分类： politics

In one of the largest anti-government mobilizations India has seen in recent years, a youth-led grassroots movement called the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) successfully leveraged social media to organize demonstrators, galvanize public support and ultimately push India’s federal education minister to step down. What began as a hybrid movement of in-person marches and Instagram content quickly turned ordinary young women into some of the movement’s most visible faces – but their participation has come at a devastating personal cost, with dozens facing sustained, gendered online harassment, violent threats and privacy violations, a new BBC investigation has found.

CJP’s defining strategy blended traditional street protest with digital activism: short-form satirical videos, meme content and on-the-ground first-person posts spread across Instagram, drawing hundreds of thousands of views and turning casual content creators and student participants into movement leaders. The movement’s peak demonstration, held July 20, saw thousands of protesters attempt to march to India’s parliament to demand policy changes, before security forces intervened with tear gas and baton charges. Official Delhi police figures put the total injured at 60 protesters and 118 police personnel, but CJP has disputed this count, claiming far more demonstrators were harmed than the government has acknowledged. In the aftermath of the demonstration, police have opened formal criminal cases against dozens of identified movement participants. But for many of the women who posted protest content online, a separate, unregulated campaign of abuse has unfolded far from official police channels.

The BBC spoke with four anonymous female activists who participated in the protests, reviewing hundreds of pages of screenshots of abusive messages, edited deepfake images and threatening communications to document the scope of the harassment. All four requested anonymity out of safety concerns for themselves and their families.

One 20-something content creator, who attended her first protest on July 20 and shared first-person accounts of the baton charge to her Instagram followers after the protest site’s internet was cut off, described unrelenting slut-shaming and personal attacks after she publicly questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s post-protest comments – in which Modi claimed he “forgave” young demonstrators and urged society not to harshly punish them. “I thought I was just helping organize aid and share what I saw, I didn’t even think of it as political,” she told the BBC. She estimates she has deleted thousands of abusive messages and blocked hundreds of accounts, but harassment continues. For her, the abuse has amplified a constant fear that is familiar to many women in India: “As a woman here, you grow up with fear. It follows you online when you speak out, too,” she said, adding that her mother has refused to read comments on her posts for months, unable to bear the vitriol directed at her daughter.

A 20-year-old first-time protester, who regularly posts light-hearted fit-check videos, shared a quick joke clip ahead of the July 20 march saying she was “going to get beaten by cops” – a clip that was picked up by national television and spread widely across social media, leading doxxers to identify her home college and flood her inbox with threats. “I was just recording what happened around me, I never thought it would go that far,” she said. Abusers sent her anonymous messages threatening to report her to police for arrest and assault, called her degrading sexual slurs, and issued threats that “your turn will come.” The pressure extended far beyond online spaces: relatives contacted her parents demanding she delete all her protest content, and she has now archived nearly all of her protest-related posts out of fear for her family’s safety. “I worry less about what happens to me than what they might do to my parents,” she explained.

A Muslim student activist, who has long shared outspoken political content online, described a sharp uptick in targeted abuse after the CJP protests, amid India’s growing religious polarization. She has since made her Instagram account private and muted most other social platforms, but offensive content about her continues to circulate. Abusers edited her photos to falsely depict her in sexually suggestive situations to shame her, morphed her image to label her an “anti-national terrorist”, and used anti-trans slurs to insult her while falsely claiming she was a paid protester. Her father, a working journalist, has pleaded with her to stop speaking out, warning that her Muslim identity makes her an easy target for state action. “My parents have watched other Muslim activists arrested and investigated, and we live in constant dread,” she said. Despite the harassment, she remains firm: “I still believe going to the protest was the right thing to do. I just understand the cost far better now.”

A West Bengal-based student activist who helped organize supply drives and an Instagram fundraiser for protesters said the abuse began after police started detaining demonstrators in her state in late July. Abusers flooded her fundraiser post with spiteful comments and sent her sexual threats in private messages, forcing her to delete the post entirely. She changed her public social media name, locked her account and blocked messages from strangers to avoid being doxxed. What has shocked her most is the clear gender double standard: her male peers expressed the same political views online, but none faced the gendered, sexualized abuse she endured. “When women speak up, the attack always turns to our gender. I just keep asking why women can’t hold the same opinions as men online without being targeted,” she said.

In a landmark legal ruling that has reignited fierce debates over academic freedom, protected belief, and the characterization of Zionism in the United Kingdom, the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) has upheld a lower court’s finding that the University of Bristol unlawfully discriminated against former political sociology professor David Miller when it terminated his employment over anti-Zionist comments he made in 2021. The tribunal also confirmed that framing Zionism as a racist, colonial, and imperialistic ideology is a coherent philosophical position eligible for legal protection under UK equality law.

The EAT’s judgment, released this week, formally rejected the University of Bristol’s appeal against a 2024 employment tribunal ruling that first found Miller’s dismissal unlawful. In its written reasoning, the tribunal laid out clear support for the legitimacy of framing Zionism in critical terms. “It is coherent to describe as ‘racist’ an ideology [Zionism] that promotes the establishment of a state [in this case, Israel] for only one race of people [Jewish] in a territory that formerly contained a large number of people of a different race [Palestinians],” the judgment read. The tribunal further added that such an ideology, which historically encouraged Jewish migration to the region backed by imperial powers with the goal of displacing the indigenous Palestinian population, can also be coherently categorized as colonial and imperialistic.

Miller, who joined the University of Bristol faculty in 2018, centered his academic research on the influence of lobbying groups, including organizations tied to the governments of Israel and South Africa. He was fired for gross misconduct in October 2021, following public comments he made earlier that year criticizing Zionism, the state of Israel, and Jewish student organizations on campus. The 2024 original employment tribunal already concluded that Miller’s termination stemmed directly from his expression of anti-Zionist beliefs, which qualify as protected philosophical beliefs under the 2010 Equality Act. The tribunal ruled that both the dismissal and the university’s rejection of Miller’s internal appeal amounted to unlawful direct discrimination, prompting the University of Bristol to launch its appeal to the EAT.

In its final decision, the EAT reaffirmed every core conclusion of the lower tribunal. It confirmed that Miller’s core belief – that political Zionism is inherently racist, colonial, and imperialist, and that it ought to be opposed – meets the legal standard for protected belief. The tribunal also backed the finding that Miller’s 2021 comments were an expression of this protected belief, and that these comments directly and materially influenced the university’s decision to fire him.

While the tribunal acknowledged that the University of Bristol acted in pursuit of what it framed as legitimate goals – including protecting student well-being and safeguarding the institution’s public reputation – it upheld the lower court’s ruling that dismissal was a disproportionate response to Miller’s comments. The judgment noted that Miller’s remarks were lawful, had not been found to be antisemitic, did not incite violence, and did not pose a threat to anyone’s personal safety. A lesser disciplinary measure would have been sufficient, the EAT concluded.

The ruling does include one partial caveat: the EAT upheld the original finding that Miller contributed to his own dismissal through his specific remarks directed at Jewish students and student societies, meaning any compensation for unfair dismissal will be reduced by 50%. However, the tribunal also ruled that the lower court did not adequately justify its conclusion that there was a 30% chance Miller would have been fairly dismissed in 2023 over separate later social media posts, so this component of the compensation ruling will require reconsideration.

For Miller, the outcome represents a total legal victory. In a post on the social platform X, he framed the decision as a “decisive” win for the global anti-Zionist movement, noting that the pressure campaign targeting him had “spectacularly backfired.” “The University of Bristol’s attempt to overturn my 2024 Employment Tribunal victory has been comprehensively dismissed. We won on every single count,” Miller wrote. “This is a public humiliation for the genocidal Zionist regime, whose assets in Britain bullied the University into sacking me and then dragged them into this futile appeal.”

A prominent Japanese legal scholar and advocacy leader has publicly denounced the Japanese government’s ongoing military expansion, accusing Tokyo of using national defense as a false pretext to erode long-standing constitutional constraints on the country’s military activity. Makoto Ito, who serves as both a practicing lawyer and director of the Japan Institute of Constitutional Law, has raised urgent alarms over the government’s steady push to move beyond the bounds of Japan’s post-WWII pacifist constitution, a foundational document that has limited the country’s military posture to strictly defensive operations for nearly 80 years. In his criticism, Ito emphasized that sticking to an exclusively defense-oriented security policy is not just a constitutional obligation, but the most effective path to delivering long-term, stable security for Japan and the broader East Asian region. He called on policymakers to reverse course on their current buildup trajectory and reaffirm the country’s historic commitment to pacifist governance that has shaped Japanese policy since the end of World War II. The criticism comes amid a years-long shift in Japanese security policy that has seen increased defense spending, expanded military deployments abroad, and incremental changes to constitutional interpretations that have relaxed restrictions on the use of military force beyond Japan’s immediate borders, a shift that has drawn growing concern from domestic legal experts and regional neighbors alike.

A landmark new study conducted by Tel Aviv University researchers has uncovered an unprecedented surge in Israeli emigration, with nearly 270,000 citizens leaving the country between the start of 2023 and the end of 2025 — the highest three-year total recorded in the nation’s modern history.

Drawing on official datasets compiled by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics and other state agencies, the research found a consistent upward trend in long-term departures. More than 86,000 Israelis exited the country for stays of three months or longer in 2023, and that number climbed to over 90,000 in both 2024 and 2025. This puts the annual average of long-term departures at roughly 90,000, a sharp 50% increase from the pre-pandemic average of 60,000 departures per year recorded between 2010 and 2019.

Unlike previous official emigration reports that only counted citizens who left for a full year or more to count as long-term emigrants, the Tel Aviv University study expands this definition to include anyone spending a minimum of three months outside Israeli borders. Study co-author Itai Ater explained to local outlet Haaretz that this adjusted methodology captures a far more accurate picture of the actual scope of outward migration. The study’s final counts also exclude recent immigrants from Ukraine and Russia who left Israel within three years of arriving, focusing only on long-term residents who had lived in the country for at least three years before their departure.

Ater emphasized that while the current cumulative numbers do not yet pose an immediate threat to Israel’s national resilience, the steady upward trajectory demands urgent action. “In 2025, we again see deeply troubling numbers of Israelis who left the country for a significant period, adding to the emigration wave of 2023 and 2024,” he said. “But looking ahead, and unless there is a change, there is growing concern that emigration from Israel will increase to a level that endangers the country’s security and economy.”

Compounding these concerns, earlier Tel Aviv University research has already confirmed that the emigration wave is disproportionately driven by highly skilled workers: a significant and worrying share of departures are doctors, PhD-holding researchers, engineers, university academics, and high-income professionals. While some skilled labor outflow has been observed in other developed economies, the institution notes that this brain drain carries unique risks for Israel. The country has limited natural resources, and its entire economic model is built around leveraging its skilled, innovation-focused workforce.

The study’s authors warn that the current trend could soon trigger an irreversible domino effect. As more people leave, the incentive grows for friends, family members and professional networks to join them, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that becomes harder to break the longer it continues. “Once emigration numbers cross a certain threshold, reversing the trend will be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible,” the university stated in its release of the study findings.

The release of the unprecedented data has sparked fierce cross-party criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling government from Israeli lawmakers. Gilad Kariv, chair of the Knesset’s Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs and a member of the left-wing opposition Democrats party, took to social platform X to condemn the government’s inaction. “Israel is facing a tsunami of emigration, and the government is doing nothing about the issue,” Kariv wrote. He called the emigration wave a “strategic threat to Israel’s future” that is directly tied to the government’s policy agenda, specifically the controversial judicial overhaul launched in early 2023 that sparked months of mass nationwide protests.

Centrist-right opposition lawmaker Meirav Cohen of the Together party also joined the criticism, drawing a pointed connection between the government’s policies toward Gaza and the growing outflow of Israeli citizens. “They declared they would carry out voluntary emigration from Gaza,” Cohen said on X, referencing the government’s widely criticized plan to encourage the expulsion of Palestinian residents from the Gaza Strip. “In the end, the October 7 government encouraged voluntary emigration from the State of Israel.”

This report was originally framed by independent regional outlet Middle East Eye, which provides specialized, unfiltered coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region.

A long-running pro-Israel lobbying group embedded within the UK Labour Party has ignited fierce internal and international debate after releasing a new policy report that argues against a national import ban on goods produced in Israeli settlements located in occupied Palestinian territory, a move that directly contradicts overwhelming grassroots support for such a ban within the party.

Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), an influential lobby group that counts more than 70 sitting UK members of Parliament among its affiliate members (though it has not published a public roster of supporters for some time), published the 15-page policy briefing late last week under the title *Settlements and Solutions: A Guide to the Issues*. The document was reviewed in full by Middle East Eye ahead of its circulation to Labour lawmakers and senior party figures.

Under international law, all Israeli settlements constructed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – territories captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War – are classified as illegal. This position was further cemented earlier this year when the United Nations’ highest judicial body, the International Court of Justice, issued an advisory opinion ruling that Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful as a whole, and required all UN member states to take active measures to end the occupation.

Against this global legal consensus, LFI’s report takes a nuanced but controversial stance, acknowledging that most of the international community rejects Israel’s claim that settlements are legal under international law while pushing for a tiered approach to the issue. The document openly criticizes unauthorised Israeli settlement outposts – small, often rogue encampments built without formal approval from the Israeli government – and calls on the UK to pressure any future Israeli government to dismantle these outposts, halt all new settlement expansion outside of existing large, established settlement blocs, increase Palestinian access to construction permits in Area C (the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control), and expand territorially for Palestinian autonomous zones.

This framework makes clear that LFI opposes any British objection to the large, established settlement blocs that house the vast majority of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The report goes further, arguing that a full national ban on all settlement goods is unfeasible on both practical and political grounds. It claims a comprehensive boycott would not only impact Israeli businesses operating within settlement blocs, East Jerusalem and Jerusalem’s Old City, but would also inadvertently harm Israeli citizens living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, effectively becoming a de facto boycott of the entire state of Israel.

Such a move, the report argues, would be perceived by the UK’s Jewish community as evidence that the Labour government is disproportionately targeting Israel for punitive action, deepening existing divides within the country over the government’s Middle East policy.

The LFI briefing comes at a critical juncture for UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s new Labour government, which widespread Whitehall sources confirm is actively considering implementing an import ban on settlement goods once Parliament reconvenes following its current recess. Burnham has publicly stated he is reviewing “further measures to deter unacceptable violence” in the occupied West Bank, where extremist settler attacks on Palestinian communities have spiked dramatically over the past two years.

Multiple senior figures within Burnham’s cabinet have documented ties to LFI. Current Defence Secretary Wes Streeting, who has previously stated he has been a supporter of LFI for more than 20 years in leaked text messages to former disgraced UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson, has nevertheless broken with the lobby group’s latest position, endorsing sanctions on Israel and publicly accusing the country of committing war crimes in Gaza. Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, another senior Labour figure, previously served as a vice-chair of LFI.

It is worth noting that when Labour was the official opposition, the party publicly called for a ban on settlement goods. In June 2020, then-shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy argued that implementing such a ban would require political courage that sitting Conservative ministers had so far refused to demonstrate.

The push for import restrictions on settlement goods is gaining traction across Europe. France and Sweden recently tabled a joint proposal calling on the European Union to implement strict new import controls on goods produced in Israeli settlements, while the Netherlands officially implemented a national ban on trade in these goods just last month.

Domestically, LFI’s position puts it sharply at odds with the vast majority of the Labour Party’s own grassroots membership. Polling conducted earlier this year found that 87 percent of registered Labour members support a national ban on trade with Israeli settlements, with just 6 percent opposing the measure.

In its report, LFI does condemn the current Israeli administration led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which took office in January 2023 and has dramatically accelerated settlement expansion beyond the established blocs while failing to crack down on violent extremist settlers. The group also argues that there is a long-standing international consensus, previously accepted by both Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams, that the major settlement blocs will remain under Israeli control as part of any final two-state peace agreement, via a land swap arrangement that would exchange Israeli territory for the occupied land held by the blocs.

Last week’s unprecedented joint military operation by the United States and Saudi Arabia against Iran-aligned militias based in Iraq has done far more than stoke fears of imminent retaliation. It has laid bare the deep fragility of Baghdad’s years-long balancing act, which has sought to nurture warmer ties with both Riyadh and Washington while keeping powerful Tehran-aligned armed factions in check — a delicate compromise that may now force Iraq to make hard choices its leaders have long evaded.

According to Iraqi and Iranian media reports, the strikes hit multiple bases belonging to Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) on July 29, leaving at least 20 PMF fighters dead alongside four military advisers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The operation marks the first time Saudi Arabia has openly participated in coordinated military strikes alongside the U.S., and was framed as retaliation for recent drone attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure that were launched from Iraqi territory.

What is most notable, however, is that neither Riyadh nor the targeted Iran-linked militias appear to be seeking a prolonged, large-scale military confrontation at this stage. The Saudi foreign ministry characterized the joint action as an act of legitimate self-defense, while noting that further strikes would only occur if additional attacks against Saudi territory are carried out. For Riyadh, the priority remains addressing ongoing Houthi threats to its oil facilities and maritime trade routes from Yemen, and the kingdom has little interest in opening a new active front against Iran-aligned groups in Iraq.

Regional analysts broadly agree that the primary goal of the strikes was to reestablish deterrence against Tehran and its Iraqi proxies, rather than spark a full-blown conflict. “The strikes were targeted at specific militia sites linked directly to drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities, to deter these groups,” explained Dr. Hesham Alghannam, a Riyadh-based scholar with the Carnegie Middle East program, in an interview with Middle East Eye. “But killing Iranian military advisers alongside militia fighters was not accidental. This was a message to Tehran that Saudi Arabia holds Iran responsible for what its personnel direct from Iraqi soil, regardless of which formation pulls the trigger.”

A similar restrained posture can be seen on the side of the Iran-aligned militias. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), an umbrella coalition that includes the PMF, has publicly vowed retaliation for the strikes, but its rhetoric toward Saudi Arabia has been far more tempered than its sharp hostility toward the United States. In a July 29 statement posted to its official Telegram channel, the group emphasized that its “response to the American enemy is inevitable,” while only noting that it may target Saudi Arabia “if circumstances require.”

The IRI has given Iraq’s central government an August 7 deadline to respond to the joint strikes, but analysts argue this timeline and accompanying threats are aimed more at influencing Baghdad’s domestic policy than setting the stage for immediate military escalation. Multiple IRI-affiliated factions, including Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba and Saraya Awliya al-Dam, have already called on Baghdad to cut diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia, indicating the pressure is intended to shape Iraq’s broader regional alignment rather than trigger immediate conflict.

Mustafa Alsaray, research director at the Al-Bayan Centre for Research and Planning, pointed out that armed factions in Iraq rarely publicize deadlines for retaliation, instead relying on surprise attacks. “When they set such deadlines, they intend to send a message and achieve something, perhaps politically or in terms of security,” he told Middle East Eye. A second possibility, he added, is that the militias are holding off on any retaliation to coordinate their response with Tehran, amid shifting currents in ongoing U.S.-Iran tensions.

In recent days, U.S.-Iran relations have shown tentative signs of de-escalation: former U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed that direct negotiations with Tehran are ongoing, though he also warned the latest talks represent Iran’s “last chance” to reach a new nuclear and security deal. A renewed breakdown in those talks could prompt Iran-aligned militias to launch new attacks against Saudi Arabia, and potentially even Jordan or other Gulf Arab states, observers warn.

Beyond regional tensions, the strikes come at an extraordinarily sensitive juncture for Iraq’s domestic politics and security agenda. Baghdad is currently working to bring all weapons held by non-state armed groups under formal state control, advance integration of the PMF (which is technically part of Iraq’s official security apparatus but hosts highly autonomous Iran-aligned factions), and implement a national disarmament plan with a September 30 compliance deadline for all armed groups.

The joint U.S.-Saudi strikes, and Baghdad’s widespread public perception as unable or unwilling to prevent the attacks on PMF bases, have already hardened resistance to the disarmament push among hardline factions. Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, secretary general of Kataeb Hezbollah, confirmed that the attacks have “reinforced the group’s commitment to retaining and developing its weapons.” To build popular support for their position, the IRI has explicitly tied the strikes to Baghdad’s disarmament initiative, challenging the government that has “called for the Resistance’s disarmament” to prove it can defend Iraqi territory.

As resistance to disarmament grows, the economic stakes of Iraq’s stalled security reforms are becoming impossible to ignore. During Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s official visit to Washington in mid-July, his government signed 48 new trade and investment partnerships with U.S. companies. But U.S. officials have made clear that deeper economic cooperation and larger investments will depend on Baghdad’s ability to rein in or disarm militias that have carried out dozens of attacks on U.S. military and diplomatic targets in recent months, a string of assaults the IRI claimed responsibility for during the U.S.-Israel conflict with Iran.

Saudi Arabia is expected to adopt a similar posture on investment in Iraq. Zaidi has repeatedly framed closer economic partnership with Riyadh as a core priority for his government, but failure to control Iran-aligned militias could derail those plans completely. “September 30 is the real test. If the disarmament process fails – on the same day U.S. forces are set to withdraw from Iraq – Riyadh and even Abu Dhabi will quietly conclude that Baghdad cannot deliver, and their willingness to invest in Iraq will be reconsidered accordingly,” Alghannam noted.

For Iraq, the aftermath of the joint strikes has turned a long-simmering internal tension into an unavoidable test: can Baghdad deliver on its security reforms, preserve its fledgling ties with Gulf Arab states, and avoid being dragged into a wider regional conflict that its war-weary population can ill afford?