MEDIA FREEDOM: By David Robie

In a week’s time next Sunday, it is World Press Freedom Day on May 3. And already our whānau of journalists who are facing horrendous danger at the hands of the Israeli killing machine have had a shocking few days.

During our 133 weeks of protest we have become painfully accustomed to how one journalist after another has been brutally assassinated, some even alongside their family members.

Far more than 260 journalists — the actual number varies with different media freedom monitoring agencies and different methodologies — have been slaughtered in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023.

• READ MORE: Journalist Amal Khalil killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon: RSF retraces events and denounces war crimes
• ‘We had Amal Khalil by her hand’s grip. Then Israel murdered her’
• Other Gaza and Lebanon media freedom reports

And some of you may have seen the chilling photograph circulating on some social media channels. It shows 8 Lebanese journalists – four men and four women – smiling and giving peace signs.

Eight Lebanese journalists killed in a month by Israel https://t.co/Fqeji5D3M8

— Pen MacRae (@penmacrae) April 23, 2026

They have all been murdered in the last month, including the tragic killing of Amal Khalil, who died last Wednesday under building rubble in the town of al-Tayri, southern Lebanon, after a double tap attack and then the Israelis fired a stun grenade on the ambulance rescue workers preventing them trying to save her.

But before I talk more about her tragedy and what it means– she was just buried yesterday with thousands at her funeral — I want to show you another photo.

This is Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist working for the Arabic channel Al Jazeera who was a highly popular household name right across the Middle East if not the world.

She was known as the “daughter of Palestine” and she was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces on 11 May 2022 — just eight days after Media Freedom Day that year.

I have this photo hanging on the wall of my office, thanks to Palestine Youth of Aotearoa, to remind me daily of the brutality and global impunity of the Israelis.

With my experience as a media freedom defender for Pacific Media Watch and Reporters Without Borders since 1996, I have come to a chilling and shameful conclusion:

The fact that there was no accountability for her murder and the US authorities and Biden administration orchestrated a cover-up – even though she was American — signalled to the Netanyahu government that they could target journalists and those bearing witness with absolute impunity.

So this is where we are at now, the Israeli killing machine launched into a bloody massacre of more than 72,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the past two plus years, especially targeting journalists, doctors and medical workers, teachers, and aid workers.

And the hypocritical Western countries, including Aotearoa New Zealand, have barely offered a timid bleat.

The Israeli bloodlust has now spread to Lebanon and other countries. The IDF claims that its military is the “most moral in the world”. That claim is an obscenity.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect journalists (CPJ), Israel is by far the world’s biggest killer of media workers.

On its monitoring website it lists the following:

• 260 journalists and media workers killed by Israel, of which:
• 207 were Palestinians killed in Gaza
• 2 Palestinian killed in Gaza during the Iran war
• 2 Palestinians killed in Israeli detention centers
• 31 Yemenis – out of a total of 32 – killed in Yemen
• 6 Lebanese in Lebanon during the war on Gaza
• 9 Lebanese in Lebanon during the Iran war
• 3 Iranians in Iran during the 12-day war

To return to the targeted murder of Amal Khalil, who worked for Al-Akhbar, she was with another journalist, Zeinab Faraj, who was rescued and survived.

The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders said in a statement by its Middle East desk chief Jonathan Dagher:

“The Israeli army has very likely committed two more war crimes on 22 April, by targeting journalists who were identified as such, obstructing rescue operations and continuing strikes that killed one journalist and injured another.

“Responsibility for these crimes also lies with Israel’s allies, who continue to allow the Netanyahu government to commit them with impunity.”

RSF published a compelling and disturbing timeline of how the IDF blocked her would-be rescuers for seven hours.

CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa regional director Sara Qudah said:

“We knew [Amal] was alive beneath the rubble – a real, breathing presence. Not in the abstract, not as rumour or hope.

“The 40-year-old female journalist, Amal Khalil, whose voice had just reached her family and colleagues, her survival depended on whether the machinery of rescue would be allowed to operate as it is supposed to under international law, and the law of humanity.

“That is what made what followed so difficult to process — not only emotionally, but structurally.

“Because this was not a case of disappearance in the fog of war.

“It was a case of proximity to survival that collapsed into confirmed death while rescue was still theoretically possible.”

Qudah added that her death could not be understood only as an individual tragedy, “although it was that to everyone who knew her, every journalist in the region”.

“It must also be understood as a stress test of the systems that are supposed to prevent this outcome — early warning, protection, humanitarian access and accountability. On each of these dimensions, the case raises unresolved questions.”

Israel is not only killing journalists, it is systematically torturing them — along with hundreds of other Palestinian hostages. CPJ’s recent report, “We returned from hell”, where the watchdog published the in-depth testimonies of 59 media prisoners released from jail since October 2023 is shocking reading.

I would like to finish with a quote by Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, who visited New Zealand in 2023 to launch his  book The Palestine Laboratory about how the Israeli killing machine exports in brutal technologies — a book that has been translated into many languages and had a profound influence in the world.

“With some notable exceptions, too many in the international media, journalists, editors and owners, have refused to take appropriate action against Israel. No official sanction.

“[They are] still interviewing Israeli spokespeople and politicians as normal. Not treating this as a monumental crime and outrage. Instead, often deferring to unproven Israeli claims that every journalist murdered was a ‘terrorist’.”

This complicity by many journalists — even in our own region — must be widely condemned.

Dr David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch and a media defender with global groups including RSF. He gave this short address at the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) rally in Auckland on Anzac Day.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

During the two years I spent writing American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants.

They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers.

They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.

• READ MORE: Lebanon truce extended; Trump says ‘clock is ticking’ for Iran to make deal

These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair.

The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.

Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.

Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.

All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XIV-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers.

The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” — overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing.

Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.

Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.

The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.

Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.

Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonises nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults US allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims.

He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programmes designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorise the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.

Trump employs the US military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”

These eight characteristics are:

1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.

2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.

3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.

4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as US Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.

5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.

6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.

7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.

8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not deserve moral consideration.

Trump is no different from past cult leaders, including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles — the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult — the Rev. Sun Myung Moon — who led the Unification Church — Credonia Mwerinde — who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda — Li Hongzhi — the founder of Falun Gong, and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas.

Cult leaders are deeply insecure, which is why they lash out with fury at the slightest criticism. They mask this insecurity with cruelty, hypermasculinity and bombastic grandiosity. They are paranoid, amoral, emotionally crippled and physically abusive. Those around them, including children, are objects to be manipulated for their enrichment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.

Cults are characterised by pedophilia and sexual abuse. Those, including Trump, who were frequently in the orbit of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, replicated the abuse endemic in cults.

“People’s Temple children were frequently sexually abused,” writes Margaret Singer in Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace. “While the group was still in California, teenage girls as young as fifteen had to provide sex for influential people courted by Jones. A supervisor of children at Jonestown had a history of child sexual abuse, and Jones himself assaulted some of the children.

“If husbands and wives were caught talking privately during a meeting, their daughters were forced to masturbate publicly or to have sex with someone the family didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults.”

Cults, Singer writes, are “a mirror of what is inside the cult leader.”

“He has no restraints on him,” she writes of the cult leader:

“He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world.

“What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours.

“He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as the child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies.

“The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.”

The language of the cult leader is rooted in verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements, often made in the same statement or only minutes apart, paralysing those attempting to read the cult leader rationally. Absurdism is the point.

The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously. They often deny ever making them, although they are documented. Lies and truth are irrelevant. The cult leader is not seeking to impart information or truth. The cult leader is seeking to appeal to the emotional needs of cult members.

“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control and Menticide. “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot — it confuses those who think straight.

“The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”

It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year, according to Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran.

The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters.

“Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 — according to an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable.

The Democratic Party, rather than pivot to address the social inequality and abandonment of the working class — which it helped orchestrate — has hit upon tax cuts as a road to regaining power. It will, once again, reduce our social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It will offer no reforms to rectify our failed democracy.

This is a gift to Trump and his followers. By refusing to acknowledge responsibility for inequality and proposing programmes to ameliorate the suffering it has caused, Democrats engage in the same kind of magical thinking as Trump cultists.

There is no way out of this political dysfunction unless popular movements rise to cripple the machinery of government and commerce on behalf of a betrayed public. But time is running out. Trump and his goons are serious about invalidating or cancelling the midterm elections if they perceive defeat. If that happens, the cult of Trump will be unassailable.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

• The Chris Hedges Report

SPECIAL REPORT: By Wendy Bacon in Sydney

While University of Sydney antisemitism adviser Dr Michael Abrahams-Sprod works in vice-chancellor Mark Scott’s office as its “resident expert” delivering training courses to stamp out what he sees as antisemitism, his close colleagues in the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism are embroiled in legal action against the university in the Federal Court.

They have accused the university of being liable for alleged racial vilification by its employees, Professor John Keane and linguist and vice-president of the USyd National Tertiary Education Union, Dr Nick Riemer, both of whom are pro-Palestinian.

The case will have significant implications for freedom of speech

and whether the law equates rejection of Israel’s genocide and anti-Zionism to antisemitism.

• READ MORE: Sydney Uni appoints antisemitism ‘lecturer’, forgets to tell anybody
• Other academic freedom and Zionism reports

Conflicts of interest and the 5A
Although Abrahams-Sprod is not a party to the case, he was a driving force behind complaints that led to the case, and letters that he signed are being used as evidence against the university.

Alongside its academics, the university is defending the action. So far its case depends on an interpretation of antisemitism that is in direct conflict with the views of 5A and Abrahams-Sprod, who is already teaching his courses for frontline administrative staff, some of whom deal with complaints against students and staff.

Three of five applicants in the court case are members of 5A. One is emeritus professor Suzanne Rutland, a longtime close colleague of Abrahams-Sprod. Rutland is on the board of Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A) of which Abrahams-Sprod was campus coordinator between November 2023 and February 26 2025, and remains a member.

She is also on the board of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Another complainant belongs to the pro-Israel Australian Jewish Association of Students, which Abrahams-Sprod assisted in making complaints.

According to 5A, anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

Its extreme views are revealed in parliamentary submissions, including one for the inquiry into measures to prohibit slogans that incite hatred, which was co-authored by Rutland.

Conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism
5A’s submission recommends prohibiting a wide range of slogans that are regularly used at pro-Palestinian protests. For example, it lists “Settlers, settlers go back home! Palestine is our home!” as a call for genocide of Israelis, and

accusations that Israel is causing ‘starvation’ in Gaza as a genocidal libel.

It supports a dangerous notion of “cumulative harm” that would see police trained to understand that protests or slogans that individually might appear lawful if repeated can become unlawful intimidation.

It recommends a new agency to operate a “centralised, anonymous complaints system to capture antisemitic incidents, chants, symbols, and patterns of conduct, including behaviour that may not individually meet prosecution thresholds.”

Its clear goal is to silence opposition to Israel’s genocide, apartheid and other war crimes.

In contrast to 5A’s views, USyd’s lawyers, led by Robert Dick SC have argued in the Federal Court that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. In fact, they have even relied on a letter to Overland journal signed by more than 50 Jewish academics and current  students, repudiating “the attempt by those making the complaint to conflate Zionism, a political ideology with Jewish and non-Jewish adherents, with Jewish identity.”

Campaign to silence critics of Israel
The complaints against Riemer and Keane were part of “concerted and coordinated efforts to silence critics of Israel across Australia’s university campuses and public squares, trammelling fundamental democratic rights of assembly, protest, expression, and dissent”, they wrote.

At the time when USyd’s submissions were filed last year, unbeknownst to staff, the university was already covering part of Abrahams-Sprod’s salary to work with Special Envoy Jillian Segal on a project developing antisemitism training.

Abraham-Sprod took up his new two-year position in the vice-chancellor’s office in January, although it was not approved by the Senate’s People, Culture and Safety Committee until late March.

Michael West Media asked the university:

“Did the Senate Committee discuss the issue of whether there could be a conflict of interest in appointing Abrahams-Sprod to work with the vice-chancellor on anti-semitism training?

“Does the university agree that there is a perceived conflict of interest? And if so, why did the university proceed with the appointment?”

In response to questions from MWM, a university spokesperson (we requested a name but were not given one) declined to disclose confidential committee discussions and stated:

“Dr Abrahams-Sprod will provide advice and perspectives rather than being involved in decision-making on issues relating to antisemitism, and so we don’t consider there to be a conflict of interest.

“His work will complement other university initiatives aimed at maintaining a civic environment that supports academic freedom and freedom of speech, while ensuring a safe and inclusive campus for all.”  

It would seem from this response that the university understands that there is a potential conflict but avoids it by separating “influence” from “decision making”.

Like all jobs, Abrahams-Sprod’s position will involve decision-making as well as influencing others’ decisions. The response undercuts the university’s description of Abrahams-Sprod as possessing “unique qualities” and being the “resident expert”.

Israel lobby’s long-term funding of Uni
Few, if any, Australian humanities departments have been so generously funded by private interests as USyd’s field of Hebrew, Biblical & Jewish Studies.

In part one yesterday, we reported that Abrahams-Sprod’s lectureship is funded by Roth family foundations, which include John, who is married to the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, and Charmaine and Stanley Roth, a leading Zionist fundraiser who died in January this year.

Further investigation reveals an astonishing integration of Hebrew, Biblical & Jewish Studies with the pro-Israel Zionist establishment of Sydney.

The department always partnered with the Jewish Higher Education Fund (JHEF), which is a registered charity. Stanley Roth was a trustee of JHEF since it was established in 1981.

The ACNC website lists the address of the charity as the Department at Sydney University, but its email contact is pwertheim@ecaj.com.au. Peter Wertheim is the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

He has chaired the fund since 1997, along with many other duties, including chair of the Jewish Board of Deputies (1996-2000). and co-CEO of ECAJ (2009 -2026). The JHEF is one of the organisations that are supported by the Jewish Communal Appeal, of which Jillian Segal was recently elected a director.

In 2018/19, the department and JHEF produced a report in which it acknowledged that “it’s only due to [the fund’s] generosity that we can plan for the future growth and development …”. The report stressed the importance of the Department’s work in combatting “polemical attacks against Israel’s legitimacy as a nation state” and “falsification of Jewish history, including calls for the BDS” to maintain “integrity of discourse about Israel and the Jewish people.”

The report celebrated the department’s achievements in stitching Australia into the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and its definition of antisemitism.

The money flow
The funds flow as needed with JHEF making annual contributions of between $450,000 and $700,000 covering lectureships, casual teaching staff and administration costs, and links with Israeli universities.

The department thanked their donors “without which the department would have no future,” including the Pratt Foundation, the Roth Family and the Isaac and Susan Wakil family foundation. The Wakil Foundation is among the most generous donors in the history of USyd, providing more than $66 million for health buildings and scholarships, apart from smaller amounts contributed to Abraham-Sprod’s department.

MWM is not suggesting that there is anything wrong with private philanthropy, which is highly valued in the context of diminishing public funds.

Michael Abrahams-Sprod has a strong teaching record.

But is a person whose academic career has depended on some of Australia’s most powerful Zionists an appropriate choice for a “resident expert” tasked with embedding interpretations of antisemitism that the university itself argues threaten academic freedom?

Academic freedom at stake
NSW Council for Civil Liberties president Tim Roberts says, “Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment is another example of employment procedures being used across our community to silence political communication.

“By employing an advisor with such a ‘partisan perspective’, the university undermines community confidence that any conduct proceedings will be undertaken in good faith and without an apprehension of bias. This should be intolerable for any academic institution,” he said.

No one can deny that there is racism on campus, including Islamophobia, First Nations racism and antisemitism. Pro-Israeli students and staff are undeniably upset by pro-Palestinian activity. But 5A’s intentions are to silence pro-Palestinian activism.

In fact, some argue that nationalistic Zionism is itself a form of racism.

What about Arabic background staff and students who feel upset by USyd’s privileging the views of 5A academics about antisemitism before any anti-racism framework has been developed?

Abrahams-Sprod is training staff to exercise administrative power, which can have big consequences, although it is often hidden and very hard to challenge.

According to USyd, Abrahams-Sprod will “consult with all relevant communities and stakeholders in his work as special advisor”. But what does this mean when the courses are already underway without two big stakeholders — the Student Representative Council or the NTEU — even being consulted?

The SRC opposes the appointment. SRC vice-president and co-convenor of Students for Palestine, Shovan Bhattarai, says it will “entrench a trend towards more authoritarianism” against hundreds of students who are “supporting campaigns against the university’s complicity in genocide.”

Protests are still permitted but the university must be notified as soon as they are announced. Posters and banners are banned except in designated spaces. Anything less than full compliance can lead to disciplinary action, which students are forbidden to speak about publicly.

Censoring links to MWM and Overland stories
At an online staff “townhall” on March 2, there was more support for discussion about antisemitism training than any other topic. Afterwards, Honi Soit reported that Dr Riemer and historian Dr David Brophy, both members of University of Sydney Staff for Palestine, posted very brief comments and links on the staff internal platform.

Neither were informed when their posts were quickly removed. Riemer expressed his concern that the training could stigmatise Palestinian staff and students, and linked his post to this MWM story. Brophy published a link to an article he wrote for Overland journal.

They were found to have posted material “reasonably perceived as inflammatory or having the potential to incite others, including other users” — a finding which they vehemently reject as interfering with their academic freedom. Riemer’s complaint against this treatment was dismissed.

The university refused to identify the decision-makers.

A disturbing exercise of hidden power, but an undoubted win for the 5A approach and the Zionist funders.

• Part one of this series was republished from Michael West Media yesterday with permission, it is here.

REVIEW: By Lee Duffield

The journalist, professor and peace activist Dr David Robie, was one of a media party on the ill-fated voyage of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985, before its sinking by French security operatives in Auckland Harbour.

He wrote a definitive book about the lead-up in the region to the fatal sinking of the ship with limpet mines; unmasking of the plot made in Paris; attempts to obtain justice and a long aftermath with demands for empowerment by former “colonial” people to prevent such outrages in their island homelands.

The book is Eyes of Fire, first published in 1986, then successively updated as the story unfolded, with new facts and consequences of the outrage coming to light.

It ran to three revised editions, the latest out now to commemorate 40 years since the attack took place. It therefore marked 40 years since the death of the Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese-born Dutch national, aged 35, father of two children, Marelle and Paul, drowned on board after the second of two blasts that hit the ship.

Eyes of Fire is a highly professional work of journalism, built out of investigation and documentation of facts, then fashioned into an accessible read; illustrated also with easy-to-comprehend maps and diagrams, showing where the ship travelled and where the bombs were planted against its hull, plus photographs from a copious accumulation built up as the Greenpeace movement generated publicity for its actions worldwide.

Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior
One section describes the Rainbow Warrior, appreciatively and affectionately: a former fisheries research vessel, a trawler type, 50-metres in length, with some difficulty converted for sail as well as power, made into a “proud campaign ship”, painted a strong green with a long rainbow-emblem along the sides.

“The wheelhouse was rather lumpy and unattractive but the rest of the ship was appealing. She had a high North Sea prow, graceful sheerline and round-the-corner stern.”

For the record…
The Rainbow Warrior sailed from Hawai’i on the Pacific Voyage — taking on board seven journalists and some leading figures from the Pacific communities, to the Marshall Islands — where it evacuated the inhabitants of a nuclear afflicted island, Rongelap, to an uninhabited island Mejatto on Kwajalein Atoll.

Pacific distances are great. They transported 350 people — with house lumber and belongings — in four trips, 250 km there and back.

The islanders were suffering from contamination by the infamous upwind explosion of the experimental thermonuclear weapon, Castle Bravo, in 1954 — causing thyroid disorders, cancers and constant miscarriages and birthing disorders.

Dissatisfied that health officials sent by the United States administration were more interested in research than care, they decided to leave. The key instigator was the late Marshall Islands legislator Senator Jeton Anjain. He was one of two Pacific Islands leaders with prominent roles in Robie’s narrative.

The other was Oscar Temaru, a nuclear-free town mayor in Tahiti, also elected as the territory’s President on five occasions.

Temaru, now 81, spoke for many when he said:

“The sad truth is that the only ones who tried to help us are the Greenpeace ecologists…”

According to folklore among Greenpeace founders, a native American woman named “Eyes of Fire” told of a legend that where there was dispossession and despoilation of the land and culture, in time mythical warriors — deliverers — would come, who would mend and restore both. So the peaceship offering aid would be a “Rainbow Warrior”.

The author, Robie, in his news despatches for Radio New Zealand and other media (for which he was awarded the 1985 NZ Media Peace Prize, judged the evacuation project a change for Greenpeace towards humanitarian work connected with environmental destruction:

“This isn’t a game or the sort of action publicity stunt that Greenpeace would do so successfully.”

But the next part of the journey was another dramatic action, in Marshall Islands, at the US missile testing base on Kwajalein Atoll. A party from the ship went ashore, got through perimeter wires and hoisted a banner inscribed “Stop Star Wars” onto a space tracking dome, escaping before the arrival of security guards.

The banner was a reference to the American Strategic Defence Initiative, “Star Wars”, testing for which had increased the heavy traffic of missiles of different levels at the Kwajalein range (dubbed by the empire as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Site).

The scene was then being set for the tragedy as the vessel made its way 5000 km to Auckland through friendly territory, calling in at Kiribati, the country hosting the former Christmas Island base for British nuclear tests (1957-58), and Vanuatu, where the leader of the then five year-old Republic, Father Walter Lini, a champion for a nuclear free Pacific, organised a big public welcome.

The strike
Celebration fitted the mood of the “Warrior” crew a lot of the time, in this account; a group of 11 skilled and idealistic younger people, sharing a mission they considered important to the world, and enjoying it as an adventure. They wanted to protect nature and promote peace, never violent, but charismatic, given to direct action, often enough dangerous.

They had others on board — in the case of David Robie, for an extended time, 11 days, time enough to get to know the characters and introduce them to readers in his book.

A further leg of the voyage was intended, to take them to Moruroa Atoll — where France was continuing with underground nuclear testing — as flagship for a flotilla of protest boats. In the event, the flotilla sailed, led by another Greepeace ship, Greenpeace III. One boat was arrested penetrating the 12-kilometre territorial limit around the atoll, where a series of tests was about to begin.

The planned disruption of activities on Moruroa may have been the death warrant for Rainbow Warrior — a solution to the riddle of what purposes its destruction was supposed to serve.

As the ship made its way towards Auckland, two French infiltrators got to work in that City, penetrating the Greenpeace operation. A group of military divers from a training base in Corsica was en route to New Zealand on a charter boat and two officers of France’s security service, DGSE, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, flew in under cover as a honeymoon couple.

Rainbow Warrior came in on Sunday, 7 July 1985, surrounded by an escort of small boats and was sunk at the dock in shallow water just before midnight on 10 July.

Divers using an inflatable boat set off the two explosions. Prieur and Mafart were spotted picking up one of the divers on a beach by men doing night watch at their boat club, who got the number of their vehicle, enabling the police to apprehend them, and begin a tortured process to try and secure justice.

Aftermath
Updating of the book takes in the negotiations over holding Prieur and Mafart, their eventual transfer to France and subsequent early release; the fate of other conspirators spirited home, promoted, decorated, “looked after” in early retirement; intensive and large scale work by the New Zealand police to find out about the charter boat carrying some of the divers, said to have transferred them onto a submarine, the Rubis; and investigative work by the French press to sheet home responsibility for the attack.

Very soon after Rainbow Warrior was sunk, the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, was sacked and the head of the DGSE Admiral Pierre Lacoste resigned. The book has a positive impression of the replacement Minister, Paul Quiles and the Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, who admitted the obvious — that it had been done by French agents and was apologetic.

Subsequent negotiations between New Zealand and France, under United Nations auspices were made very difficult; a formal apology was avoided for some time; eventually both New Zealand and Greenpeace received financial packages in compensation and exemplary damages.

After the 1996 death of François Mitterrand, French President at the time, an investigation by Le Monde turned up circumstantial evidence that he knew of the attack in advance and a statement by Lacoste that he had approved it. Fabius evidently had not known.

Mitterrand’s motive was said to have been realpolitik — to support nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union in tandem with the US, which supplied France with highly strategic computer technology.

Reviewer intercession…
Mitterrand, as a highly equivocal and manipulative politician, walked a tightrope, always watching his soft electoral margins — in this case knowing there was 60 percent support for nuclear testing in France.

In office for four years in 1985, it may have been a new government still failing to face down entrenched security identities, undisciplined, considering themselves to be “deep state”, attached to violent solutions, with potential to go rogue.

Most of Robie’s work here is a narrative, a strong true story, but it has space for analysis, and in particular registers the correlation between devastation brought by the nuclear testing, and colonial management and manipulation of islands affairs.

The post-war wave of independence had come to the Pacific, though not to French Polynesia nor New Caledonia. In addition, the United States still held its Micronesian dependencies in trust or, for Sovereign states, via signed compacts of free association, accompanied by substantial aid payments.

France’s position against independence is incentivised by maintaining colonies of more than 200,000 settlers; and in New Caledonia, the nickel deposits, around 15 percent of world resources, as well as the 200 kilometre territorial zone off the long coast of Grande Terre island, opening onto as yet unsurveyed undersea resources.

For the Americans, the priority has been both weapons testing and maintaining a strategic barrier against Russia, then China.

Old problems, future challenges
These considerations help to address the always unanswered question of what the plotters thought they had to gain. The book suggests a clumsy and excessive attempt to stop the ship leading a flotilla to Moruroa Atoll as most likely.

It goes on to identify same-old patterns of resistance in latter-day moves, successful, to get better recognition of the impacts of nuclear contamination and in the moves through international forums — such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, South Pacific Forum, United Nations agencies, the international courts — to get recognition and action on the impacts of climate change.

Pacific communities mindful of the rising seas, and other problems like impacts on sea-life, have struggled to get a hearing, finding, again, that “great powers” outside the region which hold resources that can help hold off the crisis, hold back their response.

Nuclear testing in the atmosphere was made to stop in 1974; tests underground on the atolls continued to 1996, leaving a very brief interregnum before global warming reared its head.

The current edition of Eyes of Fire has a prologue by Helen Clark, New Zealand Prime Minister from 1999-2008, a staunch keeper of the faith in a nuclear-free Pacific. Saying, “storm clouds are gathering”, she warns against renewed militarisation especially with Australia and perhaps other Pacific states acquiring nuclear submarines under the 2021 AUKUS agreement.

It is time for “de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific”, writes Clark in her contribution to the new edition. With its peace policy, New Zealand wanted to be “a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering”.

Clark warns withdrawal of funding from the United Nations, led by the US, is a new threat: “Its humanitarian, development, health, human rights, political and peacekeeping, scientific and cultural arms all face fiscal crises.”

David Robie reports on the 40th anniversary commemoration of the 1985 events by Greenpeace, sending the new purpose-built ship, the new Rainbow Warrior, sometimes known as Rainbow Warrior III, to carry out independent radiation research. He follows up the lives and careers of the crew members and the islanders they worked with, several of whom have passed away.

While the writer’s own message, as in much good journalism, emerges from true handling of the facts, Robie does privilege a quotation from the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa, Russel Norman, on the crew of Rainbow Warrior, to close the story:

“They faced down a nuclear threat to the habitability of the Pacific. Do we have the courage and wits to face down the biodiversity and climate crises facing humanity, crises that threaten the habitability of planet Earth?”

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie (Little Island Press), 2025, 225 pages.

Dr Lee Duffield reported on Australia’s dispute with France over atmospheric testing for ABC News in Sydney and then from Paris as the ABC European Correspondent. His work entailed monitoring police actions against Kanak activists in New Caledonia, including the killings on Ouvéa Island; confrontations with French Ministers over the test programme; and negotiations between France and New Zealand, in Paris, on Rainbow Warrior, especially the jailing then early release of Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart. He later taught Journalism at QUT in Brisbane and was a contributor to Pacific Journalism Review. Dr Duffield is also one of the co-owners of Independent Australia, and the chair of its editorial board. This review is republished from the Independent Australia with permission.

By Wendy Bacon and Cathy Peters in Sydney

The person chosen for the role of Sydney University’s antisemitism chief is Michael Abrahams-Sprod, chair of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies. His role is to help roll out a training programme for “front-line” staff on issues facing the Jewish community, including antisemitism in “contemporary settings”.

University staff only learned about the appointment through a staff intranet notice earlier this month. A university spokesperson told Michael West Media that Abrahams-Sprod’s new position began on January 1, 2026 and continues until December 2027.

Asked to specify the date the position was approved and from whom the vice-chancellor sought advice, the spokesperson said it was approved on the recommendation of the USyd Senate People, Culture and Safety Committee on March 6, 2026.

• READ MORE: Pro-Zionism influence at universities

This was two months after Abrahams-Sprod started his special advisor job. He was previously campus coordinator of Sydney University’s branch of the pro-Israel Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism and works alongside the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal.

This MWM investigation can also reveal that even before his new appointment, Abrahams-Sprod was funded to work on anti-semitism issues by the University.

In 2025, he worked on a collaboration with the Special Antisemitism Envoy, Jillian Segal, and the Sydney Jewish Museum, developing an antisemitism awareness training programme funded by the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne.

Antisemitism training programme
In his new role, Abrahams-Sprod will co-deliver 12 sessions with the Sydney Jewish Museum to 120 USyd staff in key areas including Human Resources, Protective and Risk Services, the Student Affairs Unit and the Office of the Vice-Chancellor.

These key front-line staff administer policies, communicate with staff and students  staff and respond to complaints.

After completing the training of administrative staff, Abrahams-Sprod will advise on training for all staff within an “overarching anti-racism framework … to align with the expectations of the Australian Human Rights Commission”.

In response to MWM questions, a spokesperson said that Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment recognised “his unique skills and experience, ongoing work supporting our Jewish and broader community and his existing role as an academic leader at the University.”

He will “consult with relevant communities … on how to tackle antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and build a campus that’s safe and welcoming to all”.

Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment is a win for the pro-Israeli lobby.

Equally, it aims to silence other staff and students and deter protests in support of Palestine.

Claims of exceptionalism
Last week, USyd Staff for Palestine called on Mark Scott to reverse the Special Advisor appointment and abolish the role.

They accused the university of “exceptionalism” and drew attention to a recent Australian Human Rights Commission finding of high rates of racism experienced by students and staff from First Nations, African, Asian, Jewish, Māori, Middle Eastern, Muslim, Palestinian and Pasifika backgrounds.

In an open letter, they stated that “in creating a unique special advisor role for antisemitism, the university has signalled that racism against Jewish people is being uniquely prioritised above other forms of discrimination”.

Abrahams-Sprod will work across the university sector to fulfill requirements of Segal-appointed former conservative Australian Catholic University VC Greg Craven, who has been tasked to oversee her punitive universities Report Card initiative.

As reported in The Guardian, Craven accused universities of being a ”major factor in making antisemitism respectful” and referred to campus protesters as “mutant radical groups”. Government funding could be withheld from universities found to “facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism.”

Jillian Segal’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism makes sweeping claims about antisemitism in Australian universities, which have been strongly critiqued by the Australian Human Rights Institute.

The assessment will be based on the contentious IHRA definition of antisemitism. This definition is rejected by many Australian university staff and students, including Jews and students from Middle East backgrounds whose families deal with the daily horror of Israel’s genocide, violent occupation, bombings, denial of humanitarian aid and other war crimes.

Bowing to Zionist pressure
Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment can be seen as a response to continuous pressure from October 2023 onwards from Abrahams-Sprod and fellow Zionist staff members on senior university managers to discipline staff and students for pro-Palestinian advocacy. Zionist leaders described ($) Scott as

“arrogant and dismissive” at a meeting in April 2024.

Their anger against anti-Israel sentiment grew after a student encampment began that month.

Scott’s initial reaction was to maintain neutrality regarding the protest, assuring the university community that he understood the right of protesters to peacefully assemble and the right of free speech.

However, by July 2024, after the two-month Gaza encampment had disbanded, USyd launched into defensive action, introducing its new Campus Access Policy, which clamped down heavily on future student or staff protests and political speech.

This policy was strongly criticised, including by the university’s Law School, which published this open letter.

Bowing further to orchestrated pressure on Scott and the university, it then commissioned an external review by Bruce Hodgkinson AM SC about the university’s handling of claims of campus antisemitism in relation to the encampment. The External Review Report made 15 recommendations, including strengthening the restrictions on protests and the imposition of a New Civility Rule with strong penalties for breaching it.

In September 2024, a contrite Mark Scott apologised to Jewish students and staff at a Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry for “failing them” in his handling of the encampment.

But key lobbyists, including Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Liebler, said Scott had lost credibility and continued to call for his resignation. Scott publicly promised ($) to fix the situation.

One of the ways to “fix” the situation appears to have been to

turn the coordinator of the Zionist complaints into a leader in his own office.

Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A)
When announcing Abrahams-Sprod’s appointment to all university staff earlier this month, Scott praised the “wealth of knowledge, experience and critical expertise” that Abrahams-Sprod brings to the new role. He did not mention his activities as the coordinator of the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A).

5A is a network of academics working to counter antisemitism in universities and medical institutions that was formed in November 2023. It claimed in its opening statement to the NSW Inquiry into Antisemitism that, “they [Jews] are hated because of their nation state, Israel. Anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism disguised as wine but truly an old poison, rebottled, labelled with new academic terminologies that misrepresent and deceive.”

5A’s linking of Jewish identity with the state of Israel, its misrepresentation of anti-Zionism and the BDS movement are antisemitic strategies that the Israeli government has generated over many years to deflect and misconstrue focus on Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It claims that campuses post October 7, 2023, became “epicentres of antisemitic activism” and that this was rooted in “protests, university encampments and cancel culture.”

This puts it on a collision course with thousands of pro-Palestinian and human rights focussed staff and students.

In his role as coordinator, Abrahams-Sprod collated at least 100 complaints against fellow staff and students, many of whom he assisted. This puts him at the centre of the campaign to pressure Scott. According to 5A, the number of complaints emanating from USyd far exceeded the minuscule number submitted from the other four large universities in Sydney.

5A labelled campus protests as antisemitic because they “delegitimise the state of Israel”. Similarly, stating that Israel is an apartheid state or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is also considered antisemitic, even though these are widely accepted findings of UN inquiries and international lawyers.

The Roth/Segal connection
Abrahams-Sprod is also connected to Jillian Segal through the funding of his own senior lectureship. Segal is married to property developer John Roth and was the sister-in-law of Stanley Roth, who died in January this year.

For more than 20 years, charitable foundations associated with the Roth family, along with several other philanthropists, have helped fund the discipline of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies.

In November 2024, the Roth family established the Roth Senior Lectureship in Jewish Civilisation, Education and Israel Studies to which Abrahams-Sprod was appointed. The university spokesperson said that the funders played no role in his selection.

In addition, the Roth family has provided funding to Youth Mental Health at the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre.

After his death, Stanley Roth was celebrated as one of Australia’s strongest supporters and most generous funders of Israel. The brothers also received widespread publicity as directors of Henroth Investments, which donated $50,000 to the far-right group Advance Australia in 2023/4.

Given Abrahams-Sprod’s highly partisan role, his appointment will only stoke division rather than build a safe and civil environment on campus. Staff for Palestine has accused the university management of being “hijacked by supporters of Israel”.

But VC Scott’s appointment has done more than signal his capitulation to the pro-Israel pressure and disdain for the pro-Palestinian supporters.

• As we will explore in part two tomorrow, it also raises conflict-of-interest issues for the university.

I don’t blame Iran for going cold on another sham negotiation session with the US.

After all, why would they take the US or Israel seriously? Or even remotely trust either of them when:

• They both bombed Iran right in the middle of two sets of previous “negotiations”; and
• Trump lied about Lebanon being included in the recent ceasefire agreement.

That inclusion was acknowledged by the mediators, Pakistan.

• READ MORE: Trump extends Iran ceasefire, keeps blockade as Pakistan talks in disarray
• Amnesty slams Netanyahu, Putin, Trump as ‘voracious predators’
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

As a result, Israel continued to bomb Lebanon; in fact they stepped up their attacks and killed 300+ people in one day.

In the very latest agreement, Iran opened up the Strait of Hormuz as agreed, but the US (incredulously) continued with its blockade.

Yesterday the US escalated things by attacking and confiscating an Iranian merchant ship.

750+ Palestinians have been murdered by the IDF during Trump’s fake ceasefire in October 2025. They are slaughtering women and kids in Gaza and the West Bank every day.

Thousands of Israeli violations
Israel broke their ceasefire agreement signed in November 2014 with Lebanon thousands of times (according to UN peacekeepers in Lebanon).

Both Trump and Netanyahu have made numerous threats to obliterate Iran, to commit genocide and even holocaust.

They have bombed thousands of Iranian civilian targets in contravention of international law — residential buildings, government buildings, historic sites, bridges, police stations, schools, universities, pharmacy companies, factories, public transport, ambulances, medical centres and hospitals.

So WHY the hell would Iran have any confidence that anything that these devious and untrustworthy US and Israeli war criminals agree will ever be adhered to?

Both of these warmongering nations have displayed a total lack of integrity and credibility through their disingenuous words and actions over many decades.

I don’t see any other alternative than for Iran to play hard ball.

Time is Trump’s enemy, not Iran’s.

And now Trump has extended the ceasefire at the last moment.

Tim O’Shea is a New Zealand social, environmental political activist and commentator.

The heads of Israel, Russia and the United States are leading the destruction of global human rights, says Amnesty International, describing them as “voracious predators” intent upon economic and political domination.

“A global environment where primitive ferocity could flourish has been long in the making,” Agnes Callamard, the head of the global rights group, wrote in an annual report on the state of the world’s human rights that was released yesterday.

In 2025, “sharp U-turns were taken away from the international order that had been imagined out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the utter destruction of world wars, and constructed slowly and painfully, albeit insufficiently, over these past 80 years,” she said.

• READ MORE: The State of the World’s Human Rights: April 2026
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

In a news conference in London, Callamard said that most governments tended to appease the “predators” rather than confront them.

“Some even thought to imitate the bullies and the looters,” she said.

Spain, however, which is an outlier in Europe for its criticism of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and US-Israeli attacks on Iran, “is standing above the double standard that is destroying the international system”, Callamard said.

She argued that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who in 2022 sent his forces into neighbouring Ukraine, have had an “absolutely dramatic” impact on the world.

Their conduct is “emboldening all of those that are tempted by similar behaviours,” said Callamard.

“It is allowing for the multiplication of copycats around the world, and therefore what we are confronting now is much more aggressive and ferocious than what we had to confront three or four years ago.”

Amnesty shocking report – Global rights collapse    Video: Al Jazeera

‘Authoritarian practices have intensified worldwide’
Amnesty’s review of the state of the world’s human rights makes for grim reading, documenting attacks on fundamental civil liberties in most nations.

“Authoritarian practices have intensified worldwide”, the report reads, before running through abuses alleged in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe in 400 pages.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Russia’s “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine, and the US-Israeli war on Iran were noted as examples of conflict in which international laws have been ignored.

In a section on repression, the United Kingdom is blamed for cracking down on the Palestine solidarity movement and Palestine Action, the direct-action group that targets sites associated with the Israeli military and is currently fighting a legal battle against its UK proscription as a “terrorist” organisation.

Afghanistan’s Taliban was responsible for further gender-based discrimination in 2025, the report noted, citing measures excluding women from education and work, while Nepalese authorities were said to have failed to investigate instances of gender-based violence against Dalit women.

Amnesty’s report comes as multiple conflicts rage across the world.

US-Israeli assault on Iran
The US-Israeli assault on Iran has killed more than 3000 people, while Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed nearly 2400.

In Gaza, the confirmed number of people killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023 has surpassed 72,500 as the decimated territory is continually threatened by Israeli bombardment.

In Ukraine, more than 15,000 have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than four years ago.

Conflicts in the Middle East are a “product of the descent into lawlessness, made possible by a vision of the world in which war-making and the killings of civilians are normalised,” said Callamard.

“No effective steps have been taken against Israel for its repeated, constant violation of basic standards of humanity.”

However, there is some room for optimism, Amnesty said.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman.

As we continue to look at the US and Israeli war on Iran, we’re joined now by Dr Maryam Jamshidi. She is an Iranian American associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute. She has written a new piece for The Nation magazine headlined “Only One Side Has Clearly Broken the Law In the Strait of Hormuz: And it isn’t Iran.”

Professor Jamshidi, explain.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me.

So, you know, what I was trying to get at in that piece is that, you know, there’s been a lot of international outcry about what Iran has done in the strait, specifically its efforts to regulate passage of ships through the strait and to charge certain ships a fee for going through the strait.

The international rhetoric has been that what Iran is doing is completely and clearly illegal. And from my perspective, that’s not entirely true. This is not a black-and-white issue. Iran does have a reasonable legal argument to regulating the Strait of Hormuz, as well as to charging fees.

• READ MORE: ‘Predators’: Amnesty slams Netanyahu, Putin, Trump as human rights decline
• Tehran spurns talks under threats; Trump says blockade stays
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

By contrast, the criticism of what the United States and Israel has done to Iran, which is an aggressive and illegal war, has been more muted, in particular from Western states, as well as from some of the regional Arab states. And I think this contrast between these two reactions is very telling — on the one hand, total condemnation of Iran on legal issues that are far from clear, and very more muted criticism, more limited criticism of the United States and Israel when it comes to actions they’ve taken that are very clearly unlawful under international law.

I think this says a lot about the ways in which international law is being deployed in this moment as a way of restraining and regulating Iranian behavior, while effectively allowing the United States and Israel a free hand to do what they want against the Iranian government.

Who is breaking international law in the Strait of Hormuz?   Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think this unprovoked war that Israel and the US — this war of choice, as it’s called — have engaged in with Iran has done to international law and people’s perspective view of it around the world, and the consequences when people want to apply international law?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. I mean, you know, over the last few years, we’ve seen the ways in which Israel, in particular, with support from the United States, as well as with support from much of the rest of the West, Western governments, has eroded and violated and scoffed at international law, in its actions towards the Palestinians, its actions in Lebanon, its actions in Syria, its actions in Yemen, its other actions in Iran.

And I think that, you know, these actions that Israel has taken has understandably led many to question the utility and importance of international law, whether or not it still exists or not. And, you know, now with this war against Iran, that, those concerns, those fears that international law is really meaningless, have only increased.

In this moment, though, I think what’s also important to understand is that states like Iran are also at the same time saying, “No, international law matters very much, and we expect to be treated as equals under international law.”

Iran, in this moment, is framing a lot of what it’s doing in international law terms, because it understands that if international law is truly going to be thrown into the dustbin, then it’s going to be far more vulnerable on the international stage.

So, we basically see a battle. We see a battle between, on the one side, states like Israel and the United States, states that are, by and large, Western, you know, basically saying, “International law doesn’t apply to us. We can do what we want,” and then other states, like Iran, states of the Global South, saying, “No, we want international law. We value international law. International law is necessary to ensuring that we are sovereign and equal to other states on the international scale. And so, we are not going to let international law just be taken away from us.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about the UN Security Council? You’ve noted multiple resolutions have been introduced to condemn Iran’s regulatory actions in the strait. Who is behind these resolutions? Meanwhile, the Iranian Parliament is reportedly considering legislation that would formalise its regulatory system, including the fee system, as part of its domestic law.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Right. So, there were — there have been multiple resolutions brought before the Security Council since the war started. They have mostly been focused on Iran and Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz. The states that have been the real force behind these resolutions appear to be the Arab Gulf states, in particular Bahrain and the UAE, who have also been the subject of the most attacks by Iran.

What’s, again, very interesting and, I think, important to understand about these resolutions is that they very clearly and absolutely condemned Iran for its regulatory actions within the Strait of Hormuz. As I mentioned, even though those actions do have a legal basis, those resolutions presented them as being fully unlawful.

And one of those resolutions, which, thankfully, was vetoed by China and Russia, would have effectively authorised all UN member states — that’s over 190 states — to go to war with Iran in order to open the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, that is a very radical proposition, to basically validate and allow states to engage in armed conflict against another state simply for the purpose of opening a waterway.

So, you know — and again, there were no resolutions that were brought to the Security Council to explicitly condemn the US and Israel for their actions against Iran.

In terms of the domestic legislation inside Iran, you know, that the Iranian Parliament appears to be contemplating, as you mentioned, this legislation would basically make the regulatory scheme within Hormuz, in the Strait of Hormuz, a part of Iranian law.

It’s not entirely clear what the terms of that law are, you know, what the basis for it is, what kind of regulation it will in fact implement. But it does seem to have a fee system as a part of it. So, the Iranians are trying to take this ad hoc fee system that they have developed over the course of the last few weeks and actually institutionalise it within domestic law.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking you about [US President Donald] Trump’s comments. On Saturday, he told a reporter at Fox News, “If Iran doesn’t sign this deal, the whole country is getting blown up.” That followed two weeks before, when he warned, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Professor Jamshidi?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: These comments are absolutely unacceptable. I mean, they are borderline genocidal in their intent and in their implications. To say to the world that you’re going to obliterate an entire civilisation is, in fact, to make very clear that you desire to destroy an entire people.

You know, I don’t know if he thinks that this is an effective negotiating tool, but certainly from a legal perspective, from a moral perspective, it’s beyond the pale.

This article is republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

AMY GOODMAN: To look more at the latest developments in Lebanon and the Middle East region, we’re joined by Dr Rami Khouri, a Palestinian American journalist and distinguished public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. He’s also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.

Rami, we began talking about the Iran-US second round of negotiations, went to this news of a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, though Hezbollah wasn’t a party to those talks. Your overall comments on what’s happening right now in the region, where you think it’s all going?

RAMI KHOURI: Well, there are so many different dynamics going on at the same time within individual countries, among countries in the region and between the region and the global powers, especially the United States, but also China and others, and Israel, of course.

My comments are that one of the striking things about this situation is that we’ve seen now, in the last six weeks, Iran and Hezbollah almost single-handedly checking — not defeating, but checking — the two biggest military powers in the region, which is the US and Israel.

They forced them into two ceasefires: one in Iran and now one in Lebanon. Now, this is not a finished story. This is still going on. This might collapse, and the war may resume.

US and Israel ‘forced into two ceasefires’                 Video: Democracy Now!

But the fact that the US and Israel have been forced to enter these ceasefires, I think, is a sign of the evolving balance of power across the region. And you’re going to see this reflected, for instance, in many Arab countries, who are — especially in the energy-producing Gulf region, who are going to recalibrate their relations.

They’ll still be very close friends with the US, buy a lot of weapons and buy a lot of tech stuff, but they’re also going to recalibrate to have more meaningful ties with Iran, with Türkiye, with China, with Russia and other people like that.

So we’re seeing a slow-motion evolution of the entire balance of power in the region, with the background being that the overwhelming majority of people in the Arab region and Islamic Türkiye and Iran, about three-quarters of a billion people, the overwhelming majority of them see Israel and the US as their main security threat.

So, something historic is going on here in slow motion.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does, Rami Khouri, these negotiations between Israel, the United States, Iran and Lebanon impact on the current situation in Gaza? Talk also about the role of the other armed groups, like Hamas, the Houthis. If you can talk about what’s happening across the region?

RAMI KHOURI: Yes. The Palestine-Israel conflict remains the starting point for all of these other conflicts. So, Iran and Israel, Hezbollah’s birth, Israel-Hezbollah, all of these tensions and conflicts ultimately derived from the unresolved battle between Palestinian nationalism and Zionism and the state of Israel.

So, it’s crucial for any attempt to get a permanent peaceful situation across the region, in the Arab countries, Iran and Israel — it’s crucial to address the Palestine issue, which means right now looking at Gaza.

Now, Gaza is in a situation of reconfigured colonial domination by the United States and Israel, with carpetbaggers from around the world, like Tony Blair and others. I call it the joint venture of the carpetbaggers and the carpet bombers. They’ve all come together on this to dominate Palestine, destroy Gaza, and now they’re looking to do the same thing in Lebanon.

But the fact that the Iranians were able to pressure the Americans, to pressure Netanyahu to enter into this ceasefire is a significant sign that the group of movements and countries that have been involved in the so-called Axis of Resistance, which pushes back against Israeli hegemony and American militarism, that group of actors is still effective.

They may not dominate the region, but they’re strong enough to do what they’ve just done, which is force the Americans, to force the Israelis to enter into a ceasefire that the Israelis did not want. The Israelis wanted to keep bombing and attacking and occupying and creating more buffer zones. But they’ve done that.

This is the seventh time, seventh time since the late 1960s, that Israel goes into Lebanon militarily in a big way, occupies land, moves millions of people around. And every time, they’ve had to pull out because of the resistance they’ve met and because they could not achieve their goals, which is an acquiescent, passive Lebanese state that agrees to be a vassal state of Israel.

And they still refuse to do it.

So, finding the negotiated mechanism to arrive at a point where the Lebanese have their sovereign rights and security protected and the Israelis have the same rights, that’s the big challenge that lies ahead. It can only be done if it is accompanied by a serious effort to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict on a permanent and fair basis.

Republished from Democracy now! Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Many American apologists cannot see the forest for the trees and think that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz represents a huge win for the United States and that Iran has caved in. Wrong.

When the Iran ceasefire was first announced by US President Donald Trump on April 8, it was meant to cover Lebanon as well.

Even the Pakistanis, who were the mediators said it covered Lebanon. But that war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to wreck the peace process and so bombed Lebanon viciously and committed genocide once again, killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent Lebanese.

• READ MORE: Iran warns US blockade of ports must end as Strait of Hormuz opens

Trump tried to rein him in but Netanyahu refused to stop the genocide and the two got into a shouting match in the early hours of the morning. The Americans just could not control the Israelis.

So Iran maintained their vice-like closure of the Strait of Hormuz. With each passing day, the world was moving towards an economic precipice and people all over the world were blaming Trump and the Americans for starting the stupid war.

Trump eventually read the riot act to Netanyahu and unilaterally imposed the ceasefire in Lebanon. The Israelis were stunned.

The ceasefire resulted not because of talks between the Lebanese and the Israelis, but because of the leverage Iran has over the Strait of Hormuz. That is why the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that because of the ceasefire in Lebanon, Iran is reopening the Strait — and Trump thanked the Iranians profusely for it.

As for Trump still maintaining the blockade of the Iranian ports, this is pure posturing by him to show that he is strong. It means nothing.

The Iranians have already warned him that if he continues with the blockade, they will not only close off the Strait of Hormuz again but also the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea and also the Gulf of Oman.

That would plunge the entire world economy into a depression and no oil from the Gulf would flow.

Trump as usual is blustering, but in reality he is praying every minute that the Iranians will go back to the negotiating table, and give him the peace deal he so desperately needs to extricate himself from the mess he created in starting this war.

Iran is showing its maturity and displaying the might of a new global power. It will soon control the entire Middle East together with the other great power — Türkiye.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph is being acquired by a German-based media giant — and now its journalists are formally expected to support Israel.

The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has cleared the takeover by Axel Springer SE. Its CEO, Mathias Döpfner, has written to Telegraph staff “outlining his commitment” to the paper.

An employee at The Telegraph has sent me that letter. It is deeply revealing.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine and Iran media reports
• Owen Jones on Substack

Döpfner insists that the values of The Telegraph and the publishing house founded by late tycoon Axel Springer — dubbed “Germany’s Rupert Murdoch” — are aligned. They are, he says, “Freedom, free markets, individual freedom and freedom of speech”.

He goes further. Axel Springer, he explains, is “guided by a clear editorial compass.” Its employees are rooted in its “Essentials” — “core values to which we are firmly committed”.

There is, he adds, “no such thing as neutral journalism”: only journalism that is “pluralistic and surprising, fair, and fact-based.”

And yet, having invoked “freedom of speech” as a foundational principle, he insists these Essentials are not partisan — but rather “define a socio-political framework within which maximum journalistic freedom and intellectual independence can flourish.”

‘We support the right of Israel to exist’
Döpfner then sets out those ‘Essentials’:

1. We stand for freedom, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and democracy.
2. We support the right of Israel to exist and oppose all forms of antisemitism.
3. We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.
4. We uphold the principles of a free-market economy.
5. We reject political and religious extremism, as well as all forms of discrimination.

Note where “we support the right of Israel to exist” sits: second.

‘Freedom’ — within limits
Döpfner emphasises that editorial independence will be protected, including from pressure by politicians, celebrities, or advertisers. “I value debate in the spirit of pluralism and freedom of expression,” he writes.

But the description of the Essentials is, frankly, Orwellian.

It is not reconcilable to argue that these tenets create the conditions for “maximum journalistic freedom” while simultaneously requiring adherence to a political position on a specific foreign state.

Out of 193 UN member states, only one is singled out in this way.

No state has a “right to exist” under international law. Peoples have a right to self-determination — a right denied, in this case, by Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and by subjecting its people to apartheid, colonisation and genocide.

A Telegraph journalist put it to me bluntly:

To be firmly told by our new parent company-to-be’s CEO that the second most important guiding principle is affirming the right of a country committing genocide and ethnic cleansing is more than a little concerning.

It also raises the question of how any reporting from the paper can be considered factual if that is our core principle.

As they note, this principle comes before any explicit rejection of discrimination.

What ‘Israel’s right to exist’ means in practice
In practice, the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes — from occupation and colonisation to apartheid and, now, mass destruction in Gaza.

It is also telling what is not said. The Essentials do not prohibit racism in general, despite later rejecting “all forms of discrimination”. There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia, for example, or anti-Arab racism.

Instead, “oppose all forms of antisemitism” is fused directly with “support the right of Israel to exist”.

That conflation matters.

Because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between antisemitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state.

So how, exactly, might Axel Springer SE interpret “oppose all forms of antisemitism”?

‘Free Palestine’ is a ‘pro-Hamas topic’
There are very strong clues, let’s put it that way.

The late Axel Springer himself declared:

It is the task of our generation to stand firmly by Israel’s side, even if this causes difficulties for our policies elsewhere.

He further added:

The country does not need encouragement, but advocacy, wherever and whenever it can be provided – in the European Community, in the United Nations, in diplomatic relations, at work, in the family.

He described this as a “German duty”.

In June 2021, when employees complained about the Israeli flag being raised at company headquarters, Mathias Döpfner responded:

I think, and I’m being very frank with you, a person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.

He was referring to demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza that May.

In October 2023, a Lebanese employee at Welt TV — part of the Axel Springer empire — was dismissed: he says it was after he challenged the outlet’s pro-Israel positions. Axel Springer SE refuse to comment on “individual personnel matters”.

In an internal email which was leaked that year, Döpfner reportedly summarised his political worldview with the phrase: “Zionism über alles” — “Zionism above all.”

He has penned repeated pro-Israel polemics. “Will we stand with Israel against the enemies of freedom despite the risks, or will we allow fear and opportunism to prevail?” he wrote in October 2023, demanding “massive, unstiting political, financial and military support”.

On a podcast for his employees, Döpfner claimed “a majority on Instagram, on other social media, and in particular on TikTok, took sides for the Hamas’ actions.” He argued that “an almost global wave of Anti-Semitism suddenly showed its ugly face”, which he described as a shock, despite knowing “that it is here and there, well hidden or presented in a politically correct manner as Anti-Zionism or “Woke-ism” or whatever.”

And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok:

“Concretely, more than 4 million posts until today have been published under the hashtag of #FreePalestine or other kind of pro-Hamas topics. And only 50,000 something, 53,000 posts basically standing by Israel.”

“Free Palestine”, he argued, was a “kind of pro-Hamas topic”.

Conflating antisemitism with critique of Israel
When Israel launched its first war on Iran last June, Döpfner declared it was “surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike.” Instead, he claimed:

the public response is dominated by anti-Israel propaganda. The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions are not admired but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly antisemitic stereotypes. This attitude is characterised not only by racist undertones, but also by a strange self-forgetfulness.

In other words, he directly conflated critique of Israel’s war with antisemitism.

A few months ago, he quoted claims about atrocities committed on October 7th which included: “A first responder testified before the Knesset that he had seen the severed skulls of three children.” The claims that Israeli children were beheaded have been comprehensively debunked.

He went on to write that:

justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews and that, as a result, instead of an obvious global wave of compassion and solidarity, a global wave of cold-heartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism has emerged.

The piece further criticised the German government — Israel’s most loyal European defender — for “massively” restricting arms sales to Israel. Tellingly, he said that decision meant that “From now on, unconditional support for Israel’s right to exist is effectively subject to conditions.”

He described the recognition of Palestinian statehood “as a reward for the barbarism of October 7″.

Last October, Al Jazeera published an investigation into German tabloid Bild, a cornerstone of Axel Springer SE, headlined “The Story of Israel’s Propaganda Machine Specialising in Anti-Palestinian Incitement’.

Al Jazeera reported that the newspaper had suggested that a Palestinian journalist killed by Israel was a “terrorist”, denied famine in Gaza, and published a lengthy report it claimed had been found on the computer of late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It transpired that the document was old, not authored by Sinwar, and had reportedly been leaked by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

The newspaper, reported Al Jazeera, had also “consistently demonised pro-Gaza demonstrators in Germany, labelling them as “mobs”, “Israel-haters”, and “anti-Semites”.

Israel’s supporters in the West have launched the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism.

We can see where the Telegraph’s new owners stand on that.

Extracted and republished from Owen Jones’ article on his Battlelines substack. Read the full article here.

It is the people of the Global South, not governments, who must resist this subversion of the concepts of the “nation’ and of non-alignment.

The Indian government’s position on the US-Israeli war against Iran shows an unbelievable degree of pusillanimity.

India attended the recent meeting of about 50 countries called by the United Kingdom where Iran was strongly criticised for closing the Strait of Hormuz, but not a word was uttered against the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

• READ MORE: Iran war’s big winners: Wall Street, weapons firms, AI and green energy
• ‘Vengeance for all’: How Iran’s Lego videos won narrative war against Trump
• Iran hasn’t survived decades of hostile sanctions, assassinations and sabotage by accident – it’s by strategy
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Likewise, India was one of the sponsors of a resolution at the UN General Assembly which criticised Iran for attacking other countries in the Gulf (though Iran was attacking only the American military bases located in those countries). Yet again, not a word was uttered in that resolution condemning the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

It is also noteworthy that India took several days before expressing any grief over the assassination Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several weeks before expressing any shock over the brutal killing of 175 innocent schoolgirls in Minab.

Such pusillanimity, however, is not confined to India: as many as 135 countries were co-sponsors of the dishonest and duplicitous UNGA resolution mentioned above, afraid that they would otherwise offend the Americans.

In fact, apart from a handful of countries in the entire world, none has had the gumption to condemn unambiguously the blatantly illegal and immoral war unleashed by the US-Israeli combine against Iran.

Extreme concern
This is a matter for extreme concern, for the attack on Iran abrogates the concept of sovereignty of nations that had been the core concept in the struggle for decolonisation and had underlain the entire post-colonial order. It destroys, in other words, the very rationale for decolonisation.

This pusillanimity on the part of Third World countries is also a matter of great puzzlement. After all, these are countries that have had long and arduous anti-colonial struggles to achieve the status of independent and sovereign states; how can they remain silent when this very sovereignty is being violated in the case of a fellow Third World state by the armed might of US imperialism?

The answer to this question, no doubt complex, must nonetheless incorporate recognition of at least two fractures that neoliberalism has introduced into our world. One is the fracturing of the concept of the “nation” whose coming into being had been accomplished by the anti-colonial struggle.

This concept of the “nation” had differed fundamentally from the European concept that had developed in the wake of the Westphalian Peace Treaties in at least three ways: first, it was inclusive and did not identify any “enemy within”; second, unlike European nationalism it shunned any imperial ambitions of its own, in the sense of having designs over the resources of distant lands; and third, it did not apotheosise the nation as standing above the people whose “duty” supposedly was to serve it.

The coming into being of this inclusive concept of the “nation” was in turn a reflection of the fact that the anti-colonial struggle was a multi-class struggle; and the dirigiste economic regime that was erected after independence, though it promoted capitalist development, also sought to put curbs on rampant capitalism in the name of achieving “national” development.

This was in the interests of preserving its multi-class support base, which even the monopoly capitalists were not averse to at that time, since they had wanted a trajectory of development where the state exercised relative autonomy vis-a-vis imperialism. The existence of a large public sector was a part of this trajectory.

Further, the policy of non-alignment pursued by these dirigiste regimes had complemented this quest for development in relative autonomy from imperialism. Michal Kalecki, the Polish Marxist economist, had erred in calling such regimes “intermediate regimes” and suggesting that the middle classes held decisive power in such regimes; but he had been right in identifying state capitalism (public sector) and non-alignment as the two most distinctive features of these regimes.

Monopoly bourgeoisie
With globalisation of capital, however, things changed. The domestic monopoly bourgeoisie integrated itself with globalised capital and abandoned its agenda of pursuing a development trajectory that was relatively autonomous of the metropolis.

Sections of the upper professional and bureaucratic segments of society, keen to send their children to study and settle down in the metropolis, joined in as supporters of the neoliberal regime that emerged under the aegis of this globalised capital.

The landed rich too sought their fortunes within this new neoliberal order, which not only promoted rampant unrestrained capitalism, but came down heavily against workers, peasants, agricultural labourers, petty producers and the lower salariat. A schism was effected within the class alliance that had been forged in the course of the anti-colonial struggle.

It was no longer the “nation” against the metropolis that was in focus, but big capital including multinational capital against those social groups which stood in the way of instituting rapid “development” defined exclusively in terms of GDP growth-rates.

The interest of big capital was, by a sleight of hand, identified as “national interest”, and the duty of all classes was to promote it.

This shift in the meaning of the term “nation” meant in effect a fracturing of the “nation” whose coming into being was the desideratum of the anti-colonial struggle. Freedom of the “nation” from imperialist domination, far from being the over-riding objective, was no longer even a desired or a relevant objective for the government within a neoliberal setting.

This is the first instance of “fracturing” referred to above. Because of this fracturing, the criterion on the basis of which the government of a neoliberal regime takes decisions is not whether a particular stance defends national sovereignty, but whether it promotes the material interests of big capital which are considered identical with those of the “nation” in its new meaning.

Deafening silences
Siding with the US-Israeli alliance appears, on balance, more advantageous than standing with Iran, the victim of aggression, from the point of view of the interests of big capital in countries of the Global South. This would go some way to explain the deafening silences, mentioned earlier, in the UNGA and other resolutions.

There is also a second “fracture” brought about by the neoliberal regime. While the neoliberal regime is “sold” to the Global South as ushering in export-led growth that would bring about a higher GDP growth-rate for all countries compared with the earlier dirigiste regime, this claim is completely false.

Since the growth rate of aggregate world demand does not increase when more countries pursue an export-led growth strategy, the neoliberal regime that generalises this strategy among all countries is, in effect, forcing them to engage in Darwinian competition against one another, that is, to pursue a “beggar-thy-neighbour” strategy.

Some countries’ higher growth-rate than before under the export-led growth strategy, it follows, must be at the expense of other countries that now experience lower growth-rate than before.

Countries engaged in a race to outdo one another can scarcely be said to be “co-operating” with one another. The effect of a general pursuit of the neoliberal strategy, therefore, is a de facto abandonment of non-alignment, of a trajectory where countries of the Global South stood with one another to face up to imperialism.

Now, countries of the Global South, each obsessed with achieving higher GDP growth and hence, within the neoliberal paradigm, obsessed with drawing in larger metropolitan investment for this purpose, would rather curry favour with imperialism in order to outdo their neighbours.

This leads to a fracturing of the non-aligned movement, which is the second fracturing we mentioned earlier.

The silence of most countries of the Global South in the face of the US-Israeli aggression on Iran, which may appear puzzling at first sight, is not so puzzling after all.

Subverting both ‘nation’, ‘non-alignment’
Neoliberalism has been at work for quite some time in subverting both the concept of the nation and the concept of non-alignment, abandoning the anti-imperialist core that characterised these concepts, and substituting in their place alternative concepts that prioritise the task of currying favour with imperialism over everything else.

The outcome of this process is what we see today.

Capitalism is invariably hostile to any collective praxis against it, even if this collective praxis takes the form of just trade union action. It believes in atomising economic agents.

Neoliberal capitalism, which represents a return to unrestrained and uncontrolled capitalism once more, brings to the fore this tendency toward the atomisation of economic agents, through a break-up of the class alliance that had participated in the anti-colonial struggle, and through a subversion of the non-aligned movement that had stood for collective opposition by countries of the Global South to imperialist hegemony.

It is for the people of the Global South, not the governments currently promoting the interests of the ruling big bourgeoisie, to extend solidarity to the people of Iran. The struggle of Iran against the US-Israeli alliance is of crucial importance for recovering the sovereignty of the Global South.

Dr Prabhat Patnaik is professor emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views are personal. This article is republished from Newsclick.

US President Donald Trump probably thinks he can starve a country that feeds itself.

Washington is selling the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as a chokehold. However, it is worth asking whether the hand actually reaches the throat.

Iran shares land borders with seven countries — Türkiye, Iraq, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nearly 5900 kilometres of border, criss-crossed by road and rail.

• READ MORE: US ready to restart combat if Iran does not agree to deal: Hegseth
• Caitlin Johnstone: I hope the US loses and the empire collapses
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

No naval force on earth blockades a land route.

Petrochemicals, minerals, manufactured goods are moved overland. Machinery, spare parts, consumer goods, all come back the same way. The Strait of Hormuz does not sit across any of that.

Then there is the food issue, which is where blockades historically do their cruellest work.

It will not work here. Iran is approximately 96 percent self-sufficient in essential foodstuffs.

Iran doesn’t depend on imported food
Fertile western plains, mountain valleys, Caspian lowlands, including wheat, rice, fruit, livestock. The Gulf states that cheered this blockade loudest — the UAE and Qatar — depend almost entirely on food imports. Iran doesn’t.

You cannot starve a country that feeds itself.

What about the blockade?

Yes, that will hurt. Hard currency earnings from oil tanker traffic will fall. That is real and Washington knows it.

But “hurt” and “collapse” are different destinations, and the distance between them is precisely what the architects of this policy appear not to have calculated.

Central Asia and the Caucasus remain open. Regional markets will absorb what the sea lanes cannot carry.

The economic pressure is genuine. The total isolation that the blockade promises is not.

Iran has survived four decades of sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It did not survive them by accident. It survived them because its geography is not a weakness waiting to be exploited.

It is the strategy.

Prince Taofeek Ajibade is an educator and digital creator from Ibadan, Nigeria.

I don’t mind admitting that I hope the US and Israel suffer a crushing, devastating defeat in Iran.

I hope this war collapses the entire US empire. My only loyalty is to humanity, and being on Team Human in today’s world means being against the US empire and against Israel.

I hope the empire falls. I hope the apartheid state of Israel is dismantled.

• LISTEN:  A reading by Tim Foley

I hope humanity is able to pry the steering wheel from the fingers of the ghouls who currently rule our world, so that we can create a healthy planet and a harmonious future together.

I hope the US loses and other notes              Video: Caitlin Johnstone

YouTube has banned the channel that’s been creating viral AI Lego music videos criticising the US war on Iran. The Google-owned platform claims the Lego videos somehow constituted “violent content”, but we all know it was to facilitate the US propaganda effort by shutting down effective propaganda for the other side.

Silicon Valley is a crucial arm of US imperial control.

It chooses to advance the interests of the empire at every significant juncture. It’s a branch of imperial soft power in the same way the military is a branch of imperial hard power.

Iran-linked accounts are circulating a new LEGO-style propaganda video portraying U.S. and Israeli leaders as corrupt elites tied to the “Epstein files,” part of a broader online campaign aimed at undermining support for the war.

The animation depicts President Donald Trump… pic.twitter.com/PdjcJGrjuy

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) April 9, 2026

❖

The US and Israel have so normalised the assassination of national leaders that the mainstream press now discuss it as a standard military tactic. The other day The Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen arguing that the US should “carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations”.

“Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed,” Thiessen writes.

At some point one of America’s enemies is going to assassinate a US official and my replies are going to be full of shrieking, outraged Americans acting like I’m the bad guy when I say Washington had it coming.

❖

Even if the US wasn’t directly responsible for the Strait of Hormuz situation, it would still be the last country on earth with any business whining about it. They’re openly imposing a fuel blockade on Cuba while complaining that nobody should be allowed to block shipping lanes, for Christ’s sake.

❖

The Democratic National Committee voted to reject a resolution denouncing the influence of AIPAC in US politics. Eighty percent of Democrats have a negative view of Israel today. The DNC’s main function is to keep the Democratic Party and its representation on the ballot from reflecting the will of the public.

❖

pic.twitter.com/K0kNiJYbKs

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 14, 2026

Dear Trump supporters, send me all of your money. I have a plan to make America great again. I will end all the wars and drain the swamp. Don’t worry if it looks like I’m not doing any of those things, I’m playing 4d chess, trust the plan. Send me your life savings right now.

❖

It’s important not to let them pin this all on Trump, in the same way it’s important not to let them pin Israel’s crimes on Netanyahu. Everything we are seeing with this disastrous Iran war is the product of the entire power structure which gave rise to it, not one guy’s dopey decisions.

The warmongers in the DC swamp have been pushing war with Iran for decades. Trump is just the guy who was chosen by Zionist oligarchs and bloodthirsty empire managers to carry out the deed. He happens to be the face on the operation, but if it wasn’t him it would have been someone else.

American warmongering insanity didn’t start with Trump, and it isn’t going to end with him either. Don’t direct your rage merely at the fleeting puppets who come and go from the imperial stage as the US murder machine trudges onward. Direct it at the empire itself.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Most of Iranian oil — 96.7 percent — is destined for China. If you note this figure, you will realise that the Americans are really trying to choke off the supply of Iranian oil to China by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

This is a major part of the American containment strategy against China.

Now that America will most likely lose control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, they are shifting their attention to the other most critical chokepoint in the world — the Strait of Malacca.

• READ MORE: Indonesia, US sign ‘major’ defence cooperation agreement
• Why Trump’s naval blockade to ‘strangle’ Iran is a joke
• Pakistani army chief in Tehran amid bid to restart US talks
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

About 80 percent of China’s imported oil has to pass through the Strait of Malacca. Vessels come down the Strait, sail past Singapore which is at the southernmost tip of the Strait, before they swing upwards into the South China Sea to go to the Philippines and East Asia, including China.

The two most important countries which border the Malacca Strait are Indonesia and Malaysia, one on either side of the Strait.

A very interesting development took place on Monday in Washington when the Defence Minister of Indonesia Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin signed a cooperation agreement with US War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Speculation on details
People are speculating about the details of the agreement:

• Will it allow the Americans to base troops in Indonesia and use Indonesian airspace for their air assets?
• Will American naval vessels be allowed to dock at the old Dutch port of Belawan, near Medan, in Northern Sumatra, which is near the opening to the Strait?
• Will the Malacca Strait now become the focal point in this great power struggle between America and China?
• What will Indonesia’s other BRICs partners, principally China and Russia think of Indonesia’s move in signing this agreement with the Americans?

To spice things up, Indonesian President Probowo Subianto was in Moscow a few days ago meeting with President Putin.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Without understanding the astonishing network of power exercised by the United Arab Emirates you would have no idea why the UAE was hit particularly hard by Iran in recent weeks.

Nor would you know what fuels chaos from Libya to Sudan to Somalia to Yemen.

If you understand the UAE’s business-geostrategic model and how it mobilises warlords, gold, oil, regional logistics and finance — you get much closer to seeing the pattern in the seeming madness.

• READ MORE: The war you’re not allowed to see: How the UAE rewrites the story of Iranian strikes
• Trump says war ‘very close to over’ — US claims all Iranian sea trade halted
• Iran slams YouTube ban on pro-Iranian group’s LEGO-style AI videos
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Tiny UAE, 1.4 million citizens, wields so much power that Saudi Arabia sees it as a serious threat. In December, Saudi Arabia bombed UAE surrogates in Yemen and told the emirates to exit the country. They didn’t. If the US and Israel hadn’t attacked Iran, more fireworks were in the offing.

Israel is the UAE’s close ally. They collaborate not just on the War on Iran but in many of these various “civil wars” that are both money-making ventures and a series of heartless state-destruction campaigns that give them greater geopolitical weight in the region.

Israel is UAE’s close ally.            Image: Google Earth map

We first need to understand what UAE (United Arab Emirates) really is. Comprising seven emirates — Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Fujairah — it is now the hub of an empire that both Iran and Saudi Arabia would like to knee-cap.

The powerhouse is actually Abu Dhabi, the oil giant which is the effective boss of the rest, including Dubai.

Family business with six sons
Abu Dhabi is a family business, run by The Bani Fatima, the sons of Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi who is the most influential of the wives of the late Sheikh. Today, ultimate power resides with MBZ (Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan) the eldest of her six sons.

MBZ was a long-time buddy of MBS (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman) but those days are well behind us. In the words of a senior Saudi figure, Ahmed Altuwaijri, Abu Dhabi is Israel’s Trojan horse in the region.

Along with Bahrain, UAE is a signatory to the Abraham Accords which is a US vehicle to bring Israel in from the cold. The other Gulf States oppose this “Israel First” policy and are clear that a resolution of the rights of the Palestinians must come first, although they do little about it.

The Bani Fatimid system works like this: identify a country that is experiencing instability, pick a side (preferably anti-political Islam) and offer not only to finance that militia or warlord of choice but provide the immense logistical support the UAE has, including air freighting weapons, supplies and soldiers, and the complex systems needed to convert, for example, stolen gold into arms or other assets.

Time and again this has resulted in the creation of shadow economies that end up controlling significant resources (gold, oil, agriculture, ports) and creating parallel states. Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen have all been played in this way. It is textbook divide and rule: weakening a state from within to then exert ongoing influence and resource extraction.

Dr Andreas Krieg of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London told The Thinking Muslim channel recently that UAE is far more advanced than Saudi Arabia in establishing powerful, agile networks across a wide zone of influence.

“It’s not about size. Size doesn’t matter in the networked global order that we’re operating in today. It’s about connectivity and who you can mobilise on your behalf — whether it’s in the information environment or armed non-state actors, such as the STC (in Yemen).

“But it’s also the commodity traders, the financiers, the banks, the insurance companies, the other trading corporations, that you can mobilise to generate what strategy is all about: influence and power,” Krieg says.

Libya’s terrible 15-year civil war has been immensely worsened by outside states, including UAE which turned general Khalifa Belqasim Haftar from a YouTube revolutionary into the head of the massively resourced LNA militia that now controls about a third of the country.

With UAE commanding the centre of a hub-and-spoke system, it can move fighters around the region at will, for example from Libya to Yemen where it sent thousands of LNA fighters to support local client militias. By backing the Southern Transition Council (STC) in Yemen, UAE got control over the vital Port of Aden. Similarly, by partnering with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, tons of stolen gold flows into Dubai. You get the picture.

Gold is the prime currency of the Bani Fatima empire (MBZ and his brothers). Dubai is known in the region as The City of Gold, the place where the bulk of Africa’s yellow metal, much of it smuggled, finds its way.

Imagine this: at the very time tens of millions of Sudanese are suffering famine or near-famine conditions, the UAE is facilitating the export to Dubai of tons of gold to fuel the war. This represents billions of dollars that should be held for the benefit of the people but instead is being used for empire building.

In Somalia the UAE has switched sides when economic or strategic advantage could be made. Along with Israel, UAE is backing militias who have declared a break-away state “Somaliland” that borders the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The UAE has military bases in “Somaliland” and has poured millions of dollars into the port of Berbera. With hundreds of kilometres of coastline adjacent to vital Red Sea shipping lanes, UAE and Israel will be important players in a contest with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other powers.

In December last year Israel became the first to recognise Somaliland as a state. UAE is understood to be working on the Trump administration to do the same – further trashing the idea of territorial integrity for the sake of advantage. As an aside: Israel hopes to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Somaliland one day.

All this dovetails with Israel’s strategy of smashing states to control them. For them, an alternative to regime change in Iran is Balkanisation to create several weak statelets thereby enhancing Israeli security and influence.

For those reasons and more, I hope the sovereign state of Iran survives the onslaught. I hope UAE and Israel’s genuinely evil business of fragmenting state after state is defeated. I hope the Western countries look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves: what kind of moral monsters would be allies of Israel and the UAE?

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz

The war on Iran is not only being fought on the battlefield, reports France24 — it is also playing out online.

Iran’s state media recently took a leaf out of the White House’s own social media playbook, mocking US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an AI-generated propaganda video styled like a LEGO animation.

The clip suggested that Trump launched the conflict to distract from scrutiny over his links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

• READ MORE: Iran slams YouTube ban on pro-Iranian group’s Lego-style AI videos
• Trump says war on Iran ‘close to over’; Israel pounds Lebanon
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The video quickly circulated online, highlighting how artificial intelligence is being used as a tool of political messaging and satire in modern conflicts.

As an Iranian living in New Zealand, I wake up every morning to the quiet green hills and the calm sea, but my mind is always thousands of kilometres away in Iran.

The news from home hits differently when you are far away. You feel helpless, but you sometimes also see things more clearly.

For years, I have watched the same old story from Washington and Tel Aviv: they want to change the regime in Iran. Not because they care about Iranian freedom, but because they want more power in the Middle East, control the oil routes, control the region, control everything.

• READ MORE: Diplomatic efforts to revive US-Iran talks intensify amid Hormuz blockade
• Iran a hugely ‘friendly’ country behind the sabre-rattling
• Other Eugene Doyle Solidarity articles

They tried it openly in the 12-Day War last year. They bombed, they threatened, they hoped the whole system would collapse. It didn’t. And now they are trying again, waiting for the Iranian people to rise up and do their job for them.

But it is not happening, and it will not happen.

From my small house here in New Zealand, I talk to family back home almost every day. They are tired, yes. Life is hard with sanctions, constant threats and bombings.

But Iran isn’t run by stupid people. The authorities in Iran have planned for this for a long time. If top figures are targeted, there is a chain ready to continue. It is not a secret. They have built it step by step.

Americans, Israelis don’t understand
The Americans and Israelis don’t seem to understand this because they do not know the religious and cultural soul of Iran. Without that knowledge any plan is blind. You cannot bomb a country and expect surrender when the children in every school learn about resistance from the first grade.

Take Imam Hussein, for example. Most people in New Zealand and other countries have probably never heard the name, so let me explain it simply. Imam Hussein was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

In the year 680, in what is now Iraq, he and just 72 of his loyal companions including women and children stood in the desert of Karbala against an army of tens of thousands sent by a tyrannical ruler. They were cut off from water for days. They knew they would be killed.

Yet Imam Hussein refused to swear loyalty to a corrupt leader. He chose death with dignity over a life of submission. Every year during the month of Muharram, Iranians mourn this event not as a defeat but as the ultimate symbol of resistance.

We cry, we march, we tell the story to our children: standing for justice is worth any price.

That lesson is not ancient history. It is taught in schools today as a living example of how a small group can defy an empire. How do you expect a nation raised on that story to give up when missiles fall?

We have many such examples from the revolution to the war with Iraq to every pressure since. According to many political analysts, this is exactly why the West keeps making the same mistake.

They don’t see the culture
They look at Iran through their own eyes. They see maps and weapons and money. They do not see the culture that turns every attack into fuel for survival.

The diaspora is another story. When I first came to New Zealand years ago, the Iranians overseas were split into two main groups. One part supported the Islamic Republic, the other part, mostly louder in the West, wanted the return of the monarchy and backed the king in exile. They argued online, but at least the lines were clear.

Now everything is different. The attacks on Iran have created real splits and even anger among those who used to be against the regime. Some of them trusted Trump and Netanyahu. They said on social media and in interviews that the bombs would bring freedom.

Instead, the bombs are bringing destruction, dead civilians, ruined houses, fear in the streets.

Now you see fights breaking out in the comments, in the Persian TV channels, even in family online group chats. The ones who still wave the old flag blame the Islamic Republic for every death.

But many others who once hated the government are saying, “This isn’t freedom. This is an attack on our country.” They feel betrayed. They realise the “liberators” they cheered for only wanted a weaker Iran they could control.

And the war does not look like it will end soon. I speculate it will drag on in this strange way that gets tighter then loosens a bit, then tightens again. Iran will keep using its asymmetric tools: missiles that reach far, drones that are cheap, friends in the region who act when needed.

The system will not fall
The economy will suffer, people will suffer more, but the system will not fall. The Iranian people have closed ranks around the idea of independence. Those in the diaspora who hoped for quick regime change will stay disappointed. The ones who begged for American and Israeli action are now watching their own relatives bury the dead and should be asking themselves what “freedom” really means when it comes with foreign bombs.

Living here in New Zealand, I sometimes feel guilty for the safety I have. I go to work without air-raid sirens. But every time I see the news, I remember why Iran will not break.

It isn’t because the government is perfect. Far from it. It is because the alternative they are being offered is not freedom. Instead, it is humiliation and loss of dignity.

The Americans and Israelis think they are playing chess. They do not realise they are fighting a nation that has turned resistance into a religion, a culture, a memory passed from mother to child for centuries.

I do not know how long this round will last. Maybe months, maybe years of shadow war. But one thing is clear from my quiet corner in New Zealand: regime change from outside will not come.

The Iranian people have decided, consciously or not, that they will decide their own future, even if it is painful. The planners in Washington and Tel Aviv should study Karbala again. They might understand then why their plans keep failing.

Kaveh is an Iranian who has been living in New Zealand for many years. Having travelled across many different countries, he takes great pride in contributing to various communities through his professional work and community activities in New Zealand. Republished with permission from Eugene Doyle’s Solidarity website.

This US naval blockade is meant to strangle the Iranian economy by preventing it from exporting oil — the economic lifeline of Iran. It will do nothing of the sort.

Please study the infographics below. Before the war started, Iran was furiously loading tankers with oil at 3 times the normal rate and sending them off to the Far East, with the ultimate destination being China.

China buys 90 percent of Iranian oil, with many of its private refineries — known colloquially as “tea pot” refineries — depending on Iranian crude.

• READ MORE: Trump claims Iran wants a deal ‘very badly’ as US blockade begins in Hormuz
• Iran threatens retaliation over Gulf ‘piracy’ in Trump’s naval blockade
• Global Sumud Flotilla heads from Barcelona to break Gaza blockade
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

There are presently at least 158 million barrels of Iranian oil sitting in some 96 tankers anchored near the Malaysian state of Johor. There, ship-to-ship transfers take place, before the shipments go off to their final destinations in China.

So this naval blockade will cost the Americans billions of dollars to maintain, but the only thing it will achieve is to make countries dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf such as Australia, Britain, Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh cry.

American voters will get mad at Trump for the surging prices at the pump and give the Republicans a shellacking in the mid-terms.

Iran rolling in cash
Iran will be rolling in cash from the sale of these 158 million barrels of oil already at sea and far away from any naval blockade, and the Iranians will be laughing at the stupidity of the Americans.

Isn’t this the classic illustration of the saying  “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”?

Let us see how long Trump can afford to keep up with this charade.

You would think that American intelligence would have the wherewithal to better advise their President what a harebrained idea his naval blockade is.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

AMY GOODMAN: Ship traffic has halted again in the Strait of Hormuz after President Trump ordered the US military to begin a naval blockade of all Iranian ports and coastal areas starting on Monday.

Iran denounced Trump’s move as an illegal act amounting to “piracy”. Iran has threatened to strike Gulf ports in retaliation.

Trump ordered the blockade after the US and Iran failed to reach a deal to end the war following 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The negotiations marked the highest-level talks between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. US Vice-President JD Vance headed the U.S. delegation, which included US envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Iranian negotiators had flown to Pakistan on a plane they called “Minab 168” as a tribute to the 168 people killed in a US missile strike on an elementary school in the city of Minab on February 28. The plane carried images of the dead schoolchildren, along with blood-stained school bags recovered beneath the rubble.

Global oil prices jumped after Trump announced the blockade.

We’re joined now by Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the author of several books, most recently, Oil Crisis in Iran: From Nationalism to Coup d’État. His forthcoming book is 1979: An Inevitable Revolution.

So, your response to what transpired in Pakistan, the deal that was not reached between Iran and the United States, and what this means, Professor?

Trump orders naval blockade of Iran            Video: Democracy Now!

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I think both sides actually presented, basically, ultimate demands which the other side couldn’t accept, so it was a false start. But the implications of the failure is going to be actually quite drastic on the United States, because Trump’s main concern has been to actually put a limit, a lid, on the oil prices going up, and they’ve already jumped from $88 a barrel to over $100. They’re going to increase more with the present crisis, with the embargo on the Strait of Hormuz.

And as the crisis escalates, I think the US will start bombing Iranian oil installations. Iran will retaliate by bombing the Gulf’s oil installations, gas installations. The oil prices then could really zoom up.

Some people expect it to reach $200 a barrel. In that case, you know, it will have long-term implications for Wall Street and the whole American economy, not to mention the world economy. So, things that Trump has tried to avoid, he has got, actually, himself into the major crisis, economic crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: You have Robert Malley, who had previously been involved with talks with Iran, saying, “Twenty-one hours was 20 hours too many if the goal was to reiterate a demand Iran had already rejected. It was many hours too few if the goal was to negotiate.” Your response?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He’s exactly right. And I think, I mean, what Iran sees as the present crisis is an existential one, because although the talk has been regime change, the Israeli policy, clearly, in the last 10 years has been more than regime change. It’s basically been the destruction of the Iranian state, Iranian nation. So Iran sees this as an existential threat.

There was a speech that Trump made when he launched the attack on Iran a couple of weeks ago. It was actually quite an interesting speech. He talked about various ethnic minorities being oppressed in Iran, and they were dying to be liberated from Iranian control. And he listed obvious ethnic groups, but then there was one ethnic group that, really, I’d never heard of.

So I scratched my head. What is this group? And I did what most people do: You google. And lo and behold, this ethnic group actually exists in the other side of the Caucasus Mountains in Dagestan.

So you wonder what reason they had for putting this ethnic group that doesn’t exist in Iran as one of the ethnic groups, unless there’s some sinister idea the Israelis have of a civil war in Iran, where they will recruit, actually, mercenaries from the other side of the Caucasus to bring into Iran.

Of course, this sounds far-fetched, but this is what actually happened in Syria. You had a lot of Chechens actually brought in to fight against Assad. So, the Israelis may be thinking in those terms of actually a long civil war in Iran, where they would be bringing in mercenaries from outside. So, for this reason, I think Iran sees this as a real, serious, existential war. It’s not just a question of a minor sort of fine tuning of relations with the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve written about oil in Iran a great deal. Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, tweeted on Sunday, “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade’, soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4-$5 [per gallon] gas.”

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the price could go up to $200 a barrel, even more than that, if, basically, the Gulf oil — it’s not just Iranian oil, but the whole Gulf oil and gas — is actually cut off from the world market.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what Iran wants right now and what the US wants. Ten o’clock am — we’re broadcasting right before that — Eastern time is when the US Navy blockades, apparently, the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

What exactly does this mean? How will the Gulf nations be affected? How will Iran be affected? Because it both exports oil, but, of course, it needs oil and makes a great deal of its own oil.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, I mean, it won’t break Iran, because it has — Iran has other ways of actually exporting oil. It’ll obviously be a hardship, but it’ll be a much worse hardship on the Gulf states, if Iran actually dismantles their oil installations.

And that affects directly United States economy, because so much of Gulf oil money, gas money actually goes into high-tech United States. And much of the American, basically, modern technology is funded by subsidies from the various Gulf states. So it would have drastic repercussions on US economy.

AMY GOODMAN: What does Trump want? His latest, and what Vance said — right? Vance leaves the Hungarian prime minister, campaigning for him, Orbán, who was soundly defeated, and then goes to Islamabad to lead this negotiation. He says it’s all about nuclear weapons. Vance said, “The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them [to quickly] achieve a nuclear weapon.” Your response?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Exactly. I mean, that’s exactly what the Obama agreement was.

AMY GOODMAN: That Trump pulled out of.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes, which Trump pulled out of. But if you look at that agreement, basically, it said Iran had the right to enrich, but it had to be supervised to make sure it couldn’t enrich to the level of nuclear weapons.

So, Netanyahu cries it was vague agreement. In fact, it was very precise. Iran could enrich to 3.67 percent of uranium. That’s as precise as you can get. It was limited to 200 grams of enriched uranium. And also, it was — everything was supervised.

There were 140 international monitors, including American monitors. So, this was an incredibly tight procedure to make sure that Iran would actually fulfill its promise not to go into nuclear weapons.

When Trump pulled out of that, he basically unwound the whole system. And the best he can get is going back to that. So, demand that Iran should have no nuclear enrichment is a nonstarter. The best he could get is to go back, permit Iran to have enrichment, but with monitoring that it would not be weapon enrichment.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute. In a call with the Russian President Putin, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said a deal is, “not out of reach.” So, if you can talk about whether — where you see this all headed?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, there are people in Iran in the — basically, in the National Security Council, including Pezeshkian, who think that they can make a deal with the United States. And they’ve been there a long time.

But there are also people now, I think, hardliners, who are stronger now than before the war, who are arguing that you can’t make a deal with Trump. Even if Trump makes a deal, he could, the following week, decide he’s going to pull out. So it’s a nonstarter, from their point of view, unless US can actually make full commitments. And I don’t see how they can do that, because Trump is basically untrustworthy.

So, from their point of view, I think the hardliners in Iran could argue, persuasively, the more the pressure they have, the more the prices are going to go up; the more it goes up, sooner or later, the patient will have a heart attack or a stroke. So they have an upper hand at the moment.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

On the night of February 28, the Israel-US airstrike killed his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his wife, his brother-in-law and sister-in-law.

According to a recent report from Reuters, Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei suffered life threatening injuries and apparently lost his leg and has a disfigured face.

The report said he communicated through written statements read by TV anchors and audio conferences with senior officials.

• READ MORE: US military says it will block all Iranian port traffic in Hormuz Strait
• US delegation ‘failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation’
• Protesters rally across Aotearoa in condemnation of Israel, US ‘warmongering’ and ‘shameful’ NZ​
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

I don’t want to believe Reuters or any puppet media from the West but I would like to believe that the new supreme leader is not in full capacity as expected.

Well, despite all that, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is still grounded, strong and with no signs of collapse.

They lost 40+ senior leaders but still fought two superpower countries to a ceasefire. They still control the Strait of Hormuz and have thousands of missiles and drones left.

This simply points out to the fact that IRGC is in control and guess who is the leader?

Led IRGC for decades
Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the martyred Ali Khamenei, who led IRGC for decades with a hand injury over a bomb explosion in a tape recorder in 1981.

Imagine you were Mojtaba who has just lost all your family to a brutal attack that claimed even more lives in your country.

In one way or another you survived and you have people taking instructions from you.

At this point I don’t think death scares you anymore because you saw death in its true colours and even had a conversation with it.

Back to myself, what if I was Mojtaba Khamenei? First, no surrender. I would fight to the last microsecond and die fighting but surrendering is where I draw the line.

Second, the Strait of Hormuz is non-negotiable. It is our territorial waters and remains under our control. We do with it what we want. It’s ours, period.

After all, it was open and safe for all until someone decided to attack us and now we call the shots. It’s either you agree with our terms of gerrarahia!

Two options on missiles
On our missile programme, two options. It’s either we maintain our missile programme or develop nukes.

We won’t sit here and be at the mercies of aggressive enemies like Israel and US with no options to protect ourselves.

It’s either we can nuke you or we can missile you one or both options. Imagine just being there and being limited to defensive missiles capabilities yet those asking you to do that are the same people attacking you during negotiations!

Uranium enrichment. Let everyone enrich uranium and use it however they want. It’s either everyone can or no one can’t. No selective privileges.

Lastly, if I was Mojtaba Khamenei, those who murdered my family would definitely pay, not by dollars, not by Shekel and of course not by propaganda but by blood.

What would you do, if you were Mojtaba Khamenei?

Bonface Chisutia is a writer and academic based in Nairobi, Kenya. This commentary is republished from his Facebook account.

When news reports first indicated that US Vice-President JD Vance was going to lead the Americans in the negotiations with Iran, the country the US and Israel are waging a foolish war against, there was a sense that someone even as young him may have recognised the train wreck that Donald Trump was creating.

Former top negotiators real estate developer Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, had already proven to be self-enriching charlatans like Trump.

If someone understood a little — only a little — more about the state of affairs, they could be excellent replacements to Witkoff and Kushner and save America from a crisis of its own making.

• READ MORE: US military to block all Iran-bound ships from transiting the Hormuz Strait
• US delegation ‘failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation’
• Protesters rally across Aotearoa in condemnation of Israel, US ‘warmongering’ and ‘shameful’ NZ​
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

As it transpired, that person was not Vance.
​
In the negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, the US vice-president proved to be no more than a minion to Trump, not someone who can rise to the occasion and stop the stupid war that is taking down the American military and the global economy.
​
If you cannot see how disastrously America and Israel are conducting the war, here is Professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on European history, parsing it for you in plain language on March 18, just two weeks after the war started:
​

“[Trump] took the greatest military force in world history, lost the war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded that the media lie about this and everything else.

I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength.”
​

By now, it is an open secret that Trump is being blackmailed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who holds evidence of degenerate behavior by the US president from his devilish days on disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

But even in a moment of incompetence, incredible loss, and national humiliation for America like this, Vance had a chance to save his country.
​
Now we know for certain that everyone who has ever worked for Trump is diminished by it. Vance was an exception only for a second.
​
IRNA News Agency is state-controlled media.

AMY GOODMAN: As the US and Iran prepared to hold ceasefire talks in Pakistan today, Israel is continuing to bomb Lebanon.

The death toll from Israel’s massive attack on Wednesday topped 300. More than 1150 people were injured. In a span of 10 minutes, Israel struck 100 sites across Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

The Financial Times described Israel’s attack on Lebanon as, “one of the deadliest single bombing campaigns in the history of a country wracked by decades of war and destruction”.

• READ MORE: Vance in Pakistan to lead US-Iran ceasefire talks; Israel bombs Lebanon
• Ending Israel’s war on peace – Iran’s 10-point proposal is serious
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Israel and the US have claimed the Iran ceasefire deal does not include Lebanon, but numerous other nations disagree — and the ceasefire mediator Pakistan provided written evidence that Lebanon was included.

Foreign ministers of Pakistan and France condemned what they called “serious ceasefire violations made in Lebanon”. CBS News reports Trump initially agreed Lebanon was included in the ceasefire, but his position changed after a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The US is expected to host talks between Israel and Lebanon on Tuesday. As Israel continues to attack Lebanon, Hezbollah has retaliated by firing missiles at Israel.

At the United Nations, a spokesperson for the secretary-general spoke.

STÉPHANE DUJARRIC: With the announcements of the ceasefire between Iran and the United States, the ongoing military activity in Lebanon poses a grave risk to the ceasefire and efforts towards a lasting and comprehensive peace in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: Since the war began in late February, Israel has killed more than 1530 people in Lebanon, including at least 130 children. In Beirut, grieving families gathered at hospitals to identify bodies after Israel’s attacks on Wednesday.

MOHAMMED: [translated] I had dropped off my sister. She went up into the house. I went on a little trip, and they hid. I came back and didn’t find the building.

I didn’t find my sister, and I didn’t find my family, any of them. I found my brother, and his son was in the rubble.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Rania Abouzeid. She’s an award-winning Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Her books include No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria. Her latest piece in New York magazine, headlined “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Rania. Why don’t you describe those scenes of a day of carnage in Beirut? We have a four-second delay, so we will wait.

Lebanon death toll tops 300 from Israel’s Black Wednesday    Video: Democracy Now

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was 10 minutes of terror, a day that the Lebanese are calling Black Wednesday. It was hard to tell what was blowing up where, because those hundred or so attacks were all happening simultaneously, and not just in the capital Beirut, but also in other parts of the country.

They targeted very densely populated parts of the capital, neighbourhoods in the capital that were themselves hosting people who had been displaced from other parts of the country. In the Beqaa, mourners at a funeral in a cemetery were targeted. In Beirut, workers at a well-known roastery were removed by Civil Defence personnel as charred corpses.

So, it was a very, very ugly day. And as we speak, the — I can’t say “rescue,” because there’s — unfortunately, the people are dead, but search teams continue to try and locate and find and retrieve the remains of people who were killed in the rubble of their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Israel will “continue to strike Hezbollah wherever required,” but later said he’s approved direct talks with Lebanon as soon as possible. Can you talk about what’s happening with these negotiations?

You had the Belgian foreign minister who had come to Beirut to meet with the Lebanese President Aoun, and the bombing hit very close to their quarters, as he was congratulating the Lebanese president on saying that he would directly negotiate with Israel, then condemned the attack and said Lebanon had to be included with the ceasefire.

Can you take it from there? What’s happening now? Where do you understand these talks will take place?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the first thing is that the talks remove Lebanon from the wider ceasefire talks that are due to take place between Iran and America tomorrow. That has many Lebanese worried, because they wonder: What sort of leverage does Lebanon have? It doesn’t exactly have a Strait of Hormuz, whereas Iran seems to have a stronger negotiating position.

Yesterday, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam made it quite clear. He said that Lebanon, the Lebanese government, will negotiate for Lebanon, and that nobody else will do so.

So he has very clearly drawn the line between whatever Iran negotiates and what he hopes his government will be able to negotiate with the Israelis. Now, the Iranian foreign minister has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a condition of tomorrow’s talks, so it’s unclear whether or not they are going to go ahead.

So, in addition to the question of what sort of leverage does Lebanon have, some Lebanese are also worried because there is a precedent. There is a 15-month so-called ceasefire, where the — this is the second war in less than two years — and there was a 15-month ceasefire between the two.

During that period, the Lebanese government was supposed to negotiate indirectly with Israel, through something called a “mechanism” — which was US and French-led — to ensure that each side fulfilled its requirements under the terms of that ceasefire. During those 15 months, Israel continued to occupy five hilltop positions that it had newly seized in the war.

It was supposed to withdraw from them under the ceasefire. It didn’t. It was supposed to withdraw its troops back across its border under the ceasefire. It didn’t. So the Lebanese government was unable to get Israel to adhere to any of the conditions of the ceasefire. So some Lebanese wonder what it will be able to achieve now.

In addition, I have to say that the — just the mere fact of direct talks not only breaks a taboo here in Lebanon, it also breaks a very longstanding law. Since the mid-1950s here, it is considered an act of treason to have any direct interaction with an Israeli.

But the Lebanese president himself, General Joseph Aoun, about a month ago, called for direct talks with Israel, breaking that massive, massive taboo. He had four conditions for these talks that were supposed to be followed sequentially. The first condition was an immediate and complete ceasefire.

Condition number two was that the Lebanese Army is strengthened. Third was that the Lebanese Army would continue its efforts to disarm Hezbollah.

And then fourth was the direct negotiation. So it looks like the Lebanese state has jumped over the president’s own — you know, three of his conditions to go straight to the fourth one.

So, Hezbollah, for its part, has said it does not think that Lebanon should be negotiating under fire, because it puts it in the weaker position. Some Lebanese fear that this is a ploy by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prolong the war under the pretext of, you know, having these talks under fire.

The proponents of the talks, I have to say, say that it is an issue of Lebanese sovereignty that Lebanon will negotiate any sort of deal with the Israelis. They also say that Lebanon is not a card for the Iranians to wield or to use in any negotiations. And they point out that, well, you don’t exactly talk to your friends to make deals; you talk to your enemies.

So, it’s a very, very divisive issue. The Hezbollah secretary-general is due to give a speech where he will, no doubt, address the issue of the talks. And there’s supposed to be a protest here in Lebanon, just behind me, actually, in front of the Grand Serail, which is where the prime minister’s office is, against the idea of these talks.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to the questions you raise in your latest New York magazine piece, “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.” First of all, “How much of Lebanon is Israel prepared to destroy while claiming to target Hezbollah and its infrastructure, and will the world just watch as it does so?”

And your second question: “Can Israel even defeat Hezbollah militarily or is it, as many Lebanese suspect, trying to exact so painful a price from fellow Lebanese that they turn on the group, plunging the country into civil strife?”

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the Israelis have made no secret of what they want to do in Lebanon. Officials, from the defence minister, Smotrich, the finance minister, they have all talked about Lebanon being part of their Greater Israel project. They have talked about seizing and occupying southern Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, which, at its deepest, is about 30 km away from the Israeli border.

Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, said that he wants to turn that area, that lush, verdant agricultural area, into a wasteland that resembles what the Israelis did in Gaza. He has threatened that the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have been displaced from there will not be allowed to return.

So, that’s what the Israelis have indicated that they want to do.

In terms of what they’re able to do, they have, according to Israeli media reports, had to scale back some of those ambitions because of the fierce resistance that they’re facing on the ground from Hezbollah fighters.

Let me give you the example of a town in southern Lebanon called Khiam, where there are Israeli forces in this town, but they have been fighting for weeks and weeks to try and take control of it, and they have been unable to.

So, according to the Israeli media reports, they now say that they want to occupy about a three-to-four-kilometre strip of territory. And Hezbollah will, no doubt, fight and try and prevent them from doing that, too. So, that’s what the Israelis want to do.

In terms of Lebanese turning on each other, Israeli officials called up — there are a couple of Christian villages down in the south. There are also Sunni. There are Druze, as well as the Shiite villages down south. It’s a mixed area.

And the Israeli officials called up some of those Christian towns, where the people refuse to leave their territory, and told them, “Listen, do not shelter your Shiite neighbours; otherwise, you will come under attack.”

So, that’s a very clear sort of indication of what the Israelis are sort of hoping to foment in terms of civil strife and turning, literally, neighbour against neighbour.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play a clip from a Beirut resident. Naim Chebbo survived a bombing on Wednesday, said he’s now afraid to sleep. He said he wants the fighting to stop, and blamed Hezbollah.

NAIM CHEBBO: [translated] We want peace. We don’t want problems with anyone anymore. Eighty percent of Arab countries have peace with Israel. Why doesn’t Lebanon have peace, so that we can end all these problems?

As long as Hezbollah is in Lebanon, Israel will strike Lebanon. That’s it. Hezbollah is not defending Lebanon. It’s defending Iran’s agenda. That’s it.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, how common or typical is this comment of a Lebanese who survived the bombing on Wednesday, Israel’s bombing?

RANIA ABOUZEID: The Lebanese are very divided over the issue of Hezbollah and its weapons, and they always have been, but more so now in this recent war, because it started on March 2, and Hezbollah lobbed about six rockets into Israel, claiming that it was in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as, “in defense of Lebanon.”

So, many Lebanese saw it as a war of choice almost by Hezbollah.

Now, Hezbollah and its supporters say that after those 15 months of a ceasefire — that wasn’t really a ceasefire, because, according to the UN, Israel violated Lebanon’s sovereignty about 15,000 times during that period. There were thousands of attacks, resulting in the deaths of more than 350 Lebanese.

So, Hezbollah supporters say they were patient for those 15 months, and now they have chosen to respond.

But, certainly, there are Lebanese who are very angry with Hezbollah. They don’t want any war. I mean, no Lebanese wants war, even the hundreds of thousands of displaced, many of whom might be Hezbollah supporters. Everybody wants to go home.

You know, war is not the option for anybody. But it’s a question of: Under what circumstances, for example, will Lebanon negotiate with Israel? Will it be under the Iranian umbrella in these talks tomorrow, or will it try and forge another path? And which is better?

I mean, look, there are some Lebanese who don’t care if aliens will negotiate on behalf of Lebanon as long as it can secure a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to, finally, ask you about what’s happening on the ground. According to the World Health Organisation, some of Lebanon’s hospitals may run out of lifesaving medical supplies within days and attempt to treat patients wounded by the Israeli airstrikes. This is WHO representative in Lebanon, Dr Abdinasir Abubakar.

DR. ABDINASIR ABUBAKAR: There are some shortages, some of those essential chronic medications, the insulin, but also some of the, you know, dialysis supplies.

If the current situation and the current demand actually continue and the current escalation continue, probably the country may be facing a very real risk of critical shortage, including trauma supplies, surgical materials, blood products, chronic medications.

And any other further disruption could seriously hinder the ability of providing timely, adequate care for both emergency and ongoing health needs.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, your final comments on what you think is about to happen? And do you think Iran will insist on including this in the ceasefire, joined by many countries around the world who are saying Lebanon has to be included, or, as you write in your column, “many Lebanese are wondering whether Iran will forsake Hezbollah and allow Lebanon to be pounded”?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Very difficult to tell, Amy. That’s the honest truth. But, you know, Iran also has its considerations. If it does forsake Hezbollah and goes it alone, well, then, you know, Hezbollah is part of Iran’s Axis of Resistance. There are other allies in the region who will see this and wonder if Iran might forsake it, too.

So it’s a question of its broader network. There are the Houthis in Yemen. There are various militia groups in Iraq who will be watching very carefully to see what Iran does, if it stands by its ally, Hezbollah, or if it doesn’t.

There are also — it also has domestic considerations. You know, Iranians have been pounded now for weeks and weeks. They want a reprieve. They don’t want to return to war.

So, the Iranians will be juggling those, their own sort of conditions, as well, in terms of what their ultimate stance is with regard to heading to the negotiations with or without a ceasefire in Lebanon.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Rania, I mean, you are there in Beirut. Israel struck central Beirut, southern Beirut, gone beyond the Litani River to the Zahrani River, some are wondering if they’ll take over that whole land, about a fifth of Lebanon. But you, yourself, are you afraid to walk in the streets?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It depends on what streets, Amy. It depends on where, what part of Lebanon, because that’s the thing about Wednesday’s attack, is that it shattered the sense that any place is safe, because you just don’t know.

The neighbourhoods that were targeted were very far, for example, from the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah has some institutions — not that that justifies striking a very densely, you know, populated area. The southern suburbs are home to hundreds of thousands of people.

But it was anybody’s guess. Like, why target a street with a roastery? Why target during rush hour when children were leaving school and civil servants were heading home? So, that’s the thing. The sense of safety anywhere has been shattered.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

ANALYSIS: By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

A two-week ceasefire has partially halted the Israel-US war on Iran. The war accomplished precisely nothing that a competent diplomat could not have achieved in an afternoon.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and it is open again now, but with more Iranian control.

Meanwhile, the chaos continues. Israel is intent on blowing up the ceasefire, as this was Israel’s war from the start.

• READ MORE: This illegal US-Israeli attack on Iran is also an assault on the United Nations
• Israel says no ceasefire with Lebanon, US-Iran talks due
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Israel dazzled Trump with the prospect of a one-day decapitation strike that would put Trump in charge of Iran’s oil. Israel, in turn, was out for bigger prey: to bring down the Iranian regime and thereby become the regional hegemon of Western Asia.

The foundation of the ceasefire is Iran’s 10-point plan, which Trump (perhaps unwittingly) called a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” The plan makes sense, but it is a major climbdown for the US, and probably a redline for Israel.

Among other points, the plan calls for an end to the wars raging in the Middle East, almost all of which have Israel at their root cause. The plan would also resolve the nuclear issue, essentially by going back to the JCPOA that Trump ripped up in 2018.

The Iran War, and the other wars raging across the Middle East, trace back to one core Israeli idea, that Israel will permanently and steadfastly oppose a sovereign Palestinian state and will topple any government in the Middle East that supports armed struggle for national sovereignty.

It is crucial to note that the UN General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions, such as Resolution 37/43 (1982), affirming that political self-determination is so vital, that armed struggle in the quest for self-determination is legitimate.

The UN was born, in part, out of the determination to end the centuries of European imperial domination over Africa and Asia. Of course, there would be no cause for armed struggle if Israel would accept a political solution, notably the two-state solution that has overwhelming support throughout the world.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it.
Netanyahu’s core goal may be summarised as Greater Israel. This means no Palestinian sovereignty, and no clear boundaries for Israel even beyond the boundary of historical Palestine under British rule after the First World War.

Zionist extremists like Netanyahu’s political allies, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich favour Israeli control over parts of Lebanon and Syria, as well as permanent control over all of what was British Palestine.

America’s Christian Zionists, exemplified by the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and a strong voter base of Trump, speak of God’s promise to Israel of the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates. Crazy stuff, but these are real beliefs, nonetheless, and they are conveyed in the White House.

Israel’s strategy is therefore regime change in every country that resists Greater Israel, a plan already foreshadowed in the famous political document “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” written by US Zionist neocons as a platform for Netanyahu’s new government in 1996.

We’ve had constant wars in the Middle East since then to implement the Clean Break vision. This has included the war in Libya to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi, the wars in Lebanon, the war to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the war to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and now the war to topple the Iranian regime.

This is not to say that the US lacks its own grandiose ideas. Israel wants regional hegemony, this is not a secret. Netanyahu confirmed these ambitions in his recent remarks about Israel becoming “a regional power, and in certain fields a global power.”

On the other hand, American officials dream of global hegemony. And Trump dreams of money. He craves the Iranian oil and repeatedly said so.

In any event, it’s clear that this war was Netanyahu’s creation. He and the Mossad chief came to Washington to sell Trump a bill of goods. It’s not hard. Trump was suckered, while everybody else had their doubts about Netanyahu’s claims of an easy one-day decapitation strike — essentially a replay of the US operation in Venezuela.

It’s pathetic to “listen in” on the White House discussion, as revealed by the New York Times. Netanyahu, a con man, presented rosy scenarios of regime change that US intelligence contradicted, yet Trump foolishly accepted.

Trump and Netanyahu were cheered on by Christian Zionists (Hegseth), Jewish Zionists and real-estate developers (Kushner and Witkoff), a faith healer (Franklin Graham), and high-level sycophants (Rubio and Ratcliffe).

Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire
Until Tuesday evening, it looked like Trump might lead the world blindly to the Third World War. The vulgarity and brutality of his public rhetoric was unmatched in US presidential history.

Now we know that he was desperately seeking an off-ramp and using Pakistan for that purpose. While Trump was telling the world that Iran was begging for a ceasefire, it was Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire. The Pakistani leader delivered it.

The ceasefire is good, and the 10-point plan is good, even if perhaps Trump didn’t know what was in it when he said that it was a good basis for negotiation. Israel will, in any event, work overtime to break it, and has already started to do so, with carpet bombing of Beirut that is killing hundreds of civilians, and with other strikes.

A permanent US-Iran agreement is the last thing that Netanyahu wants. That would end his dream of Greater Israel.

Yet there is a way to peace and that is for the US to face reality. Israel is the real “terror state,” waging perpetual war throughout the Middle East for a wholly indefensible reason — to have unchecked freedom to terrorise and rule over the Palestinian people and to expand its borders as Israel’s zealots see fit.

To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognised borders of June 4, 1967.

Iran’s 10-point plan can be the basis of a comprehensive regional peace — if the US accepts the reality of a state of Palestine. In that case, Iran would likely agree to stop funding non-state belligerents, and Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the entire region could live in mutual security and peace.

That outcome should be the basis of a negotiated agreement of the US and Iran in the next two weeks.

American views clear
The American people have made their views clear. A 2025 Pew survey finds most Jewish Americans lack confidence in Netanyahu and back the two-state solution. Most Americans now view Israel unfavourably, the highest unfavourability in history. Sympathy for Israel has hit a 25-year low. Now the political class must catch up with the public.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it. Iran’s proposal is serious and the ceasefire is a fragile opening for a comprehensive settlement.

The question is whether the US will, once again, allow Israel to destroy the peace, or rather this time stand up for America’s interests and the world’s interests in a lasting peace.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

Republished under Creative Commons.

An hour before Trump said he’d cause the death of a “whole civilisation” if Iran didn’t open the strait of Hormuz, an Iranian official said the shipping channel would be reopened for two weeks if the United States stopped bombing Iran.

The US has now stopped bombing Iran.

So we’re back to the status quo before Trump began his war.

• READ MORE: Israel’s Lebanon attacks threaten US-Iran ceasefire as negotiations near
• Trump claims ‘success’ in Iran in just 32 days compared to lengthy US wars
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Only now, Iran can credibly threaten to close the strait if it doesn’t get what it wants from Trump — thereby causing havoc to the US and world economies. Trump’s only remaining bargaining chip is his threat of committing war crimes.

In other words, Tuesday’s showdown was a clear victory for Iran and a clear defeat for Trump (although he framed it as a victory).

The Iran fiasco is only the latest in a host of examples revealing how to defeat Trump.

In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Greenland.

Inside the US
Inside the United States, the people of Minneapolis have used them, as have Harvard University, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, writer E Jean Carroll and the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale.

What’s the strategy that connects them all? All refused to cave to Trump, despite his superior military or economic power.

Instead, they’ve engaged in a kind of jiujitsu in which they use Trump’s power against him, while allowing Trump to save face by claiming he’s won. Consider:

Iran knew it was no match for the superior might of the US (and Israel). So it used cheap drones and missiles to close the Strait of Hormuz and incapacitate other Gulf oil installations, thereby driving up the prices of oil and gas at the pump in the US, which has put growing political pressure on Trump, months before a midterm election. Hence, Trump has been forced to pause his war.

China knew what to do when Trump imposed a giant tariff on Chinese exports to the US: it put restrictions on seven types of heavy rare earth metals and magnets, crucial to US defense and tech industries. Beijing continues to use these rare earth restrictions as tactical levers in ongoing negotiations over trade, rather than demand complete surrender by Trump on his trade policies.

Russia has leveraged its vast deposits of oil and natural gas in gaining leverage over US allies. It has also demonstrated its potential ability to intrude into US elections (the Mueller report detailed a “sweeping and systematic” campaign by Russia to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, primarily favouring Trump).

Canada and Mexico have won tariff showdowns with Trump by leveraging the US’s substantial economic dependence on them for components and raw materials, but without crowing about their victories.

Greenland has leveraged public opinion globally and in the United States — overwhelmingly against an American invasion or occupation — to curb Trump’s ambitions there.

Minneapolis resistance
Now, as to what’s happened inside the United States:

The citizens of Minneapolis and St Paul have leveraged their asymmetric power against Trump’s ICE and border patrol agents by carefully organising themselves into a force of non-violent resistance to protect immigrants there.

Harvard University’s strategy for resisting Trump’s interference in Harvard’s academic freedom has been to leverage its influence with the federal courts in Boston and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to get rulings that stopped Trump (although he’s still trying).

The comedian Jimmy Kimmel turned a political crisis into a ratings victory by using the public backlash against his suspension from ABC, which Disney owns. Since ABC reinstated him, Kimmel has continued to target Trump, and secured his contract through 2027.

The writer E Jean Carroll defeated Donald Trump in two civil cases over sexual abuse and defamation, ultimately securing over $88 million in damages from him — verdicts that have been upheld by federal appeals courts.

Carroll’s lawyers used a civil lawsuit, requiring a lower burden of proof than proving a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. They presented the jury with Trump’s Access Hollywood tape and testimony from other Trump accusers. His depositions, where he called her a “whack job”, were played for the jury.

The law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale refused to follow Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms that had represented causes or clients that Trump opposed.

First Amendment rights infringed
The firms leveraged constitutional arguments with the federal courts — arguing that the orders infringed on their First Amendment rights to advocate whatever causes they wished, violated the constitution’s separation of powers because the orders would prevent the judiciary from considering challenges to executive authority, and violated their clients’ rights under the constitution to be represented.

The Justice Department ultimately dropped its fight against these firms in March 2026 after federal appellate judges also found Trump’s orders unconstitutional.

What’s happened to the countries and organisations that have caved to Trump?

All have strengthened Trump’s leverage over them. Europe seems incapacitated, fearing Trump will leave Nato (despite a US law prohibiting it), but unable to decide where to draw the line with him.

The media network ABC continues to lose viewers, while being subject to Trump’s next whims. CBS was purchased by the Trump allies Larry Ellison and his son, David, and is hemorrhaging talent.

Columbia University has been racked by dissent from both students and faculty. The Trump regime continues to make demands of it.

The law firms that caved in to Trump’s executive orders have seen lawyers exit who felt the deals betrayed the firms’ values and principles.

Microsoft dropped Simpson Thacher to work with Jenner & Block — a firm that fought Trump. Students at elite law schools have also reportedly begun to shun firms that struck deals with the Trump regime.

Bottom line: there’s now a clear blueprint for how to defeat Trump. It’s available to any country, organisation or person on which he seeks to impose his will: reject his demands and then use your own asymmetric power — a form of jiujitsu — to turn Trump’s power against him.

Robert Reich, a former US Secretary of Labour, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and he blogs at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK. This article is republished from his Facebook page — other Robert Reich articles at Asia Pacific Report.

Yesterday began with Donald Trump issuing genocidal threats against Iran on social media and ended — just ten hours later — with the announcement of a 14-day ceasefire, on Iran’s terms.

Even by the volatile standards of Trump’s presidency, the whiplash is extraordinary. What, then, have the two sides actually agreed to — and what might it mean?

In a subsequent post, Trump asserted that Iran had agreed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open during the two-week pause in hostilities. Negotiations, he added, will proceed over that period on the basis of Iran’s 10-point plan, which he described as a “workable” foundation for talks.

• READ MORE: ‘Killing machine’: Lebanon mourns as Israeli raids shake US-Iran
• Iranians breathe a ‘ceasefire’ sigh of relief as all sides claim victory
• Ignoring genocide – the bill for Australia’s silence has arrived
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Those 10 points are:

1. The US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.
2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.
3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear programme.
4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.
5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.
6. End of all United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.
7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear programme.
8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.
9. Withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.
10. Ceasefire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The United States has not, of course, signed on to all 10 points. But the mere fact that Iran’s framework will anchor the negotiations amounts to a significant diplomatic victory for Tehran.

More striking still, according to the Associated Press, Iran will retain control of the Strait during the ceasefire and continue — alongside Oman — to collect transit fees from passing vessels. In effect, Washington appears to have conceded that reopening the waterway comes with tacit recognition of Iran’s authority over it.

The geopolitical consequences could be profound. As Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti note in Responsible Statecraft, Tehran is likely to leverage this position to rebuild economic ties with Asian and European partners — countries that once traded extensively with Iran but were driven out of its market over the past 15 years by US sanctions.

Also strategic
Iran’s calculus is not driven solely by solidarity with Palestinians and Lebanese. It is also strategic. Continued Israeli bombardment risks reigniting direct confrontation between Israel and Iran — a cycle that has already flared twice since October 7.

From Tehran’s perspective, a durable halt to its conflict with Israel is inseparable from ending Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. This is not an aspirational add-on; it is a prerequisite.

The forthcoming talks in Islamabad between Washington and Tehran may yet falter. But the terrain has shifted. Trump’s failed use of force has blunted the credibility of American military threats, introducing a new dynamic into US-Iran diplomacy.

Washington can still rattle its sabre. But after a failed war, such threats ring hollow.

The United States is no longer in a position to dictate terms; any agreement will have to rest on genuine compromise. That, in turn, demands real diplomacy — patience, discipline, and a tolerance for ambiguity — qualities not typically associated with Trump.

It may also require the participation of other major powers, particularly China, to help anchor the process and reduce the risk of a relapse into conflict.

Above all, the ceasefire’s durability will hinge on whether Trump can restrain Israel from undermining the diplomatic track.

No illusions
On this point, there should be no illusions. Senior Israeli officials have already denounced the agreement as the greatest “political disaster” in the country’s history — a signal, if any were needed, of how fragile this moment may prove to be.

Even if the talks collapse — and even if Israel resumes its bombardment of Iran — it does not necessarily follow that the United States will return to war. There is little reason to believe a second round would produce a different outcome, or that it would not once again leave Iran in a position to hold the global economy hostage.

In that sense, Tehran has, at least for now, restored a measure of deterrence.

One final point bears emphasis: this elective war was not only a strategic blunder. Rather than precipitating regime change, it has likely granted Iran’s theocracy a renewed lease on life — much as Saddam Hussein did in 1980, when his invasion enabled Ayatollah Khomeini to consolidate power at home.

The magnitude of this miscalculation may well puzzle historians for decades to come.

Dr Trita Parsi is the executive VP of the Quincy Institute and an award-winning author. Washingtonian Magazine has named him one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy. Noam Chomsky calls him “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran”.

Having launched an illegal, destructive war that brutally struck the entire planet’s economy (and confirmed once again Europe’s combination of irrelevance and hypocrisy), and after threatening Iran with genocide and “civilisational annihilation,” President Trump ultimately backed down on everything.

Like a Roman Emperor during the Empire’s declining years would declare victory and stage triumphs in Rome following massive defeats of his legions at the hands of Gothic warriors, so now does this modern American Nero struggle to convince us that he “won”.

In reality, Iran now decides which vessels pass through the Strait of Hormuz and, for the first time, charge them tolls for so doing.

• READ MORE: US, Iran announce two-week ceasefire; Israel claims truce excludes Lebanon
• Pope Leo XIV hails ceasefire between US and Iran as “sign of real hope”
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The demands of the White House, which Trump had set as prerequisites for stopping the bombings, have bitten the dust.

The surrender of Iran’s enriched uranium, the demand for the destruction of Iran’s missiles, the vain hopes for regime change, the designs on Iranian oil — all of these goals were forgotten.

What has not been forgotten, and will not be forgotten, are the 180 schoolgirls that the US murdered on the first day of their attack by striking their school — along with the thousands of other killed and maimed civilians.

False sense of relief
Lest the world be overtaken by a false sense of relief, it is crucial to brace ourselves for the long-lasting economic repercussions of Trump’s idiotic war.

Make no mistake: the shockwaves of economic hardship caused by the US attack on Iran may wane but it will not be averted.

The wave of soaring prices, the blow to employment, the increase in interest rates and foreclosures will not disappear with this ceasefire.

On the contrary, because of the oligarchic cartels that also see this crisis as an opportunity, it will take political pressure by the many on the very few to reverse the negative consequences of this criminal war, as well as all the various crises that preceded it.

Republished from Yanis Varoufakis’ X feed.

There is a bitter truth that must be spoken before we can talk honestly about what is happening to us now. Michael West Media reports on Australia’s quiet complicity in the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.

When the hospitals were destroyed, when the aid was blocked, when children were pulled from rubble in pieces, when the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organisations with decades of credibility in conflict zones used words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, Australia was quiet.

Not uniformly. Not entirely. There were protests in every major city, sustained over months, of a size and seriousness this country has not seen since the Iraq War.

• READ MORE: Iran accepts ceasefire after Trump says it will pause bombing for two weeks
• Synagogue in Tehran ‘completely destroyed’ in US-Israeli attack
• Top university says US-Israel attack targeted Iran’s progress, AI learning
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

There were independent senators who stood in Parliament and said what needed to be said, in plain language, without diplomatic hedging. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets, and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.

Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities, and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience, screamed into a political void and were told, in effect, to calm down.

Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.

“I’m offended by crocs,” says man apprehended by many police & special ops for wearing “F… Israel” t-shirt

The footage #andrewbrown #legend #auspol pic.twitter.com/fc1p3f911d

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) April 6, 2026

The country, as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, its official voice to the world, was quiet.

The cost of silence
That silence had a cost. Not just a moral cost, though the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully reckon with.

A strategic cost. The cost of allowing a logic of unchecked military impunity to establish itself as the operating principle of the US-Israeli alliance. A logic that, once normalised in Gaza, did not stay in Gaza.

It never does.

More than 72,000 people killed so far. More than 171,000 injured. An entire civilian population, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, was systematically starved, displaced, and destroyed.

Journalists were killed in numbers that constitute, by any honest accounting, a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Paramedics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were struck.

Aid workers from Australia’s own partner organisations were killed in strikes so precise they could not have been accidental.

Australia expressed concern.

Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.

And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by 18 months of zero meaningful consequence, turned its weapons on a sovereign nation-state, on Iran, on February 28 of this year, Australia expressed support. Called it constructive. Offered the American justification back to its own people as sovereign Australian policy.

Warnings ignored
The people warning loudest about Gaza were not merely warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israeli strategic ambition, freed from the constraints of international law and serious allied pushback, would expand. Would find new targets. Would come, eventually, for the stability of every country caught in its orbit.

They were right. And they were called antisemitic for saying so.

Iran did not come from nowhere. The assault on Iran is the direct and logical extension of the impunity normalised in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population with no meaningful consequence, you can bomb a sovereign nation.

If the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu means nothing, then international law means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force.

And the consequences of force are distributed not just to the combatants but to every country whose government chose alignment over principle.

Australia chose alignment over the people of Gaza. It chose it again over Iran. And now it is discovering, at the bowser and the checkout and the business bank account, exactly what that choice costs.

The war came home
Here is what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.

The pain is no longer abstract.

When Gaza burned, the average Australian, cocooned by geographic distance, insulated by a media that kept the most confronting images off prime time, reassured by politicians who described it as heartbreaking while doing nothing, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.

Terrible, certainly. Distant. Manageable. Something that happened over there, to people over there, in a conflict that had been going on forever and would presumably continue

without any particular bearing on the school fees or the mortgage or the quarterly business figures.

That fiction is now dead.

The fuel price spike is not over there. The supply chain disruption is not over there. The investment uncertainty showing up in superannuation statements, in business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months.

None of that is over there.

The war came home. Not in body bags. Not in the specific grief of a military family. It came home in the way that imperial adventurism always eventually comes home to the countries that enable it.

Through the economy. Through the slow, grinding, distributed punishment of a population that was never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices would cost them.

Australia’s complicity
Australia was a participant in Gaza’s destruction. Not with weapons. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. With the specific, material legitimacy that flows from a liberal democracy declining to formally object. And with the arms adjacent, intelligence and security cooperation that flows through Five Eyes and has never been seriously interrogated in the Australian public domain.

Complicity is not passive.

When you have the power to intervene, to sanction, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic cover, and you choose not to, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. And participants, eventually, share in the consequences.

The Palestinian people could not make Australia listen with their suffering alone.

Not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the suffering was made distant. The media made it complex. The politicians made it delicate. The lobby groups made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what was plainly happening.

The whole architecture of managed consent did its job with brutal efficiency for 18 months.

But a 40 percent fuel price increase cuts through managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians told to absorb the economic consequences of a war their government endorsed without their knowledge or consent. That cuts through everything.

The people who protested over Gaza, who were dismissed and belittled and accused of antisemitism and told they were being naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class is only now beginning to grasp: That the world does not offer permanent non-involvement. That the wars you enable reach you. That the impunity you excuse comes back denominated in currencies you understand personally.

Fuel. Food. Jobs. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.
This is that reckoning. The genocide in Gaza did not wake Australia up, the bill for enabling it will.

And when Australia wakes, fully, clearly, with the focused fury of people who now understand exactly what was done to them, the politicians who called it constructive and the media that told them to blame the Energy Minister are going to find that managed consent has a shelf life.

That shelf life has expired.

Vietnam survived Nixon’s madman theory and the world survived the era of mutually assured destruction. Now we face the moment of two super-empowered shitheads. There is nothing nicer to call them.

Who will stop two self-obsessed, very old men, already dedicated to tearing down humanity? Today Trump openly declares his intention to destroy a civilisation. They are apparently only able to see war personally, Netanyahu as the climax of 40 years of dreaming, and Trump as his arbitrary prerogative.

In lockstep they destroyed Gaza’s homes, places of learning and culture, health and modernity. They murdered civilians with abandon and drew pictures of capitalist castles on the beach — and still they failed, just as their over-armed predecessors have failed from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

• READ MORE: Iran accepts ceasefire after Trump says it will pause bombing for two weeks
• Synagogue in Tehran ‘completely destroyed’ in US-Israeli attack
• Top university says US-Israel attack targeted Iran’s progress, AI learning
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

People still live, in great need of our action.

The scorched-earth vision of Trump and Netanyahu rolls onward. Now in Iran and again in Lebanon, they make war on civilian homes and infrastructure. They destroy families and livelihoods, places of beauty and culture, the bridges that connect us, the industries that rebuild and the energy that lights the darkness.

They desecrate all of our religions. The list of their crimes grows daily.

These two evil despots are content to erode the world’s supplies of power, fertiliser, manufacturing components. They are oblivious to the lives they imperil in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine — and countless other people who they will kill around the world by hunger and hardship.

Anything to rule, even over a landscape of bones and dust. They will fail but they must not be allowed to play this out.

We are beyond disgust. We are witnessing the end of an order indeed: America’s empire is flailing in its death throes. How many people will Trump take down with it?

Weighed down with dread, we have no words but these: someone, everyone, stop them!

Republished from Sh’ma Koleinu — Alternative Jewish Voices.

Trump may have backed down for now, but he’s shown how unhinged he is by threatening the death of a “whole civilization.”

I’m heading back to DC to try and get answers for the American people. Congress needs to return to the Capitol immediately and vote to end this war. https://t.co/vZLXb0anhq

— Senator Andy Kim (@SenatorAndyKim) April 8, 2026

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Here is a reliable indicator that you are being managed rather than informed.

When the story gets complicated, when the real cause of your pain points uncomfortably toward power, toward allies, toward the architecture of foreign policy that cannot be questioned, the Murdoch press reaches for a scapegoat.

And so, as Australians watch fuel prices surge by approximately 40 percent, a direct consequence of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, as ABC News has itself reported, the editors and columnists of News Corp’s Australian outlets have a different culprit in mind.

• READ MORE: Monsters of war – the men who have put the world at risk
• ‘Complete demolition’: Trump repeats Iran ultimatum as deal deadline looms
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Not Netanyahu. Not Trump. Not the war that has sent energy markets into convulsions and supply chains into chaos. Not the illegal military campaign that blocked one of the world’s most critical shipping arteries and sent insurance premiums for tankers into the stratosphere.

No, their preferred villain is Chris Bowen.

Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who did not bomb Iran. Chris Bowen, who does not set the global price of oil. Chris Bowen, whose energy policies, right or wrong, are entirely debatable on their merits, has precisely nothing to do with a US-Israeli military campaign that closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the worst fuel price shock in years.

The Bowen beat-up is not journalism. It is misdirection of the most deliberate and dishonest kind. It is the Murdoch press doing what it does most reliably and most effectively — running cover for power, redirecting the public’s legitimate anger toward a safe domestic target, and keeping the real architecture of the crisis, the geopolitical decisions, the alliance commitments, the illegal war, safely out of frame.

Because here is what the Murdoch press will not tell you, and what the mainstream media in general has failed to say with anything like the clarity the situation demands.

Australians are paying more for fuel because a war closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Doh!

That war was launched on February 28 of this year by the United States and Israel against Iran.

It was not sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. It was not authorised by any provision of international law that serious legal scholars recognise as applicable. It was not preceded by any meaningful consultation with allies, including Australia, whose economies would absorb its consequences.

It was a unilateral act of military aggression by the most powerful country on earth and its primary regional client, conducted because they had the weapons to do it and had calculated, correctly, that nobody with the power to stop them would try.

Puppet on a string
And when it happened, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went on the ABC’s 7:30 programme and told Sarah Ferguson that what Australia supported was the American decision to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons and to address Iran’s role in destabilising the region.

Read that answer carefully. It is not an answer about Australian interests. It contains no reference to Australian sovereignty, Australian economic security, or the fuel price increase already beginning when those words were spoken.

It is a recitation, clean, fluent, almost word for word, of the American and Israeli justification for the strikes, delivered in the Prime Minister’s voice, on Australian public television, as though it represented Australia’s own sovereign and independently arrived at conclusion, which it didn’t.

He later described Australia’s contribution to the conflict as “constructive”. He has since said he wants more certainty about the war’s objectives and acknowledged there needs to be an end point.

This is the man who endorsed the war before its objectives had been defined, now asking what they are.

Managed complicity and Murdoch
This is what managed complicity looks like up close. You sign on. You use the ally’s language. You call it constructive. And then, when the consequences arrive in the form of 40 percent fuel price increases and small businesses collapsing under freight surcharge pressure, you allow the media ecosystem you have never seriously challenged to redirect the public’s fury at your own Energy Minister.

The Murdoch press is doing its job. That job is not to inform Australians.

That job, in this specific context, on this specific story, is to protect the US-Israeli alliance from the accountability it deserves and to ensure that the legitimate rage of a population being economically punished for decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem never finds its proper target.

The proprietor of that press empire has spent decades cultivating proximity to exactly the power centres that prosecuted this war.

Murdoch newspapers in the United States were among the most consistent cheerleaders for the military adventurism that set the conditions for what is now unfolding. His Australian mastheads take their foreign policy cues from a worldview that treats American and Israeli strategic interests as essentially synonymous with the interests of the English-speaking world.

That worldview is not Australia’s sovereign foreign policy. It is an ideology dressed as common sense, distributed at scale through the country’s most-read newspapers, and deployed most aggressively when the connection between geopolitical decisions and domestic pain threatens to become too obvious to ignore.

Chris Bowen did not block the Strait of Hormuz. A war did.

An illegal war. Conducted without Australian consent. Endorsed by an Australian Prime Minister on national television, using the language of the people who started it.

And the newspapers owned by a man whose commercial and ideological interests align entirely with the people who started it are telling you it is the Energy Minister’s fault.

That is not a coincidence; it is the system working exactly as designed.

The question is whether Australians are going to keep letting it work.

Minister,

You are about to meet US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a time of real global tension.

Moments like this define countries.

My great-grandfather fought fascism.

• READ MORE: ‘Complete demolition’: Trump repeats Iran ultimatum as deal deadline looms
• Monsters of war – the men who have put the world at risk
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

In 1935, when fascist Italy invaded my country of birth, Ethiopia, then Abyssinia, Emperor Haile Selassie warned the world at the League of Nations. Many countries hesitated. New Zealand didn’t.

Under Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage, we called for sanctions. We chose principle over power.

We used to be clear about our principles in international politics. We stood against apartheid. We stood against nuclear testing in the Pacific.

In the 2010s, New Zealand went across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia asking for support to sit on the UN Security Council — not as a powerful country, but as a voice for the powerless.

Many countries trusted us and backed us. And for a time, we honoured that trust.

On 23 December 2016, under [then Foreign Minister] Murray McCully, we backed a UN resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal under international law. There was pressure. We stood firm.

On 25 March 2026, the UN voted to recognise slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as among the gravest crimes against humanity. Most countries supported it. New Zealand stepped back.

And as of 2026, we still refuse to recognise the State of Palestine while genocide unfolds in Gaza.

Minister, the current global tensions make this even more important. New Zealand is clear on international law when it comes to Iran. We must be just as clear when it comes to the United States and Israel.

As a small trading nation, our economic, diplomatic and security interests depend on international law being applied consistently. If we pick and choose, we weaken that system and we weaken ourselves.

Our reputation was built by standing up and punching above our weight, even when it was uncomfortable.

That is where our soft power came from. We have the potential to be a superpower in soft power.

Right now, we risk losing that by moving closer to powerful countries, even when they are in the wrong.

Minister, take that history with you into that meeting. Be clear. Be consistent. Stand for international law everywhere, not just where it is easy.

People in New Zealand and around the world are watching. And history has a long memory.

Nureddin Abdurahman is a Tangata Tiriti from Addis Ababa 17 years ago and a Wellington City Councillor. He first won a seat as a Paekawakawa/Southern Ward councillor in 2022 and was re-elected in 2025.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Two men are mainly responsible for the war on Iran. And then there are those — such as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — who wilfully acquiesce to their murderous whims.

It’s the men. Not their press releases. Not their carefully managed public personas. Not the language their communications teams have stress tested for maximum palatability.

It’s the men themselves.

• READ MORE: Tehran says response to ceasefire proposals formulated, no direct talks
• NZ’s Peters called on to stress Palestine ‘open wound’ with Rubio
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Their records. Their legal jeopardy. And the extraordinary, historically unprecedented fact that the two primary architects of a war now costing ordinary Australians their livelihoods are both, in their own ways, running from accountability while simultaneously running the world.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Netanyahu is not merely a controversial leader prosecuting a controversial war. He is a criminal defendant. An accused man.

A person who, under the laws of his own country, not the laws of his enemies, not the laws of international tribunals, he can dismiss as biased, stands charged with fraud, breach of trust, and bribery.

His trial has been grinding through Israel’s courts since 2020. It has not concluded. And critics, serious critics, within Israel’s own legal and political establishment, have made the case, with mounting evidence, that the prolongation of this war serves Netanyahu’s personal legal interests at least as much as it serves Israel’s security ones.

Think about what that means.

A man facing prison. A man whose political survival depends on remaining in power. A man for whom a ceasefire, a negotiated peace, a return to normalcy could mean the resumption of court proceedings that his wartime emergency has conveniently disrupted. A man whose far-right coalition partners have made clear they will collapse the government the moment the guns fall silent.

This man, this specific man, in this specific legal and political predicament, has been handed a blank cheque by Washington. Unlimited weapons. Diplomatic cover.

A US veto at the Security Council every time the international community tries to intervene.

And Anthony Albanese calls the objectives of his war appropriate.

ICC arrest warrant
The International Criminal Court did not call them appropriate. It issued an arrest warrant.

A warrant that sits unrequited and unenforced as Western governments, including Australia’s, conduct business as usual with a man the court has found reasonable grounds to prosecute for war crimes. This is not a technicality. This is not a diplomatic inconvenience. It is the most fundamental possible test of whether the rules-based international order that Australia constantly invokes as a guiding principle means anything whatsoever.

And Australia is failing that test, quietly, daily,

with a smile and a press release about shared values.

This is the casus belli we are never allowed to examine. Not the security rationale. Not the stated military objectives. The actual human being in whose name and for whose benefit this catastrophe is being prosecuted. And what that human being is running from.

Donald Trump
Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 carrying more legal and personal baggage than any president in American history.

A convicted felon. Civil judgments in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And something else, something the mainstream press, particularly in America and Australia, has handled with a caution so extraordinary it constitutes institutional cowardice — the Epstein files.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a lone predator. He was the centre of a network. A procurement and blackmail operation, almost certainly intelligence connected, that ran for decades across the highest levels of American, British, and Israeli power.

The files released in dribs and drabs, fought over in courts, partially suppressed and heavily redacted, point toward a system of leverage that compromised some of the most powerful men on earth.

Trump’s name appears in those files thousands of times. His association with Epstein was long, documented, and by his own prior admission, enthusiastic. In a 2002 interview, he described Epstein as terrific fun, noting approvingly that he liked beautiful women, many of them on the younger side.

That statement was made publicly. It has not been retracted.

It has simply been absorbed into the general noise of a political culture that has lost the capacity for appropriate disgust.

But the Epstein connection is not merely a personal scandal. It is a geopolitical one.

Epstein’s operation did not exist in a vacuum. Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, convicted and imprisoned, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the media baron confirmed after his death to have been a Mossad asset.

The intelligence dimensions of the Epstein network have been reported by journalists of unimpeachable seriousness across multiple continents. The suggestion that a blackmail operation of this scale, running through the power centres of American political and financial life for decades, had no connection to the intelligence services that specialise precisely in this kind of leverage is not a serious position.

It is wilful blindness.

The Mossad connection
Mossad is Israel’s foreign intelligence service and one of the most operationally aggressive intelligence agencies on the planet. It has assassinated scientists in foreign countries. It has conducted sabotage operations across the Middle East. It has run networks of influence, surveillance, and covert pressure in Western capitals for decades.

This is not conspiracy. This is its known, partially acknowledged, historically documented record.

What the Epstein network, the Mossad connection, the Maxwell lineage, and the drip feed of suppressed files collectively describe, if you follow the thread honestly and without flinching, is a Western political order in which deference to Israeli policy is not entirely or even primarily explained by shared democratic values and strategic alignment.

Some of it is explained by fear.

Some of it is explained by leverage.

Some of it is explained by the quiet, unspoken, never to be uttered in polite company reality that powerful men in Washington, London, and Canberra have made themselves vulnerable. To networks of kompromat, to relationships they cannot fully disclose, to the specific kind of coercive power that intelligence operations specialising in the exploitation of human weakness have deployed for as long as intelligence operations have existed.

This is why the charge of antisemitism is deployed so rapidly against anyone who raises these questions.

Not because the questions are antisemitic.

They manifestly are not, being questions about the conduct of specific governments, specific intelligence agencies, and specific individuals, not about Jewish people as a whole.

But because the charge works. It silences. It ends careers. It redirects the conversation. And the people with the most to lose from honest answers have every incentive to ensure the conversation never reaches those answers.

The International Criminal Court has issued its warrant. The Epstein files are dripping into the public domain. The Maxwell Mossad connection is confirmed historical record.

The leverage that may explain a generation of Western politicians who cannot bring themselves to say a single word of meaningful criticism of Israeli state conduct is no longer the province of conspiracy forums. It is the subject of serious investigative journalism on three continents.

And Australia’s answer, apparently, is to look away.

Anthony Albanese will not be the one to look squarely at any of this. He has already told us where he stands. On national television, he endorsed the war. He called it constructive. He offered the American justification back to an Australian audience as though it were Australia’s own sovereign conclusion.

It was not. It was obedience dressed as policy. And the men who benefit most from that obedience, a defendant in Tel Aviv and a felon in Washington, are laughing all the way to the next airstrike while ordinary Australians pay the bill, while journalists are prosecuted.

• Tomorrow: How the Murdoch press is running cover for a war and pointing your anger at the wrong man entirely.

An Easter message. There’s no mystery about why wars start. They happen because someone, somewhere, decides that negotiation is more dangerous to them than to the people being bombed.

Look at what was happening this “Good” Friday. Iran. Gaza. The West Bank. Lebanon.

Thirty-six days of missiles and a Strait of Hormuz sealed shut while oil companies post record profits and defence contractors book forward orders through 2031. No one in those boardrooms is losing sleep over a negotiated settlement.

• READ MORE: Iran slams Trump’s Strait of Hormuz threats as ‘incitement to war crimes’
• Eugene Doyle: Who will pay billions in reparations to Iran? We will
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

That would be the one outcome they cannot monetise.

The choice of war over negotiation is always deliberate. It’s what happens when the institutions built to make negotiation workable — the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the mechanisms of international law — are systematically defunded, vetoed into paralysis, or simply disregarded by those states powerful enough to ignore them without consequence.

When accountability is optional, war is always cheaper than compromise. For the people making the decision, not for the people paying for it in blood.

And here is what makes this moment different from others: we’re not even pretending anymore. Israeli ministers speak of erasure openly. American officials wave away civilian casualties with the language of collateral necessity.

Actions become shameless
The international community issues statements of concern and then approves the next arms shipment. The gap between what is said and what is done has closed — not because the words have become honest, but because the actions have become shameless.

Negotiation requires recognising the humanity of the other party. That’s precisely why it’s rebuffed. You can’t negotiate with someone you have spent 20 years or more dehumanising. Make them monstrous enough and war stops requiring justification. It becomes necessary.

But nothing about this is inevitable. Wars end when the people with the power to end them decide the cost of continuing exceeds the cost of stopping.

That calculation is being made right now, every day, by people who are not dying. The question is not when they will choose peace. It’s when the rest of us will make their continuing refusal untenable.

Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and futurist, and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

In the coming years, if Iran survives as a sovereign state and retains control over the Strait of Hormuz, countries like Australia, New Zealand, the UK, South Korea and Japan will be made to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for the US-Israeli war on Iran.

For this to come to pass, Iran must fight the aggressors to a standstill and ensure they can impose, if necessary, a chokehold on the oil, gas and fertilisers vital to the global economy.

• READ MORE: Protesters condemn Luxon govt for failing to condemn illegal war on Iran
• President Trump, don’t listen to your sycophants on Iran, this isn’t reality TV
• US bombing targets bridges and Pasteur Institute – ‘symbols of Iran’s scientific strength’, says spokeswoman
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

So, when next you see an image of spectacular US-Israeli violence, think this: “I might have to pay for that”.

There is no doubt that US-Israel has succeeded in setting fire to Iran, inflicting a heavy death toll, and hundreds of billions of dollars in damages to the civilian infrastructure of the country.

As the Leader of the so-called “Free World” said this week: the aim is to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.

The US and Israel have dropped well over 15,000 huge bombs and missiles on Iran. According to the United Nations, by March 17 the US and Israel had already destroyed 54,000 civilian homes.

Destruction now far worse
The destruction is now far worse, approaching 100,000 structures. By the end of March hundreds of schools, dozens of universities, much of the civilian infrastructure including major bridges, energy systems and cultural sites had been attacked by the Americans and Israelis. Does anyone still believe they have come to Iran to free the people?

Who should pay for reconstruction? The Iranian government is clear: we should — because this immense crime was, from their perspective, aided and abetted by Australia, the UK, EU, New Zealand and others, who, as with the genocide in Gaza, did nothing meaningful to stop it.

According to Lloyds, Iran has now set up a toll booth at the Strait of Hormuz — referred to by some as “The Aya-Toll-a Booth” — to tax ships that pass through the strait. It may be questionable under the Law of the Sea but this would be to quibble after the US-Israelis blitzkrieg.

The Majlis (Iranian Parliament) is finalising a law declaring Iranian “sovereignty, control and oversight” of the Strait, something it had never asserted before. The bill introduces a system of transit fees for commercial vessels passing the Hormuz Strait, effectively imposing a tax of up to $2 million per vessel that wishes to pass.

A large oil tanker has a cargo worth about $200 million so the fee is not excessive. Multiply that by more than 100 ship movements per day under peacetime conditions and Iran could be in receipt of tens of billions of dollars per year.

Given the rogue states who launched this war will never submit to international law or reparations it seems an elegant solution.

Under the system, ships must now provide their International Maritime Organisation (IMO) number, cargo manifest, crew names, ownership details and destination before Iran will issue a safe passage clearance. The law bans vessels from the US, Israel, and their allies, while granting safe transit to China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Bangladesh and other friendly nations.

Iran needs to win
For this to fully come to fruition, Iran needs to win.

Professor Robert Pape, a top US expert on warfare, based at the University of Chicago, says Iran will likely emerge from this terrible war as a super-power.  Many analysts, such as Colonel Daniel Davis, Mark Sleboda, Annelle Sheline, and Professor John Mearsheimer, now see an Iranian victory as likely.

Professor Pape himself has run simulations of US-Iran wars for decades and is clear: “Trump made a huge mistake.”

Professor Pape, who was one of the prime architects of the US Air Force’s war curriculum, told journalist Mahmoud Ansari that Trump and others are currently confusing tactical success with strategic outcomes. For the moment, the Americans and Israelis are enjoying success after success: killing leaders and school girls, blowing stuff up and so on.

“That can be mesmerising, and cause this illusion of precision control but it is not the same thing as a strategic victory. Iran before the war controlled 4 percent of the world’s oil. Twenty-six days later they control 20 percent of the world’s oil.”

As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute pointed out this week, Denmark charged transit fees for 400 years for vessels to pass through the Øresund Strait into and out of the Baltic. Panama, Egypt and Turkey all charge transit fees.

The countries who played the starring supporting roles in the genocide in Gaza — Germany, UK, Australia — and supported Israel and America in their rampages across the Middle East for decades may — if they are lucky — get access to the Gulf again but may have to pay a heavy price for their role in the destruction of the lives of tens of millions of people.

NZ awaits eventual negotiations
The energy security of a minor henchman like New Zealand will have to await eventual negotiations between its major suppliers — South Korea and Singapore — and Iran.

Bloodied but as yet unbowed, Iran knows it can — and must — rise like the Phoenix from the ashes.

In the Iranian version of the Phoenix tradition — reaching back thousands of years —  the Phoenix (Simurgh in Farsi) must face death and destruction before being reborn and revitalised.

The Simurgh is so ancient it possesses the wisdom of the ages: in other words it knows how to survive calamities that would consume others. This is called civilisational resilience and it is baked into the DNA of the Iranian people.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published on his Solidarity blog.

Mr Trump, may I have a word?

Bad enough for you to insist — in the face of all evidence to the contrary — that you “won” the 2020 election.

But it’s another thing for you to pretend — in the face of mounting deaths and injuries, ballooning expenses, and rising prices — that you won, or are winning, the war with Iran you began on February 28.

“Let me say, we’ve won,” you told a rally in Kentucky on March 11.

• READ MORE: US ‘hasn’t even started’ attacks on Iran’s infrastructure, Trump warns
• US bombing targets bridges and Pasteur Institute – ‘symbols of Iran’s scientific strength’, says spokeswoman
• ‘No kings’: What Americans can learn from other nonviolent civil activism movements
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

“I think we’ve won,” you said on the White House South Lawn on March 20.

“We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” you said in the Oval Office on March 24.

“We are winning so big,” you told a fundraising dinner on March 25.

“We’ve had regime change,” you told reporters just a few days ago. “The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead.” Iran has now moved onto its “third regime,” and American negotiators are now speaking to “a whole different group of people” who have “been very reasonable,” you said.

You’re making this up
You’re making all this up. In fact, you’re losing your war. And so is America and much of the rest of the world.

After a month, your war has already cost 13 American lives, cost American taxpayers more than US$30 billion, cost American consumers at least a dollar more per gallon of gas than they paid a month ago, pushed up food prices and mortgage rates, and pushed down the value of 401(k) retirement plans.

It’s mangled supply chains for industries that rely on items such as fertiliser to grow food or helium to make computer chips. It’s also wreaked havoc across the Middle East with at least 1574 civilians killed in Iran, including 236 children, and at least 50 killed in Iran’s attacks on other Gulf nations.

You assumed Iran would give up its nuclear programme. Wrong. After more than a month of bombing by the United States and Israel, you’ve most likely stiffened the regime’s resolve to produce a nuclear weapon.

In this respect, too, America is worse off — more endangered than we were in 2018 before you withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by former President Barack Obama. In that deal, Iran agreed to restrict its nuclear programme — reducing uranium stockpiles by 98 percent and capping enrichment at 3.67 percent, and allowing inspections — in exchange for relief from UN, EU, and US nuclear-related sanctions.

Iran now holds a stockpile of approximately 970 pounds of uranium enriched up to 60 percent purity, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. That’s close to weapons-grade. No one knows where it’s stored.

You thought winning this war would be as easy as abducting Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and setting up a puppet regime there. Wrong again. The old ayatollah is gone, but the new one and his regime are even more radical and hard line.

Embraced asymmetric warfare
You assumed America’s military might would weaken Iran’s military capacity. Wrong. They’ve embraced asymmetric warfare — using cheap drones and missiles and blocking the Strait of Hormuz — rather than take on America’s and Israel’s superior forces directly.

You thought the regime would soon cave. Wrong. It’s been over a month and they’re the ones playing the waiting game. They think they can withstand the mounting political and economic pressures better and longer than you and America can. They may be correct.

Reportedly, you’ve told aides you’re now willing to end the war even if Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe this is your best option at this point. But it will allow Iran to decide in the future how much oil gets through and for whom, and could cause the economic damage to the US to grow exponentially worse.

Mr Trump, do you really believe you won this war? Do you really believe America is better off than it was when you began the war?

Maybe the people around you are telling you that you’ve won the war and we’re better off because you punish the bearers of bad news and reward those who tell you what you want to hear. Presumably you’re hearing the same fictionalised good news from Republicans in Congress, from sycophantic leaders abroad, from other assorted lackeys and suck-ups.

Or maybe you think that if you can convince enough people that you won and we’re better off, you will have won and America will be better off. Because for you it’s always about public perceptions of reality rather than reality itself.

No truth, only belief
Everything depends on hype, spin, exaggeration, and outright lies. For you there’s no truth, only belief.

Or maybe you think that if you keep saying you won or are winning, and America has come out on top, your magical thinking will in fact come true.

But this isn’t a game, and you’re not a magician.

This is real blood and guts. Real pain. Real deaths and injuries. Real price increases at the gas pump. Real hardships for real people — in America, in the Middle East, and elsewhere.

You can’t pretend, sir. This isn’t reality television. This is for real. And the reality is Americans are worse off now and less secure than we were when you started this.

Robert Reich is an American professor, writer, former Secretary of Labour, and author of The System, The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, Aftershock, Supercapitalism, The Work of Nations. He is also co-founder of Inequality Media. This commentary was originally published on his Facebook page and is republished under Creative Commons.

One day in October 2023 I was walking down the supermarket aisle when I saw greenwashing in plain sight.

Fonterra’s Anchor butter was sitting in the chiller with a prominent claim on the packaging that it was Grass Fed.

I knew that Fonterra cows were fed on millions of tonnes of palm kernel. So I decided to do something about it. And today we finally won that battle.

• READ MORE: Fonterra settles activists’ misleading packaging lawsuit for ‘100 percent NZ grass-fed’ claims

Today, after Greenpeace sued Fonterra under the Fair Trading Act, Fonterra has published a statement admitting its “100% New Zealand Grass Fed” claim breached section 9 of the Act.

Section 9 makes it illegal to “engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive.” Fonterra has undertaken to not use this label again.

Thus Fonterra, New Zealand’s largest company, a multinational with $26 billion a year in turnover, was today forced to admit it has been deceiving its customers about a key claim it makes about its products — “100% New Zealand Grass Fed”.

Fonterra’s deception
While Fonterra was telling its customers that its Anchor brand butter was “100% New Zealand Grass Fed”, they were telling their milk suppliers that they could feed their dairy cows up to 3kg of palm kernel every day.

That works out at around 20 percent of all the food that a dairy cow eats. In practice dairy producers are probably on average providing about 6 percent to 8 percent of a New Zealand dairy cow’s diet from palm kernel, though it could be up to 20 percent in individual cases.

Palm kernel is one of the products of the palm industry in Malaysia and Indonesia — yes, the same palm industry that is destroying the last of the Southeast Asian tropical rainforests.

A million tonne deception
So on the one hand Fonterra was telling New Zealanders that they should buy Fonterra products because they are natural, 100 percent from New Zealand grass, while at the same time it was giving the green light to its milk suppliers to feed dairy cattle palm kernel from offshore.

And not just a little bit, I mean millions of tonnes of palm kernel.

In fact, Fonterra’s milk suppliers are using so much palm kernel that New Zealand is the world’s largest importer of palm kernel, at around two million tonnes per year, most of which is fed to dairy cattle.

During the period when Fonterra used the “100% New Zealand Grass Fed” label (they state from December 2023 to April 2025), New Zealand imported around three million tonnes of palm kernel, at a cost of around $800 million. Of this, around two and a quarter million tonnes went to Fonterra suppliers.

So not only was Fonterra deceiving their customers that their butter was “100% New Zealand Grass Fed”, but they were doing it on a massive scale. 

It looked like a huge lie in plain sight by New Zealand’s largest company. Someone had to do something.

Off to the Commerce Commission
So standing in the chiller aisle of the supermarket I had an idea — I should complain to the Commerce Commission, as it was a breach of the Fair Trading Act. It was deceptive and misleading advertising.

The Commerce Commission is responsible for the Fair Trading Act so surely they would care that New Zealand’s largest company was misleading millions of New Zealanders about a key claim of their products.

So I sent off my complaint in November 2023, received an automated acknowledgement, and then I waited. And waited.

Finally in June 2024 I chased them up and in July 2024 managed to get a zoom meeting with the relevant Commission investigator. The investigator explained that they had done some kind of investigation and had connected with Fonterra but they were planning to take zero enforcement action. Nothing.

So eight months after my original complaint, with zero effort by the Commerce Commission to contact me, I discovered they planned to do nothing about it.

I was pretty annoyed so I decided to make an Official Information Act (OIA) request to the Commerce Commission to find out what they had done.

Commission wrote Fonterra a letter, Fonterra carried on
And this is where it starts to get pretty interesting. The OIA showed that Commerce Commission investigators had actually done some investigating. Moreover, they had concluded that the label was likely to mislead consumers.

The Commerce Commission wrote to Fonterra in March 2024 stating that the label “may lead consumers to form an overall impression that the cow’s diet comprises of [sic] 100% grass… A reasonable consumer… may not … be aware that up to 8% of a cow’s diet may consist of supplemental non-grass feed… the use of PKE may not be clear to a reasonable consumer.”

If the Commerce Commission found the label was misleading, hence in breach of the Fair Trading Act, what would they do?

The Commission letter to Fonterra stated that “we do not intend to further investigate the complaint made against you at this time”.

So… the Commission wrote them the letter, and nothing else.

Fonterra received the Commerce Commission letter in March 2024 giving the commission’s opinion that the label was likely to be misleading but stating that the commission would take no further action.

And what did Fonterra do? Fonterra just kept using the label.

Greenpeace takes legal action against Fonterra
In late September 2024, we had had enough of the greenwashing by Fonterra and the failure of the Commerce Commission to take action and we initiated legal action ourselves.

Aside from the deceptive advertising issue, Greenpeace has campaigned on palm kernel for years. Palm kernel is driving tropical rainforest destruction in Southeast Asia as well as providing the feed for intensive dairy agribusiness in New Zealand, which is polluting fresh water and producing climate emissions.

We want the dairy industry to cut out palm kernel, and we want New Zealand consumers to know that Fonterra’s dairy products are driving rainforest destruction.

We sued them under the Fair Trading Act, doing the work that the Commerce Commission had failed to do.

This is no small matter for a New Zealand NGO to take on a $26 billion a year multinational corporation. Fonterra employed the law firm Chapman Tripp against us, the biggest law firm in the country.

If we were to lose the case and have costs awarded against us, it could have been disastrous, as both sides knew.

Fonterra stops using the deceptive label
And guess what? In April 2025, six months after we lodged our legal action, Fonterra quietly stopped using the deceptive and misleading “100% New Zealand Grass Fed” label.

And then finally in March 2026, as the court hearing date approached, Fonterra agreed to an out of court settlement in which they admitted they had breached section 9 of the Fair Trading Act by engaging in deceptive and misleading advertising. And they agreed not to use the label again.

We finally made Fonterra admit that they were using tonnes of palm kernel and that their milk is most certainly not 100 percent New Zealand Grass Fed.

Fonterra has a choice about how its milk is produced. It chooses to accept milk produced with palm kernel, chooses to accept destroying rainforests, killing orangutans and birds of paradise.

Multinational corporations are just machines for making money – we need to regulate them
Fonterra deliberately chose to use that misleading label back in December 2023. Presumably they did this to sell more of their products, to maximise profits.

Fonterra chose to keep using the label even after the Commerce Commission told them they thought it was likely to mislead consumers. It was only when Greenpeace took legal action against them that they were forced to change.

Fonterra spouts a lot of nonsense about how it cares for the environment or New Zealanders or whatever. But they are just a machine for making money for their shareholders. The practical benefit of all the corporate talk about “caring” is to avoid proper government regulation.

If we want to align the activities of multinational corporations with society’s values then we have to regulate them, as they will not do it themselves. By design, large corporations do not have “values”. They are just machines for making money, and whether they make money by destroying nature, or not, only depends on the laws under which they operate and whether those laws are enforced.

The Commerce Commission let the biggest corporation in the country get away with deceiving consumers – a deception that was millions of tonnes in size and repeated weekly to every New Zealander who walked down a supermarket aisle. And so that corporation just carried on doing it.

Greenpeace stood up and we won. But it shouldn’t have been up to us.

The role of the government is to act in our collective interest by regulating corporations, not only to make sure they don’t deceive consumers, but to protect a stable climate, to protect the biodiversity of our planet, and indeed to protect life on Earth.

Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa. Republished from Greenpeace Aotearoa with permission.

• Petition: Stop Fonterra using Palm Kernel

US President Donald Trump has been obsessed with seizing Iran’s Kharg Island for more than 35 years — way before he became a politician. In 1990, he wrote in an American newspaper that the United States should seize Kharg.

Trump thinks that by seizing Kharg, he would get hold of Iranian oil, which he has admitted he wants badly. Either he is deliberately misleading the world or he is not well informed.

Kharg is nothing more than a loading terminal. It is a small island, only about 90 sq km in size, some 28 km from the Iranian mainland.

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It’s main advantage is that it is surrounded by very deep waters which allows what are known as Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) to come alongside and load huge quantities of crude oil. A VLCC can easily load up to 2 million barrels of crude.

At today’s price of US$116 per barrel, the value of the cargo would exceed $232 million.

Kharg itself is not an oilfield. It does not produce crude. Every drop of oil which is stored in its many storage tanks are piped there from the mainland through underwater pipes.

All the Iranian oil fields are on the mainland. Now that the Iranians have known well in advance that Trump might seize the island, do you know what they will do? They will turn off the spigot.

No more oil flow
No more oil will flow from the mainland to the island. What oil there is stored in the tanks on the island would have been loaded onto vessels which would have departed Kharg.

I am willing to put a wager that if the Americans seize the island, they will not find any oil. Maybe there will be some residue left in the tanks but the amounts would be so miniscule that in law it would be known as de minimis.

Trump can seize the island and I am sure the Iranians will allow him to do so. But what will happen after that?

The marines and the paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division will be slaughtered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). I pity the American mothers and wives who will be receiving the bodies of their sons and husbands.

Iranian missiles and drones will descend on the American troops like fire and brimstone. There is absolutely no way the Americans can hold the island. The Iranians know this and have dared the Americans to come because they know that it is an invitation to hell for the enemy.

The trouble with the Americans is hubris. They think the rest of the world can easily be walked over by their unbeatable marines and other elite troops.

Napoleon too thought that his Old Guards or Imperial Guards were invincible until they came up against the British Grenadier, Coldstream and Scots Guards at Waterloo. And for the first time ever in the Napoleonic Wars, the agonising cry from the French generals of “En arriere!“ meaning “backward” or “retreat” was heard in the ranks of this legendary unit.

Best trained, fanatical
When the Americans face the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, whether at Kharg or Hormuz, they will be coming up against some of the best trained and fanatical soldiers in the world, who are equipped to the hilt with modern weaponry.

All their generals are veterans of the bloody 8 year Iran-Iraq war. If there are soldiers who know what war is, it is the IRGC.

And to me it is the height of absurdity for the Americans to think that they can accomplish their missions with only about 17,000 ground troops.

I think the scale of the slaughter is going to be gut-wrenching and awful. It will be the modern day equivalent of the battle of Cannae where Hannibal destroyed the entire Roman army, killing 80,000 enemy soldiers in a single day and taking another 10,000 as prisoners.

In 1980, America was humiliated when their military helicopters floundered in the failed Operation Eagle Claw rescue mission to extract the embassy hostages. Nearly half a century later, I fear America will again be humiliated in Iran.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Museums around the world present the story of war in different ways. The Imperial War Museum in London includes military history, the Holocaust, women’s roles in the two world wars, wartime artwork and the political issues of the time.

This museum records both civilian and military experiences, looking at the impact of war on people’s lives. Its Crimes Against Humanity section has a continuous film about genocide and ethnic violence in our time.

The Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam focuses on the Dutch experience during the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany during World War Two, and features personal stories of those who lived during that period.

• READ MORE: Up close and friendly with Vietnam’s war resistance Củ Chi tunnels and museum
• Scars on the Heart exhibition at Auckland Museum
• Museum’s attempt to show ‘both sides’ of the Second World War
• Nuclear-Free Pacific exhibition opened – calls for inspired peace and regionalism

National museums in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh musealise the memory of the 1947 Partition in different, selective ways, with oral history, survivor testimonies, and personal artefacts to document the displacement and trauma of the subcontinent’s division.

How does our own war museum remember war?

Visitors to Auckland’s War Memorial Museum find that the top floor is dedicated to the memory of New Zealand soldiers killed in World Wars One and Two.

The WWI Hall of Memories contains a sanctuary, used for commemoration. In this space are medals and badges of units in which men and women from the Auckland Province served, and British badges that acknowledge those who joined British units.

Roll of honour
In the WWII Hall of Memories, carved into marble is the permanent roll of honour of men and women from the Auckland Province who died in both World Wars, and in Korea, Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam.

The Scars on the Heart exhibition covers New Zealand’s civil wars of the 1840s and 1860s, the Anglo-Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, the Asian wars and New Zealand’s involvement in United Nations peacekeeping missions. Items on display include letters, diaries, photos, clothing and firearms.

There is a recreation of a bivouac shelter at Gallipoli and a Western Front trench from WWI.

This year, the greatest number of active armed conflicts since the end of the Second World War is taking place. The Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight on January 27 — the closest it has ever been to midnight.

Funding for nuclear weapons programmes is increasing and the New START treaty, the nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia has expired, with US President Donald Trump having no interest in renewing arms limitation agreements.

Remembering the destructive and tragic consequences of war should be central to the role of museums in their telling of stories about war. However, unfortunately, around the same time as the recent removal of asbestos from the museum, some of these vital stories have been removed.

They include evidence of civilian war trauma installed in the 1990s by then head curator Lieutenant-Colonel Chris Pugsley to show impacts of war on civilians. Another removal has been the 1968 “Letter from a Vietnam Hospital” by the New Zealand surgeon and surgical team leader in Vietnam, Dr Peter Eccles-Smith, and a photo of a woman and a child who were victims of the Nagasaki atomic bomb in 1945.

No record of NZ nuclear protests
There is also no longer any text or photos showing New Zealand’s official protests against French nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in the South Pacific.

In addition to the reinstatement of these particular items, a more encompassing telling of stories about war at Auckland Museum than at present could include the portrayal of New Zealand’s resistance to international wars, the work of civilian and army medical personnel, photos of injured soldiers and civilians, photos and placards of anti-war demonstrators, stories of conscientious objectors, portrayals of victims of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and photos and stories about the nuclear-free movement in NZ and the Pacific, including the fateful journey of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior across Oceania into Auckland Harbour.

Auckland Museum’s 2025 plan included “Enabling commemoration opportunities to reflect the community while exploring themes of conflict and peace; and commitment to broadening our commemorative narrative to be inclusive of diverse experiences and events relevant to our communities.”

This year is 30 years since the International Court of Justice declared that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally contradict international law. Next year, 2027, will be the 40th anniversary of NZ’s nuclear-free legislation, a fitting time for Auckland Museum to launch an exhibition that could include NZ’s official and civil society opposition to nuclear weapons.

Veteran peace activists hope to forge a constructive working relationship with Auckland Museum to help portray people’s experience of war more fully, and create a peace gallery to tell the story of NZ’s peace history.

Audrey van Ryn is a peace activist and writer. In 2009, she created the Auckland Peace Heritage Walk on behalf of the United Nations Association of NZ. She is currently secretary of Community Groups Feeding the Homeless.

• If interested, please contact Dr David Robie of the Asia Pacific Media Network

Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?

One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.

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The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.

Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.

But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.

They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Rushed into war
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.

Joe Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Addressing the Israeli Parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing: “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”

A video from 2001 shows Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, caught secretly on camera, telling a group of settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

Former US president Barack Obama, who ran up against Netanyahu repeatedly as Obama tried and failed to limit the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, thought the same.

In his 2020 autobiography, he wrote that the Israel lobby insisted that “there should be ‘no daylight’ between the US and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”

Any politician who disobeyed “risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election”.

Obscuring the relationship
But any rigid, binary way of framing the relationship between the US and Israel obscures more than it illuminates.

I addressed this issue in my 2008 book on Israeli foreign policy, titled Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iran, Iraq and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. My conclusion then, as now, was that the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv was better understood in different terms: as the dog and the tail wagging each other.

What does that mean?

Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state. It must, therefore, operate within the “security” parameters for the Middle East laid down by the US.

In fact, part of Israel’s job — the reason it is such an important client state — is because it has, until now, been able to enforce those parameters on others in the region.

But the story is more complicated than that.

At the same time, Israel seeks to maximise its ability to influence those parameters in its own interests, chiefly by shaping military, political and cultural discourse in the United States, through the many levers available to it.

Mobilised by Zionist lobbies
Zionist lobbies, both Jewish and Christian, mobilise large numbers of ordinary people to support whatever Israel claims to be in both its and US interests.

Mega-donors like Adelson use their wealth to cajole and intimidate US politicians.

Think-tanks with murky funding write legislation on Israel’s behalf that US politicians wave through.

Legal organisations, again with opaque funding, weaponise the law to silence and bankrupt.

And media owners, all too often in Israel’s camp, mould the public mood to stigmatise as “antisemitism” anything that opposes Israeli excesses.

This makes for a very messy arrangement.

The trouble with the idea that the US simply dictates to Israel — rather than that the two are constantly bargaining over what constitutes their shared interests — becomes apparent the moment we consider the two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza.

Desire to ‘disappear’ Palestinians
Israel has long had a fervent desire to disappear the Palestinians, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It wants the whole of historic Palestine, and the Palestinians are an obstacle to the realisation of that goal. Should the opportunity arise, Israel is also keen to secure a Greater Israel that requires grabbing and annexing substantial territory from neighbours, particularly Lebanon and Syria — as it is doing again right now.

After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel seized on the chance to renew in earnest the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it began in 1948, at the state’s founding.

It carpet-bombed Gaza, creating a “humanitarian crisis”, to force Egypt to open the floodgates into Sinai, where it hoped to drive the enclave’s population. Cairo refused.

As a result, Israel tried to increase the pressure by slaughtering and starving the people of Gaza. In legal terms, that constituted genocide.

But the idea that the US was deeply invested in Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza, or directed that genocide, or had any particular interest in the genocide taking place, is hard to sustain.

Washington — first under Biden, then under Trump — gave Israel cover to carry out the mass slaughter of the Palestinian population, and armed and financed the genocide. But that is very different from it having a geostrategic interest in the mass slaughter.

Indifferent to Palestinians’ fate
Rather, the US is and always has been largely indifferent as to the fate of the Palestinians, so long as they are contained. They can be locked up permanently in occupation prisons.

Or ethnically cleansed to Sinai and Jordan. Or given a pretend statelet under a compliant dictator like Mahmoud Abbas. Or exterminated.

The US will bankroll whichever option Israel believes best serves its interests — so long as that “solution” can be sold by pro-Israel lobbies to western publics as a legitimate “response” to Palestinian “terrorism”.

What Israel could get away with changed on 7 October 2023. The US was prepared to approve Israel shifting from a policy of intermittently “mowing the lawn” in Gaza — short wrecking sprees — to the incremental levelling of the whole of Gaza.

In other words, Israel worked all its levers to persuade Washington that it was the right time for it to get away with genocide. It sold to the US the plan that Gaza could now be destroyed.

To present that as Washington’s plan is simply perverse. It was decisively Israel’s plan.

That doesn’t diminish in any way US responsibility for the genocide. It is fully complicit. It paid for the genocide. It armed the genocide. It must own it too.

Similar Iran war analysis
A similar analysis can be applied to the Iran war.

The US and Israel share the same larger policy towards Iran: they want it contained, weak, unable to exert influence. But they do so for slightly different reasons.

Israel demands to be regional hegemon in the Middle East, an invaluable client state with privileged access to Washington policymakers. Its supremacy and impunity, therefore, depend on Iran — its only plausible rival in the region — being as weak as possible and incapable of forging effective alliances with armed resistance groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Equally, Washington wants Israel unthreatened, leaving its ally free to project US imperial power into the Middle East.

But it has a more complex set of interests to consider. It needs to ensure that the Arab monarchies remain compliant, and it does so by both wielding a stick — threatening to unleash the attack dog of Israel on them should they disobey — and proffering a carrot — promising to shield them under its security umbrella against Iran so long as they stay loyal.

The ultimate goal is to guarantee unchallenged US control over the flow of oil and thereby the global economy.

In other words, the US has to weigh far more interests in how it deals with Iran than Israel does.

Effects on the global economy
Unlike Israel, Washington has to consider the effects of an attack on Iran on the global economy, to assess any impact on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and protect against rival powers like China and Russia exploiting strategic missteps.

For those reasons, Washington has traditionally preferred maintaining a degree of stability in the region. Instability is very bad for business, as is being demonstrated only too clearly right now.

Israel, by contrast, regards its struggle against Iran in existential terms. Many in the Israeli cabinet view it as a religious war. They are not interested in simply containing Iran – a decades-old policy they believe has failed. They want Iran and its allies on their knees, or at least in so much chaos that they cannot pose any kind of challenge to Israeli regional hegemony.

That point was highlighted by Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. He cited recent comments to him by Israel’s former military intelligence lead on Iran, Danny Cintrinowicz, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”.

Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”

In other words, Israel wants to engineer instability in Iran, which is sure to spread instability across the region.

Those two agendas, as should be clear by now, are not easily compatible. Which is why Netanyahu has spent decades working every lever at his disposal in Washington to create an appetite for war.

Had war been self-evidently in US interests, his efforts would have been superfluous.

Israel deployed its lobbies
Instead, Israel has had to deploy its lobbies, marshal its donors and recruit sympathetic columnists to slowly shift the public mood to the point where a war was conceivable rather than patently dangerous.

And most importantly of all, Israel nurtured an intimate, ideological alliance with the neocons — hawkish, zealously pro-Israel US officials — who long ago gained a foothold in the inner sanctums of Washington.

Each recent administration has been a cat-fight over whether the neocons or more “moderate” voices would win out. Under George W Bush, the neocons dominated, leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s short war on Lebanon in 2006, and a failed plan to expand the war to Syria and then Iran.

I documented all of this in Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.

Under Obama, the neocons were forced to take more of a back seat, which is why his administration was able to sign a nuclear deal with Iran that held until Trump ripped it up in 2018, during his first term as president. Biden, as with so much else, dithered.

In Trump’s second term, the neocons seem to be firmly back in charge, again weaving their mischief. The result — an illegal war on Iran — is likely to be a strategic catastrophe for the US, and a potential, if short-lived, victory for Israel.

So isn’t this the same as saying the tail wags the dog?

Sole repositories of power
No, not least because that assumes the visible realm of US politics — the President, the Congress, the two main political parties — are the sole repositories of power in the system.

Even in this visible sphere, support for Israel has dramatically waned since the Gaza genocide. As the illegal war on Iran grows ever more costly, both in treasure and lives, support for Israel among US voters is going to fall off a cliff.

Israel is for the first time a deeply partisan issue, dividing Democrats and Republicans, as well as a generational divide between the young and old. It is even splitting the MAGA base Trump depends on.

This political polarisation will continue to get much worse, ultimately freeing braver figures in US politics to start speaking out in franker terms about Israel’s nefarious role.

But power in the US isn’t just wielded at the formal, visible level. There is a permanent bureaucracy, with an institutional memory, that operates out of sight. We have gained brief glimpses of its covert operations from the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s publishing platform for whistleblowers, and from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed illegal mass surveillance by the US state of its own citizens.

Both suffered serious consequences for their efforts to bring a little transparency to a profoundly corrupt system of secret power. Assange was locked away in a London high-security prison for many years as the US sought to extradite him on trumped-up “espionage” charges, while Snowden was forced into exile in Russia to evade arrest and long-term incarceration.

That bureaucracy — sometimes referred to as the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex — doesn’t play or fight fair. It doesn’t need to. It operates in the shadows.

Curtailing Israel’s influence
Were it to so choose, it could undermine the Israel lobby, and thereby curtail Israel’s influence over the visible realm of US politics.

It could effectively do to the leaders of the lobby — AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Organisation of America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Christians United for Israel, and others — what it did to Assange and Snowden.

It could, for example, influence public discourse to begin questioning whether these groups are really serving US interests or acting as foreign agents. That would, in turn, free up space for the media and legislators to call for tighter restrictions on these groups’ activities, requiring them to register as such.

The permanent bureaucracy is doubtless capable of doing much darker, underhand things too.

The fact that it hasn’t chosen to do any of this yet suggests Israel’s goals are not seen so far to be significantly in conflict with US goals.

But that could be about to change. In fact, the current, all-too-public debates about Israel driving the US into a war against Iran — an idea already seeping into popular consciousness — may be the first salvoes in the battle to come.

If the war on Iran turns out to be a catastrophic misstep, as it gives every appearance of being, there will be a price to pay — and leading US politicians are likely to scramble to shift the blame on to Israel. It may be that they are already getting in their excuses.

The all-too-visible freedom Israel has enjoyed in Washington to buy, bully and silence could soon become a central liability. It will not be hard to argue that a system so clearly open to manipulation that the US could be bounced into a self-sabotaging war needs to be remade, to prevent any repeat of such a disaster.

This may be the biggest lesson Washington learns from the war on Iran. That it is time to stop the tail wagging so vigorously.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published on the author’s Substack and reepublished with permission.

The Middle East is in flames. Britain is being dragged into an illegal war, the aims of which are entirely unclear, reports Richard Sanders of Double Down News.

“It’s a war of choice, and the man who chose it is Benjamin Netanyahu. Why, yet again, is the West dancing to Israel’s tune?

“I’ve made a number of videos exposing Israeli crimes. This one is different. It’s directed at conservatives and people generally who support the state of Israel.

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“I believe our indulgence of Israel is not just morally wrong. It’s against the interests of the US and the UK and ultimately against the interests of Israel itself.

“It is leading us all to disaster. Palestine is the place you come thundering, crashing into the buffers, the limits of the Western liberal moral imagination.

“The tragedy and complexity of Israel is that it’s both a product of the most unspeakable racism and a cause of it. Zionism was born from the suffering of Jewish people in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, from a desire for a safe haven, a territory where Jews would for once be the hosts and not the eternal guests.

“It was framed as a return to a historic biblical homeland. and for its supporters. These two factors give it an entirely different complexion morally from other enterprises where predominantly European populations have settled far-flung parts of the world.

Dispossession and subjugation
“There’s no doubt that the Zionist dream has enormous emotional power. The problem, of course, is the other side of the equation, the people. It was inflicted upon the Palestinians whose experience of dispossession and subjugation was no different from that of countless other peoples subjected to European colonialism.

“In fact, arguably, it’s been considerably worse than many, precisely because of the licence and indulgence granted to the Israeli state.

“Let’s lay out the bold, indisputable facts. In 1948, more than 80 percent of the Palestinian population of what became Israel fled their homes. Now, if you want to believe this was not an act of deliberate ethnic cleansing, fine.

“What’s undeniable is that they were never allowed to return. In 1947, they were there. In 1949, they were not. The granting of the vote to that small fragment of the Palestinian population that remained provided a democratic fig leaf for the new state, one that was blown away once the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967.

The End of Israel                                     Documentary: Double Down News

“There Palestinians have no right to vote for the political entity, the state of Israel that controls their lives. Jewish settlers, on the other hand, occupying the same territory do.

“Even in East Jerusalem, which as far as the Israeli government is concerned has been formally annexed to Israel, Palestinians cannot vote. Political rights depend upon ethnicity. That is not democracy.

“Israel is and has always been a state whose defining feature is that it’s structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another. What else does the term a Jewish state mean?

‘Elephant in the room’
“This is the elephant in the room. the simple, blindingly obvious, undeniable fact that the Western political media class has decided that we must never mention or acknowledge, despite the fact that all of the world’s leading human rights organisations, including the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, have denounced Israel as an apartheid state.

“Now scour the history of the modern world. No people has ever resigned itself to being second class citizens in their own country. Spend just 10 minutes at a checkpoint in the West Bank and you get it.

“The disfiguring dehumanisation, the humiliation of elderly men and women forced to stand in the sun for hours waiting for 18-year-olds to search them.

“The brutalisation of young men in particular, the daily control of rage that is the lot of every Palestinian. It is simply emotionally, psychologically intolerable.”

• Watch the full Double Down News video

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: An Israeli court has closed an investigation into the death of Walid Ahmad, a 17-year-old from the occupied West Bank who died in an Israeli jail six months after he was arrested, held without charges and accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.

An autopsy showed Ahmad likely starved to death after suffering extreme weight loss, muscle wasting and untreated scabies. Human rights groups say nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli jails since October 2023.

Meanwhile, local and international media outlets report Israeli forces recently tortured a Palestinian toddler in Gaza to coerce a confession from his father.

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According to reports from Palestine TV, Al Jazeera and others, the child’s father, Osama Abu Nassar, was detained near the al-Maghazi refugee camp after he came under fire from Israeli soldiers.

He was forced to approach an Israeli checkpoint, where he was separated from his 18-month-old son, stripped naked and forced to watch as soldiers used a cigarette to burn one of the toddler’s legs while using a nail to puncture the other.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as a new UN report warns Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent”.The report, titled “Torture and Genocide”, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

In July, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on her over her report naming dozens of companies she says are profiting from Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International blasted the sanctions as a “shameless and transparent attack on the fundamental principles of international justice”. Francesca Albanese’s new book is When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.

Francesca, thank you so much for being with us. Why don’t you lay out what you found in your new report, “Torture and Genocide,” that you just presented at the U.N. Human Rights Council?

Torture and Genocide — a new UN report.     Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Thank you. Thank you, Amy and Nermeen.

I’ve been investigating genocide for over two years now. So, five out of eight reports I’ve produced for the United Nations focus on genocide, acts of genocide, the context in which a genocide happens, why the genocide is not stopped, the layers of complicity from states and private companies, which is the reason why also I’m sanctioned by the United States, against which now my 13-year-old daughter, who’s an American citizen, is the only one to take action suing the Trump administration.

But of all the investigations I’ve carried out, this has been absolutely the most excruciating, that led me to say that Israel uses torture in a systematic and widespread fashion, intentionally and sadistically, to break the spirit of the Palestinians, not just as individuals, but as a people, considering the scale and intensity of torture.

And I monitored torture behind bars, collecting hundreds, hundreds of testimonies, directly and from Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, but also analyzing what experts call torturous environment, meaning the cumulative impact of all the practices, of all the crimes that Israel has massively inflicted on the Palestinians — again, beyond the torture, sodomisation, raping in jail, the enforced disappearance, which is touching 4000 people.

This is new. This is a new crime, including for Israel, toward the Palestinians. But also starvation, constant forced displacement, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and home demolition, the fear of being always threatened with death or other crimes, it creates a torturous environment for the Palestinians, which is an essential element of genocide.

And it is genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Francesca, if you could elaborate on this point that you’ve just made and that you make in the report, namely, that torture has effectively become state policy for Israel since October 2023? So, what are the kinds of transformations you’ve seen, both in terms of Israeli security personnel, as well as settlers, against the Palestinians?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, I have to say that what I’ve investigated is something on which even the United Nations Committee Against Torture and the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Israel/Palestine had shed light already, the fact that Israel, after October 7, has massively used torture to punish the Palestinians vindictively.

In fact, the concept of torture has become a state policy is something that the Committee Against Torture found out recently.

I have zoomed in: What does it mean, and where does it come from? Surely, one of the main engineers or architects of this, what’s been called — what he has called the “prison revolution,” is Itamar Ben-Gvir, was — immediately after October 7, has declared that the Palestinians in jail will not be afforded luxury treatment or five-star treatment anymore, as if it was a five-star hotel, what the Israeli prison system afforded Palestinians before October 7.

By the way, in 2023, in July 2023, I produced a report showing how widespread and systemic was the arbitrary treatment of Palestinian detainees, so, just to give a context.

But the conditions have become more and more brutal, and intentionally so. What does it mean? Palestinians have routinely been abducted — I mean, detained without charge or trial. They’ve been arrested, because Palestinians, if they were specific professionals, like journalists and doctors or headed medical personnel, all the more.

Seventeen hundred Palestinian healthcare personnel have been killed. Hundreds remain in jail. And they have been shackled, blindfolded, beaten, humiliated, stripped naked, photographed, filmed, exposed to Israeli civilians, including settlers, coming in to document and to film, to participate into this orgy of depravity, of how a person can be humiliated.

But the most painful, excruciating thing — and I’ve read some of the testimonies — is how Palestinian women and men have been sodomised, have been raped, with bottles, with knives, with metal rods. Even the prisoner who was sodomised through — was raped with a knife, brought to the hospital.

Five Israeli officials were identified and pressed charged against, and now the charges have been dropped. And the person who leaked the video from within the military apparatus is under house arrest on top of it.

So, not only that I’ve documented the vindictiveness toward the Palestinians, the humiliation, the continuous abuses against them in jail, really to break their spirit once and for all as a people, but also the fact that there has been almost something celebratory against the mistreatment of Palestinians in jail among the society.

The legislative power, the Knesset, has been discussing the right to rape Palestinians, and so other members of the executive. The judiciary has not looked into it. And as I said, even those who were found, caught on video, committing this crime were released.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesca, in this last 30 seconds, what are you calling for?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Oh, for justice. Justice. Israel must be stopped, because, Amy, I can’t even use the past tense. As we speak, there are still over 9000 Palestinian hostages, hostages to an unlawful occupation in Israeli jail.

The only thing this — International Court of Justice has spoken. Israel must withdraw the occupation, the troops, the colonies. And the exploitation of Palestinian resources must end.

Meanwhile, the settlers continue to terrorise people. Very few Israelis are engaged against this. So member states must intervene, cut ties and stop weapons transfers to Israel once and for all, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesco Albanese, we thank you so much for being with us, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. We’ll link to your report, “Torture and Genocide,” and have you back on to talk about your book.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

COMMENTARY: By Eman Hillis

Displaced from my home in northern Gaza, I sit reading reports of the Iran war as my little sister, 6, struggles to walk across the room. Two months into the ceasefire, an Israeli soldier shot her in the head.

On my phone, a video of US politician Tommy Tuberville criticising the Iranian regime for “treating women like dogs” plays.

Another follows, showing Matt Schlapp suggesting the girls killed in a school bombing in Iran are better dead than living a “barbaric life”. To top it all, Israel celebrated International Women’s Day in Persian, posting an AI video of fake US, Israeli, and Iranian women frolicking together.

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Watching these statements and videos from Gaza, where women have been subjected to relentless violence throughout the more than two-year genocide, the sudden concern for women’s rights is difficult to take seriously.

I was among the hundreds of thousands of women displaced by Israel in Gaza. I experienced the suffering that Israel, backed by the US, subjected us to, and watched other women endure.

One month before the third US veto of a proposed ceasefire in Gaza, a sudden midnight strike hit the apartment next to where I was sheltering in Khan Younis. Human remains were scattered about — half of one man’s body was hanging on what had been a window on the seventh floor, the other half on a bus in the street.

No women were killed, but I watched them weep for loved ones, denied the chance to mourn them or even gather and bury the remains.

Fleeing women dragged children
The tanks then rushed in. Dozens of women, children, and men ran through the street — some women still weeping for those who had just been killed. Most of them dragged two or more children by the hand.

I was running with a woman who held a baby she had given birth to one week earlier, crying and gasping for breath. The tanks were advancing toward us, firing shells at a hospital nearby, while drones above us strafed us indiscriminately.

The violence did not stop with the killings and displacements. Israel made life even more miserable for women, without using missiles. It cut off water, then prohibited the entry of sanitary pads and painkillers, turning women’s periods into a living hell.

Israel’s policy of starving Gaza has raised miscarriage rates among women to 300 percent.

Israeli soldiers set dogs on Palestinian women, assaulted pregnant mothers, and threatened them with rape — all of this with US support and under the protection of six US vetoes.

“Terrorist organisations have brought disaster upon you,” was one of the most common statements that Israeli leaflets repeated in Gaza and Lebanon before launching a brutal attack on a certain area. The line was often followed by “for your safety, leave the place” or “the IDF has no intention of harming you”.

The language is moral and protective, suggesting the action about to follow is a “rescue mission,” not an act of war.

US uses similar rhetoric
The US has long used similar rhetoric to justify its political ambitions abroad. In Iraq, it claimed to be saving the international community from “weapons of mass destruction.”

It claimed to be saving civilians from oppression by “terrorist organisations” when it backed Israel in its wars against Palestine and Lebanon.

In Afghanistan, the US-led invasion was often justified from a “feminist” lens to “rescue” women oppressed by the Taliban.

Now, the same strategy is being deployed against Iran. Women’s rights are weaponised as a pretext for airstrikes, sanctions, and military invasion.

Hundreds of Iranian women, including pregnant mothers, have been killed in US and Israeli strikes. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been destroyed, displacing millions of women and their loved ones within the country.

This is not to suggest that Iranian women enjoy full rights in their country, but feminism cannot be achieved through bombs.

This US and Israeli rhetoric contradicts a fundamental principle of feminism. By assuming that women are unable to fight and speak up for their rights, they deny women’s right of self-determination.

Struggling to address women’s rights
Notably, the same governments that attempt to act as the “saviours” of women struggle to address women’s rights at home. Israel, which struggles to curb incidents of sexual harassment against women, has been commodifying female soldiers to garner public sympathy during the Gaza war.

Meanwhile, one in five women in the US has experienced completed or attempted rape in their lifetime.

For women who have lived through US and Israeli wars, claims of defending Iranian women ring hollow.

The blood of more than 16,000 Palestinian women killed during the two-year genocide has not yet dried, yet the US and Israel present themselves as the guardians of women’s rights.

Those who kill and oppress other women cannot claim to defend women’s rights elsewhere. True feminism cannot defend the humanity of women in one place and ignore it in another.

Eman Hillis is a Gaza-based journalist and fact-checker reporting on war and disinformation from the ground during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This article was first published by The New Arab.

The actions of the Trump administration and its AIPAC-Israeli donors have reached new levels of immorality, illegality and unprecedented venality.

It is almost universally accepted that the US-Israel attack on Iran had no justification under international law: it was simply a war of aggression and thus the commission of perhaps the most serious crime under international law, precisely what the UN was set up to prevent.

Then we have the conduct of the war by the US and Israel, each pursuing its own agenda but completely lacking any coherent strategy.

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From day one of the attack they have committed war crime after war crime, most recently in bombing civilian targets and now civilian infrastructure. The current escalation flowing from the attack near an Iranian nuclear power plant and on Iran’s electrical power grid demonstrates this and demonstrates equally clearly Iran’s current strategic and tactical advantages.

While all this is happening the US Empire is declining rapidly and the rogue state of Israel is experiencing in its own territory a taste of the death, injury and destruction that inevitably follows any war, yet they still both continue to escalate and to widen the war.

Now it emerges in the US that analyses of market activity including especially oil trades demonstrate a very high probability of massive insider trading that can only come from within the Trump White House coterie.

For example, market reaction to Trump’s Monday Truth Social post about having discussions with the Iranians caused the S&P market cap to rise by about two trillion dollars; the later Iranian announcement there were no discussions caused it to drop by about one trillion dollars and those market movements were anticipated by traders who made trades, literally last minute, to the value of about $500 million.

There have been similar shenanigans with the trade in oil, that market being highly sensitive to information about the likely future course of the war. Trump insiders know when a new policy tweet will be issued and what it will say.

And incredibly, the Epstein cabal play these games with human lives without compunction while grasping for unearned riches.

Innocent civilians of all ages are being slaughtered, countries are being physically and financially decimated and the entire world is spiralling into a deepening energy vortex with inevitably disastrous consequences, all while the actually crucial diplomatic and military decisions with profound geopolitical consequences are made by ignorant, incompetent, amoral, avaricious zealots pursuing immediate self-interest at the expense of the future of their countries, of people all over the world and indeed of the entire globe.

Kellie Tranter is a lawyer, researcher, and human rights advocate. This commentary was first published on her X account where she tweets from @KellieTranter

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by, for the first time in six years except for yesterday, Juan González, also in New York. It’s great to be with you again, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Thanks, Amy. And welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

As the US and Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran enters its 25th day, President Trump is claiming that Iran has begun negotiations with the United States, but the Iranian government has dismissed the claim as “fake news”, accusing Trump of trying to manipulate financial and oil markets.

Over the weekend, Trump threatened to, quote, “obliterate” Iranian power plants if Iran did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Monday night. But on Monday, Trump reversed course, extended his deadline to five days and repeatedly claimed the US was now in productive conversations with Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “With Iran, we’ve been negotiating for a long time. And this time, they mean business. And it’s only because of the great job that our military did, is the reason they mean business. They want to settle, and we’re going to get it done, I hope.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Earlier in the day, President Trump claimed he might personally take joint control of the Strait of Hormuz with Iran’s next ayatollah.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “It will be jointly controlled.”

REPORTER: “By whom?”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Maybe me. Maybe me.”

REPORTER: “You want the United States to be in control of the Strait of Hormuz?”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Me and the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is, whoever the next ayatollah — look, and there’ll also be a form of a — a very serious form of a regime change.

“Now, in all fairness, everybody has been killed from the regime. They’re really starting off. There’s automatically a regime change.

“But we’re dealing with some people that I find to be very reasonable, very solid. The people within know who they are. They’re very respected.

“And maybe one of them will be exactly what we’re looking for. Look at Venezuela, how well that’s working out. We are doing so well in Venezuela with oil and with the relationship between the president-elect and us. And maybe we find somebody like that in Iran.”

AMY GOODMAN: Despite Trump’s claims of US-Iran negotiations, US Central Command says US forces, “continue to aggressively strike,” Iran.

Meanwhile, Iran has retaliated by striking other Gulf nations and Israel. Israeli officials said Iran has launched seven missile barrages since midnight, targeting Tel Aviv and other cities. The Israeli military said one of the missiles that hit Tel Aviv carried a 220-pound warhead. Israel’s Health Ministry said nearly 4800 people have been injured by Iran’s attacks on Israel since the war began.

We go now to London, where we’re joined by Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. His recent piece for Zeteo is headlined “Why Netanyahu Duped Trump Into the Illegal War With Iran.”

Well, Daniel Levy, thanks so much for being with us again. Why don’t you explain that headline?

DANIEL LEVY: Well, good to be with you, Amy and Juan.

Netanyahu himself and other Israeli leaders, although he’s been at the helm for much of the last three decades, have, during an awfully long period, told us Iran is at the precipice of becoming a nuclear power.

By the way, we should always remind ourselves, Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the region. But they’ve been telling us, “It’s imminent. We have to act now.” And they’ve been trying to pull successive American presidents into that war, to launch such a military campaign.

They’ve never succeeded. You have had American presidents across the decades, from whichever party has been in power, who have created an extremely indulgent, permissive environment for Israel in the region, and in particular when it comes to Israel’s consistent war crimes against the Palestinians.

What you have not had is a president who could be led into this kind of a military operation. And we’re seeing right now, in almost the last month of this war, precisely why. But this president is made of different stuff, less serious stuff, apparently, and Netanyahu saw his opportunity.

But the reason, I think, why this was of such significance for Netanyahu is we are in a new era. It’s not an era of a Pax Americana with — alongside all that indulgence of Israel, there were still certain brake mechanisms. This time, Israel sees us in an era of what I would call a Pax Greater Israel.

This is about how far Israel can extend its dominion, how much of a hard-power, dominant hegemon it can be in the region, seizing parts of Syria or of Lebanon, trying to finish an eradicationist approach to the Palestinians. And crucially, to do that, you have to weaken Iran militarily, to remove some kind of deterrent.

You can only do that with the US, so you need to pull the US into this war. If that means further accelerating American decline and even accelerating Israel’s loss of support in America, then it’s a price to pay. It’s kind of “use it or lose it,” because those things are happening anyway.

In saying all of this, I don’t want to suggest that America has no agency in this. There are things to do with the Trump administration, the neocons, the people who still have positions of influence in the US that have brought them into this. But that’s what Netanyahu is trying to achieve, to achieve Greater Israel, domination in the region, including the weakening of the Gulf, which is intentional, at the expense of America bleeding further reputational, political, economic assets in this war.

Trump’s ‘Israel First’ Iran War                       Video: Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Daniel Levy, you’ve also written that, quote, “The idea that this is a war to serve American rather than Israeli interests resonates primarily in three spaces: the gullible, the true believers (especially of end times religious [thinking]), or those who are paid-up members of Israel’s echo chamber.” Could you elaborate?

DANIEL LEVY: Yes. I think there is a lot of attention being paid to this question of who does this serve. Now, you can make the case that you also have a US government that is locked into its own kind of logic of war.

You have, if I may suggest, a decline anxiety in the US. You have an attempt to reassert primacy and preponderance. I don’t think that is or can go well. You have Marco Rubio, for instance, telling the Europeans, “Join us in the next Western century of imperial domination.”

That can perhaps play out in the Western Hemisphere — the crime committed with the kidnapping of a leader in Venezuela, the illegal blockade on Cuba. But if you travel too far afield to find monsters to slay, and if you have an incoherent strategy and an incompetent administration implementing that strategy, then things are going to go very badly wrong, which was entirely predictable in this illegal war of choice launched by the US and Israel.

And therefore, if you look at this, and even if you factor in the attempt to assert American interest, this war would not have happened if Israel’s leader had not been there whispering in the president’s ear, making the case.

[There were] seven bilateral meetings in the first 13 months of the second Trump term between Trump and Netanyahu, two meetings in the eight weeks leading up to the launching of this illegal war, daily phone calls, we are told, now information coming out in The New York Times that the Mossad apparently bamboozled Americans with the idea that if you could decapitate some of the regime leadership, the Mossad could foment a coup on the streets, that you could arm Kurdish groups from the outside to take geographical parts of Iran to start dismantling the central state.

You really have to be, therefore, either extremely gullible, as I suggested, or a true believer that, well, this is high risk, but it’s worth it, because what maybe you’re ideologically committed to, the Greater Israel cause, maybe that comes from a place of evangelical dispensationalist belief in the end times, or you simply are part of an echo chamber whose wheels are greased very consistently.

And we see that play out over so many years in American politics. That’s what I’m suggesting. And I do think that the attempt to suggest this is more than Israel first, that somehow this serves America’s interest, are not going to go well, and Israel will pay a tremendous price for that over time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also — there appears to have been a shift in the last few days in how the Israeli government permits damage within Israel from Iranian attacks to be publicised by the press, because, clearly, during the first two weeks of the war, Israel essentially prevented any kind of images, from the US media especially, going out to the world.

Now, in the last few days, it’s almost as if Netanyahu and the government want their own people and the rest of the world to see some of this damage. I’m wondering your thoughts about this. Has there been a change in approach or tactics by the Israeli government?

DANIEL LEVY: So, I’m not so sure. I think it’s an interesting question to dwell upon. But what one might be seeing is an inability, and therefore a degradation of credibility if Israel tries to claim that none of this destruction is happening — in other words, an inability to prevent those images from coming out — when those strikes are now causing very significant damage. I don’t want to exaggerate that, either. I don’t think that is what causes this unnecessary war to come to an end.

But what one perhaps has to look to is, if you remember, early on in the war, one of the real questions, as this became a war of endurance, almost a war of attrition, was: Could the US and Israeli side sufficiently deplete Iran’s missile-launching capacity before Iran both sufficiently degraded the interception capacity on the Israeli and US side — so they have to be a bit more selective in terms of what they use the interceptors for, because they can’t take everything out and they are going to run out — and also Iran apparently holding back some of its heavier kit, because in its strategy, it assumed this could go on for a long time, and it had to have a plan for week one, week two, week three? And so, I think, to the extent to which we’re seeing more images, it is likely because that equation hasn’t played well for the US and Israel, and because we’re seeing more damage being done.

I think you have a war where Israel has a strategy. It’s an extremely ambitious overreach strategy in terms of not regime change, but regime collapse, state collapse, implosion, the dismantling of the Iranian state, where Iran has a strategy of escalating horizontally, testing American endurance and holding out and winning that way.

But I think you’d be really hard pushed to find a coherent strategy on the US side.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip of President Trump speaking to reporters about US aims in negotiations.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “No nuclear bomb, no nuclear weapon, not even close to it, low key on the missiles. We want to see peace in the Middle East. We want the nuclear dust.

“We’re going to want that, and I think we’re going to get that. We’ve agreed to that. … If this happens, it’s a great start for Iran to build itself back, and it’s everything that we want.

“And it’s also great for Israel, and it’s great for the other Middle Eastern countries.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, Daniel Levy, you are a former Israeli negotiator under two Israeli prime ministers. If you can respond to what he’s saying, and also to what Iran is saying, that the idea that there’s any negotiation going on is fake news intended to “manipulate financial and oil markets and to escape the quagmire in which America and Israel are trapped,” said the speaker of Iran’s parliament?

DANIEL LEVY: So, there are a couple of things going on here, and I want to try and disentangle those. First of all, the question of: Are negotiations taking place? And what I think is very clear is that there are channels of communication via third countries.

Those have been available all the time. Partly, one has to understand that countries in the region, who were not a party to launching this war nor to the decision to go to war, who, in fact, cautioned against this war, in the Gulf and elsewhere, they are feeling tremendous blowback and taking hits from this war, and they are keen to bring it to an end.

There may be some who, for some reason, still believe America can do the job and that they should trust America’s competence and coherence in attempting to do so. I think most are not in that camp. They know the cost is too high, and they are experiencing daily what it means to rely on America for your security, and the answer is not good.

So, there are a number of states, also beyond that — Türkiye has been super active, Pakistan, for instance, Egypt — who are maintaining open channels with both parties and obviously sending messages, because, by the way, the whole world is suffering from this — higher fuel, food, fertiliser prices, etc. So there are active channels. Are they talking directly? I don’t know. I doubt it. But I also think it doesn’t matter very much.

What matters is the question you kind of raise there, Amy, which is: Are these talks, first of all, intended to produce an outcome? Was this another American deployment of diplomacy as a ruse?

We saw in the lead-up to this war that America played with negotiations, attempted that as a distraction, but actually intended to go for the military option. So, is this trying to buy some time while the US waits for a third aircraft carrier, more of your taxpayer dollars, to be deployed in the West Asia-Middle East region?

Was this a Monday-morning pre-stock market intervention on the part of the president? Because if there’s one thing he does pay attention to, it’s that. So, was he trying to calm the markets, give himself a few more days, or is this a serious attempt to chart a path to deescalation?

If it is the latter, then that would have to include an acknowledgment that in negotiations you have to listen to the other side. You have to take into account their interests. If you go in with maximalist positions, often designed by the worst elements of maximalism in your administration and by the Israelis intentionally trying to make sure that talks cannot succeed, then — guess what — the talks won’t succeed.

So, if you think you can impose on Iran in these talks things that you couldn’t achieve in your military assault or things that they weren’t willing to accept beforehand, then the talks are doomed to fail.

The one thing that may be working to our benefit is not who might host these talks. It’s certainly not the fact that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff might be involved, because that would be very bad news indeed, given their record of failure, if they’re the only people.

But the one piece of good news is that the loose and perhaps nonexistent relationship between what Trump says and the realities out there in the real world, that relationship means that Trump can claim what he likes, because what we’re probably looking for is three victory speeches, given in Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington, DC.

They won’t align. They won’t match up. But they might allow for a cessation and then for some of these issues to be addressed afterwards.

But as long as that doesn’t happen, we still have to contend with the fact that Israel has been driving a lot of the escalatory logic in this war. It will continue to attempt to prevent a ceasefire. It’s not alone. There are certainly American sources trying to do that, as well.

Israel is still on the impunity high from its Gaza genocide, which has led us here. And we have to contend with the fact that each time you try and get a “mission accomplished” victory image, you might escalate, leading to a further cycle of escalation, and then that can collapse any putative path out of this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Daniel Levy, we only have about a minute left, but I wanted to ask you — while the war is continuing in Iran and Israeli forces are in Lebanon, the settlers in the West Bank continue to perpetuate violence against Palestinians, and the IDF continues to attack Palestinians in Gaza. I’m wondering your sense of how this has basically faded from the international view while the war against Iran continues.

DANIEL LEVY: Well, I wish I could say that it needed the war in Iran in order to shift attention away from this, in order for Israel to be able to continue to not be held accountable and to get away with these daily violations of international law and with these appalling atrocities against the Palestinians, but it didn’t take the war.

Israel is doing that, and it will continue to do that unless and until it is held to account, it is contained and deterred. And, of course, you also see 1 million displaced in Lebanon and the attempt, apparently, to reestablish a zone of Israeli domination there, still in control of territory in Syria, as well.

But I also want to challenge this notion that the problem in the West Bank is the settlers. There is no armed settler militia without the IDF. The settlers roam the West Bank with the active backing of Israel’s military.

Occasionally, they may call a handful of people to account and say, “No. Stop.” But most of the occupation and the entrenchment of a matrix of control and an apartheid regime, that is run not by lone settlers. That is run by the Israeli state. That is run by the IDF.

It is the IDF and the Israeli state that run that regime of control, that also, as you mentioned, despite the so-called ceasefire, are in control of about 60 percent directly of Gaza, carrying out daily military assaults, daily killings of Palestinians in Gaza, still not allowing the necessary humanitarian assistance or shelter into Gaza, and, in parallel, conducting the largest military intervention in the West Bank, the largest displacement and destruction, often focused on refugee camps, like Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur al-Shams, that we have seen since 1967.

I think this will ultimately end very badly for Israel and generate tremendous blowback. But in the meantime, it is again the Palestinians bearing the brunt.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, we want to thank you so much for being with us, president of the US/Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. We’ll link to your piece in Zeteo, “Why Netanyahu Duped Trump Into the Illegal War With Iran.” You can follow Levy’s writings on his Substack.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

In recent days, Israel and the United States have expressed outrage over the deliberate and indiscriminate targeting of civilians and civilian residences and infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf by Iranian forces.

They have cited the illegality of such attacks, urged global condemnation, and demanded that human rights organisations speak out.

Having spent years weakening the laws meant to protect civilians, they are now discovering that those same laws are too fragile to protect their own people.

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Israeli and US officials seem unaware that the crimes they now condemn are ones they themselves have long justified as legitimate military actions.

Take cluster munitions. Following Iran’s reported use of these indiscriminate weapons on March 9 around Tel Aviv, Israeli officials condemned their use in populated areas.

“The Iranian regime is firing cluster bombs at Israeli civilians. Their deliberate and repeated use against civilians shows that the Iranian terror regime is seeking to maximise civilian deaths and harm,” declared Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which provided an infographic explaining how the weapon — banned by 124 countries — is inherently indiscriminate.

The Pentagon echoed the criticism, with Admiral Brad Cooper, the chief of US Central Command, condemning Iran’s use of “inherently indiscriminate” cluster munitions.

4 million cluster munitions
Yet in 2006 Israel fired more than four million cluster munitions into southern Lebanon, turning large swaths of the country into a no-go zone while insisting their use was a military necessity.

Unexploded cluster munitions continue to terrorise Lebanese civilians, maiming and killing at least 400 people as they detonated years after the war. Israel reportedly resumed using cluster munitions in Lebanon in 2025 but would neither confirm nor deny doing so.

Israel’s vast use of these weapons in 2006 helped spur the 2010 Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning them as inherently indiscriminate. Yet Israel and the United States — along with Russia and Iran — have refused to ratify the treaty, insisting they may be used legitimately in wartime.

In 2023 and 2024, the Biden administration shipped large quantities of cluster munitions to Ukraine despite warnings that unexploded ordnance would endanger civilians for decades to come. The consequences are now clear — having challenged the ban on these weapons, Israel now finds its own civilians under attack from them.

Iranian attacks on Israeli and Gulf civilian infrastructure — from residences to schools to water desalination plants — have drawn similar condemnations as unlawful attacks on civilians, even though such strikes have been preceded or followed by unlawful attacks on Iranian civilians and infrastructure.

On March 8, the United Nations Security Council issued a resolution singling out Iranian attacks on civilians for condemnation, even though Israeli and US forces had also struck a girls’ school, civilian residences, and an Iranian water desalination plant, among other civilian sites.

Even AIPAC chimed in, bemoaning that Iran was “killing civilians” in Bahrain following a strike that killed a young woman on March 9.

Condemnations ring hollow
These condemnations ring hollow in the wake of Israel’s vast destruction of residential buildings, schools, universities, and agricultural lands in Gaza, leaving the territory buried under 61 billion tons of rubble and largely uninhabitable, and more than 75,000 people, the majority women and children, dead.

For more than three years since its latest war in Gaza, Israel has defended its assault on Palestinian civilians as military necessity, blamed Hamas for “starting” the war, and rejected condemnations as products of bias and antisemitism.

Israeli and US officials have gone further still, at times rejecting very applicability of international law. “I don’t need international law,” asserted President Donald Trump earlier this year; adding “my own morality” is “the only thing that can stop me”.

For its part, Israel rejects the status of Palestine as occupied territory under the Geneva Conventions and the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force; both US and Israeli officials reject the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

“Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has suggested dispensing with international humanitarian law altogether, declaring that the United States should employ “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and give “no quarter, no mercy to our enemies” — rhetoric that, when applied in an armed conflict, constitutes a war crime.

Such contempt for international law may seem convenient for states that believe their power shields them from consequences.

Weakened rules an invitation
But in a world where destructive force is widely distributed, weakening the rules meant to protect civilians invites others to do the same. The result is not greater security but a downward spiral in which every side claims necessity while civilians pay the price.

International humanitarian law was never meant to protect only one side’s people. It protects civilians precisely because it binds all parties equally.

When powerful states defy those rules, they do more than harm their adversaries; they weaken the only framework that can protect their own civilians in return. If governments truly want to safeguard their people, the answer is not selective outrage but consistent compliance — uphold the law, apply it universally, and defend it even when it constrains your own actions.

Sarah Leah Whitson is the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now and formerly executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division. Republished from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons licence.

You can’t make this stuff up. The President of the United States, while sitting next to the Japanese Prime Minister in the Oval Office, just celebrated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

When asked by a Japanese reporter on Friday why the US didn’t consult with allies before launching the surprise attack on Iran, Trump said: “One thing you don’t want is to signal too much. We went in very hard — and we didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise.”

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Then, turning to Sanae Takaichi, he said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan?” Moments before, sitting on the plush lemon chair in the gold-encrusted Oval Office, Takaichi had been smiling from ear to ear.  Trump wiped the smile off her face with one question:

“Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?” By now the Prime Minister was squirming uncomfortably. Trump looked straight at her and said:  “Okay, RIGHT? He [the journalist] is asking me, do you believe in surprise?

“I think you much more so than us. And we had a surprise, and because of that surprise, we probably knocked out 50 percent — and much more than we anticipated doing. So if I go and tell everybody about it, it is no longer a surprise.”

For more than 80 years the US has claimed a moral high ground on the basis of its rejection of “sneak attacks”. In one rhetorical flourish Trump exposed the jarring desolation of what the US now stands for.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech was delivered on December 8, 1941, following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbour the day before.

Responding to ‘unprovoked’ sneak attack
Roosevelt, like President Pezeshkian of Iran today, was responding to an “unprovoked” sneak attack.  President Roosevelt pointed out that negotiations were ongoing and, for him, the aggressor’s conduct was false, deceptive and below contempt:

“Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

As with President Pezeshkian of Iran today, Franklin Delano Roosevelt drew the obvious conclusion: the nation was facing an existential threat.

“The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.”

Last week, I interviewed US Ambassador (ret) Chas Freeman who emphasised that the Iranians fully understood that the US-Israeli war machine launched against them would not stop unless compelled to do so.

For the Iranians, the goal is nothing less than to drive the Americans out of the region. To understand the intensity of their determination simply hear the words of FDR from 1941:

“No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.”

I would remind US President Donald Trump that in referencing that other sneak attack he might have paused to ask: “Who won that war in the end?”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand, and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. This article was first published on his website www.solidarity.co.nz

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Global oil and natural gas prices are soaring after Israel bombed a massive natural gas reserve in Iran, the largest in the world. Iran retaliated by twice attacking the world’s largest liquid natural gas production facility, located in Qatar.

Iran also attacked key energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. At one point, the price of oil reached US$118 a barrel, a 60 percent jump since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran.

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In a post online, Trump threatened to blow up the entire South Pars gas field if Iran continued to target the Qatari facility. Trump also claimed the US, “knew nothing” about the Israeli attack on the South Pars gas field, but The Wall Street Journal reports Trump approved the strike to pressure Iran to open up the critical Strait of Hormuz.

AMY GOODMAN: About 20 percent of the world’s oil exports flows through the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump has asked other countries to send warships to help force open the strait, but many nations are rejecting the request.

We’re joined now by Laleh Khalili, professor of Gulf studies at University of Exeter and the author of several books, including her latest, Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy. She also wrote Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula.

Professor Khalili, thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by talking about the state of the Strait of Hormuz right now, its closure; President Trump, according to Reuters, perhaps sending in thousands of troops, what exactly this means; and the Israeli bombing of the South Pars gas field, the largest in the world?

President Trump said, in a rare rebuke, the US didn’t know. Most people are saying that is highly unlikely, that is probably untrue.

The end of the petrodollar?             Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript:

LALEH KHALILI: So, the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most important choke points for oil — a choke point being an area during which, if it’s closed down, you end up getting a major disruption in the flow of global trade.

So, the Strait of Hormuz is one. The Suez Canal is another one. The Panama Canal is another one.

And there are a number of these different choke points all around the world. Now, what’s specific about Hormuz and what’s distinctive about it is that it is the choke point where the quantity of oil that goes through is higher than any other commodity that actually flows across the strait.

As you just mentioned, about 30 percent of the global oil flows through that. And part of the reason for that is, of course, that the world’s biggest oil producers — some of the biggest oil producers are all sitting around the Persian/Arabian Gulf, so Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Abu Dhabi, which all are huge producers of oil in the first place, and then natural gas in the case of Qatar and Iran in second place.

Now, what has been fascinating is that anybody who has one of these apps that you can put on your phone, like MarineTraffic or VesselFinder, you can actually take a look at the flow of traffic, the flow of vessel traffic, flow of ship traffic, through these different seas in the world.

And if you zoom in on the Strait of Hormuz, what you’ll find is that instead of seeing actually a steady traffic of little usually pink or green arrows going through, which indicate tankers, what you end up seeing are major clusters of ships that are bunched up very near ports where oil is produced and usually put on ships.

What that indicates is that, basically, for a number of different reasons — and I’m going to go into that in a minute — the flow of ships, the flow of ship traffic, has basically come to a halt.

Now, the reasons behind this are multifold. Of course, there is, number one, that Iran is attacking a number of the ships that are going through, and the way that it’s attacking them is through the use of very cheap either drones or sea mines, and that means that it’s basically almost impossible to deal with this particular threat, because the drones are produced so extensively in terms of number and they’re so inexpensive that they can basically be replenished even if they are destroyed.

Also being smaller, they’re much harder to target, etc. So, there has been a number of drone attacks against ships carrying oil through the channel, and so, of course, that scares a lot of carriers, a lot of tankers.

The second reason, which I actually think is perhaps even more significant, in part because it is actually not something that either the US or Iran can control, is that the moment something like this happens, the moment that there is a threat against ships, what you end up having is that insurance brokers, primarily situated in London, but there are, of course, some also in the US, China and in Europe, but really the centre for provision of maritime insurance is London, at Lloyd’s, and the ship brokers end up putting a specific war risk premium on ships.

And that means that going from something like 1 percent of the cost of the hull, meaning the ship’s body, or the cargo, meaning what it’s carrying, goes to something like 5 percent, or it goes from one fraction of 1 percent to, say, 5 percent. So that means that suddenly, instead of paying in the hundreds of thousands for insurance for a super tanker, what you’re looking at is millions in insurance, which, of course, increases the cost of the oil that is traveling. So, that’s the second reason.

The third reason is something that the Houthis noticed when they were blockading the Red Sea in support of the Palestinians when Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. And that is that sometimes the threat alone suffices in getting the ships to stop going through or, indeed, to make declarations that allows for them a degree of protection.

So, the Houthis, when they had blockaded the sea, had asked that any ships that claimed that they were not touching Israel, meaning they were not delivering to or picking up from Israel, could be allowed to go through the canal.

And so, it happened that this automatic identification system that a lot of ships — well, all ships carry — it’s called the AIS system, and the AIS system indicates what ship is in the vicinity of the system, what it’s carrying and what flag it has, meaning which authorities it responds to.

So, now what we’re seeing is that apparently Iran has mentioned that any ship, for example, that is going to China will be let through, or any ship that is not coming from one of these allied states to the US will be allowed through. Of course, there is a lot of variation in what kind of thing they have requested or what is being reported, so it’s a lot harder to see what exactly the AIS systems are being on these ships.

As I said, we are mostly seeing them clustering and waiting in these locations, one of the main ones being the Port of Fujairah, which is actually not in the Persian Gulf. It is in the Gulf of Oman.

And oil from Abu Dhabi, which is on the Persian Gulf side, is shipped to Fujaira through a pipeline. So we’re seeing a cluster of ships near Fujaira.

Iran, of course, also attacked Fujaira port. And then we’re seeing a cluster of ships near Ras Laffan, which is the main gas production and gas lifting port in Qatar. The third is, of course, around the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, a little bit further up the Persian Gulf. And so, these clusters of ships are waiting there and hoping to be able to at some point pick up oil to be carried out.

But we’re not seeing much of that flow anywhere at all.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Khalili, you mentioned that there are — they are looking for, the Iranians, to see which vessels in the Strait of Hormuz — to what countries they’re affiliated, looking at their flags. Chinese vessels have reportedly been permitted to pass through the strait. China imports about 40 percent of its oil from the Middle East and has been one of the largest buyers of Iranian oil. There are also reports that the Iranians are suggesting they’d consider allowing a small number of oil tankers to pass through the strait if the oil cargo is traded in Chinese yuan rather than —

LALEH KHALILI: Yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — US dollars. If you could comment on that?

LALEH KHALILI: This is really fascinating, because, of course, we know that the fundamental basis of the US imperial order since the end of the Second World War has been, on the one hand, petroleum and, on the other hand, the US dollar. The globe’s production and finance worlds are dependent on the petroleum that the US has guaranteed the flow of since the end of the Second World War, and which, until the nationalisation of oil in the 1970s and 1980s, basically controlled something like 60 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

After nationalisation, that percentage dropped dramatically, but the US dollar continues to be, and the financial channels that the US has crafted, continue to be a very significant bolster for the empire.

So, the fact that Iran is actually looking for alternatives to the dollar in order to challenge the petrodollar regime, which is, you know, as I said, one of the fundamentals of the US empire, is a really interesting and quite clever indication of how the Iranians are hoping to influence the crafting of a world post this war, or a new world order post this war, where there’s a multipolar financial system, where, for example, the dollar is no longer a single currency that rules the world and the US is the only channel that controls — or, the only power that controls financial channels, because, of course, the US has used this inordinate power to strong-arm various states, to institute sanctions, to make it difficult for its enemies, for example, to purchase oil.

And, of course, it has used it to coerce a lot of countries, as we see, for example, in the case of Cuba or Iran, or indeed Russia, to do its bidding. So, the fact that Iran is calling for petroyuans to become an alternative to petrodollars is actually quite significant also in indicating that the Iranians are well aware of how extensively the US has used its coercive sanction capabilities, through its control of the financial channels and through its mastery of the petrodollar, and are trying to erode that power.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Khalili, you know, the US is now the world’s largest oil producer, but because oil is a globally priced commodity, the price goes up in the US if the world market price goes up. But —

LALEH KHALILI: That’s right.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — how important do you think this might be in Trump’s calculation? Because another consideration, another aspect of this, may be that as oil supplies diminish from the Middle East, the US could benefit, because it is the world’s largest oil producer, and the price of its oil will go up, and the demand for its oil.

LALEH KHALILI: Absolutely. What a fantastic question, because, in fact, we have seen that when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began and the Nord Stream gas, natural gas, pipelines to Europe were sabotaged, we now — there are now indications that this may have been done at the behest of the US.and its Ukrainian allies. But nevertheless, when that sabotage happened, it actually translated into massive gains for US natural gas production.

The thing is that there are a number of reasons why oil is not — why the US cannot become the sole oil producer for the whole of the world. One is the question of proximity, for example. The second is the question of capacity that the US has in order to actually replace, for example, the oil that is produced by Saudi Arabia or by Iran or, indeed, by Russia.

But the third factor — and I think that this is the one that I think we should look out for — is that in the last 10 or 15 years, China has actually begun generating an alternative set of fuels, sustainable fuels, and developing technologies, particularly of electric and battery technologies, that will allow for, for example, solar or wind energy to displace fossil fuels.

And the more that the price of oil goes up, which, of course, we’ve seen that happen, as you mentioned earlier — and, in fact, this also translates into major windfalls for US oil companies. This oil prices going up benefits Chevron. It benefits Exxon. It doesn’t benefit the average US citizen at the petrol stations, at the gas stations, but it does benefit the oil companies.

So, it definitely does — that does happen. But the higher the price of oil goes up, the relatively cheaper it becomes to actually have sustainable alternatives, which, of course, that means that it benefits China in a major way, since China is way ahead of the rest of the world in producing these technologies and in producing them cheaply.

The solar panels that are being produced in China are a fraction of the price of solar panels that were being produced something like 15 or 20 years ago. And I think this shift is actually a major long-term concern for the oil companies.

In the short term, they’re taking all the windfall that they can get. But this, again, is — the kind of a postwar order that will likely also have major implications for the kind of energy people are paying to use or people are willing to use, actually.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 20 seconds. But the effect of the bombing of the South Pars facility, the largest gas facility in the world, what it means for Iran, what it means for the world, and President Trump denying the US had anything to do with, which most do not believe?

LALEH KHALILI: No, absolutely not. There is no way that Israel would have actually done this without coordination with the United States. And, in fact, the channels that deny, for example, that the US coordinated, or report Trump’s denials, are the channels that are often used to feed us the kinds of lies that the administration tells us.

But what is quite significant about South Pars — and I know it’s a very short time left, so I’m going to be very quick about it — is that the South Pars field is actually shared between Iran and Qatar.

The North Dome, which is on the south part of the Persian Gulf, is Qatar’s share of this major field, and Iran’s bit is in the northern part of the Persian Gulf.

And so, the destruction of the infrastructure there will not only have an effect on Iranians’ ability to produce electricity and fuel their various kinds of industries and/or homes, but it will also have an effect on the infrastructures that are used by the Qataris and which the Iranians and Qataris have been using in an extraordinary degree — to an extraordinary degree of coordination since the fields have been used. So, this actually also affects Qatar.

The bombing itself also affects Qatar. And I don’t think that this is a calculation that the rather know-nothing Trump administration has taken into account.

AMY GOODMAN: Laleh Khalili, we want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of Gulf studies at University of Exeter, author of several books, including her latest, Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy. Thanks so much for being there.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

When Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, was assassinated in the opening stages of the US-Israeli war against Iran, I didn’t mourn.

Khamenei was not someone who deserved to be mourned notwithstanding my contempt for the increasing use of assassination by aggressor nations; in this case the United States and Israel.

Having said this, had either US President Donald Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu been assassinated I would have “not mourned” them even more.

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On the other hand, along with thousands of residents in the Iranian city of Minab a mass funeral, I did privately mourn for the at least 165 schoolgirls and staff killed in the opening hours of the US-Israeli strikes when one of their missiles hit a girls’ elementary school.

Two words distinguish Iran from United States and Israel
Understanding what distinguishes Iran from both the United States and Israel begins with two uncomplimentary words — repression and genocide.

Repression is the action of subduing someone or something by force. This can include suppressing thoughts or desires in people so that they remain unconscious. Iran’s theocratic political system is unquestionably repressive.

If, in some way, you question the regime or the governing values enough there is a high risk of repression. Keep your head down and you are likely to be safe. If not then you are likely to be in danger.

In contrast, genocide is the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

Genocide a characteristic of Israel and US government policies
Israel’s policy of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland now incorporates genocide as the main means of achieving this objective, particularly in Gaza which is there for all to observe.

While Israel is the practitioner of genocide in Gaza, the United States is the enabler and main funder. This is in terms of both funding weapons supplies and political support for Israel’s brutal military occupation of this small remaining piece of Palestinian land.

Without this US support there would be no genocide in Gaza; like the West Bank, just ongoing repression.

While it is right to condemn repressive actions by the Iranian government, it is mindbogglingly immoral for these genocide supporting governments to make any judgment call on Iran, let alone declare war on the country.

Understanding the Islamic Republic
As discussed above, the Islamic Republic is a repressive government towards those who oppose it in some public way. But repression is not its only characteristic.

Iran is a highly diverse nation. While 61 percent of its population are Persian, there are more than 20 ethnic groups in total. Major minority groups include Azeris (16-24 percent), Kurds (7-10 percent), Lurs (2-6 percent), Baloch (2 percent), Arabs (1-3 percent) and Turkmens (2 percent).

As many as 99 percent of Iranians in the Republic are Muslim, predominantly Shia (90-95 percent) with the remainder comprising the Sunni minority.

While the Islamic Republic state is dominated by Shia Islam, there are recognised minority religions which are granted reserved parliamentary seats. These include Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism.

An exception is the Baháʼí faith, a world religion was founded in the 19th century mainly in Iran. It may be the second largest non-Muslim religion in the country.

Many Iranian Baháʼí have a previous Muslim background and are subjected to persecution. However, this is an inherited persecution that goes back to the mid-19th century.

Iran is not repressive towards minority ethnic groups because of their ethnicity. Azeris, for example, are not repressed because they are Azeris; only if they “put their heads above the barricades” so to speak.

The same can be said for Sunni Muslims and non-Muslim religions, except for Baháʼí whose repression is historical, predating the Islamic Republic by over a century.

But if the Republic is only seen as despotic, then an entire historical legacy explaining so much more than this is lost.

Iran is home to one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilisations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to the 5th century BC.

In spite of invasions by foreign powers, such as the Greeks, Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, the Iranian national identity was repeatedly asserted and preserved despite several changes in its dynastic empires.

The Pahlavi dynasty legacy
In 1925, Reza Khan established the Pahlavi (and last) dynasty. Following a military coup he became the new dynasty’s first Shah. In 1941, however, he was overthrown with his son Mohammad-Reza  becoming the second and last Pahlavi Shah.

Initially there were hopes of a constitutional monarchy. However, in 1951. Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq got sufficient parliamentary support to nationalise the British-owned oil industry.

In response, Mosaddeq was briefly removed from power in 1952. But, due to a popular uprising in support of him, he was quickly but reluctantly reappointed by the Shah. This enabled Mosaddeq to briefly exile the Shah in 1953 after surviving a subsequent failed military coup.

However, in August 1953, Mosaddeq was deposed by a successful US-supported military coup that was also actively supported by Britain.

The Shah then returned to power ruling Iran as a brutal autocracy with strong US support until the 1979 revolution and the Shah’s final overthrow.

Oil was central to the Shah’s policies. His government entered into agreement with an international consortium of foreign companies which ran the Iranian oil facilities for the next 25 years, splitting profits 50-50 with Iran. However, Iran was not allowed to audit the companies’ accounts or have members on their board of directors.

The Iran that the Islamic Republic inherited in 1979, on the one hand, had never been colonised; unlike much of Africa and Asia, for example. It had a proud national identity. On the other hand, under the Pahlavi dynasty, particularly in its last 25 years. it had become subservient to the United States and the oil companies.

The Shah’s autocratic regime was overthrown by a powerful mass popular movement. Among the forefront of this unstoppable movement were those that came to lead the new Islamic Republic.

The republic was the consequence of this popular will. While today there is strong internal Iranian opposition to the leadership of the Republic, there is also strong internal support for it

In 1979, Iran’s political system had changed from an autocracy to a theocracy. But there was more to it than this.

The hated legacy, under the last Shah, of the interests of Iranians being subservient to that of US imperialism, was powerful. In no small part this shaped the Islamic Republic’s politics. It was reinforced by US support for Iraq’s protected war against Iran in the 1980s.

Further, whereas the Shah held openly expressed racist views on Arabs, the republic saw it differently.

In particular, it intuitively supported Palestinian self-determination which put it at odds with Zionist Israel.

Iran also empathised with countries with quite different political systems, such as secular Cuba, that had been subjected to continuing US hostility and shared Iran’s antipathy towards US imperialism and supported for Palestine.

While your enemy’s enemy may not be your friend, nevertheless there may be principled shared interests.

Understanding the United States and its imperialism
Imperialism put simply is a policy of extending a powerful country’s economic power, exploitation of, and influence over other countries. Historically this has been through colonisation, invariably by the use of military force.

Historically the biggest imperialist power was the British Empire which, by the early 20^th century, included much of Africa and Asia (and beyond).

The United States is now the world’s strongest imperialist power.

The United States began as an imperialist power in the early 20th century, particularly in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Since the Second World War it has become, by far, the biggest imperial power reinforced by the most powerful military.

Put simply, capitalism is an economic system relentlessly driven by the maximisation of wealth accumulation. Imperialism is the highest and most extensive form of capitalism.

In this context, particularly since 1953, Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty was a complicit pawn willingly exploited by US imperialism.

This ended in 1979 by the popular will that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic; something US imperialism has never forgiven and the republic has never forgotten.

In other words, the US-Islamic Republic relationship is a recipe for continuous conflict and has reached its highest point with the current US-Israel initiated war.

False confusing justifications for the US-Israel war
The failure of the United States (and Israel) to acknowledge the above discussed escalating conflict to the point of outright war between them and the Islamic Republic has led to their muddled and changing false justifications for the war.

The truth of the matter is that the war centres on the republic’s firm opposition to US imperialism and support for Palestinian self-determination. The use of deceitful justifications is a public relations attempt to fudge this truth.

One false argument is that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. However, in the short war last June, the US and Israel boasted that they destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapons capability.

What is the lie — what they said then or what they now say? More likely it is both. After all Israel is the only country possessing nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Further, unlike Iran, it isn’t a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In fact, there is only one nuclear power in Middle East — Israel. But while Israel is ignored, Iran hypocritically is the focus of deceitful accusations and intense pressure, and now war.

Another false justification is that the US, in particular, wants to save Iranian lives by ending the repression. It is barely worth the time rejecting this claim from supporters and practitioners of genocide.

Further their bombing has already killed more than 1400 Iranians (a reported 30 percent are children) and rising. More than 17,000 have been injured including over 1000 children. Hypocrisy at its peak.

A related occasional justification is restoring democracy. But the Islamic Republic is more democratic than the outright autocracy it replaced and no less democratic than the ruthless US ally Saudi Arabia; admittedly they are both low thresholds.

Perhaps the most damming indictment of the claimed justifications is the recent resignation of Donald Trump’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, Joe Kent.

Explaining this dramatic decision, Kent referred to his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran. These included that, despite Trump’s claims, there was no imminent threat from Iran and that the US was “manipulated” by Israel.

Consequently Kent advised that he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war against Iran. Both optimistically and bravely he urged the President to end it.

In fact, Trump’s disingenuousness and underestimation of the strength of Iranian resistance and fightback have made a ceasefire improbable for some time.

Iran already agreed to a ceasefire in June. But the US and Israel broke it even though diplomacy discussions were underway.

US, Israel can’t be trusted
Why would Iran agree to another ceasefire just to give the US and Israel enough time to regroup and start another war against a combative but weakened Iran.

Iran now believes that the US and Israel can’t be trusted and it would be better to try to further weaken them instead. After all, what does Iran have to lose!

Words like reaping and sowing come to mind!

Since the mid-1980s successful New Zealand governments have had an independent foreign policy.

However, especially under the current government, we have drifted back towards being aligned with our former position of being a United States lapdog.

This observable drift was further escalated by the government’s response through Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (in an embarrassingly mashed way) and Foreign Minister Winston Peters.

In summary, while maintaining a loud silence on the US-Israeli bombing of Iran, they condemned Iran’s own bombing response in those neighbouring Arab countries with US military bases.

These US bases would be akin to Iran having its own military bases in Canada and/or Mexico (perhaps Cuba; just saying).

There has been considered media coverage of the government’s response to the war beginning with Bryce Edwards’ Democracy Briefing (March 1): How should NZ respond to the US bombing Iran.

Christopher Luxon fumbles and flounders in toe-cringingly style  

Edwards was followed by two Sam Sachdeva Newsroom articles (March 2 and 3): Trump poses headache for NZ and Luxon’s fumbling, floundering response.

To complete this considered coverage was international relations expert Professor Robert Patman, also in Newsroom (March 3): Risky Iran attack gamble.

However, it took former Prime Minister Helen Clark to demonstrate the type of political leadership we deserved to have (having herself demonstrated this over the disastrous US-led war in Iraq nearly two decades ago).

Her uncompromising criticism of the government’s response included calling it a “disgrace” (March 1): Government response a disgrace.

While Clark didn’t use the term “lapdog” to describe the government’s position, if she had she would have been right.

Repressed by Iranian government – but terrified of regime collapse
The insights of Iranians critical of the Islamic Republic’s repressive nature but even more critical of the US-Israel bombing of Iran are invaluable.

Below is an extract from a Facebook post (March 2) from an Iranian man’s YouTube channel. Consistent with the theme of my comments above, this Iranian expresses the paradox Iranians involuntarily now find themselves in — caught between an internal repressive regime and external narcissistic warmongers.

In his words:

“As an Iranian, I can tell you the situation is no longer just political — it’s existential. We are trapped between two collapsing structures: one internal, one external. On one hand, we face a deeply dysfunctional government, led by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic’s unelected institutions.

“Decades of economic mismanagement, suppression of dissent, and brutal ideological control have alienated multiple generations. No one believes in reform anymore — because every attempt has either been co-opted or crushed.

“But here’s the paradox: We are also terrified of regime collapse — because we’ve watched the aftermath of Western intervention in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Each was promised freedom; each descended into chaos, civil war, or foreign occupation.

“So no, we don’t trust the US or Israel. Not because we support our regime — but because we know how imperial powers treat ‘”liberated” nations in the Middle East.

“Freedom, in their language, often means vacuum, fire, and permanent instability. Right now, many Iranians live with three truths at once: The Islamic Republic is morally and politically bankrupt. The alternatives offered by foreign actors are not liberation — they’re collapse.

“A bad government is survivable. No government is not. We are not silent because we agree. We are cautious because we’ve learned — too well — what happens when superpowers decide to “help”.

“In a sentence: Iran is a nation held hostage by its own regime, but haunted by the fate of its neighbors. We are stuck in a house we hate, surrounded by fires we fear more.”

The final word — and what a word it is
Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American author most known for her internationally acclaimed debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree. It has been translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries.

In her own courageous and insightful words:

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves.

Nothing you can tell be about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven’t lived in blood and bone.

That does not mean that I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins.

If your vision of liberation is only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it’s not freedom you’re after.

These words are more than eloquence; more than heart rendering. They convert complexity into simplicity; they are powerful; they speak truth to power.

They deserve to be the last word in this article.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

Since the Solomon Islands established diplomatic relations with China in 2019, the Pacific country has become a strategic arena for Beijing’s influence.

By capitalising on the economic fragility of the local media sector, China has stepped up conditional funding, editorial partnerships and influence programmes to disseminate its narratives.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the Solomon Islands’ government to make the viability and independence of the media sector a priority.

• READ MORE: Other Solomon Islands media reports

One day in January 2024, Lloyd Loji, publisher of the Island Sun, one of the country’s leading dailies, reportedly received a call from a Chinese diplomat.

According to the investigative outlet In-depth Solomons, the diplomat expressed the embassy’s “concern” about an op-ed published that same day on the election of the new president of Taiwan and its implications for relations between China and Western countries.

At the end of the call, the Chinese diplomat explicitly asked the newspaper to relay articles he had sent, reflecting Beijing’s official position on regional affairs.

The Chinese diplomat did not stop at interfering in the editorial line of the Island Sun.

In-depth Solomons reports that he also emailed the owners and editors of the country’s main media outlets, urging them to adopt the Chinese narrative on the Taiwanese elections and sharing two articles he asked them to publish.

The Solomon Star, the other major daily of the Solomon Islands, duly published the articles supplied by the Chinese embassy. Both the Solomon Star and Island Sun depend on Chinese funding as the country’s media landscape is facing structural economic difficulties.

Economic precarity as Beijing’s gateway
With fewer than 700,000 inhabitants and a limited advertising market — which is increasingly dominated by social media companies — news organisations in this nation face structural economic hardship.

These vulnerabilities deepened during the covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of traditional press revenues which mostly consist of advertising, making external funding essential to survival, whether from Australia, China or the United States.

Unlike support from other foreign partners, Chinese assistance often comes with editorial conditions.

After 15 years as a journalist in the Solomon Islands, Priestley Habru — now a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide — told RSF about the demands made by the Chinese embassy to Island Sun after he left the outlet. According to his network, after the diplomatic mission donated computers, the newsroom was instructed to “stop publishing articles on Taiwan’s President.”

An investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international investigative journalism network, also revealed that in 2022 the Solomon Star sought SI$1.15 million (about US$140,000) from China to modernise its infrastructure, pledging in return to promote Beijing’s image as the islands’ “most generous and trustworthy” partner.

Following revelations about attempts by Chinese diplomats to directly interfere with the Island Sun and the country’s leading media outlets in early 2024, Beijing appears to have adopted a more discreet approach.

Ofani Eremae, president of the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI), explained to RSF that several local outlets have signed agreements with Chinese state media to use the state media’s content — which is fully controlled by the Chinese authorities — free of charge.

In early 2026, CCTV+, China’s state-owned international video news service, also offered MASI and In-depth Solomons use of its raw video footage and live broadcast signals free of charge, and invited them to sign cooperation agreements. Both In-depth Solomons and MASI have not yet responded to the proposal.

When the Strait of Hormuz closes, you don’t need to be a military analyst to understand what just happened. You only need to understand what the world runs on.

Oil. Gas. Shipping lanes. Insurance rates. Container schedules. Energy prices that decide whether factories hum or go dark, whether households heat or freeze, whether governments fall or survive.

This is why serious analysts have been saying for years that Hormuz is not a “threat” Iran invented for propaganda; it is a structural red line that the US and its allies kept treating like a bluff because they could not imagine a regional actor actually pulling the lever that exposes a vulnerability — dependence.

• READ MORE: Iran vows ‘revenge’ for Larijani, Soleimani; 2 killed in attacks on Israel
• Thousands urge NZ prime minister Luxon to condemn illegal US-Israeli war on Iran
• As Israel keeps bombing Iran, Palestinians face growing violence in West Bank
• Trump scolds allies over Strait of Hormuz operation; UAE closes airspace
• Chris Hedges: The world according to Gaza – it’s only the start
• War on Iran: Australia should put trust in its neighbours not a modern Titanic rogue state
• Other US-Israel War on Iran reports

And this is why what we are watching now is a massive US miscalculation that will be studied later the way the Iraq invasion is studied today, with the same disbelief that decision-makers could be so arrogant, so blind, and so certain that the other side would fold.

Because Washington didn’t only miscalculate Iran’s will. It miscalculated geography, logistics, and blowback. It miscalculated the fact that the US empire in the Middle East is not a fortress; it is a web of exposed arteries: bases scattered across Gulf monarchies, troops housed in predictable locations, air defenses that are expensive and finite, radars and communications nodes that can be degraded, and a regional order that can be shaken with one choke point.

You can see the arrogance in the assumptions. For years, Iran warned that if its survival is threatened — if the US and Israel push the conflict into an existential zone — Hormuz becomes part of the battlefield. Washington heard that and filed it under “Iranian theatrics,” because the American political class is addicted to the idea that their enemies always bluff, while they alone possess the right to act.

But Iran was not bluffing. Iran was describing the rules of an environment where deterrence is the only language that keeps you alive.

Hormuz was always the red line
The Strait of Hormuz is the world economy’s pressure point, and the fact that it remained open for years was not proof of Western strength. It was proof that Iran understood escalation control, because keeping Hormuz open — even while under sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, and constant threats — was Iran’s way of signaling restraint.

The West interpreted that restraint as weakness.

That’s the miscalculation.

Washington assumed Iran would keep absorbing blows, keep taking “limited strikes,” keep responding in contained ways, because Washington has lived for decades inside a fantasy where escalation is something the US controls.

But in a real war environment, you don’t get to decide the boundaries alone. The other side gets a vote. And Iran’s vote is written in the geography of the Gulf.

Iran’s ‘Samson option’
I used the phrase “Samson option” not to be dramatic, but to describe the logic of a state pushed into a corner: if the enemy wants you neutralised, disarmed, and humiliated, you don’t respond only with missiles; you respond with the full spectrum of leverage you possess — military, diplomatic, economic, and psychological.

Iran’s leverage is not limited to striking targets. It includes making the war economically unbearable for everyone who enabled it. It includes turning a regional conflict into a global cost spiral. It includes demonstrating that the “free flow of energy” is not a natural law; it is a contingent privilege that can evaporate when a state is pushed past its red lines.

This is what the West still struggles to internalise. It thinks deterrence is only about bombs and bases. Iran thinks deterrence is about making aggression unaffordable.

And Hormuz is how you make it unaffordable.

The three “solutions” don’t solve anything
Once Hormuz becomes the choke point, you immediately hear the same three proposals recycled through Western media.

First: “military escorts”: The idea that you can escort tankers through the most militarised, most surveilled, most missile-saturated corridor on earth as if this is a piracy problem. But escorts do not remove risk; they merely concentrate it.

They turn commercial shipping into military convoys, and that increases the probability of a clash that escalates further. You can escort 10 ships. Can you escort everything, every day, indefinitely, under constant threat? And at what cost in interceptors, drones, naval assets, and insurance panic?

Second: “ceasefire”: The idea that Washington can call a pause and re-freeze the conflict after crossing lines that Iran considers existential. But a ceasefire is not a magic reset button; it is a negotiation outcome.

And Iran is no longer interested in ceasefires that reproduce the same cycle: war, negotiations, pause, then war again. Iran has learned — painfully — that diplomacy has been weaponised against it.

Third: “capitulation”: The fantasy that Iran will disarm itself and accept a future where it is strategically naked. This is the most delusional solution of all, because it assumes Iranians are incapable of reading the regional record.

Iraq disarmed and was invaded. Libya dismantled its programme and was destroyed. Syria gave up its chemical file and was still ripped apart. In that record, capitulation is not peace. Capitulation is an invitation.

So no, none of the three “solutions” solves the crisis. They only reveal the empire’s problem: it assumed it could impose costs without paying them.

Even The New York Times admits miscalculation
One of the most interesting developments is how even mainstream reporting — carefully framed, carefully sourced — has begun to concede what was obvious from day one: the Trump administration and its advisers miscalculated Iran’s response.

The New York Times, in the sections I cited, points to something the propaganda refuses to admit: Iran is not acting like a decapitated regime. Iran is adapting. It is learning. It is targeting vulnerabilities, not staging symbolic retaliation.

It is degrading key radar and air defence systems, hitting communications infrastructure, and shifting the battlefield away from the tidy “Israel–Iran” framing into a wider map that includes US assets and allies across the Gulf.

That matters because for years the West comforted itself with the idea that the Iranian response would be predictable and containable. The NYT reporting suggests the opposite: Iran is adjusting its tactics as the campaign evolves, hitting systems that matter to US coordination and defence, and doing so without the old “ample warning” pattern that allowed the US to frame everything as controlled.

In other words, Iran is making the environment less manageable for the US, which is exactly what deterrence looks like when you cannot match the empire symmetrically.

The miscalculation wasn’t only military
There is another layer that people avoid saying out loud, but it’s central: the US and Israel did not only miscalculate Iran’s missiles; they miscalculated Iran’s society.

Even Iranians who dislike the Islamic nature of their political system can still connect a basic dot: wherever America and Israel intervene, the country becomes worse.

People don’t need to love their government to recognise a foreign assault on their nation. This is why the fantasy of “decapitation + instant uprising” is so dangerous: it projects Western wishful thinking onto a society that is being attacked and then expects the society to celebrate its attacker.

That is not how national psychology works under bombardment.

‘They want Iran’s energy’ is the quiet part out loud
Now we come to the part that explains the deeper imperial logic behind all this: energy.

I referenced the mindset openly circulating among the empire-adjacent influencer class: the idea that “we need Iran’s energy for AI projects,” that the AI race with China will be decided by securing energy inputs, and that therefore this war is not only Israel’s war, but “our war”.

This is imperial logic in its purest form. It doesn’t even bother to hide behind democracy or human rights. It says: we need your resources for our future, and if you will not give them to us under cooperative terms, we will take them under coercive terms.

And here is the thing these people cannot understand, because their mindset is trapped in a 19th-century colonial reflex: cooperation is possible.

China shows that cooperation is possible. China buys resources, builds infrastructure, creates contracts, offers development pathways, and yes, does it for its own interests, but it does it through exchange, not through looting. The US model, by contrast, is too often: bully, sanction, destabilise, bomb, then pretend it’s about “order”.

So when I say this war has gone “too wrong” for Washington even to benefit from Iranian energy later, I mean something very simple: you do not kill people, destroy families, and then expect business as usual. You don’t kill children and then expect Iranian society to say, “Sure, let’s partner with you.”

This is where imperial arrogance collides with a proud, dignified Iranian society.

How Trump miscalculated                            Video: Syriana Analysis

Iran’s demands are not cosmetic
Now the crucial point: why Iran won’t stop now.

Iran is not continuing this because it “loves war”. It is continuing because the war created leverage, and Iran’s leadership understands that if you stop now, you waste the leverage you paid for in blood and risk.

This is why Iran’s demands are emerging with clarity.

First: deterrence restored. Not just for Iran, but for the wider deterrence ecosystem that includes Hezbollah. Iran wants to punish its enemy to a degree that makes future attacks psychologically and strategically unthinkable.

Second: US bases constrained or removed. Iran is not naïve; it knows it may not expel the US from the region overnight. But it can force a new reality where US installations become purely defensive or are reconfigured in ways that reduce their offensive utility against Iran.

In plain language: if Gulf monarchies host bases that are used to strike Iran, those bases become part of the battlefield, and Iran is signaling it wants to break that model permanently.

This is why the Iranian foreign minister’s tone matters, and why voices like professor Marandi’s matter: the message is no longer “we can negotiate and return to normal.” The message is “normal is what created this war, and we need a new security architecture.”

‘Deterrence or nothing’ framework
This is where Amal Saad’s analysis captures the logic cleanly: deterrence or nothing; total war or total ceasefire.

Her point is that the old conflict-resolution framework doesn’t apply, because Iran is not seeking a temporary suspension of hostilities; it is seeking to alter the bargaining space itself. Tehran rejects the framework in which negotiations are essentially arms control over Iran, and insists instead that the real issue is US-Israeli aggression and the regional order that enables it.

That is why Iran refuses a ceasefire that simply resets the cycle.

And that is why the US miscalculation is so profound: Washington thought it could strike under a cover of “diplomacy,” then return to negotiation as if diplomacy were a neutral channel. Iran now treats that as subterfuge, and it wants to make the weaponisation of diplomacy costly enough that it cannot be repeated.

Why Iran won’t stop now
So we return to the simple truth: Iran won’t stop now because stopping now would mean relinquishing the leverage it has finally acquired — militarily, economically, psychologically — at the very moment when the US and Europe are feeling pain they cannot hide.

Trump was elected on promises of prosperity. Now energy prices surge, markets shake, global supply lines tighten, and allies panic. From Tehran’s point of view, this is the rare moment when the empire is vulnerable enough that Iran can increase its demands instead of being forced to accept humiliating ones.

And when you understand that, you understand why this isn’t ending with a tidy “ceasefire” press release. Iran believes that if it accepts another temporary arrangement, it will simply be attacked again when the West finds a better moment.

So the choice Iran is presenting is brutal but clear: a settlement that restores deterrence and rewires the regional security order, or continued pressure through the one lever that forces the world to pay attention.

Hormuz.

Washington assumed it was a bluff.

Now the world is learning what happens when a red line is real.

Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis. This article was first published on his Substack Kevork’s Newsletter and shared via Collective Evolution.