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Letter from Bethlehem: Mazin Qumsiyeh

 Three years that changed the world: On 3 October 2026, Israeli forces bombed one of the few remaining buildings in Gaza instantly killing two mothers and two daughters: Maysaa Khader Ibrahim Abu Daoud and her daughter, Maria (both Christian) and Dr. Yasmin Al-Boubo (Khamis) and her daughter Halloum (both Muslim). Three years of accelerated genocide will be marked 7 October. The murderous campaign to ethnically cleanse our country still goes on. The satellite images alone prove the this. We must now reflect on our changing world and act.... read more at

https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2026/10/three-years-that-changed-world.html

At our institute (palestinenature.org), in those three years with our volunteers and staff we: built new facilities (the new natural history museum, seedbank, peace garden), published over 70 papers (focusing on the ongoing destruction but also on resistance and resilience initiatives), implemented over 100 workshops for environmental stewardship (especially among children), gave talks to thousands, conducted hundreds of interviews in media outlets around the world, received many awards and grants, and engaged in direct conservation and community service efforts (e.g. our work in Al-Arqoub communities). This is our flourishing OASIS OF HOPE in Palestine! Come join our growing family: You can volunteer remotely or in person and/or you can also donate (see palestinenature.org). Follow our activities on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PIBS.PMNH

New plant named after me in their words to "show appreciation for Palestine"  
Silene qumsiyehii (Caryophyllaceae: Physolychnis): a new species from West-Central Mexico
https://abm.ojs.inecol.mx/index.php/abm/article/view/2655
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/415048710_Silene_qumsiyehii_Caryophyllaceae_Physolychnis_una_nueva_especie_del_centro-occidente_de_Mexico  

Stay Humane, act, and keep hope and Palestine alive

Mazin Qumsiyeh
A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor, Founder, and (volunteer) Director
Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine

Lula, Trump and the Limits of the New Monroe Doctrine by Imran Khalid

 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Donald Trump spoke back to back at the United Nations on September 22, twelve days before Brazil votes. Lula told the General Assembly that “Brazilian democracy belongs to Brazilians” and that Brazil “does not belong in anyone’s backyard.” He never named the United States. He did not have to.

Trump followed him and cited Venezuela as proof that Washington “will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.” He never mentioned Brazil, and neither side requested a bilateral. The same day he gathered the 15 governments of his Shield of the Americas coalition. Brazil is not a member.

Brazil’s first round of elections on October 4, and the likely runoff on October 25, are the largest test yet of Trump’s attempt to restore a U.S. hierarchy in the hemisphere. They are also the hardest, because the methods Washington has used on smaller countries cannot be used openly here.

The doctrine has a name. Last December’s National Security Strategy proclaimed a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. In Venezuela, it meant force. In Argentina, it meant conditions stated out loud: “If he loses, we are not going to be generous,” Trump said of presidential candidate Javier Milei, with $20 billion on the table. He made the same threat in Honduras. Both his candidates won.

Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy, a founding member of BRICS, and China’s customer before America’s. Washington has been here before. On March 31, 1964, the State Department cabled its embassy that tankers, a carrier task force, and 110 tons of ammunition were being readied to assist anti-democratic forces. The generals held power for 21 years.

The blunt approach failed again in 2025. Fifty percent tariffs and sanctions on Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes did not keep Jair Bolsonaro from receiving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup, and these U.S. actions lifted Lula’s approval.

A thaw followed. Washington dropped the tariff on beef and coffee in November and took Moraes off its sanctions list in December. A senior administration official told CBS News that the lower house’s passage of an amnesty bill, legislation bearing directly on Bolsonaro and his supporters, signaled improving conditions in Brazil. Sanctions relief for a judge was justified by a change in Brazilian criminal law.

The trade talks ran on the same logic. Washington’s 21 demands in October 2025 included one that Brazil “must not detain, imprison, or arbitrarily limit participation of political dissidents” in the 2026 election. According to foreign ministry sources, that meant Bolsonaro and the January 8 rioters.

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency tariffs in February, the pressure found other channels. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the imprisoned former leader and now Lula’s challenger, met Trump in the Oval Office in May. Two days later Brazil’s two largest gangs were designated terrorist organizations, and Flávio said he had “worked to have them treated as terrorists.” In July, a 25 percent tariff took effect, followed by a 12.5 percent duty over forced labor. In August, Brazil’s intelligence agency, Abin, rated the risk of U.S. interference “critical,” though its assessment does not appear to suggest an electoral operation.

Some of Washington’s grievances hold. The Section 301 case covers Brazil’s Pix payment system, court orders against U.S. platforms, and both ethanol and deforestation. It also exempts more than 2,100 product lines. The gangs designated as “terrorist” are real. Brazil’s Supreme Court took X offline for more than five weeks in 2024. None of that explains a trade clause about “political dissidents.” What Washington will trade its grievances for says more than the grievances do.

The voting machines are where these threads meet. In July, Brazil denied visas to two senior State Department officials planning to discuss “election integrity.” The State Department called Brazil’s interference concerns a “baseless lie.” Days earlier, Flávio had linked Brazil’s machines to Smartmatic, citing a CIA document about Venezuela. His father spent years attacking the same machines before losing in 2022.

Last week the fight reached Brazil’s courts. Lula’s allies asked the Supreme Court and the electoral court to examine paid posts on X from foreign accounts and whether the Rockbridge Network, a donor group co-founded by Vice President JD Vance, aided Flávio’s campaign. The petition admits it could not identify who paid for the posts.

None of this proves a Washington plot to pick Brazil’s president. But the Trump administration is certainly trying to shape the conditions under which Brazilians pick one. Brazil’s trade ministry calculates that 23.1 percent of its U.S.-bound exports face the new duties, and 16.5 percent pay both. The terror designations raise compliance risk for any Brazilian bank suspected of indirect gang links. Each lever reminds Brasília what staying outside Trump’s coalition costs. Lula has said he will not choose between Washington and Beijing, which is a hedge, not hostility.

The polls settle nothing. Datafolha has Lula ahead 47 to 45 percent in a runoff, inside the margin of error, while another firm, Quaest, has Flávio up by one. Voters are weighing crime, prices, and a Supreme Court investigation into the millions Flávio took from Banco Master’s Daniel Vorcaro to fund a film about his father. Ironically, Alexandre de Moraes is also caught up in a scandal involving Vorcaro.

The danger lies after election night. On September 24, Bernie Sanders and 30 House Democrats told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the United States “is acting as an agent of interference and destabilization” in Brazil. They asked for one commitment: that Washington will recognize the certified result.

Now, imagine Flávio Bolsonaro losing by a point after a summer spent tying the machines to Venezuela. His first appeal would go to a State Department that wanted to fly to Brasília to discuss “election integrity.” One sentence from Rubio now would close that door.

If Washington wants to defend Bolsonaro’s supporters, it can argue that in public. If it wants Brazil in its orbit, that is ordinary foreign policy. Neither gives it the right to set the boundaries of Brazil’s democracy.

This first appeared on FPIF.

Whoever wins on October 25, the result that matters more comes afterward: whether Brazil’s courts and its next president treat American pressure as something to manage or a line to accept. Venezuela showed what the Trump Corollary means when Washington uses force. Brazil will show what it means when Washington can’t.

Imran Khalid is a geostrategic analyst and columnist on international affairs. His work has been widely published by prestigious international news organizations and publications.

‘Did he know?’: Why Israel is Rejecting an October 7 Reckoning by Yoav Litvin

 As Israel prepares to mark three years since the October 7 attacks and with less than a month to go to parliamentary elections, one topic is dominating the electoral agenda.

Media reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by the United Arab Emirates before the attacks have put his alleged responsibility back in the spotlight.

“Did he know?” is the question on everyone’s lips.

Listening to the accusatory choir, one might think that Israeli society finally is acknowledging the real meaning of October 7. Yet the opposite is true.

Instead of giving a platform to a reckoning, the elections function to scapegoat Netanyahu for his alleged role in facilitating Hamas’s attack while absolving Israeli society and the Zionist movement of its collective responsibility for the preceding violence and ensuing genocidal aggression.

For example, it does not insist on investigating whether the “Hannibal Directive” was deployed as part of the Israeli military response on October 7 and whether it killed Israeli citizens and how many.

It does not scrutinise subsequent Israeli military operations or whether they put the Israeli hostages in danger or how many were killed by Israeli bombs.

There is no questioning of why key Palestinian negotiators were attacked during ceasefire and hostage negotiations, including Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief negotiator, in July 2024 in Tehran and Hamas’s negotiating delegation in September 2025 in Doha.

There is no debate about why the Israeli government repeatedly rejected ceasefire proposals that could have brought the hostages back much earlier.

There is little attention paid to the fact that Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant face arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

None of these made the cut. Why?

The answer lies in the psychological state of Israeli society. For many Israelis, October 7 became a psychological rupture, making it difficult to reconcile their sense of humanity with their complicity in the criminal reality that followed.

The problem, then, is not that Israelis are in denial or misinformed. It is that a large portion of the society is complicit in criminality and actively avoids reckoning with it.

The absence of Gaza and Palestinians more broadly from Israeli political discourse is because of their complete dehumanisation by Israeli society.

How else could one explain the absence from the election rhetoric of questions about, and subsequent accountability for, actions against the Palestinian people?

Why has the Israeli military killed at least 74,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians? Why has it carried out mass and arbitrary detentions, torture and enforced disappearances of Palestinians?

Why has it targeted journalists, medical workers and academics? Destroyed and occupied hospitals? Wiped out ancient landmarks and irreplaceable cultural heritage sites?

Why has the sadistic and often sexually deviant celebration of destruction, subjugation, ethnic cleansing and death by Israeli soldiers been allowed?

What’s more, there is also little interrogation of the consequences of bombing and invading Lebanon, killing nearly 9,000 people since October 2023. Or bombing Syria and Yemen.

These are not isolated abuses. They are symptoms of a system of theft and domination driven by greed and sustained through psychological conditioning, segregation, fear and rewards for aggression. In line with the “Wired to Steal” model, dehumanisation helps produce consent for aggression while escalation following acts of resistance leads to normalisation of further expansion and robbery.

Thus, this election is not about a reckoning with October 7 or its horrifying aftermath. It is a lens onto a fascistic settler society engaged in denial and dehumanisation of an Indigenous “other” as a means of evading and normalising its own ongoing genocidal actions. Although Netanyahu may become the scapegoat, replacing him does not address the underlying machinery of domination and may instead serve to entrench it further.

That machinery remains firmly in place. The continuity between the violence unleashed since October 7 and the longer history of Zionist colonial expansionism is striking, with no lessons learned other than how to improve and grease the machinations of genocide. Fear, victimhood and the construction of a permanently besieged “us” against a dehumanised “them” continue to produce consent for further aggression and expansion.

October 7, therefore, has become not an occasion for genuine reckoning but another means of avoiding one. Netanyahu seeks to focus responsibility for the attacks on questions of what he knew and when while leaving the much broader record of what Israel has done since largely outside the electoral debate. His opponents, meanwhile, have their own complicity and ambitions to answer for. Thus, there is little political interest in a genuine reckoning with October 7. The fixation on Netanyahu allows the wider political establishment and Israeli society to avoid confronting the system of domination in which they remain invested.

This piece first appeared on Al Jazeera.

Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience and author of Wired to Steal: Zionism and the Shaping of the Western Mind with Ilan Pappé (Interlink Books, Fall 2026). For more info, please visit yoavlitvin.com

Egypt's rail link project in Sinai sets off alarm bells in Israel

 Egypt is constructing a new railway to connect the Suez Canal on the Red Sea to the northern Sinai town of Taba near the border with Israel, a project that has raised alarm bells in Israel and prompted calls for tight supervision from Tel Aviv.

The railway, some Israeli media outlets have claimed, would change the demography of Sinai, for years considered a symbol of isolation on the border between Egypt and Israel.

It could also enable the flow of military logistics at high speed, consequently changing the entire regional equation, one Israeli media outlet warned.

Extending over 500 kilometres from al-Ferdan, the world's largest rotating bridge over the Suez Canal, to Taba, the new rail line is Egypt's new attempt to create the infrastructure necessary for the development of Sinai, a territory the size of Israel, Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon combined that has remained largely underdeveloped for decades.

An empty, massive expanse of desert on the Egyptian Israeli border was always viewed as a good sandy buffer against direct contact between the Egyptian and Israeli militaries, bolstering limits to troop deployments on the shared border between the two countries, ones enshrined in the Security Annex of the 1979 peace treaty, analysts said.

But an outsized buffer has come at a heavy cost for Egypt's national security, the same analysts added.

"My belief is that the lack of development in this area for year gave the chance for terrorist groups to take root and grow in it," remarked Gen. Ali Hefzi, the former governor of North Sinai.

Speaking to The New Arab, he added that terrorist groups exploited Sinai's sparsely populated geography because of the lack of services in it to expand.

"This is why development is becoming a prerequisite of security in this Egyptian territory," Gen. Hefzi said.

It took the Egyptian army and police a sizeable amount of resources to eradicate a branch of the Islamic State group that popped up in Sinai between 2012 and 2023 and wanted to establish an Islamic caliphate in this territory.

Thousands of Egyptian army personnel and policemen were also either killed or injured over the same decade, during which Egypt tried to uproot the group from Sinai, according to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Dual goals

Sinai remains generally empty, despite its huge size. Covering almost 6% of Egypt's overall space of 1 million square kilometres, this territory is home to around 600,000 people only.

In the past few years, Egypt accelerated the development of this territory, implementing agricultural and industrial development projects worth tens of millions of dollars.

The same projects also include a new network of roads and educational institutions that try to meet the needs of the territory's residents which have been complaining from the lack of services for years, observers said.

Apart from easing the movement of persons to and from Sinai, the project could also serve as an alternative backup to the Suez Canal for certain types of cargo, thus competing with old Israeli initiatives for a rail link between the Red Sea port of Eilat and the Mediterranean Port of Ashdod, Israeli media declared.

Having been discussed since 1950, the Eilat-Ashdod rail link would be Israel's first attempt to connect the Red Sea with the Mediterranean through an overland route.

According to initial plans, the core section of the project would run from Beersheba/Dimona in southern Israel through the Negev and Arava to Eilat, covering between 180 and 260 kilometres.

The project was approved by the Israeli cabinet in 2012, having received interest from China and other countries for construction and financing.

Egyptian specialists do not underestimate Israeli fears from the new rail link between Suez and Taba sabotaging the planned Eilat-Ashdod link.

The Egyptian project, they say, aims primarily to preserve the competitiveness of the Suez Canal route, contribute to Sinai's development, and protect Egypt's status as an international trade nod at a time of high rivalry.

"The Egyptian project will necessarily negatively affect the planned Israeli project," Wael Qadurra, a former deputy head of the Suez Canal Authority, told TNA.

Egypt's construction of the railway, he added, would make the Israeli project both "useless" and "unfeasible", even as its main objective remains to allow for a speedier transport of goods between Egypt's Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts.

Egyptian-Israeli relations at a critical time

The Egyptians are working round the clock to finalise the new Suez-Taba rail link which enjoys support from Sisi and is directly supervised by the minister of transport and the prime minister, according to Israeli media.

The line will pump economic life into Sinai's desert and strengthen Egyptian sovereignty in the region, it adds.

The basic part of the project is in place already, a 100-kilometre line between Suez and the North Sinai town of Bir al-Abd that has returned to work after a five-decade slump since the 1967 Egyptian-Israeli war.

On 30 September, Egyptian Minister of Transport Kamel al-Wazir highlighted the importance of transport and infrastructure projects in Sinai for development in this Egyptian territory.

Commenting on Israeli media reports about the new railway, he added that Egypt has the full right to develop each inch of Sinai.

"Sinai is an inseparable part of the Egyptian homeland," the minister of transport said.

"The primary goal of the road network and the railway [constructed in Sinai] is to serve residents and ease the movement of persons and goods," he told Egyptian television.

The construction of the new rail link comes, meanwhile, at a critical time for relations between Egypt and Israel, analysts said.

These relations are coming under renewed stress against the background of a number of regional developments, including Israel's procrastination to implement the Gaza ceasefire plan which was proposed by US President Donald Trump and approved in Sharm el-Sheikh in October last year, they added.

Israel is also expressing objection to the measures Egypt has taken in Sinai since 2023, including the deployment of additional troops in the border area, in what the Israelis describe as a violation of the Security Annex of the 1979 peace treaty.

However, this tension appears to be only one aspect of complex relations between Cairo and Tel Aviv.

An international newspaper has just revealed that Egypt's former intelligence chief Abbas Kamel visited Israel and met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu days ahead of the October 7, 2023 attacks by Gaza factions to warn him against the imminent attacks.

"Despite political differences and tensions between the two countries, they are capable of maintaining a minimum level of security and intelligence coordination," Gen. Hefzi said. "This coordination is important for finding solutions to problems that emerge between the two sides, not to mention security coordination on the shared border and coordinating aid entry into Gaza."