Thomas Karat, behavioral analyst 

The Mavi Marmara had sailed from Istanbul’s Sarayburnu port on 22 May 2010, bound for Gaza with aid. On 31 May, after Israeli commandos had taken the ship in international waters and nine of the people aboard lay dead, a Turkish reporter named Kürşat Bayhan tried to save his work by hiding his camera’s memory card under his tongue. It was found during a medical examination and taken from him. Around sixty journalists came off the flotilla at Ashdod that week, and all of their recorded media was confiscated, never to be returned. In the days that followed, the Israeli military released short, edited clips drawn in part from the material it had seized, and its account of the raid dominated coverage while the survivors were held without contact. For about forty-eight hours, while survivors were held incommunicado, the clips released by Israel, edited from the ship’s security cameras and from equipment taken off journalists, were most of what the world saw. On 3 June the Committee to Protect Journalists accused Israel of confiscating journalistic material and then manipulating it to serve its own interests. A United Nations fact-finding mission later recorded that a large quantity of video and photographs from the vessels, including much of the assault on the Mavi Marmara itself, had been taken by the Israeli authorities and not returned. The seized material stayed useful to its holders long after the raid. Months later, while the Israeli chief of staff was giving testimony about the operation, army radio released a further short clip from the confiscated videos, a timing one Israeli outlet read as a domestic political move. The Turkish photojournalist Cevdet Kılıçlar was among those killed on the ship, and a Canadian aid worker, Kevin Neish, who hid the memory card from his own camera and later smuggled it out, published photographs of the dead that the official clips had left out. What survived reached the public because individuals beat the search, among them two Turkish journalists, Adem Özköse and Şefik Dinç, who smuggled their work home or recovered it from damaged cards.

Readers in Türkiye know that method from their own history. The state seizes the cameras, holds the witnesses until the story has set and then releases whatever selection supports the official version. It is the maritime equivalent of the colonial bonfires described in the first part of this series, where Britain burned or sank the files that might embarrass it and later locked away the rest. Both methods rest on one condition. The state has to hold the only copies. In Gaza since October 2023 that condition has failed, because a large part of the evidence was recorded by Israeli soldiers on their own phones and published by them, under their own names, before anyone in authority could decide what the public would be allowed to see.

The most common scene in that material is a demolition. Engineers thread explosives through the houses of an entire street, a countdown runs, and a block of homes drops at once into a single rolling cloud, while the men who set the charges cheer and the man holding the phone keeps it steady on the collapse. The same footage recurs across Gaza in thousands of clips filmed by unit after unit, some dedicating a detonation to a fallen comrade or to a holiday at home. One soldier captioned the levelling of houses in Rafah “renovations in Gaza.” The Fourth Geneva Convention bars an occupying power from destroying civilian property unless military operations make it absolutely necessary, and it lists extensive destruction of property, carried out unlawfully and wantonly and without military necessity, among the grave breaches that constitute war crimes. Footage of soldiers celebrating the collapse of a residential block is poor evidence of necessity. Demolition compelled by an operational requirement gives no occasion for a victory song, and the soundtrack records the attitude in which the decision was carried out.

The second recurring scene shows detainees. Across the Strip soldiers filmed men they had rounded up, who had been stripped to their underwear and blindfolded before being made to kneel in long rows, and they filmed themselves standing over them. In December 2023 a soldier named Yossi Gamzoo posted footage of a Palestinian stripped and bound, bleeding, under interrogation at Gaza College and then marched barefoot through the street, along with a second clip from Yarmouk stadium in which hundreds of men kneel in rows, many in their underwear and some blindfolded, with three women on their knees behind a goal. Another soldier, later identified as Ilya Blank, set a montage of blindfolded detainees packed into a pickup truck, with a comrade grinning and raising his thumb beside them, to an Israeli rap track. The Geneva Conventions require that people in custody be treated humanely and protected against insults and public curiosity. Legal scholars who examined this footage for the BBC concluded that it breached those protections. Two named soldiers stand here for a practice that was widespread and openly displayed, posted by men who expected their audience to approve.

The same practice reached the occupied West Bank. In December 2023, during a three-day military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, reservists filmed themselves inside a mosque reciting the Shema Yisrael and singing Hanukkah songs over the loudspeaker normally used for the call to prayer, one of them standing on the minbar. Graffiti left in the building read, among other things, greetings from the Gaza envelope. The army said the conduct contradicted its values and removed the soldiers from operational duty. Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, meanwhile posted the video on his own Telegram channel, presenting it as a prayer performed by heroic soldiers. Türkiye’s Foreign Ministry condemned the incident as a provocation. The episode compressed the whole problem into a single week. The military moved to discipline the men who had filmed the act, while a cabinet minister circulated the same footage to his followers as something to admire, which left the state disowning and promoting one recording at the same moment.

Some of the gravest material emerged by a different route, through a leak rather than a boast. On 6 August 2024 Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast surveillance footage from Sde Teiman, a military detention camp in southern Israel holding Palestinians taken from Gaza. It showed soldiers leading a detainee aside and surrounding him with riot shields, so that what was done to him took place just outside the camera’s view. The military’s own indictment later described what the shields concealed. Soldiers had attacked the man with severe violence and inserted a sharp object that penetrated near his rectum and tore the rectal wall, leaving him with fractured ribs and a punctured lung. The broadcast characterised the attack as a rape, while the charges filed stopped at aggravated assault. What followed belongs at the centre of this account. Israel arrested a senior military lawyer on suspicion of having leaked the video, and the military advocate general’s office later withdrew the indictments against the reservists. The legal jeopardy moved from the men in the footage to the official accused of letting the public see it.

Once the soldiers’ own posts were public, others began to organise them into evidence. The Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi spent months identifying soldiers and units from what they had published, including a sniper team he traced after one of its members uploaded a video recounting the unit’s operations in Gaza City that showed unarmed people being shot. He collected post after post of soldiers posing with the lingerie and the mannequins of women whose homes they had occupied, and Al Jazeera’s investigative unit compiled a database of more than two and a half thousand accounts belonging to serving soldiers. A Belgian organisation, the Hind Rajab Foundation, began converting that material into criminal complaints, identifying individual soldiers from their own publications and filing cases in the countries they visited. Within a year it had lodged around fifty complaints and submitted the names of a thousand soldiers to the International Criminal Court, supported by thousands of items of footage and posts. A judge in Brazil issued an arrest warrant against one soldier, who avoided it by crossing into Argentina. A complaint in Portugal relied on a sniper’s own online boast of four bullets fired without a miss. In Belgium the foundation filed a further complaint against a dual national from the same sniper team, built around the siege of a Gaza hospital. The Israeli military responded by warning its personnel to stop publishing details of their service and by advising some of them to leave the countries they were visiting before they could be detained.

The footage reached the highest court available to states. When South Africa brought its case under the Genocide Convention to the International Court of Justice, its counsel played the soldiers’ videos in the courtroom and read out statements soldiers had made on camera as evidence of intent. The court found that the Palestinians’ claimed right to protection from genocide was plausible and issued binding provisional measures, among them an order that Israel prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to the allegations. A later order required Israel to admit United Nations investigators to Gaza. Türkiye, a party to the Genocide Convention, submitted its own declaration of intervention in the case on 7 August 2024 under Article 63 of the Court’s Statute, and the Court invited South Africa and Israel to submit written observations on the request, months after Ankara had suspended trade with Israel over the war. In November 2025 the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office announced arrest warrants on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against 37 Israeli officials, among them the prime minister, the defence minister and the chief of the general staff. Israel’s foreign minister rejected the warrants with contempt and called them a PR stunt, arguing that the Turkish judiciary had become a political instrument and citing the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor earlier that year. The warrants have no force outside Türkiye, and their weight lies in the record they help assemble. The International Criminal Court had already issued warrants for the prime minister and his former defence minister a year earlier. Across these proceedings the soldiers’ own recordings form part of the evidentiary base, which means the state now faces courts in The Hague and prosecutors abroad with material its own personnel produced and published.

From that point the work of erasure ran in reverse. A government that in 2010 had held the cameras now had to recover material already copied onto other people’s devices. In February 2024 the chief of the general staff, Herzi Halevi, wrote to commanders instructing soldiers not to loot and not to film revenge videos, and soldiers who had posted demolition footage were told to remove it. The concern, as described by the military’s own people, was that the clips could feed the cases building at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. By mid-2025 the chief military censor had issued an order restricting what could be posted about strikes altogether, an order Haaretz described as legally invalid. By 2026 the army’s chief of staff had asked military lawyers to examine legal action against the makers of a prize-winning documentary in which soldiers described the deliberate killing of civilians in Gaza. The effort that had begun with deleting a conscript’s post extended, within two years, to pursuing those who assembled such material into a public account.

The removal of evidence also operated on the platforms, and it fell unevenly. In October and November 2023 Human Rights Watch documented more than a thousand takedowns and suppressions of Palestinian content on Instagram and Facebook. Of the 1,050 cases it reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestinians, and a single case involved content supporting Israel. The organisation identified six recurring patterns of suppression, ranging from removal and account suspension to shadow-banning and restrictions on live video, affecting posts of evident news value, including footage of Palestinian dead. It attributed the pattern to automated moderation and to government pressure over what the company removed, including referrals from Israel’s state cyber unit. Users responded by misspelling the word Gaza or substituting a watermelon for the Palestinian flag to evade the filters. A human-rights review commissioned by Meta itself had already found, before the war, that its moderation harmed Palestinian rights. The two bodies of material differ in kind. The soldiers’ footage documents alleged crimes, while most of the suppressed Palestinian content documented what was being done to civilians. In both cases the record most damaging to the stronger party proved the harder one to keep in view.

Older forms of erasure continued alongside the new. Early in the war an airstrike destroyed the Central Archives of Gaza City, which held some 150 years of the territory’s history in roughly 110,000 documents and photographs. The library of the Islamic University of Gaza had been levelled in the second week of fighting, and the Gaza City public library, holding about ten thousand volumes, followed. United Nations experts used the term scholasticide for the systematic destruction of the territory’s education system, reporting that more than eighty per cent of Gaza’s schools had been damaged or destroyed. One count put the dead at 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors. The last functioning university was demolished in January 2024, after the army had used it for seventy days as a base and detention site. The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 2024 as the deadliest year for the press since it began keeping records in 1992, with 124 journalists killed worldwide and around sixty per cent of the toll attributed to Israel. The dead included the journalist Hamza Dahdouh, son of the Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh, killed in a strike on his car, and Ismail al-Ghoul with his cameraman Rami al-Rifi, killed in a vehicle with press markings while both wore press vests. Many of those killed were freelancers working after their newsrooms had been destroyed, filling a gap left by Israel’s refusal to admit foreign reporters except on escorted military visits, a restriction that more than fifty foreign correspondents protested in an open letter.

The oldest layer of the practice reaches back to the state’s founding. For two decades a security department of the Israeli defence ministry known by its Hebrew acronym, Malmab, has removed documents from Israeli archives, often without legal authority and in some cases resealing papers the military censor had already cleared, including material on the expulsions of 1948 that historians had published and cited. The largest archive in the country, that of the military itself, remains almost entirely sealed. One historian discovered that files he had quoted fifteen years earlier were no longer available to him. Among the documents withdrawn was an internal report on how Palestinian villages were emptied in the first months of the 1948 war, a record that complicates the official account of a population that left of its own accord. That is the British method in its Israeli form, the quiet withdrawal of evidence that had once been open.

The motive is consistent across both parts of this series. A state that claims to conduct its wars within the law draws standing from that claim both at home and in the international forums where it seeks support. Documented abuse, examined by courts it does not control, undermines the claim and attaches it to named individuals. Britain protected that standing with fire, with retention orders and with closed courts, and the effort succeeded for half a century because the state held the only copies of the evidence. Israel controlled the record of the Mavi Marmara in 2010 by the same means, through possession of the cameras. In Gaza it has held neither the cameras nor the copies. The decisive evidence was produced by its own soldiers, distributed before any censor intervened, archived by investigators within hours and entered into proceedings at The Hague before any deletion order took effect. The first part of this series ended at Akrotiri, where Britain still withholds its surveillance footage of Gaza on grounds of national security. The contrast with the footage Israel’s own soldiers chose to publish defines the present moment. A state can seal what it alone possesses. It has far fewer means to recall a confession its personnel have already made to the world, and the scale of the effort it devotes to trying remains the clearest indication of what that confession contains.

Settle, deny, seal: Britain’s formula for colonial torture, from Kenya to Cyprus — 1

Thomas Karat, behavioral analyst 

In January 2019 the British government announced that it would pay one million pounds to thirty-three Cypriots who said they had been tortured in British custody during the uprising of 1955 to 1959. The statement that accompanied the money contained a sentence that readers in Nairobi would have recognised. The settlement, London said, did not constitute any admission of liability and set no precedent for any future claim against the government. Five and a half years earlier, announcing compensation for Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau Emergency, the same government had kept its denial of liability intact and declared that the payment set no precedent for any other former colony. Two territories, two populations of torture survivors, and one formula, carried from one continent to another with its wording barely altered. A sentence that travels like that belongs to a method. The method has a history that runs from colonial bonfires in the 1950s through statutes still in force today, and it ends, for the moment, at a British air base on Cyprus that is still in operation.

The Cyprus Emergency began in 1955, when EOKA, a Greek Cypriot organisation seeking union with Greece, opened an armed campaign against British rule, a campaign London classified as terrorism. The violence ran in more than one direction. According to figures published by a Turkish Cypriot outlet, EOKA killed 371 British servicemen between 1955 and 1959, and its victims included Turkish Cypriots, the first of them a police sergeant, Abdullah Alparslan, killed in Paphos in 1956. None of this alters the legal position of a prisoner. The prohibition on torturing people in custody protects every detainee regardless of the cause he served, and it was the treatment of detainees that the British administration worked hardest to keep from view. Allegations of abuse circulated widely at the time, and the colonial authorities dismissed them as EOKA propaganda. No British soldier or policeman was prosecuted for torture during the uprising, although two officers of the Gordon Highlanders were court-martialled and convicted of causing actual bodily harm. The EOKA veterans’ association says that fourteen Greek Cypriots died under British interrogation, two of them aged seventeen. In 2022 new evidence on those deaths was published, drawing on testimony from British veterans and Cypriot fighters, post-mortem and morgue records, and photographs from the Cyprus State Archives that appear to show mutilation of the genitals; it was the first time British forces, intelligence services included, had been accused of a campaign of extrajudicial killing during the uprising. Among the thirty-three claimants who settled in 2019 was a woman who said that, at sixteen, she had been repeatedly raped by soldiers.

For half a century the documents that could have tested those accounts were officially said not to exist. They surfaced because of a lawsuit on another continent. In the course of the Kenyan litigation the Foreign Office conceded that it held thousands of files from former colonial administrations, around 9,000 from thirty-seven of them by one early count, long thought to have been destroyed. Among them were Cyprus papers in which British police and military officers themselves described the brutal treatment of suspected EOKA fighters and of civilians. Foreign Office documents released in July 2012 set out claims of torture and abuse from the Emergency years, and in July 2015 thirty-five Cypriots filed suit. Reporting on the newly available material, the Cyprus Mail found that the top-secret files showed suspected EOKA fighters and ordinary civilians alike had been brutally tortured in the course of the Emergency. Their lawyer had to persuade the government to let him see classified material, which meant repeated visits to Hanslope Park, the secretive Foreign Office site in Buckinghamshire where the colonial archive had been held. A Labour member of parliament of Cypriot descent observed that, in a matter where torture was certainly involved, the government would rather the case never saw the light of day. When the settlement came, the minister for Europe described the period before independence as a matter of regret, and pointed to the passage of time as a reason the claims could no longer be fairly tried. The passage of time in question included the fifty years during which the government had kept the relevant files out of reach. Even the settlement did not close the archive. During a later visit by the claimants’ lawyer to Cyprus it was announced that thousands of further classified documents bearing on torture allegations from the Emergency were due for release, which meant that, years after London had paid to end the case, part of the record it concerned had still not been opened. The pace at which that material reaches the public is still set by the department that withheld it in the first place.

The disappearance of those files had been planned with the same care as any other branch of colonial administration. From 1961 the colonial secretary, Iain Macleod, directed officers across the remaining territories to identify and remove any document that might embarrass the British government or its officials, together with anything open to reading as evidence of racial prejudice or religious bias. The criterion applied was reputational: a paper went to the fire according to the harm it could do to Britain’s name, whatever its military value. Files fit to pass to an incoming government were marked legacy. Files destined for destruction or for secret shipment to London were marked watch, and the instructions required that successor governments never learn such files had existed, so that where one was withdrawn from a series a dummy file took its place. The work was reserved for officers who were British subjects of European descent. Paper was burned and the ash broken up, or packed into weighted crates and sunk in deep water far from the coast. In Belize the files went up with help from the Royal Navy and several gallons of petrol. In British Guiana two secretaries fed papers into an oil drum on the grounds of Government House until the army lent a hand. In Aden a committee of three began burning in 1966, a full year before the British withdrew. In Malaya five lorry loads were driven to the naval base in a single purge, a destruction so conspicuous that officers in Kenya were later warned against repeating it. Each completed destruction produced a signed certificate for London. The programme was called Operation Legacy.

Kenya was where the concealment finally broke. Three elderly survivors of the detention camps of the Mau Mau Emergency, who had been beaten and sexually mutilated in British custody, sued the Foreign Office. One of them described in his witness statement a period before independence in which men were castrated and women raped. The department fought the claim for three years, arguing first that liability for colonial conduct had passed to the independent Kenyan state in 1963, a position the High Court rejected. It was during that litigation, more than a decade after the case began, that the hidden archive came to light. Historians who had argued for years that the records had been removed and concealed were vindicated, after a long period in which the government had been content to let them appear mistaken rather than acknowledge what it held. The files became catalogue series FCO 141 at the National Archives, some twenty thousand files from around forty former territories. On 6 June 2013 the foreign secretary told the House of Commons that the government would pay £19.9 million) to 5,228 claimants and that it sincerely regretted the abuses, in a statement that preserved the denial of liability and the refusal of precedent that Cyprus would hear in 2019.

The formula performs a precise legal function. A payment made without admission of liability produces no finding against the state, and no court ever pronounces on what the files show. A payment declared to set no precedent obliges every other group of victims, in every other former territory, to begin from nothing, against a defendant that holds the documents and controls the pace at which they emerge. The Cypriot claimants learned from the Kenyan case that settlement was possible, and their lawyer said publicly that the government’s resistance in Cyprus had been ill advised because the Mau Mau case had already shown where such litigation led. The government nonetheless repeated the full sequence, resisting the claims, contesting access to the files and finally settling without admission. Kenya also received a memorial in Nairobi, unveiled as a symbol of reconciliation, while no comparable memorial has been offered to Cyprus. Each case is handled as an exception, which is the outcome the formula is designed to secure.

An incomplete record does not leave a neutral space behind it. It leaves room for partisan shorthand, and the shorthand settles on whichever community has the least access to the documents. When the BBC reported the 2019 settlement, its story described Turkish Cypriots as thugs, wording the broadcaster later apologised for and removed. The Emergency years shaped relations between the island’s communities, and a full account of them, drawn from the files rather than from competing memories, serves Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots alike. The party that has kept that account incomplete is the former colonial power, whose officers wrote the reports and whose ministries still decide which of them may be read.

The fire was the crude instrument. The durable one is statutory and still operates. The Public Records Act provides that records selected for permanent preservation pass into public view within twenty years, a period reduced from thirty in 2010. The same section allows a department to keep records back if they are required for administrative purposes or ought to be retained for any other special reason, and in its broadest application it permits a blanket retention covering an entire class of files, reviewed once every ten years. In 2013 the Foreign Office was found to be holding a further body of material it called its special collections, estimated at the time at 1.2 million files and occupying roughly fifteen miles of shelving, held for years in breach of the Act. The justice secretary responded by signing a blanket authorisation that converted the breach into lawful retention, and a group of historians considered a legal challenge under both the Public Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act. The colonial files of Hong Kong remain closed under an order set to run until 2047. In 2015 the power to approve retention moved from the Lord Chancellor to a Secretary of State, and the authorising document was renamed from a Lord Chancellor’s Instrument to a plain Retention Instrument. The Lord Chancellor’s role had carried a measure of independent oversight of the public records system, and the change moved the decision closer to the departments that hold the records and have reasons of their own to keep them closed. Between 2017 and 2019 the British army’s headquarters in Kenya destroyed most of its physical files created before 2015, years after ministers had expressed regret in Parliament for precisely this kind of loss.

Destruction and retention govern what reaches the record. A third instrument governs what reaches the courtroom. English law has held since Lord Hewart’s judgment of 1924 that justice must manifestly be seen to be done, and the principle has long been treated as part of the rule of law itself. The Justice and Security Act of 2013 introduced closed material procedures into ordinary civil litigation for the first time. Where the government is sued over the conduct of its own agencies, it may now rely on evidence that the claimant and the claimant’s own lawyer never see. A security-cleared special advocate reads the material in their place and is then barred from discussing it with the person whose interests he represents. Special advocates themselves told Parliament the procedures were inherently unfair and contrary to the common-law tradition. The Law Society warned that the Act damaged the equality of arms on which a fair trial depends. A recently retired Law Lord described the legislation as so radical a departure from open justice that every available safeguard should be built in against its use, and the government’s own equality and human-rights watchdog judged the Bill incompatible with European human-rights requirements. Parliament passed the Act regardless of these objections. In 2014 prosecutors applied to hold an entire terrorism trial in secret, with the defendants kept anonymous. The Court of Appeal refused a complete blackout, holding that criminal trials must be public and defendants named, and recorded its grave concern at what had been attempted. The core of the trial still proceeded in private, with a small group of journalists admitted on terms that kept almost everything they heard out of print and their notebooks in the court’s custody.

The two efforts were assembled side by side. The Justice and Security Act received royal assent on 25 April 2013. Six weeks later, on 6 June, the same government expressed in the Commons its regret for colonial torture whose evidence it had withheld for fifty years and surrendered only under compulsion of a court. An apology for an old concealment and the legal machinery for future concealment came from one administration within a single parliamentary season. Six years after that, the Cyprus settlement repeated the words of the apology while the machinery remained in place.

The motive is legible in the record itself. A state that presents itself abroad as a custodian of the rule of law, and that sits as one of the guarantors of an independent Cyprus, draws much of its standing from the claim that its own conduct can withstand scrutiny. Documented torture, examined in open court, falsifies that claim and attaches names to it. The instruments differ in where they intervene, and they protect the same asset. Destruction prevents evidence from ever reaching a court. Retention keeps surviving files from historians for decades at a time, and closed procedures keep evidence from the public even after it reaches a judge. The Court of Appeal named the stakes in its 2014 judgment, describing open justice as a hallmark of the rule of law, a guarantee that the conduct of the state in its own courts can be watched by the people in whose name it acts. Each instrument described here is a way of declining that watch. Sustained over half a century, the expense involved gives some measure of the value placed on that asset. A government does not maintain a secret archive for fifty years, legalise its retention when exposed and redesign its own civil procedure in order to protect material it regards as harmless.

On Cyprus the British state retains more than archives. Under the 1960 Treaty of Establishment the island became independent with the exception of two areas at Akrotiri and at Dhekelia, which remained under British sovereignty, and under the accompanying Treaty of Guarantee, Türkiye and Greece, together with the United Kingdom, undertook to guarantee the independence of the Republic together with its territorial integrity and its security. From Akrotiri, beginning in December 2023, Royal Air Force Shadow R1 surveillance aircraft flew hundreds of missions over and around Gaza, at least 518 according to an investigation by Action on Armed Violence for Declassified UK, a figure the charity later put at 606. The Ministry of Defence has said the flights served only to help locate hostages, and has refused to say whether it shared live surveillance footage with Israel. It has confirmed, in answer to a freedom-of-information request, that it holds video of Gaza from a flight on 1 April 2024, the day Israeli strikes killed seven international aid workers, three of them British military veterans, and it has declined to release that footage on national-security grounds.

The island on which British officers once kept colonial files out of reach now hosts a British base whose record of a present war is withheld on familiar grounds. The reflex traced here through Kenya and Cyprus belongs to no single state. The second part of this series follows it to Israel, whose conduct in Gaza and the West Bank has been recorded on a scale no archive was built to contain, much of it by Israeli soldiers themselves, and whose authorities have since worked to remove that record from the platforms where it first appeared. Britain’s method assumed that evidence could be held in one place and managed over decades. What becomes of that method when the evidence exists everywhere at once is the question the second part examines.

Li Xinbo, Research Assistant, Center for Turkish Studies, Shanghai University

Introduction

The Chinese new film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East follows the experience of Xu Fu, who is a Chinese chef in the Middle East, shows how war intrudes into the lives of ordinary people. The protagonist Xu Fu first arrives in the region to pay off debts, but as war breaks out, he is gradually drawn into conflicts among different forces. He does business with the U.S. military while also forming ties with local residents and armed actors. He profits from the commercial opportunities the war creates, yet ultimately suffers its blowback. The film does not divide its characters neatly into good and evil; instead, it reveals the complex personal histories behind different identities.

The film not only relates to humanity in wartime, but also raises a central question in international politics: when states come into conflict, are we also prone to understanding the world through the lens of blocs? Once freedom, equality, human rights and other values regarded as universally significant enter the political competition among states, can they be assigned a particular bloc identity? And does this make it easier for states to justify intervention in the internal affairs of others in the name of defending such values?

One article published in The Economist, in its review of the film, coined the phrase “dragon-restaurant diplomacy” from Xu Fu’s dealings with various parties. In The Economist’s opinion, “dragon-restaurant diplomacy” is a diplomatic approach that prioritizes commercial interests and seeks to maintain relations with different countries, while it is also questioning whether such engagement is sufficiently deep. This interpretation of The Economist shows that the film can be viewed not only as an anti-war story but also as a window onto China’s diplomatic image and its international political implications. This article begins with bloc politics, discusses the use of universal values in international relations, and then responds to The Economist’s critique of China’s diplomatic approach in order to analyze the diplomatic principles China emphasizes.

1. From “blue on blue” to bloc politics: When identity obscures the concrete person

The term “Blue on Blue” in the film is a military expression that generally refers to friendly fire. The logic behind it is that a battlefield must distinguish friend from foe: only after determining which side a person belongs to can one judge whether that person poses a threat. Yet while this distinction is militarily necessary, it can also reduce complex individuals to a single bloc identity.

A similar logic operates in international politics. States need to assess security threats, identify allies, and decide their own positions in conflicts of interest. Especially in war and great-power competition, bloc division lowers the complexity of judgment, but it also makes it easy to understand international conflict as a struggle between two opposed wholes. In such narratives, one side is often described as defending order and justice while the other is portrayed as a threat and a source of chaos, while differences, contradictions and specific circumstances within each side may be ignored.

The film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East reflects on this logic to some degree. The film depicts violence by the U.S. military in war and the destruction it causes to local civilian life, yet it does not portray all American soldiers as identical figures. At the same time, one of the main characters Zaid is both a participant in violent conflict and a victim of war; his experience shows how an individual can gradually turn from victim into perpetrator in the cycle of trauma, hatred and violence. This is not the film excusing violence; it is the film showing that we cannot reduce a person to a stereotype based solely on the person’s bloc identity.

The problem with bloc politics is not that states should never distinguish friends from foes, but that this distinction must not become the sole explanation of reality. When a state or group is categorized wholesale as an enemy, the different voices within it, the lives of ordinary people, and the complex causes behind the conflict may all be excluded from international society’s understanding. Through the concrete interactions among people from different camps, the film reminds viewers that political identity can explain relations between people, but it should not replace specific perceptions of an individual.

2. From food to universal values: Can “non-aligned” things also be absorbed into bloc politics?

If “Blue on Blue” shows how war draws the line between friend and foe, food offers the film another way of observing the world. Food itself does not naturally belong to any political bloc. Xu Fu cooks for Arabs and for Americans; food has no camp of its own, and Americans can eat it just as Arabs can. But in war, food is also drawn into violence. Chili peppers can become an instrument of torture, and sprouted potatoes can become a means of saving lives in certain circumstances. The original meaning of objects is not entirely lost, yet it is reshaped by conflict.

This raises a question with greater significance for international politics: if something as everyday and concrete as food can be given friend or foe meanings by war, can freedom, equality, human rights, human dignity and other universal values also be assigned a bloc identity in competition among states, thereby facilitating interference in other countries?

Tocqueville noted in The Old Regime and the French Revolution that the ideas of freedom, equality and popular sovereignty advanced by the French Revolution were able to exert influence beyond French soil not because they naturally belonged to France, but because they touched on problems shared by many societies. From this we can conclude that universal values such as freedom, equality, human dignity and the right to life do not inherently belong to any one country. “universal” means that they should not fundamentally change according to nationality, ethnicity, religion or political bloc, and it does not mean that any one state has the authority to interpret “the universal.”

The problem is that when universal values are brought into competition among states, they may shift from shared normative principles into political criteria for distinguishing “us” from “them.” Once a state treats its own understanding of freedom, democracy or human rights as the only correct model and judges other states’ legitimacy on that basis, universal values may be given a particular national position and bloc identity.

The politicization of universal values does not mean that universal values themselves have lost their meaning; it means that we need to distinguish between value principles and specific political actions taken in the name of those values. A state’s claim to uphold human rights does not automatically prove that its intervention is legitimate; conversely, an emphasis on state sovereignty cannot be a sufficient reason to ignore severe humanitarian suffering. Whether external intervention is reasonable still requires examining its legal basis, the manner of action, the actual consequences, and whether the relevant states and peoples have space to express their own will. The key, then, is not to make a simple either-or choice between universal values and state sovereignty, but to prevent either side from monopolizing the authority to interpret legitimacy.

Of course, this does not mean that human rights and sovereignty must be opposed in international society. Sovereignty can provide institutional safeguards for a state to choose its own development path, while human rights remind us that state power itself should not become a reason to ignore individual suffering. The truly difficult question is how to avoid choosing on behalf of others in the name of universal values while also not equating respect for sovereignty with indifference to all internal problems.

3. From “which side are you on” to “respecting autonomy”: The principles and practical significance of China’s piplomacy

If bloc politics tends to simplify international relations into an either-or choice, respecting national autonomy offers another way of thinking. In handling Middle East issues, China emphasizes respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, respect for the right of the peoples of all countries to independently choose their development paths, and settlement of regional disputes through political dialogue and peaceful means. These principles are reflected in China’s Arab Policy Paper and The Global Security Initiative Concept Paper issued by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From the perspective of international politics, this position stresses that international cooperation should not be premised on acceptance of a particular political model and that differences among states should not automatically turn into confrontations in which one must take sides.

The Economist summarizes this diplomatic approach as “dragon-restaurant diplomacy,” arguing that China is able to maintain commercial relations with states in conflict and that its motive comes more from commercial interests than political ideology, while questioning whether such relations are sufficiently deep. However, setting commercial interests in opposition to political ideas cannot fully explain the actual significance of diplomacy. States certainly consider their own interests when conducting economic cooperation, but interest driven behavior does not mean that cooperation lacks political significance. For states with political differences, economic and trade exchanges can provide sustained links of interest, enabling them to maintain a degree of cooperation without having to agree on every issue.

The Economist also questions the depth of “dragon-restaurant diplomacy” by pointing to China’s cautious attitude toward security responsibilities. This criticism reflects a traditional Western assumption: must the depth of diplomacy be measured by military intervention or by becoming a regional security guarantor? Security guarantees are certainly an important issue in international politics, and economic cooperation cannot replace all security and humanitarian responsibilities. But diplomacy does not function only through military force; political dialogue, economic ties and multilateral cooperation can also create conditions for easing tensions and sustaining relations.

Conclusion

From “Blue on Blue” to a meal in a restaurant, Once Upon a Time in the Middle East presents two ways of understanding the world: one first confirms friend-or-foe identity and then judges the other side accordingly, while the other tries to see concrete people and their lives beyond political identity. Brought into international politics, this contrast reveals that bloc division also shapes how people understand universal values, evaluate war and judge diplomatic behavior.

Respecting sovereignty and autonomous choice doesn’t mean denying freedom, human rights or human dignity; emphasizing universal values does not mean that any state naturally has the right to choose on behalf of others. War can divide the world into different colors, but international politics should not therefore lose its understanding of concrete circumstances. Whatever differences exist among states, peace, life, human dignity and other universal values should not become the exclusive values of any one bloc.