On February 2, 2026 (U.S. Pacific Time), JWE President Helena Cobban conducted this wide-ranging conversation with the European strategic analyst Elijah J. Magnier. They discussed principally the points he'd raised in his Feb. 1 blog post "Why Washington Flaunts Naval Power When the Real War Architecture Lies Elsewhere". Other relevant recent writings of Elijah's are this, from Jan. 30, and this, from Jan. 28.

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Helena Cobban, President of Just World Educational, reads her January 24,  2026 newsletter that examined major political developments affecting Gaza, Iran, and the United Nations. She described Donald Trump’s launch of a new body called the Board of Peace and said it appeared designed to sideline the UN. 

She detailed Jared Kushner’s proposed plan for Gaza, which envisioned population concentration zones, a coastal tourism strip, and an industrial zone along the armistice line. However, she questioned who could impose a settlement where Israel had failed. 

She also addressed Trump’s renewed pressure on Iran, warnings of a possible US Israeli assault, and the impact of decades of US sanctions. She called those sanctions a form of terrorism. She reflected on European resistance to Trump’s Board of Peace and urged a stronger defense of the UN, especially UNRWA. She closed with updates from Just World Educational and calls to engage with its work. 

List of links mentioned in the talk: 

• The Globalities writing platform https://globalities.org/
• Israeli authorities demolish UN compound in occupied East Jerusalem (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8...) 
• Board of Peace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_o...) 
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United...) 
• Jared Kushner unveils ‘free market Gaza’ with coastal towers and data centres (https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ja...) 
• How Israel and the U.S. are using the ‘shock doctrine’ to impose a new administration in Gaza (https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/how-is...)

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This episode was the third in our timely 3-part series "Venezuela in Washington’s Crosshairs: Breaking the Information Blockade," which is co-hosted by Just World Ed's Helena Cobban and Roger Harris of Task Force on the Americas. The series is presented by these two organizations and co-sponsored by the U.S. Peace Council, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition.

This episode featured: 

• Michelle Ellner, of CodePink
• Dan Kovalik, international human-rights lawyer and author
• Ajamu Baraka, of the Black Alliance for Peace.

Ms. Ellner, a Venezuelan American, gave us some vivid descriptions of the effects the U.S. military attack of January 3 and Washington's many other hostile actions have had on her family members and colleagues back home in Venezuela. She spoke of the extreme importance of breaking the "information blockade" regarding Venezuela that nearly all the Western corporate media have engaged in.

Mr. Kovalik described the many ways in which U.S. actions, including the lengthy and debilitating sanctions and the U.S. military's attacks against shipping, have violated fundamental tenets of international law. He explored some of the regional dimensions of the ongoing crisis. He also warned that the violence the trump administration has deployed so widely and so illegally in other countries is also coming home, with the attacks the ICE forces and their allies have been taking against protesters in Minnesota and elsewhere.

Mr. Baraka situated the U.S. actions against Venezuela's sovereignty within both the broader history of Western colonialism and the long history of the United States' push for expansionism.

The speakers and moderators engaged in a broad conversation on these issues and underlined the need for concerted global action to resist and overthrow Western colonial hegemony. 

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This episode was the second in our timely 3-part series "Venezuela in Washington’s Crosshairs: Breaking the Information Blockade," which is co-hosted by Just World Ed's Helena Cobban and Roger Harris of Task Force on the Americas. The series is presented by these two organizations and co-sponsored by the U.S. Peace Council, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition.

This episode featured: 

• Jesús Rodríguez-Espinosa, the Editor of the Orinoco Tribune and a former Venezuelan diplomat; 
• Richard Falk, professor of international law and former UN special rapporteur for Palestine (also, a board member of Just World Ed); and
• Corinna Mullin, a leaders in the US Peace Council and the Anti-imperialist Scholars Collective.

Mr. Rodríguez Espinoza spoke with us from Venezuela and described the widespread networks of Bolivárian solidarity that provide resilience for Venezuelan society under the onslaught from U.S. imperialism. He stressed that internal cohesion and international partnerships remained key. He addressed sanctions and framed them as part of a wider strategy to weaken the state and society. 

Dr. Mullin focused on sanctions as collective punishment. She linked them to shortages, economic harm, and media narratives that obscure their impact and challenged the legal basis used to justify these measures. 

Professor  Falk placed Venezuela’s case within international law. He reflected on sovereignty, coercive measures, and the need to hear the perspective of those targeted by power politics. He welcomed analysis rooted in lived experience rather than external narratives. 

The speakers and moderators engaged in a broad conversation on these issues before the webinar closed with a call to confront the information blockade and to ground debate in law, facts, and solidarity.

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This is the second in our timely 3-episode series "Venezuela in Washington’s Crosshairs: Breaking the Information Blockade," which is co-hosted by Just World Ed's Helena Cobban and Roger Harris of Task Force on the Americas. The series is presented by these two organizations and co-sponsored by the U.S. Peace Council, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition.

This episode featured: 

• Jesús Rodríguez-Espinosa,
• Prof. Richard Falk, and
• Corinna Mullin.

Find more information about them here.

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This episode inaugurated our timely series "Venezuela in Washington’s Crosshairs: Breaking the Information Blockade," which is co-hosted by Just World Ed's Helena Cobban and Roger Harris of Task Force on the Americas. The series is presented by these two organizations and co-sponsored by the U.S. Peace Council, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition.

This episode featured: Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist María Paéz Victor, Leonardo Flores of the Venezuela Solidarity Committee, and Prof. Marjorie Cohn, the former president of the National Lawyers' Guild.

The speakers examined how U.S. policy has targeted Venezuela's sovereignty and national independence and has worked to shape public narratives about the country. Their discussion focused on the illegality of Pres. Trump's violent kidnapping of Pres. Nicolás Maduro and other U.S. policies like the debilitating sanctions, attacks on shipping, etc; and on the ongoing regime change efforts, and the role of media silence and distortion. 

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In this episode of "Gaza & the World" JWE President Helena Cobban's guest was  Prof. John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and the co-author with Stephen Walt of the groundbreaking 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. This conversation took place less than 24 hours after the November 17 passage by the UN Security Council of Resolution 2803, by which the Security Council threw its full support behind the whole of the (very controversial) 20-point "Peace Plan" for Gaza that Pres. Trump had unveiled September 29.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Ms. Cobban and Prof. Mearsheimer explored the impact that Seceurity Council might have, both on developments in Gaza and the rest of West Asia and on the standing of the UN itself going forward.

The two  discussed the details of how the "Israel Lobby" has functioned over the years and the serious impact it currently has on essential aspects of the free-speech situation in the United States.

The conversation ended with more discussion of the changing shape of the global order, which Prof. Mearsheimer describes as having been a multipolar one "since 2017."

See the multimedia records of all the conversation s conducted in the "Gaza & the World" project, here.

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In this episode of our "Gaza & the World" series, Helena Cobban talked with Dr. Ghada Karmi about the intersection of the genocide in Gaza and the shifting global balance of power. Dr. Karmi is a British-Palestinian who had a strong career in London as a physician and a medical historian; then between 2002 and 2023 she published four  thoughtful books that explored not only her own personal experiences as a member of the Nakba generation and a justice activist, but also the broader realities faced by Palestinians inside and outside the homeland. Her most recent work of non-fiction was One State:  The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel. 

Dr. Karmi described the unprecedented groundswell of popular support for Palestinian rights the British public has displayed since October 2023, which she contrasted with the continued pro-Israel stance of the British government and many of the country's elite institutions. 

She detailed her role as a juror of conscience at the Gaza People’s Tribunal in Istanbul, where she and others weighed the extremely harrowing testimonies of Israel's atrocities in Gaza. 

She was unequivocal: the underlying cause of the Palestinians' suffering is Zionism, which must therefore, she argued, be dismantled— which would not be the same as the physical destruction of Israel or its people. She was deeply skeptical of the wisdom of striving for a two-state solution, seeing it as perpetuating the destructive ideology of Zionism. She called instead for the reconstitution of pre-Zionist Palestine and the establishment of a single democratic state for all. 

She also described some of the experiences she had had while working as a consultant for the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, back in 2005.

She recognized the significance of the hopeful shifts among younger generations and new political actors in the West but warned that time is running out for Palestinian rights and existence. 

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In this episode of our "Gaza & the World" series, Helena Cobban talked with Vijay Prashad about the intersection of the genocide in Gaza and the shifting global balance of power. 

Vijay Prashad is a visionary global justice activist, the executive director of the Tri Continental Institute for Social Research, the editor of Left Word Books, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and a senior non-resident fellow at the Chong Yang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. He was speaking with Cobban from Beijing.

In this episode, Prashad argued that while the world's economic center of gravity had shifted away from the United States, the US maintained overwhelming dominance through its military and information power.  He discussed the role of China in providing an alternative economic pole, which allowed Global South nations to speak more freely against Western policies, arguing that the genocide in Gaza had exposed the moral bankruptcy of the West to the global majority and evoked historical memories of colonialism. [

He contended that any discussion of post-conflict governance in Gaza was meaningless without the release of all Palestinian political leaders, whose imprisonment by Israel had crippled Palestinian political life. He concluded on a sobering note, saying that a direct confrontation with the US military was not currently feasible for rising powers and that meaningful change required a political transformation within the United States to dismantle its military-first approach to global affairs.

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This is the second episode of "Gaza & the World," a weekly podcast from Just World Educational, hosted by our president, Helena Cobban. This project explores the many interactions between the ongoing, genocidal crisis in Gaza and the world-changing shifts that the global balance of power is currently undergoing.

In this episode, Helena's guest is JWE's valued board member Prof. Richard Falk, a veteran scholar of international law who has also served a crucial term as the UN's Special Rapporteur on Palestinian rights. Shortly before joining this conversation Falk had presided over  the final, four-day-long session of the globe-girdling Gaza People's Tribunal, which was held in Istanbul Türkiye. 

The two discussed the tribunal's conclusion that Israel had committed genocide, and explored the tribunal's findings on the multiple forms that genocide has taken, including domicide and ecocide. They discussed the complicity of Western governments. 

Falk also analyzed the failures of the United Nations, especially the Security Council, contrasting it with the more principled stances of the International Court of Justice and UN Special Rapporteurs.  

He argued that despite Israel's military dominance, it had lost the "legitimacy war," which he believed would ultimately be the decisive factor, drawing parallels with other anti-colonial struggles in the past. 

We're planning to release new episodes weekly, each Wednesday. Be sure to catch them all!

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