Opinions

Sudan’s army has had a good summer. Last month, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) recaptured several towns along the strategic Export Road, known locally as Sadirat, which connects the central Nile valley to the country’s west, and pushed the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) into a defensive crouch across much of the centre of the country.

On the back of these gains, SAF leaders are now speaking more confidently of defeating the RSF entirely, rather than merely containing it.

But look east, to Sudan’s Blue Nile state, and the picture inverts. In mid-August, the RSF and its ally, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (led by Abdulaziz al-Hilu), retook Kurmuk and seized Geisan within days, in attacks that Sudanese military sources said were launched from across the border in Ethiopia. Drone attacks on multiple army-controlled cities this month also showed that the RSF’s reach extends well beyond Darfur, its main territorial stronghold.

The lesson of the summer, then, is not that the SAF is on the verge of decisive victory. It is that military victory and political resolution are becoming two very different things. Even a full RSF defeat may not end Sudan’s war so much as fracture it into several smaller conflicts.

A look at the coalitions doing the fighting helps explain why. The anti-RSF coalition is coordinated and led by the SAF, but the army also relies on allied armed movements, including Darfuri factions that signed the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement (JPA). These include Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim’s Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement, led by Darfur Governor Minni Minnawi. The JPA required their forces to be integrated into Sudan’s military and security services, but they have been reluctant to give up the military autonomy that underpins their political leverage.

Yasser al-Atta, then assistant commander-in-chief and now army chief of staff, announced in March that the army would activate mechanisms to organise and integrate allied irregular groups into the formal military and security services, but little has happened since.

Al-Atta wasn’t even the first to promise to address the problems of the proliferation of weapons and armed groups. Two years earlier, deputy commander-in-chief Shams al-Din Kabbashi told a graduation ceremony for Minni Minnawi’s Sudan Liberation Movement fighters that the army had “begun enacting a law and structures to control the many popular resistance groups”, warning that the array of semi-autonomous militias, tribal coalitions and volunteers backing the SAF’s war efforts, the “popular resistance” as it is called, would “become the next danger if we continue this way”.

More than two years on from Kabbashi’s speech, the underlying problem remains largely unresolved.

Then there is the RSF’s own coalition, which is actively fragmenting. A string of senior figures, al-Nour al-Qubba, al-Savanna, and more recently, the RSF-appointed governor for the Kordofan region, Hamad Khalifa, have defected, amid reports of Saudi financial inducements as well as tribal grievances.

When al-Nour al-Qubba left, he took dozens of combat vehicles and a large contingent of fighters with him. Given that the RSF is a franchise more than a unified fighting force, these defections should worry the SAF as much as they comfort it: defectors often arrive as intact forces loyal to their commanders, not soldiers used to reporting to a chain of command. In a way, the SAF inherits the RSF’s structural weakness with each defection.

Another example is Abu Aqla Keikel, an SAF-trained officer who initially fought on the army’s side after the war erupted in 2023, before defecting to the RSF later that year and then back to the SAF in October 2024. His Sudan Shield Forces remain, in practice, more under his own command than the army’s, even as he appears alongside SAF leadership and Darfuri commanders at recent battlefield-victory photo ops.

Many commanders inside the anti-RSF camp maintain a fairly wide margin of operational independence and consequently their own political calculations. This will become far more apparent once the war ends and there is no longer a common enemy to paper over the differences.

Sudan’s Islamists, meanwhile, occupy a strange position. Brigades like al-Baraa ibn Malik, affiliated with Sudan’s Islamic Movement, which underpinned Omar al-Bashir’s former ruling National Congress Party (NCP), supplied thousands of fighters and were instrumental in retaking Khartoum from the RSF. The United States has sanctioned al-Baraa ibn Malik, while the European Union has sanctioned its leader, al-Misbah Abu Zaid. Amid this international pressure and SAF battlefield gains, some Islamist fighters and leaders have begun pulling back, in what one Sudan Tribune report described as a “tactical withdrawal”. Al-Misbah recently posted that “we have returned to our civilian lives”.

But retreating from the battlefield is not the same as retreating from politics. Ahmed Haroun, chairman of the former ruling NCP, told Reuters news agency last year that the Islamic Movement could support an extended period of army rule, with an eye towards returning to government through “the ballot box”, as Haroun put it.

Indeed, another potential flashpoint for the SAF is that the war has given fighters in Islamist brigades like al-Baraa ibn Malik years of battlefield experience. There is little reason to think fighters who helped recapture the capital will disarm and disband the moment the war is over, at least not without a political settlement that creates a path for demobilisation.

This is the context in which SAF chief and de facto president General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s recently announced national dialogue should be read, less as a comprehensive resolution to the country’s militia problem than as a political process that could convert the army’s wartime alliances into post-war influence.

Burhan has explicitly ruled out the return of RSF leaders to power, promising there would be no “incomplete peace” that allowed Hemedti or other RSF leaders back into government. Given the RSF’s abysmal human rights record during the war, the exclusion is defensible, but the broader armed-group problem remains unresolved: namely, how the RSF’s remaining forces would actually be dismantled or integrated, particularly in Darfur, and how the SAF’s own allied militias would be brought under a single chain of command once the shooting slows down.

Another structural problem that is older than this war reinforces why claims of total victory remain elusive. The Sudanese army has long struggled to project sustained power across the country’s peripheries. Under Omar al-Bashir, the government relied on Janjaweed militias to help the army fight the rebellion in Darfur. In 2013, many Janjaweed fighters were brought into the newly created RSF.

There is little reason to think a hollowed-out, cash-poor SAF, dependent on volunteer recruits, Islamist militias and Juba Peace Agreement signatory forces, can now succeed where the pre-war state repeatedly struggled: in Darfur, a region roughly the size of France, where the RSF continues to use cross-border supply routes.

Even if the RSF is somehow eventually broken, its weapons and its fighters will not simply disappear. They will pass to whichever political entrepreneur is best positioned to pick them up. Meanwhile, in Khartoum, the questions of the day after will pry open conflicts that the war has, for now, kept closed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

A top Iranian official says Iran and Oman have agreed on a new temporary route for shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, but insisted that the waterway will not reopen until the United States fulfils its commitments under an interim peace deal signed in June.

The remarks by Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, came on Tuesday, after Iran and Oman’s top diplomats held talks in Tehran to finalise the details of a phased framework for managing the strait.

Iran and Oman, both coastal nations on the strait, have been in on-and-off talks for weeks about controlling traffic through the strategic waterway, which handled one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments before the US-Israel war on Tehran began in February.

Most ⁠shipping in the strait has been shut down since then.

Gharibabadi, speaking on state television, said Iran and Oman had agreed the new route’s entry “would be through our territorial waters, and part of the exit route would also be through our territorial waters”.

The transit corridor would be seven miles (11.3km) wide, he said.

“The agreed-upon transit route with Oman is a temporary route,” he added.

Earlier on Tuesday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with his Omani counterpart, Badr Albusaidi, in Tehran to discuss the temporary navigation corridor as well as a project to clear mines from the strait, according to a joint statement.

Albusaidi said on X he hoped the countries would “soon announce” the corridor, adding that “future management of the strait and a permanent solution will follow in due course.”

Technical talks are planned to develop a long-term arrangement, including mechanisms for information sharing and navigational and security services, according to the statement.

Mines in Hormuz

The Strait of Hormuz became a flashpoint after Tehran responded to the US-Israel war by closing the waterway. It then announced a new shipping route through its territorial waters, bypassing the internationally recognised Traffic Separation Scheme adopted by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 1968. Tehran said that route had been mined.

Then in June, when Iran and the US signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to end the war, Oman and the IMO announced a new transit corridor in the Strait of Hormuz – backed by the US – that hugged the Omani coast.

Iran said the so-called southern route violated the MoU and launched attacks on ships using the corridor, resulting in the collapse of the interim deal.

Diplomatic efforts towards a broader peace deal have since stalled, and passage through the strait remains dangerous. An oil tanker was disabled by an unidentified projectile on Tuesday near Oman’s Ash Shishah, close to the strait’s entrance, the United Kingdom’s maritime trade watchdog said.

Gharibabadi, in his comments on Tuesday, said Iran would not consider the strait open despite the agreement with Oman.

He also dismissed a claim by US President Donald Trump that all mines had been cleared from the strait’s international waters, saying it was “only aimed at calming the markets”. He warned that US mine-detection vessels would become “very good targets” if they entered the area.

Gharibabadi insisted the US must fulfil its commitments under the MoU – including sanctions relief and the release of frozen Iranian assets – if it wants a return to the diplomatic track.

He also urged countries to resist US pressure over sanctions on Iran.

Trump had announced last week the “most crushing economic operation ever” against Iran, and threatened sanctions against any country that does business with it.

“We are urging countries not to succumb to American pressure regarding the sanctions that Washington wants to impose on us,” Gharibabadi said, adding that Washington was “mistaken about its ability to enforce its sanctions against our neighbours”.

He said an earlier US sanctions campaign under Trump had failed to achieve its goals and predicted new measures would meet the same fate.

“The new American sanctions are doomed to failure, and we have our own methods to counter them,” he added.

August 25 is an incredibly painful day for the Rohingya. It marks the anniversary of the 2017 genocidal campaign by the Myanmar military. Babies and young children were thrown into fires. Women and young girls were systematically gang-raped and mutilated. Entire families were slaughtered as they fled. Others were trapped inside their homes and burned alive. More than 700,000 of our people were forced to flee to Bangladesh.

The Rohingya, who are an ethnic Muslim-majority group who speak their own language from the Indo-Aryan family, have long faced discrimination and persecution in Myanmar.

Today, about 1.2 million Rohingya remain trapped in camps in Bangladesh, while a new wave of persecution is forcing more Rohingya from their homes in Rakhine state. Others are risking their lives at sea in a desperate search for safety.

In this desperate situation, there is a ray of hope raised by international justice proceedings in Argentina and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Still, the international community is falling short in fulfilling its commitments to ensure accountability and protect the Rohingya.

The genocide never stopped

Over the past two years, the balance of power in Rakhine has dramatically changed. The Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic Rakhine armed group, now controls most of the state, including the main Rohingya areas in the north. But the brutality and persecution Rohingya face have not ended.

As the AA has consolidated its control, evidence has mounted of mass killings and targeted attacks on civilians, documenting what Rohingya communities have been warning of.

Rohingya also face forced recruitment, forced labour, detention and severe restrictions on movement. Sexual violence, a hallmark of the Rohingya genocide, is continuing under AA authority.

Rohingya in Rakhine report that the violence and oppression they now face from the AA is just as brutal as the Myanmar military’s ethnic cleansing in 2017. Taken together, we see these abuses as part of a deliberate strategy to drive Rohingya from their homes and continue their erasure from Myanmar.

The same anti-Rohingya racism that drove decades of persecution by the Myanmar military is also at the heart of the AA’s treatment of the Rohingya. The perpetrators may have changed, but the dehumanisation and denial of our identity and rights continue.

The AA is completing what the Myanmar military started. Rohingya are being driven from their villages and prevented from returning, while their land is confiscated and new Rakhine settlements are built on it, sometimes by Rohingya coerced into forced labour. The possibility of return is being destroyed in real time.

Nowhere safe to go

More than 150,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since late 2023, just as international humanitarian funding for refugees is being slashed. Learning centres in Cox’s Bazar have closed and essential services are being cut. Children who fled genocide are growing up without education or hope for their future. Others were born in the camps and have never known a life outside them. The international community is allowing an entire generation of Rohingya children to be abandoned.

Rohingya are being forced to choose between continuing persecution in their homeland and hunger, insecurity and an increasingly desperate existence in camps.

For those forced to flee, there is often no safe route to protection. The very people forcing Rohingya to flee are often involved in and profiting from their trafficking as they try to escape. In July, two boats carrying more than 500 Rohingya, including children and young people, sank after leaving Rakhine. No one would put their children on such a dangerous journey unless staying was even more dangerous.

Meanwhile, there is growing anti-Rohingya sentiment in countries that host them as refugees. Governments talk about Rohingya returning home while more are being forced out and the land they would return to is being taken. We want to go home. But we want to go home with our rights: citizenship, equal rights and the right to return to our own land.

Nine years of impunity

For nine years, the Myanmar military leaders responsible for genocide against Rohingya have faced no real consequences. The architects of the genocide remain free, while the same military has gone on to commit atrocities against communities across Myanmar. Accountability is not only about the past. It is about stopping the violence happening now and preventing further atrocities.

The world cannot repeat the same failure with the Arakan Army. We have seen this pattern before and know where it leads. The longer the Myanmar military and AA are allowed to act with impunity, the closer we come to the complete erasure of the Rohingya from Rakhine.

Rohingya survivors and organisations have spent years documenting crimes, giving evidence and fighting for accountability. We had to pursue justice on the other side of the world because governments and international institutions failed to deliver it.

That fight is finally producing results. My organisation, the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK), brought a universal jurisdiction case in Argentina which has resulted in international arrest warrants for 22 Myanmar military officials and three civilians, including the military government’s leaders Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and General Soe Win, for genocide and crimes against humanity. We are also pursuing reparations for Rohingya survivors.

A judgement is also expected in the coming months in the genocide case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar at the ICJ.

Rohingya are getting closer to justice in international courts but at the same time are being pushed further from our homeland. Legal progress means little if Rohingya continue to be killed, forced out and stripped of the land to which they hope one day to return.

We have fought for years to get this far. Now governments must act. Every possible pressure point must be applied.

States must enforce the Argentinian arrest warrants whenever those wanted enter their jurisdictions, and Interpol must act on Argentina’s request for red notices. Governments must impose coordinated targeted sanctions on the AA and the Myanmar military, alongside restrictions on arms, aviation fuel and revenue streams that enable further atrocities. Maximum international pressure must be applied on the AA to end its persecution of Rohingya and ensure our protection and equal rights.

The United Nations Security Council must act. The United Kingdom, as penholder on Myanmar, must push for an urgent council meeting on the atrocities taking place in Rakhine and the continued failure to protect the Rohingya.

Governments must restore and increase humanitarian funding for Rohingya in Bangladesh and Rakhine, facilitate cross-border aid and pressure the Myanmar military and the AA to end restrictions on humanitarian access.

Governments must pursue every available route to justice and accountability for crimes by the Myanmar military and the AA. They must also be ready to respond to the forthcoming ICJ judgement.

Justice and accountability delivered years too late will mean nothing if there are no Rohingya left in Myanmar.

Justice is not only about what happens in courtrooms. For Rohingya, it means being able to return to our villages and our land. It means restoring the citizenship and rights that have been taken from us. Above all, it means being able to live freely and as equals in Myanmar, without ever again facing persecution and genocide.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Each time we travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), we first go to listen.

In Bunia, we have met dozens of community representatives: survivors, women, young people, local organisations, health workers and leaders from affected areas. Their message is direct: involve us. We know our communities. We know where families seek care, how information moves and why trust is breaking down. Give us the means to help drive the response. They are right.

Ebola spreads through communities and communities hold the knowledge required to stop it. They can identify illness early, alert health teams, help identify and trace contacts, challenge dangerous rumours and support families through access to treatment and safe, dignified burials. The response always moves faster when communities lead alongside national authorities and health workers.

One hundred days ago, the government of the DRC declared the country’s 17th Ebola outbreak, following confirmation of the Bundibugyo virus. WHO subsequently declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, followed by Africa CDC’s declaration of a Public Health Emergency of Continental Security.

The scale of the emergency is immense. As of August 21, the DRC has reported 5,290 confirmed cases and 2,516 deaths across 56 health zones. This is now the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded and it is moving faster than any previous one. It is being fuelled by insecurity caused by decades of armed conflict that have undermined law, order and social services, and displaced more than a million people.

At the centre of the response are the people who show up every day. Health workers care for patients. Laboratory teams identify the virus. Contact tracers follow its path. Community health workers build trust where fear and misinformation have taken hold. Burial teams help families honour their loved ones safely and with dignity.

They are working under extraordinary pressure, often in insecure and hard-to-reach areas. Some have contracted Ebola in the line of duty.

Their service must be met with action: safety, protective equipment, training, sufficient medical supplies, timely payment, psychosocial support and access to rapid diagnosis and high-quality supportive care if they fall ill. The safety of frontline workers is central to stopping transmission.

The response has made progress. Under the leadership of national authorities, Congolese responders, WHO, Africa CDC and partners have expanded surveillance, deployed laboratories, supported treatment centres, reinforced infection prevention and delivered essential supplies.

Neighbouring Uganda has interrupted locally acquired transmission of the virus. Several health zones in northern Ituri and South Kivu provinces in the DRC have also interrupted transmission. These experiences prove that the outbreak can be stopped more quickly when rapid detection, decisive national leadership and close cooperation with communities break the chains of transmission.

But the continued emergency in the rest of Ituri province and five other provinces demands urgently scaled-up action.

To turn the corner, surveillance teams are being expanded and equipped to detect cases early and rapidly identify contacts. Safe clinical care and infection prevention measures are being increased wherever people seek treatment.

More risk communication and community engagement teams are being deployed to reach out to communities to empower them to participate in the response and address barriers to care. More safe and dignified burial teams are working to prevent transmission associated with deaths. Special efforts are being made to reach vulnerable populations and communities in insecure and hard-to-reach areas.

But despite all these efforts, more is needed. We need to scale our response by two to three times current capacities, across all the response pillars.

Health facilities also require urgent protection from infection. As of August 20, 158 health workers have been infected and 45 have died. Every facility in an affected or high-risk area needs trained staff, protective equipment, clean water, sanitation and functioning infection-prevention systems.

National and local teams need predictable funding for surveillance, laboratories, treatment, logistics, infection prevention and community engagement. Frontline workers must be paid on time. Local organisations need direct support to work consistently with communities. Supplies must arrive before stocks run out.

Delayed financing costs lives. Fragmented financing leaves gaps. Ebola exploits both. On the ground, we at WHO and Africa CDC have established tight integration among health and relief organisations working with the government. Donors therefore need to support and enhance that integration, rather than back siloed and disconnected efforts.

Cross-border coordination also must remain strong. People move within and between countries to trade, work, study, seek care and support their families. Borders must serve as bridges for coordinated public health action. This does not require closing borders or imposing blanket travel and trade restrictions. Such measures can disrupt response operations and livelihoods without stopping transmission. The priority is coordinated surveillance, rapid information-sharing and prepared health services along movement routes.

The first 100 days have made the priorities clear.

Find every case. Follow every contact. Break every chain of transmission, protect every health and frontline worker, save lives and ensure that no community is left behind. Bring testing and treatment closer to every affected community. Bolster cross-border coordination. Scale up international support. Turn every pledge into action.

WHO and Africa CDC will continue working with the DRC, neighbouring countries, communities and partners to deliver on these priorities. Our responsibility is to bring the full strength of international and continental cooperation behind the nationally-led response.

Uganda and areas in DRC have shown how the course of the outbreak can be turned, through rapid detection, decisive action and close cooperation with communities. But these measures must be delivered at scale. Success depends on sustained national leadership, continental solidarity and international support. We must rise to this challenge, together.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

On Tuesday, Israeli fighter jets attacked Abu al-Duhur airbase in northwestern Syria, drawing condemnations from the United States, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, as well as regional countries. The Israeli government claimed that it had intelligence of Turkish military movement to the site.

In a subsequent interview, US Ambassador to Turkiye and Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack said the US had received this intelligence from the Israelis six days before the attack. However, US intelligence conducted its own due diligence and found no basis for the claim.

The incident not only reflects a shift in the dynamics between Turkiye and Israel, but also signals a regional reordering that the latter is no longer at the centre of.

The Turkish response

Seeing the Israeli attack on the Syrian base as a provocation, Ankara refrained from escalating and instead provided an off-ramp out of the crisis. It framed the issue not in bilateral terms but as one between Israel and the US, and between Israel and the regional and international consensus.

Normally, there is a deconfliction mechanism between Turkiye and Israel. However, as Barrack indicated in the interview, Israel did not warn Turkiye about the attack, which could have triggered a military response.

The US envoy called for a deconfliction mechanism, but such an initiative can be effective only if the sides involved want it to be. In this case, there is no evidence that Israel sought de-escalation. In fact, it appears escalation was the intended outcome, as Israel notified neither Turkiye nor the US about the attack and acted on a pretext that the US intelligence found no basis for – a ploy to boost Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral campaign.

After the US-imposed lull on the Iran front, Netanyahu is likely seeking escalation on other fronts, be it Syria, Lebanon or Gaza, in the run-up to the Israeli election. The challenge for Turkiye would be to avoid taking Netanyahu’s bait while also preventing the normalisation of such aggression.

That would require direct intervention by US President Donald Trump to rein in Netanyahu. Indeed, a trilateral deconfliction mechanism can work and be credible only if the US throws real weight behind it.

But even if a mechanism is in place, it would not change the fact that Syria has altered the lens through which Turkiye and Israel view each other. For a long time, the core of Turkiye’s discontent with Israel was the Palestinian issue. Hence, it was more humanitarian-, identity- and solidarity-based in nature.

Today, Ankara views Israeli attempts to undermine the Syrian transition as having direct repercussions for its national security. Therefore, Turkiye is no longer seeing Israel solely through the prism of the Palestinian question. Rather, it increasingly sees it as a national security challenge, with Israeli regional revisionism threatening its interests.

The international consensus on Syria

From the Eastern Mediterranean to the Horn of Africa and the wider Middle East, Turkiye and Israel have conflicting policies, priorities and threat perceptions. Despite this, Syria serves as a microcosm of Turkiye and Israel’s visions of the regional order.

Ankara wants its southern neighbour to be centralised, stable and capable militarily. In contrast, Israel wants a Syria that is weak, fragmented and bereft of serious military might.

Yet this is not merely a conflict between Turkish and Israeli visions. Israel is at odds with the regional and international consensus on Syria. The US, the UK, Europe and regional states have all supported a centralised and stable government in Damascus. In an ironic way, the only other regional state that probably wants a weak or failed Syria is Iran.

Like any other sovereign state, Syria will have an army. If Israel believes that the only way to ensure its own security is by keeping its neighbouring or regional states weak, fragmented and bereft of military capability, this is a recipe for perpetual wars and for regional and international isolation.

The undermining of the Syrian state and the failure of its transition would pave the way for non-state actors and radicalism, which would bode ill for the entire region, including Israel. Indeed, neighbouring Lebanon should serve as a cautionary tale. The Israeli occupation and the weakness of the Lebanese state gave birth to and empowered Hezbollah.

Post-Abrahamic Middle East

Israel and Turkiye’s ideas of regional order are also at odds. The recent Mecca Pact, which brought together Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, is not inherently anti-Israel. However, it represents a regional shift that signals the failure of the order envisioned by the Abraham Accords, or similar initiatives such as India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) or the strategic partnership between India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the US known as I2U2.

The Abrahamic vision of the regional order was premised on Arab-Israeli normalisation and cooperation under the US security umbrella. Hard containment of Iran, soft containment of Turkiye, and de-emphasising the Palestinian issue were also part of the same vision.

Inherently, this Abrahamic vision had more to do with Israel and its regional normalisation than the Arab states and their needs and priorities.

However, with its aggressive and revisionist policies, Israel has deepened the prospect of its regional isolation, increased the cost of any normalisation, and doomed this Abrahamic – or Israeli-centric – vision of regional order.

Israeli revisionism is not only driving a wedge between Israel and other major regional states, but it is also revealing the gap between Israel and the US on the question of regional reordering.

While Israel opposes the Mecca Pact, Trump has hailed it, likely seeing it as aligned with his strategy of burden-sharing and burden-shifting with regional allies, and as enjoying more regional legitimacy and acceptance. The US position might also reflect a recalibration of Washington’s regional vision.

Over the last decade, the US invested heavily in creating a regional order premised on Israel and the Arab-Gulf states. But this was essentially an Israeli-centric project for the regional order.

This vision is no longer tenable, and no one is more responsible for its demise than Israel itself.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

For years, the day in Kulak ended when the generator powered down. Like thousands of villages across Iraq, this small farming community in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region lived to the faltering rhythm of an erratic power supply: a few hours of electricity, then the water pumps stopped, refrigerators warmed and children put down their books.

Today, Kulak runs on the sun. Solar panels harness its energy, batteries store the excess and residents have power 24/7. The change is visible beyond the homes: water pumps keep running, and cold storage gives farmers more control over when they sell their harvest.

This is the part of the energy transition the global climate conversation too often overlooks. Solar hardware is cheap; the world has learned how to install it. What matters is what comes after the panels go up: building the local capacity to keep the systems running and using reliable power to support farms, livelihoods and communities.

The energy transition will not be won in conference halls. It will be won, or lost, in places like Kulak.

Iraq’s rural energy crisis

Iraq’s energy story is usually told as a paradox. It is one of the world’s great oil producers, yet rural communities still endure daily power cuts. Summers now regularly push past 50 degrees, and the United Nations ranks Iraq among the nations most vulnerable to climate change. Drought has emptied farmland. Heat has made whole regions harder to live in. Rural families face a quiet, grinding choice between staying on land that can no longer sustain them or joining the drift towards overcrowded cities.

These pressures do not respect provincial boundaries. They are shared across Iraq, from the marshes of the south to the mountains of the north. They demand responses that work for the whole country.

For remote communities, decentralised power should not simply be treated as a stopgap while they wait for the grid. It can be part of the long-term answer.

Beyond electrification

Kulak is one of five villages in the Kurdistan region electrified through a solar initiative that pairs new infrastructure with local training and agricultural development. Residents are trained to operate and maintain their own systems, while research is under way into how reliable power can support local production.

Energy is treated not as a gift to be received but as an asset to be managed. That means looking beyond electricity itself to what it can enable: cold storage that allows farmers to hold their harvest for better prices, irrigation that no longer depends on diesel and processing that adds value before crops ever leave the village.

That distinction matters, because the graveyard of development is full of well-intentioned infrastructure. Anyone who has worked in this field has seen the solar array gathering dust because no one was trained to fix an inverter, or the water project abandoned when the foreign NGO moved on.

Sustainability is not a slogan; it is a design choice. Building local capability into a project from day one is the difference between a photo opportunity and a future.

Building the transition from the ground up

There is a broader argument here for the climate movement.

The energy transition is overwhelmingly narrated from the top down: through COP plenaries, G7 communiques and the financing pledges of wealthy nations, many of them unmet. Yet for hundreds of millions of people in the Global South, the transition will arrive, if it arrives at all, through decentralised solutions built close to the ground.

Rural Iraq will not wait decades for grid expansion to reach every valley. It does not have to. Distributed solar suits these communities better than centralised generation ever did, while local institutions can move at a speed that multilateral programmes rarely match.

There is also a quieter point about who gets to act on climate.

The prevailing image of climate action in the Middle East is the megaproject: vast desert solar farms, futuristic cities and sovereign wealth funds. Those have their place. But electrifying farming villages one by one represents a different kind of ambition, one rooted in the belief that Iraqis themselves, in all their diversity, can build the country’s energy future rather than wait for it to be delivered.

Local involvement matters particularly in places where reliable electricity is tied not only to household comfort but to whether farms can irrigate crops, preserve produce and remain economically viable.

Iraq has thousands of rural communities, and scaling this model will require partners, patient financing and supportive policy at every level of government. The agricultural research is promising but young.

On my last visit to Kulak, I was struck less by the panels than by what surrounded them: the cold store, the working pumps, the sense of a community planning for next season rather than next month.

The lights staying on is the least of it. What has really been switched on is the future tense.

If Iraq’s energy transformation is built like this across the whole country, village by village and from the ground up, it will be more durable than anything imposed from above. That means investing not only in the systems themselves, but in the people who will maintain them and the farms, businesses and livelihoods that reliable power can support.

The world’s climate diplomats could do worse than pay attention.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The Red Sea does not recognise political borders as maps draw them. Instead, it binds every country on its shores to a shared fate with its neighbours across the water. When the western shore of this sea is shaken, the eastern shore does not remain untouched. This is a hard geopolitical reality that Saudi Arabia has understood well through decades of dealing with crises in the Horn of Africa and Yemen as a direct extension of its own domestic security.

It is through this deep understanding of geography as a shared destiny that the agreement establishing the Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council, signed in Riyadh on August 17, 2026, should be read. It is the institutional expression of a firmly held Saudi conviction: that the stability of a unified Sudan is indispensable to the stability of the kingdom itself, and that Sudan’s collapse or fragmentation would inevitably become a Saudi national security crisis.

Historical ties and cultural common ground

Long before strategic considerations and geopolitical crises came to the fore, Saudis viewed Sudanese people with great respect and as among those to whom they felt closest. Since the earliest times, Hijazis have shared cultural and linguistic traits with people on the other side of the Red Sea, particularly Sudanese people.

Throughout modern history, relations between the two countries have not been marked by serious crises. Indeed, they have been distinguished by a unique historical fact: the relationship has never witnessed a political crisis between the two states or their peoples, and there has always been mutual appreciation between them. This exceptional relationship, rooted in religious, cultural and social ties, has made the two countries a rare model of intra-Arab relations that has withstood all regional storms.

Saudi Arabia has stood by Sudanese people through every ordeal, including Nile floods and natural disasters, as well as the country’s crises and civil wars. This has created a fabric of human ties that goes beyond narrow political interests. It was this unique historical legacy that made Saudi mediation welcome to both sides when the war broke out, with the Jeddah platform working to ease the conflict and address the humanitarian crisis.

Saudi Arabia’s current position towards Sudan, then, is not merely the product of cold strategic or political calculations. It is the natural extension of a relationship that lived in people’s hearts before it was translated into institutions and agreements.

A framework for strategic partnership

This relationship culminated in the Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council, whose founding agreement was signed in Riyadh on August 17, 2026, by the two countries’ foreign ministers, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud and Mohieddin Salem. Sources say it is not merely a conventional diplomatic framework, but a comprehensive institutional platform intended to oversee 10 major strategic areas. These reflect the depth of the partnership between the two countries and their desire to move from political and humanitarian support towards a long-term strategic, economic and investment partnership.

The 10 areas covered by the council include Sudan’s reconstruction; agriculture and food security; livestock; gold and mining; the Red Sea and ports; energy and electricity; finance and banking; industry and food processing; communications and digital transformation; and tourism, real estate and services.

Taken together, these areas constitute an integrated roadmap for turning bilateral relations into a genuine development partnership, drawing on Saudi Arabia’s investment and technological capabilities and Sudan’s enormous natural and human resources.

According to the Sudanese foreign minister, the council’s priorities centre on security, defence and the economy, with the Red Sea added as an area of strategic cooperation because of its importance to both countries. This is why Sudan joined the maritime defence alliance established by Saudi Arabia on July 30, 2026. This reflects a shared understanding that security and stability are the essential preconditions for any economic development, and that Red Sea security is a shared responsibility that cannot be separated from the stability of the states along its shores.

Sudan and the wider Arab project

For more than a decade and a half, the Arab region has witnessed a wave of systematic projects of fragmentation targeting pivotal states such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Countries that once played an active role in the regional order have been turned into open arenas of conflict managed by regional and international actors through local proxies. With its enormous resources and vital location connecting the Arab world with the African interior, Sudan has always been an ideal target for such a project of division.

When Saudi Arabia acts to support a path that preserves the unity of the Sudanese state and its national institutions, it objectively contributes to thwarting one link in this scheme targeting the Arab world as a whole. Every Arab state protected from fragmentation represents another defeat for this project, while every state that succumbs to it represents a victory that encourages its repetition. From this perspective, Sudanese stability is a collective Arab battle, and Saudi Arabia finds itself in the position of a state capable of leading that battle in defence of a collective Arab project that cannot afford to lose another link.

Sudan in the regional equation

Sudan occupies a unique position that makes it one of the region’s most important strategic keys: it is an Arab state that borders both the Red Sea and the Nile, connects the Horn of Africa with the Sahara, the Sahel and the Arab hinterland, and borders seven African and Arab countries.

This location makes Sudan a natural bridge between the Arab world and Africa, a vital maritime gateway on the Red Sea and a strategic water nexus on the Nile.

If a state in such a position fragments, it opens a geopolitical rupture whose effects extend from the Nile Basin to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and from the African Sahel to the Arabian Peninsula. The recent experience of Yemen has clearly demonstrated how the collapse of a state on the Red Sea can transform a vital maritime chokepoint such as Bab al-Mandeb from a safe commercial passage into an arena of direct threats to global shipping.

Saudi Arabia, which has paid a heavy price in both security and economic terms as a result of the war in Yemen, has realised that the security of waterways cannot be safeguarded merely by guarding the passages themselves, but by ensuring the stability of the states whose coastlines surround them.

Security beyond borders

In classical and contemporary strategic thought, the security of any major state is measured not only at its immediate borders, but also through its “strategic depth”: the wider geographical sphere that absorbs shocks before they reach the core. This idea, whose roots can be traced to strategic thinkers such as Nicholas Spykman and Walter Lippmann, holds that a state exists within a geopolitical environment that either acts as a buffer and absorbs crises, or transmits and amplifies them.

Given Saudi Arabia’s position as a pivotal regional power, it cannot content itself with securing its immediate borders while crises rage throughout its strategic surroundings. From this perspective, Sudan is not merely a neighbour across the sea, but one of the most important components of Saudi strategic depth. Its stability means stability along the kingdom’s western maritime frontier, control over flows of irregular migration and smuggling, and keeping at bay the spectre of a security vacuum that could be exploited by armed groups and extremist organisations.

When Riyadh invests in Sudan’s reconstruction and development through permanent institutional frameworks such as the Coordination Council, it is building a wall of stability around its strategic depth. It has understood that genuine security cannot be bought with walls alone, but is built through the prosperity of its neighbours.

A new Saudi approach to Red Sea security

The security of major waterways is not simply the product of military protection of the passage itself, but of the strength and stability of the states along its shores. A Red Sea bordered or surrounded by fragile or collapsed states, or states penetrated by irregular forces, is an insecure Red Sea regardless of the military capabilities of the major powers along its shores.

From this lesson, a more mature Saudi vision has emerged: it is not enough for the kingdom to be strong on the eastern shore. The states along the western shore and the Red Sea’s southern approaches, including Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, must also be strong, cohesive and capable of exercising full sovereignty over their coastlines. By placing the “Red Sea” alongside security and defence among its areas of focus, the Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council puts this philosophy into practice: strengthening Sudan’s ability to control its coastline is a direct Saudi investment in the security of the Red Sea as a whole.

The responsibility of regional power

The Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council is an expression of a broader political philosophy embraced by Riyadh: genuine regional power does not grow stronger by isolating itself behind borders, but by assuming responsibility for the stability of its surroundings. At a time when projects of fragmentation are proliferating, supporting Sudan’s unity, strengthening Saudi strategic depth and safeguarding Red Sea security are three sides of the same coin.

When Saudi Arabia safeguards the unity of its neighbour, it safeguards the integrity of its own strategic project. When it protects the stability of the Sudanese coast, it protects the stability of its own. This is the dialectic of shared geography: neither neighbour can be secure without the other, and neither shore can be stable without the one opposite it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

It had been a lengthy and productive meeting with the chief of staff to a Republican member of Congress. We had discussed United States policy towards Israel, and the scepticism of many of the Grand Old Party members towards the relationship and the challenge they face in saying anything about it given President Donald Trump’s iron grip on it. But there was one final agenda item I needed to raise: the member’s participation in the newly created “Sharia-Free America Caucus”, a group of US representatives standing against what one founding member described as “a religion of violence, abuse of women, and ruthless political conquest. Its laws and practices have no place in American society.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” the staffer said, with a wave of his hand. “Muslims are just the low-hanging fruit. Really it is about Indians. And brown people in general. And the Jews, too. It won’t get in the way of putting America first. Really the only Member [of the Caucus] who believes all the bullshit about Israel is Randy Fine.”

The whipping up of Islamophobia in the US has become visible and visceral, to the extent that many in the Muslim community now look back almost wistfully to the days of George W Bush, who made a point, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, of visiting a mosque and declaring that “Islam is peace”. Such efforts at inclusivity have almost vanished entirely from the Republican Party, replaced by an outright bigotry that has inspired a spike in anti-Muslim attacks, such as the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego in May that killed two worshippers and a security guard. A recent proposal by Dallas Fort Worth international airport to add unobtrusive foot-washing stations for Muslims wishing to perform wudu (and presumably anyone else with dirty feet) was swiftly abandoned in the face of condemnation by Texas Governor Greg Abbott that the installation of such stations would be unconstitutional.

Where is all this coming from? To be sure, some of it is a reflection of the politics that Trump has promoted since his very first day of presidential campaigning in 2015 to divide Americans by suggesting that the country’s White majority and its historic place atop the social hierarchy are at risk; in this context it is not only Muslims who are under attack, but all minorities, as demonstrated by his administration’s attacks on Black history or Hispanic culture. But when it comes to Islamophobia, there is a more targeted driver of the trend.

In January this year, the government of Israel hosted an anti-Semitism conference in Jerusalem. This, by itself, is rather unremarkable. But what is noteworthy is who attended: leaders from across the European far right, including representatives from Poland’s PiS, Spain’s Vox, Hungary’s Fidesz, and France’s Rassemblement National. The event was, perhaps, the largest gathering of European right-wingers to discuss anti-Semitism since the US-led umerziehung (re-education) process in post-war Germany.

But the far right are now allies, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told them, in the fight against the “invasion of radical Islam”. Since January, Netanyahu has continued on this theme, recently warning that “the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic republic of Britain”, and campaigning for re-election under a billboard titled “Don’t let them win” that features the faces of Hezbollah and Iranian leaders alongside those of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Israel’s promotion of Islamophobia is not limited to Netanyahu, nor does it end at its own shores. As Israel’s own reputation has cratered, rather than examining its actions (particularly in Gaza), it has decided its salvation rests in more effective public relations and propaganda campaigns. Some of this has materialised in an effort to prop up its own reputation: “The US-Israel relationship promotes stability”, explained an automated text message that millions of other Americans and I recently received via Israeli-contracted Clock Tower X. But Israel is also going on the offensive by trying to knock down and delegitimise its critics and by rallying the right through a purposeful campaign of Islamophobia.

The strategy may have been informed by a leaked study solicited by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from US public relations firm Stagwell Global, which found that the most effective tactic in shifting public opinion would be to drive fear of “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism” but, in the absence of any compelling reason why the US should continue to back his country, Netanyahu has increasingly leaned into the argument that Israel is, as he claims foreign leaders have told him, the “model in the struggle against radical Islam which threatens the entire civilised world”.

This has manifested itself in Israel’s leveraging of increasingly virulent Islamophobia as part of its hasbara strategy, for instance in Canada in 2024, when an Israeli-government-funded influence operation using the name United Citizens for Canada conducted social media campaigns claiming that Muslim immigrants to the country posed a threat to society and were trying to impose Islamic law.

In many cases, Americans and Europeans have seen through such efforts. Recent primary wins for prominent Muslim congressional candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed have demonstrated a cross-communal rejection of Islamophobic rhetoric. But in other areas, Muslim communities increasingly feel under siege.

Israeli society is premised on Jewish supremacy and the pursuit of demographic homogeneity, but Western countries are increasingly diverse in both their demographics and their leadership. While the path to peace for Israel may be one that makes Israel look more like the West – a country with equality for all its people – at the core of its current propaganda campaign is the desire to make the West look more like Israel. That poses a test for Western pluralism, but even if the West fails that test, Israel should not assume that such a failure would inherently lead to an embrace of Zionism.

Fear and hatred are powerful tools, and the current Islamophobic campaign is likely to unleash further and deeper harms. But even on its primary objective, to stem the loss of support in Israel’s last bastion of Western far-right opinion, it is far from clear that it will succeed. In the meantime, Europeans and Americans would be wise to see it for what it is: a desperate foreign influence operation driven by a state that is increasingly running out of options.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Most people, when asked what terrorism is, will say that it is the use of violence and terror to create fear among people. This is broadly the dictionary definition. The 2017 Manchester Arena bombing at an Ariana Grande concert, in which 22 people, including many children, were killed, is a clear example.

Yet the legal definition of terrorism in Britain is far broader than this common understanding. Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows even “damage to property” to constitute terrorism when it is carried out for a political, religious, racial or ideological purpose and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public. Where firearms or explosives are involved, the latter requirement does not apply.

Including politically motivated damage to property within the definition was controversial from the start. When Parliament debated the bill in 1999, animal liberation activists were among the groups MPs had in mind.

Labour MP Alan Simpson warned during the debate that by defining attacks on property as terrorism, “we transform the relationship between civil protest movements and elected Parliaments and the judicial system.”

The criticism did not end with Parliament. The Supreme Court later described Section 1’s definition of terrorism as “very far-reaching”, while David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, called it “remarkably broad – absurdly so in some cases”.

In his 2012 report, Anderson observed:

“The current law allows members of any nationalist or separatist group to be turned into terrorists by virtue of their participation in a lawful armed conflict… however odious the regime which they have attacked.”

In his 2014 Terrorism Report, he warned:

“To render people subject to the terrorism laws whom no sensible person would think of as terrorists risks destroying the trust upon which these special powers depend for their acceptance by the public.”

Yet defining what can count as terrorism is only part of the story. Not every organisation whose conduct falls within that definition is proscribed. That decision rests with the government.

Proscription therefore adds a political choice: Which organisations should be banned, making membership and inviting support for them criminal offences.

For example, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed Kurdish group that has fought the Turkish state for decades, is proscribed in Britain. Its Syrian offshoot, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), is not, because PYD-led forces became Western allies in the fight against ISIS (ISIL).

Britain proscribed Hamas’s military wing in 2001. In 2021, Home Secretary Priti Patel extended that proscription to Hamas in its entirety, including its political wing, declaring the previous distinction between the two “artificial”. Many civilian members of Hamas who had never picked up a gun were now deemed terrorists alongside its fighters.

By collapsing the distinction between Hamas’s military and political wings, Britain legitimised Israel’s portrayal of Hamas’s civilian administration as part of a terrorist apparatus and, with it, the targeting of hospitals and schools as terrorist infrastructure.

The asymmetry is stark. Britain’s terrorism laws can criminalise non-state organisations and those who support them, while state terrorism, including Israel’s, remains outside their reach.

The proscription of Palestine Action brought a different consequence of these laws into focus: Their use against protest in Britain. Palestine Action is a British direct-action group that has targeted arms companies supplying Israel. In July 2025, the government proscribed it under the Terrorism Act 2000.

United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Turk warned that the decision to proscribe Palestine Action “raises serious concerns that counter-terrorism laws are being applied to conduct that is not terrorist”.

The ban has been fiercely contested in the courts. In February 2026, the Divisional Court ruled the proscription unlawful. On June 15, the Court of Appeal reversed that decision and upheld the ban. The court also described Elbit as carrying out a “lawful business”, ignoring its role in supplying the Israeli military during the genocide.

In upholding the ban, Lady Chief Justice Sue Carr drew a contrast with the Suffragettes, saying Palestine Action was not “a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the Suffragettes operating transparently in the open” but “a covert group operating in cells”.

Carr’s characterisation rests on an extraordinarily sanitised version of suffragette history.

In November 1909, a suffragette attacked Winston Churchill with a horse whip. In the same month, suffragettes, armed with a catapult and missiles, attacked Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s car in Liverpool.

In 1912, Suffragettes attempted to set fire to the Theatre Royal in Dublin during a matinee attended by Asquith. They left a canister of gunpowder close to the stage. Earlier in the day, Mary Leigh had hurled a hatchet towards Asquith.

In 1913, four postmen in Dundee were severely injured by phosphorus chemicals left in post boxes. The following year, Mary Richardson slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, while bombs were discovered in St Paul’s and churches were burned down.

This history sits uneasily with Carr’s distinction. The Suffragettes themselves engaged in politically motivated attacks on property and people of precisely the kind that Britain’s modern definition of terrorism is broad enough to capture.

The Filton case shows what this can mean in practice. When the Filton 25 attacked an Elbit factory in Bristol, they were remanded in custody for up to 18 months. When six of them went on trial in November 2025, the jury acquitted them of aggravated burglary, the most serious charge, and failed to reach verdicts on criminal damage. No defendant was convicted at that first trial. At a retrial, four were convicted of criminal damage; only one was eventually convicted of grievous bodily harm, without intent.

The jury was not told that guilty verdicts could later lead to the offences being treated as having a “terrorist connection” for sentencing. Justice Jeremy Johnson subsequently made precisely that finding. Johnson had also ruled out defences based on necessity and the need to prevent the greater crime of genocide. In doing so, he usurped the role of the jury.

The consequences of the ban were not confined to those accused of taking direct action against Elbit. Once Palestine Action was proscribed, inviting or expressing support for the group became a terrorism offence.

When the government proscribed Palestine Action, people defied the ban. Nearly 4,000 people have been arrested for holding placards supporting Palestine Action.

The Home Office reported that in the year ending March 2026, there were 3,061 terrorism-related arrests, 2,819 of them linked to suspected support for Palestine Action. The average age of those arrested in connection with Palestine Action was 59, compared with 31 for all other terrorism-related arrests. A majority of the Palestine Action arrests were women.

The profile of Britain’s average “terrorist” changed from a man aged 31 to a woman aged 59.

This is where Britain’s extraordinarily broad definition of terrorism, combined with the government’s power to proscribe organisations, has led. Conduct once understood as protest and political expression can now be prosecuted under terrorism legislation.

As Orwell wrote, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” When the meaning of “terrorism” is stretched far enough, the extraordinary powers attached to that word stretch with it.

Today, my own trial begins. I am accused of inviting support for Hamas. My prosecution is not separate from the story told here. It is where that story leads.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The initial step taken on August 14, 2001 cannot be viewed merely as the submission of a political party’s founding petition within the annals of international political history; rather, it is the reincarnation of a millennium-old, deep-rooted civilisational vision on the modern world stage. Today, having left a quarter of a century behind, the AK Party is not merely a tale of national development within its borders, but an unparalleled 25-year epic of democracy on a global scale. Coming to power with immense public favour just 16 months after its founding, and steering the country with uninterrupted stability for a quarter of a century, this political movement has secured a highly exceptional place in world political history.

The greatest power behind this stability lies in the fact that this movement is not a rootless structure blown about by the wind. It carries on its shoulders, as a historical trust, the democratic struggle of the late Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his companions, who sacrificed their lives for the nation’s beliefs during the arduous days of the single-party era. The mighty plane tree founded by our President and Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdogan – under whose shade our nation and oppressed geographies have drawn a breath of relief for 25 years – is the very embodiment of this tremendous historical legacy.

While the lifespans of political parties are generally measured by election results or their terms in government, the AK Party’s ability to overcome successive global and national crises with the continuous support of vastly diverse social segments over 25 years can be explained by a much more structural concept: Its “capacity for political translation”.

This capacity is the process of accurately hearing the expectations, needs, and objections within society, transforming them into viable party programmes, budgets, and public policies, and submitting the resulting outcomes back for societal evaluation. Social needs do not always arrive in politics as ready-made texts; it is here that the AK Party has established a colossal “translation” mechanism that turns seemingly disparate experiences into common problems and solutions. Indeed, for someone of a generation like mine – who grew up in a Turkiye shaped by the AK Party, took on responsibilities in its youth branches since childhood, and today serves as a member of parliament and the party’s secretary-general – this political ground is the very essence of that transformation.

To grasp the magnitude of this transformation, one must look back at the Turkiye of the 1990s. It is essential to read those years not just as an “era of a unipolar world and severe economic crises”, but as a colossal “age of political collapse and instability” that paralysed the state and deepened societal fault lines.

The 90s were a lost decade in which fragile coalitions lasting only months, political bargaining and recurring crises shook state authority. While unsolved murders and an escalating spiral of terror threatened citizens’ lives on the one hand, the heavy fist of tutelage brought down upon civilian politics via the February 28 post-modern coup explicitly usurped the nation’s will on the other. Even though voter turnout reached 87 percent in parliamentary elections during that era, this high public interest in politics could not translate into a stable and effective governing capacity, with no single party able to form a majority government.

The closure of the Refah Party in 1998 and the Fazilet Party in 2001 through judicial tutelage created a profound crisis regarding the continuity of legitimate channels of representation for the masses. Therefore, the year 2001 was a historical threshold – not merely a year of economic bankruptcy marked by cash registers being thrown in protest, but the absolute peak of political fragmentation, tutelary regimes, governance vulnerabilities, and constitutional rights remaining strictly on paper. Inheriting this multidimensional political and economic wreckage, the AK Party built the world’s most experienced cadres in every field, from security to economics, from foreign policy to social policies, establishing a “game-changing” political style.

At the core of this game-changing politics lies the dismantling of the “state commands its citizens” mentality, replacing it with the principle that “the state is the servant of the nation”. Believing that true change lies in execution rather than packaging, the AK Party tore down the cold walls built between the state and the nation, making the nation’s red lines the same as the state’s.

The silent majority, who for decades had been left disheartened like “tenants” in their own homeland, rose with self-confidence to become the true “landlords” of their country. Today, as the world’s largest and most dynamic school of politics with more than 12 million members, the AK Party conducts politics not by pontificating from television screens, but by directly sharing the burdens of the people and keeping a finger on the pulse of the streets. The secret behind these victories is hidden in these devoted organisations that hold the nation’s consent above all else, and in the vision of the leader of this great march, our President and Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The party’s quarter-century has gone down in history not through noisy destructions and polarising conflicts, but through institutional “silent revolutions” woven stitch by stitch. The Health Transformation Program and national fighter jets and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) produced in the defence industry are the building blocks of this revolution.

Moreover, Turkiye does not view technological transformation merely as instrumental progress; it presents a brand new vision. By openly opposing the algorithmic exploitation of global digital giants, it advocates for a value-oriented and ethical technological order that places human dignity, privacy, and the family at its centre. TEKNOFEST is not just a technology fair; it is a ceremony of institutional self-confidence where a generation – once intended to be manipulated in the streets during past coup eras – becomes the builder of this very moral and fully independent technological future.

The greatest outcome of this will for full independence is the historic struggle waged against the scourge of terrorism – which has made the nation weep blood – under the ideal of a “Terror-Free Turkiye”. Recipes dictated from the outside have been crumpled up and thrown away; terrorism has been dried up at its source, and the dirty corridors intended to be established at our borders have been shattered by the “Turkiye Model”. A Turkiye completely cleansed of terrorism has thwarted Israel’s expansionist ambitions built on dividing, weakening, and destabilising the region; it has become the greatest hope for the Palestinian cause, for Jerusalem, and for the oppressed in Gaza.

Viewing democracy not as a tool but as an unshakable value, this political mindset forever closed the dark parenthesis of tutelage opened on May 27, 1960, on the night of July 15, when the nation lay down in front of tanks and braved gun barrels. This democratic resilience achieved at home has today made Turkiye the vanguard of a global conscience movement abroad.

The objection raised by our President and Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdogan that “The World is Bigger Than Five!” has transformed into an “Erdogan Doctrine” that maps the conscience of humanity against those who fancy themselves masters of the globe. This quest for justice – embodied in the human tragedy in Gaza, in baby Aylan whose washed-up body shook the world, and in a little boy who recited the Quran with his last breath under the rubble – is the clearest indicator of Turkiye’s determination to defend the rights of the innocent in international diplomacy.

Today, moving far beyond being a passive ally in global politics, Turkiye has risen to the position of a subject that rewrites the rules of the international system, produces solutions to geopolitical crises, and personally steers diplomatic change.

Having long transcended artificial agendas and polemics in domestic politics, the AK Party’s true power in this multipolar world lies not only in the country’s economic and strategic capacity. It lies in the unshakeable democratic legitimacy behind our President and Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdogan – one of the most senior and experienced heads of state in world politics – and in the profound trust that all oppressed peoples across the earth place in Turkiye.

Our tremendous state experience over the past quarter-century is our most solid reference; yet, this political movement, with its face always turned towards the future, is determined to build the “Century of Turkiye” vision on the axis of justice, compassion, and sustainable global peace by blending it with the nation’s internal dynamics. In this new age marked by great trials that deeply affect humanity, under the leadership of our President and Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who shapes global politics with his unparalleled state experience and vision in the international arena – Turkiye marches forward with strong steps, shoulder to shoulder with our nation, as a playmaker towards new targets and a bright new quarter-century.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

In designating Brazil’s two largest criminal organisations, Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV), as “terrorist” groups, the United States has asserted its own definition of Brazil’s security threats, with consequences that reach far beyond law enforcement. The move is being presented by both the US and the Brazilian far right as a “necessary response” to the “growing transnational reach of organised crime”, but, in reality, it says far more about politics than security.

The designation reflects a dangerous convergence between Washington’s longstanding interventionist instincts in Latin America, echoing memories from the US-sponsored dictatorship that lasted from 1964 until 1985, and the interests of Brazil’s far right.

PCC and CV are indeed responsible for violence on a massive scale. They are among the most powerful criminal networks in Latin America and pose a genuine threat to public security in Brazil and beyond. But violence, however extreme, does not in itself make an organisation “terrorist”. Although the term is contested, terrorism is generally understood to involve violence pursued for political or ideological ends.

PCC and CV may corrupt institutions, influence politicians, control territory or confront the state when it serves their interests, but their primary purpose is criminal power and profit, not political transformation. Politics is a means of protecting and expanding their operations, not the reason those organisations exist.

The more broadly governments apply the terrorism label, the more it risks obscuring the nature of the security threat itself, while giving states greater scope to use such designations for political ends. That makes the question of why Washington chose to act now particularly important.

Neither PCC nor CV is a newly discovered threat. The PCC has existed since the early 1990s; the CV is even older, and both organisations and the harm they cause have been known to Brasilia and Washington alike for decades.

So why did the US decide in 2026 that these long-established organised crime networks should now be designated “terrorist” groups?

The answer appears to lie less in any new assessment of the threat than in Brazil’s domestic politics.

The timing of the designation is difficult to separate from the Bolsonaro family’s efforts to enlist Washington in its political fight with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government. Former President Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year-and-three-month sentence for his role in an attempted coup following his 2022 election defeat, while his sons have increasingly taken that fight to the US.

Flavio Bolsonaro, one of the former president’s sons, has spent months portraying Lula as soft on organised crime and pressing US officials to take a harder line against his government, including by directly pushing the Trump administration to designate PCC and CV as “terrorist” organisations. His brother Eduardo Bolsonaro, who now lives in the US, went further during the proceedings against their father, lobbying for sanctions against Brazilian Supreme Court justices and tariffs on Brazil. On June 16, Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced Eduardo to four years and two months in prison for coercion over that campaign.

Flavio’s lobbying also has an immediate electoral significance. He has emerged as Lula’s main challenger in October’s election. An August 11 CNT/MDA poll put Lula on 42.4 percent in the first round and Flavio on 28.7 percent.

In that electoral context, the terrorism designation serves an important political function, reinforcing a narrative promoted by the Brazilian far right that Lula is aligned with criminal organisations or unwilling to confront them. The objective is not necessarily to prove such claims, but to create a climate of suspicion that can be weaponised domestically and used to justify greater US involvement in Brazil.

During far-right demonstrations, it is common to see supporters of the Bolsonaro family displaying US flags and openly asking for military and foreign intervention to “save” Brazil from the left. The US flags and calls for intervention are therefore not merely theatrical; they reflect a political movement that increasingly looks to Washington as an ally in its domestic struggle.

The strategy is familiar. Across the world, right-wing movements have increasingly blurred distinctions between crime, migration, political opposition and terrorism. Security rhetoric has become a tool for delegitimising opponents and justifying extraordinary measures.

Mexico offers a notable example. Calls from US politicians to classify Mexican cartels as terrorist organisations have often been accompanied by proposals for unilateral military action inside Mexican territory. And after Nicolas Maduro was kidnapped by US forces from his secure residence in Caracas, any Latin American leader has reason to take Trump’s threats of unilateral action seriously.

The issue, then, is not simply how Washington defines a security threat, but what powers and forms of intervention that definition can be used to justify. That question now extends directly to Brazil. Washington insists that the designation of groups such as the PCC and CV as terrorist organisations merely provides additional legal tools, but those tools carry consequences well beyond criminal prosecution. They give US authorities greater powers to freeze assets, impose sanctions and prosecute individuals accused of supporting these groups.

They also create new compliance obligations for companies operating in Brazil and expose financial networks to increased scrutiny. Banks may have no knowing connection with PCC or CV and still face pressure to show that their systems have not been used, directly or indirectly, to move funds linked to them. Tracing such links through clients, third parties, front companies and complex payment chains can be extraordinarily difficult.

The financial implications also intersect with a separate US dispute over PIX, Brazil’s central bank-run instant payment system, which has become a major alternative to card networks such as Visa and Mastercard. Washington has scrutinised PIX as part of a broader trade dispute, while Flavio Bolsonaro has proposed limiting its future links with non-Western payment systems.

The PCC and CV designation could add another layer of scrutiny if funds linked to either group are found to have moved through PIX.

Brazilian security officials have also warned that the designation could complicate long-established channels of police cooperation with the US. Joint investigations into PCC and CV rely heavily on routine intelligence-sharing and coordination between law enforcement agencies, but treating the groups as “terrorist” organisations could shift some investigations into more restricted intelligence and national-security channels, making that cooperation harder rather than strengthening it.

Beyond these immediate consequences, the designation creates a precedent for deeper US involvement in Brazilian security policy, and the whole of Latin America has seen this movie before.

Throughout the Cold War, Washington routinely justified interventions by framing domestic political conflicts as components of a larger ideological struggle against communism. Governments, social movements and political actors were classified according to their usefulness within broader US strategic objectives.

Today, anticommunism has largely been replaced by counterterrorism as a justification for intervention, even though Trump and the far right have also revived the fear of communism, applying it to almost anything to their left. The vocabulary has changed, but the logic remains strikingly similar.

By defining threats unilaterally and exporting those definitions abroad, Washington creates new avenues for political influence within sovereign countries that have experienced US intervention before.

Brazil has a serious organised crime problem that requires robust law enforcement, international cooperation and institutional reform. But combating criminal organisations effectively requires understanding what they are, not what political actors would like them to be.

PCC and CV are dangerous precisely because they are sophisticated criminal enterprises. Recasting them as “terrorist” organisations may generate political advantages, but it risks obscuring the nature of the threat itself.

Washington is turning a complex domestic security problem into a geopolitical and ideological battleground.

And in Latin America, history suggests that when Washington starts redefining domestic problems through the lens of its own political interests, sovereignty is often the first casualty.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is once again under attack from the United States. The reason behind Washington’s efforts to dismantle the institution is simple: an insistence that the US enjoys wholesale impunity.

In numerous contexts, there are credible allegations of US citizens being involved in international crimes. If the US weren’t exposed to accountability for its atrocities, it wouldn’t be seeking to destroy the court.

Now it’s the time for the ICC’s backers to stand up.

US aggression towards the ICC is nothing new. The US has been seeking to subvert the work of the court since before it was even a fixture of the global arena. Since the presidency of George W Bush, Republicans in particular have been obsessed with the court and its operations. From former national security adviser John Bolton to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Republican officials have been fixated on the ICC even though it has never actually issued a warrant for any American citizen.

Ironically, the efforts of US officials to condemn the ICC have bestowed prestige and legitimacy upon the institution. To those across the globe who believe that the ICC is feckless in the face of US imperial ambitions, tantrums from successive Republican administrations are a powerful antidote. In a nutshell, the greater Washington’s hysteria over the ICC, the more powerful and persuasive the court appears to those who believe the US is not above the law.

The disdain from political quarters and any commitment to undermine the institution is a feature, not a bug, of international relations – and it always has been. Yet this time feels different. The US sanctions against the ICC’s staff and threats to sanction the court as a whole as well as to dismantle it “brick by brick”, per Rubio, smack of escalation and pose an existential threat to the ICC.

The only thing that can save the court is its members. If they fail to do so, it will not be President Donald Trump who kills the ICC, but their indifference.

The smattering of primarily European and South American expressions of support for the ICC is good. But it is not enough. There are concrete actions that states can take to not only defend the court but also to strengthen it.

First, members of the ICC should double down on cooperating with the court. They should reiterate that they support every situation currently under investigation and they will offer tangible cooperation in terms of evidence and any enforcement of arrest warrants issued by the institution. If they have already done so, they should do it again.

Second, the court’s backers should encourage more states to join the ICC. This is particularly important given the recent withdrawals of Venezuela and Chad from the court – both of which left after being asked to do so by Washington. If the Trump administration is seeking to damage the court by diminishing its membership, states supportive of the institution should respond in kind with a campaign to rally other states to join.

Many states have considered joining the ICC but have not committed to do so. Now is the time to convince them. Lebanon, for example, has toyed with becoming an ICC member state, which would give the court jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed by Israeli officials and Hezbollah commanders.

As it stands, Beirut has decided not to join the court, but states could be clear that they support it doing so. They could, for example, articulate how joining the ICC could offer Lebanon yet another multilateral venue to withstand pressure from external parties like the US and demonstrate to Lebanese civilians that the rule of law matters. More generally, ICC member states could do more to link bilateral and multilateral trade and economic negotiations with efforts to encourage states to join the court.

Third, states should offer additional financial backing to the ICC. Some say the court’s budget is too big for what it has accomplished. For 2026, it was about $210m – almost a fifth of the daily cost the US is paying to carry out the war in Iran. This is for a court that is seeking to hold perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide accountable in Ukraine, Palestine and Darfur.

Money speaks louder than words. Offering additional and flexible funding to the ICC would be a way to say: This is our court, and we will do whatever is necessary to ensure its operations have the resources they need.

Fourth, states must properly protect ICC staff sanctioned by the US. In August last year, numerous judges at the court were targeted with sanctions for doing nothing more than their part in impartially applying the law to hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable. As a result, they can’t use banks, book hotels or pay for a meal with their credit cards.

The European Union and Canada each have laws on their books that could block the impact of US sanctions on judges. Yet inexplicably, the EU has not invoked its Blocking Statute, and Canada has refused to invoke the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act, leaving their citizens working at the ICC to twist in the wind.

Additionally and inexplicably, neither the EU nor Canada has backed the legal suit by some of the judges to challenge the sanctions in US courts.

Trying to get the US under Trump to stop attacking the ICC is like trying to nail pudding to the wall: It’s not going to happen. But that does not justify the dithering of the court’s purported supporters.

The US assault against the court is calculated to silence ICC supporters and isolate them from the institution. Why? Because the US knows its siege on the court cannot alone ruin the institution. To succeed, it needs others to abandon the ICC.

Instead, states should take the opportunity offered by these unprecedented times to back the ICC in unprecedented ways. However imperfect it is, the court is the only permanent institution capable of holding the world’s worst perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide to account.

For its flaws, the court should be reformed, not destroyed to allow those very perpetrators off the hook. Maintaining support for the ICC in the face of Trump’s attacks is about more than protecting the court – it’s about drawing a line and pronouncing that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

One of my favourite protest songs rings out every year on August 9, which is Women’s Day in South Africa. The song works as a call and response: one set of voices cries out, “You have struck a woman,” while another set responds, “so, you have struck a rock!”

The chant dates back to the historic protest that gave South Africa’s Women’s Day its date and meaning. In 1956, 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria in opposition to “pass laws” that the apartheid regime was seeking to extend to African women. African men were already subject to the indignity of carrying passes, and with this latest move, thousands of domestic workers across the country immediately understood that they too would be subjected to random stops and searches by police. What little freedom of mobility they enjoyed would be snatched away.

Led by the multiracial Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) and the Women’s League of the African National Congress (ANC), a group of politically engaged women organised a petition and a march to oppose the incoming laws.

After months of hard work, thousands of women, most of them Black, woke up at the crack of dawn and began to make their way to the Union Buildings, the seat of power of the Afrikaner government. By nine that morning, they had gathered in front of the office of the Minister for Native Affairs.

It was no accident that the rally took place on a Thursday, which was also known as “Sheila’s Day.” In the 1950s and 1960s, Sheila was a generic name used to describe Black women who were domestic workers; a casual way for white women employers to refer to the African women who worked in their homes without having to remember their actual individual names. Most madams gave their staff Thursdays off and so it came to be known as Sheila’s Day.

As a delegation handed over a petition, the women broke out in song, pointedly addressing then Prime Minister JG Strijdom and insisting, “Strijdom, you have struck the women, so you have struck a rock!”

I was a young feminist in the 1990s and I remember singing that song countless times at rallies, protesting gender-based violence and calling for treatment for pregnant women living with HIV and AIDS. I remember, too, the stories of older women who marched on August 9, who reminded younger activists that many of them had taken to the streets over the objections of their husbands and fellow male comrades. They explained that at the time they did not have the language to explain how race, class and gender intersected; they just knew how sexism felt in their bodies.

By the time we were marching for a new set of rights, they had gifted us the language and analysis to describe how race, class and gender shaped women’s experiences. Their stories also showed us that sexism did not sit neatly outside the struggle against apartheid: women could stand alongside men in a liberation movement while still having to fight for equality with those same men. This was one of the most important legacies of the women’s march in 1956.

The rally that day failed to stop the pass laws, but it had a far more significant impact on the South African political landscape, effectively launching the South African women’s movement. The momentum and defiance of that day gave women in subsequent generations a blueprint for activism and analysis.

When apartheid ended in 1994, many of the women who had been at the forefront of the march in 1956 were still active in politics. The movement they had helped build was such a powerful force in the transition to democracy that almost a third of the incoming parliament comprised women, making South Africa one of only a handful of countries with such strong women’s representation in politics.

Once they were in power, the daughters of 1956 pushed through numerous legal and policy changes on reproductive rights, customary law and marriage – and the rights of domestic workers.

As a result of their efforts, South Africa has some of the most progressive laws and policies promoting gender equity and equality in the world. More than 30 years after the end of apartheid, women still constitute about 45 percent of parliamentarians and 44 percent of ministers.

Yet these gains have not translated into safety. South Africa’s first national gender-based violence study found that 33.1 percent of women aged 18 and older had experienced physical violence in their lifetime, while one in five men surveyed admitted to perpetrating physical or sexual intimate partner violence. The persistence of such violence exposes the limits of formal equality: laws can change faster than the attitudes, relationships and behaviours that shape women’s lives.

The same gap between formal rights and lived reality is evident in economic life. The disconnect between the rights enjoyed by women in positions of power who have helped shape South Africa’s laws and the lives of women in the poor communities to which they are accountable is stark.

South African women living in poverty are besieged by high levels of unemployment, gender-based violence and poor access to health and education services, while middle-class women enjoy many of the privileges once reserved for whites only. This is because in the last 30 years the ANC-led government has done little to dismantle the underlying economic structures that upheld apartheid. Formal equality has not translated into material equality for millions of women.

It is hard to find hope for women in South Africa’s statistics. Indeed, many women I know don’t celebrate Women’s Day – they are weary. Yet the women’s movement that the march helped galvanise 70 years ago still has much to teach us.

The lesson we learn from the vibrant movement that was created that day is that gender equality cannot be driven by women’s demands alone. Real progress requires call and response. Women have been making the call for generations. It is time for men to respond.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

For most of Israel’s history, disagreements between political leaders and the military remained largely private. Arguments over strategy, timing or risk were real, but they were managed away from the public eye. Citizens saw a country that, whatever its internal tensions, could present a coherent face in wartime.

That quiet arrangement has frayed. Nearly three years after the October 7 attacks, open clashes between ministers and senior officers have become almost routine. The latest began when Defence Minister Israel Katz criticised Major-General Avi Bluth, the commander of Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, for seeking to extend the detention of an extremist settler. Katz then announced on live television that Bluth would be replaced, only for Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir to push back publicly, insisting that the general would remain in his post and that the proper procedures must be followed. What was once contained now plays out in full view.

This exchange, like many before it, is not the real story. The real story is what these repeated public ruptures reveal about a country still at war. The campaign that began with a demand for national unity has gradually redefined the relationship between those who set the direction and those who must turn it into reality. The disagreement is no longer mainly about tactics. It is about something more fundamental: Who has the right to define victory, to set the aims of the war, and to decide what is possible.

This change is bigger than a simple loss of discipline or a personal clash. Israel was never a state in which the army merely carried out orders. From the state’s earliest years, the military was a partner in shaping security policy, not a pure executive arm. David Ben-Gurion built the Israeli military as a central national institution. Later leaders – Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Benny Gantz, Yoav Gallant – rose from its ranks. The boundary between political authority and military judgement was always porous. The army did not simply implement policy; it helped define the realistic limits of what politics could demand.

For decades, that partnership rested on an unspoken understanding. The military, with its professional assessment of force, terrain, and risk, often set the ceiling of political ambition. Generals could, and frequently did, tell elected leaders: This is possible, this is not, this will cost more than you are prepared to pay. Politicians retained formal authority, but they operated within a framework of military realism that constrained excess. The army, in its own way, protected the political system from overreach by insisting on the boundaries of the achievable.

That relationship has inverted under the weight of a long war.

Four realities help explain why.

The first is time. Short wars allow disagreements to remain professional. A war that stretches across years turns almost every choice into a political one. How many reservists to call up, when to push deeper, how to weigh the lives of captives against broader military aims, how long a society can sustain the burden of repeated mobilisations – these are no longer purely operational questions. They touch families, communities, and the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people. As the fighting has continued into its third year, the space for quiet professional judgement has narrowed.

The second is the absence of a shared definition of success. Official statements still speak of dismantling Hamas’s military capacity, bringing the captives home, and restoring security to the border communities. In practice, these aims pull against one another and are valued differently by different actors. Some emphasise lasting control or the elimination of residual threats. Others place the captives first or warn against an open-ended occupation. When the meaning of victory itself remains unsettled, each side begins to measure progress by its own lights. Soldiers and their commanders look for results that can be sustained. Political leaders look for outcomes that can be explained to a weary public and to their own political bases.

The third is the divergence of human incentives. Senior officers live with the state of the force and with the consequences of decisions that send people into harm’s way. Ministers live with coalition pressures, public anger, and the next election. When these pressures collide, public disagreement becomes more likely. The longer the war continues without a clear and jointly accepted end, the more often those collisions occur in the open.

The fourth, and most revealing, is the reversal of who defines the possible. Previously, the army told the political leadership what could realistically be achieved. Today, political leaders increasingly tell the army what must be achieved – and attack it when the answer is no. The military is no longer the institution that sets the ceiling of ambition. It is expected to make the politically desired outcome possible, and it is blamed when the limits of force become visible. This is not a minor adjustment in tone. It is a structural inversion of the old partnership.

The result is a deeper uncertainty about authority. In a short campaign, the question of who ultimately directs the war can remain unspoken. In a long war, it becomes unavoidable. Does final responsibility rest with the prime minister, the security cabinet, the defence minister, or the chief of staff? Different answers produce different strategies, different tolerances for risk, and different timelines for ending the fighting. When these answers are disputed in public, the coherence of decision-making suffers, and so does the clarity of what is being asked of the people who must execute the decisions.

The practical effects are already felt. Shared objectives become harder to set. An end that both political and military leaders can accept becomes more difficult to reach. A single durable strategy grows less likely. These are not problems of personality. They are problems of a system under prolonged strain. A country that once relied on the military’s professional standing to define the realistic boundaries of political ambition now finds politicians demanding outcomes that the army is expected simply to deliver, while soldiers, reservists, and families continue to bear the human consequences.

The public dispute between a defence minister and a chief of staff may look, on the surface, like another round of personal or partisan conflict. It is better understood as the latest expression of a larger question that has accompanied Israel since October 7: When a war stretches across years rather than weeks, who finally decides what is possible – the politician whose survival depends on the appearance of control, or the general who believes he understands the limits of military power? The answer will shape not only the relationship between government and army, but the manner and the moment in which this war eventually ends, and the human price still to be paid until then.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Every Palestinian born in the West Bank before the start of the occupation in 1967 has witnessed the extent to which Israel has transformed the landscape through spatial planning, military closures, and settlement, infrastructure and road construction. Sixty years on, what used to be a straightforward journey from point A to point B within the West Bank has become an arduous and frequently hazardous undertaking.

As a foreigner living in the West Bank in the 1980s and visiting it off and on ever since, this transformation revealed itself in incremental leaps and bounds, on each occasion provoking a shock of recognition mixed with consternation at how things looked the same but different.

I remember driving from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the 1980s, for example. The two cities were linked by a single highway with an Israeli army checkpoint at Qalandia refugee camp. To get to my destination would take me from 20 minutes to half an hour, at most, depending on traffic and the mood of the soldiers that day.

Fast forward to 2000. I had not visited for several years on the day I took my rental car along the old road out of Jerusalem. Ten minutes into my journey and not having taken any turns, I suddenly found myself inside an Israeli settlement, a suburb of occupied East Jerusalem.

Backtracking, I discovered that the way to Ramallah now required leaving the main highway for a lesser road. I proceeded. Yet before another 10 minutes had passed, I ended up at the entrance to another Israeli settlement, this time in the occupied West Bank, having again missed the relevant exit.

Looking back at those days, I now remember such unexpected forced deviations as annoyances that barely consumed additional time. Today, by contrast, travelling from Jerusalem to Ramallah can take an hour, or hours, as the army slows down or holds up traffic at all the available access points to Ramallah at will.

For Palestinians, the experience is 10 times worse. Ever growing in number and impact, Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement have come in various types. One class includes army checkpoints, both stationary and mobile, on West Bank arteries, makeshift earthen embankments blocking roads to villages and refugee camps, and steel gates that the army can close and open via remote control.

A second category involves access to occupied East Jerusalem and Israel, which is possible only by obtaining a permit from the military authorities. This affects Palestinians wishing to visit Islam’s and Christianity’s holy sites as well as those employed inside Israel.

And a third category of restrictions concerns West Bank Palestinians’ ability to travel abroad via the Allenby Bridge border crossing with Jordan.

Movement restrictions intensified after the October 2023 Hamas attacks on southern Israel. Their cumulative impact has been to fragment Palestinian society and the way it functions. They have disrupted the economy, in particular.

A combination of military no-go zones and settler violence has made the 61 percent of the West Bank that constitutes Area C, where most agricultural lands are located, increasingly inaccessible.

Curbs on movement have affected trade, raising the cost of commerce when transport is delayed at checkpoints and perishable goods spoil.

Imports and exports also face impediments, harming a Palestinian economy that is heavily dependent on trade with Israel and the outside world (representing roughly 67 percent of its GDP).

Restricted hours at Allenby and an untransparent, elastic definition of “dual-use” goods cause costly delays for imports, stymying development. Traders’ inability to meet their Israeli counterparts in person forces them to use intermediaries at additional expense.

Movement restrictions have created their own self-perpetuating cat-and-mouse dynamic as Palestinians find ways to circumvent them and the army imposes additional curbs, forcing people to pursue evermore inventive bypass tactics. But their clever manoeuvring may carry additional costs or even risks to their lives.

Take, for example, efforts by Palestinians – desperate to put food on the table – to illegally cross into Israel for work. Some have been shot dead when breaching Israel’s separation barrier while others have been detained.

In the months before October 2023, about 193,000 West Bank and Gaza workers were employed in Israel or Israeli settlements, mainly in construction and agriculture, contributing 20 to 25 percent to the Palestinian GDP.

Israel stopped workers from crossing the Green Line on the heels of the Hamas attack, citing security concerns, even though it has offered no evidence that Palestinian workers employed in Israel in any way played a role in the events of October 2023. Since then, the number of those permitted to go to their Israeli jobs is estimated at a mere 44,000, mostly in skilled professions.

The loss of what may be a family’s primary income has been calamitous, affecting about 750,000 people (based on an average family size of five) in a population of about 3.3 million. Meanwhile, an economic downturn has further swelled the ranks of the West Bank unemployed. Poverty rates have shot up.

Movement restrictions have also disrupted family networks, limiting participation in large gatherings, such as weddings and funerals, as extended families are spread throughout the West Bank. Curbs on movement additionally complicate access to emergency or specialised medical care and even to education. Since October 2023, Palestinian institutions of higher education have reduced in-class teaching as students have faced repeated delays – often of unpredictable length – in coming to school. Online classes can only partially compensate for this disruption.

What purpose do the myriad movement restrictions serve? Palestinians often describe their experience of navigating army checkpoints as a humiliation and a form of harassment, an effort by Israeli soldiers to both show who is boss and make the population’s life difficult. Many Palestinians see in soldiers’ conduct a way of taking revenge for the Hamas attacks.

Yet by increasing the occupation’s severity, checkpoints and other restrictions on Palestinians’ movement could well have the opposite effect of triggering greater violence and thus making Israel and its citizens, including those residing in illegal settlements, not more but less secure.

While the Israeli army might argue that a certain checkpoint at a given location and time is justified on the grounds of maintaining security, in their ubiquity and seeming arbitrariness, these restrictions have, over the years, gone far beyond what could reasonably be termed a security rationale.

A motive other than maintaining security must, therefore, be at play. It is not hard to find one when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out a two-state solution and champions annexing the occupied West Bank to Israel while some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, openly espouse policies that would encourage West Bank Palestinians to emigrate.

Whatever the declared policy, the compounding impact of Israel’s movement restrictions has been to break up the West Bank into smaller zones that the Israeli army and intelligence apparatus can more easily penetrate and control. Palestinian politics remains vibrant in these localities (elections to West Bank municipal councils were held most recently this past April) while national politics and governance have eroded, partly as a result of obstacles to movement.

And Israel has been able to suppress, for now, armed resistance to the occupation, which has assumed an increasingly local character. The army made short work of small armed groups like the Lions’ Den, for example. These had emerged five years ago in the northern West Bank, spontaneously and largely uncoordinated between localities.

Yet even as Israel splits Palestinian society into separate enclaves, it has found no effective answer to Palestinians’ enduring aspirations to free themselves from the military occupation. To the contrary, it is sowing the seeds for further resistance through its annexationist agenda and unremittingly punitive actions.

A version of this article appeared first on Al Jazeera Arabic’s website. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

On Thursday, United States President Donald Trump announced that Hamas had agreed to disarm and move to the next phase of the ceasefire deal in Gaza. The announcement was received positively by various regional actors while the US president characterised it as a “historic agreement”.

The problem is that the disarmament is unlikely to take place. That is because Hamas has made clear that it has conditioned relinquishing its weapons on Israel abiding by its obligations under the agreement, which the latter has failed to do since it was reached in October. The Board of Peace, the body tasked with overseeing the ceasefire and Gaza’s reconstruction, has done nothing to pressure it into compliance.

This is one of the many failures of this body, which has very little to show for its six-month existence. It lacks the power, financing, enforcement mechanisms and legal standing within the international legal system to fulfil its self-declared mandate. Rather than creating a pathway towards de-escalation, it has created an appearance of diplomatic progress that provides political cover for the continuation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The only way to move forward is for the board to be abandoned and responsibility returned to the United Nations.

Achieving nothing

The Board of Peace was established under Article 9 of Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, announced in October. Its mandate is to oversee a temporary Palestinian technocratic body that would manage Gaza and an International Stabilization Force (ISF) of multinational peacekeepers. In theory, the board would supervise Gaza’s reconstruction and Israel’s gradual withdrawal. In practice, it has not achieved any progress on either of these processes.

Despite lofty promises from the Trump administration about transforming Gaza into a modern urban landscape, there has been no movement in that direction. The majority of the population still lives in abhorrent conditions in tents.

Last month, the board scaled down the reconstruction plan to a pilot project near Rafah, close to the Egyptian border, which is under the control of the Palestinians who collaborate with Israel. Israel would vet the Palestinians who are allowed to stay in that development.

Worse still, the board is trying to give itself the right to confiscate Palestinian properties or use them “free of charge”. This signals its willingness to serve as a facade for continuing Israeli theft of Palestinian land.

An Israeli withdrawal – the other major process the board should oversee – has been all but forgotten. Instead, Israel has continued to kill Palestinians in regular bombardments and encroach on more and more Palestinian land.

Since the ceasefire began in October, Israel has killed more than 1,100 Palestinian civilians. It has continued to carry out demolitions of Palestinian homes and to move its “Yellow Line”, expanding its control to about 70 percent of Gaza’s territory, up from 53 percent at the start of the ceasefire.

The Board of Peace has taken no action in response to these Israeli colonial practices and has not issued any public statements condemning them.

Meanwhile, the board has framed Palestinians as responsible for the lack of progress. Its high representative, Nickolay Mladenov, has described Hamas as the “principal obstacle” to implementing the ceasefire despite no recorded Palestinian attacks since its beginning.

This one-sided scrutiny reveals the board’s function: not peacemaking but providing cover for the ongoing occupation.

The Board of Peace has also maintained arrangements that allow Israel to control the flow of aid into Gaza. Although Trump’s plan stipulates that neither Hamas nor Israel should interfere with the entry and distribution of assistance, the Israeli military continues to determine both the quantity and type of assistance allowed into the Gaza Strip.

Major European countries and China have declined to join the Board of Peace. States that initially signalled a willingness to contribute to the ISF have since frozen or withdrawn their commitments.

This lack of confidence is also reflected in funding failures. Despite initial pledges of $10bn from the US and a further $7bn from other countries, the World Bank account established for the board reportedly has received no funds. Instead, it has relied on a few million dollars deposited into a private JP Morgan account, much of which has been spent on salaries and administrative overhead rather than reconstruction or civilian protection.

The return of the UN

Perhaps the starkest sign of the failure of the Board of Peace is that it is seeking to give itself immunity from prosecution. In a draft resolution, the board appears to pursue protections for its members and administrative bodies, including the Office of the High Representative, Palestinian technocrats, international military forces and nonresident contractors.

In other words, the board wants to operate above the law. The goal is clear: impose a foreign governance structure that obscures Israeli colonisation of Gaza behind an international body.

The continuing existence of such a body is an international disgrace, and it needs to end.

The appropriate response is a collective push by states that support the two-state solution and the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to bring the process back to the United Nations umbrella. Palestinian factions should be at the forefront of this effort.

The UN should assume responsibility and transfer any relevant functions away from the board to established UN bodies.

Critics may counter that the UN has failed to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for more than seven decades. That is true. But its umbrella offers an international legal framework that anchors action in international law and readily identifies violations. That provides structure and legal levers the Palestinians can use to continue pushing for their rights.

What is more, there is a dedicated UN agency – UNRWA – that deals with Palestinian refugee problems and is best equipped to handle the vast challenges of a displaced and impoverished population. The return of UNRWA is important not only as a service-provision body but also as an entity that protects the rights and status of Palestinian refugees.

The UN and its associated bodies have established accountability and transparency mechanisms that can minimise the misuse of resources needed for rebuilding Gaza. While ending the occupation depends on the political will of the world’s foremost powers, the UN umbrella maintains the legal status of Gaza as occupied territory and protects the rights of the occupied population.

The UN can also play a role in the deployment of the ISF. The force should be deployed not just in Gaza but also the West Bank to protect Palestinians from settler attacks. Giving the ISF a UN mandate would encourage more countries to contribute to its creation and help build a wider coalition of countries invested in the stabilisation and protection of Gaza and the West Bank. This could be a preliminary step that sets up Israel’s withdrawal from these occupied territories.

The international community must act now. The Board of Peace must be abandoned, and all responsibility for Gaza must be transferred back to the UN system. The UN must be empowered to take the lead in any future arrangements.

Continuing to maintain the current situation in Gaza means the continuation of Palestinian suffering and the deepening of uninhabitability, in effect paving the way for the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land. What is urgently needed is a UN-led mechanism that is immediately enforceable and grounded in international law.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Police cases, social media takedowns and online abuse have followed many who took part in India’s Cockroach Janta Party-led demonstrations that ended on July 25. Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he forgives ‘misled children’ who abused him during the protests.

Nearly eight decades after the establishment of Israel, the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state remains the defining question of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Wars have been fought, peace treaties signed and diplomatic initiatives launched, yet this central strategic issue remains unresolved.

Today, Saudi Arabia is at the forefront of the efforts to establish a Palestinian state and deliver a lasting peace arrangement with Israel. Its commitment to the issue is made clear by its decision to cosponsor the creation of the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution in 2024, which is currently meeting in Rome.

King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are following in the footsteps of successive Saudi monarchs. For more than half a century, the kingdom has maintained a remarkably consistent position. The question has never been whether peace with Israel is possible, but whether the political conditions required to make such a peace comprehensive, legitimate and irreversible were present.

Within that framework, recognition of Israel and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state are parallel components of a single settlement. Neither is intended to precede the other.

That doctrine originated under King Faisal, who made Palestinian self-determination a central pillar of Saudi national security policy. His successors preserved the principle while adapting its diplomatic expression to changing regional realities. The objective remained constant even as the diplomatic environment evolved.

The Fahd Plan of 1981 – named after King Fahd – translated that doctrine into a formal peace proposal calling for Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territories and recognition of Palestinian national rights. Two decades later, the Crown Prince and later King Abdullah expanded the same strategic logic through the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. Israel was offered comprehensive peace and normal relations with the Arab world in return for withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

The current Saudi leadership therefore inherits an established strategic doctrine rather than an unresolved policy debate. Their responsibility is to determine whether today’s diplomatic environment can finally satisfy conditions that have remained fundamentally unchanged for decades.

That continuity also reflects a broader question of state legitimacy. For the Saudi monarchy, support for Palestinian statehood has never been solely a matter of foreign policy. It has become one of the enduring pillars of the kingdom’s political and religious legitimacy, rooted in the monarch’s role as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and reinforced by the kingdom’s longstanding position within both the Arab and Islamic worlds.

The significance of that continuity became clearer after the Abraham Accords of 2020. By establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, later joined by Morocco and Sudan, the accords demonstrated that Arab-Israeli normalisation could advance without progress on Palestinian statehood. They reshaped regional diplomacy, but they neither resolved the Palestinian question nor completed the wider peace process.

Successive US administrations have regarded Saudi participation as the decisive missing element. The Abraham Accords could expand without Riyadh, but they could not acquire their full strategic significance without the kingdom’s participation.

The Trump administration has once again placed Saudi-Israeli normalisation at the centre of its regional diplomacy. But this diplomatic push has to be evaluated in the larger post-October 7 context.

The war in Gaza created an entirely new diplomatic environment. The subsequent ceasefire initiative and the establishment of the Board of Peace introduced a framework intended to end the conflict, stabilise the territory and begin reconstruction. Their significance lies not in replacing a political settlement, but in creating conditions under which one might become possible.

For the kingdom, however, the essential political requirement remains unchanged: the actual and irreversible establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

That position rests upon mutually reinforcing political, religious and economic foundations. The monarch governs not only as head of state but also as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, a responsibility carrying religious authority throughout the Islamic world. Any decision concerning recognition of Israel would therefore require both political approval and broad religious legitimacy. Such legitimacy could not credibly rest upon promises of future negotiations. It would require the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

The kingdom’s wider influence reinforces that position. It is by far the Arab world’s largest economy, representing about one-third of total Arab economic output. The kingdom is the only regional member of the G20, one of the world’s leading energy superpowers and the world’s leading crude oil exporter. It is also the Middle East’s principal economic engine. Combined with its religious standing, these factors give Saudi decisions consequences extending far beyond bilateral diplomacy.

The implications would reach well beyond the kingdom itself. Several major Arab states, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Algeria, have not recognised Israel. Their decisions are sovereign, but a Saudi-Israeli settlement founded upon Palestinian statehood would nevertheless transform the political environment in which those decisions are made.

Lebanon illustrates the point. Washington is encouraging Beirut to move towards formal relations with Israel as part of a broader effort to stabilise the Israeli-Lebanese frontier. The domestic political cost of such a decision, however, would look fundamentally different after a Saudi-backed settlement based upon Palestinian statehood than before one.

The same logic extends across the wider Muslim world. Major influential countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Malaysia have withheld recognition of Israel because the Palestinian question remains unresolved. A settlement accepted by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and accompanied by the establishment of a Palestinian state would compel those governments to follow. It would remove the principal political and religious obstacles to reconsidering their positions.

This is what ultimately distinguishes Saudi Arabia from the earlier Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia’s participation would be different in kind, not merely in scale, carrying political, economic and religious significance across the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Whether the current diplomatic process can ultimately reach that point remains uncertain. Israel, the Palestinians, the United States, the European Union and certain regional governments all have indispensable roles to play. The final Saudi decision, however, rests with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Within the strategic framework they have inherited, Palestinian statehood and recognition of Israel are not sequential steps but parallel obligations. Neither can acquire lasting legitimacy without the other.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The recent uprising of the youth in India might seem to have subsided after forcing Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister of India, to resign. Still, he was never the true target of this historic youth revolt. The slogans, the placards, the irreverent digital art and the collective anger of the young were directed at one man alone: Narendra Modi.

There exists a pervasive prejudice among the intelligentsia that young Indians today are politically indifferent, consumerist and unconcerned with politics or the erosion of democratic norms. The events at Jantar Mantar have laid bare the shallowness of this assumption. The young harboured no illusions about the nature of this regime. They understood with absolute clarity that in the present constitutional setup, no minister possesses independent agency.

The Indian state today has been reduced to a single face, a single voice and an unyielding hub of authority: Narendra Modi. To demand the resignation of a minister, therefore, was not an administrative plea; it was a deliberate act to compel the supreme leader himself to yield.

Walking through Jantar Mantar, the protest site in central Delhi, occupied by thousands of young people for weeks, one could not escape this truth. What these young people achieved was nothing short of the iconoclasm of our times: the systematic demolition of the carefully curated, mythic public persona that this regime has spent a decade building as the sole visage of the nation.

What was most remarkable about this uprising was its radical decentralisation.

There were no high-budget, professionally printed banners. There was no vanguard organisation dictating the visual language of the protest or distributing uniform slogans for the benefit of television cameras. Scraps of cardboard, discarded paper and cheap marker pens sufficed. Each placard bore the unmistakable, authentic imprint of individual moral agency.

Yet, beneath this extraordinary heterogeneity, there remained an unwavering thematic unity.

Everything revolved around Modi.

The prime minister was mocked, caricatured and systematically stripped of the sacral aura that had been constructed around him for more than 10 years. In a matter of weeks, this generation transformed an imposing figure of state authority into a subject of collective laughter.

The young were outraged, above all, by the sheer, unbridled arrogance of power.

This uprising did not spring from material grievances alone; it arose from a profound sense of humiliation. The immediate symbolic spark was the deeply insensitive remark made by the chief justice of India, who publicly compared unemployed young people to “cockroaches”.

Coming after years in which the higher judiciary has increasingly appeared less like an independent guardian of the Constitution and more like an extension of executive power, the remark was understood as an articulation of the regime’s own contempt for its youth.

The formation of the “Cockroach Janta Party” (CJP) was an act of counter-humour born of deep injury. The already unfolding scandal over irregularities in the NEET examinations provided the movement with a concrete institutional focal point. The scandal became the occasion to demand accountability not just for a single test, but for an entire culture of governance.

The regime, meanwhile, suffered from its own hubris. It had persuaded itself that Indian society was thoroughly managed. Preoccupied with engineering electoral outcomes through the manipulation of rolls, managing parliamentary majorities through party defections, and consolidating its hold over state institutions, it failed to notice the quiet, gathering storm beneath the surface.

Those who possessed platforms, prestige and the power to shape public discourse were engrossed in celebrating the grand narrative of national glory. Television studios debated the nation’s civilisational destiny and its global standing. The mainstream press sang panegyrics to a “New India”. Scarcely anyone looked towards the young who found every avenue of mobility blocked. Their anxieties were rendered invisible because the state and its allied media did not consider them worthy of serious democratic attention.

Deprived of traditional spaces, they constructed their own. Their smartphones became their public square; social media platforms became their political assemblies; and satire became their primary democratic vocabulary.

The ruling ideology had convinced itself that the project of cultural hegemonisation was complete: once the majority was mobilised around a politics of religious identity and grievance against minorities, material realities would cease to matter. The aspirations, anxieties and dignity of an entire generation simply did not figure in this political imagination.

It was against this backdrop of institutional indifference that Sonam Wangchuk began his fast at Jantar Mantar. The government’s initial response was its standard weapon: calculated silence. As Wangchuk’s health deteriorated, the refusal to even acknowledge his presence generated profound moral outrage. Then came the fateful decision to forcibly remove him.

It proved to be a fatal miscalculation. The young perceived the treatment of Wangchuk as an insult to their own citizenship. What was done to him could be done to anyone who dared to stand up. His humiliation became their collective provocation. The response was immediate: Jantar Mantar was flooded by thousands of young bodies.

When the young marched towards parliament on July 20, the state relied on its familiar playbook: barricades, prohibitory orders and violent suppression. It had deployed these very methods against the anti-CAA protesters and the farmers’ movement. But this time, the internal mechanics of fear failed to operate. The blows they received did not shatter their spirit; they deepened their moral clarity.

Their struggle was not merely about securing a policy change or extracting a routine administrative concession. They set out to breach that institutional arrogance. When the Delhi police rained blows on the protesters on July 20, beating young citizens with a ferocity typically reserved for enemy combatants, the protesters did not view those batons as the instruments of an indifferent police force. They recognised them as the direct expression of Narendra Modi’s political will.

Yet, fear failed to perform its intended historic function. Many returned to Jantar Mantar carrying their wounds like badges of honour. Some returned barefoot. Their injuries became symbols of moral persistence rather than reasons for retreat. Their resolve was remarkably simple: they would force Modi to sacrifice one of his own.

Crucially, the protesters refused to yield to the temptation of violence. Their weapons remained language, images and satire. Armed with their phones, they launched an unrelenting assault on the prime minister’s public image, the very asset he has guarded most fiercely throughout his political life. For the first time, Modi was drawn onto a battleground where he could not dictate the rules.

When the prime minister attempted to intervene directly on social media, addressing the youth as “friends”, the rebuttal was instant and devastating:

“We are not your friends.”

It was more than a clever slogan; it marked the psychological collapse of a carefully cultivated paternalistic relationship. For years, Modi had sought to speak directly to the populace, bypassing mediating institutions and independent media. The young rejected that calculated intimacy in a single sentence. The authority of the patriarch dissolved into the irreverence that a free people reserve for their elected officials. The spell of fear was broken.

The assault on Modi’s public image appears to have shaken the regime far more deeply than any routine electoral setback ever could. For more than a decade, his authority has rested not merely on the coercive power of the state, but on the illusion of invulnerability: an image of a leader who never retreats, never admits error and never compromises.

The movement had to be contained before the satire hardened into permanent collective memory and the laughter of the young became the common language of the republic.

Pradhan’s resignation must be read precisely in this light. It is not the sacrifice of a minister; it is a desperate attempt to construct a firewall around the prime minister himself. The government will undoubtedly frame this as evidence of its responsiveness and democratic sensitivity. But the young understand it differently. For them, the resignation is a political concession extracted from an authority that had run out of options.

Before arriving at this point, the state had exhausted its standard repertoire of delegitimisation. It ignored the movement, questioned its motives, accused the youth of being proxies for opposition parties and deployed its media networks to allege foreign plots. When these slurs failed to stick, it resorted to force. Having endured all of this, the young do not view the minister’s exit as an act of state benevolence; they see it as the reluctant admission of a defeat that could no longer be disguised.

Ordinarily, the vocabulary of victory and defeat should not dominate a constitutional democracy. A government is expected to listen to its citizens, not view them as adversaries to be crushed. Dissent is not treason. But when a state consistently treats criticism as hostility and peaceful protesters as enemies of the state, it transforms democratic dialogue into a confrontation. When that happens, it cannot complain if citizens celebrate its retreat as a democratic victory.

The ultimate significance of this movement lies in its moral and creative form. The young answered state coercion with speech, wit, art and an extraordinary mastery of contemporary cultural forms. Their elders have often lamented that a generation raised on short-form content lacks political depth and endurance. Jantar Mantar has demolished that patronising assumption.

The meme was elevated to a potent instrument of political resistance. Laughter accomplished what solemn political rhetoric often fails to do: it punctured fear, dismantled false authority and deprived power of the uncritical reverence upon which authoritarian politics depends.

Authoritarianism requires not just obedience, but awe. It survives as long as people believe the ruler is beyond challenge, beyond satire and beyond defeat. The young at Jantar Mantar refused to grant Narendra Modi that sacral status. They restored him to the position he must occupy in a constitutional republic: an ordinary, accountable political leader, subject to the scrutiny, criticism and satire of the citizenry.

The protest site at Jantar Mantar may now be empty. The barricades have been moved aside and the crowds have returned to their hostels, campuses and homes. But movements of this nature do not end when the physical space is vacated. The critique inaugurated on the streets will continue in countless quiet spaces: university libraries, rented rooms, bus rides and millions of illuminated screens. The language that has been discovered cannot easily be unlearned.

If this youth uprising leaves behind an enduring lesson for the republic, it is a simple, fundamental truth: democracy begins the moment a people recover confidence in their own voice.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.