How casting choices, public advocacy, and the myth of neutrality reveal a political project
Why Iran? A Creative Choice in the Shadow of War
In Joe's College Road Trip (2026), Tyler Perry introduces a "Hard R" thriller subplot involving an Iranian gang led by a character played by Shekeb Sekander. On its face, this is a fictional antagonist in a comedy-thriller. But creative choices do not occur in a vacuum. In a film whose central premise—a grandfather taking his grandson on a college tour—did not require a geopolitically specific villain, the decision to name Iran as the origin point of organised criminality does specific ideological work. And it does so at a moment when Iran is under active, illegal military assault by the very states whose security narratives Perry's film reinforces.
The grandad character, Joe, is introduced to the viewer as someone who will offend. Early scenes establish him through language designed to shock, and Perry appears to be pushing the use of the N-word as a comedic device—a choice that borders on the offensive in its own right, particularly coming from a filmmaker who has positioned himself as a moral guardian of Black culture. The character's function is unambiguous: he is the corrupting outsider, the foreign criminal element importing violence and vice into American life.
This review excoriates Joe's College Road Trip on narrative, comedic, and cultural grounds—criticising the film from a mainstream perspective that does not engage its geopolitical subtext. The review's objections to the film's quality stand independently of the political argument advanced in this article.
The broader representational tradition into which this character fits was catalogued by the late Palestinian-American academic and literary critic Edward Said in his landmark 1978 work Orientalism, which demonstrated how Western cultural production systematically constructs the "Orient" as exotic, dangerous, and in need of external discipline. This critique was extended to Hollywood specifically by Jack Shaheen in Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001), which documented what Shaheen termed the "triple B" syndrome: the reduction of Arab and Middle Eastern characters to terrorists, oil sheikhs, or belly dancers. The belly dancer trope in particular carries a sexual charge—the Middle Eastern figure as a source of exoticised sexual threat or availability—and its application to a society as conservative as Iran's is a particularly egregious distortion.
It should be noted that production decisions on Joe's College Road Trip preceded the February 2026 assault on Iran — casting was confirmed in late 2023, and the film was released on February 13, two weeks before the bombing began. Perry did not build a propaganda vehicle for a specific war. What the timeline reveals is something more systemic and therefore more indicting: he did not need to. The representational template Said and Shaheen catalogued does not depend on individual intent. It circulates through the culture as inherited vocabulary, available to any filmmaker who reaches for a convenient villain. The war did not create the Iranian gangster on screen. It simply arrived to confirm him.
The War Context: Attacking While Negotiating
The political meaning of Perry's creative choice cannot be understood without the timeline of military aggression that forms its backdrop. In 2025, the occupying Power in East Jerusalem launched a twelve-day war against Iran—an unprovoked, illegal assault on a sovereign state. On February 28, 2026, at the end of Ramadan, while negotiations between Iran and Western powers were still ongoing in Oman, a coordinated attack was launched by both the United States and the occupying Power. Iran had already offered to transfer its uranium supplies to Western control as a gesture of good faith. While that offer was on the table, and while diplomatic channels remained open, the bombing began.
The attack specifically targeted Iran's leadership. Ayatollah Khamenei was assassinated on February 28. Multiple senior figures were killed in a campaign the Western powers openly described as "decapitation"—the elimination of a state's political and military command structure. A second round of US-Iran talks in Islamabad, held on April 11-12, 2026 ended without a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), prompting the US to impose a naval blockade on Iran shortly after. As of this writing, on April 24, 2026, the war is in its fifty-fourth day.
The narrative required to justify this assault is that Iran cannot be trusted, that it negotiates in bad faith, that its leadership is criminal by nature, and that force is the only language it understands. The Sekander character in Perry's film—the Iranian gangster importing violence into America—is that narrative rendered as entertainment. He is the fictional vindication of a real military campaign. The film says to its audience: you have seen the Iranian criminal on screen; now understand why he must be dealt with by force.
Inverting Reality: Who Threatens Women?
The inversion at work in Perry's film extends beyond geopolitics into the politics of gender. In Western discourse, "freedom" for women is persistently defined as the right to sexual self-objectification—the freedom to appear in public exposed, to monetise one's body on platforms like OnlyFans, to participate in a culture of commodified sexuality that the West treats as liberated and that conservative societies treat as exploitation. By this definition, Iranian women are "unfree" because they live under a social and legal order that restricts public exposure of the body and prohibits the commercialisation of sex.
OnlyFans is owned through Fenix International by Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American entrepreneur who acquired the platform in 2018. In February 2024, Rolling Stone reported that internal AIPAC documents — obtained by The Lever — identified Radvinsky and his wife as having pledged $11 million to AIPAC, the largest single contribution in documents covering the month following October 7. Radvinsky denied the pledge. The documentation, including a wire transfer record, told a different story. Radvinsky died in March 2026. The platform he built into the emblem of Western sexual commodification was, on the available evidence, also a source of funding for the lobby that has done more than any other single organisation to sustain American political support for the occupation.
The platform's proliferation represents a defining feature of contemporary Western society: the mass commodification of women's bodies as a legitimate business model. Iran, by contrast, restricts pornography, prohibits platforms like OnlyFans, and maintains internet limitations that, while tightened during wartime for obvious security reasons, are consistent with a broader social commitment to conservative norms regarding public sexuality.
The Western critique of Iran frames these restrictions as oppression. But what is actually being demanded is not women's freedom in any meaningful sense—it is women's availability for sexual consumption under the sign of liberation. And here is the grotesque inversion at the heart of Perry's film: at the very moment the United States and the occupying Power are bombing Iran, at the very moment Iran is the aggrieved party defending itself against unprovoked aggression, Perry releases a film in which Iranians are portrayed as the source of sexual criminality infiltrating American society. The country that restricts OnlyFans is depicted as the exporter of sexual exploitation. The country being bombed is depicted as the threat to moral order. This is not storytelling. It is war propaganda in narrative form.
The Trafficking Data Is Not Neutral
Perry's defenders might argue that casting Iran as a trafficking hub simply reflects reality. But this defence collapses upon examination of how trafficking data is constructed. The most influential global ranking on human trafficking, the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, consistently places Iran in its lowest Tier 3 category. Yet this same report has faced sustained scholarly critique for conflating compliance with prevalence and for functioning as a diplomatic instrument rather than an empirical measure.
Academic research has demonstrated that trafficking indicators are "neither neutral nor unskewed" and that political, racialised, and gendered concerns fundamentally shape what counts as trafficking and what is ignored. An analysis of the Global Slavery Index found that its methodology produces a map "replete with colonial overtones"—one that consistently places developed Western nations favourably and developing nations poorly. The Index relies heavily on the U.S. TIP Reports as a primary data source, creating a circular validation loop. Even the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has acknowledged that cross-national trafficking comparisons are unreliable because differences in reported rates often reflect political priorities and detection capacity rather than actual prevalence.
Meanwhile, the sexual commodification of women through platforms like OnlyFans, the documented prevalence of prostitution across American cities, and the trafficking networks that supply the Western demand for commercial sex are treated as features of a free society rather than evidence of systemic exploitation. The selective application of moral outrage—trafficking in Tehran is a crime against humanity; trafficking in Los Angeles is a lifestyle choice—reveals the political function of the data. Perry's choice to single out Iran as a trafficking menace is not an empirical claim. It is an endorsement, in narrative form, of a contested geopolitical framing that serves the interests of the powers currently bombing Iran.
Public Advocacy and the Hostage Letter
Perry's creative choices do not exist in isolation. They sit alongside a public record of advocacy that consistently aligns with the interests of the occupying Power in East Jerusalem while avoiding solidarity with Palestinian suffering.
In October 2023, Perry was among the signatories of an open letter to President Biden as part of the #NoHostageLeftBehind campaign. The letter thanked the administration for its "unwavering moral conviction" and urged a focus on the release of hostages taken by Hamas. While the letter included a brief line expressing a desire for "freedom for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace," its operational demand was singular: prioritise the hostages. No call for a ceasefire. No acknowledgment of the proportionality of the military response. No mention of Palestinian civilian deaths, even as the death toll in Gaza climbed into the thousands.
The letter's signatory list included figures such as Gal Gadot, Amy Schumer, and Jerry Seinfeld—celebrities who had already publicly aligned themselves with the military campaign. Perry's presence on this list, within this political milieu, was a statement of alignment.
Absence from the Ceasefire Movement
Equally telling is where Perry's name does not appear. He is conspicuously absent from the Artists4Ceasefire initiative, a letter signed by prominent Black celebrities including Drake, Jennifer Lopez, and Dua Lipa, which explicitly called for an immediate end to the bombardment of Gaza. The letter framed the issue in humanitarian terms, emphasising the catastrophic civilian toll and the need for de-escalation.
Perry, with a platform among the largest of any Black entertainer in America, chose not to add his name. This is not passive neutrality. In the context of a military campaign that the International Court of Justice would later find presented a "plausible" case for genocide, declining to call for a ceasefire while signing a letter that thanks the administration enabling the campaign is a political act.
Rejecting the Genocide Label
By late 2025, Perry had reportedly moved from silence to active denial. Reports indicate that he explicitly argued against the application of the term "genocide" to the war in Gaza. His reasoning relied on a legalistic distinction: genocide requires a specific intent to destroy a people, and the stated goal—the destruction of Hamas—was military rather than eliminatory.
This framing, advanced by the occupying Power and its defenders, has been contested by major human rights organisations. Amnesty International concluded in a December 2024 report that genocide had been and continued to be committed against Palestinians in Gaza. The International Court of Justice, in its January 2024 provisional measures ruling, found it "plausible" that the acts in question amounted to violations of the Genocide Convention. The United Nations Special Committee investigating practices in the occupied territories described the warfare methods employed in Gaza as "consistent with the characteristics of genocide."
By publicly aligning himself with the denial of this charge, Perry did more than express an opinion. He lent his considerable cultural authority to a legal and moral defence of the state carrying out the military campaign.
"The ICJ found it 'plausible' that the acts in question amounted to violations of the Genocide Convention. Perry's response was to argue that the word didn't apply."
| Advocacy Action | Perry's Position | Political Function |
|---|---|---|
| #NoHostageLeftBehind letter (Oct 2023) | Signed | Aligned with U.S. narrative and interests of occupying Power; thanks administration for leadership; no ceasefire call |
| Artists4Ceasefire letter | Did not sign | Declined to join prominent Black celebrities calling for end to bombardment |
| Terminology of "genocide" (Late 2025) | Rejected the label | Legalistic defence of military campaign; dismissal of ICJ and human rights findings |
| Joe's College Road Trip antagonist | Iranian gang | Reinforces Western security narrative casting Iran as criminal threat during ongoing military assault |
The Unreclaimed Mind
Steve Biko identified the deepest mechanism of colonial control not in the pass book or the sjambok but in the colonised mind — the mind that has absorbed the oppressor's framework so completely that it reproduces colonial logic while speaking the language of liberation. "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor," Biko wrote, "is the mind of the oppressed." Perry's political project is not best understood as conscious Zionism. It is better understood as a Bikoan case study: a man who reclaimed land without reclaiming his consciousness. The physical geography changed. The mental geography did not.
This distinction matters because it closes the exit that Perry's defenders habitually use. The argument from intent — he does not mean to serve imperial interests, he genuinely believes in love and reconciliation — is irrelevant under Biko's framework. A mind shaped by the colonial order will reproduce colonial outputs regardless of intent. The question is not what Perry means to do. The question is what his politics does — whose power it protects, whose suffering it renders invisible, whose land it implicitly endorses as legitimately held.
The Black-Jewish Alliance as Moral Shield
The backbone of Perry's public identity is his constant invocation of the "Black-Jewish Alliance." He has repeatedly cited the 1964 murders of Jewish activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were killed alongside Black activist James Chaney in Mississippi while fighting for voting rights. His mother, he has stated, taught him the "commonality" between slavery and the Holocaust — a lesson that both communities have "deep scars" and must not be divided by a "competition of suffering."
This framing is not, on its face, objectionable. The historical Black-Jewish alliance during the Civil Rights Movement was real, and the shared experience of systemic persecution is genuine. But Perry deploys this history selectively, using it as a shield against critique of a political project — the occupation and settlement of Palestinian land — that the radical Black tradition has increasingly identified as incompatible with liberation. In Biko's terms, this is the colonised mind at work: reaching instinctively for the framework the dominant culture has authorised, and using it to silence the framework the dominant culture has suppressed.
The Black Panther Party expressed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle as early as 1970. Malcolm X drew explicit parallels between the displacement of Palestinians and the colonisation of Africa. Angela Davis has consistently linked the prison-industrial complex, anti-Black racism in the United States, and the occupation of Palestine as manifestations of the same imperial logic. More recently, the Movement for Black Lives platform has explicitly condemned Israeli apartheid and expressed solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The Mandela family legacy stands squarely on the side of Palestinian liberation. Nelson Mandela himself drew a direct parallel between the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the Palestinian cause, stating that South Africa's freedom would be incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians. His grandson, Mandla Mandela, carried this commitment forward into direct action: he participated in the Global Sumud Flotilla attempting to break the blockade of Gaza with humanitarian aid and was detained in international waters by the occupying Power's naval forces. Following his release, Mandla Mandela described what he had witnessed as an apartheid state, placing his grandfather's moral authority behind the Palestinian struggle.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who knew something about apartheid from the inside, went further. After visiting the occupied territories and examining the regime of checkpoints, separate roads, land confiscation, and military courts applied to one population but not another, Tutu stated unequivocally that what he saw was worse than apartheid in South Africa. The man who had chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who had spent his life dismantling one system of racial oppression, looked at the occupation and pronounced it more severe than the system he had fought at home.
By invoking the Black-Jewish alliance solely in the context of defending the occupying Power, Perry erases this entire alternative lineage. He presents solidarity as a one-way street: Black Americans must remember Jewish sacrifices in the Civil Rights struggle, but Palestinian suffering under occupation does not merit the same solidarity in return. The equation is not "shared trauma demands shared liberation." It is "shared trauma demands Black support for the occupation." This is not a political position Perry reasoned his way into. It is the position the colonial order prepared him to hold.
"The equation is not 'shared trauma demands shared liberation.' It is 'shared trauma demands Black support for the occupation.'"
The Middle Ground That Favours the Oppressor
All of this is anchored by Perry's stated philosophy: "meeting in the middle." In his 2021 Oscar acceptance speech for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, Perry urged audiences to "refuse hate" and "stand in the middle," arguing that blanket judgment against any group — including police officers or Jewish people — was itself a form of hate.
Desmond Tutu offered a different formulation: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." The maxim has become a touchstone of anti-apartheid and anti-colonial thought precisely because it names the function of neutrality in asymmetric conflicts. When one party possesses overwhelming military power — F-35 fighter jets, an Iron Dome defence system, and the unconditional backing of the world's largest superpower — and the other is a blockaded population of two million people, half of them children, being bombed in what human rights organisations describe as one of the deadliest conflicts for civilians in modern history, calling for "both sides" to meet in the middle is not humanitarianism. It is an endorsement of the status quo.
Biko went further than naming neutrality as complicity. He argued that the liberal — the figure who preached reconciliation, dialogue, and meeting in the middle — was not a passive bystander but an active stabiliser of the system. The liberal's function was to absorb radical energy, redirect it toward manageable reform, and prevent the confrontation that structural change requires. Perry has internalised this liberal posture so completely that he performs it from a Black body — which makes it more effective, not less. He provides the system with precisely what it needs: a Black voice of extraordinary reach telling Black audiences that refusing to hate is the highest form of wisdom. Biko would have recognised the function immediately, even if the face has changed.
Perry's "middle ground" allows him to appear magnanimous while functioning as a firewall against radical critique. By refusing to "hate" the systems responsible for land theft and mass killing, he effectively endorses the outcomes those systems produce. The moral calculus is straightforward: you cannot claim to be a humanitarian while refusing to name the source of the harm.
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." — Desmond Tutu
The Contradiction of Reclamation
There is a final, devastating contradiction at the heart of Perry's position. He has built his personal mythology around an act of land reclamation. In 2015, he purchased a 330-acre former Confederate army base in Atlanta and transformed it into Tyler Perry Studios — the largest film production studio in the United States owned outright by a Black individual. The symbolic power of this act is immense: a Black man, descended from enslaved people, turning a site of Confederate military power into a hub of Black creative and economic production.
Perry himself has spoken about the significance of this reclamation. Yet when Palestinians resist the ongoing confiscation of their land — when they demand the right of return for refugees displaced since 1948, when they protest the expansion of settlements deemed illegal under international law, when they resist a blockade that has turned Gaza into what human rights organisations describe as an open-air prison — Perry is silent. Worse, he actively defends the state carrying out the dispossession.
The standard he applied to a Confederate base — that stolen land should be reclaimed — is one he does not extend to the villages of Deir Yassin, the olive groves of the West Bank, or the fishing waters of Gaza. Reclamation, in Perry's world, is for Black Americans. Palestinians must accept their displacement. Liberation is not universal. It is selective.
In Biko's terms, Perry never completed the liberation he performed. He freed the land. He did not free the mind that stands on it.
Conclusion: He Has Chosen His Side
Whether Perry arrived at his position by calculation or by the slower gravity of a colonised mind makes no practical difference to the people his politics harms. The effect is the same. And the record is the record.
Tyler Perry has not simply remained neutral in a difficult geopolitical conflict. His record shows a consistent pattern: casting a regional adversary of the occupying Power as a criminal threat while that adversary is under active bombardment; signing letters of support for an administration enabling mass killing; refusing to join ceasefire calls; and publicly disputing the legal language used to describe what international bodies have found to be plausible acts of genocide. He has released a film during an ongoing war—now in its fifty-fourth day—that portrays the victims of that war as the moral corrupters of Western society. All of this is wrapped in the language of love, healing, and refusing to hate.
But there is nothing humanitarian about a neutrality that protects the powerful from accountability. For a man who built an empire on the reclamation of stolen land, his refusal to apply that same standard to the Palestinians is not a contradiction. It is a revelation. Tyler Perry has chosen his side. It is not the side of the oppressed.
References
On Tyler Perry's Public Advocacy
"Tyler Perry Notes Jewish Allyship to Black Community Amid Kanye West Antisemitism." Billboard, 2022. https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/tyler-perry-jewish-allyship-to-black-community-amid-kanye-west-antisemitism-1235165356/
"Tyler Perry Shares His Family's Personal Connection to the Jewish Community." Black Enterprise, 2022. https://www.blackenterprise.com/tyler-perry-shares-his-familys-personal-connection-to-the-jewish-community/
"Tyler Perry Made a Powerful Statement Calling Out Antisemitism and Refusing Hate." Black Jewish Entertainment Alliance, Facebook, 2022. https://www.facebook.com/BJEAlliance/posts/tyler-perry-made-a-powerful-statement-calling-out-antisemitism-and-refusing-hate/1155636846609922/
"Full List of Celebrities Demanding Release of All Hamas Hostages." Newsweek, October 2023. https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-celebrities-demanding-release-all-hamas-hostages-1837190
"Gal Gadot, Amy Schumer, Jerry Seinfeld Among Hollywood Figures Signing Letter to Biden on Israel Hostages." The Hollywood Reporter, October 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/hollywood-biden-letter-israel-hostages-gal-gadot-chris-rock-1235625403/
"Drake, Jennifer Lopez, and Other Recording Artists Sign Letter for Gaza Ceasefire." Yahoo Entertainment, 2023. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/drake-jennifer-lopez-other-recording-161502307.html
"Tyler Perry's 2021 Oscars Acceptance Speech Transcript." USA Today, April 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/oscars/2021/04/26/tyler-perry-oscars-speech-read-his-humanitarian-award-remarks-full/7380447002/
On OnlyFans and Political Alignment
Ramirez, Nikki McCann. "OnlyFans Owner Leonid Radvinsky Pledged $11 Million To AIPAC: Report." Rolling Stone, February 1, 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/onlyfans-owner-leonid-radvinsky-11-million-aipac-1234958976/
On the History and Politics of Black Solidarity with Palestine
Marable, Manning. "Black Zionism: The Political and Emotional Impact of the Black-Jewish Conflict." Race & Class, 1995.
Davis, Angela. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016.
"A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice." The Movement for Black Lives, 2016. https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/
Mandela, Nelson. Speech at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Pretoria, December 1997.
"Mandla Mandela Detained in International Waters During Gaza Aid Flotilla." Al Jazeera, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/
Tutu, Desmond. "Apartheid in the Holy Land." The Guardian, April 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/29/comment
Tutu, Desmond. Interview with Haaretz, 2014, in which he stated the occupation is "worse than apartheid" in South Africa.
On Trafficking Data and Methodological Critique
Gallagher, Anne. "Trafficking in Persons: The Illusion of Objectivity." Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2014.
O'Connell Davidson, Julia. "New Slavery, Old Binaries: Human Trafficking and the Borders of 'Freedom.'" Global Networks, 2010.
Smith, Molly, and Mac, Juno. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights. Verso Books, 2018.
Butler, Jess. "The Colonial Overtones of the Global Slavery Index." Sociology, 2021.
"An Uncomfortable Truth: UN Peacekeeping and Human Trafficking." Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 2020.
On Genocide, International Law, and the ICJ
"Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Order of 26 January 2024." International Court of Justice. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
Amnesty International. "'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza." December 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/
"Report of the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices." United Nations, 2024. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-committee-finds-israels-warfare-methods-gaza-consistent
On Orientalism and Representation
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
Shaheen, Jack. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Olive Branch Press, 2001.
On the Legal Status of East Jerusalem
Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), Article 47 and Section III (Articles 47–78). https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0173.pdf
UNSC Resolution 478 (1980). https://undocs.org/S/RES/478(1980)
UNSC Resolution 672 (1990). https://undocs.org/S/RES/672(1990)
UNSC Resolution 2334 (2016). https://undocs.org/S/RES/2334(2016)
ICJ Advisory Opinion, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2004). https://www.icj-cij.org/case/131
ICJ Advisory Opinion, Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (2024). https://www.icj-cij.org/case/186
On Tyler Perry Studios and Land Reclamation
"Tyler Perry Studios: The Story Behind the Historic Purchase." The Hollywood Reporter, 2019. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/tyler-perry-studios-story-behind-historic-purchase-1256644/
On Joe's College Road Trip
"Joe's College Road Trip (2026)." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_College_Road_Trip
On Steve Biko
Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. Bowerdean Press, 1978.
Multimedia
Adam Does Movies, video review of Joe's College Road Trip (February 2026). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J-I2gur_2w
Editorial Note on Terminology:
This text uses the terms "occupying Power" and "occupying authority" in reference to the de facto administration governing East Jerusalem, in accordance with the language of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), UNSC Resolution 672 (1990) which explicitly designates that administration as "occupying Power" in the Jerusalem context, and the advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice (2004, 2024), which consistently characterise the presence in East Jerusalem as occupation rather than sovereign governance and affirm that all states are under an obligation not to recognise the legal validity of that presence. The use of these terms neither asserts nor forecloses any position on questions of statehood or recognition beyond what is established in the instruments cited.
This article builds on a critical essay originally commissioned for analysis and has been expanded with scholarly references and legal citations for publication.
