using administrative tools in subversive ways.
Turn procurement into a form of public ownership.
Redirect budgets to seed experiments in community autonomy.
Use the press conference not as a spectacle of control, but as a stage for the voices usually absent from it.
Protect protest rather than contain it.
Leak what must be leaked.
In short, convert administration into infrastructure for collective agency.
Cohen’s “First we take Manhattan” was never meant as a finale. It was a beginning — the first breach in the walls of power, not their collapse. Manhattan is the entry point, the place where the machinery of modern power is most visible and most intricate. But the song never ends there. “Then we take Berlin” is the real destination — not another city, but the endgame. Berlin is code for the higher citadel: the White House, the global financial core, the administrative brain of empire itself.
City Hall’s task is not to destroy that machinery, but to prepare the conditions for those who might.
It must become an outpost of the movement, a relay station where civic power can be reassembled, disciplined, and scaled. Its purpose is not to concentrate authority, but to radiate it outward — into neighborhoods, workplaces, unions, schools, and networks of solidarity.
If Mamdani can keep that compass steady, City Hall may yet become what Tolkien and Cohen both imagined in different keys: a point of resistance within the architecture of domination, where the machinery of empire begins to turn against itself.
From there, the movement can grow outward — from Manhattan to Berlin, from City Hall to the White House, from the heart of the metropolis to the heart of the empire.
And when it finally reaches the furnace — the global foundry where the Ring of Power was forged, in capital, in hierarchy, in the myth of inevitability — its task will not be to wield that power better, but to cast it into the fire and end its dominion altogether, liberating all who have lived under its spell and enabling the emergence of real democracy.

​

​Dyab Abou Jahjah


Now that the killing has paused in Gaza, we must be even sharper than before. The first question we must ask is simple yet decisive: has the genocide ended?

No — it has not.
Genocide is not defined solely by mass killing. It also consists of the deliberate imposition of conditions on a people — in whole or in part — intended to bring about their destruction. Those conditions remain brutally in place for the Palestinian people in Gaza. As long as they persist, the genocide continues. Only when they are fully and permanently lifted can we say it has ended.
This is not an opinion; it is the legal position under international law.
Let us hope this genocide will finally cease. But when it does, a new battle must begin — the battle for accountability.
After a genocide, those responsible cannot be thanked or normalized simply because they stopped committing it. They must be held accountable for having done it. The state that committed it — Israel — must face legal, political, and cultural consequences for being genocidal. Responsibility extends from the highest echelons of power to the foot soldiers who executed the crimes. The entire apparatus that enabled them must be dismantled.
This requires more than a change of government; it demands regime change in Israel. The regime that committed genocide — the Zionist regime — must be changed. And until that happens, Israel should remain isolated, boycotted, and treated as the rogue state it is.
This genocide is not that of Netanyahu alone. It is the genocide of Zionism. Zionism, like Nazism, like ISIS, like the Khmer Rouge, like Hutu nationalism — like every genocidal regime in history — must end.
The battle for this is manyfold. The legal battle we wage is essential, but another battle is equally vital: the battle for memory and narrative.
What happened in Gaza goes far beyond what the world has seen. In my work as Director of the Hind Rajab Foundation, I meet victims and review evidence. The stories I hear and the material I see belong in a horror-apocalyptic series. Gaza was a killing field.
Zionism, like Nazism, like ISIS, like the Khmer Rouge, like Hutu nationalism — like every genocidal regime in history — must end.
The global awareness that now exists can change the world — and it can put an end to Zionism. That is precisely why Zionism will counterattack. It will try to silence and intimidate those who seek accountability. But even more dangerously, it will attempt to reconquer the narrative.
This can only happen by attacking memory and planting negationism of the Gaza genocide everywhere — on social media, in the press, in movies, in cartoons, in songs. This counterattack is already underway: massive, well-funded, and coordinated. Money is being poured in, platforms are being bought or subdued, and networks around the world are being revived.
The coming struggle over memory, facts, narrative, and truth will be decisive. We must not allow history to be rewritten or this monumental crime erased.
This genocide is a defining moment for the future. What happened in Gaza is not merely a tragedy — it is a model that must be stopped, and it must recoil against those who conceived and executed it. If it does not, it will become the playbook of empire and power worldwide: a tech-genocide, AI-driven, and Orwellianly denied.
This is the battlefield of the coming decade.
For Gaza’s victims, for humanity, and for the very meaning of justice itself — this battle must be won.

​By Dyab Abou Jahjah
As the world holds its breath to see whether Israel will respect the deal brokered by Donald Trump — a deal that could at least pause the genocide in its direct killing form — many are asking an uncomfortable question: Is this a capitulation? Should the Palestinian resistance not continue fighting?

For nearly two years, the resistance in Gaza has fought with unmatched courage against overwhelming odds. It has not fought Israel alone, but the entire power of a global order complicit in its crimes — complicit through the flow of weapons, technology, money, and, above all, impunity.
And yet, despite the destruction, Israel failed to achieve its goal. Gaza has been turned to rubble, but the will to resist remains unbroken. Israel’s objective was never merely to punish Gaza; it was to erase it — to depopulate the territory entirely and end the Palestinian presence there once and for all. We all remember Trump’s so-called Riviera Plan and the talk of relocating Palestinians elsewhere. But even that was too modest compared to Netanyahu’s ultimate dream: the total annexation of Gaza and, in time, the West Bank.
That dream has now been blocked.
The current deal, if implemented, closes the door to the full annexation Israel envisioned. And that is precisely why Israel will do everything possible to reignite the war. Because, for Israel’s leadership, stopping the killing is bad politics. Every day of peace undermines its narrative of eternal conflict. Every day that Gaza survives is an act of resistance.
Today, the most vital mission is to secure the survival and dignity of Gazans, to break the siege in practice, and to ensure real international protection. Of course, Israel will attempt to turn any ceasefire into another form of domination. We see it already in Lebanon, where Israel continues its criminal pattern of bombing and assassinations, killing civilians, including children, with impunity.
Ultimately, only deterrence can restrain such violence. But deterrence now takes new forms: international isolation, expanding boycotts, and the relentless pursuit of accountability for genocide and war crimes.
This is the defining struggle of this generation — to end impunity and restore justice. The generation that has witnessed Gaza’s destruction is the same one that will soon shape global politics. It will not forget what it has seen. It will reorder the moral and political world according to its conscience.
Netanyahu understands this, which is why he has launched a “war for hearts and minds.” But it is a war he has already lost. The counterattack of disinformation is coming — yet no amount of propaganda or money can erase the truth that the world has seen with its own eyes. It is our collective duty to ensure it never does.
Soft power — the power of truth, justice, and global solidarity — will ultimately dismantle the genocidal apartheid regime in Palestine. Resistance, in its essence, is an act of survival. But it becomes truly transformative when it connects with a worldwide movement capable of redefining the moral center of humanity.
In my 2016 book The Case for Radicalisation, I wrote:
“Constructive radicals are constructive because they strive not only to build new structures, but also to create new narratives — anti-racist, decolonial, egalitarian, democratic, post-capitalist. All these narratives intertwine into a radical metanarrative that will one day become the liberated mainstream — as opposed to the mainstream of submission to the system.”
That transformation is now unfolding before our eyes.
The struggle for Palestine has become the crucible of a broader awakening. The manufactured culture war — woke versus anti-woke— have collapsed. It died in Gaza.
Palestine has become the incubator of a new global conscience.
But let us be clear: this movement is not united — and that is precisely why it is powerful. It is diverse, contradictory, and often chaotic. It gathers people who disagree on almost everything — economics, identity, culture, even religion — yet who find in Palestine a moral constant.
Palestine has become a code word, a symbol, a common denominator. It represents human dignity, justice, and truth — and the refusal to submit to the brute power of corrupted elites.
In its diversity, this movement mirrors the world itself. It embodies the tension between different visions of freedom, yet it converges on one essential truth: that no people should be massacred, dispossessed, or dehumanized with impunity.
Zionists often tell LGBTQ activists that “Palestinians would kill you.” Even though this is false, the answer from within the movement is simple and powerful: We do not care — we stand for what is right. Likewise, conservative voices who find themselves side by side with LGBTQ activists reply in kind: We do not care — the cause is just.
This paradoxical diversity — this non-unity — is its strength. It resists control, resists labeling, resists co-optation. It is not an organization but an awakening, not a coalition but a convergence of conscience.
The challenge now is to protect this moral convergence from those who will try to fracture it. The counterattack will come — through propaganda, polarization, and manufactured cultural wars. That is why Palestine and the pursuit of accountability for genocide must remain the moral and strategic heart of this global movement.
Because when Palestine is free, the world will be free.
And perhaps that is the greatest fear of all for those who built their power on injustice — that the liberation of a small, besieged land will awaken humanity everywhere to its own power and to the truth that no system of oppression can survive a world that refuses to believe its lies.

​Dyab Abou Jahjah
What happened at the United Nations yesterday during Netanyahu’s speech was good, yes. That walkout sent a message of condemnation and rejection, and such a message was needed — but it was needed two years ago. It was needed in mid-October 2023, when the intent to commit genocide was already crystal clear, when Israel’s leaders were declaring their plans openly, when the massacres had already begun and the possibility of halting them before they unfolded into full-scale genocide was still real. At that moment, a decisive international stand could have made a difference. But now, two years into a genocide that has annihilated tens of thousands of lives and reduced Gaza to rubble, symbolic gestures like walking out of a speech feel hollow, insufficient, and tragically out of time. They ring as echoes in a chamber that should have been filled with urgent action, not belated symbolism.

And why is Netanyahu even there at the UN podium to begin with? Why is he granted the privilege of addressing the international community — even if in front of empty seats? The answer is as predictable as it is shameful: American protection. The United States has acted as Israel’s shield and enabler, allowing its leaders to walk unpunished, to kill with impunity, to mock the very institutions meant to guarantee peace and justice. Trump, who many once imagined might distance himself from endless wars, proved to be not only as bad as “genocide Joe” Biden, but far worse. Trump’s words and actions revealed a leader even more genocidal, more indifferent to human suffering, more openly dehumanizing of Palestinians and of anyone who dares stand in solidarity with them. His rhetoric normalized brutality and gave cover for slaughter.
But this explanation, while true, is not enough. Netanyahu is speaking in New York because he was allowed to get there. His plane was not intercepted in the skies. It was not forced to land in Madrid, or Rome, or Lisbon, or London, where international law could and should have taken its course. He speaks because his impunity is protected not only by Washington but by the collective inaction of all those states under binding obligation to either prosecute or extradite war criminals. They chose silence. They chose paralysis. They chose complicity. And so the man who presides over mass killings, over collective punishment, over the starving and bombing of children, strolls into New York and mounts a stage at the UN as though he were a statesman rather than a criminal.
The diplomats who staged that walkout should have gone further. They should not only have walked out; they should have walked up. They should have performed a citizen’s arrest against the genocidal monster poisoning the atmosphere with his words and with his very presence. International law — like any law — is not meant to be a poem we recite, a ritual of words repeated in solemn halls. If it is not enforced, it is nothing but theatre. It becomes an ornament to hypocrisy rather than a tool of justice.
And let us be clear: law alone is not enough. Law, as it stands, is not only a record of rights but also a record of obligations. International law does not merely condemn genocide; it codifies the duty to prevent it, the duty to intervene to stop it. That duty is not optional. It is binding. After two years, every legal and diplomatic attempt to halt this genocide has failed. Israel’s bombs still fall. Its snipers still fire. Its tanks still flatten homes. Its siege still strangles life. Law without enforcement is an accomplice to murder.
This genocide must be stopped by force if it cannot be stopped otherwise. The Palestinian people must be protected — not by words, not by resolutions, but by action. They must be shielded from Israeli butchers, by whatever means are necessary. This is what Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro rightly called for: a coalition of the willing, unchained from the paralysis of a UN Security Council forever vetoed by America’s blood-drenched hand, must land a massive force on the shores of Gaza. They must break the siege. They must disarm the hand of the executioner. They must end the genocide.
Will this happen? Likely not. And this — this failure to act — is complicity. Defaulting on the duty to intervene is not neutrality; it is partnership in the crime. We will not applaud statements anymore. We will not throw flowers at speeches, no matter how eloquent or well-intentioned. Words are nothing without deeds.
Only actions matter. Actions like the ICJ complaint brought by South Africa — though even there, we must press for consistency. South Africa must now also prosecute its own nationals who joined Israel’s killing machine; we have already provided their names. Actions like Spain’s arms embargo on Israel — though again, words and partial measures are not enough. Spain must also prosecute war criminals who stroll into its cities for leisure, sipping wine on Spanish soil after bathing in the blood of Gaza’s children.
Every action counts, even if it falls short. But let us not deceive ourselves: the one action that can actually stop this genocide is military intervention. The obligation is clear. The moral necessity is urgent. Anything less is complicity dressed as diplomacy.

​By Dyab Abou Jahjah
Today, we filed a criminal complaint in Greece against Naor Shlomo Dadon, an Israeli soldier from the Givati Brigade’s 432nd Battalion. He documented his role in the destruction of Gaza — torching schools, posing proudly on ruins, grilling meat amid starvation. Now he’s enjoying a “healing retreat” in the Greek mountains.
Let that sink in.

While survivors in Gaza sift through rubble to find the remains of their families, the man who helped bury them is meditating under the pines. This is the world we live in: killers get therapy; victims get silence.
But it’s not just silence. It’s erasure. Because the story is never really about Palestinians. It’s always about the Israeli conscience.
I remember being invited on a Dutch talk show where each guest chooses video clips to discuss. But one clip was practically imposed on me: a scene from Waltz with Bashir, the film about Israeli soldiers soul-searching after the Sabra and Shatila massacre — which, coincidentally, was commemorated this week.
I was disgusted.
That clip, like so much of the Western gaze on Palestine, wasn’t about the thousands of Palestinians slaughtered — it was about the psychological anguish of the killers. Their dreams, their regrets, their broken innocence. The only grief that matters is the grief of the perpetrator. The only pain worth filming is the pain of those who still hold the gun.
Even when we tell the story of a massacre, it has to be about them.
That’s what these healing retreats are for. Not repentance. Not reckoning. But emotional hygiene for men who want to return to war with a clearer head. Resilience without responsibility.
We’re always encouraged to look for the “good Israeli.” The one who hesitates. The one who says “maybe this is too much.” But what does it say when rejecting genocide is treated as heroism? It means genocide has become the baseline. And the ones who carry it out aren’t monsters — they’re victims of their own trauma.
But the real victims are gone, and the survivors are buried in the footnotes.
I believe in healing. But healing without justice is impunity. If Dadon wants to heal, let him face the law. Let him hear the names of those he helped erase.
We don’t need another Israeli soldier crying on camera.
We need indictments.
We need trials.
We need justice — and memory that belongs to the victims.

​By Dyab Abou Jahjah
International law was never born as a universal covenant. It was crafted in the aftermath of war, but its vocation was always political: a tool to punish the defeated and restrain the unruly, never to bind the powerful. The Third World learned this early. Colonial wars raged, coups were sponsored, entire nations were starved — and the law remained silent, or worse, complicit.

Law spoke loudly in Nuremberg, but fell mute in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Congo, in Latin America. It prosecuted the enemies of a certain order, but never its guardians. For decades, the Global South lived under this contradiction: law proclaimed as universal, but practiced as selective.
Now comes Palestine. Gaza is not just another crime; it is a mirror held up to humanity. A genocide broadcast in real time, its perpetrators protected and applauded. Here, the mask has slipped. International law is mocked in daylight, its judges sanctioned, its courts ridiculed. The very frame that was supposed to restrain violence is being humiliated — not by the weak, but by those who built it.
And what happens when the frame collapses? Violence escapes. It spreads. Murder becomes ordinary, political violence becomes grammar, and the world slips into a state where no argument can survive without a corpse attached to it.
This is the threshold we are crossing. Political violence is no longer the monopoly of states or insurgencies. It is becoming the common language of our age, legitimized by the silence over genocide.
So the question before us is stark. Either Palestine buries international law once and for all — exposing it as nothing more than a colonial instrument, a mask for raw power — or Palestine forces its transformation into something it has never truly been: a universal shield, a law for all humanity, not just for the convenient few.
History is speaking. Either Gaza becomes the graveyard of international law, or its birthplace anew. And if we fail, then the future of humanity is already written in Leonard Cohen’s haunting words:
“ I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder .”

​On this very spot, nearly 50 years ago—perhaps in 1975—I sat with my mother under the shade of a fig tree at the entrance of this house. I was only four years old. Suddenly, helicopters roared through the sky, and my mother, her voice trembling with fear, said, “Dyab, we need to get inside. It’s dangerous.” At that age, I didn’t understand much, only that something monstrous—something my mother called Israel—was in the sky, firing on people below.

​Since this genocide started, I've been having regular nightmares about losing my children. In my dreams, they fall off cliffs, down stairs, and I wake up in panic. However, the worst nightmares are those I see with my own eyes on my cellphone every day. Children are being murdered daily, fathers are carrying the lifeless bodies of their children. Many times, I've pondered how death might be an easier price to pay for such a father.

By Dyab Abou Jahjah

First some general context: 
Gaza is an open-air prison where Palestinians have been collectively incarcerated for 17 years.
See here.
Every two years or so, Israel commits mass slaughter in Gaza. Even when Palestinians choose to protest non-violently against the blockade. 
See here.
The majority of Gaza's residents (86%) are refugees ethnically cleansed by Israel from towns around the Gaza Strip.  See here.
Jewish settlers now live in these towns amid green oases, overlooking the walls of the open-air Gaza prison. 
This is part of Israel's ongoing colonisation and military occupation of Palestine, which has now continued for more than 75 years. 
To have an idea, see here
So what did really happen on the 7th of October 2023?​

1- On October 7, fighters attacked several of Israel's military positions near the prison wall around Gaza. Most of these fighters were born during the blockade and are children or grandchildren of refugees originally from the area. Although they are members of Hamas, this is secondary; at their core, they are Palestinians who oppose the occupation of their land. 
2- To the surprise of these fighters, they were able to quickly eliminate all military positions, killing or routing Israeli soldiers. 
3- At the same time, a number of fighters were dropped behind the lines via Gliders. The Gliders were meant to attack Israeli positions from behind. The resistance was unaware of an ongoing party. Present Israeli policemen took the fighters under fire, resulting in a gunfight. Many civilians at the festival were caught in the crossfire.  Many were also reportedly deliberately killed by the militants, according to Israeli sources. If confirmed by independent investigation, this does constitute a condemnable war crime. 
However there was no planned or systematic slaughter. 
4- The fighters reached unexpectedly up to 20 kilometres beyond Gaza. 
5- The resistance then captured several soldiers, officers and civilians. The intention was to exchange them with the more than 5,000 Palestinian hostages in Israeli hands. 
6- During this chaos, hundreds of other fighters from Hamas and other groups joined the attack, without being part of the original attack plans. Chaos ensued. 
7- Israeli forces launched a counter-attack, resulting in fierce firefights in several locations. This left hundreds of Israeli civilians dead. Many civilians are also army reservists and are armed. They also took Hamas fighters under fire from homes and shelters. 
8- To illustrate the intensity of the fighting, 1,200 Palestinian fighters died during the raid. Anyone who has ever been in a war, or knows anything about firefights, understands how much firepower it takes to take out 1200 fighters. A lot, in other words. This Israeli firepower also killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. 
9- However, the orders to Hamas fighters were not to attack civilians. See their position here.
Several testimonies from Israeli civilians confirm this. 
Eg here.
Another Israeli witness stated in an interview with Radio Israel that civilians in her neighbourhood were killed by Israeli fire See here.
And here is the original recording which has since been censored away from the radio: 
10- There were casualties among children during the attack and firefights. That is absolutely regrettable. However, no babies were deliberately killed, let alone beheaded. Nor were any women raped.
These are now debunked propaganda lies. 
See here and here, And here.
11- Israeli civilians were allegedly deliberately killed by some Hamas fighters who did not follow orders, and especially by fighters who later entered the area. If confirmed, these are war crimes.
12- Not all hostages are in the hands of Hamas. The many other armed fighters who entered the area also took civilians hostage. In some situations, Hamas has freed hostages and taken them to hospitals. 
13- Israel refuses an independent investigation into these events. As it has regularly refused independent investigations all along. 
E.g here.
14- Israeli citizens who contradict the Netanyahu regime's official narrative are threatened, intimidated and, in many cases, arrested. 
See here.