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As the illegal U.S-Israeli war on Iran spreads violence throughout the Middle East, oil exports from the region have ground to a halt. 00:00 Intro 01:11 Strait Of Hormuz Shut Down 21:36 Dubai Airport In Flames 35:11 Expert Explains Trump’s War Aims 50:04 Would Israel Use A Nuke? Plus: Why Trump’s war aims are looking increasingly untenable, and we ask whether Israel would use its nuclear weapons. With Michael Walker, Ash Sarkar & Annelle Sheline. Support our work: http://novara.media/support Buy Novara Media merch: https://shop.novaramedia.com/ Discuss the show on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Novara/_Media/

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As the illegal U.S-Israeli war on Iran spreads violence throughout the Middle East, oil exports from the region have ground to a halt.

Plus: Why Trump’s war aims are looking increasingly untenable, and we ask whether Israel would use its nuclear weapons.

With Michael Walker, Ash Sarkar & Annelle Sheline.

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A United States diplomat has told Brazilian port industry executives that Washington does not want a Chinese company to win the concession for a major container terminal in Santos, the largest port in Latin America, in the latest sign that the race for one of Brazil’s most prized infrastructure assets has become a front in the broader rivalry between Washington and Beijing. Kevin Murakami, the US consul-general in Sao Paulo, made the comments on March 5, at an event organised by Grupo A Tribuna,...

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On Tuesday 17 March, Quakers will hold a silent Meeting for Worship outside New Scotland Yard. They’ll then join a mass lobby of parliament to defend the right to protest.

The meeting follows two police raids on Quaker premises. On 5 March the Metropolitan Police raided Westminster Meeting House, arresting 15 people attending a nonviolent direct action training session.

No one has yet been charged. No one from the first raid, less than a year ago, was ever charged either.

The Quaker meeting takes place at 11.45am at the southern end of Embankment Gardens, with supporters invited to meet from 11.15am. There will also be a livestream.

Quakers – 350 years of resisting oppression

Caroline Nursey, clerk of Westminster Quaker Meeting, said:

Quakers have been accustomed to oppression by the state for over 350 years. We will continue to hire space to explicitly nonviolent groups, just as we always have.

After the meeting for worship, participants will join a mass lobby of parliament from 2pm. Amnesty International UK, Greenpeace, Liberty, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Quakers in Britain, and major trade unions have organised the lobby.

At meetings in Westminster Hall, they will urge MPs to reject the “cumulative disruption” clause in the Crime and Policing Bill. This clause is dangerously broad and undermines human rights. In particular it threatens the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.

Though its primary target is Palestine marches, it could sweep up campaigns on peace, climate justice, and much more.

Police could ban an anti-racist march from Whitehall because of a previous farmers’ protest. Or they could restrict a pride march because a far-right demonstration recently happened in the same town.

The Crime and Policing Bill is part of a broader trend in the UK of cracking down on those who disagree with the government.

The UK is already the only western European country which Civicus has rated “obstructed” for civic freedoms. And a United Nations Special Rapporteur has criticised the UK’s approach.

Gina Romero, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association, will attend the mass lobby and hold separate meetings with MPs.

Find full details of the Quakers’ event here.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

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In 2026, High Street chains are continuing to close due to a lack of consumer spending power and the move to online shopping. River Island plans to shut 32 of its stores this year. And there were 30% less High Street stores in 2024 then there were in 2014.

But maybe that’s a good thing? Arts venues, independent outlets and community spaces could replace Big Brand consumerism, turning the centrepiece of towns from dull shopping centres to vibrant creative development.

The number of grassroots music venues (GMVs) is still shrinking, but they are making a comeback – unlike High Street chains. That perhaps shows an appetite for the move away from such consumerism and towards creative nourishment. In 2025, the number of GMVs shrank by just nine, the lowest since 2018. Half of GMVs make no profit.

Questionable losses

The thing is, charity shops and stores like Poundland are also closing. Low income people rely on these places for basic goods. While the existence of charity is a sign the system isn’t working, it’s better than nothing. Cancer Research UK plans to close around 90 of its shops by May. At the same time, the government can always take a stake in such necessary outfits, lowering prices and reducing inflation. It can also provide more funding towards cancer research, a disease responsible for over a quarter of all deaths in the UK.

Your town, your choice?

The direction of the town centre could be delivered through people’s engagement with the city council, making each town different rather than endless boring chains in every part of the UK. While Neighbourhood Planning is already a thing, big capital often takes priority under the current system. Another issue is people are too busy working long hours on low salaries.

We can do better than our town centres consisting of people working retail hours on the minimum wage in grey, lifeless buildings. They should be places of excitement, varied education and community, but spaces that still recognise the individual. Pubs and cafes, definitely – but also arts venues, independent stores, and grassroots spaces.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

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South East Water has said it cannot provide water for new homes planned in the area it’s supposed to provide for. Yet in 2024 it wasted more than 100 million litres of water every day through its creaking pipes.

South East Water put profit over infrastructure

The water company has spent significantly more servicing its debt and paying shareholder dividends than it has on upgrading infrastructure. In the two years to March 2022, South East Water paid £156 million in dividends and £72.8 million in interest. Yet it spent just £179.8 million on infrastructure improvements.

This highlights that water privatisation is the key issue preventing new homes from having water in the area.

If the water company were nationalised, it could be funded by government issued, debt-free flat currency with increased taxes on extreme wealth to control any inflation from the central money creation. Even if the infrastructure were funded by the current system of government borrowing, that has a lower interest rate than the private sector takes on. So debt would be zero or lower under public ownership – offering tens of millions in funding for infrastructure improvements in those two years. And the £156 million in dividends could also have gone on infrastructure improvements.

“Cannot accommodate” housing

A spokesperson for South East Water said:

From our review of the latest housing forecast figures, we have identified that we cannot accommodate additional growth beyond what was assumed in our Water Resources Management Plan 2024 in areas where we do not have a supply-demand surplus… Specifically, in the Tonbridge and Malling area, where we currently lack available headroom in our supplies, we would be unable to accommodate any growth exceeding our 2024 forecast assumptions throughout the entire planning period.

Perhaps there would be enough water supply if the company had invested in infrastructure such as pipe maintenance and reservoirs.

Shambles

On top of being unable to provide new homes with water, the company left 30,000 homes without water in Kent and Sussex in January. And that’s not the first time. In 2023, South East Water left thousands of homes without running water.

It’s clear the profit motive is incompatible with the essential of water.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

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Deputy leader of Reform Richard Tice has claimed that reports his property empire avoided almost £600,000 in tax is “a desperate Establishment trying to smear” him. Of course, exploiting rent from people’s need for housing with net property assets of over £30 million is entirely anti-establishment and doesn’t epitomise the housing crisis the country is facing.

Tice chats shit

According to the Times, Tice channelled shareholder dividends into an offshore trust and dormant businesses. Doing so, he reportedly avoided hundreds of thousands in tax from the majority of 2018 to 2021. And that’s on multi-million pound profits.

Apparently, a thriving member of the rentier neoliberal capitalist class who treats the essential of housing as an asset is going to help struggling Britons with the cost of living.

Tice recently said:

The cost of living is the number one concern of everybody, and everything that this Government does is just adding to costs for businesses, and they have to pass it on to consumers.

Labour has added ‘costs’ to businesses. But the issue with the government’s rise in employer National Insurance Contributions (NICs) is that they were flat rather than progressive. Labour’s business tax rise impacted less profitable small and medium size outfits. Whereas, highly profitable businesses can afford to pay more in tax to address inflation (through reducing available pounds – the main function of tax).

For example, private equity and venture capital UK firms make as much profit as £5,206,406 per employee. Meanwhile, real estate – like the company Tice owns – is the most profitable overall industry in the UK.

Instead, housing design, location and features should be provided at cost price by the state with that amount paid off in monthly installments. It should be a not for profit industry.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

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Two young people have died following an outbreak of meningitis in Kent. According to BBC reporting, a further 11 individuals are critically ill in hospital.

The first individual to die was an as-yet-unnamed student at the University of Kent. The second was Juliette, a year-13 student at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham.

The outbreak is thought to be linked to an event at Club Chemistry, a nightclub in Canterbury. As of yet, the specific strain of the infection hasn’t been identified.

Meningitis outbreak: UKHSA response

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is currently managing the response to the outbreak. The organisation is contacting over 30,000 people in the Canterbury area with information.

The University of Kent has stated that it’s moving assessments and exams online as a precautionary measure. Given that we’re currently in an exam season, this is likely to cause a not-insignificant level of disruption.

A spokesperson also said that students who have been in contact with infected individuals are being offered advice.

On campus, hundreds of students stood in line today wearing masks, waiting for preventative antibiotics. Students also reported seeing ambulances and hazmat suit-clad teams outside of their accommodation.

Meanwhile, the guardians of pupils from Norton Knatchbull School in Ashford have also been warned that a sixth-former has been admitted to hospital on suspicion of meningitis.

What to watch out for

Meningitis is a bacterial infection of the meninges, the protective membranes that wrap the brain and spinal cord. It’s most common in young people, from babies to young adults, although anyone can be affected.

If it isn’t treated quickly, the infection can cause permanent brain and nerve damage, or even life-threatening sepsis. Having been infected before is not guarantee that you can’t be re-infected.

Asymptomatic carriers of the infection can spread it to others via spit or saliva. Usually, this will take the form of coughs and sneezes, although it can also be transferred by sharing cutlery or kissing.

Trish Mannes, the regional lead for UKHSA South East, stated that:

Meningococcal disease can progress rapidly, so it’s essential that students and staff are alert to the signs and symptoms of meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia.

Students are particularly at risk of missing the early warning signs of meningitis because they can be easily confused with other illnesses such as a bad cold, flu or even a hangover.

According to the NHS website, symptoms to watch out for include:

• a high temperature (fever)
• being sick
• a headache
• a rash that does not fade when a glass is rolled over it (but a rash will not always develop)
• a stiff neck
• a dislike of bright lights
• drowsiness or unresponsiveness
• seizures (fits)

A rare outbreak

After a confirmed meningococcal outbreak, specialist lab testing is needed to confirm the exact strain of the bacteria responsible. Blood and cerebrospinal fluid tests allow technicians to determine the bacterium’s serogroup and genome.

This information is highly important, as it allows healthcare workers to determine whether a targeted vaccination programme is needed, and whether individual cases are linked. In this case, the wait to know the exact strain may be anywhere between three and seven days.

Outbreaks of meningitis of this magnitude are rare in the UK. However, the BBCreported that senior scientists believe that group B meningococcus bacteria are the most likely cause.

Just last October, the UK government announced that there were 378 cases of invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) in 2024-25. Of these, MenB accounted for 313 (82.6%) of the cases.

Crucially, the Men B vaccine was introduced back in 2025, but only for babies. This means that the teens and young adults who are being affected in Kent wouldn’t have received the vaccine. As things stand, the only way to access the vaccine for individuals outside of infancy is privately, through high-street pharmacies.

Vaccine skepticism on the rise

With vaccine skepticism on the rise in the UK, the US and elsewhere, the current outbreak in Kent is a tragic reminder of the lifesaving necessity of immunisation.

In the US, the rise of anti-vaxxers was underlined by Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a noted vaccine conspiracy theorist, as health secretary. And sure enough, last year, the American Centre for Disease Control was forced to take down its statement that ‘vaccines don’t cause autism’.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Reform leader Nigel Farage is also busy stoking up the conspiracists. In particular, he made vague claims that the Covid-19 jab wasn’t a real vaccine, stating that:

I believe in vaccinations when they’re vaccinations. I don’t think what happened with Covid were vaccinations. You have to keep having them every 6 months.

This anti-science pandering to the extreme right is dangerous – it’s an active threat to public health, and one that we must oppose at every turn. If not, we’ll only see more tragedies like the scenes unfolding in Kent right now.

Featured image via the Canary

By Alex/Rose Cocker

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The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has announced that employers will receive £3,000 for every 18-24-year-old they employ. They will also give small and medium businesses £2,000 for every apprentice they take on.

But, as usual, the approach they’re taking is totally wrong.

DWP pushing kids into shit jobs

Pat McFadden, the Secretary of State for the DWP, has announced the Youth Jobs Grant. This will work alongside the Youth Guarantee. As the Canary has reported, this will push young people into low paid and low skilled work, regardless of whether they’re well enough to work.

McFadden said:

These measures will give life-changing opportunities to young people and significantly reverse the increase we inherited in those not in education, employment or training.

We are focusing funding where it’s needed most and giving employers the flexibility and support they’ve asked for.

The press release, bizarrely, includes a staggering thirty-two quotes ranging everyone from the prime minister to the CEO of B&M.

This gives us a flavour of the sort of employers who will be involved in the scheme. It includes Lloyds Banking Group, Severn Trent, B&M and Amazon. As the Canary previously reported, McFadden’s first Youth Guarantee jobs fair was packed to the teeth with military and weapons companies.

The grant is being touted as incredible reforms, but nobody is looking at the big picture. Yes, it’s great that more jobs are being created for young people, but why do big conglomerates like Amazon need a financial incentive to employ someone? While no doubt some of them will be good jobs, it’s looking more like it will just trap working-class kids in crap jobs with no way out.

Apprenticeships instead of fully paid work

The DWP has also announced £2.5 billion in funding for training and apprenticeships. But then you have to look at what the apprenticeships are. As part of the scheme, the DWP will introduce short apprentice units in:

• AI Leadership – developing AI strategy
• Electric vehicle charging point installation and maintenance
• Electrical fitting and assembly
• Mechanical fitting and assembly
• Permanent modular building assembly
• Solar PV installation and maintenance welding

While some of these are useful and practical, a lot seem like babysitting the robots, don’t they?

The department is also ‘streamlining’ many ‘apprenticeship standards’. But again, looking at the list, these are low-skilled jobs for which people will be paid even less than usual. The jobs involve ‘cleaning hygiene operative’, which lets be honest, is a cleaning job. And “custody and detention professional’, which is a prison officer.

What support for work?

While this grand announcement was made, there were, of course, no specifics published. So we don’t know who will be able to apply for the grants and how many they will be able to claim. It goes without saying that this will be wide open to abuse from greedy companies. It’s ironic that the DWP are going to seemingly allow this after accusing employers of abusing the Access to Work scheme just last week.

With each announcement, it becomes clearer just how little the DWP actually cares about supporting young people into work. It’s time the DWP stopped pretending and instead owned up to the fact that they only care about how much money they can exploit from people.

Featured image via the Canary

By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

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By Al-Akhbar – Mar 10, 2026

The time has come to stop prioritizing Western approval, to stop promoting conciliatory frameworks, and to stop treating the strategy of resistance as obsolete. Instead, we must align with the masses in their steadfast fight for liberation.

Translation of a statement by Palestinian and Arab thought leaders, including Ghassan Abu Sittah, Sbeih Sbeih, Wissam Al-Faqaawi, Salah Hammouri, and others.

As liberation movements in the Global South forged their new political language reflecting the perspective of colonized peoples, Amílcar Cabral was one of several leaders who identified the role of intellectuals and the educated elite as a critical vulnerability at the heart of popular revolutions.

Some intellectuals have sought to promote Western-friendly approaches while normalizing conciliatory, defeatist frameworks.

Cabral’s warning resurfaces sharply in the Palestinian and Arab context, after a brutal and unprecedented genocide met with a widespread silence and betrayal from the public, and complicity on the part of many Arab and Muslim regimes. A prevailing trend among “functionary” intellectuals has exchanged the trenches of resistance for the salons of liberalism and neoliberalism, preferring to retreat from the organic struggle of the masses in favor of academic cosplay from within the colonial core.

Arab intellectuals, and especially Palestinian intellectuals, can only fulfil their historic national role through organic alignment with the masses, who are the primary incubator of true resistance and its ultimate horizon. Intellectuals must devote their efforts to help organize and channel the immense potential energy and moral reserves of the masses, whose displays of steadfastness and sacrifice during the recent wars of extermination have rarely been equalled in contemporary history.

Some intellectuals have sought to promote Western-friendly approaches while normalizing conciliatory, defeatist frameworks. They introduce terms such as “weapons regulation” – rather than calling it by the proper term, “disarmament” – to strip the armed struggle of its liberational character and recast it as a procedural or security matter.

This echoes the “security chaos” discourse of the Oslo Authority, which framed any weapon held outside imperial or Zionist control as a threat. Weapons were transferred from the domain of popular resistance into the embrace of bureaucratic institutions bound by international obligations. In effect this domesticates the weapons and neutralises their role in resistance, which is what has happened before under conditions of surrender.

This “Day-After” thinking relies on the distortion of concepts with deep existential significance and reduces them to artificial, shallow contexts.

It comes as part of a wider strategy. Those supporting “weapons regulation” invariably fail to address any comprehensive strategic framework for resistance. Global solidarity is held up as an alternative to struggle in the field; resistance is declared dead; and the Palestinian people are relegated to passive victims awaiting a global awakening that has been promised for decades but has never materialized. It represents an inversion of reality: field resistance is the primary force, and solidarity follows in its wake. Replacing resistance with solidarity undermines popular agency and scorns the bloodshed of countless sacrifices.

At its core, this trend aligns with systems of dependency and the liberal frameworks which seek to confine Palestinian and Arab resistance within modes deemed acceptable to the West and the Zionist entity. It reframes the struggle as a human rights issue to be settled with negotiation and recasts disarmament and surrender as intellectual positions under the guise of “weapons regulation”. Such narratives exploit humanitarian crises, while promoting political liquidation and absolving cultural elites from confronting the structural nature of colonial oppression.

These voices theorise a “new era” which is an imposed ideological construct designed to reshape national aspirations in the service of dominant powers, highlighting the close connection between cultural decline and political failure.

For decades, certain Arab regimes have branded Palestinian resistance as “terrorism”. Today, some intellectuals appear to echo that position, using the suffering of Gaza to argue that the historic conflict has ended and Palestinians must accept defeat. Respect for the blood that has been shed demands we remain faithful to the national project, and do everything we can to consolidate popular steadfastness, rather than abandoning it. Zionist settler-colonialism continues to pursue a strategy of a final solution, banking on exhausting the resistance and support from the masses. Promoting such defeatist theses strengthens such a strategy ideologically at the very moment we need maximum political and cultural steadfastness.

Recent publications, conferences and literature have failed to grasp the genocidal and settler-colonialist nature of the Zionist entity and its links to Arab regimes. Key terms are misused, producing a superficial and misleading discourse. These voices theorise a “new era” which is an imposed ideological construct designed to reshape national aspirations in the service of dominant powers, highlighting the close connection between cultural decline and political failure.

This “Day-After” thinking relies on the distortion of concepts with deep existential significance and reduces them to artificial, shallow contexts. Political decay inevitably produces intellectual and cultural decline, a pattern familiar in liberation movements across the Global South. Comparative studies of colonialism and genocide are distorted to serve agendas hostile to resistance, making conceptual clarity essential.

These writings reveal more than a cultural decline. By attempting to write the obituary of resistance movements in order to justify future arrangements dictated by Zionist, American, and compliant Arab authorities, such thinking in fact sounds the death knell of Arab intellectuals themselves, and the cultural currents they espouse, in an act of profound submission and fragmentation.

The term “apartheid” is often invoked by Palestinian intellectuals and politicians, but they understand the concept superficially at best. It is nothing new—even a former US president used the term. While it might be useful as a diagnosis, the description is limited, partial, and potentially misleading. Most settler-colonial regimes have practiced segregation. What they have not followed is the structural logic of mass extermination, which defines the Zionist project, as many experts agree.

This simplification obscures the genocidal nature of Zionist settler-colonialism, misrepresents erstwhile solidarity movements, and criminalizes resistance.

The existential threat posed by Zionist settler-colonialism lies in its fundamentally genocidal structure, not merely its practice of segregation. It is not a copy of South Africa’s apartheid and invoking South Africa as a model is misleading. Segregationist systems have been seen from North America to Australia. What distinguishes Zionism is its mechanisms of structural extermination. Reducing the conflict to a kind of apartheid ignores this reality and risks the promotion of solutions based on unrelated historical contexts.

Viewing Zionism through the lens of apartheid isolates the outcome while erasing three centuries of colonial causes in South Africa. It normalizes long-term colonial domination, and presents international solidarity, legal action, and boycotts as the only “solution”. This simplification obscures the genocidal nature of Zionist settler-colonialism, misrepresents erstwhile solidarity movements, and criminalizes resistance.

By contrast, the Algeria model is analytically closer to Palestine. Instead of settling for rhetorical lamentation, the cause openly advocated for armed revolution; it identified structural colonialism as the cause of the problem; and insisted on its removal as the path to liberation. Algeria’s example challenges the dominant discourse by emphasizing resistance as the means to achieve freedom, not negotiation within imposed limits.

Repeatedly invoking apartheid offers Western audiences a simplified view that focuses on individual criminals or extremist settlers while ignoring the settler-colonial state itself. It also serves Palestinians and Arabs who lack the political courage to confront the core issue. Limiting criticism to apartheid reproduces the legalistic mindset of international human rights frameworks, which inadvertently justify the system by condemning “repression” while leaving colonial sovereignty intact.

Return to the Masses: A Call for Revolutionary Intellectual Alignment
Amílcar Cabral, founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, coined the concept of “returning to the source” as a call to re-root liberation in the lived reality of the people. It was not a nostalgic gesture, but a strategic imperative: for Cabral, the popular masses—their authentic culture and extraordinary willingness to sacrifice—formed the first and most essential line of resistance.

Central to Cabral’s vision was a challenge to the intellectual elite. In colonized societies, the petit bourgeoisie occupies a precarious position: possessing the knowledge and tools to manage society, while being socially and culturally conditioned to serve as intermediaries for the colonial system. Cabral left them with a stark choice: betray the revolution or undergo a radical intellectual and class realignment, embedding themselves in the struggles of the masses.

In the Palestinian context, this dilemma is plain for all to see. Many intellectuals have aligned themselves with comprador regimes and imperial centers, shaping the national project to suit external interests rather than reconnecting with the grassroots struggle. Our proposal for a “Charter for Comprehensive Revolutionary Liberation” calls on Palestinian and Arab intellectuals—academics, NGO workers, researchers, and political and military bureaucrats—to confront this historic moment with courage and ethical commitment. The call is clear: return to the source—to the environments that sustain resistance, where ordinary people create extraordinary acts of sacrifice, as witnessed in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. This contrasts sharply with intellectuals who compete for personal gain at the expense of their people.

Global South intellectuals are constrained by the dominance of “colonial enlightenment”. Many interpret resistance through a Western lens, shaped by class and personal priorities, while fearing—or even opposing—the revolutionary potential of the masses. For them, liberation becomes a request for insignificant concessions rather than the dismantling of colonial structures. Returning to the grassroots—the refugee camps, villages, cities, traditional social networks, and local resistant practices—is treated as a burden, something to be jettisoned in pursuit of a false promise of colonial modernity and individual advancement.

Their discourse is deliberately convoluted, indirect, and donor-friendly, creating a knowledge gap that separates them from the frontline actors paying the ultimate price.

The harmful role of compliant intellectuals emerges in their attempts to “modernize” and “civilize” resistance to suit colonial sensitivities. They strip liberation movements of their struggle-driven content and recast them within liberal institutional frameworks. Many deliberately ignore—or deride—the revolutionary potential of local grounding, and prefer to import liberal fantasies, such as treating victims and occupiers as “equal citizens”, while the reality is one of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and systemic destruction.

When these intellectuals promote ideas like a “state for all its citizens”, institutional reform, liberal democracy, or national unity within such frameworks, they exclude the popular masses whose sacrifices sustain the struggle. After decades of failed settlements, such proposals are pathways to diplomatic fixes rather than liberation. Cultural authority is weaponized to mask the structural brutality of the settler-colonial and imperialist project, transforming it into a tool for negotiation rather than resistance.

Their discourse is deliberately convoluted, indirect, and donor-friendly, creating a knowledge gap that separates them from the frontline actors paying the ultimate price. It serves as a class disguise, concealing ties between compliant elites, allied Arab regimes, and the colonial core. This results in the exclusion of the masses as drivers of their own liberation struggles, and reduces existential conflicts to academic exercises.

Any national project loses its revolutionary core if it ignores historical actors and actors in the field, particularly armed resistance fighters, and becomes merely an instrument for elite authority. True ideology, in contrast, is a practical force which enables the masses to decode layers of exploitation imposed by complicit cultural stewards. The problem is not merely academic abstraction—it is a fundamentally opposed class and political position, stripping liberation movements of popular momentum and reducing them to intellectual exercises favouring colonial and comprador states.

For Palestine, success requires structural rejection of dependent state apparatuses and colonial systems. Every revolutionary, every fighter, and every intellectual must sever intellectual, political, and cultural ties with the instruments of compradorship—from the colonial core to allied functionary regimes—to restore popular agency and pursue genuine liberation.

Charter for Comprehensive Liberation
We, as members of the Palestinian Arab people and the wider Arab nation, and as academics, researchers and workers in intellectual and cultural fields, recognize the profound existential predicament brought about by class structures, functionary positions and cultural backgrounds under a genocidal settler-colonial system.

We therefore declare our full and unwavering alignment with the choice of our popular masses, their historic struggle and their comprehensive resistance in all arenas. Without hesitation, we affirm our readiness to bear any cost that may arise from this position, regardless of how great it may be.

This statement calls on Arab intellectuals to stand with us in declaring an end to the intermediary intellectual and the functionary agent, and the birth of the resistant, organic and engaged intellectual who views knowledge and culture not as a luxury or a profession but as a central weapon in the struggle of our people and our nation toward comprehensive liberation and unity.

Accordingly, we affirm the following:

First: Concepts of liberation and the national project must be formulated from the real material conditions of resistance environments: the refugee camp, the village, the prison cell, the trench and the tunnel. We reject imported liberal frameworks and ready-made formulas designed according to the preferences and interests of comprador forces and the colonial core. These models are used as tools for social engineering to freeze and neutralize Arab social and political forces from the real struggle, while the enemy continues to pursue its goals ruthlessly to their conclusion. True liberation begins with dismantling epistemic colonialism as a prerequisite for full liberation.

Second: We reject all forms of comprador-based funding, regardless of its source. Such funding is politically conditioned and aims to domesticate Palestinian and Arab consciousness under different labels. It is essential to dismantle the authority of intermediaries and to reject the rent-seeking structures of Arab intellectuals and bureaucracies tied to donors and financiers if we are to achieve a genuine and revolutionary understanding of the national project. Turning national and resistance work into employment within NGOs, government bodies or research centers funded by imperial powers or comprador regimes constitutes the most dangerous structural breach of the national project that will inevitably lead to defeat and ruin.

Therefore, we call for complete revolutionary transparency and rejection of all outside funding. The sole criterion for any activity or program must be its value towards resistance, without conditions imposed by funders or donors. This charter also rejects any false claim of neutrality by Arab intellectuals. The intellectual is neither mediator nor neutral bystander. One either stands with the people in the trenches of confrontation and resistance or one finds oneself in the camp of the enemy. Any discourse that ignores the genocide and the necessity of comprehensive resistance in favor of reformist language is complicit.

Third: Actors in the field must be reinstated as the sole and ultimate reference. The national project cannot be directed remotely from imperial capitals or the capitals of comprador regimes. Legitimate political authority is seized by those who carry arms and by the supporting environments that directly confront the colonial machine on the ground without pause. They offer daily sacrifices and blood, and their authentic local culture forms the moral and existential shield of the national project.

Fourth: Comprador bourgeois cultural identity must be dismantled. Intellectuals must consciously abandon the pursuit of academic prestige or career advancement tied to the approval of international institutions and subordinate functionary organizations. Knowledge and its production should instead serve resisting social structures such as refugee camps, villages and popular resistance communities.

Fifth: A strategy of class alignment and transforming knowledge into material force. We call on every Arab academic and intellectual to end their submission to the privileges granted by the colonial core and comprador regimes. Their research tools and technical knowledge must become ammunition in the hands of the resistance. Knowledge that is neither understood nor used in trenches and battlefields is sterile and historically hostile to the national project. A true intellectual committed to the liberation of their people must move from observation to participation, placing technical and intellectual expertise in all fields at the disposal of the resistance’s popular base without conditions.

Sixth: We call for exposing and boycotting intellectuals and academics who persist in acting as functionary agents of the colonial core and its Arab instruments of compradorship. This is not a matter of personal reprisal. It is a necessary structural purification of the liberation path from the impurities of compradorship in a national project that is greater than any individual.

After the recent wars of extermination, in which our people paid with hundreds of thousands of martyrs and wounded, after the total destruction of Gaza, and amid ongoing aggression in the West Bank, across Palestine, Lebanon and the Arab region, silence has become a betrayal of this blood.

We call for the intellectual and political unmasking of all who refuse to relinquish their roles as intermediaries and agents. Committed intellectuals should monitor and document any discourse that adopts the language of the colonizer and publicize it as an example of cultural betrayal. We also call for the exposing of conditional funding received by organizations and research centers that imposes agendas of normalization or pacification on Arab societies, particularly on Palestinian society.

We also call for the isolation and boycotting of elites that choose to align with the colonial core and comprador regimes, and the rejection of their representation of the national project in any forum. The principle that must be established is clear: no representation without resistance, and no mandate except revolutionary legitimacy. Its sole source is the social geography that sustains resistance, the trenches, the tunnels and the prison cells.

On this basis, we call for establishing an Observatory for Liberation Culture as an independent popular body composed of committed and engaged intellectuals dedicated to the national project and its requirements. Its mission will be to evaluate the performance of cultural and political institutions according to their adherence to, or distance from, the Charter of Comprehensive Liberation.

The Academic Racists Behind Iranian Monarchism

The Cultural Alternative of Resistance
The purpose of this charter is not limited to criticism. It also seeks to propose an existential and intellectual alternative as a moral, national and historical responsibility. From this perspective, we affirm our commitment to building a cultural alternative of resistance that emerges from the collapse of epistemic domination. This requires adopting the epistemology of resistance as an engaged field of knowledge rooted in the lived environment of popular resistance and collective struggle.

Accordingly, we affirm the following principles:

First: Rooting knowledge in lived reality
Localizing knowledge means recognizing the living field and material conditions of popular resistance environments as the primary laboratory for intellectual work and knowledge production. The organic intellectual committed to national and Arab liberation cannot remain a neutral observer or retreat into academic isolation. Instead, methodological tools must become practical instruments that serve the historical sources of resistance – the fighter, the farmer, the worker and the refugee. The central role of academics and intellectuals is to bridge specialized knowledge gaps in ways that strengthen the durability and effectiveness of the resistance project.

Second: Intellectual sovereignty and dismantling the colonial lexicon
We call for genuine intellectual independence by breaking decisively from the lexicon of colonialism and developing unified conceptual tools for resistance. Purging our language of terms and frameworks shaped within imperial centers and aligned with their interests is an existential necessity. Concepts such as disarmament, terrorism, governance and neoliberal reform are frequently deployed to fragment national structures and dilute the struggle. Confronting this requires dismantling Westernized linguistic frameworks within Arab academia and replacing them with a vocabulary rooted in the popular language of resistance.

The value of any academic thesis or intellectual position should be measured on the basis of whether it can be understood and used in the trench, the refugee camp, the tunnel and the prison cell. The task of the intellectual committed to resistance is to help provide a strategic compass for the masses, not to produce abstract knowledge that entrenches political alienation. We also reject Western centrality as the sole reference for truth, particularly in writing the historical narrative and value system of our people and their resistance.

Third: Democratizing knowledge and turning ideology into material force
Revolutionary ideology is not a collection of slogans. It is a framework that clarifies the geopolitical dimensions of the struggle and exposes structural exploitation, including the intersecting interests that link sectors of Arab society with imperial powers and the Zionist settler project. At the same time, resistance environments provide intellectuals with lived experience, practical knowledge and concrete facts that prevent theory from drifting into the abstractions of liberal discourse.

The shared destiny of the fighter and the intellectual transforms knowledge from an intellectual luxury into symbolic weapons that operate side-by-side with material weapons. This connection grants resistance action its historical meaning, its existential horizon and its moral legitimacy.

This charter calls for reclaiming national decision-making from elites accustomed to acting as intermediaries and agents, and returning it to the masses and the social environments that sustain resistance and shape history through their sacrifices. It is a call to move beyond the politics of begging towards the dismantling of colonial structures.

In light of the immense sacrifices of the masses, the minimum ethical responsibility of the Arab intellectual is to abandon elite privilege and narrow self-interest and to fully align with the act of resistance. We affirm our pride in belonging to the resilient Palestinian people, to our Arab national identity, and to our intellectual roots in the Global South. From these foundations we derive our human and international outlook and seek to reclaim the history that colonialism has attempted to erase.

We reject the hierarchies of Western centrality and the illusion of chasing its defective model of modernity. We refuse the role of the subordinate mimic. Resistance knowledge alone can help shape the emergence of a free Arab human being who not only removes the colonizer from our land but uproots its influence from our consciousness.

Our will cannot accept accommodating the existing order, but on dismantling its foundations, regardless of the balance of power.

Let us break the chains of knowledge until victory.

Long live an Arab Palestine.

(al-akhbar)

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