Geopolitical Realignments
The geopolitical dimension of Donald Trump’s second term is the center of debate and speculation. While some anticipate that his 2025 inauguration will be remembered as the beginning of a new era, others contend that US hegemony will not be decisively affected by the theatrics or erratic behavior of its 47th president. Judging from its first months, the Trump administration is undeniably committed to the destruction of the international liberal order that its predecessors saw as the expression of the country’s exceptionalism. At the same time, MAGA 2.0’s agenda resonates with much of the worldview that America’s main competitors have been holding for some time. Rather than its dawn therefore, the return of Donald Trump marks the belated entry of the United States into the new age of international relations.
The world in which the champion of America First is inserting himself has been called “multipolar”, even by his own Secretary of State. Indeed, today’s world is neither divided between two blocs – antagonistic yet determined to avoid direct confrontation – nor subjected to the rulings of an ostensibly unified, albeit Western-led, international community. Though often engaged in fierce economic competition, the members of the illiberal coterie that Donald Trump has joined differ from previous imperial powers insofar as they are equally disinclined to export an ideology and to impose universal norms. Far from wishing to gratify the whole of humanity with a superior socio-economic system or an enviable way of life, their objective is to grant their own people – often defined in ethnic or religious terms – the privilege of settling and being the only true citizens in the land.
Versions of this project – i.e. national regeneration through territorial expansion – include the absorption of the “Russian World” (Russkiï mir) into the Russian Federation, the application of the “One China” principle (Yīgè zhōngguó) to irredentist islands, the reconfiguration of India into the Hindu National Home (hindu rashtra), the conversion of New Turkey (Yeni Türkyie) to pan-turkism, and the return of “Judea” and “Samaria” to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel). Though arriving late to the party, Donald Trump seems to have caught up with his fellow predators by adding territorial claims – from Panama to Greenland and Canada – to the ethno-cultural cleansing agenda of MAGA 1.0.
To explore the state of international relations in this context involves taking account of: (1) the distinctive features of the domination that regional powers seek to exercise over their neighbors; (2) the ways in which these top dogs manage their relationships with one another (particularly, how they balance the pursuit of competing ambitions with expressions mutual respect); (3) the tragic consequences of their entente for the peoples who have the misfortune of living in the territories over which they claim exclusive sovereignty; (4) the conditions under which nationalist leaders of more modest stature succeed in becoming junior partners in the global oligarchy; and (5) the options that the new world order affords to states whose territorial integrity is not immediately under threat.
EXTRACTIVISM, GREEN AND BROWN
Interview conducted on 14 March 2025
"When I talk about green capitalism, it is kind of a mix of productive forces that are already deployed to produce certain products that at least are justified because they have some role in greening the economy, whether that's a lithium battery or lower carbon steel, but also unproven technologies like geoengineering or carbon capture."
GENOCIDAL INTENT
Interview conducted on 26 January 2025
"The genocide requires the intent to destroy people in whole or in part, or any protected group, in whole or in part. And the way to understand it is not really to just look at the evidence, but at the relation between evidence. So, in fact, it's become a meta-process. It's evidence about evidence."
Portraits
Raphaël Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Jewish Polish lawyer trained at the Lwów law school (now Lviv, Ukraine), who escaped to Sweden and eventually to the United States after the occupation of Poland by the Nazis. He coined the term genocide and was pivotal in clarifying its multifaceted legal definition, with which state-led mass murder could be criminalized.
In the early 1920s, Lemkin was already scrutinizing the systematic elimination of the Armenian people that had accompanied the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Then, two decades later, he became one of the first legal scholars who not only perceived the specific nature of the crimes committed against the European Jews, but who also extended the notion of genocide to instances of settler colonial violence, such as the treatment received by some Slavic groups during the Second World War.
As outlined in his major research on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, genocide “is intended (…) to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group1.”
1 Raphael LEMKIN, Axis rule in occupied Europe : laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress, Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944, p. 79.
Francesca Albanese
Francesca Albanese is an Italian international lawyer and academic affiliated to Georgetown University and the organization Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development. She has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories since 2022, and her three year mandate was renewed in 2025.
Since her first report, calling for action to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime, including through boycotts and sanctions, Albanese has personally been the target of recurrent smear campaigns, along with delegitimation attempts against the United Nations. Her latest report presented in March 2024 at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva expounded detailed evidence for Israel’s intentional enactment of at least three “genocidal acts” against the Palestinians.
She is currently preparing a report on Israel's experimentation with new military technology, such as remote-controlled quadcopters, autonomous lethal weapons and killer robots.
Friedrich Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was a German geographer and zoologist who had a major influence on German geopolitical thought at the turn of the 20th century. Intoxicated by his social Darwinism, he developed dubious biologistic concepts to describe the differential development of states and their spatial expansion.
His ideas are considered a decisive impetus for the “Lebensraum” ideology of National Socialism, the postulate that a strong and self-sufficient nation-state requires ample space and resources to feed its population and support its industry, which in turn legitimizes plundering neighboring territories.
Eighty years after Hitler’s defeat, Ratzel’s infamous concept seems to be enjoying a rebirth of sorts, at least among the advocates of a “Russian World” that would absorb Ukraine, of a “Land of Israel” that would annex the West bank and Gaza, and even of a “Greater America” that would range from Greenland to the Panama Canal and even include Canada
Clyde Snow
“Being dead is not a problem, dying is.” Clyde Snow often repeated these words, as the bodies he autopsied lay at the bottom of mass graves. An expert listener to such silent witnesses, the American medical examiner and anthropologist spent years reconstructing the story of their final hours by documenting the traces of abuse, torture, beatings, or execution engraved in their bones. Snow’s work was ultimately aimed at identifying these bodies and restoring their dignity.
Forensic anthropology began in 1865, when Clara Barton was commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to identify unknown soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield during the Civil War. In 1984, the discipline took on a new dimension. Clyde Snow's expertise was then called upon in Argentina, where it was no longer just a matter of restoring the identity of human remains, but of proving, through anthropometric study, the “dirty war” waged from 1976 to 1983 by the military dictatorship of General Videla.
Clyde Snow enthusiastically accepted the mission, seeing it as an important new application of forensic anthropology: documenting human rights violations. He thus headed to the mass graves where death squads had piled up some of the 30,000 desaparecidos. Bullet wounds and perimortem fractures were among the evidence that the anthropologist then presented at the trial of the Argentine generals responsible for these massacres, leading to the conviction of five of them.
In Croatia, he discovered the remains of 200 patients and hospital staff executed by soldiers. In El Salvador, he found the skeletons of 136 children and infants who had been shot by army squads. In the Philippines, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rwanda, Chile... all over the world, Clyde Snow has excavated bodies from mass graves and provided evidence of atrocities committed by governments, dictatorial regimes and generals, so that those responsible can be brought to justice. As one of the main witnesses at Saddam Hussein’s trial for genocide against the Kurdish ethnic group in 2007, the anthropologist stood for four hours presenting detailed forensic evidence of the use of sarin gas and summary executions.
A member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Clyde Snow became the father of a movement that put forensic anthropology at the service of human rights campaigns against genocide, massacres, and war crimes. In more than 20 countries, he scientifically and psychologically trained experts in excavation techniques designed to preserve evidence, identify human remains in conflict situations, and reconstruct the conditions of their death.
Bones never lie and never forget, Clyde Snow used to say. “Their testimony is silent, but very eloquent.”
Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Ghassan Abu Sittah is a British-Palestinian surgeon, who regularly intervenes in conflict and crisis situations, including in Palestine where he first came as a medical student at the time of the First Intifada. During the Nakba, his father’s family were expelled from their land and became refugees in the Gaza Strip, before moving to Kuwait and later to the United Kingdom.
Amidst the urgency of October 2023, Abu Sittah once again returned to Gaza to volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, performing numerous amputations and other procedures at al-Shifa, al-Awda, and al-Ahli hospitals. The latter was targeted by a first Israeli attack on October 17 of that year, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, as Abu Sittah was conducting an operation inside the hospital.
With his first-hand experience of devastating injuries, including burns caused by white phosphorus, he has supported multiple investigations into war crimes. There have been multiple attempts to silence Abu Sittah and to suspend his medical license. In April 2024, Germany banned him from obtaining a visa for one year in the entirety of the Schengen area.
Moshe Dayan
For anyone who came of age during the Cold War, and particularly among supporters of Israel, Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) is an iconic figure. One of the first prominent Israeli politicians to be born in Palestine, he joined the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organization, at the age of 14, before enlisting in the British Army during World War II. From the declaration of independence in 1948 until his death in 1981, Moshe Dayan held numerous positions in the army and government: he was Chief of Staff from 1955 to 1958, Minister of Agriculture in the early 1960s, Minister of Defense in the governments of Levi Eshkol during the Six-Day War and Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War, and finally Menachem Begin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1977 and 1979, at the time of the peace negotiations with Egypt.
A fervent supporter of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Dayan campaigned after 1967 for a dual strategy of quelling resistance while integrating Palestinians into the Israeli economy, notably through the widespread distribution of work permits.
Moshe Dayan's name has recently returned to the headlines because of a famous eulogy: On April 30, 1956, the then chief of staff of the army visited the Nahal Oz kibbutz on the Gaza Strip border to pay tribute to Ro'i Rothberg, a kibbutznik killed the day before by Palestinian refugees who had returned to the place from which they had been expelled eight years earlier.
Moshe Dayan's speech remains famous in Israel, mainly because it called on Israelis never to let their guard down. However, it is the fact that the Nahal Oz kibbutz was one of the places most violently attacked by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, that has brought it back into the spotlight. For advocates of Israeli “reprisals,” Moshe Dayan's call for uncompromising firmness in 1956 is more relevant than ever today. But critics of the ongoing destruction of Gaza focus on two other aspects of the famous general's speech.
First, they recall that when Moshe Dayan took the floor at Nahal Oz, he began his speech as follows: “Yesterday morning, Ro'i was murdered. Intoxicated by the serenity of dawn, he did not see those who were waiting for him in ambush at the edge of the plowed field. But let us not cast shame on his murderers. Why blame them for the burning hatred they feel toward us? For eight years they have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their very eyes we have made our own the land and villages where they and their ancestors lived. It is not the Arabs of Gaza we should ask to account for Ro'i's blood, but ourselves. How could we have closed our eyes and refused to face our destiny and the mission of our generation, in all its cruelty?”
Second, as historian Omer Bartov points out, Moshe Dayan’s lucidity proved short-lived. For when he recorded his eulogy for Israeli radio the next day, there was no trace of the passage about the refugees and their good reasons for rejecting the settlers rule1.
1Omer Bartov, As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel, The Guardian, 13 August 2024
Yosef Weitz
Yosef Weitz (1890-1972) was one of Modern Israel’s founding fathers, emigrating from present-day Ukraine in 1908 to champion the Zionist cause, becoming director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) during the Mandatory Period.
He had a notorious role in the frantic expropriation of Palestinian lands, and in consolidating the war’s spoils over decades through agriculture and arboriculture. He thereby implemented Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben Gurion’s call to “make the desert bloom”, all the while uprooting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands. The Ottoman property laws, taken up by the British mandate and then by the Israeli occupation, were employed to legitimize, through its cultivation, colonial ownership of the land seized from the local population.
Raphaël Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Jewish Polish lawyer trained at the Lwów law school (now Lviv, Ukraine), who escaped to Sweden and eventually to the United States after the occupation of Poland by the Nazis. He coined the term genocide and was pivotal in clarifying its multifaceted legal definition, with which state-led mass murder could be criminalized.
In the early 1920s, Lemkin was already scrutinizing the systematic elimination of the Armenian people that had accompanied the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Then, two decades later, he became one of the first legal scholars who not only perceived the specific nature of the crimes committed against the European Jews, but who also extended the notion of genocide to instances of settler colonial violence, such as the treatment received by some Slavic groups during the Second World War.
As outlined in his major research on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, genocide “is intended (…) to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group1.”
1 Raphael LEMKIN, Axis rule in occupied Europe : laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress, Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944, p. 79.
Francesca Albanese
Francesca Albanese is an Italian international lawyer and academic affiliated to Georgetown University and the organization Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development. She has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories since 2022, and her three year mandate was renewed in 2025.
Since her first report, calling for action to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime, including through boycotts and sanctions, Albanese has personally been the target of recurrent smear campaigns, along with delegitimation attempts against the United Nations. Her latest report presented in March 2024 at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva expounded detailed evidence for Israel’s intentional enactment of at least three “genocidal acts” against the Palestinians.
She is currently preparing a report on Israel's experimentation with new military technology, such as remote-controlled quadcopters, autonomous lethal weapons and killer robots.
Friedrich Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was a German geographer and zoologist who had a major influence on German geopolitical thought at the turn of the 20th century. Intoxicated by his social Darwinism, he developed dubious biologistic concepts to describe the differential development of states and their spatial expansion.
His ideas are considered a decisive impetus for the “Lebensraum” ideology of National Socialism, the postulate that a strong and self-sufficient nation-state requires ample space and resources to feed its population and support its industry, which in turn legitimizes plundering neighboring territories.
Eighty years after Hitler’s defeat, Ratzel’s infamous concept seems to be enjoying a rebirth of sorts, at least among the advocates of a “Russian World” that would absorb Ukraine, of a “Land of Israel” that would annex the West bank and Gaza, and even of a “Greater America” that would range from Greenland to the Panama Canal and even include Canada
Clyde Snow
“Being dead is not a problem, dying is.” Clyde Snow often repeated these words, as the bodies he autopsied lay at the bottom of mass graves. An expert listener to such silent witnesses, the American medical examiner and anthropologist spent years reconstructing the story of their final hours by documenting the traces of abuse, torture, beatings, or execution engraved in their bones. Snow’s work was ultimately aimed at identifying these bodies and restoring their dignity.
Forensic anthropology began in 1865, when Clara Barton was commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to identify unknown soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield during the Civil War. In 1984, the discipline took on a new dimension. Clyde Snow's expertise was then called upon in Argentina, where it was no longer just a matter of restoring the identity of human remains, but of proving, through anthropometric study, the “dirty war” waged from 1976 to 1983 by the military dictatorship of General Videla.
Clyde Snow enthusiastically accepted the mission, seeing it as an important new application of forensic anthropology: documenting human rights violations. He thus headed to the mass graves where death squads had piled up some of the 30,000 desaparecidos. Bullet wounds and perimortem fractures were among the evidence that the anthropologist then presented at the trial of the Argentine generals responsible for these massacres, leading to the conviction of five of them.
In Croatia, he discovered the remains of 200 patients and hospital staff executed by soldiers. In El Salvador, he found the skeletons of 136 children and infants who had been shot by army squads. In the Philippines, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rwanda, Chile... all over the world, Clyde Snow has excavated bodies from mass graves and provided evidence of atrocities committed by governments, dictatorial regimes and generals, so that those responsible can be brought to justice. As one of the main witnesses at Saddam Hussein’s trial for genocide against the Kurdish ethnic group in 2007, the anthropologist stood for four hours presenting detailed forensic evidence of the use of sarin gas and summary executions.
A member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Clyde Snow became the father of a movement that put forensic anthropology at the service of human rights campaigns against genocide, massacres, and war crimes. In more than 20 countries, he scientifically and psychologically trained experts in excavation techniques designed to preserve evidence, identify human remains in conflict situations, and reconstruct the conditions of their death.
Bones never lie and never forget, Clyde Snow used to say. “Their testimony is silent, but very eloquent.”
Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Ghassan Abu Sittah is a British-Palestinian surgeon, who regularly intervenes in conflict and crisis situations, including in Palestine where he first came as a medical student at the time of the First Intifada. During the Nakba, his father’s family were expelled from their land and became refugees in the Gaza Strip, before moving to Kuwait and later to the United Kingdom.
Amidst the urgency of October 2023, Abu Sittah once again returned to Gaza to volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, performing numerous amputations and other procedures at al-Shifa, al-Awda, and al-Ahli hospitals. The latter was targeted by a first Israeli attack on October 17 of that year, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, as Abu Sittah was conducting an operation inside the hospital.
With his first-hand experience of devastating injuries, including burns caused by white phosphorus, he has supported multiple investigations into war crimes. There have been multiple attempts to silence Abu Sittah and to suspend his medical license. In April 2024, Germany banned him from obtaining a visa for one year in the entirety of the Schengen area.
Moshe Dayan
For anyone who came of age during the Cold War, and particularly among supporters of Israel, Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) is an iconic figure. One of the first prominent Israeli politicians to be born in Palestine, he joined the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organization, at the age of 14, before enlisting in the British Army during World War II. From the declaration of independence in 1948 until his death in 1981, Moshe Dayan held numerous positions in the army and government: he was Chief of Staff from 1955 to 1958, Minister of Agriculture in the early 1960s, Minister of Defense in the governments of Levi Eshkol during the Six-Day War and Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War, and finally Menachem Begin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1977 and 1979, at the time of the peace negotiations with Egypt.
A fervent supporter of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Dayan campaigned after 1967 for a dual strategy of quelling resistance while integrating Palestinians into the Israeli economy, notably through the widespread distribution of work permits.
Moshe Dayan's name has recently returned to the headlines because of a famous eulogy: On April 30, 1956, the then chief of staff of the army visited the Nahal Oz kibbutz on the Gaza Strip border to pay tribute to Ro'i Rothberg, a kibbutznik killed the day before by Palestinian refugees who had returned to the place from which they had been expelled eight years earlier.
Moshe Dayan's speech remains famous in Israel, mainly because it called on Israelis never to let their guard down. However, it is the fact that the Nahal Oz kibbutz was one of the places most violently attacked by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, that has brought it back into the spotlight. For advocates of Israeli “reprisals,” Moshe Dayan's call for uncompromising firmness in 1956 is more relevant than ever today. But critics of the ongoing destruction of Gaza focus on two other aspects of the famous general's speech.
First, they recall that when Moshe Dayan took the floor at Nahal Oz, he began his speech as follows: “Yesterday morning, Ro'i was murdered. Intoxicated by the serenity of dawn, he did not see those who were waiting for him in ambush at the edge of the plowed field. But let us not cast shame on his murderers. Why blame them for the burning hatred they feel toward us? For eight years they have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their very eyes we have made our own the land and villages where they and their ancestors lived. It is not the Arabs of Gaza we should ask to account for Ro'i's blood, but ourselves. How could we have closed our eyes and refused to face our destiny and the mission of our generation, in all its cruelty?”
Second, as historian Omer Bartov points out, Moshe Dayan’s lucidity proved short-lived. For when he recorded his eulogy for Israeli radio the next day, there was no trace of the passage about the refugees and their good reasons for rejecting the settlers rule1.
1Omer Bartov, As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel, The Guardian, 13 August 2024
Yosef Weitz
Yosef Weitz (1890-1972) was one of Modern Israel’s founding fathers, emigrating from present-day Ukraine in 1908 to champion the Zionist cause, becoming director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) during the Mandatory Period.
He had a notorious role in the frantic expropriation of Palestinian lands, and in consolidating the war’s spoils over decades through agriculture and arboriculture. He thereby implemented Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben Gurion’s call to “make the desert bloom”, all the while uprooting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands. The Ottoman property laws, taken up by the British mandate and then by the Israeli occupation, were employed to legitimize, through its cultivation, colonial ownership of the land seized from the local population.
Timelines
Gaza Under Fire 1949-2022
1949
Creation of the Gaza Strip: The armistice signed between Israel and Egypt in February 1949 put the 555 square kilometers area henceforth known as the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control. Out of the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes during the Nakba (the catastrophe), 200,000 were forced to resettle in Gaza, many of them in refugee camps.
1953
Attack of al-Bureij camp. In 1953, Moshe Dayan, the newly appointed IDF chief of staff, created Unit 101, a commando unit whose mission was to eliminate “infiltrators”, i.e., refugees trying to return to their homes. On August 28 of that year, a patrol of Unit 101 led by Ariel Sharon entered the al-Bureij camp in the Gaza Strip and killed up to 50 civilians in what was framed as a preventive mission against further infiltrations.
1956
Khan Yunis and Rafah massacres. During the Suez campaign, the IDF briefly occupied Gaza as part of a combined attempt by Israel, France and Britain to occupy the Sinai, topple Gamal Abdel Nasser and reopen the Suez Canal. During their incursion, Israeli soldiers rounded up and killed hundreds of men, first in the Khan Younis refugee camp, on November 3, and nine days later in the city of Rafah.
1967
Occupation of Gaza. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in June 1967. Dubbed the Naksa (the setback), the conquest of these territories was followed by what Palestinians remember as the “Four Year War”. Ariel Sharon, then head of Israel's Southern Command, orchestrated the division of the Strip into zones, the deportation of thousands of Gazans and the destruction of several refugee camps in order to quell the resistance.
1987
First Intifada. The First Intifada started in Gaza, on December 8, 1987: a riot erupted in the Jabalia refugee camp after an Israeli vehicle caused a crash that killed four Palestinians. The upheaval would rapidly spread to the rest of the Strip and the West Bank. Violently repressed by Israeli forces, the Intifada lasted six years, during which a hundred Israelis and a thousand Palestinians were killed.
1996
The Iron Wall. One year after the signing of the Oslo I Accord, the Israeli authorities sought to tighten their control over the allegedly autonomous Gaza strip by erecting a barrier called the Iron Wall. Fully erected by 1996, this construction has played a crucial role in the isolation and de-development of Gaza.
2004
Second Intifada. During the Second Intifada (September 2000-February 2005), Israeli forces launched a number of retaliatory raids in Gaza: “Operation Rainbow”, in May 2004, involved the murder of more than 50 Palestinians, including children, and the destruction of three hundred homes in Rafah, whereas “Operation Forward Shield”, in August, and “Operation Days of Penitence”, in October, killed at least 134 Palestinians in the towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia.
2007
The Blockade. Following its withdrawal from the Strip in 2005 and the victory of Hamas in the 2006 legislative elections, Israel declared Gaza “hostile territory” and imposed a blockade on the transfer of electricity, fuel, and other supplies into the Strip.
2008/9
The First Gaza War. In December 2008, Israel broke what had been a fragile ceasefire with Hamas by launching “Operation Cast Lead”: combining air strikes, naval operations and ground invasions, the mission lasted until the end of January 2009 and killed about 1,400 Palestinians and injured 5,300 in Gaza City, Rafah, and elsewhere in the Strip. Particularly brutal was the Zeitoun District Massacre: entire neighborhoods were razed, creating about 100,000 refugees, whilst white phosphorus munitions were used on civilian populations in densely-populated residential areas.
2012
Operation Pillar of Defense. Starting with the assassination of Ahmed Jabari, chief of the Hamas military wing in Gaza, Israel launched “Operation Pillar of Defense” in November 2012: the maneuver destroyed settlements all over the Gaza strip, killing 171 Palestinians, including 102 civilians, in the span of 8 days, and displacing 700 families.
2014
Battle of the Withered Grain. In order to dissuade Hamas from firing rockets from Gaza, Israel conducted a seven-week-long operation, dubbed “Protective Edge”: ground and air forces launched about 50,000 shells onto the Strip, in a combination of bombs, tank missiles, and other artillery. About 2,200 Gazans were killed including 1543 civilians and 10,000 wounded.
2018/9
The Great March of Return. From March 2018 to December 2019, Gazan civilians, eventually backed by Hamas, demonstrated peacefully every Friday to claim their “right of return” and protested the blockade imposed on the Strip. Israeli soldiers systematically responded with deadly force, killing 214 demonstrators and over 36,000 injured in the course of 21 months.
2021
Unity Intifada. The so-called Unity Intifada was triggered by an Israeli Supreme Court decision, in May 2021, ordering the eviction of four Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. Violence escalated after the Israeli police stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Hamas and Islamic Jihad retaliated by launching rockets from Gaza. In response, the IDF conducted a two-week operation “Guardian of the Walls”, which killed 260 people, destroyed about a thousand housing units and resulted in the internal displacement of more than 70,000 Palestinians, in what Tsahal described as the “first artificial intelligence war”. Journalists were targeted in the shelling of the al-Jalaa Tower, which housed Al Jazeera, Associated Press, and several other media.
2022
Operation Breaking Dawn. In August, 2022, then Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz ordered “Operation Breaking Dawn” in retaliation for ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad: it involved some 147 airstrikes and killed about 50 civilians in Gaza City, Rafah, Khan Yunis, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia. “Breaking Dawn” was the last operation of its kind before the ongoing genocidal campaign.
A Brief History of Geoeconomics from the 1970s to Trump 2.0
1973
OPEC and the First Wave of Resource Security. OPEC’s rise in the 1970s marked a turning point in Global South sovereignty over resources, challenging Western control by nationalizing oil industries. The 1973 oil shock, Chile’s 1971 copper nationalization, and rising fears of resource scarcity spurred U.S. policies like Nixon’s “Project Independence” and Carter’s energy security push. These revived WWII-era stockpiling strategies, including lithium. Today’s calls for a “Lithium OPEC” echo this earlier scramble to control extractive frontiers central to global capitalism.
2008
The Commodity Boom. The 2008 commodity boom, driven by China’s industrial rise, exposed Global North anxieties over resource dependence amid the financial crisis. While the U.S. reeled from economic collapse and movements like Occupy rose, resource-exporting nations thrived. Rare earth elements—vital for green tech—became a strategic concern as China gained control over 70% of supply. These materials, though not rare geologically, pose severe environmental and health risks in China, where lax regulation has led to toxic pollution and rising cancer rates in mining regions.
2018
Resource Security under Trump’s First Mandate. In 2018, the Trump administration expanded the definition of “critical minerals,” easing regulations to boost domestic extraction, notably of lithium. This shift, rooted in economic nationalism, linked mineral policy to national security and industrial revival. Executive Orders and bipartisan bills like Murkowski’s “American Mineral Act” framed reliance on Chinese imports as a threat. Ethical concerns over foreign extraction—raised even by officials like Francis Fannon, then Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Energy Resources at the State Department—bolstered calls to reshore supply chains or source from trusted allies to safeguard the clean energy transition.
2021-2024
Biden’s Industrial Push for Green Dominance. The Biden administration expanded Trump-era mineral policies, tying resource security to the energy transition. A 2021 supply chain review led to a vertically integrated lithium strategy, invoking the Defense Production Act and funding mining, R&D, and recycling. The 2021 Infrastructure Act and 2022 IRA and CHIPS Acts provided billions in incentives while imposing strict sourcing rules to limit Chinese inputs. By 2024, Biden raised tariffs sharply on Chinese EVs, batteries, and minerals, framing green tech dominance as both economic and geopolitical strategy—blurring the line between climate action and protectionism.
2025
Trump 2.0. Since returning to office in 2025, Trump launched an aggressive critical minerals agenda. Executive Orders 14241 and 14272 invoked the Defense Production Act, expedited permits, and investigated import risks. Another order promoted offshore seabed mining for cobalt and rare earths. In May, 10 new mining projects were fast-tracked under the FAST-41 program. These moves aim to boost U.S. resource autonomy and reduce dependence on China, while securing dominance in tech-critical minerals—paradoxically paired with a broader rollback of renewable energy investments.