Najeeba Hayat, a 34-year-old footwear designer and brand consultant, was heading to a protest at Kuwait’s parliament house one morning in October 2023 when she started noticing her Instagram notifications were going off. Hayat, who founded her luxury shoe brand Liudmila in 2013, described by Vogue as “something out of a fairy tale or Marie Antoinette’s closet,” featured by Rihanna’s Fenty campaigns, and worn by Bella Hadid, had been in the trenches of social media hate before. She had made viral videos on Kuwait’s MeToo movement and other political topics, but this was different. It was worse than viral, moving so fast she would blink to find thousands of furious comments. It wasn’t stopping or slowing down, but mushrooming out of control. That’s when Hayat realized she had been “Z-too’ed” as she describes it, subjected to a Zionist troll attack and unsuccessful doxxing campaign.

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She had recently posted a video about Dodo Bar Or, an Israeli designer who shared a reel cobbled out of the movie Independence Day, after October 7: Protesters shout ‘Free, free Palestine’ until a spaceship plays the Muslim call to prayer right before detonating massive explosions that kill everyone while targeting a building with the EU, French, and UK flags. “The message was ‘the West is next,’” Hayat remembers, “because that’s the narrative Israel has: that Islam is some rapacious beast that’s out to destroy the West, as if that’s not what the West has done to us for the past 500 years.” Hayat, outraged by Or’s Islamophobia, made her own video.

“Matches, My Theresa girlies, Net a Porter VIPS,” she shouted out the online shopping platforms, “especially Harrods turbo shoppers, Moda bulk buyers, this is your time to shine.” In a call to action, Hayat spoke to all the high-net-worth shoppers who followed her thanks to her shoe brand, women who regularly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on luxury ecommerce sites: “feel free to let them know what they think about one of their brands pushing out vile, dangerous, r*cist propaganda.” The shoppers, many of them despairing and feeling hopeless, watching Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, understood that this was something they could do. They apparently sent a deluge of texts to their personal shoppers as well as to the e-commerce platforms, saying they wouldn’t spend a cent unless Or was removed. “The biggest platforms took her off,” Hayat tells me. Net-a-Porter went so far as to say that “Discrimination, hate, and violence have no place on our platforms.”

But Or’s clothing was reinstated on the shopping sites within days. She said in a statement on Instagram: “I had not realized this warning video was led by the voice of Adhan [the Muslim call to prayer] in the background, I did not mean to offend anyone by that.” The majority of Or’s statement, however, was spent regurgitating Israeli talking points. (Mytheresa reportedly said in a statement at the time that it made the decision to bring back the brand after the original post was removed and “context was given in the meantime by the designer.” Net-a-Porter did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

A counter campaign of harassment against Hayat then began.

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Why, you might be asking, has a video of Indian Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan dancing at the wedding of a billionaire’s child gone viral? Which billionaire’s wedding, is probably your follow-up question. Is this the same multi-mega-loaded person’s wedding that a Trump son danced at? Who can tell? It’s hard to keep up with the vulgar festivities of India’s ultra-rich.

In one clip, a bride in all her sparkling finery asks Khan to repeat the lines from one of his well-known advertisements. Khan declined the insistent bride in his typically self-effacing way; when you do a ghutka (chewing tobacco) ad, they never let you forget it, he demurred. In another viral video, he appears to invite a bride to dance, and she appears to shyly refuse (the groom, however, does try to match his steps). Is it the same bride? I honestly can’t tell. Either way, Khan performing at a billionaire’s wedding is nothing new. Remember him coaxing that rhythmless dud of a dancer, Hillary Clinton, to shake a leg at the wedding of one of the Ambani children (India’s richest family)? Who can forget?

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The actor, who recently became a billionaire himself, commands massive fees for his appearances. One Indian website estimated that eight crore rupees – nearly $900,000 – is Khan’s standard payment for dancing with a giggling bride and her luxury guests. Khan has said at different moments that he takes these gigs to bring happiness to people (which people, he did not specify) and to fund his films, which are hardly short of funding. But Khan’s latest viral moments raise a larger, more depressing question. As the world burns and images of human suffering from Gaza to Sudan are broadcast in an endless loop of carnage, what sort of politics does Khan – uniquely positioned to speak to hundreds of millions of people – represent?

The answer is simple: none whatsoever. Khan’s brand identity, so to speak, is one designed to evoke diversity and an idea of India that is increasingly a fantasy – one of openness, inclusion, and harmony. Yet simultaneously, his public posture is so carefully constructed to say absolutely nothing at all, polite but ultimately deferent to power.

This past fall, he made a happy birthday video for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 75th – Bollywood actors from the top of the heap, like Khan, all the way down to Z-listers fawn over Modi in a decidedly North Korean fashion, rushing to felicitate their dear leader for all the world to see. “Your journey from a small city to the global stage is very inspiring,” Khan gushed this past birthday. “In this story, I can see your discipline, your hard work and your dedication towards your country.” If Modi’s birthday were made a public holiday, I don’t think anyone would be surprised at this point.

The birthday greeting was hardly Khan’s first public rhapsodizing of the extreme right-wing BJP leader, whose party has actively fostered a political agenda and climate intended to downgrade Muslims like Khan, whom the ruling dispensation openly views as second-class citizens if not outright interlopers. The actor congratulated Modi on India’s G20 presidency, made a music video appeal for people to vote at the PM’s request, and spoke at a state event on Mahatma Gandhi, where he called for a “Gandhiji 2.0” as Modi smiled next to him. Indeed, Khan’s shapeshifting persona mirrors India’s changing moods. In the early days of the Modi era, when it was still worthy to trade in ‘we are all one, Hindu-Muslim same same’ discourse, Khan made anodyne statements about tolerance: “There is intolerance, there is extreme intolerance… there is, I think… there is growing intolerance.”

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During Congress rule, when a history of fighting the British was semi-fashionable, and public spaces displayed M.K. Gandhi’s portrait rather than those of the RSS ideologues who inspired his killer, Khan reminded us that his father, who was from Peshawar in what later became Pakistan, was a freedom fighter. In an interview, he recalled his father saying, “You should never take your freedom for granted. We have given it to you, so always maintain this freedom. At that point of time, I really used to think that by the freedom he meant from a foreign rule or something, but now I understand after having grown up that this freedom he was talking about was in terms of poverty maybe, freedom from misery.”

Today, as India remains one of Israel’s staunchest allies two years into the holocaust of Gaza, Khan – the biggest Muslim star in India and perhaps even the world – has not publicly uttered one word about Palestine. Not a single peep. That Khan represents ‘secular India,’ as his fans are fond of claiming, tells you everything about the sorry state of Indian secularism as it stands currently. It is, like the wedding dances, rich in performance but increasingly empty in substance, a toothless, cowed ideology subservient to fascism and capitalism.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. ‘Gaza: The Story of a Genocide,’ a collection of essays she co-edited, is now available. Her memoir, ‘The Hour of the Wolf,’ will be published in January.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox. Check out more of her essays below:

The announcement was teased in the manner of a reality television reveal. Who would the Bachelor hand a rose to? Which contestant would be going home? And who would be joining the Abraham Accords, enjoying peace (theoretically!) with Israel? The world held its breath until the following morning when we were told it was…Kazakhstan.

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It was a peculiar announcement. Recognizing a country in the middle of its ongoing genocide of Gaza would seem to be rewarding the rogue state that has engaged in endless, live-streamed slaughter over the last 25 months. But this was made stranger by the fact that Kazakhstan has recognized Israel since 1992 and is one of Israel’s energy suppliers. As such, telling us what they did 33 years ago doesn’t really qualify as “news,” but regardless, Kazakhstan will now be the fourth member – alongside the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco – to formally join the accords. The move was hailed by President Donald Trump, who threatened on Truth Social that “there are many more countries trying to join this club of STRENGTH.”

‘I Think He’s Going to Join’

Israel, whose very existence is impossible without theft, can only secure its rapacious fantasy of ‘Greater Israel’ with more and more land – including that belonging to Lebanon, Syria, and its other neighbors. Yet, to many watchers of the region, the very inception of the Abraham Accords felt like an elaborate bait and switch – a theatrical setup that formalized the covert dealings these states already had with Israel, while paving the way for Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. Reportedly, one of Hamas’s goals of Oct. 7 was to interrupt Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s desire to recognize the apartheid state. But more than two years of genocide later, and ahead of MBS’s visit planned to the US for next week, here we are again, subjected to watching a flurry of states scrape and bow before Israel so that the kingdom will be the last in a long line of subservient states to submit to Israel’s malign dominance. “I think he’s going to join,” Trump recently said of his friend, MBS. For its part, Saudi Arabia reportedly continues to insist that it won’t join the Abraham Accords without an agreement that includes a roadmap to Palestinian statehood.

Last month, as Trump visited the Middle East ahead of his Asia tour, there was chatter that the Indonesian president would visit Israel. His government denied the reports, and no visit took place, but the world’s largest Muslim-majority country has at times been floated as a nation that could join the Abraham Accords. Such a move, even the Times of Israel acknowledged last year, would be “a stunning about face.” The newspaper, however, made quite clear why Indonesia would betray its own much vaunted history of non-alignment, anti-imperialism, and independence to do so: access into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). If you want to be let in to the neo-liberal club of 38 so-called ‘developed countries,’ unanimous support from its members is required, and though Indonesia began the process to be admitted last year, Israel objected to its entry. Normalization, or you can’t sit with us.

US envoy Tom Barrack, a man so impressively tactless he makes Trump look diplomatic, threatened Lebanon earlier this month to follow Damascus and open dialogue with Israel or else. Barrack compared Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s overtures to Israel as “speed dating” and revealed that the former wanted leader of the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda had already engaged in five rounds of discussions with Israel. Since taking over the country last year, Sharaa has promised that he will not allow Syria to be used as the launching pad for attacks against Israel. This is after Israel effectively disarmed the Syrian army, bombed the center of Damascus in broad daylight, set up at least nine military posts inside Syria, and captured yet more land besides the Golan, which Israel has occupied since the 1967 war. “Every morning when [Sharaa] opens his eyes at the Presidential Palace in Damascus, he will see the IDF watching him from the peak of the Hermon,” Defense Minister Israel Katz has said.

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By the end of last year, Israeli soldiers were deeper inside Syria than ever before, 15 miles from the capital. This is what Barrack berates Lebanon for not pursuing – not peace but abject surrender. Israel has demolished villages in southern Lebanon, hunted and assassinated Lebanese journalists, set fire to thousands of acres of agricultural land, displaced over a million Lebanese, used banned white phosphorous in urban centers, and bombed Tyre, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. Israeli forces had invaded Lebanon for 18 years, during which they oversaw horrific massacres such as in Qana and Sabra and Shatilla. It was Hezbollah that forced their retreat in 2000 and again sent them packing in the summer war of 2006. For this, the US demands Hezbollah be disarmed, a move that would leave Lebanon, whose army is toothless and underpaid, effectively defenseless. In the southern village of Hula, Israeli soldiers spray-painted the Star of David to mark their presence, adding “The only good Shia is a dead Shia” in Hebrew. Who can resist such diplomatic overtures?

Where Pakistan Stands

What appears to be the highest value and consequential target for capitulation to the Abraham Accords is also, for me, the most personal: Pakistan. For all its dysfunction and failings, there is no question that Pakistan is a force to be reckoned with. Geopolitically, you would be hard-pressed to find a country more strategically placed: Pakistan shares borders with China, India, Iran, and Afghanistan. It is mineral and gas-rich. It boasts one of the largest armies in the world – one with tentacles everywhere and armed with sophistication and skill – and is the only Muslim-majority country in possession of a nuclear asset. Logically, Pakistan, founded to be a refuge for Muslims, should have led the vanguard against Israel and been a staunch defender of the Palestinian people, but it has done little more than pay meaningless lip service for the past 40-odd years. Most recently, the government nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.

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And now, this wildly unpopular government has started to hint at the possibility of ‘peace’ with Israel. “Not recognizing Israel sounds nice,” a federal minister opined during a televised meeting, “but it’s just not possible in today’s world.” Remembering that during India’s attacks on Pakistan in May, the closest the two nuclear states have come to hot war in decades, Israel aided India with support, would be nice, but in today’s world, states are asked to put Israel’s welfare above their own national interests. Israel has been making overtures to Pakistan for some time now. In 2005, under the government of military dictator General Pervez Musharraf, there were handshakes and at least one meeting. Israel Hayom, the tabloid owned by the family of Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, reported that a British-Pakistani adviser to Prime Minister Imran Khan visited Israel and engaged in talks in 2020. The adviser, Sayed Zulfi Bukhari, denied it on Twitter. In recent years, Hasbara tours were organized for Pakistanis in the arts. Even though our passports do not allow us to visit Israel, off they went to do the work of cheap propagandists. Even Khan himself, a staunch critic of Israel, acknowledged that there was pressure from the US and other countries to engage in talks. When asked if he meant fellow Muslim states were leaning on Pakistan to recognize Israel during his government, Khan demurred, “There are things we cannot say. We have good relations with them.”

It was evident he was referring to Saudi Arabia, which holds Pakistan in a vice grip of debt.

Normalization Is Treason

For Pakistan – and for Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, et al. – to recognize Israel is an act of political suicide. Their populations, sickened by Israeli terror and the decimation of Gaza, will never forgive such betrayal. For Pakistan, it is an existential issue: there is no question that Israel would seek to dismantle or destroy its nuclear assets. What is the point of such capabilities if the state and its establishment are little more than vassals? Pakistan’s people have suffered injury upon injury from a military and their successive, approved governments that have denied them the most basic assurances: healthcare, education, safety, and order. And now, it appears prepared to degrade itself far beyond even our lowest expectations.

Normalization is seen as treason by millions of not just Muslims but also people around the world who have watched Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza. If the protection of Muslims is not the mandate of Pakistan, then why are we a state? If the new Syria is ‘free,’ then why has it ceded its earth without barely a grumble? If Lebanon is a ‘failed state,’ as Barrack so charmingly put it, then why is the most powerful country in the world standing on its neck? If the holocaust of Gaza is not worth standing against, what does a country stand for?

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. ‘Gaza: The Story of a Genocide,’ a collection of essays she co-edited, is now available. Her memoir, ‘The Hour of the Wolf,’ will be published in January.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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Is the recognition of a Palestinian state the pièce de résistance of two years of Western political gaslighting? I can’t help but feel that it is. We have watched the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and France shed crocodile tears for the Palestinians as Israel bombed, starved, and exploded every single university in Gaza. The UK’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron tut-tutted while making sure that Israel had all the millions of dollars worth of weaponry needed to enact its horrific slaughter of men, women, and children.

And now we are supposed to believe that these same governments that diplomatically shielded Israel from sanctions, broke international law by not enforcing ICC arrest warrants, and stood by mutely while Israel maimed so many children that Gaza is now home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world, suddenly care about Palestinians?

I don’t buy it for a second.

Starmer had more to say about Kneecap, the Irish punk trio, than about the Israeli army’s pumping of over 300 bullets into the vehicle carrying 6-year-old Hind Rajab. Less than two weeks ago, he shook the bloody hand of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whose statement post October 7 – that all Palestinians in Gaza were responsible – can be classified as demonstrating genocidal intent. All that this performative and pathetically useless gesture accomplishes is a return to the Zionist dream of a ‘two-state’ solution.

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The Oslo Accords, pushed by Western media and politicians as a trailblazing document of peace, have long been dead in the water, and thank God. Edward Said called it “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.” While putting no conditions or brakes on Israel, which conceded absolutely nothing, Oslo forced Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist. By recognizing his occupier’s right to exist rather than the fact of its existence ipso facto, Yasser Arafat recognized, in gruesome modern parlance, Israel’s right to commit the Nakba, to massacre and to displace some 700,000 Palestinians. The PLO renounced the armed struggle against apartheid Israel, ended the intifada, and in return, Arafat was offered a Palestinian state on a measly 22% of historic Palestine. It was a degrading capitulation. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz called Oslo – or the two-state solution, as it came to be known – “the second biggest victory in the history of Zionism.”

This pointless series of recognitions, just like Oslo, purposely says nothing about the Palestinian right of return to their homeland. Rather, all the states jumping on board have hooked their recognition to the demilitarization of a people facing genocide and the disarming of Palestinian resistance, the only force standing against Israel’s onslaught. This move, whether by five Western states or 50, is a theater. It does not end the genocide, it doesn’t medically evacuate tens if not hundreds of thousands of critically injured children, and it does nothing to end Israel’s ruthless starvation of Gaza. The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakri, called Israel’s starvation campaign “the fastest in modern history.”

By design, these recognitions don’t accomplish anything. Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Anita Anand, announced Canada’s intentions to join France et al, but added that Canada won’t normalize diplomatic relations entirely. Instead, actual recognition will hinge on the Palestinian Authority’s “democratic progress.” If you’re confused, let me translate: Canada is recognizing a state but promising not to have any dealings with it, while continuing to ship weapons to Israel, while it commits genocide of the people Canada has just recognized, sort of.

Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC on charges of war crimes, has fumed and threatened those pushing recognition, this too feels like a charade. Israel has lied endlessly over the past two years – about rapes, beheaded babies, tunnels, Israeli officials lied about not shooting starving people, about the aid they refuse to allow into Gaza, about UNRWA. This anger feels like flimsy gaslighting. Palestinian academic Joseph Massad wrote recently that the true purpose of Western recognition is “to save Israel from itself by safeguarding its right to remain a Jewish supremacist state.” While Israel pummels what is left of Gaza, this move benefits only Israel as it absolves it of its hideous crimes and provides a timely distraction.

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If Keir Starmer and friends have suddenly felt the pangs of their long-dormant consciences, there is a lot they can actually do: end all weapon sales to Israel, sanction Israel economically, enact a cultural and sports boycott of Israel similar to the one carried out against Russia, and stage an immediate military intervention to halt Israel’s genocide. If they’re truly, truly serious about protecting and honoring Palestinians and upholding human rights, they can go further and derecognize Israel. But they won’t do it, because none of this depends on state recognition; it is an eyewash. There are many reasons to be suspicious of this dubious wave of announcements, but remember also that there is already a state called Palestine. It exists, and it has been occupied by Israel for decades.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her upcoming books include the memoir, The Hour of the Wolf, and a collection of essays she co-edited titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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As a Pakistani, I am used to politics as a theater of the absurd. But even a weary watcher such as myself was taken aback to see Pakistan bestowing a Nishan-e-Imtiaz, the national medal of excellence, on outgoing US CENTCOM chief General Michael Kurilla last month. The former chief, whose CENTCOM covered military operations in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia, was lauded by the Pakistani government for his “visionary leadership” and “exemplary service.” They happened to leave out a few other details – “In case you don't know, he is Israel's favorite US general & the most pro-Israel general in the American military,” Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, Maleeha Lodhi, tweeted. Kurilla played what Israeli news site Ynet called a “central role” in bolstering American military coordination during Israel’s war on Gaza, and appears to have been instrumental in pushing for the US to take part in Israel’s aggression against Iran.

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Bestowing a medal on the very American general who has been so intimately involved in Israel’s holocaust of Gaza is beyond macabre. Gaza is now the most bombed site in recent history. Israel has destroyed nearly all the trees and 92% of all homes in the Strip. The scale of Israel’s destruction of Gaza is higher than that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden, London during the Blitz, Syria, and Iraq.

Though relations between the two countries had soured in the post-“War on Terror” years – former President Joe Biden not only pointedly didn’t even talk to former Prime Minister Imran Khan over the phone, but Khan publicly accused the US of threatening him and orchestrating his removal from power – they have enjoyed an upswing in recent months.

Pakistani folklore has long held that Republican administrations are more friendly towards the country than Democrats, a belief that is garnering traction as we speak. In March, Pakistan’s overwhelmed and embattled government formed a Crypto Council and announced a crypto minister. A month later, the council signed a deal with a company in which the Trumps hold a majority stake, World Liberty Financial. In July, a trade deal was announced between the two countries that hinted at lower tariffs for Pakistan, estimated to be at 19% (India, Pakistan’s arch-nemesis, was walloped with 25% tariffs and threatened with another 25% on top if they didn’t stop buying Russian oil). President Donald Trump recently posted on social media that the US would soon be developing Pakistan’s “massive Oil Reserves” – pushing the knife in as deeply as possible by adding that one day, perhaps India would be buying Pakistani oil! This month, Marco Rubio announced what one can only imagine will be a wildly exploitative venture of US exploration of Pakistan’s critical minerals and hydrocarbon in Balochistan. The province is home to Reko Diq, considered to be one of the largest gold and copper mines in the world. It was a grim irony to make such an announcement on our Independence Day.

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And who can forget – because he keeps reminding us – that it was Trump who brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan earlier this year. “I love Pakistan, I think Modi is a fantastic man…I stopped the war between India and Pakistan,” Trump declared in June on the day he hosted Pakistan’s chief of Army staff, Field Marshall Asim Munir, at the White House. A White House spokesperson said the unprecedented meeting – the first time a US president met the head of Pakistan’s military without the presence of Pakistani civilian politicians and leaders – was held after Munir called for Trump to be nominated for the Nobel Prize. In a florid statement just days after the meeting, the Pakistani government confirmed it would nominate Trump, recognizing his “decisive intervention and pivotal leadership” during India’s Operation Sindoor attacks on Pakistan and praised his “great strategic foresight and stellar statesmanship.” (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges, also nominated Trump for the pointless prize).

All this is especially bizarre considering that it was China who played a conclusive role in defending Pakistan’s sovereignty during the Indian attacks, not the US. The May 7 dogfight between India and Pakistan was the world’s largest aerial battle in decades; it was also the first time that China’s stealth fighter jets were used in combat “anywhere in the world,” and they performed spectacularly. Pakistan’s air force, using Chinese jets and missiles, claimed it shot down five Indian aircraft, including three French-made Rafales, described as the “jewel of India’s fleet.” If confirmed, it would have been the first time a Rafale fighter jet has been shot down in its history. India’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, “firmly rejected” Pakistan’s claims but refused to say how many Indian planes were downed. “Numbers are not important,” Chauhan dodged when asked. China is apparently fast-tracking its next-generation J-35A stealth fighters to Pakistan, which is the first known country that the jets will be exported to. It would have made more sense for a medal of national honor to go to China in this context rather than an American general.

Pakistan ought to have good relations with the US; it is certainly to Pakistan’s benefit economically. But to give a medal of excellence to a general so closely involved in this horror in Gaza is criminal. Such a move could only have come at the hands of the putrid elite who have long captured Pakistani politics. There is no longer any pretence of this elite serving the people. Up to 44% of school-age children in Pakistan are not in school, and the World Bank estimates that nearly 45% of Pakistan’s entire population lives below the poverty line. This is not politics as usual; it is a matter of national shame. Flash floods have killed more than 785 people and caused horrific devastation across the country since the monsoon season started in late June. Why was no serious planning undertaken before the monsoon season? Why has Pakistan, one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, not managed to bolster its disaster planning, flood management, and disaster relief capabilities?

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Meanwhile, a troubling military operation is underway in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s tribal district, with many locals being internally displaced. We are told this is to sweep the area of terrorists, but the recent announcement of the US interest in our critical minerals leaves many uneasy at the timing. Busy handing medals to genocidaires, Pakistan’s ruling politicians issued neither apologies nor announced corrective measures to the people whose futures they have decimated through incompetence, grift, and lack of governance. This shameless elite has run far beyond its course, to Pakistan’s detriment. But high noon is fast approaching, the people – already disgruntled – have had enough of such flagrantly parasitic politics.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her upcoming books include the memoir, The Hour of the Wolf, and a collection of essays she co-edited titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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From the time that I woke up Tuesday morning, dressed my children, fed them breakfast, and sat down at my computer to write this article, three children died of starvation in Gaza.

In the afternoon, when I send a photo of my newborn son, only 2 months old, to my brother so he can see how his nephew is growing, starting to smile and coo, I must scroll through pictures I have taken screen shots of: a skeletal 2-year-old boy in Gaza, Yazan is his name, who will almost certainly die as he has no food to eat. Israel has refused to allow established relief networks like the Norwegian Refugee Council to bring supplies into Gaza for more than 142 days. Yazan’s mother holds him in her arms, herself shrunken from hunger, lifting his shirt so the world can see the fading heartbeat of her son. But the world has seen images of Israel’s holocaust in Gaza for over 650 days, and it has done absolutely nothing.

On Monday, logging onto X, I saw a video of a father holding his bloodied child in his arms and running, screaming for help. But the young child’s legs have been shredded; where his body should be is only burning flesh mingled with the scraps of fabric that once were his trousers.

On Instagram, where I once watched my friends on vacation and the overly filtered faces of strangers, I see a post from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Mosab Abu Toha. He shares a series of WhatsApp messages he has sent to Patrick Kingsley, the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief. Abu Toha asks if the paper is going to cover the news of a fetus, beheaded by an Israeli strike on the Al Shati camp, and murdered along with his mother. “Thank you for the suggestion,” Kingsley replies, “I appreciate it.” In the screenshots, Abu Toha follows up, asking about the story and sending a video. Here is an ACTUAL baby, a fetus no less, beheaded by Israel. Not the Israeli hasbara of sordid lies, made up to manufacture consent for their genocide, such as the 40 beheaded phantom babies. Will they not cover this real, true case? But Kingsley doesn’t reply to Abu Toha, who writes and calls him repeatedly. He may as well be speaking into a void.

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I cannot count the images of utter horror I have seen only in these last two days: a little boy called Faisal talking about how he saw Israeli soldiers shoot his pregnant mother in her stomach; a newborn baby who is all bones and has no sucking reflex – it has had no milk and is too weak to attempt that basic, instinctual attempt to feed; children and adults wading through spilled flour desperately trying to gather enough to take home to their families before they are shot by the American mercenaries or Israeli occupation forces, the latter of which routinely kill starving Palestinians at so-called “aid” points; a boy too young to be a teenager – underneath the blood that covers his face, you can see that his skin is smooth he is not old enough to grow stubble. He was killed by an Israeli sniper while trying to find food in Jabalia. I see a video of an elderly man, probably someone’s grandfather, holding a red bucket, waiting for food before he collapses. He reportedly dies right there, upright and hungry. I watch a British surgeon Nick Maynard describe how Israeli soldiers routinely shoot children in different body parts, depending on the day of the week: one day the genitals, the next the knees. I come across a video of children in a tent dancing because their brother had come back from an “aid” point alive, carrying a sack of flour on his shoulders. Every story I read, every image I see, I feel my heart will burst into a million pieces. We are not equipped to see such violence; we have no means of comprehending such barbarity.

Israel has blocked or severely restricted baby formula from entering Gaza, just as it has done with incubators – without which premature babies simply cannot breathe. It has also restricted the entry of fuel, so the incubators that do exist cannot run. But it is not just newborns who are being starved to death. The United Nations Relief Works Agency, a lifeline for the people of Gaza, has enough food to feed the entire remaining population for more than three months – 6,000 trucks worth – but Israel refuses them entry. Alex de Waal, a famine expert, told Al Jazeera that not since World War II has there been a case of starvation “so minutely designed and controlled” as what Israel is doing to Gaza.

Right now, Israel has herded all of what is left of the population – the human beings who they have not murdered by bombs, bullets, or starvation – into 12% of Gaza. A literal concentration camp.

There is no country, no state, no leader free or courageous enough to break Israel’s siege. The only people who have shown any hearts or guts are ordinary people, those with no power. Online, a movement builds calling for Pope Leo XIV to bring food, to get on a plane and land in Gaza, and save its people from certain death. The argument is that even Israel, which abides by no norms, no protocols of war, no human decency, no laws, wouldn’t shoot at the Pope. Wouldn’t they? Just last week, Israel bombed the only Catholic Church in Gaza, I suspect in revenge for Pope Francis’s stance on their genocide – he called that very parish every single night starting on October 9, 2023. There is no one Israel wouldn’t attack; we know that after watching their cruelty and inhumanity for two years straight. On Sunday, Israel not only attacked a building that housed a kindergarten while it was filled with children, it reportedly double-tapped it – hitting it twice to ensure maximum deaths.

Speaking during mass at the Holy Family Church of Gaza on Sunday, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who visited the Strip, said that ‘the devil was present and very powerful’ among us. As he delivers his homily, the sounds of Israeli explosions can be heard.

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We have signed petitions, protested, fundraised, crowd-funded, gathered, wept, and prayed. Will Israel ever be stopped? I fear they will continue until they have killed everyone left in Gaza. I do not say this with any hyperbole. I fear it deeply.

Where is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya? The pediatrician and neonatologist whose young son Israel murdered in cold blood in an airstrike on the hospital. Abu Saifya himself was injured in an Israeli drone strike, when he refused to leave his hospital and patients. They took him into their terrifying custody in December. His lawyers say he is being tortured and has lost about 40 kg of body weight. They kill or arrest the doctors, so there will be no one left to save the survivors. They shoot journalists, so there will be no one left to tell the story of their crimes.

By the time you read this article, more newborn babies will have died from starvation in Gaza. The bodies of more of God’s precious children will be torn apart by weaponry paid for by your tax dollars and sent by politicians you elected. But we will remember. We will never be able to forget what Israel has done in Gaza. And if we cannot stop them, they will have done more than destroy Gaza; they will have broken the world.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her upcoming books include the memoir, The Hour of the Wolf, and a collection of essays she co-edited titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

Hussam Abu Safiya, the doctor mentioned in Fatima’s piece, was featured in the film that Zeteo recently acquired. Watch the film by clicking the link below and check out Zeteo’s other coverage of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza:

At the end of April, 25 Indians and one Nepalese national were killed in an attack in a meadow popular with tourists near Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir. The victims, all men, were shot at close range by unidentified gunmen in a popular but isolated travel spot.

Almost immediately after the attack, which India blamed on an obscure group that few had heard of until then called the “Kashmir Resistance,” Narendra Modi’s government pointed the finger at Pakistan, saying it was behind the deadly ambush, though it offered no evidence or credible claims for Islambad’s supposed involvement. While former dictator and President Pervez Musharraf said Pakistan turned a “blind eye” towards the formation of militant groups, officially, Pakistan has long rejected India’s accusations about their role in Kashmiri militancy; recently, the government denied any role in the Pahalgam attacks and offered to cooperate with “any neutral, transparent, and credible investigation,” but Modi and his cronies were having none of this diplomacy nonsense. This trigger-sensitive tension is not new; India has long accused Pakistan of funding and arming militancy in Kashmir. Pakistan has always denied the claims.

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In the aftermath of Pahalgam, India proceeded to cancel visas of Pakistani nationals living in India, separating mothers from children in heart-rending scenes at the border, expelled diplomats, closed the Attari land border, and unilaterally suspended the Indus Water Treaty, an essential water-sharing agreement between the two nuclear-armed nations that has no suspension clause. Modi promised to chase the culprits to “the ends of the Earth,” his commerce minister scolded India’s 1.4 billion citizens and said unless they made “nationalism and patriotism their supreme duty, these types of incidents will continue to trouble the country” (making Pahalgam their fault and Pakistan’s in some manifestation of magical/psychic coordination), and the minister of resources promised to ensure “not a single drop of water” would flow from India to Pakistan. Modi granted India’s military “operational freedom” going forward, both countries tested missiles, and there was firing and shelling across Kashmir’s Line of Control. For its part, Pakistan responded in kind while also closing its airspace and suspending trade with India.

In a largely sycophantic corporate media environment, few Indian outlets have been able to ask how the Pahalgam attack could have occurred in a zone that has one of the largest security force deployments in the world. Or why were tourists allowed into the isolated meadows near Pahalgam? Or what proof does the state have to back up its incendiary claims? India is not unique in blaming its neighbor for terror attacks. In March, across the border, the Jaffer Express, a passenger train traveling between Quetta and Peshawar, was hijacked. Gunmen purporting to be part of the Balochistan Liberation Army held hundreds of passengers hostage, and it took Pakistan’s security forces nearly two days to end the terrifying hijacking. Pakistan has long blamed India for roiling tensions in Balochistan and suggested that the Jaffer Express attack was the work of “regional adversaries.”

Yet Modi’s anti-Pakistani war drums have been played so incessantly and so tunelessly over his interminable rule that whatever threatening power they might have once had has long since faded. Now, they are simply noisy and irritating. But unfortunately, with global consequences.

Textbook Subjugation

India’s brutalization of Kashmir is not a matter of which part of the border you belong to; it is textbook occupation and subjugation. Though it is claimed by both India and Pakistan, Kashmir is divided between both countries. While there’s no recent polling, data in the past has shown that a plurality of Kashmiris want independence and full autonomy as a people. Indian-held Kashmir is one of the most militarized zones in the world, with India deploying up to 1 million troops in the region. Indian troops in Kashmir operate under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), giving them the authority to conduct raids and searches without warrants, carry out mass arrests on negligible grounds, and shoot-to-kill with little if any consequences; essentially, the AFSPA grants the Indian army total impunity in Kashmir. Human rights groups, including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, have consistently recorded India’s use of torture, rape, and human shields in Kashmir.

While India has long focused on “terror,” which it blames exclusively on Pakistan, it has done so largely to avoid “occupation” being a part of the discourse about Kashmir. In August 2019, seemingly out of the blue, without any consultation from Kashmir, Modi revoked parts of a constitutional provision that gave Kashmir a special status that afforded the region a certain degree of autonomy and prevented it from being settled by Indians from the rest of the country. If the articles of ascension were rendered null and void by Modi’s government, then logically speaking, so too was Kashmir’s place in the Indian Union. Immediately after Modi’s abrogation – a long-standing dream of the Hindu right that he serves – Kashmir was placed under an internet and phone blackout that was the longest internet shutdown in a democracy, thousands of Kashmiris were arrested and held incommunicado including politicians, and thousands of Indians were encouraged to settle in Kashmir and given residency cards in an effort to alter the demographics and finally end the region’s Muslim majority.

Today, it is New Delhi that decides Kashmir’s fate, reducing its state government to window dressing. Just two weeks before the Pahalgam attacks, a security meeting held in the Kashmiri city of Srinagar and chaired by Modi’s right-hand man, Home Minister Amit Shah, did not include Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah.

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The Pahalgam tragedy is not significant for India’s jingoism – which has become sadly commonplace in a country where “news influencers,” infamous troll farms, and viral WhatsApp groups dominate the information space. Indians have posted pictures of Gaza’s Rafah reduced to rubble on X, promising that is what will happen to Pakistan’s Rawalpindi next. Since the Pahalgam attack, Kashmiri students and young Muslim men have been harassed and beaten across India, with images of their wounds shared across social media. A daily wage laborer who reportedly shouted “Long live Pakistan” at a local cricket match in Karnataka was reportedly lynched earlier this week. In northern India’s Uttar Pradesh, a 15-year-old Muslim schoolboy was manhandled by a mob and forced to urinate on a Pakistani flag. In the video that went viral on social media, police can be seen watching as the child was abused. He had nothing to do with Kashmir or Pahalgam but was simply an example of how Muslims are routinely treated in Modi’s India.

More than 2,000 Kashmiris have been arrested in sweeping raids, and politicians are threatening Pakistan with bloody war on an hourly basis. Most recently, a Karnataka Minister belonging to the Congress Party swore that he was ready to wear a “suicide bomb…and go to Pakistan.” Never mind that the last time our two countries faced such tension, ahead of the Indian elections of 2019, India’s chest-thumping resulted in airstrikes that India swore had killed “large numbers” of Pakistani terrorists, but Pakistani journalists showed at maximum, India had hit an uninhabited forest. It also saw the downing of an Indian jet over Pakistan and the capture of an Indian Air Force pilot who was reportedly treated to tea by the Pakistani army.

The Israel Model of Warfare

Pahalgam is significant for India’s turning to what can safely be described as the Israel model of warfare. Under Modi, India has become the largest buyer of Israeli weaponry in the world, and right-wing Indian troll farms have done much of the online warring for Israel over the last year and a half. The group blamed for the Pahalgam attack, the Kashmir Resistance, also known as the Resistance Front, has “unequivocally” denied responsibility. They called a social media post on one of their digital platforms claiming their involvement “a familiar tactic in the Indian state’s digital warfare arsenal…and part of an orchestrated campaign to malign the Kashmiri resistance.” Modi’s government was reportedly an enthusiastic purchaser and user of Israeli spyware and was a major name in the Pegasus scandal of 2021.

Ever ready to make everything about themselves, Israel’s ambassador to India was quick to compare Pahalgam to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, and claimed without any substantiation that Hamas was traipsing around Kashmir on the Pakistani side of the border. Without much delay, India demolished the homes of at least 10 suspects, only two of whom were named by the police as part of their investigation, and raided over 1,000 homes. Collective punishment in this manner is a hallmark of Israel.

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However, India’s contempt for international protocols is perhaps the biggest takeaway of its new Israeli style of statecraft. The Indus Water Treaty has no exit clause; it is not suspendable. Both India and Pakistan get water from three rivers each, all from the Indus basin. The Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej, three eastern rivers, feed India, while the western Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab rivers deliver 80% of the water required for Pakistan’s agricultural needs. Beyond the fact that the treaty, brokered by the World Bank in the 1960s, has survived wars and more serious conflicts between the two countries, Pakistan is water-stressed, and India’s threatened actions would affect millions of people. In response, Pakistan has suspended the 1972 Simla Agreement, which demarcated a line of control between Pakistan and India in Kashmir, creating a de facto border. India doesn’t have the hydroelectric infrastructure to back up its threats, but still, if states can opt out of treaties based on whim and fury, we enter a lawless and vindictive future in which diplomacy will have no power against force.

Many have warned that Israel’s flagrant shredding of international protocols and basic human rights norms in Gaza would have grotesque international consequences. Look no further than India today for a vision of what that precarious future might include: fundamental resources held hostage, nuclear-armed states operating without the safeguards of bilateral agreements, and Whatsapp forwards replacing a qualified and responsible fourth estate.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent books include the novel The Runaways and her non-fiction reportage New Kings of the World. She recently hosted Reframe, a four-part series on the genocide in Gaza, on Al Jazeera.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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It’s been 25 years since I was a freshman at Barnard College, such a long time ago that much has changed both at Columbia University and in the world – enough perhaps to warrant a look back at the women’s college that advertises itself as “bold,” “fearless,” and the sort of place where empowered young women can “generate new ideas and communicate them in a way that can change how people understand the world.” With Columbia’s innovations of censorship and authoritarianism coming at such breakneck speed, how will prospective students ever be able to keep track of them while deciding where to begin their college experience? It’s springtime, and your son or daughter is receiving envelopes and emails from admissions offices. Will they get into Columbia or its affiliate, Barnard? Should they go? As an alumna, I’m here to help.

Lessons in Getting Arrested, Suspended, and Evicted

As an anxious 18-year-old away from home for the first time, I remember being slightly alarmed by a friendly orientation session on basic self-defense tips, after which we were gifted a rape whistle. But I needn’t have been alarmed; that was the extent of the threats and dangers presented to us. In my time, Columbia University didn’t call the NYPD on its students, inviting them to fly police drones as they did over Hamilton Hall nearly a year ago when students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza took over the building, renaming it Hind’s Hall in honor of Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed along with her family in their car that the Israeli military shot at over 300 times. Dressed in riot gear, the police used stun guns against the students, arrested 100 of them, and tore down the encampments. Columbia has such a good relationship with the NYPD now that they keep calling them back to campus! Ever wanted to know how you might fare in jail? How many Ivy Leagues give you the chance to find out?

More and more, as it turns out, but let’s remember that CU was a leader in this regard.

The university failed to protect protesters who were sprayed by pro-Israel students with a noxious substance, sending several of them to the hospital with severe nausea, headaches, and abdominal pain. On the contrary, after temporarily suspending one student for the attack, Columbia backtracked when he sued the school and paid out $395,000 in a settlement. Oops, the university said, the substance used in the attack thought to be the notorious skunk water – used by the Israeli military against Palestinians – wasn’t actually a chemical attack. It was something the university said was – I can’t believe I’m typing this – a non-lethal “fart spray” bought on Amazon. Yet, Shay, a Jewish student, was seen at the ER, where the official diagnosis was a “chemical exposure.” In my day, plenty of former Israeli soldiers and reservists roamed around campus, but they didn’t attack other students with impunity then. They just dobbed professors to Campus Watch and launched endless and spurious complaints of harassment against professors critical of Israeli apartheid and occupation.

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But there’s more! When I was a student, the university didn’t evict students protesting ethnic cleansing campaigns from their dorms with just a few hours' notice – sending young women out into New York City to fend for themselves. At last count, my alma mater has suspended over 50 students and evicted 46 young women for their participation in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and political activism. Many of the suspended students were denied due process, and some immediately lost access to their dormitory housing, healthcare, and pre-paid meal plans. I guess the “new ideas” that Barnard hopes to generate to “change how people understand the world” is that genocide is good and admirable as long as Israel is doing it, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim lives are irrelevant and insignificant, and political activism means you should have no food or housing. That’s the message I certainly take away.

Experience Fascism First-Hand!

I know what you’re thinking, you’re paranoid! Please stop making this about anti-genocide activists. Forget that Israel’s genocide in Gaza killed more women and children in a single year than any conflict in recent memory – including hundreds of newborns under the age of 1 – more importantly, how are Israel’s defenders feeling? Not good, but sad and unsafe. Never mind that none of the students physically attacked by a noxious spray were pro-Israeli, nor were any of the students doxed, nor were any of the students who were suspended, expelled, and evicted out into the dark New York night. Have some sensitivity, for God’s sake. Feelings are important! Everyone has them, but no one cares about yours.

If you’ve ever fancied being up close and personal with deranged politicians whom human rights groups accused of war crimes, think of the opportunities both Columbia and Harvard recently gave their students to listen to former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. At Harvard, he joked about giving anyone who disrupted his talk explosive pagers. Ha Ha, people who feel sad-face unsafe laughed at Bennett’s droll Israeli humor about killing people for fun, according to the Harvard Crimson.

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Speaking of safety, Palestinian activist and Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil wrote to the university to say he was fearful for his safety, after which he was arrested by plainclothes DHS officers, spirited to Louisiana, where he remains detained as a political prisoner, and threatened with deportation even though he is a green card holder, married to an American citizen, and committed no actual crimes. His safety and feelings of lack thereof aren’t relevant. Next, the Department of Homeland Security raided two students' dorm rooms – no one at Columbia enquired about how they felt. Then, the Justice Department said it’s investigating whether pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia violated terrorism laws. Trying to prove that they are a university the government can rely on, Columbia has since agreed to ban certain masks, empowering new campus security personnel to arrest students, and appointed someone to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department and the Palestine studies center of study. “Vichy on the Hudson,” Professor Rashid Khalidi called them recently, referring to France’s Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany.

Think of the exposure your child will have to the finer workings of government at Columbia: raided and detained by ICE, beaten and arrested by the NYPD, investigated for terrorism. Where else can you experience fascism firsthand like this? That alone is worth sending your offspring to Columbia; they will get to live through history – and not the good kind. What an opportunity!

Finally, tuition money. Getting a Barnard/Columbia degree will set you back more than $67,000 a year. You or your child can have an incredible degree, and there’s only a slight chance that the university will revoke it! No, none of this live-action repression is refundable. Keep your feelings in check and remember that Spiderman was filmed on campus, and plenty of other students feel really, really sad when Israel’s feelings get hurt during their active genocide. So you lost some money, put things in perspective. Not everything in life is about you. (It’s about Israel.)

If I could do it all again, would I have spent this obscene amount of tuition money on Barnard, who makes sure to email me endless impersonal spam to ask for yet more money in the form of donations and gifts? Absolutely not. But what do my feelings matter? Happy senior year everyone.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent books include the novel The Runaways and her non-fiction reportage New Kings of the World. She recently hosted Reframe, a four-part series on the genocide in Gaza, on Al Jazeera.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

Check out more from Fatima and other Zeteo contributors:

This op-ed from the one and only Fatima Bhutto is so important for Zeteo subscribers to read. Fatima cites shocking testimony about rape and sexual assault in the Middle East that has been ignored by all of our major ‘mainstream’ media outlets. Zeteo is publishing portions of that testimony. A warning: this piece contains graphic descriptions that some readers may find disturbing.

- Mehdi

“We have also documented a case of gang rape… on a woman……She said she was filmed during the assault… [they] stripped her, kept beating her in her genitals … humiliated her for four hours. She said the cameras were recording the whole time.”

The average Westerner who reads only mainstream media coverage of the Middle East might think this is what Hamas fighters did to Israeli women on Oct. 7.

But actually, it's what Israeli troops are alleged to have done to Palestinian women.

Earlier this month, Kifeya Khraim from the Palestinian NGO the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC) and another advocate for Palestinian women, who was not named, testified at a UN Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian women facing “systematic sexual violence and intimidation by Israeli forces.” Khraim began her statement by recounting the story of a home invasion in the occupied West Bank in July 2023 when female Israeli soldiers with large dogs forced Palestinian women to undress and “made [them] walk around the house naked.”

Women are routinely sexually abused during home invasions by the Israeli military. They’re forced to disrobe – sometimes in front of their male relatives – and adopt humiliating poses for the soldiers to film them, Khraim said. During some West Bank home invasions, the other advocate testified, Israeli soldiers touched Palestinian women sexually and threatened them with rape, all while their male relatives were handcuffed. The soldiers “make sexual noises and gestures, threaten to rape [the woman] even, doing this in front of [her male relatives] while they're being handcuffed or blindfolded, not able to stop it, not able to protect [their] daughter, sister, whatever it may be. It's a form to not only control the woman, but also control the men as well, and break up the family and, in turn, break up society as a whole.”

These advocates’ testimony is so shocking and horrific that it should have been front-page news around the world and sparked global feminist outrage. Instead, it was resolutely ignored by the Western press, white feminists, and politicians across Europe and the United States. While major media outlets such as the BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post published stories referencing, in broad terms, a UN report that came out just after the testimony on “Israel's systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence” since Oct. 7, none of them cited or bothered to mention any of Khraim's devastating testimony. Surely, such detailed revelations, and specific allegations of rape and gang rape, warrant their own story?

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Gang Rape, A Soldier Exposed His Genitals

“Rape was mainly done by Israeli female officers inserting objects inside genitals” of the detained, Khraim testified. The female Israeli soldiers raped both men and women, photographing and often filming the assaults. The advocates heard from Palestinian women who said they had been gang raped while detained.

One woman, Khraim said, was raped by a female soldier who inserted objects into the victim’s rectum. In another incident, women and men who had been abducted at a checkpoint while fleeing Gaza through a supposed safety corridor were forcibly disappeared and held in a Negev detention center where they were made to strip, after which the Israeli military opened the doors to Israeli civilians who photographed the detainees, mocked them and jeered at them. Many of the Palestinian women who had been detained by the Israeli military in the last year and a half were beaten on their genitals so frequently that advocates determined it was Israeli policy to treat Palestinian women in this sadistic manner.

“What these testimonies reveal was a systematic trend of sexual violence that was being used as a weapon of genocide,” the unnamed advocate testified.

Khraim described women who were fleeing Israel’s bombing with whatever belongings they could carry being stopped at checkpoints in Gaza and looted. The soldiers would “make them fully undress and touch them, touch their bras and molest them in the way to get the jewelry and the expensive stuff out of their undergarments.”

It’s not just at checkpoints in Gaza. Women are often sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at West Bank checkpoints, too, the advocates said. Palestinian women avoid at least one checkpoint in Hebron because a soldier is known to expose his genitals to Palestinians there. “Come, take a look. Come touch it,” the Israeli soldier told one Palestinian woman in Arabic while exposing himself, according to Khraim.

“I haven't heard of this before,” a clearly shocked Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and member of the three-person UN Commission of Inquiry, said at one point.

A 14-year-old girl who passes through a checkpoint on her way to school told WCLAC Israeli soldiers “pretended to be searching her” and “they started touching her, touching her breasts, touching her inappropriately.” This young girl, Khraim said “is terrified to go to school anymore.”

Though this testimony was collected after October 7, 2023, Israel has used sexual violence against women since 1948 “as a means to ethnically cleanse Palestinians,” the unnamed advocate told Sidoti.

Raped to Death

No one who has followed Israel’s history, literally founded on mass extermination, theft, and terror, will be surprised by any of this. Rights groups have documented how the Israeli military had systematically inflicted sexual and physical torture upon Palestinians for decades. In 2002, the rabbi who would eventually be promoted to the chief rabbi of the Israeli military, Col. Eyal Karim, declared that the rape of non-Jewish women was permitted “out of consideration for the difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success.” Last year, the UN Commission of Inquiry found that specific forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including public stripping and nudity intended to humiliate Palestinians, “constitute part of Israeli Security Forces’ operating procedures.”

I won’t belabor the point by going into the long and varied history of sexual sadism and degradation employed by Israel but let us not forget that Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, the head of orthopedics at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital, was detained by the Israeli military and is believed to have been raped and beaten to death in Ofer Prison last April. "He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked from the lower part of his body. The prison guards threw him in the middle of the [prison] yard and left him there,” a human rights lawyer told Sky News, citing testimony from a Palestinian who saw al-Bursh just before he died in an Israeli prison. (Of course, Israel has denied any responsibility for the doctor’s death just as it has denied striking hospitals and committing the largest child massacre in its history just last week).

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When several Israeli soldiers were arrested for allegedly gang-raping another Palestinian hostage at the infamous Sde Teiman torture site in July, Israelis were outraged. Outraged that their compatriots had been arrested, that is. A mob that included a minister of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Cabinet stormed the location where the soldiers were being held, demanding their release. A prominent Israeli TV host defended the gang rape (though he later retracted his comments) and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister in charge of the prison services, proudly declared that “everything published about the abominable conditions” thousands of Palestinians were kept in “was true.”

The Screams Now Have Words

But you’d be forgiven for thinking that most esteemed journalists of the West had never heard of any of this – or, in fact, have never learned how to do a basic Google search – by the way in which they have merrily ignored Israel’s policy of sexual violence against Palestinians. The only stories of rape they have bothered to extensively write about are, curiously enough, apparently ones that never happened.

Who can forget the New York Times’ “Screams Without Words,” a piece of unbridled Israeli propaganda largely about invented Hamas atrocities so fantastic that even a victim’s family members had to come out and refute its claims as impossible? The late Gal Abdush’s family – photographed for the piece – disputed that she had been raped on Oct. 7; key sources had a history of making fraudulent claims; other sources later changed their testimony; and one of the authors was a former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer who had liked a tweet demanding Gaza be made into a “slaughterhouse” and calling Palestinians “human animals.” According to the Intercept, even an episode of the Times’ ‘The Daily’ podcast was pulled after “furious internal debate” about the veracity of the original article’s reporting.

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In January, Moran Gaz of the Israeli Prosecutor’s Office admitted to the Israeli outlet Yedioth Ahronoth that no one had come forward to her office with allegations against Hamas of rape or sexual assault. Gaz told the paper that her office had even gone so far as to seek out the cooperation of women’s rights organizations, and “they told us that no one had approached them.” This, in a society where Israeli women have come out to accuse a former defense minister of sexual assault and a former president of rape, both of whom were convicted.

So where is former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who made an entire film about debunked allegations of ‘mass rape’ against Israeli women by Hamas, now that Palestinian women are sharing the sexual abuse they have suffered from Israeli soldiers, both men and women? Where is actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who took time away from flogging cashmere sweatpants on her tedious website, to denounce Palestinians, falsely suggesting they use rape as a method of resistance? Where are former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his deranged Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who peddled debunked Hamas ‘mass rape’ claims? Where are the authors of “Screams Without Words” now that the screams actually have words? Has the Times commissioned a front-page piece on how Israeli women in uniform raped Palestinian women? Western hypocrisy is alive and well and thoroughly unrepentant. Women’s bodies are only sacred when they can be used as props to further Western imperial designs, and rape is only a crime and an outrage when it serves Western political interests.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent books include the novel The Runaways and her non-fiction reportage New Kings of the World. She recently hosted Reframe, a four-part series on the genocide in Gaza, on Al Jazeera.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

Check out more recent essays from Zeteo:

Watching the news today, you’d be forgiven for wondering what exactly international law is – a near-mythic concept; it is mentioned only to be shouted down, if it’s recalled at all. People know it exists – we’ve read about it, we’ve just never witnessed it in real life. As tempting as it is to blame the new Trump administration for its destruction, American presidents have long laughed at the idea of international law. When asked in 2003 if his Iraq invasion and subsequent policy met the standards of international law, George W. Bush chuckled, “International law? I better call my lawyer; he didn’t bring that up to me.” Barack Obama, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, authorized 563 strikes, largely by drones, during his presidency across three countries, often killing civilians. And it was the Biden administration that threw away the scraps of what tiny symbolic respect remained for the concept of international protocols of war by arming, defending, and providing cover for Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Karim Khan, the beleaguered prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has said ICC officials faced “threats” from supporters of Israel and Russia and that a senior figure had reminded him that the ICC was “built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,” not for Western countries and their friends.

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So, it ought not to come as a surprise that the launch of a nine-state body to defend and uphold the values of international law had not a single country from the Global North among them. The Hague Group, convened by Progressive International, was launched earlier this year by Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa. At the group’s inauguration, chair Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla recalled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring, “Nobody will stop us, not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anyone else” after the International Court of Justice hearings on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Ahmed Alnaouq, a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, presented the group’s opening testimony. It was important for it to be from an ordinary Palestinian, he told me, not an official, “the world has to hear from the victims.” An Israeli strike on his home in October 2023 killed 21 members of his sleeping family, including 14 children.

‘Taking a Real Risk’

The inaugural commitments of The Hague Group are three simple but vital measures: to uphold the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant; to refuse harbor to vessels carrying jet fuel and weaponry to Israel; and to transfer no arms to Israel. The commitments echo a September 2024 UN resolution that called on Israel to end its occupation within a year, and for member states to cease arms transfers to Israel if the aid could be used against Palestinians.

It was a historic resolution, but it had the support of 124 nations. The nine countries part of The Hague Group are "sticking their neck out," Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s former minister of Foreign Affairs and an adviser to The Hague Group, told me. They "are not shielded by 115 countries," Guillaume said. "They're taking a real risk."

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Colombia, a traditional US ally whose security in the context of their long and deadly civil war was offshored to Israel, which trained and armed ruthless paramilitaries, signed onto the group after imposing a coal embargo on Israel. It was, until then, the biggest coal exporter to Israel. Colombia cut diplomatic ties with Israel, as did Belize, Bolivia, and South Africa. Cuba hasn’t had relations with Israel in decades and has long been a supporter of the Palestinian cause. Namibia had already refused to provide harbor for Israel-bound ships carrying weapons, and Malaysia – besides being a power in the Muslim world – is strategically important because of the Malacca Strait, a major shipping route.

After the ICC arrest warrants were issued, Gandikota-Nellutla wondered if such a move rendered the then-idea of The Hague Group obsolete, but then very quickly watched as “countries like France that have for decades pushed … nations to continue to sign up to the Rome Statute make up rules as they go along and say there’s immunity for Netanyahu.” France took one week to throw away its commitment to international law and announce that it would continue to work closely with a wanted war criminal.

Blocking the ‘Arteries of the Genocidal Machine’

Israel, Gandikota-Nellutla says, was using “logistics networks in every single one of our countries” throughout the genocide as ships sometimes passed through harbors without being labeled as military ships or carrying military cargo but “disguised through the use of shell companies …with fake names.”

The Hague Group members felt a “real resentment and anger at our soil being used for this with deception,” and if war globalization had led to unified action on one side – countries agreeing to be transit points for Israel’s war machine – then surely the same spirit of coordination could be used to cut what Gandikota-Nellutla calls “the arteries of the genocidal machine.”

It was the UN Security Council’s arms embargo against South Africa in 1977 that unleashed a domino effect in bringing down apartheid. The UNSC went further against South Africa, making their arms embargo more stringent in 1986 and closing what loopholes remained.

A binding Security Council resolution against Israel today seems impossible because of the US veto. If that body doesn’t act to cut the supply of weapons to Israel, then The Hague Group will. It cannot be another talk shop, everyone I spoke to stressed. It is designed to be a network of interconnectedness that enforces its commitments, transforming them into state policy.

‘A Global South Rebellion?’

As exciting as The Hague Group is for those of us concerned with the concept of universal jurisdiction, any tangible actions it attempts to take will likely face hurdles and pushback from Israel’s allies, notably the US.

We’ve already seen the US threaten Spain, a NATO ally not part of The Hague Group, over actions taken to prevent ships carrying weapons to Israel dock its ports. Last year, the US launched an investigation and threatened fines and other punitive measures over Spain's decision to refuse to dock several ships due to its embargo on arms bound for Israel. The US additionally violated Spain’s embargo by sending over 1,000 tons of ammunition to Israel via one of their local naval bases.

When it comes to The Hague Group itself, the Trump administration, in particular, already has antagonistic views of some of its member countries. Trump, for example, put Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism and froze aid to South Africa over the baseless claims it was violating the “human rights” of “white farmers.” Perhaps most worrying is Trump’s targeting of the ICC. Last month, he signed an executive order sanctioning the court for what he called “illegitimate and baseless” actions targeting the US and Israel.

Israel, for its part, demonstrated their classic arrogance in the face of international law with the vulgar braggadocio befitting a serial killer. Following the US, it disengaged with the UN Human Rights Council and gifted Trump a golden pager embedded in the bark of an olive tree, a terroristic tongue in cheek referencing Israel’s deadly pager attack in Lebanon.

Gandikota-Nellutla called Trump’s ICC sanctions “the final iteration of ‘Mask off Empire,’” saying it was “profoundly concerned about their devastating blow to the integrity of the UN Charter and its foundational principles of human rights, sovereign equality, and the prohibition of genocide.” The group will continue forward, expanding membership and measures, unimpeded by the intimidation and secure in the lessons of history: ultimately, it was a unified block taking unified action like blockades and arms embargoes that broke apartheid South Africa.

Will Trump provoke a massive Global South rebellion? I, for one, hope so.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent books include the novel The Runaways and her non-fiction reportage New Kings of the World. She recently hosted Reframe, a four-part series on the genocide in Gaza, on Al Jazeera.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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It happened almost overnight. In late 2023, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, international law expert, and writer was catapulted onto the world stage when she simultaneously became – in her own words – “a reluctant chronicler of genocide,” an internet idol to her many admirers who study and share her press conferences and viral diplomatic interventions, and a “Hamas apologist” according to right-wing Zionists who stalk her every move. UN Watch, a pro-Israel organization whose seeming mission is to eradicate any shred of criticism of the state worldwide and for all eternity, has a particular obsession with Albanese. Their homepage displays a lurid campaign titled #firefrancesca.

Unlike her public remonstrations, Albanese laughs easily and radiates warmth and good humor. Wherever she goes, she seems to become the hive, the epicenter of attention and action, and even through this limited lens of Zoom, over the days we speak, I watch her husband, children, and children’s friends orbit her, gravitating towards her. When I mention the many enemies her outspoken defense of the Palestinian people has cultivated, Albanese doesn’t seem overly perturbed. “I have this device of hope, as we say in Italian,” she answers. “Yes, there are ideological enemies, but the moment people start engaging with me, I see that it’s hard for them to hate me. I tend to elicit sympathy face-to-face instead of hate. And this is something the haters hate.”

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Our first Zoom call opens with her familiar face, which I’ve spent more than the last 15 months watching on television, across social media, and via streamed UN meetings. Albanese has just spent her first week off in months. She went on a trip to Albania with her family last summer, but that didn’t really count as she spent hours in the evening preparing a submission to the International Criminal Court. Today she’s in Valle D’Aosta in Italy, up in the mountains, and enjoying the euphoria of time with her family. “It’s been beautiful not to watch the news,” she exhales. She is wearing her trademark thick black-rimmed glasses, her salt and pepper hair perfectly disheveled, and colorful earrings that look like a red poppy in bloom.

Life at home is less intense than the public world Albanese inhabits. There are no pets because her husband “is allergic to the concept of dependence,” but plenty of books (she is rereading Anthony Lowenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory) by literary figures of inspiration, including Edward Said and Primo Levi, who she feels especially close to as an Italian, and friends whom she once loved cooking for though she rarely has the time now. She speaks five languages – Italian, French, Spanish, English, and Bahasa Indonesian – six if you consider Arabic, which Albanese doesn’t. She studied it but doesn’t consider herself fluent in it anymore. Though she is a trained yoga teacher, Albanese doesn’t have the time to teach anymore either though she practices when she can and is devoted to her daily meditation, promising that you don’t want to engage with her on the days that she misses the calming practice.

Albanese grew up in a socialist home where her father often spoke about politics and foreign policy was discussed during family meals – a nuclear scene that she now replicates with her own family. She describes the Italy she grew up in as one where Palestine was almost a domestic issue – unthinkable today in Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, where fascist salutes are raised at political gatherings and protesters are clubbed by police. One of her earliest memories of something happening outside her home country was the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, and yet, when she began studying law, Albanese didn’t intend to focus on Palestine.

It wasn’t until she was doing her Masters at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London that the question of Palestine illuminated itself to Albanese. She understood that Palestine had to be advocated for on the grounds of international law, not just street activism. She didn’t have “the impulse of the humanitarian,” at least not fully. Rather, it was a “profound sense of outrage in the face of protracted injustice” that turned her onto the path of Palestine advocacy.

“I’ve lived it,” she says in her characteristic staccato, “and I’ve studied it primarily through the experience of Palestinian refugees, and when you do that, you cannot escape the Nakba. You cannot escape the reality that Palestinians are, first and foremost, Nakba survivors. It’s unmissable, and because of that, I’m brought to challenge the mainstream narrative that dominates the debate – that of a conflict.” Beyond which, if Albanese is a believer in anything it’s the idea of justice. It comes up again and again in conversation, and she speaks of justice and international law as its guarantor with the fervor of a believer – the same way the faithful revere their prophets. That international law exists and has simultaneously been “betrayed over and over again in the name of an ideology and at the expense of the rights of the Palestinians,” Albanese shakes her head. “It’s something that I. Cannot. Stand.”

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A Seismic Moment

When Albanese was 33 years old, she moved to Jerusalem to work in UNRWA’s Department of Legal Affairs. She had visited the ancient city for the first time the previous year, in 2009. It would be where Albanese and her husband lived before they were married in Stromboli and where her first child was conceived. She recalls the time there as “beautiful but also painful” and notes she was never truly comfortable working there as a lawyer. There was the home she loved in Musrara, the flower-lined West Jerusalem neighborhood founded by Arab Christians in the 19th century. Though it should have been institutional policy, in her mind, not to rent refugee property, Albanese asked UNRWA’s legal adviser to check what the story was of the home. They came back to her and said if she liked the house, she should live in it, but they couldn’t be sure the original owners weren’t displaced.' “It doesn’t matter the charm of the place,” Albanese says, “I’m happy I didn’t live there because the thought that this could have been property taken from refugees wouldn’t have let me sleep at night.”

When the Russian writer Anton Chekov said, “Any idiot can face a crisis, but it’s the day-to-day business of living that wears you out,’ he was not thinking of grocery shopping, but he could have been. Albanese and her husband – whom she calls as radical as she is on ethical matters – had “the most politicized fridge in Jerusalem.” Nothing inside it came from the settlements. A colleague recently reminded her jokingly of the moment she came into their office, flush with the realization that she wasn’t the lawyer of Palestinian refugees as she imagined she would be, but the lawyer of an institution. To meet neutrality regulations, everything had to be so depoliticized – from the agency to the plight of the Palestinians – and after three years there, Albanese was out of steam from dealing with the maze of depoliticized politics. She left towards the end of 2012, right when the Gaza war of that year had begun, and thought that she was “done with Palestine.”

“I didn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore,” she recounts, shaking her head. She was depressed and exhausted. And then Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza began.

Operation Protective Edge, as it was called by Israel, saw a massive use of firepower – more than 6,000 airstrikes on Gaza over the 50-day assault, with some 50,000 tank and artillery shells fired. Over 2,000 Palestinians were killed and 11,000 others injured – 10% of whom suffered permanent disabilities.

Albanese felt devastated by 2014. It was, she says, a “seismic” moment for her. She remembers holding her first child, Leila, watching the atrocities, and hearing about colleagues in Gaza who had been killed. “I saw people really punished for being Palestinian,” she recalls, “I felt a sense of impotence, and this is when I started getting engaged again. I knew that I couldn’t live with this feeling of impotence.” She pauses. “I don’t have that feeling over the past 14 or 15 months because I know that I can at least speak out using all the might of international law.”

And speak out she certainly has done. Her transparent outrage, her indignation at bad faith questions and lack of patience for snarky, gotcha journalists, her refusal to follow established scripts, her passionate tweets against the dehumanization of a besieged people, her distaste for politicians covering for ethnic cleansing – all of this marks Albanese as separate from her peers and it is this that has illuminated her as an uncommon voice of morality in the West.

She scolded Piers Morgan for trafficking in the debunked “beheaded babies” story pushed by Israel defenders and apologists, holding up a finger at him. Even the normally loquacious anchor fumbled as he tried to recover.

There was the magnificent eye roll when Albanese was reminded that David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, was a lawyer. “It’s not the numbers of those killed that determine genocide, and any lawyer would know that, so I was surprised,” she shrugged on video. And she went viral for her exasperated response to a journalist in Canada asking her whether Israel had a right to exist. “Israel does exist,” Albanese replied, as though talking to an incredibly thick plank, “It is a recognized member of the United Nations. Besides this, there is no such thing in international law like ‘a right to exist.’ Does Italy have the right to exist? Italy exists…what is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist. So, the state is there, and it’s protected as a member of the United Nations. Does this justify the right of erasure of another people? Hell no.”

“I’m cognizant of the fact that I can speak unapologetically to power,” Albanese tells me over the phone. “I don’t feel intimidated at all – and it’s new to me. I didn’t know I had that in me.” It’s a claim worth pushing back on. Albanese hardly seems like she might have gone through a wallflower phase. She admits that naturally, she’s a good connector and bridge builder and has a certain curiosity about life and people that allows her to speak her mind without judgment against who she’s talking to, but “I had no idea that I could stand in front of the General Assembly and basically tell them off, saying what are you doing? And that empathy has evaporated from this room.” (What she actually said to the world’s foremost diplomats on a UN Committee was: “Those of you who have not uttered a word on Gaza demonstrate that empathy has evaporated from this room and empathy is the glue that makes us stand united as humanity. But don’t worry, you can continue, and you will become more and more irrelevant to the rest of the world, which is in turmoil.”)

What Israel Sells

For the firm believer in justice that Albanese is, she doesn’t quite think the international justice system “as it stands” is fit to deliver full justice to the Palestinian people. We don’t yet know the full extent of what Palestinians in Gaza have suffered over nearly 16 months; she says sombrely, “When the dust settles, we will know, we will start to know.” But the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court are a good start, and have gone much further than any previous attempts, though they should have been triggered much earlier. In any case, Albanese wants to believe that days of Israel being treated with “the white gloves of exceptionalism” are crumbling.

I ask her why Israel hasn’t faced any consequences – why, for example, the UN hasn’t suspended Israel from its body, given it has killed more UN workers than have ever been killed in a single crisis. She thinks for a moment before answering, accepting that there are many, many answers and laying some out on the table. There’s the intoxication from the violence it can produce without facing any consequences, there’s the Western guilt narrative that Albanese herself doesn’t quite buy – maybe an older generation harbored the collective burden of what Europe did to the Jewish people for centuries, but she settles on two main explanations: “The Western settler-colonial block, of which Israel is a longstanding member, tends to protect itself,” she begins, “but now I think it’s something deeper. The most convincing answer is not what is transferred to Israel – but it’s what Israel sells to the entire world in terms of tech, training, weaponry, surveillance technology, mass containment techniques.”

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This is Israel’s most exported good, if you can call it that. The countries that don’t buy these goods from Israel are incredibly few, “even countries that acknowledge the genocide and stand firmly against occupation and apartheid, they still have not cut trade with Israel.” After the ICJ opinion that found that it was “plausible” Israel had violated the Genocide Convention, Albanese, alongside other special rapporteurs, proposed that member states should do an audit that would reveal all of their ties – political, economic, research-related, military – to Israel. Then when all the information was collated, the second step would be to see these states divesting and halting engagement with Israel as much as possible. That would have given us a clear sense of which member states were serious about cutting ties with the occupation or with Israel's apartheid. It hasn’t happened yet.

But Albanese is not deterred. And she’s not waiting around for divine justice or the poetic kind, but concrete, tangible justice. “I want to help make human justice work,” she says, “because this is what we got from World War II with dozens of millions of people dead, including millions of Jews and Roma and Sinti and others who had been exterminated. We have a universal jurisdiction that was a response to the horrors of the Holocaust, and I want it to work. I want to see it work and not fail time and time again.” Just the idea seems Quixotic today, though not to Albanese. “We will get there,” she assures me. “I have no doubt because the tide is changing.”

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By the afternoon after the Gaza ceasefire was announced, Albanese had yet to give any interviews about her thoughts on the topic. The truth is, she tells me, she didn’t know what to say. “Of course, I welcome a ceasefire, but my words are cut short – and I was already not holding my breath – by the fact that between 70 to 80 Palestinians were killed after the press conference.” Yes, she’s very happy to see people joyful in Gaza, especially the children, as well as the Israeli families who are waiting for the hostages to come home. And obviously, it’s good for Palestinians in Gaza to see the end of the bombs and the drones and the raging fires over their heads and homes, but as necessary as the ceasefire is, it’s impossible to ignore its frailty.

“Gaza is destroyed,” Albanese tells me at the end of a long day. “When Biden says, ‘Oh, let the Palestinians return home,’ the fact is there is nothing most people in Gaza can return to. They are alone, including children.” The violence in the West Bank has only escalated, there was no reference to genocide in the ceasefire document, and Albanese worries that once the hostages are released, the pummelling of Gaza will continue. She hopes that this ceasefire is the beginning of something serious, but for that to be so, Israel would have to completely change its behavior. “Israel might well find another excuse to continue its oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza,” Albanese points out, “this is what I’m afraid of.” After President Trump’s inauguration, Israel launched Operation Iron Wall in the West Bank. Armed settlers went on a rampage, setting fire to Palestinian homes while the military’s deadly assault on Jenin killed 12 and injured dozens more. If Israel’s “death machinery” was not forced to stop, Albanese tweeted, their “genocide of Palestinians will not be confined to Gaza, mark my words.”

‘I Do See Hope’

The past year had been a grueling one personally, and Albanese likens it to a rupture in time similar to Before Christ and After Christ: before genocide and after genocide. There have been tons of attention – before the new year, images circulated online of an alternate Time Magazine ‘Person of the Year’: Francesca Albanese in her black-rimmed glasses, almost enshrined in a glowing light. She saw the picture, but really, it should have been Hind Rajab, she tells me, or the novelist Susan Abulhawa or the lawyer Noura Erakat. “I really resent how I take space,” she tells me, “I don’t want to take the space of the Palestinians.”

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But for all the flattering memes and awards, there has been plenty of sinister, even menacing attention too. After her report, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide,’ was released, Albanese faced serious security threats. Her private details, phone number, and address were leaked online, and threats were sent to herself and her family. They took the necessary precautions and “made the decision not to be worried.” Her critics have also renewed their accusations of antisemitism, often pointing to a 2014 Facebook post. When the post resurfaced in 2022, she reportedly said some of her 2014 comments were “infelicitous, analytically inaccurate, and unintendedly offensive,” but she rejected the antisemitism charge and decried “yet another malicious attack” on her UN mandate. The accusations against her lack bona fides; the same parties and organizations that have spent years name-calling Albanese and pushing for her sacking had, for example, nothing to say about the recent salute made by Elon Musk that was welcomed by Nazis.

Perhaps part of what makes her endearing to so many people – it’s hard to imagine another UN official becoming the internet’s social media friend, certainly no one passed around Kofi Annan’s speeches to bookmark and mimic, nor can any of us profess to know the names of even three other special rapporteurs – is not so much her moxy or defiance, but the fact that Albanese somehow acts as a mirror to how the rest of us have felt over these frightening, enraging, and tragic months.

Like nearly everyone, Albanese has lost friends, old friends who “slipped out of her heart” because she saw them in positions of power, in big companies, concentrating on keeping silent about the genocide rather than daring to challenge their management or operate with basic human principles. She laments the fact that in Western society, there’s no real space to grieve collectively. And if there is no space to mourn, then how do we heal?

In the first days and weeks after the Oct. 7 attack and the ensuing assault on Gaza, Albanese often fell sick, physically and mentally exhausted, and thought she couldn’t go on after seeing image after image of relentless horror and stories of endless suffering. “It was the despair of the mothers mourning their children,” she says, “Oh my god, the mothers.” But it didn’t take long for her strength to kick back in, and this, she stresses to me, is something she wants to be made “loud and clear:” There is so much that can and must be done by individuals, we need to start taking action; we need to unionize, in a way. “It’s not just about making noise, it’s putting pressure and creating disruption, thinking outside the box about peaceful but powerful ways to keep the focus on Palestine and the fate of its people. We must be active. We cannot be clock-worked into acceptance of this brutal violence.” Albanese is an ethical consumer herself, her Twitter bio reads, “solidarity is the political declination of love,” and she lists for me the ways we can take action: support principled journalists, defend those who have been harassed for their stands, pursue domestic legal cases, read, join solidarity movements, speak, protest, research.

“We are at the juncture when the decades of Palestinian resistance – not armed struggle, but I mean their resistance to be seen as a people, as a collective – I know it’s bloody time, but something is blossoming.” She is an emphatic talker, whether sharing her current reading list or her opinion on what the future means. But now, Albanese slows down a touch to stress the importance of what she’s saying. “I do see hope at the end of this dark winter,” she chooses her words deliberately, “and it’s theirs.”

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent books include the novel The Runaways and her non-fiction reportage New Kings of the World. She recently hosted Reframe, a four-part series on the genocide in Gaza, on Al Jazeera.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of her columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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It is killing season in Pakistan. For the country’s most vulnerable, it is perpetual, bloody, and passes without redress or justice. For Shias, since 1990, there has been little respite from an open season of violence. Last week, at least 42 Shia pilgrims, including six women and children, who were traveling in the northern town of Parachinar, the capital of Kurram district, were killed when their convoys came under heavy gunfire. They had been traveling with police escorts, so blatant and longstanding is the threat to Shias in Pakistan. More than 20 people were wounded, and another 26 Shia pilgrims were abducted by the unknown militants – no one has claimed responsibility. Clashes between rival groups erupted in the days after the ambush. At least 88 people have been killed since the latest outbreak of violence began, according to local authorities.

In my lifetime, Pakistan has undergone military coups, frequent terror attacks, targeted killings, and the ugly persecution of minorities. Yet there is always something chilling about the violence directed at Shias – I never cease to be shocked by the scale, the precision, and the ease with which countless civilians can be identified, hounded, and murdered. 

This gruesome attack was not a surprise, it did not come out of the blue. This summer, a spate of violence between Shias and Sunni tribesmen in the area saw at least 50 people killed – the majority Shia – and a further 200 wounded. In early November, a peace march was held in Kurram district – whose 800,000 residents are approximately 45% Shia – where protesters demanded more security from a state that seems largely unconcerned by the constant violence. No new security measures were taken, and the concerns of Parachinar’s hunted and persecuted Shias fell on cold, uninterested ears. 

A worldwide minority among Muslims, Shias make up 15% of Pakistan’s population. The Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect has called them “the focus of most sectarian violence” in Pakistan, more vulnerable than our tiny population of Hindus and Christians. For as long as I can remember, Shias have been the target of a persistent, determined violence. I was 12 years old the first time I was asked at school in Karachi whether I was Sunni or Shia. I had grown up in Syria, returning to Pakistan only in the sixth grade. I had no idea I could be anything other than just Muslim, no one had ever asked me the question before. Until that point, I hadn’t realized you had to declare yourself one or the other. “You’re Shia,” the boy concluded. “All your family are. You all have Shia names.” I have never known a Pakistan without this eerie undercurrent of anti-Shia animus. Though there certainly was a time when Shias and Sunnis existed in relative harmony, it was before my generation of Pakistanis was born.

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Sectarian Violence: A Brief History

The 1990s saw a campaign of terror unleashed against prominent Shias. Imam Bargahs and mosques were routinely hit by bombs and machine gunfire. And dozens of Shia doctors were reportedly assassinated in the early 2000s. Ethnic Hazaras, who are also Shia, have been singled out and killed for decades. At least 180 Hazaras were killed in bomb attacks in the first two months of 2013, and gunmen in Mach, Balochistan, murdered 11 Hazara coal miners in 2021, an attack so heinous that vigils for the dead were held across the province. More than 4,000 people – the majority Shia – are thought to have been killed in sectarian violence between 1987 and 2007. Thousands of Shias are estimated to have been killed between 2008 and 2014 in violence connected to the war on terror, according to Human Rights Watch. 

The animosity towards Shias is not unique to Pakistan’s Sunni majority and stretches back to the succession of Islamic leadership after the death of the Prophet (peace be upon him). In Pakistan, there are many geopolitical and local factors; problems of this magnitude are often many-headed hydras, but the issue can be understood, at least on the surface, through three wide lenses – the first is the enduring legacy of the CIA-backed military dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia ul Haq who seized power in 1977. 

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Zia was an enthusiastic conduit for the US war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and during his junta, Pakistan was intimately involved in the training and arming of the mujahideen – who later morphed into the Taliban, the progenitors of Sunni militancy. Various Sunni groups across Pakistan were actively backed and supported by the general and his coterie, and Pakistan saw a mushrooming of madrassas – religious schools largely funded by the Saudis at the time – that were ideological training grounds for countless young men that went on to fight in the jihad against the “godless Soviets.” Pakistan’s laws and society were brutalized by the hardline version of Sunni Islam practiced by the dictator, which had little connection to Islam as a text or religion but drew inspiration from what we now think of as Wahabi fundamentalism. 

Second was the burst of sectarianism inflamed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which “radicalized (Pakistan’s) Shia and Sunni identities,” according to the scholar Vali Nasr. And third is the sense – whether true or not – that Shias constitute a privileged minority in the country with access to education, power, and resources. For example, it’s whispered that the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a Shia, though no clear confirmation exists. In the Kurram district, local Shias owned much of the land. This, rather than actual religious hostility, is often said to be the reason for the violence between the two sects in the area. 

Politics Sink to Pettiest Levels

In response to the horrors of the Parachinar attacks, all travel routes into the area have been closed, mobile and data services suspended, exams indefinitely postponed, and all schools and universities shut. The government has announced a commission that will work to settle the land dispute amongst the tribes and says that they are working to impose a ceasefire.

But this sounds and feels very much like doing nothing much at all, especially when one considers the gargantuan effort undertaken by this same government – including deploying thousands of police and paramilitaries – to impede a long march called by former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf, and led by his wife, Bushra Bibi, calling for his release from imprisonment. On Tuesday morning, the military was deployed to the capital, and “intense” tear gas shelling against protesters was reported. 

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No matter the urgency of the issue, one can count on politics in Pakistan to sink to the pettiest level possible. In response to widespread criticism against the government being caught seemingly unaware in Parachinar, Punjab’s Information Minister Azma Bukhari pointed out that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Parachinar is located, is, in fact, a province ruled by a PTI government. Why was the party expending so much of their efforts, asked Bukhari, to rally for one man when dozens of their own constituents had been killed in cold blood in Parachinar? (PTI and Khan himself launched similar never-ending marches calling for his return to power smack in the middle of the catastrophic floods of 2022).

Pakistan’s political landscape has hit – even by our incredibly low standards – a dispiriting nadir. The country’s economy is in collapse, and the climate crisis is so extreme that on Nov. 15, Lahore enjoyed the infamy of being the most polluted city on Earth; there is little opportunity or stability for our millions of young people, and yet politics cannot be budged to do anything about these enormous crises. The state fights its opponents, and the opponents fight the state, over and over again, like a deranged ouroboros. As the carnage against Shias shows no sign of abating, PTI is calling this march for Khan’s release their ‘do or die’ protest. Unfortunately, in the meantime, plenty in Pakistan will die while no one does anything at all. 

Update: This essay has been corrected to reflect that Imran Khan held rallies during the floods of 2022, not 2002, as previously stated.

Make sure you’re signed up to receive ‘The Global South with Fatima Bhutto’ to get all of Fatima’s essays in your inbox. Catch up on some of her previous essays below:

One evening in August, I was in the kitchen looking at my phone when on X, in a blur of scrolling, I thought I saw a child with half his head blown off on my feed. In a panic, I scrolled past the image, my heart pounding. What had I just seen? There had been another massacre in Gaza, another slaughter by the Israeli military. It was 10 months into the genocide. 

I didn’t want to see the image, but I moved through my feed to try to understand what had just happened when I saw it again. A boy, half his head a tumble of light brown curls; the other half of his head decimated, missing, gone. He was being carried by his father; his father who thought he could still save his boy, his son, his darling child. Though over these interminably cruel months, I have seen premature babies gasping for oxygen in incubators that are about to be powered off, a beheaded baby held in the air by his howling father, and women weeping into the shrouds of their children, I burst into tears. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever seen. 

It has been one year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the old world order is gone, obliterated by Israel, which has ushered us into something nightmarish and unimaginable. Before this year, I could never have imagined that I would know what a toddler looks like without half his head. But Israel and its backers, who have empowered it to act with total impunity, have changed more than just our nightmares – they have changed with dire and dangerous consequences the protocols of war. You may not care about Palestinians, but tomorrow these tactics may be visited on your city, on your people, with you as the victims. 

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Israel is replicating its playbook in Lebanon as we speak – assassinating journalists in their homes, reportedly bombing ambulances, and killing children. When it remotely detonated 3,000 pagers in an act of mass terrorism, Israel reportedly sent messages so that their victims would hold them close to their faces when they exploded, ensuring death or severe injuries. Western papers like the New York Times could barely contain their teenage-like glee over Israel’s murderous technology, praising its innovation and daring as though this were an action movie where the serial killer gets craftier with every kill. Lincoln Jopp, a Conservative MP in the UK, insisted we “look on in awe” at Israel’s “phenomenal” attack. No matter that the pagers exploded in grocery stores, in people's homes, and even in a pediatrician's office as the doctor was examining a 10-day-old baby. Dozens of people, including two children, were killed when Israel detonated the pagers and other devices over two days. The maiming and murdering of newborns and children – this is Israel’s specialty. 

Not Ordinary Acts of War

In Gaza, Israel has killed more UN workers since Oct. 7 of last year than have been targeted at any point in their entire history. An unprecedented number of aid workers have been hunted down and murdered.

Israel has killed more than 120 Palestinian journalists and media workers – making the war the most deadly single conflict in modern history. Often, the families of journalists were also stalked and exterminated. Al Jazeera’s Wael Al Dahdouh’s wife, son, daughter, and one-and-a-half-year-old grandson were killed when their home was bombed by the Israeli military. Israel killed another one of his sons later. On Sunday, 20-year-old journalist Hassan Hamad was murdered; what was left of his body fit in a shoe box. Before he was killed, he had been reportedly threatened by an Israeli officer. “Listen, if you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next,” the WhatsApp message read, ordering to cease filming in Gaza “…this is your last warning.” These are not ordinary acts of war.

Doctors, healthcare workers, and paramedics have been targeted, abducted, tortured, and killed. The Israeli military bombed or raided 32 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza – targeting anything that sustains life. Only 17 hospitals are functioning partially. Israel blew up every single university and hundreds of schools and UN shelters. Genocide is too light a word for what Israel has wrought in Gaza. Israel has exceeded the confines of our language with its brutality and terror. One public health expert estimates the death toll from Israel’s genocide in Gaza could be as high as 335,000 people by the end of the year. 

Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Israel kills a child every 10 minutes, the UN has estimated. Today, Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees on Earth. Genocide is not the right word; it does not convey the evil of purposely targeting children. “No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world’s best snipers,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an American doctor, recently charged. “And they’re dead-center shots.” Over 710 newborns have been killed – taken by Israel before their lives even began.

Leave aside, if you can, the slaying of journalists and poets and teachers and medics, and just look at the children. A recent Oxfam report says that Israel has killed more Palestinian children in this one year than Russia has killed civilians in the entirety of the Ukrainian war so far. This is the wholesale slaughter of children. 

There is no end to Israel’s horror. Israel has allowed infectious diseases as deadly as polio to be reintroduced into Gaza – where it was previously eradicated – with no care for global health. Just the first two months of Israel’s genocide saw it release at least 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – the annual footprint of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations in just 60 days.

These are the most heinous of war crimes. To kill the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut, Israel leveled six residential apartment buildings with reportedly several 2,000 lb bombs in a tightly packed civilian neighborhood. President Joe Biden, whose clear disregard for the Palestinians has no equal among his predecessors, called this “a measure of justice.” One million Lebanese have been displaced by Israel’s ferocious carpet bombing in less than a week. 

Israel has carried out more than 17,000 attacks on five countries since Oct. 7, according to Al Jazeera. It is no wonder that so many people say that this one tiny state has made the entire world unsafe. 

But it’s not just Israel. Before the end of August, Biden’s administration had completed its 500th delivery of weapons to Israel since October. In June, officials said the US had reportedly given $6.5 billion in assistance to Israel since the war began. At the start of Israel's assault on Lebanon, the Biden administration rewarded the country with an additional $8.7 billion. The United States is not complicit in Israel’s butchery; it is an equal partner and will forever be remembered as such across the Global South. Its standing in the Middle East will never recover. 

Time Is Israel’s Enemy

“We have yet to understand,” the writer James Baldwin said, “that if I am starving, you are in danger.” Oct. 7 shattered the false myth that Israel could live complacently, safely, with rights for themselves and absolutely nothing for the Palestinians – not rights, nor freedom, not even the right to eat, as Gazan’s calorie intake was strictly monitored by Israel, keeping them just above starvation long before 2023. And there is so much more that Israel still does not seem to understand. Flattening Gaza, carpet bombing Lebanon, bombarding Hodeidah, Yemen’s main humanitarian port, or assassinating the head of Hamas on Iran’s sovereign soil does not impress Israel’s strength on the world. On the contrary, it is evidence of its patent weakness. 

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Israel – and the US – have threatened International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan to back off his investigations of genocide. In response to a separate genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Netanyahu sneered, “Nobody will stop us.” Those who have tried to stop them – Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – have paid fatally for their interventions, but Netanyahu is wrong. Time is Israel’s enemy. People fighting for their homes never fail; it is the colonizer who is always vanquished. It is simply a matter of time. The native has nowhere else to go and nothing to lose. You can pour as many troops or guns or money against them. Those troops can leave, but the people fighting for their homes cannot. This is blazingly evident given that Israel’s army, like so many criminal and terror outfits around the world, is made up of tens of thousands of foreign fighters – nationals or recent immigrants from France, England, the US, India, and beyond. As former Communist leader Ho Chi Minh said when fighting the French and Americans in Vietnam, “You can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose, and I will win.” 

One year later, Israel has been thoroughly morally delegitimized in the world. No man or woman of heart or conscience can stand by it. Israel is isolated and will have brought about a collapse not just of the international order but also of the Western world. Through its relentless terror over the last year, it has made Palestine the cause of free human beings in the world. Authoritarian governments and mendacious media are Israel’s allies, but Palestine has the hearts and solidarity of the people. No amount of weaponry can defeat that. 

Read more of Zeteo’s special content marking Oct. 7:

Early last month, a 31-year-old trainee doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College was midway through a 36-hour shift when she took a break to eat a late dinner with her colleagues around 2 am local time. After the meal, they left her alone in the seminar room, where she was reportedly going to rest because there were no facilities for exhausted doctors. The next morning, her body was found with signs of extreme sexual abuse. Hospital administrators told her family that she had committed suicide, but when her parents – who had toiled and saved to send their only child to medical school – saw the body, it was beyond evident that she had been tortured and murdered. Her father, a tailor, had worried about her safety traveling home late at night after her shifts and had borrowed money to buy a car. “I wanted her to be safe on the roads at night,” her father said, “but she wasn’t even safe at the hospital as a doctor on duty.”

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After the story broke and a hospital volunteer was arrested, protests erupted in Kolkata and across India. The principal of the medical college didn’t, at least publicly, offer his deepest condolences or promise an inquiry. Instead, Sandip Ghosh asked why the female doctor was resting alone in a room at night. The India Medical Association, the country’s largest group of doctors, called a nationwide strike shutting down all non-emergency services for 24 hours across the enormous country. Women across India joined the protests to express their anger and grief. Junior doctors in Bengal kept their strike going for weeks, ending it only recently. 

This is not the first time that India has been rocked by such a barbarous crime. A young woman was horrifically gang raped on a bus in Delhi in 2012, sending shock waves across the world. In 2018, an 8-year-old Muslim girl, Asifa Bano, was gang-raped, held for days in a temple, and then killed. When her alleged rapists were arrested, two ministers from the ruling BJP party attended rallies in support of the men. Though they later had to resign, it was that same year that a Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual report called India the most dangerous country in the world for women, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Four years later, in 2022, it was estimated that an average of 86 rapes took place in India every day.

A Deadly Combination

Why India, then?

Indian men don’t hate women any more than English men or French men do, as shown by the recent, grotesque cases of Wayne Couzens, a former London police officer serving a life sentence for rape and murder, or Dominique Pelicot, who admitted to drugging his wife and recruiting dozens of men to rape and sexually assault her. Pelicot explained his sadistic abuse against his wife by saying that he was “utterly idle” after retiring.

Gender inequality, violent patriarchy, misogyny, and accepted, casual violence to women are universal. India has all those factors, as every country does, but its rapid and ruthless neo-liberalization in the 1990s wrought havoc on its society and men in ways that are increasingly evident in the rage and cruelty of these rape cases.

Speaking of the youngest Delhi rapist, Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy noted that it was he – the minor – who inflicted the most horrific violence on the woman, named Nirbhaya, or brave heart, by the Indian press. According to Nandy, the boy had left home at 8 years old to work in highway eateries. He was brutalised himself, Nandy noted: the roadside stalls are notorious for the sexual abuse of children, beyond which he had been separated from his family. That dislocation, alienation, and rage is a deadly combination. 

The details of the crime in Kolkata are so grisly: the injuries the woman sustained, the way her body was found, the fact that after her death, her name was released in contravention of Indian law, which was then entered into Google video searches and porn sites by so many people that her name “+ photo + video” reportedly became the fifth most searched item in India according to Google Trends. Though grotesque, this is perhaps not surprising, given that across regional languages as well as Bollywood cinema, violence towards women is presented casually and constantly. It is as much a standard of local cinema as the song and numbers – it is entertainment.

No Places for Women

At nearly the same time as the Kolkata crime, a Dalit woman was gang-raped in Lucknow, but her violation did not inspire national protests. The rapes of Dalit and tribal women rarely do, though they are not any less horrific. Dalit women, who comprise around 16% of India’s female population (80 million), exist at the bottom of a brutal caste hierarchy. According to Human Rights Watch, they make up the majority of India’s landless laborers and scavengers and are so vulnerable to both physical and sexual violence that a law had to be passed by the Indian parliament in 1989 to prevent atrocities against them. But the laws make little difference to Dalits, faced with police apathy and outright hostility, little political power, and the fact that casteist attitudes prevail in Indian society. 

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After the Kolkata rape, the self-proclaimed “concerned citizens” of an apartment complex in a well-to-do Mumbai neighborhood organized a “reclaim the night” protest in the public space outside a shopping mall and asked women to come out and join them in large numbers. But when the Bahujan women (a term that includes members of scheduled castes, including Dalits, as well as scheduled tribes) of the nearby Jai Bhim Nagar slum joined the protests, they were asked to leave. Their homes had recently been demolished, just ahead of monsoon season, leaving this population of vulnerable women in further precarity – they were sleeping out on the footpaths, in the open, under the angry elements. They had come to demand safety and to show solidarity with the trainee doctor whose story had shaken them. “Your issues are different from those raised here,” one of the apartment complex women reportedly told the Bahujan women. “This is an exclusive protest.”

But these are no places for women, period – not for tribal women, not for Dalits, not for married women since India’s new penal code does not criminalize marital rape, not for Kashmiri women who have suffered rape as a weapon of war at the hands of Indian soldiers who are protected under the Armed Forces Special Powers act. In 1991, soldiers raped more than 30 women in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora. Not one of the women has received justice over three decades later. The same wrestler who represented India at the Olympics, Vinesh Phoghat, left her two national medals on the roadside in December after Delhi police prevented her from meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi after she and 10 other wrestlers accused Brij Bhushan Singh, the former Wrestling Federation of India Chief of sexual harassment. Singh is a member of the BJP. Earlier that year, Phoghat and others were roughed up by the Delhi police when they protested in the capital. 

“War Has Become Essential” 

This frightening animus towards women is shared by men – both powerful and powerless – but finds strange allies among women too. Two years ago, a website popped up selling prominent Muslim women for nominal amounts to work as servants. The Muslims being sold on the fake online auction were well-known journalists, activists, and public figures. It was not the first time such a site had appeared, but this time the police went to arrest the culprit who had put the site together. It was a woman. The bizarre trend of Hindutva pop songs calling for the death and expulsion of Muslims from India is fronted by plenty of women singers. 

India’s Central Bureau of Investigation has stepped in to probe the Kolkata case, and though its investigations are ongoing, it has said there may not be evidence of gang rape. Many questions remain. South Asia, like much of the world, is held in the grip of a sinister and insidious force: a neoliberal, capitalist mindset that has ravaged society and shattered so many lives in its wake. “We are living in a very violent economic order to which war has become essential,” Indian activist and author Vandana Shiva has said, "war against the earth, war against women’s bodies, war against local economies, and war against democracy. And I think we need to see the connections between all these forms of violence."

Globalization and its failures can be seen in this split screen – the India of the uber-rich Ambanis, where $600 million dollars can be spent on a single human being’s wedding, and a family of five people can live in a 27-story skyscraper, known as Antilla, that cost $2 billion to build and the India where the monthly minimum wage is 5,340 rupees or $63.  It is these two Indias that have dislocated hundreds of millions of rural men to bring them to metropolises to build mansions and malls for the ultra-wealthy. Life in ancestral villages, however hard, were places that had inbuilt systems of support and networks that relied on each other for generations, and these lives were uprooted to faceless megacities where each man must survive on his own and encounter countless deprivations in order to eke out a meager living. Besides the physical disjointedness of such a massive upheaval, there is the humiliation, the isolation, and with it, naturally the rage. The young men responsible for the 2012 Delhi rape that horrified the world were the picture images of this dislocation and rage.

These failures of globalization and capitalism are built into the systems that thus far have no way of managing this violent inequality. Rather, they depend on it. There is a global epidemic of violence towards women – the perpetrators must be punished, the police and legal institutions must answer why so few safeties exist to protect women yet so many to exonerate their tormentors, but there must also be a societal reckoning if this war on women is to be ended. You cannot have Antilla without the degradation of the man who lays its bricks. And without any redress of this shock doctrine, it is hard to imagine how women anywhere, from doctors in Kolkata to Dalits in Lucknow, will be safe. 

Missed previous editions of Fatima Bhutto’s ‘The Global South’? Check out some of them below…

In the massive, overburdened metropolis of Karachi, millions of ordinary citizens struggle to survive. The hardships are too numerous to list adequately: a fragile law and order system presided over by a mercenary police force, a corrupt provincial government growing fat and rich while impoverished citizens labor tirelessly for salaries that ought to be illegal in the 21st century with almost zero basic services provided to them – not healthcare, not education, not even potable water. Last April, two children in Karachi’s northern district of Nazimabad died from drinking water that was so polluted it was contaminated with worms “that could be seen with the naked eye.” Experts later classified the water as turbid, so filthy that even chlorine tablets were ineffective in rendering it drinkable. 

Karachi, my hometown, is an urban mess run by gangsters and thugs if it runs at all. Cruelty is endemic to the city. Though it is an ethnically diverse city, more than any other in Pakistan, minorities have suffered here. A violent campaign saw Shia Muslims assassinated in the 1990s. Ethnic Pathans from Northern Pakistan or refugees from Afghanistan are often set upon by political parties even though they make up an integral part of the city and survive in neighborhoods without even the minimum of public services.

Such services are hard to come by, however, no matter where you live. Try to file a police report and experience humiliation at the hands of a notoriously corrupt force, try to survive the summer months – with temperatures easily cruising over 100 degrees with no electricity. K-electric, formerly the Karachi Electrical Supply Company, is one of the most incompetent and feckless companies nationwide. The amount of load-shedding is so obscene that large swaths of the city go without electricity for hours while continuing to receive astronomical bills. If you don’t have the money, you cannot pay for a generator. If you don’t have the means, you cannot afford the cost of a private water tanker and must forfeit running water at home too. It is a rough city. 

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We inherited a bloated civil bureaucracy from the British, and yet the only thing that the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC) seems to do with any enthusiasm or efficiency is poison stray dogs. District municipal authorities have killed hundreds of thousands of stray dogs over the years, even though a “fully fledged” provincial rabies control program exists. In 2021, Pakistan killed an estimated 50,000 dogs by poison alone. Photographs shared in newspapers showed hundreds of dog carcasses lined up on busy roads – a shocking image of savagery.  The authorities' preferred method of what they call “dog culling’” is to leave parcels of poisoned food all over the city. As a result, stray dogs, starving and trying to feed their young, die horribly in full view of pedestrians: convulsing with pain, frothing at the mouth, and howling on the streets. 

In all the years I lived in Karachi, I never saw KMC do anything capably – the garbage is piled sky high and ignored for months, the roads are horribly constructed, and there are no working sewage systems; there are barely any public spaces that are free and well looked after – the only one I can think of that’s free is the beach and it is certainly not well looked after, littered with garbage and the sand soggy with slicks of oil. Karachi traffic is notoriously terrifying and seemingly out of the control of city authorities. But they poison dogs with aplomb. 

In December 2021, a KMC supervisor was arrested after a toddler picked up a poisoned sweet intended for a dog, ate it, and died. Five other children also ate the toxic sweets that the official was carrying with him to leave around the city and had to be hospitalized. “The fact that innocent children and animals have had to pay the price for the heartlessness and cruelty of adults is disgusting,” Ayesha Chundrigar, who founded Pakistan’s first and largest animal shelter, the ACF Animal Rescue, told VICE World News at the time. 

For a long time, I was one of the many Karachiites who said, ‘Yes, it’s terrible so many animals are suffering but what about the people?’ We have to solve the problems people face before we can turn to the animals – there are shortages of cooking gas, overcrowded public hospitals often short on medicine, and millions of women across the country don’t have the ID cards that are required to vote because voting in Pakistan is not a right but a luxury: you have to pay for the ID card. This week, UNICEF officials announced that 98% of infants under 2 years old in Sindh, Pakistan’s southernmost province, are undernourished – a shocking statistic. But it has become increasingly hard to ignore that these are interconnected systems of degradation, abuse, and governmental ineptitude. 

A Spate of Cruelty 

I have thought a lot about cruelty over the last few months. There is seemingly no respite from it, no shelter from the constant barrage of news of violence, torture, and pain no matter what country’s newspaper you are reading.

None of this is unique to Pakistan, we live in a world of bottomless cruelty – from the war crimes being committed in broad daylight and live-streamed from Gaza, mobs lynching Muslims in India, fascists on the march across Europe, rioters trying to set fire to asylum seekers in England and beyond. Many in Pakistan will argue that for all the cruelty before them, they have no space to consider the violence done to animals. Others point out that animal welfare is an elite concern in the country. Yet it’s a well-established fact that psychopaths and serial killers don’t jump straight into their crimes – they begin by torturing animals. After animals, they move on to people. What does it mean then to live in a society where the torture of animals is so widespread? 

In the past two months, Karachi, the provincial capital of Sindh, and other cities have seen a spate of horrific cases of animal cruelty. In early June, two men in the Liaqatabad neighborhood filmed a video exhorting a third man – Qasim, an impoverished cleaner – to throw a puppy off a balcony. The men hated dogs, saying they scared the local children, even though that puppy, small, and desperate with fear, could not have hurt anyone. Qasim allegedly did as he was asked. The puppy was flung off the balcony and died. 

After their video went viral, public outcry saw the poorest of the three men arrested. Qasim cut a familiar figure to anyone with knowledge of Pakistan’s corrupt policing – the fall guy, the character without connections who always pays the price for the crimes of the more powerful. Asad and Talat, the two men whose idea it allegedly was to torture the dog were not initially touched by the police, but because of the infamy of their video, they were eventually forced to turn themselves in. A case was registered against all three men but in a city where you can kill a man and walk free with no reasonable worry that the law will follow you, the chances that they will be punished before the law is slim. 

In the weeks that followed the Liaqatabad case, horror story after horror story captured Pakistan’s attention. In the barrack city of Rawalpindi, a donkey’s ears were severed, the victim of an argument over land between two farmers. In Hyderabad, about 124 miles from Karachi, a donkey cart rider allegedly broke his donkey’s legs and mutilated its private parts in a fit of anger. And in Sanghar, upper Sindh, a landlord allegedly amputated the leg of a camel belonging to a poor farmer after it strayed onto his land to forage. The landlord has not been arrested because the police can find “no evidence” against him. The man who owned the young camel, only 8 months old when its leg was hacked off with an axe, declined to identify the landlord to the police. Thanks once more to social media scandal and public anger, the police were forced to act. But not having the remit to arrest a landlord – a powerful figure in Sindh’s agricultural heartland – they filed what’s known as a first information report against “unknown persons.” Eventually, they arrested six local men who denied having anything to do with the crime. 

A Warning Sign

The horror with which animals are treated in Pakistani society is emblematic of an undercurrent of rage that always existed but seems to have spread dangerously in the post-pandemic years, a warning sign of the fury and alienation that lurks barely under the surface.

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky said that “the degree of a civilization can be judged by its prisons,” but he might have included how its animals are treated. Animal shelters throughout Karachi are flooded with cases of torture inflicted on dogs, donkeys, and other small animals. And while Karachi Zoo takes in ticket fees every day from visitors, its animals are starved and locked in empty, filthy cages and staff members are often denied their salaries for months.

“People are becoming bolder because there are no laws holding them accountable,” said Sarah Jahangir, the director of CDRS Benji Project for Animal Welfare and Rescue, a shelter in Karachi that took in both the donkey with the broken legs and the camel with the amputated leg.

The young camel is being looked after at CDRS where they are managing her infection and pain and working with the livestock department on a bionic solution that would enable her to stand again, critical to her health and survival. But the donkey’s chances of surviving were quite low, Jahangir told me when we spoke in July. “It’s a daily thing we see,” she continued, referring to the cases of abuse. “It’s getting worse and without harsh laws, people think ‘we can get away with murder’ because they literally can.” Days after I spoke to Jahangir, the donkey died. 

ACF Animal Rescue’s Chundrigar is working on exactly that. She worked with a law firm to put together a several thousand-page brief on animal rights laws from around the world, including Nepal, Turkey, and various Western countries, which presented the document to the Sindh Chief Minister. “It’s 2024 and Pakistan is still without active animal rights laws,” she told me, underscoring that “prioritizing the most vulnerable” benefits everyone in a society because it can only foster compassion. To her point, Chundrigar’s shelter, which has rescued and helped more than 35,000 animals also runs workshops for donkey cart drivers and local children, and goes into bazaars that sell and trade animals in the hope of educating and supporting those who work with animals. 

“One day, I saw a young man, in his twenties, cross a double main road, his hands full of mud,” Chundrigar said. “I was curious and worried about how he would cross safely with the crazy traffic.” While she was watching him, concerned that he would get walloped by a motorcyclist or a speeding truck, Chundrigar noticed the man march towards a clay bowl that some good Samaritan had left out filled with water for birds to drink from in the scorching Karachi heat. “He dumped all the mud in his hands inside the clean water as the pigeons were drinking,” Chundrigar recounted, “and started laughing when they began flapping their wings in distress.” People are uncomfortable when animals are in their natural, tranquil state, she concluded, they seem to relax only once the animal struggles and suffers. 

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Pakistan this week marked 77 years of independence. For those of us who love Pakistan, there is much to mourn. The pervasive cases of animal cruelty also reflect the contempt and destruction with which we treat our natural heritage. In May, a rare Indus Blind Dolphin was killed in Sindh apparently for fun; again a video circulated over the internet. Bulhan, as the dolphin is known locally, is one of the two surviving river dolphin species in the world that date back to creatures that swam the waters of this region 50 million years ago. There are six species of river dolphin in existence today, ours is the only blind one. A striped Hyena was recently killed in Balochistan. The International Union of Conservation of Nature lists the animal as near threatened; Bulhan is on its red list of endangered species. Senior WWF officials warned in July that Pakistan’s already critically endangered leopard population is at risk of vanishing entirely and the reason is unsurprising: the beautiful, rare leopards cannot survive their high rate of encounters with humans. We are destroying their forest cover, we are hunting them illegally for our shallow entertainment, we kill for fun, for sport. We are the plague. 

“Nothing and No One Is Spared”

The issue of cruelty on a micro level exists against a backdrop of very serious political crises. As I was writing this piece, I had to pause repeatedly to update it with newer cases of violence and cruelty – not just against animals but people as well. A spate of violence in the Shia-majority town of Parachinar in northern Pakistan saw at least 50 people killed by Sunni tribesmen and more than 200 wounded. Baloch protesters calling for the release of their leaders from prisons and demanding answers about the many cases of disappearances were arrested by security services. The government blocked highways to quell the protests and cracked down on the activists.

A man in the northern town of Swat was burned alive by a mob after being accused of blasphemy. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are so deadly that even mentioning the crime of an accused person can count as blasphemy. In any event, mobs do not need just cause to take the law into their hands, a mere accusation is enough and so charges of blasphemy are often used to settle petty enmities and grudges. The man was in police custody, already apprehended for his alleged crime, when he was killed. The mob beat him with a hammer, in the very presence of the institution that was supposed to protect him. After his murder, the man’s mother was forced to publicly disown him to keep herself and her other children safe. This was not a unique case. Another man in Sarghoda was lynched and killed in May on similar charges. 

The mobs have little true understanding of Islam, they are armed with fury, not scripture. In the same way, those who have tortured animals with the belief that the only life that is sacred is their own, know very little about what their religion believes about the sanctity of all life. There is an understanding in Islam that animals are, as we are, conscious of God. No matter that they cannot bend in supplication, in their being, creation, and beauty they are proof of the divine. As such, Islam forbids the killing of animals except for food or in the case where the animal has attacked a human and the violence is justified by defense. The Quran describes enemies of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as men “who strive throughout the land to cause corruption therein and destroy crops and animals.” The hadiths, stories of the Prophet’s life and actions recounted by his followers and close associates, are filled with accounts of the Prophet Muhammad protecting and nurturing animals and of God’s forgiveness to those who showed mercy to helpless creatures, including the story of a prostitute who noticed a dog panting out of desperate thirst. She went to a well and using her shoe drew water for the dog to drink from, an act of compassion that redeemed her enough for God to forgive her of all her sins. 

Pakistan is often spoken of as a country with a bottomless reserve of resilience. It would need it to weather its constant political storms. But this epidemic of cruelty forecasts something ominous and deep. “It is a sign of a society where nothing and no one is spared abuse,” as the Pakistani author, Rafia Zakaria, wrote after this ominous rash of abuse cases.

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In July, 20-year-old mother Sania Zehra was discovered hanging from a ceiling fan in her home in Multan. She was pregnant with her second child. Sania’s husband beat her, relatives say, and threatened her with violence if she did not sell a property and hand him the money. Though the forensic doctor present on the scene when her body was discovered noted her bruised eyes and her broken jaw, pressure allegedly applied to the Punjab police from somewhere has resulted in the narrative around this young woman’s grisly death morphing until it sounded like a different case altogether. She wasn’t pregnant, wasn’t beaten, wasn’t asphyxiated, and, according to her husband’s family, had committed suicide. Sania’s family strongly contested the claim and after convening a committee comprised of experts to look into the case, the Punjab Information Minister declared the case a homicide and accused Sania’s mother-in-law and husband of acting together to fake a claim of suicide. 

This month in Sindh, 22-year-old Sobia Batool Shah was sleeping when her father and other male relatives attacked her with a hatchet. They were angry that she was insisting on divorcing her husband – Islam has the most liberal divorce rights for women of any religion; in Pakistan, a woman need only select the right of divorce on her wedding papers and she can file for divorce whenever she wants. Sobia had been threatened by her father previously and she had gone to the courts for protection. They did nothing, suggesting she go live in a women’s shelter. 

Who will give Sania and Sobia justice in a country that’s ranked second to last in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap 2024 report? The police force that changes facts by the day? Will the courts that have failed sitting prime ministers be dedicated enough to devote themselves to the trials of ordinary men and women? It is unlikely. Till then, Sania’s father posted about the case on his Facebook, and Sobia, defiant in a hospital where she is being treated for her injuries, has finally been given police protection. Though her father was arrested, her brother is out on bail. “I am very scared,” she told the press. 

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What brings together Shah Rukh Khan, Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, John Cena, and Boris Johnson? The marriage of Anant Ambani, son of the richest man in India, and Radhika Merchant in a wedding so expensive and tasteless it will go down in history.

The festivities began in March when the youngest Ambani held a three-day “pre-wedding” party in the family hometown of Jamnagar, Gujarat, where the Ambanis own the largest oil refinery in the world. In May, they sailed the Mediterranean on a luxury cruise with 1,200 of their closest friends, docking in Portofino where they shut down the entire seashore to the ire of locals so Andrea Bocelli could serenade the young couple. Justin Bieber sang at their sangeet in July, and then, some $600 million later, they were finally married. Performing fealty at this kind of grotesque spectacle in the face of India’s surrounding poverty should give off the same smell that attending a Chechen warlord’s party does. Yet, over the course of their louche celebrations, the Ambanis welcomed freeloaders such as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the Clintons, and the Blairs. 

The family outdid each other night after night (and month after month), sporting obnoxiously extravagant jewelry. Nita Ambani, the mother of the blushing groom, wore a $59 million emerald necklace as she welcomed her guests with a terrifying rictus. To accommodate all the guests the Ambanis were flying over in a horde of private jets, the Indian government upgraded Jamnagar’s small airport into an international facility literally overnight, multiplying its staff and “deploying military and air force personnel in the service of the family.”

In 2013, Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan was asked if audiences would ever see a film with Bollywood’s three biggest stars altogether, SRK, as he is known, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan. “If you can afford, offer us a film,” SRK laughed before adding, “Son, you will go broke signing the three of us together.” But what is money to Mukesh Ambani – his $123 billion fortune makes him the 11th richest person in the world – who had all three Khans dancing at his son’s pre-wedding event like the sort of party entertainers a normal person might hire to perform magic tricks at their child’s birthday?

The Ambanis’ Reliance Industries is a $200 billion mega-conglomerate dealing in phones – they corner more than 40% of India’s mobile phone market – oil, online shopping, streaming, and more. While millions of poor Indians were forced to march by foot back to their home states during the COVID-19 pandemic, and an extraordinary 50% of Mumbai’s slum dwellers were infected by the virus, living in suffocatingly cramped quarters, Ambani senior faced no such hardship; he made $12 million an hour during that same period. In 2021, Oxfam calculated that it would take the average unskilled Indian worker “10,000 years to make what [Mukesh] Ambani made in an hour during the pandemic.”

The family is certainly no stranger to Versailles-style opulence. They live in Antilla, the world’s most expensive private residence, which can survive a magnitude 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale. It is a 27-story monstrosity that cost between $1 to 2 billion to construct, has six floors of parking, a helipad, an ice cream parlor, its own temple, and a permanent staff of 600 servants. It takes a serious amount of shamelessness to flaunt one's hideous wealth in one of the most unequal countries in the world. Though it is the second largest food producer after China, India is home to a quarter of the world’s underfed, with approximately 190 million hungry people. The poorest Indian states have infant mortality rates that supersede sub-Saharan Africa, according to Oxfam, and every second, about two Indians are pushed into poverty because of rising healthcare costs. For all its growing economic power, India’s spending on public healthcare is one of the world’s lowest; instead, the country has put its energy into expanding the rising commercial health sector. The bride’s father, a multi-millionaire in his own right, is the CEO of Encore Health, a top player in the field. 

This most recent Ambani wedding is not just significant in its extreme vulgarity; in their unrestrained flash, the Ambanis are the human embodiment of India’s dark confluence of money and right-wing Hindu extremism that has grown under Modi’s rule. Ahead of his nuptials, Anant was blessed by Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS), a quasi-fascist paramilitary organization that is the ideological heart of Hindutva, right-wing Hindu supremacy. Ambani senior is known to be a close associate of Modi – the prime minister is himself a lifelong RSS member – and the family was front and center at Modi’s inauguration of the Ram Temple earlier this year, a Hindu temple built on the grounds of a 16th-century mosque torn to the ground brick by brick by Indians in an orgy of violence in 1992. Modi was a star guest at the recent wedding festivities. 

Without their ability to throw freebies at former presidents, prime ministers, Instagram influencers, and actors and court a voyeuristic curiosity over their haute couture clothes and gems, perhaps more questions would be asked about the danger of this kind of wealth being so close to halls of Indian and global power. “Legally, it may be their money,” Kerala politician Thomas Isaac posted on social media, “but such ostentatious expenditure is a sin against mother earth and the poor.”

When one thinks of Bollywood, plenty springs to mind: hours of colorful drama, a propensity for musical numbers in the rain, and heroines twirling in the tightest clothing possible. You watch a Bollywood film for its exuberance and whimsy, not for its narrative clarity. Though there might have been a time, most notably in the 1970s, when the films captured the struggles of poor, working-class, and rural Indians those times are long gone. There are no moral lessons to be learned from Bollywood blockbusters today, no protagonists fighting the good fight against hierarchy or injustice. Contemporary heroes are the servants of unbridled capitalism, rich yuppies, or else the foot soldiers of a Hindu supremacist ideology, Hindutva, doing battle against Muslims.

It’s not that every director in Bollywood has mysteriously vanished only to be replaced with right-wing filmmakers; it’s that Bollywood has always reflected the mood of India, and the mood of India over the past decade has been dark. No one expects courage or defiance from Bollywood, on or off screen because, as a fraternity, India’s film industry has long been famous for its spinelessness.

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Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long reign, the majority of Bollywood and its actors have served as unofficial cheerleaders for the state, its increasingly incoherent economic policies, and right-wing politics. One star, actress Kangana Ranaut, who has long supported Modi, was even elected to Parliament this week.

But that win came against the backdrop of a surprise result. While Modi will stay in power for a third term, he has lost his majority and faces the uneasy prospect of heading a coalition government.

As Tuesday’s election returns rolled in, Indian journalist and author Rana Ayyub tweeted, “Will Bollywood now stop churning those mediocre, Islamophobic films?” It is a question many were wondering about. Hopefully, Modi’s diminished win and a surge of votes for the opposition will translate to a lifting of Bollywood’s cultural shift towards the right, but until it does, it’s important to look at just how complicit India’s film fraternity was in Modi’s political project. 

The Three Khans

When India was rocked by Modi’s snap decision in 2016 to demonetize, a decision that withdrew 86% of India’s currency from the market overnight, Aamir Khan – one of the three Khans, the largest Muslim stars of Bollywood – was on hand to buff the government’s unfathomable move. It was required for the nation’s growth, Khan – who, as far as anyone can tell, doesn’t have a degree in economics – pontificated. “I know common people are facing problems and I feel sad about it. Our prime minister has taken a good initiative and we must support him,” he continued. During his 2019 re-election campaign, Modi tweeted at Indian public figures and Bollywood stars every two minutes for an hour, urging them to use their influence to call voters to the polls. It was an unusual ask from a sitting head of state that no one dared leave unanswered. Many of the stars who received the ominous public request responded enthusiastically and quickly.

One star, however, took his time. Shah Rukh Khan, long considered Bollywood’s, if not India’s, most famous star, had a good excuse for his delay in responding. “The PM asked for creativity, I’m a bit late because I was making a video,” he tweeted in Hindi.  Shah Rukh had gone the extra mile for Modi, instead of just throwing together 120 character tweet, he made and starred in a minute-long flashy video, in which he rapped and bopped with a wind blower wafting through his thick hair, urging Indians to vote.

The third Khan, Salman, whose film reputation was crafted over decades to present him as the toughie of the three and who remains a hard-bodied, macho, action star in

his fifties, spent the early years of Modi’s rule supporting the prime minister's various initiatives, including a getting fit campaign, and was on hand for selfies whenever requested.  

But that was Modi’s first term. His second term saw the tide turn bleaker and more sinister as the government moved to disenfranchise Muslims with the Citizen’s Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens. As Modi’s power entrenched itself and its grip on the film industry tightened, Bollywood produced a barrage of films that looked as though the BJP had written them themselves.

There was ‘Uri,’ about a dashing “surgical strike” on Pakistan that, in reality, saw India engage in little more than standard cross-border firing and lose a pilot in enemy territory when his plane was shot down by the Pakistani air force during a dogfight. ‘Kesari’ (or saffron, the color of the Hindu Right) told the story of a Sikh regiment in the British colonial army that fought Pashtun warriors battling for independence. In the film’s telling, it is the Pashtun anti-colonialists who are “invaders,” not the British empire. Considering that Modi himself has referred to Muslims as “those with more children” in his speeches – “infiltrators” is another favorite – it is not difficult to guess who this line of thought is designed to please. Add to this, a roster of anti-Muslim tawdry titles such as ‘The Kashmir Files,’ ‘The Kerala Story,’ and ‘Razakar’ among many others. 

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As Modi heads into a third term, Bollywood stars don’t seem simply compliant but rather sycophantic and zealous proponents of Modi’s politics.

This year, the BJP inaugurated the Ram Temple in Ayodha, a right-wing prize accomplishment decades in the making, marking the culmination of a hate-filled campaign that saw ordinary Indians tear down a 16th-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, after the party claimed it had been built by the Mughals over the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. The opening ceremony of the new temple saw the rare mingling of both film industry A-listers and D-graders as they flocked to be photographed, with many wearing saffron sashes over their designer outfits. 

Silence on Gaza

There’s no debate over the fact that many Hollywood stars have been gutless cowards when it comes to protesting Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, choosing instead to expend their efforts on writing open thank-you letters to President Biden for his leadership and organizing glitzy fundraisers for a president with a 39% approval rating. Bollywood has been nearly as pathetic as evincing even a modicum of compassion for the besieged and starved population of Gaza. Minus actors like Sonam Kapoor and Swara Bhaskar who have been very vocal, young actresses like Kani Kusruti who wore a watermelon handbag on the Cannes red carpet, and a handful of others who shared the AI image of All Eyes of Rafah and posted news stories on their social media, Bollywood’s elite has been studiously silent. 

Shah Rukh Khan, beloved by Muslims all over the world, has posted nothing about Gaza. His X account is devoted totally to himself: an assault of film promo tweets, selfies with celebrities like David Beckham, and faux genuine replies to fans (“I love you too” and so on). 

Salman Khan fares no better, tweeting goo like “It is so cool to see our Hon PM Narendrabhai Modi at the beautiful, clear n stunning beaches of Lashshwadeep, and the best part is yeh hamara India mein hai” (and the best part is this is in our India). Aamir Khan, the intellectual, doesn’t sully himself with social media in general. Of course, one is free to post and tweet about whatever one likes, but it is telling that India’s three largest Muslim stars are either unconcerned by the horrors of Gaza or too afraid to say anything that goes against the Indian government’s pro-Israeli stand. 

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While Modi’s government has paid lip service here and there to the relentless slaughter of Gaza, their position has been pretty clear. Not long after the start of the war on Gaza, India abstained from a UN General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. They later voted in favor of a resolution calling for the unconditional release of all hostages and abstained from voting for an Israeli arms embargo. It is a drastic fall for a country once considered a loyal ally of the Palestinian cause. M.K Gandhi, in his time, believed that “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French,” but he is no longer the spiritual father to those who lead the nation. Today, Gandhi has been replaced with V.D Savarkar, the ideological father of Hindutva who was an ardent admirer of both the Nazis and early Zionists. Savarkar simultaneously believed that “Nazism is undeniably the savior of Germany” and also proclaimed that “if the Zionists’ dreams are ever realized, if Palestine becomes a Jewish State, it will gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.” 

Under Modi’s stewardship, India has become the world’s largest buyer of Israeli weapons, importing $2.9 billion in military equipment in the last decade. At least 37% of all Israeli military exports go to India. Modi was also an avid buyer of Israeli spy surveillance which he reportedly used to spy on his opponents, journalists, and human rights activists. He was the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel in 2017 and oversaw deals such as the one between one of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers, Elbit Systems, and the Adani Group to make Hermes 900 drones in India which would then be shipped back to Israel for home use. The Hyderabad-based joint venture, Adani Elbit, sent 20 of the first India-made Hermes drones to Israel in February to bolster the military’s operations. Recently, India was caught red-handed when Spain stopped a ship carrying 27 tonnes of explosive material from calling at its port as it made its way from Chennai to Haifa. Sending 27 tonnes of explosives to Israel in the middle of its genocide is more than just a friendly gesture, though Modi’s India has made plenty of those too. 

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Though Pakistan, my country, is in no great shape itself – facing an economic breakdown, a dirty political crisis that has jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and a crackdown on information that has resulted in a Twitter ban across the country – India has widely been given the inglorious honor of being named the global capital of disinformation and misinformation. According to the World Economic Forum's 2024 Global Risk Report, India is at the highest risk globally for misinformation and disinformation. Pakistan ranks in the top 10. 

Many tweeting or posting about Gaza these past eight months will have noticed the volume of Indian trolls in the responses – but the truth is more disturbing than just troll farms lending an ally a hand. The false rumor about the 40 beheaded babies was widely disseminated by Indian news media including NDTV, Republic TV, and The Times of India. I googled “NDTV” and the debunked “40 beheaded babies” story and, counting its YouTube, found four hits all with lurid headlines promoting the fake news story. I couldn’t find anything on NDTV about the real story of the Palestinian baby beheaded by Israel’s tent massacre in Rafah. One story was constructed out of Israeli talking points about the bloody attack with zero mention of Ahmed Al Najjar, the baby whose mutilated body was held before the cameras by its father.

After Election, Will Bollywood See a Shift?

As 600 million Indian voters headed to the polls, a series of deepfake videos went viral. The AI-generated videos were of Aamir Khan and another star, Ranveer Singh, criticizing Modi and urging voters to cast their support for the opposition. In his video, referring to unemployment and inflation, Singh bemoans “our India heading towards a time of injustice at such a pace.” Ironically, Singh’s doctored lines came from a real video of him gushing about Modi. Visiting the Kashi Vishwanath Shiva temple in Uttar Pradesh, Singh praised Modi’s “vision” of celebrating Indian culture, going on to say “India is progressing towards modernity at a remarkable pace.” Though the videos got some million views, audiences should have known immediately that they were fake – no Bollywood star would dare criticize the sitting prime minister and no big shot would have the temerity to voice a public opinion about injustice.

One dreads to think what kind of unwatchable films Bollywood will churn out with five more years of Modi. Hopefully, India’s turn away from a full Modi majority will mean a similar shift in Bollywood but one thing is for sure: having a spine in Bollywood is a major obstacle to stardom. 

Look out for The Global South every month. I’ll write about everything from geopolitics to humanitarian issues to pop culture. If you aren’t already signed up to receive The Global South, subscribe now and be sure to select my newsletter.

When I was a freshman at Barnard College, two months into college life and terribly homesick, the second intifada erupted. Sitting in my dorm, I watched the footage of Israeli soldiers killing 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah as he crouched behind his father in Gaza. The young boy’s body was contorted in fear as his father tried to shelter him from Israeli bullets. Even in the grainy footage, you could see Muhammad crying out, helpless and afraid. I have never forgotten his face. It has been seared in my memory ever since. 

That horrific killing and the tumultuous events in America and worldwide would become the backdrop of my college life – Israel’s brutality in trying to quash the second Intifada, 9/11, the neoconservative U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush’s first term, the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Students across campus felt the same horror and fury that I did, and we gathered in defiance of the violence of the ruling classes – to protest it, to speak for a better world, and to learn from each other. Watching the students leading today’s protests sweeping college campuses, including at Barnard, I see that what we had then was just a spark. Today, it is a conflagration.  

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Growing up in Syria and coming from a family that was resolutely pro-Palestinian (my father wore a keffiyeh on his wedding day), I had been raised in the shadow of Israel’s violent occupation and apartheid. But it was not until college that I had ever attended a protest in solidarity with dispossessed Palestinians. During the second intifada and throughout my time at Barnard, an affiliate of and located across from Columbia University, I wore a keffiyeh in the winter to protect against the cold and went to all the protests, sit-ins, class strikes, and die-ins. It was in New York, on the same campus police swarmed this year, that I joined hundreds of other students to call for divestment from Israel even then, though at the time, it seemed a faraway dream. The gatherings were what we could muster against a cruel and indifferent world, and those of us who attended came with but slivers of hope in our hearts that one day, someday, that world would tremble with solidarity for Palestine. I truly never thought I would live to see the day. But as Malcolm X said to a woman despairing that there were too few like-minded people to make a difference, “Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are.”

Even though I was a college student at the paranoid time of the Patriot Act and pervasive anti-Muslim surveillance and policing, I never felt unsafe at any of the protests. I felt reasonably assured that my university wouldn’t hand me over to the state for reading Franz Fanon or the Oxford University short history on terrorism. The president of Columbia at the time never called the NYPD to put down any of the student protests. It was, after all, a time when the university stood up for academic freedom. Columbia remained behind Professor Edward Said when Zionist activists agitated to have him stripped of his tenure after he was photographed hurling a rock across the southern Lebanese border into Israel. It seems, however, that those days are over. 

From ‘Mandela Hall’ to ‘Hind’s Hall’

At the invitations of university administrators nationwide, police clad in riot gear have, over the last few weeks, swarmed campuses, arresting thousands of protesters peacefully calling for the very thing students were demanding more than two decades ago.

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At Columbia, president Minouche Shafik invited the notoriously brutal NYPD in against the very student body she is charged with protecting and appearing to give them carte blanche to carry out the largest on-campus mass arrests since 1968. Some of the most distressing images came out of Hamilton Hall, a Columbia building that students occupied demanding divestment from Israel, financial transparency over the university’s $14 billion endowment, and amnesty for all the student participants. Instead of entering a serious and genuine dialogue over those demands, including divestment, the university allowed police to arrest and assault protesters. According to Students for Justice in Palestine, police pushed one student down the stairs, rendering them unconscious, after which point they were denied medical care. 

Despite this disproportionate violence, Columbia students are carrying on a proud legacy. In the last seven months of Israel’s relentless assault and nightmarish genocide, it was footage of Columbia students unfurling a banner renaming Hamilton “Hind’s Hall” after the six-year-old martyr Hind Rajab that gave me an electrical feeling I had almost forgotten: hope. Hind sat in a car with her murdered family, her small voice trembling on a phone line to the Palestinian Red Crescent as she begged to be rescued from Israeli fire only to be killed by them too. “We cannot act for our Palestinian comrades,” the Columbia student communique read, “but we see them; we are with them.” It was signed on behalf of The People’s University for a Liberated Palestine and released on the 206th day of Israel’s genocide. 

It was their forebearers who, less than four decades earlier, occupied the same Hamilton Hall for about three weeks, chaining and padlocking its doors shut and renaming it “Mandela Hall” – in order to force divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. It was their agitation that made Columbia University, in 1985, the first Ivy League school to announce it would sever all financial links with the apartheid regime, committing to divest 4% of its portfolio.

Yale University had an encampment against apartheid, Harvard students occupied the Dean’s office, and activists at the University of California Berkeley launched sit-ins, boycotts, and agitation against their university that lasted a year and a half before the University of California regents pulled about $3 billion dollars out of corporations doing business with apartheid South Africa in 1986. It made history as the largest university divestment in the country and was so significant that after he was released from prison, Nelson Mandela made a special journey to Berkeley to thank his “blood brothers and sisters” for their part in toppling apartheid. 

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Ultimately, at least 155 American universities divested from apartheid South Africa, bowing to students' demands nearly identical to today’s: no more business with corporations turning profits from apartheid. It was their action that turned the tide globally and forced Western governments to enact changes they had long resisted. The European community didn’t ban certain investments in South Africa until September 1986, while the U.S. Congress successfully overturned President Ronald Reagan’s veto to impose economic sanctions the following month – more than a year after students globally forced the issue to the forefront.

Today’s pundits who say that divestment from Israel is impossible are, at best, uninformed and out of touch, but mostly, they are pernicious peddlers of a status quo that is dead in the water. It was Columbia students who successfully pressured the university to cut its investments in not just companies linked to apartheid South Africa, but also in private prisons, tobacco companies, Sudan, and fossil fuels. 

Why Should Universities Be Allowed Quiet and Calm?

Columbia University’s brutal crackdown on student activists has set off a national movement of student intifadas. Students at more than 150 universities have since set up their own encampments or held protests to rally for divestment from Israel. Students at Princeton took over university property. Mumia Abu-Jamal, the imprisoned political activist and founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party, spoke to students at CUNY, the largest public urban university in the United States, and exhorted them to “not bow to those who want you to be silent.”

Activists at Harvard – whose endowment is the heftiest at $50 billion – read the names of Palestinian martyrs in Gaza as administrators collected their IDs to mark them for punishment. When administrators handed out disciplinary slips to protesters, they handed their own back. “There are no remaining universities in Gaza. The genocide of Palestinians is far more disruptive to education than anything Harvard students have done, but about this violence, the University is completely silent,” the slips said. They also listed the Gazan death toll – nearing 35,000 murdered at the time – and ended with the following in bold:

Repeated violations of our moral duty to liberation will result in increased disruption. Universities that remain complicit in genocide may not be granted peace. 

And why should universities be allowed the necessary quiet and calm so that they may reap the profits of investing in Israeli spyware, surveillance, and weaponry used to slaughter children? It is not a coincidence that Israel has destroyed or damaged 80% of the schools in Gaza and, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “systematically destroyed every university,” in the enclave, blowing up the last standing higher learning institute, Israa University by reportedly detonating 315 mines in January. Palestinians have one of the highest literacy rates in the world and have, in the past, been called some of “the most thoroughly educated people in the world.” In its concentrated scholasticide, Israel has targeted UNRWA schools and murdered at least 5,479 students, 261 teachers, 95 university professors, poets, translators, and writers. Students in Gaza have not attended school since at least Nov. 6, 2023, when the academic year was suspended due to the ferocity of Israeli strikes. 

I have no doubt that today’s student protesters will be successful. Already, more than 70 public and private universities that make up the Spanish University Confederation have announced they will cut research ties with Israeli universities. Trinity College in Dublin agreed to divest, London’s Goldsmiths College conceded to protesters’ demands, and Evergreen State College and the Columbia-affiliated Union Theological Seminary have announced that they will start or work towards selling all their shares in companies financially invested in Israel’s war and occupation. 

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“Americans keep wondering what has ‘got into’ the students,” the writer James Baldwin wrote during the civil rights movement and the era of Vietnam war protests, “what has ‘got into’ them is their history in this country.” It was a country whose history was rotten – all the moral and political evidence demonstrated as much. Being educated, both students and teachers, Baldwin felt, had a duty not only to be at war with that rot, but also to transform it. It is telling that Columbia’s students – and university students across the country and the world – have historically risen against the state in protest over its wars, violence, and treacherous policies against the marginalized and impoverished. America’s version of itself as a moral actor in the world is betrayed again and again by ferocious violence in practice. Today, it is not just America’s cold military power that has defended and armed a genocide that the student intifada has exposed, but the nexus between the Israeli military and police brutality, as well as the lies of a media apparatus operating purely in bad faith. 

About student protesters, Baldwin wrote in an essay that could be about our present moment, “The great significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably expressed.”

Look out for The Global South every month. I’ll write about everything from geopolitics to humanitarian issues to pop culture. If you aren’t already signed up to receive The Global South, subscribe now and be sure to select my newsletter.

Nearly a month ago, I gave birth to my first child. Though I had read all the books and watched all the videos and spent nine months preparing, I was blindsided by the pain of childbirth. With every luxury afforded to me – doctor, midwives, anesthesia, care, a safe hospital, a bed to recover in, food to sustain me, warm shelter, and clothing for me and my child – I still struggled with the pain and intensity of childbirth. And every time I felt frightened, I remembered Gaza and felt ashamed. 

I have been haunted by Gaza since Israel began its genocidal assault more than six months ago; haunted by the utterly preventable deaths of babies in neonatal wards, unable to have even a fighting chance at life by the shockingly cruel Israeli attacks on hospitals coupled with electricity and fuel blockades. Doctors in the Al Emirati hospital, the main maternity hospital in Rafah, told the United Nations Population Fund that prior to Oct. 7, their incubator unit had capacity for 10 babies at any given time. Now, they are caring for 70 premature babies, with multiple newborns sharing the same beds. There is only one ventilator in the ward, which means it is up to the doctors to make the nightmarish choice of which premature baby with respiratory issues, will get the care that will save their lives. They cannot all be saved. 

“Bringing a baby into the world should be a moment of celebration for a family,” Joe English, a UNICEF spokesperson told me over the phone last week, “but at the moment it is pure terror to hope, to pray, that you’re able to bring a healthy child into the world and that they’ll be able to survive.” There is almost nowhere in the world “where it is more desperate a time to be a pregnant woman, he added.” By the end of March, 31,000 babies had been born into this war, according to English. Beyond the 52,000 pregnant women in Gaza, 183 of whom give birth a day, an additional 105,000 breastfeeding women are being intentionally starved by Israel, which has stopped critical aid from entering Gaza. Without adequate calorie intake and water to drink, these women cannot feed their infants. Without clean water, new mothers cannot even feed their babies formula. 

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Tanya Haj Hassan, a doctor with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), has said that even in the womb, fetuses are being “sentenced to death” due to the stress faced by their mothers during pregnancy. Health organizations have reported that Palestinian women have faced an extraordinary 300% surge in miscarriages since Oct. 7 and various UN agencies have noted that half of pregnant women in Gaza are anemic, which increases the risk of preterm births and low birthweights. Women cannot give birth safely, and once they have given birth, there is no certainty that either they or their babies will survive. 

And yet, not only is Gaza not a universal feminist touchstone, but it also barely seems to register at all for some of the world’s most famous feminists. Appearing on the late-night talk show circuit, Hillary Clinton sneered at voters disillusioned with the prospect of voting for Donald Trump or a president who has actively aided and abetted a genocide to “get over yourself.” Those are the two choices, the hawkish Clinton lectured, going on to describe President Joe Biden as “effective and compassionate and (he) has a heart and really cares about people,” for his negatives, she only conceded that he was “old.” That he is old is the least disparaging thing you can say about a president who has generously ensured Israel doesn’t run out of 2,000 lb bombs to continue its ferocious carpet bombing of Gaza even after the International Court of Justice found that it was plausible that Israel’s campaign amounted to genocide. 

While Clinton is a particular breed of war-mongering feminist – the kind who gave speeches supporting the anti-hijab protests in Iran but continuously refuses to call for a ceasefire or press Israel on its wanton slaughter of women and children in Gaza – many Western feminists seem to have found themselves tongue-tied to the point of incoherence when it comes to the rights of Palestinian women. Brené Brown, the author and corporate motivator, wrote a rambling word salad of utter nonsense titled, ‘Not Looking Away: Thoughts on the Israel-Hamas War’ in February. Four months into Israel’s genocide, at a time when doctors and aid agencies were already sounding the alarm over the fact that 1 in 5 pregnant women was suffering malnourishment and the UN had projected that more than half a million Gazans faced “catastrophic conditions characterized by lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities,” Brown stretched the limits of intelligible language with a statement of milquetoast drivel. “I do believe that people have the right to defend themselves,” she wrote, “AND I believe the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the killing of thousands of innocent Palestinian people in response to the Hamas attacks is an unacceptable human rights violation.” 

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I cannot help hearing Carrie Bradshaw’s voice as I imagine Brown thinking deeply over her laptop as she parrots Israeli talking points about Hamas using civilians as “human shields” while she wonders to herself what role Iran has in all this (“not to be confused with the incredible people of Iran.”) Brown, unlike Clinton, at least professes to care about the human rights of Palestinians. But like all other white feminists, she is unable to speak of Palestinian suffering except as an unfortunate consequence of their own making. Israel is spared culpability and criminality, it is absolved of apartheid, femicide, infanticide – here too, the likes of Gloria Steinem would join Brown in reducing the totality of Israeli oppression to the lonely figure of Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who, according to this logic, if voted out, would take all of Israel’s murderous unpleasantness with him. 

The 50 French actresses and public figures who felt so moved by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody in Iran after breaching the country’s hijab rules, that they came together to record a video of themselves trimming their hair in solidarity with Iranian women, have made no such video for their sisters in Gaza. Under the embarrassing hashtag #hairforfreedom, Juliette Binoche, Marion Cotillard, and others cut their tresses while staring dolefully at the camera. “It is impossible not to denounce again and again this terrible repression,” the caption to their video read. “The dead are already numbered in the dozens, including children.”

While Binoche has come out in favor of a ceasefire, the 9,671 dead women in Gaza and 15,370 slaughtered children have warranted no public acts of sisterhood from any of the public figures who made videos, wore t-shirts, posted, and bellowed the Iranian cry of Women, Life, Freedom during the Iranian protests against the veil. 

Gaza has also shown us that playing a feminist on the big screen is no guarantee of having any actual compassion for women in real life. Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress known for playing Wonder Woman, posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed after delivering her fourth child. “The pregnancy was not easy,” she wrote, “and we made it through.” The best you can say for the post is that Gadot — who served in the Israeli military during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah and has publicly supported Israel’s bombing of Gaza in the past — is shamelessly tone-deaf given her country’s near-total destruction of Gazan medical facilities. Israeli bombardment has rendered a third of hospitals partially functional while two-thirds of primary health facilities have closed down. The worst you can say is that her post is heartless. Israel’s war on Gaza has left thousands of pregnant Palestinian women to give birth in tents and on roadsides. Those who have had cesarean sections are being discharged from hospitals as early as three hours after giving birth, endangering their and their infant’s lives. Since Israel has blockaded electricity, fuel, medical supplies, and drugs, doctors have described using the light from their cell phones during operations, performing c-sections without anesthesia, and keeping newborn infants warm with tins of hot water. 

The hypocrisy of Western feminists is not a new discovery. Their shallow version of women’s liberty only surfaces when the issue of women’s rights aligns with Western political interests, wars, and agendas – you can always rely on a Western feminist to be outraged over women’s issues in Afghanistan or Iran but never bothered by the status of women in MBS's Saudi Arabia or Narendra Modi’s India, which a Thomson Reuters 2018 poll found was the most dangerous country for women due to high rates of sexual violence and incidence of women being forced into slave labor. 

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Barbie is the patron saint of this brand of feminism, a plastic doll with perfect hair and hip-to-waist ratio who lives in a mansion and drives a convertible. It has no interest in the majority of the world’s women whose aspirations are more simple than owning their own private jet and who labor and fight for the most basic of dreams: to live and work safely, to feed their children, to keep their loved ones healthy and free of harm. Gaza has exposed how meaningless feminism is when it mobilizes its global forces against a piece of clothing but not against a live-streamed genocide whose primary victims are women. Seventy percent of those killed by Israel’s war in Gaza are women and children. In the end, Western feminism will not be betrayed by the patriarchy nor by Trump or Rishi Sunak or any of the interchangeable right-wing men in power, rather it will be undone by its own foot soldiers: women who have been silent over the worst crimes our generation has witnessed in our lifetime. 

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