The Stanford Prison Experiment

The 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment, is not a documentary of the experiment on power aggrandizement that took place in 1971; actors play the supervising professor s well as the 24 students who were the subjects—12 randomly being assigned as guards and the other 12 as prisoners. The film can be characterized as a psychological drama on human nature, given the salience therein of the will to power. Had Nietzsche been alive to watch the film, he would have been engrossed, finding much to confirm his theory that not only the will to power is the basic human motive, but also the weak too easily resort to cruelty (and pettiness) to feel any pleasure they can out of the exercise of whatever power they can muster, given their innate weakness.

The full essay is at "The Stanford Prison Experiment."

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad: Guilty but Free

Because Syria’s government had not signed onto the Rome Statute, which renders governments and their respective officials subject to the International Criminal Court, including its arrest warrants and verdicts, Bashar al-Assad and his younger brother, Mahar, who were then in absentia under Putin’s protection in Russia, were not subject to the ICC when a Syrian court found the two brothers guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes on August 11, 2026. The two men could evade the death sentences issued by their own country’s judiciary as long as they could be protected by the Russian president in Russia. Although an Israeli court had tried and convicted the Nazi Eichmann of crimes against humanity, so a precedent existed for national courts adjudicating that crime, the fact that Israel had to illegally kidnap Eichmann in Argentina and the al-Assad brothers could evade being held accountable for their horrendous crimes in Syria suggests that the right, proper, and effective court to hear cases on crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes, is international, such as the ICC. That court’s weakness, however, as in Syria, Russia, and Israel not being subject to that court’s jurisdiction, points to a hole in jurisprudence on crimes against humanity, assuming that the proper and necessary jurisdiction is rightly international rather than national. With the U.S. having recently announced a full-on attack on the ICC (and its prosecutors) at the behest of the indicted suspect Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, it could be asked whether the ICC was in a position to “fill the hole” in the jurisprudence of crimes against humanity (and war crimes), or whether a coalition of the willing of national governments would have to start from scratch to construct a new international criminal court (and block diplomacy and trade with any country not willing to be bound by the new international jurisprudence). The judicial case against the al-Assad brothers (and their maternal cousin, who was in the courtroom and thus could be held accountable by the national court for having led the 2011 Daraa crackdown) demonstrates the value in shoring up international jurisprudence on crimes against humanity (and war crimes).

The Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus, Syria, found the country’s former dictator guilty of having ordered “the murder of civilians including children, as well as torture and unlawful detention.”[1] Although the senior director of the Soufan Center said at the time of the verdict and sentencing of death, “The ruling we saw today on the al-Assad brothers and their cousin, Atef Najib, marks a new chapter in Syria’s post-regime accountability landscape,” such accountability was severely limited because neither of the brothers were in Syria, and thus could not be touched by the ruling and sentence.[2] In fact, the ruling on and sentencing of the two brothers even as they were in absentia showcases the limitations of a global order in which accountability in regard to crimes against humanity is subject to national sovereignty rather than international jurisprudence. Caroline Rose, the director at Soufan, admitted, “Bashar and Maher remain in Russia and likely will not be handed over by Moscow.”[3] It is indeed tenuous at best for accountability for the guilty of crimes against humanity to hinge on the political discretion of Russia’s president Putin, who was then wanted by the ICC for having abducted Ukrainian children and having them send to Russia to indoctrinate them to be ethnic Russians rather than Ukrainians.

So even though Rose said of the Syrian court’s verdict and sentencing, “It is a decision that seeks to satisfy millions of Syrians who seek accountability and justice after war crimes committed by the regime, seeking closure,” the “result” was anything but closure.[4] This is significant because the “al-Assad regime’s documented atrocities over 14 years include the use of chemical weapons, most notably a sarin attack on the Ghouta suburb of Damascus in August 2013 that killed an estimated 1,400 people, according to US intelligence reports” and “confirmed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.”[5] Additionally, the Syrian Network for Human Rights reports that the “regime also dropped more than 80,000 barrel bombs on civilian areas,” and photographs smuggled out by a military police photographer confirm that 11,000 detainees died “from torture, starvation or execution in Syrian government facilities.”[6] 

The severity of such crimes in Syria can be said to transcend national sovereignty and the related reach of national judiciaries, and thus to properly belong to international jurisprudence in line with the Nuremberg Trials wherein several Nazi officials were tried between 1945 and 1949 by an international, albeit of the Allied powers, tribunal. It was there that “crimes against humanity” was coined and first tried, and with success. In fact, that not every defendant was found guilty added to the credibility of the Trials as being something more than the vengeance of the victors on a vanquished regime. Even the Israeli trial of Eichmann turned out to be credible, as the verdict hinged on Eichmann’s violation of Himmler’s order not to march Hungarian Jews to far-away death-camps; Eichmann could not say that he was just following orders, and thus he could be found guilty of having committed a crime against humanity. Even so, both the added credibility that an international court would have had and it not having to necessarily resort in illegal abduction argue in favor of having an international rather than a national court adjudicate on crimes against humanity (and war crimes), rather than leaving these crimes only to national tribunals, especially as military technology, including on chemical weapons, has magnified the possible scale of the crimes. 

As in the case of nuclear weapons and even carbon-emissions, the weapons that technology, or science, already made possible when the al-Assad brothers were killing and torturing Syrian civilians for 14 years, can justify a situs for justice at the global level—as jurisprudence in a global order, and thus not held back by absolutist interpretations of national sovereignty which had arguably already been antiquated when Nazi Germany enforced nationalism throughout Europe in the mid-20^th century. In other words, the limitations on the Syrian court being the enforcer of justice against two brothers found guilty of horrendous crimes against humanity could ween nationalists around the world from the addiction to national sovereignty as the exclusive default for any sort of global arrangement and international relations.

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1. Aleksandar Brezar, “Syria Sentences Bashar al-Assad to Death in Absentia for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity,” Euronews.com, 11 August, 2026.
2.Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine

Writing on theology and ethics and their application to politics and economics in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Reinhold Niebuhr runs the risk of fusing the respective domains, which I maintain are qualitatively different, and thereby minimizing or losing outright what is unique to each domain. Besides occasioning category mistakes, such as in labeling divine love as ethical rather than as distinctly theological, overreaches from one domain onto another even at the expense of the other’s own criteria can occur from the underlying error. Besides being extant in Niebuhr’s text, the conflation of distinct domains and the related overreaches of their respective criteria has exacerbated the long-standing conflict between the Jews and Arabs in what was Palestine when Niebuhr was writing his book on Christian ethics in which he discusses the sheer intractability of the conflict.

The full essay is at "Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine."

Massive AI Infrastructure Planned in the E.U. and U.S.: A Synergistic Opportunity

The relationship between human and artificial intelligence is a tantalizing but formidable investigative topic requiring much more intelligence than I can proffer. The likelihood of interlarding emotion and desire to warp the former under the gravitational pull of selfishness may render us the weaker party even though, at least as of 2026, we humans still held the strings. That the human mind is not far-reaching enough in its intellectual gaze may be why we are so afraid of the potential of AI as being able at some point to displease our desire to control it (and just about everything else under the Sun). The advent of planned AI gigafactories in the E.U. and giant data centers in the U.S. presented American and European elected officials in 2026 with a synergistic opportunity that, if successfully achieved, could cause a leap in AI while paradoxically showcasing the human mind and thus possibly increasing our confidence in ourselves while decreasing our corresponding fear of AI.

At the AI Action Summit in the E.U. in February, 2025, President von der Leyen announced a plan  to build “up to seven AI gigafactories . . . to train advance AI models and catch up with global tech companies.”[1] Gigafactories “are large-scale computing facilities equipped with state-of-the-art, highly specialised chips designed to train the next generation of AI technologies—notably the most advanced large language models, which require crunching trillions of data points.”[2] So many data points would present the need for huge data centers to house so much data. So it is highly relevant that over in the U.S., in late July, 2026, President Trump announced a plan to repurpose “large chunks of federal land to host enormous data centers and the power plants needed to run them” in order to “accelerate the development of artificial intelligence.”[3] The obvious yet politically challenging synergistic conclusion would be to open both the factories and data centers to both European and American tech companies.

The net gain from specialization and “trade” can be gleamed simply from reading Adam Smith’s famous text, The Wealth of Nations. Getting in the way of such a lucrative “marriage,” with both countries anxious to thwart China’s intent to dominate the tech sector, including AI, was the E.U.’s enormous fine against Google for having operated a search engine in preference to the company rather than its competitors. The Trump Administration’s defense of Google and the E.U.’s less business-friendly Digital Act clashed and this difference could quell any political interests in favor of linking the gigafactories and data centers in spite of the tremendous potential synergy.

Moreover, both the Commission’s “rhetoric about the urgency of catching up with the US and China” and U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright hoping that the U.S. “wins the A.I. race” evince a mercantile governmental position that is at odds with joint mega-projects. In his text, Smith argues that the economic advantages to two countries trading with each other as each takes advantage of its comparative advantage vastly exceed economic gain from countries being exclusively oriented to their own gain (and even trying to cause other countries to lose, economically and in terms of AI). Whether a government is trying to maximize its storage of gold and silver or its exclusive AI technology, the resulting technology achievable by E.U. and U.S. firms (and governments) by linking the planned gigafactories to the planned data centers can be anticipated to be much greater. 

Such a feat would take the enlightened self-interest that is in leadership oriented to the long-term. For both the E.U. and U.S., the threat of China’s dominance in AI—in particular, how the autocratic government might use its AI to spy on the West and even undermine Western tech companies and even governments—highlights the self-interest part of enlightened self-interest, which in turn is associated with visionary rather than exclusively transactional leadership. The presidents of the E.U. and U.S. (i.e., the respective heads of the respective executive branches, whom I contend can be regarded as the respective presidents of the respective unions) would have to look past the Commission’s fine against Google (without cancelling the fine, for no common ground on that score need be supposed or demanded as a precondition for broader synergistic relations).

Moreover, high officials of both the E.U. and U.S. would also have to look askance at the natural political interest of each administration to defend and look out for the interests of home tech companies while being unconcerned with or even hostile to giving greater access to tech companies based in the other union. A synergistic agreement with respect to sharing access to the gigafactories and data centers would benefit from a vision of Western civilization out in front on AI as geo-political foes Russia and China are forced to try to catch up rather than dominate and thwart from up front. In this way, foreign policy, trade policy, and tech policy can be seen as dovetailing, which itself implies some synergy. The question in mid-2026 was perhaps whether the human, all too human intelligence of the politicians in high office in the two unions would be enlightened enough over narrow self-interests (both of the unions and the respective politicians themselves!) for artificial intelligence to be able to leverage tremendous synergy. In this relationship, I am afraid that we are the weaker party.

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1. Luca Bertuzzi, “EU Opens Call for Seven ‘Gigafactories’ to Train Next-Generation AI Technologies,” Euronews.com, 30 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Brad Plumer, “Energy Dept. Wants to Put Data Centers on U.S. Land,” The New York Times, July 31, 2026. Print edition. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/climate/trump-federal-data-centers.html 

European Priorities Regarding Ukraine

On 5 August, 2026, President Von der Leyen of the E.U. “announced that €1.4 billion in profits from immobilised Russian assets [held in the E.U. would] be allocated after Russia’s deadly strikes on Kyiv.”[1] This response sounds well and good, especially as Ukraine had failed to shoot down all of the missiles and thus was in vital need of American anti-missile weaponry. Yet in spite of this strategic vulnerability, “only €70 million” of the €1.4 billion would be “directed toward military assistance.” The lion’s share of the profits would “be used to repay G7 and EU loans.”[2] In other words, the E.U. Commission was seeing to it that almost all of the profits from Russian assets would go to creditors outside of Ukraine in the E.U. and elsewhere. Because Russia had been serially lobing missiles on civilian targets such as apartment buildings in Ukraine with overwhelming success, and, moreover, occupied at least 20 percent of Ukraine in the east at the time, the Commission’s decision to pay off loans rather than keep them outstanding so much more money than €70 million could be directed to Ukraine’s military defenses. Both ethically and geopolitically, getting the lent money back especially to creditors in the E.U. right away is problematic.

The Commission acting on behalf or in the interest of creditors that are in the E.U. has all the earmarks of an institutional, or structural conflict of interest even though the expedient politics are obvious behind the decision are obvious. In a conflict of interest, typically a relatively narrow, or confined (usually private) benefit is put before satisfying a wider benefit, which can even be viewed as being a duty. A duty to the public good, for example, is eclipsed by a desire to satisfy a more narrow or circumscribed private benefit, whether to oneself or a related party. In this case, the exploitation of the conflict of interest lies in the E.U. prioritizing the relatively narrow private financial benefit of E.U. creditors over the wider, public good of pushing the invading Russians out of Ukraine and thus standing up against military invasion itself.

Although most of the scholars on the conflict-of-interest scenario in ethics have argued that an unexploited institutional conflict of interest is not unethical, I contend that human nature renders such a temptation ethical even though the temptation is in the structure within an organization or inter-organizationally. For President Von der Leyen even to have the power to siphon off most of the profits to lenders in the E.U. is arguably unethical in itself, given the incentive of the underlying expedient politics of preferring one’s own over exogenous groups (e.g., Ukraine). Accordingly, the Council of Ministers, the European Council, and the E.U. Parliament should have passed a federal law mandating that all of the profits go to Ukraine to augment its military.

Also on 5 August, 2026, “Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy . . . called for allies to send more anti-ballistic air defence, after Russian strikes killed at least 17 people overnight.”[3] Von der Leyen’s response to this plea can be put in the following way: Even though we have €1.4 billion at our disposal now, we are giving you only €70 million. Zelensky could be forgiven for thinking, thanks a lot sarcastically even though being thankful for getting anything. For overnight, when the “Russian army sent 115 drones and fired 28 high-speed missiles, including ballistic ones, Ukraine’s military had been “unable to shoot down a single Russian missile” due to “a drastic shortage of anti-ballistic munitions.”[4] The opportunity cost in the Commission’s decision to pay off loans rather than devote the entire amount of profits to Ukrainian defenses was spelled out at the time by Ukraine’s president, who said, “Ballistics interceptors are something that could have saved the lives of those who died today. It is very important that partners realise that delays in their delivery or unwillingness to transfer anti-ballistics leads to such terrible victims and destruction.”[5] Moreover, the Russian advantage in missile offense says, in effect, that it is ok to invade another country that does not pose a threat; furthermore, military power decides geopolitical disputes with impunity. Lest that dogma become the default for international relations, international law can be relegated as an oxymoron in what is a return to a Hobbesian state of nature beyond the nation-state. With so much on the line—big picture—Von der Leyen’s decision to divert so much of the profits to Ukraine’s international creditors can be viewed as a case of Aristotle’s notion of misordered concupiscence: putting a lower good above a higher one. She would have been easily understood were she to have told those creditors that it was more important to buttress Ukraine’s anti-missile (and other) defence than even to make full interest payments because the world needed to show Russia’s President Putin that military aggression does not work in the twenty-first century—that war crimes won’t go unpunished, and of course Ukraine desperately needed anti-missile munitions and weaponry, and fortifying other weaponry wouldn’t hurt Ukraine’s position either.

In short, priorities, especially that interlace geopolitical, business, and military affairs, matter even in terms of what sort of global order might result amid the collapsing post-World War II order. Would international relations boil down to “dog eat dog,” or would even just informal coalitions of nation-states force back aggressive advocates of military might who scoff at international law and norms that constrain political realism (i.e., strategic state interests as hegemonic)? Priorities matter in terms of whether the overblown militaristic forays into Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran would eventually be able to become and even define the status quo in international relations.

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1. Sandor Zsiros, “EU Releases €1.4 Billion to Ukraine from Frozen Russian AssetProfits after Kyiv Attacks,” Euronews.com, 5 August, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Sasha Vakulina, “Ukraine Failed to Shoot Down a Single Russian Missile Launchedin Overnight Barrage,” Euronews.com, 5 August, 2026.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Chaos in Massive Illegal Crossings into the E.U.: The Case of Ceuta

Even though the default absolutist notion of national sovereignty has consistently undercut global efforts to combat climate change and rid the world of nuclear weapons and even war itself, to disregard territorial sovereignty altogether is also problematic. Interestingly, both extremes treat international relations as a Hobbesian state of nature, and disregarding national sovereignty even extends the state of nature to within a country such that even national government is presumed not to exist. Illegal immigration is a case in point. When sixty thousand North Africans illegally entered Ceuta in the E.U. on July 30, 2026, the utter disrespect for the rule of law as well as the E.U.’s territorial integrity and legitimacy was palpable.

The disregard for governmental sovereignty could be seen visually as videos taken at the time on Ceuta’s Tarajal beach “reveal the chaos that accompanied the crossings, showing large crowds running between the breakwater and the roads around the border area.”[1] Sixty thousand people swimming over to a small city of just 19 square kilometers provides a snapshot of just how easily illegal immigration can spiral into mob-rule. Both Plato and Aristotle situate mob-rule as democratic decadence, and thus, like tyranny, to be avoided. As Hobbes argues in Leviathan, there is a good reason for government, given human nature. His theory differs markedly from Locke’s theory of natural rights, save the right of self-preservation that is inalienable according to Hobbes even though a sovereign has even the exclusive right even to interpret divine writ. For Hobbes, no natural rights exist that would limit the authority of a sovereign. None of these four historical philosophers would claim that illegal immigration between modern nation-states is a natural right. In fact, I suspect the four would be appalled at the utter effrontery in ignoring a country’s territorial sovereignty.

The push-back from North Africa backs up the disregard evinced by the people who illegally crossed into Ceuta. That Morocco had regarded the cities of Ceuta and Melilla as “part of its own territory since its independence from France and Spain in 1956” does not justify the strategy of spinning the illegal crossings as part of a dispute on sovereignty, for the people crossing were not doing so to protest that issue.[2] Neither do the social and economic conditions in Morocco justify disregarding another country’s government as if being unemployed justifies illegally entering another country. “One of Morocco’s most popular news outlets Hespress wrote that ‘the waves of incursions into Ceuta and the attempts to cross that later extended to Melilla have brought back to the fore the debate on the social and economic situation in the areas bordering the two enclaves. . . . What happened once again shines a light on the cities’ connection with their Moroccan environment and the complexities of their historical and sovereignty dossier.’”[3] Dossier? The attempt to primp the statement using misplaced diplomatic language flies in the face of the sheer chaos on the ground in Ceuta on 30 July, 2026. Disagreements on a “dossier” do not justify tens of thousands of illegal crossings in utter disregard for the laws and government of the receiving city, state, and federal union.

The existence of the latter, the European Union, in which Spain, which in turn includes Ceuta, is a state, enabled the North Africans to exploit a vulnerability in the federal system, for states’ rights ideologues (i.e., Euroskeptics) had been successful in blocking a stronger federal role in patrolling the E.U.’s territorial borders. The extant state-centric bricolage of immigration laws could easily be exploited without the Commission being able to fill the gaps. The Schengen Agreement, which allows for the free movement of people within the E.U., is flimsy at best. In the wake of the chaos in Ceuta, “Italy’s Interior Ministry . . . ordered the closure of the [state’s] sea and air borders with Spain, temporarily suspending the Schengen free movement regime” between the two E.U. states.[4] Imagine if Texas were able to close its borders to people coming from California were its government to suddenly open the flood-gates to illegal immigrants coming up from Mexico to California. We don’t have to imagine the government of Texas sending illegal immigrants from that U.S. member-state to Illinois.[5] Were the U.S. border subject only to a Schengen-like agreement between some of the member-states, chaos could be expected not only by interlarding migrants, but also between the states. The refusal of the E.U. state of Italy to accept people arriving from another E.U. state undermines the E.U. itself, and demonstrates just how fragile its state-dominated federal system has was even the case in 2026.

The statement at the time by Antonio Tajani, a state official of Italy, relates the state’s unilateral suspension of Schengen regarding the E.U. state of Spain to shoring up the E.U.’s borders: “The temporary suspension of Schengen with Spain is a necessary choice to safeguard the security of our citizens and defend the European borders.”[6] By “our citizens,” Tanjana was referring to those of the state of Italy, the interests of whom are not necessarily the same as those of E.U. citizens throughout the Union. This difference—between the interests of a part and the whole of which the part is just a part—is precisely why the protection of E.U. borders warranted more federal authority, rather than just the Schengen “patch-work” that could so easily be undone by “necessary” choices by state governments. In the U.S., the federalizing of regulating interstate commerce occurred because states such as New York and New Jersey were penalizing trade from each other by instituting duties under the Articles of Confederation. Whereas that confederation, which lasted from 1981-1789, consisted of fully sovereign countries, the E.U. states are semi-sovereign, just as U.S. states are because both the E.U. and U.S. have enumerated competencies or powers reserved for the federal level. By acting like a confederation with regard to border control, the E.U. played into the hands of Morocco and its citizens who illegally crossed into the E.U., such that E.U. citizens were vulnerable even to the excuse that bad economic conditions in a country outside of the E.U. gives rise to a natural right to enter the E.U. illegally as if no governments existed in Ceuta, Spain, and the E.U. itself even with respect to its borders.

Were unemployment a suitable justification to enter another country illegally, there would be chaos in both the E.U. and U.S. as it would be “open season” from Africa and Central America to cross international borders as if they did not exist. To disregard the laws of another country by entering without its government’s permission is so presumptuous in fact that the underlying mentality alone can be treated as a red-flag. The vulnerability in the E.U.’s state-centric federal system was particularly exposed because the government and state media of Morocco enabled such a mentality by citing a sovereignty dispute and bad domestic social and economic conditions as if these justify illegal immigration. In short, the E.U. should not have had to rely on the Schengen Agreement, which was as of 2026 only between some but not all E.U. states anyway. Even treating the sovereignty dispute as a Moroccan-Spanish concern belies the structural integrity of the E.U. as a federal union in which the E.U.’s borders are properly a matter of concern to the Union rather than just its states.

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1. Chaima Chihi, “Sovereignty, Sarcasm, Blame: How North Africa Reacted to Ceuta Crisis,” Euronews.com, 31 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Gabriele Barbati and Greta Ruffino, “Italy Suspends Schengen with Spain over Ceuta Migrant Crisis, Closes Air and Sea Borders,” Euronews.com, 31 July, 2026.
5. In fact, Chicago’s O’hare Airport closed its regional-bus transit facility to accommodate the incoming immigrants from Texas.
6. Gabriele Barbati and Greta Ruffino, “Italy Suspends Schengen with Spain over Ceuta Migrant Crisis, Closes Air and Sea Borders,” Euronews.com, 31 July, 2026.

Castigating NGO’s: An American Israeli-Surrogate on Gaza Reconstruction

Besides international law, international organizations, or NGOs, function internationally beyond the reach of the nation-state. From the standpoint of national sovereignty, the sheer existence of the NGO as an institutional arrangement can be viewed as a potential threat and thus smartly to be expunged. One strategy that a country’s government bent on protecting national sovereignty could use to discredit NGOs is to label them using the turbo-charged “T” word, even in the case of an NGO that is oriented exclusively to providing humanitarian aid. By 2026, Israel had decimated the infrastructure and buildings in its occupied Gaza strip, and Russia had been bombing residential buildings in Kiev and other large cities in Ukraine for four years, so it could not be said that humanitarian aid was not needed in the world. Parts of Africa ravaged by draught and war, such as in Somalia, were also in vital need of humanitarian aid. To discredit NGOs providing such assistance, whether in terms of shelter, food, or medicine, meant being open to the charge of callous disregard for the suffering of very large numbers of people.  The case of Gaza—in particular, the position of the Trump administration on NGO’s being involved in the reconstruction of the strip—demonstrates the harm that is involved in turning the NGO institution-type into a controversial and even suspicious thing in order to do the bidding of a belligerent ally while removing a potential external threat to national sovereignty.

In a closed-door meeting in July, 2026 with European and Arab government officials in Brussels oriented to how nearly €900 million would be distributed to reconstruct the Gaza strip, “US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, called for a radical overhaul of financial support for Gaza.”[1] Although he was not an official of the U.S. Government, he doubtless had the U.S. President’s backing in calling for a fundamental shift from the UN’s standard approach in order to “turn the tide” against the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and other NGOs that the U.S. and Israel believed were aiding Hamas.[2] In fact, Kushner dismissed outright the Gaza aid initiatives carried out so far as being “designed step by step by NGOs and terrorists.”[3] It would certainly be news to the UN that UNRWA was actually so tainted. Of course, Kushner and his two task masters meant to discredit the very existence of the United Nation. The day before, U.S. Secretary of State Rubio had announced that the U.S. would attempt to dismantle the International Criminal Court in what could be interpreted as a wider mission to discredit international law itself and thus give carte blanche to any country’s unimpeded sovereignty.

Even though Kushner sought to discredit the UNRWA and NGO’s in general, he can be viewed as ethically compromised in that he was, whether in effect or intent, representing Israel, or at least the position of its prime minister, Ben Netanyahu, that the UN was to be a target. Domestically in the U.S., Kushner was widely viewed as partisan, for he was married to President Trump’s daughter and, more directly, was on Trump’s Board of Peace, “the controversial body . . . expected to oversee the Strip’s reconstruction.”[4] That mega-project likely included lucrative financial investments by the Trump Organization and Kushner’s own investment firm related to prospective luxury resorts on the Gaza-coast. Furthermore, Kushner was a close friend of Netanyahu and thus would likely have been doing his partisan bidding as well, especially in casting suspicion on a UN agency as aiding groups that Israel considered to be “terrorist.” In his speech, “Kushner made a clear link between the current humanitarian aid system and the indirect financing of Hamas, claiming that a consistent flow of money has fallen into the hands of Hamas, which used it to buy weapons, build tunnels, and develop rockets.”[5] It is no accident that Israel was accusing “UNRWA of connections with terrorist groups” even though the UN agency had denied “diverting any aid.”[6] Of course, decimating an entire strip the size of Gaza, which included entire cities, could be considered terrorism because civilians tacitly deemed by apartheid Israel to be “subhuman” had been targeted by Israel’s military, and thus government. Therefore, Kushner’s application of the “T” word is itself indicative of his one-sided stance, and therefore of his questionable credibility even besides the financial interest of his firm, in directing, in effect, the international reconstruction effort that was formally launched at that very meeting.

The significance of Kushner’s (and thus America’s and Israel’s governments’) complaint goes beyond the reconstruction of Gaza under American and Israeli supervision, for in castigating a UN agency and other international NGO’s, Kushner can be interpreted as attempting to sideline international organization itself. The unspoken assumption may be that anything beyond national sovereignty is inherently suspicious, or at least a threat to such sovereignty. Moreover, any potential external obstacle is best taken out, or sidelined, in the interests of national sovereignty. Such a strategy protects national actors who are or may be aggressive internationally, as evinced in 2026 by the U.S. in Iran, Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, and even Lebanon, and Russia in Ukraine. It was no accident, in other words, that international organization itself would be sidelined by the Trump and Netanyahu administrations. At the time, the ICC had a warrant out for Netanyahu’s arrest. Whereas the U.S. had been instrumental in the founding of the UN and thus could be regarded as betraying the international body, the U.S. had not ratified the Rome Statute and thus could attack the ICC from the outside, and U.S. Secretary of State Rubio had recent done just that. Again, Netanyahu's fingerprints could be seen upon careful enough inspection.

Therefore, the problem with Kushner’s speech is not merely that he was acting as Israel's surrogate in attacking the UN; even more important is the fact that he included even the UN itself in his attack on NGOs, and was thus urging the collapse of the post-World-War-II global order that had stood for international law rather than unimpeded absolutist national sovereignty. It is indeed telling that “(d)isarming Hamas was a central theme of Kushner’s speech”[7], as this emphasis was undoubtedly as per the wishes of his Israeli friend, Ben Netanyahu, who had been behind the decimation of Gaza and the homelessness of over a million residents. It should not be forgotten that the purpose of the meeting was to begin the task of turning €900 million into real construction “on the ground,” especially as the Gazans had already been relegated to tents and would soon be forcibly sent to heavily-guarded concentration-camp-like compounds in Gaza built by Israel and reminiscent of other camps  on another continent at another time. 

Perhaps the operative question is when humanity would be spared such inhumanity even in cycles, and look forward to international and thus unbiased humanitarian aid and reconstruction. Discrediting international organizations, and especially the UN, was not the way to build confidence globally that any such turn-around would be coming anytime soon. Given Israel’s sordid role in Gaza and the enabling by the Trump administration, those two countries arguably should not have had such a large role in a €900 billion project in Gaza. Afterall, Israel’s occupation itself of Gaza was in violation of the UN, to which Israel was, at least on a de facto basis, still a member.

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1. Vincenzo Genovese, “Exclusive: US Wants ‘a New Approach’ to Rebuild Gaza, Kushner Told EU Ministers,” Euronews.com, 16 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.