In Tehran, it is raining oil.
After US–Israeli illegal strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure, burning fuel has fallen back to earth in black sheets. Above the city, plumes of smoke drift across the skyline. Across West Asia, the war widens: Lebanon bombarded once again, Gaza sealed under total siege, the West Bank carved apart by annexation and armed settlers.
What began as a genocide live-streamed from Gaza is now spilling across the region.
For nearly two and a half years, Israel’s assault on Gaza has demolished hospitals, universities, and entire neighbourhoods. Thermobaric weapons — devices that suck oxygen from the air before igniting a fireball — have turned crowded streets into infernos hot enough to “evaporate” human bodies, as Palestinian scholar Yara Hawari told the People’s Congress in Amsterdam last week. The devastation, she noted, now exceeds several times the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb, compressed into a narrow strip of land.
And still the machinery grinds on.
Aid convoys are halted. Border crossings sealed. Reconstruction plans drafted in Washington imagine Gaza transformed into a network of biometric camps and corporate concessions — a dystopian “Board of Peace” imposed upon the ruins.
The lesson is unmistakable: impunity breeds escalation.
For Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Gaza has become the proving ground for a new global order. Israel’s “total impunity,” he warned in Amsterdam, is ushering in a world where “might makes right” — where doctrines first tested on Palestinians are exported across the globe.
Iran now sits squarely within that expanding theatre of war.
Last week in The Hague, forty states convened under the banner of The Hague Group — the largest gathering since the initiative’s creation — to coordinate collective action in defence of international law. Their discussions moved beyond declarations and condemnations toward mechanisms of enforcement.
At the centre of those deliberations was a simple proposition: There can be no safe haven for war criminals.
States examined a coordinated immigration directive that would restrict entry to individuals implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine — a measure designed to ensure that those responsible for atrocity cannot travel freely through the capitals of the world.
“Deny port access and routes shift,” said Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, Executive Secretary of The Hague Group. “Coordinate enforcement of international law and impunity becomes harder to sustain.”
Recent events have already demonstrated the point. When Namibia barred vessels suspected of carrying military supplies to Israel from docking in its ports, shipping routes were forced to change overnight — proof that coordinated state action can impose real logistical and political costs on the machinery of war.
But law alone is not enough.
Outside the meeting halls in The Hague, trade unionists, parliamentarians, activists and organisers gathered in Amsterdam for the People’s Congress for The Hague Group — an attempt to build the social force capable of sustaining such action — at courts, ports, and factories.
The novelist Sally Rooney recalled the Irish workers who once refused to handle South African fruit during apartheid — a small act of solidarity that eventually helped drive a national boycott. Liberation struggles, she argued, succeed when ordinary people identify the weak points in the machinery of oppression and apply pressure until it breaks.
The same logic now confronts the world.
If Gaza marks the collapse of the old “rules-based order,” then The Hague and Amsterdam represent an attempt to build something in its place: states and movements willing to build and wield counter-power.
Whether that experiment succeeds may determine far more than the fate of Palestine.
As Barghouti warned the Congress: Palestine today has become the test of whether humanity can begin dismantling centuries of colonial domination — or descend further into a world ruled openly by force.
In Amsterdam, organisers, parliamentarians, jurists and trade unionists gathered for the People’s Congress for The Hague Group, convened alongside the meeting of states in The Hague. The Congress brought together organisations across the Palestine solidarity movement to coordinate strategies capable of enforcing international law and confronting the impunity that has enabled Israel’s assault on Gaza.
On 8 March, Venezuela held its sixth National Popular Consultation, a participatory democratic process launched in 2024 as part of a national strategy to counter the US blockade and deepen direct democratic decision-making across the country.
After a boycott by France’s booksellers’ association, Amazon withdrew its sponsorship from the Paris Book Festival, marking an important victory against the company’s growing domination of the publishing industry.
Spain has announced humanitarian assistance to Cuba as the island confronts an intensifying oil blockade that has strained fuel supplies and public services. The decision adds to growing international pressure against the decades-long embargo imposed on the country.
In Kenya, Booker Omole, national vice-chairperson of the Communist Party of Kenya, has been released from prison. During his imprisonment, Omole transformed his cell into a political classroom, organising political education and debate among fellow prisoners.
In Colombia, progressive forces secured an important electoral victory, strengthening the government’s reform programme and demonstrating continued popular support for efforts to reverse decades of neoliberal policy and political violence.
In South Africa, Abahlali baseMjondolo held a memorial north of Durban for five children who burned to death in a shack fire in an occupation settlement in the eKumimini area. The previous Saturday the movement buried Zweli ‘Khabazela’ Mkhize, assassinated for opposing criminal mafias seeking to capture occupied land and sell it for profit. “Being poor means living close to death,” the movement wrote. “You can die slowly or you can die quickly. You can die in a fire or from a gun.”
Earth’s Greatest Enemy, the second feature film project by Abby Martin, is a groundbreaking anti-imperialist environmental documentary - and it in on tour in Europe this month.
Exempt from international climate agreements and rarely scrutinised in mainstream reporting, the Pentagon is the world’s single largest institutional polluter—spewing carbon, contaminating water, and scarring landscapes across the globe. Combining investigative journalism, striking visuals, and stories from impacted communities, this film challenges audiences to rethink the hidden costs of a global military empire and its planetary consequences. Provocative, urgent, and eye-opening, this is a documentary that will change how you see both the military and environmentalism. Find a tour date near you and book your ticket [here](https://earthsgreatestenemy.com/).
2 March 1896 – The Battle of Adwa
Ethiopian forces defeated invading Italian troops at the Battle of Adwa, delivering one of the most decisive anti-colonial victories in modern history. The triumph preserved Ethiopia’s sovereignty and became a symbol of resistance across Africa and the diaspora.
8 March – International Women's Day
International Women's Day originated in the struggles of women workers in the early 20th century. On 8 March 1917, women textile workers in Petrograd demonstrated against bread shortages and the war, sparking the February Revolution that brought down the Tsarist regime.
The Wood Library at Amsterdam’s Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) is a “scientific” catalogue once used by Dutch merchants to evaluate timber from former colonies. A section labelled “Israel, 1962,” holds wood from various regions of historical Palestine, erasing the existence of Palestinian land and territories.
In May 2025, Palestinian artist Hamza Badran anonymously infiltrated the library by placing a fictitiously labelled piece of wood, having studied the collection’s handwriting and forms. Badran’s action criticises the ongoing falsification of history through colonial artefacts and objects, despite the museum’s position acknowledging its colonial past. Hamza Badran (1993, Palestine) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Basel, and currently an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. In 2023, he won the Kiefer Hablitzel Göhner Art Prize, and in 2022, he was included in documenta fifteen as part of the collective Jimmie Durham and a Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road.
