The US Empire’s 72-Year War on Iran

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 2, 2025 |

https://original.antiwar.com/srichman/2025/07/01/the-us-empires-72-year-war-on-iran/

The likely temporary Israel-Iran ceasefire notwithstanding, if you need proof of how despicable Donald Trump is, consider this:

When asked last week if he would ask Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop bombing Iran, which had already said it would stop retaliating for Israeli attacks, Trump said, “I think it’s very hard to make that request right now. If somebody is winning, it’s a little bit harder to do that [than] if somebody’s losing. But we’re ready, willing and able, and we’ve been speaking to Iran. Israel is doing well, in terms of war, and… Iran is doing less well. It’s a little bit hard to get somebody to stop.”

Of course, Trump could have done more than request. He could have told Netanyahu that the transfer of American tax money, bombs, missiles, planes, arms, and spare parts would end at once if he did not stop the war. Trump did not do that. Instead, he made light of the question. That’s despicable.

To say the least, Trump has a thing about Iran. That is likely explained in part by the 1979 Islamic revolution, which overthrew the American- and Israeli-backed dictator-monarch, and the taking of hostages in the American embassy. However, history did not begin in 1979. The U.S. government had helped abuse the Iranians long before that. A more suitable date on which to begin the story is August 15, 1953. That is when the CIA and British operatives ousted the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and restored the autocratic Shah of Iran to power. Mosaddegh, among other things, had nationalized the oil industry to the detriment of British oil interests.

It so happens that in 2014, when the Obama administration was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA) and congressional Democrats and Republicans were trying to undermine the interim agreement that had been agreed to, my old friend Marc Joffe and I wrote an article in the Guardian detailing the U.S. government’s long abuse of Iran. Here are highlights from that article.

Congressional hostility toward Iran is rooted in a black-and-white worldview that runs as follows: the United States and Israel are liberal democracies that defend individual rights and human dignity, whereas Iran is a despotic theocratic regime that sponsors terrorism and would do anything within its power to wipe Israel off the map.

The world is rarely black and white, and conflicts are usually not resolved until each side understands the other’s point of view. With that in mind, it may be worth pondering some inconvenient truths that would cause a fair-minded Iranian to doubt congressional wisdom.

The assertion that US policies are driven by a concern for human rights is not consistent with the history of US-Iran relations.

That may have been (and still may be) news to many Americans, but it should not have been. It wasn’t news to the Iranians. The U.S. government has been aligned with brutal regimes all over the world for a long time. You can look it up. No need to go through the larger record here. The history of U.S.-Iran relations makes the point.

As the CIA now admits, [the U.S. government] overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 and restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. For the next quarter century, until the 1979 Islamic revolution, the US government supported the autocratic Shah – whose regime also enjoyed close relations with Israel.

The Shah’s secret police – Savak – became increasingly brutal, ultimately detaining without trial and torturing tens of thousands of Iranian citizens. By the 1970s, the regime’s brutality had been well documented in the west.

In 1976 the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva reported: “There is abundant evidence showing the systematic use of impermissible methods of psychological and physical torture of political suspects during interrogation.”

Yet successive US administrations supported the Shah until the very end and then shielded him from prosecution after his overthrow.

Not only did the United States impose and support a regime that tortured innocent Iranians, there is also evidence that the CIA assisted Savak. A 1980 report on CBS’s 60 Minutes documented close ties between these two organizations.

Joffe and I pointed out that this “adds perspective to the US embassy hostage-taking drama that stretched over the last 444 days of the Carter administration. Many in Iran believed that US embassy staff had aided and abetted Savak and were thus fair targets for retaliation. One need not condone the hostage-taking to understand that it was not merely an unprovoked, sadistic act.” The 66 American embassy personnel were not seized by militant students until months after the revolution, when President Jimmy Carter admitted the Shah to the United States for medical treatment and presumably political refuge. The students were backed by the new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

That was not the end of the story. Americans might have forgotten the U.S. role in Iraq’s savage war on Iran.

It is now well known that the Reagan administration helped Iraq with “intelligence and military support” after Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and launched a brutal eight-year war. “[I]t was the express policy of Reagan to ensure an Iraqi victory in the war, whatever the cost,” Shane Harris and Matthew M Aid wrote in Foreign Policy magazine last year. With the administration’s knowledge,

Note well: “Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces, killing thousands. Declassified government records show that the Reagan administration, represented by special envoy Donald Rumsfeld, helped Saddam’s military produce and deploy these awful weapons of mass destruction, which included biological as well as chemical agents.”

Got that? The U.S. government provided WMD to Saddam Hussein for use against Iran. Iran’s ruler refused to permit his military to produce chemical weapons for retaliation. (In 2003 the U.S. military invaded Iraq supposedly over WMD that Saddam had gotten rid of years earlier.)

To add injury to injury:

In 1988, while the war was in progress, a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian aircraft over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 aboard, including 66 children. The captain of the ship said it was under assault by Iranian gunboats at the time and that the Airbus A300 was misidentified as an attacking F-14 Tomcat. Iran countered that flight 655 left Iran the same time every day. Witnesses with Italy’s navy and on a nearby US warship said that at the time it was shot down, the airliner was climbing. In 1996 the United States settled an Iranian claim against it at the International Court of Justice for $131.8m. While it was appropriate for the US government to accept responsibility, it could not make up for the Iranian people’s losses: more innocent lives were snuffed out by this attack than were killed in the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.

President George H. W. Bush, however, refused to apologize for the tragedy. As Bush I put it: “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” Sensitive, yes?

The new century signaled no diminution in American belligerence toward Iran—not even after the 9/11 attacks, which presented an opportunity for rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.

Despite Iran’s efforts to cooperate with the United States after 9/11 (the Shiite regime opposed both the Sunni Taliban and al-Qaida in next-door Afghanistan to the east), President [George W.] Bush in 2002 included Iran as a member of the “axis of evil” along with North Korea and Iraq. The following year, the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein and occupied Iraq – placing US forces on both Iran’s western and eastern flanks. Finally, in 2011, Iranian forces captured a US surveillance drone that was flying well within its air space – about 140 miles from the Afghanistan border.

Thus, “far from being innocent, US policy toward Iran appears downright hostile when viewed from the other side. Rather than continuing to tell ourselves tales, it is time we embrace the truth about our relations with Iran, which even American and Israeli intelligence agencies say is not building a nuclear weapon. We have a historic chance to end the destructive cold war with Iran, which, like it or not, will remain a major power in the Middle East. It would be a tragedy if Congress were to sabotage this opportunity.”

Congressional obstruction notwithstanding, Obama, working with the other Security Council members, Germany, and the rest of the European Union, finalized the nuclear agreement with Iran, which imposed an additional inspections regime along with other restrictions and seemed to take war off the table. In return, Western sanctions were to be lifted, and Iran was to rejoin the world economy. In the 1990s, Iran’s second and current “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa forbidding the procurement, production, or use of nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, Trump tore up the agreement in 2018. President Joe Biden did precious little to revive his old boss’s deal, but Trump presumably would have torn that up too when he returned to office this year. The U.S. government’s shameful record concerning Iran continues to haunt the world. It’s not over yet, no matter what Trump says.

Israeli Military Admits To Killing Palestinian Civilians Near Aid Sites in Gaza

The IDF is claiming the death toll from Gaza's Health Ministry is exaggerated

by Dave DeCamp | Jun 30, 2025

https://news.antiwar.com/2025/06/30/israeli-military-admits-to-killing-palestinian-civilians-near-aid-sites-in-gaza/

The Israeli military admitted on Monday that its forces have killed Palestinians in Gaza near aid sites run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), but claimed the death toll from Gaza’s Health Ministry was exaggerated.

The admission came after the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israeli troops had been given orders to fire on unarmed Palestinians attempting to reach GHF distribution sites to drive them away or disperse them, even though they posed no threat.

The Israeli military has denied there are orders to fire on unarmed aid seekers and is claiming that its forces only used gunfire when they felt threatened, though the IDF is not claiming that any of the Palestinians it opened fire on near the aid sites were armed.

The IDF said that in a small number of cases, Palestinians were hit by Israeli fire and that in at least three incidents, aid seekers were hit with Israeli artillery, causing 30 to 40 casualties, including several dead. The IDF said the casualties “did not need to happen” and claimed they weren’t intentional, although testimony from Israeli soldiers speaking to Haaretz makes clear they were intentionally firing on civilians.

Based on Gaza’s Health Ministry’s latest numbers and the killing of Palestinians near aid sites on Monday, more than 600 aid seekers have been killed in Gaza since the GHF began operating at the end of May. While the IDF disputes the numbers, the figures align with daily reports coming out of Gaza, which have cited eyewitnesses, rescue workers, and medical staff at hospitals. Studies have also found that the Health Ministry’s overall death toll is likely a significant undercount.

The Trump administration recently announced it was providing the GHF with $30 million despite its role in the aid massacres. State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce was asked on Monday if the Israeli military’s admission that it killed civilians near GHF sites would impact the funding, and she said no, then blamed Hamas for the massacres.

“Well, I think the answer to that certainly is no. The IDF and Israel have announced that they are, of course, investigating certain incidents,” Bruce said. “It is a good time for a reminder here that Hamas is responsible for the current situation in Gaza.”

 

100,000 Dead: What We Know About Gaza's True Death Toll

The death toll in Gaza, as reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry, understates the true scale of the crisis, researchers say. Hunger, disease, and Israeli gunfire at food distribution centers have made the war in the Strip one of the bloodiest of the 21st century

Nir Hasson

Jun 26, 2025

https://archive.vn/4TVuP

On Monday of this week, Hamas' Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip published an updated list of those killed in the war, a 1,227-page chart, arranged from youngest to oldest. The Arabic-language document includes the deceased person's full name, the names of the father and grandfather, date of birth and ID number.

Unlike previous lists, this compilation notes the precise age of children who were under the age of one year when they were killed. Mahmoud al-Maranakh and seven more children died on the same day they were born. Four more children were killed on the day after they entered the world, five others lived to the age of two days. Not until page 11, following 486 names, does the name appear of the first child who was more than six months old when he was killed.

The names of the children under the age of 18 cover 381 pages and amount to 17,121 children, all told. Of the total of 55,202 dead people, 9,126 were women.

Israeli spokespersons, journalists and influencers reject with knee-jerk disgust the data of the Palestinian Health Ministry, claiming that it's inflated and exaggerated. But more and more international experts are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality.

Prof. Michael Spagat, an economist at Holloway College at the University of London, is a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts. He's written dozens of articles on the wars in Iraq, Syria and Kosovo, among others. This week he and a team of researchers published the most comprehensive study to date on the subject of mortality in the Gaza Strip.

With the aid of Palestinian political scientist Dr. Khalil Shikaki, the team surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza, comprising almost 10,000 people. They concluded that, as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the war, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions.

At that time, the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip placed the number of those killed since the war's start at 45,660. In other words, the Health Ministry's data undercounted the true total by about 40 percent.

The study hasn't yet undergone peer review – it was published as a "preprint" – but its results are very similar to those of a study conducted by completely different methods and published last January by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That group also estimated the disparity between the Health Ministry data and the true figures to be about 40 percent.

Another report, published this week by Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill, a history doctoral student at the London School of Economics, carried out for the organization Action on Armed Violence, also cites larger numbers than those of the Gaza Health Ministry. Cockerill and his team examined the names of 1,000 children out of 3,000 that the Health Ministry erased from its lists, and concluded that, despite the erasure, solid evidence exists that most of those children were killed.

The study by Spagat and his colleagues also tries, for the first time, to answer the question of excess mortality in the Strip. In other words, how many people died from the indirect effects of war: hunger, cold, diseases that could not be treated because of the destruction of the health system, and other factors.

During the first year of the war, various estimates about the excess mortality rate were published by researchers and physicians, most of which turned out to be highly exaggerated. According to the new survey, the number of excess deaths until January stood at 8,540. That's a huge number by any standard, but low compared to the estimates that tens of thousands would die in Gaza due to hunger and disease.

Haaretz spoke to a number of experts on this subject. The conventional answer is that before the war, the health of the Gaza Strip's population and the condition of the health-care system there were relatively good, certainly compared to other places plagued with ongoing conflicts, such as Africa or Yemen. For example, the vaccination rate in Gaza was very high, in part thanks to a multi-year effort by UNRWA, the United Nations refugee agency.

Another explanation the researchers offer for what was previously a relatively low excess mortality rate is Gaza's social and communal structure. The family support networks proved their effectiveness in times of hunger and deprivation, and apparently saved many Gazans from death. Spagat also notes favorably the activity of the UN and the other aid organizations, which during the war's first year were successful in feeding the population and looking after the state of its health.

But all those protections, Spagat emphasizes, were effective only during that first year. During the past half-year, it's been evident that the Gazan population increasingly lacks the ability to protect itself against excess mortality.

For one, the displacement of 90 percent of the Strip's residents and the collapse of the health system led to a decline in the vaccination rate. Additionally, exposure to cold, heat, accidents, crowding and diseases in the tent cities in which the majority of Gaza's inhabitants now live has left them increasingly vulnerable.

The shortage of food and the neutralization of a large proportion of the UN's activity in Gaza, in the wake of the full siege of 78 days (March 2-May 19), and the partial siege that has continued for more than a month since then, are causing a deficiency of vitamins, minerals and proteins, affecting Gazans' immune systems. The ongoing destruction of the hospitals and the rest of the Strip's medical infrastructure has increased extensively since the resumption of hostilities.

The conclusion from these developments is that it's very likely that Gaza will continue to experience waves of excess mortality in the near future. "I would speculate that the ratio of nonviolent to violent deaths has gone up since [the January study]," Spagat says.

In the 'Africa league'

In the meantime, even without the anticipated future waves of excess mortality, the combination of casualties from violence and those who died from diseases and hunger led to the death of 83,740 people prior to January, taking into account the survey and the excess mortality. Since then, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 10,000 people have been killed, and that doesn't include those in the category of excess mortality. The upshot is that even if the war hasn't yet crossed the line of 100,000 dead, it's very close.

These data, says Prof. Spagat, position the war in the Gaza Strip as one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century. Even if the overall number of war victims in Syria, Ukraine and Sudan is higher in each case, Gaza is apparently in first place in terms of the ratio of combatants to noncombatants killed, as well as in terms of rate of death relative to population size.

According to the survey's data, which is consistent with those of the Palestinian Health Ministry, 56 percent of those killed have been either children up to the age of 18, or women. That's an exceptional figure when compared with almost every other conflict since World War II.

Data compiled and published by Spagat indicates that the proportion of women and children killed via a violent death in Gaza is more than double the proportion in almost every other recent conflict, including, for example, the civil wars in Kosovo (20 percent), northern Ethiopia (9 percent), Syria (20 percent), Colombia (21 percent), Iraq (17 percent) and Sudan (23 percent).

Another extreme datum found in the study is the proportion of those killed relative to the population. "I think we're probably at something like 4 percent of the population killed," Spagat says, adding, "I'm not sure that there's another case in the 21st century that's reached that high.

"I should have another look at the new data coming out of Sudan, and there's controversy regarding the Democratic Republic of Congo. But we are in the league of Africa, not the Middle East." That's not good company.

Despite these numbers, Spagat is in no hurry to employ the term "genocide," which has been adopted by a large part of the international community of conflict researchers about the war in Gaza. "I don't think this survey can give a verdict [on this question]," he says. It's still necessary to prove Israel's intention to perpetrate genocide, he adds, but "I think that South Africa had a pretty strong case to make" at the International Court of Justice.

The best scenario, he says, is that what's taking place in Gaza amounts to "only" ethnic cleansing.

In contrast to the richness of the data, offered by the official ministry lists and the research studies, that corroborate the numbers of the Gaza Health Ministry, the silence of official Israeli spokespeople about the number of those killed is striking. The October 7 war is the first in which the Israel Defense Forces has not provided estimates of the number of enemy civilians killed.

The only figure that the IDF Spokesperson's Unit and other official Israeli spokespersons repeat is of 20,000 terrorists from Hamas and other organizations who were killed. That figure is not backed up by a list of names or other proof or sourcing.

According to Spagat, there was an attempt to count the number of names of terrorists that were published by Israel. His team managed to arrive at a few hundred, but it's difficult to compile a list of even a thousand, he says.

Cockerill, too, maintains that that number is not credible. "Based on an overwhelmingly consistent historical pattern," he says, "we know that [in general,] at least twice as many combatants will be wounded as killed. So if Israel says 20,000 have been killed, we assume at least 40,000 have been injured, and it doesn't make sense that Hamas had 60,000 militants."

Cockerill says that Israel is "engineering the combatants figure" by two main means. "One is by redefining civilians who work for the government as combatants, the other is 'kill zones,'" in which everyone who is killed is considered a combatant.

One way or the other, even if we accept the official figure, it still comes down to a ratio of four noncombatants killed for every Hamas militant. That's very far from the statements of Israeli spokespersons, who talk about a 1:1 proportion.

The recent research raises a question: If the number of dead is indeed significantly greater than what's reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, where are the bodies? The ministry's records are based primarily on bodies that have been brought to hospital morgues.

Spagat and other researchers think that thousands of people are still buried under the rubble of tens of thousands of buildings in the Strip, and therefore their names do not appear on the lists. Some people were close to the epicenter of explosions and nothing remains of them. But that cannot account fully for the disparity between the Health Ministry and the survey.

Another explanation suggested by Spagat is that families who lost loved ones simply buried them without bringing the bodies to the hospitals and without reporting the deaths to the Health Ministry. "Some families just don't want to report or are unable to report," Cockerill avers. "Maybe the parents die, and the children, and an 8-year-old remains. How is the 8-year-old going to report this?"

'Can I die, please?'

At Nasser Hospital, in the city of Khan Yunis, the statistics take on real form. "You cope every day with cases of trauma, blast injuries and shrapnel," says Dr. Goher Rahbour, a British surgeon who returned home last week from a month at the Gaza hospital. "Every two or three days, there was a mass-casualty event, and then the ER was totally flooded, complete chaos."

One case that remains engraved indelibly in Rahbour's memory is that of a 15-year-old boy whose entire family was killed and who had himself been wounded and left paralyzed. "He has shrapnel going through the spinal cord, so he is paraplegic, which means he's got no sensation below the waist or the belly button.

"He's lived in Gaza for 15 years, he knows what's coming next, what's waiting in Gaza for a 15-year-old boy in a wheelchair. No family, no physiotherapy, all these things that we take for granted.

"So he goes around in the hospital and says to us, 'Can I die, please?'"

Even though Israel has for the past month been allowing the entry into Gaza of a limited supply of food via the UN and the Israeli-American Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the nutrition situation in the Strip continues to worsen. Last month, 5,452 children were hospitalized because of severe malnutrition, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

"People are simply gaunt," says Rahabour. "You can see the bones on their face, the bent appearance, the protruding jawbones. For a month, I haven't seen fruits, vegetables, meat or fish here.

"They have formula which they can give to children from the age of six months to five years. So I asked what happens if a hungry child of seven arrives. Sorry, we have to say bye-bye and send them home to die."

Dr. Rahabour and other physicians in the Strip say that the general health situation of the population is deteriorating steadily, because of the hunger and displacement. "You see that the body has no wound-healing capabilities," says Dr. Victoria Rose, a British surgeon who was a volunteer in the Gaza Strip until three weeks ago.

"One of the first things you lose in malnutrition is your ability to fight infection," she adds. "The children have very little healing ability left, and they're living in tents. There's no sanitation, there's no sewage [treatment] or anything like that. Everything has been destroyed and clean water is running out. All of that combined means that you just can't get anything clean, so it can't heal without infection."

If the hunger itself were not enough, hundreds of people have been killed in recent weeks by Israeli gunfire while on their way to collect food from the distribution centers.

Two weeks after Goher Rahabour arrived at Nasser Hospital, on June 1, he observed that the profile of the wounds had changed. Instead of blast and detonation injuries, many more people began arriving with bullets in their body, after Israeli troops opened fire at the starved crowd.

On the first day, he recalls, 150 or 200 wounded people arrived, in addition to 30 dead. "With some of them you can see that they were shot while they lay on the ground, trying to evade being shot. Most of them were young men, but there was one woman in her early 30s, who was 24 weeks pregnant. The bullet went through the fetus. She survived but needed a hysterectomy, so no more children. When we opened the abdomen, we could see the hand and the formed foot of the dead fetus.

"I'm just staring, like what the hell, but the [Palestinian] anesthetist, gynecologist and scrub nurse are carrying on as though this is normal. It's because they've seen this again and again. You just become numb to it.

"It's as if it's just normal, you know?"

Zohran Mamdani’s victory marks the end of Israel’s central place in U.S. politics

Zohran Mamdani's victory over Andrew Cuomo is a historic turning point for Palestine in U.S. politics. It reflects a growing fatigue with Israel’s role in American life and the slow implosion of Zionism under the weight of its own excess.

By Abdaljawad Omar  June 25, 2025

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/zohran-mamdanis-victory-marks-the-end-of-israels-central-place-in-u-s-politics/

It may appear, at first glance, irrelevant—even absurd—that a mayoral contest in New York City, or the electoral fate of a councilwoman in Brooklyn, should hinge upon one’s position vis-à-vis Palestine. What, after all, does municipal governance—zoning, sanitation, housing affordability—have to do with the devastation of Gaza, the starvation of a people, the slow-motion spectacle of death under bombardment? And yet, this apparent disconnect—between the intimacy of local issues and the enormity of geopolitical violence—is precisely the condition under which American politics operates.

It is also within this disjuncture between scale and intensity, between geographic distance and ideological proximity, that something more fundamental becomes visible.

In this context, the victory of Zohran Mamdani over a figure so emblematic of institutional continuity and dynastic power as Andrew Cuomo is not a mere electoral anecdote. It is a political event. One that must be read not through the metrics of personality or campaign mechanics, but through the symbolic grammar of what is now speakable, representable, and electorally viable. Mamdani’s triumph indexes a shifting horizon—where Palestine, long treated as a “third rail” of American politics, no longer electrocutes those who dare to touch it. It is, perhaps, not yet a mainstream moral consensus, but it is no longer a guarantee of political suicide.

To be clear, Mamdani did not run as a firebrand of unrepentant anti-Zionism. He conceded, symbolically and rhetorically, to the anxieties of some the liberal Zionist electorate. He sought a middle ground—tempering his moral commitments with gestures of reassurance, striking a posture that neither retreated from his history of solidarity with Palestine nor fully embraced the uncompromising clarity that Palestine often demands. And that, too, is telling. 

It is precisely this calibrated ambivalence—this oscillation between affirmation and reassurance—that invited criticism, even from within Mamdani’s own base, and for those who worked with him in building and disseminating the Palestine movement. His campaign’s equivocations around the question of Israel’s “right to exist,” and his hesitant invocation of a long-standing grounding in pro-Palestinian politics, sparked unease. For some, it echoed the familiar choreography of moral retreat: a gesture of concession that risks metastasizing into posture, then into position, and eventually into principle. The fear, voiced not out of cynicism but historical memory, is that one concession invites another—and that, over time, the cumulative weight of these concessions will fold Mamdani into the very establishment his victory seemed to defy. There is, in other words, a profound anxiety that the dialectic of incorporation is already in motion: that the system, unable to fully neutralize Palestine as a politics, will instead absorb it as discourse—sanitized, defanged, and made legible only through the grammar of “balance”, “two sidism”, and lack of empathy for Palestine. Mamdani’s electoral success may mark the symbolic end of Palestine as a third-rail issue, but it also raises the unsettling possibility that this normalization comes at the price of its radical edge. That to enter the political bloodstream is also to risk being filtered by it, and conceding too much ground for it, too.

His win, then, is not solely an endorsement of Palestine as a cause, but a testament to Palestine’s altered status as a question. No longer a line that cannot be crossed, it has become a contested terrain—one in which candidates can engage, hedge, affirm, or deflect without automatic disqualification. That shift is monumental. It speaks to the cumulative force of decades of organizing, to the moral aftermath of Gaza’s unendurable visibility, and to the weariness of younger voters and many progressives with the cold, procedural evasions of their predecessors. In that sense, Mamdani’s success is not only about what he said, but about what no longer needs to be unsaid. The enforced silences are cracking—not with revolutionary rupture, but with the slow, grinding attrition of imperial consensus. What once had to be hidden can now be tentatively named, even if symbolic concessions are also made. What once marked the outer edge of the acceptable is now folded—awkwardly, cautiously, but definitively—into the domain of the political.

To be clear, there are contingencies—many, in fact. Mamdani’s victory cannot be abstracted from the particularities of this race. He was, after all, running against a disgraced former governor, whose name—once a shorthand for executive dominance in New York—now lingers with the stale odor of scandal and the exhausted theatrics of establishment redemption. Moreover, Mamdani’s campaign was unusually precise in its architecture. It moved with clarity, discipline, and a distinct communicative cadence—earnest but composed, clear but tactically agile. His appeal was not cultivated through demagoguery or cultic charisma, but through an almost anachronistic fidelity to program: free public buses, expanded child care, rent stabilization—not as isolated policy demands but as part of a larger moral and political imaginary shaped by his socialist commitments. That this message resonated, and not only in progressive enclaves but across disparate urban constituencies—young people, immigrants, tenants, cultural workers, the politically disenchanted—is itself a signal: not of a messianic candidacy, but of a deeper hunger. A hunger for coherence, for principle, and for a politics unafraid to name power, yet disciplined enough to speak of what can be built.

But what is also becoming increasingly palpable—though still spoken of in hushed or disavowing tones—is a growing fatigue within the United States itself. A kind of political and psychic exhaustion, faint at first but now unmistakable, that has begun to gather around the place of Israel in American public life. Among pundits, podcasters, and the constellation of media-facing personae who orbit the centers of alternative mediums, there is an emerging discomfort—an irritation, even—with the obsessive centrality of Israel to American identity, to its political rituals, and to the compulsive performances of allegiance it demands. It is not only the confrontation within the right wing with an “America First” that excludes Israel, and one that folds Israel into the meaning of “America First.” It is not only in the rising voices that center Palestine, although still on the margins, but growing in power.

But it is also in the very emergence of the question itself—the question of Israel’s “right to exist,” of the politician’s obligatory fealty, of the ritualistic declarations of support—that a deeper malaise becomes legible. What was once treated as settled, as axiomatic, as sacred, is now weighed down by its own performative burden. These questions no longer float as self-evident truths; they fall under the weight of their own exhaustion. To even ask them now is to register that something has shifted—that these affirmations, repeated ad nauseam, have become signifiers not of moral clarity but of ideological bankruptcy.

Increasingly, the insistence upon Israel as a litmus test is no longer heard as a signal of moral seriousness, but as the worn-out reflex of a ruling class—political, media, institutional—whose ethical coordinates are collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions. The repetition of allegiance now functions less as a marker of conviction than as a symptom: of fear, of ideological decay, of a desperate clinging to an order whose foundational myths are beginning to unravel. One need only examine the New York Times’ implicit endorsement of Andrew Cuomo, and its barely veiled aversion to Zohran Mamdani—a gesture not of policy disagreement, but of retaliatory contempt for the very fact of his pro-Palestinian record. Or one might turn, with no illusions, to the likes of Tucker Carlson, whose remarks on the obsessive centrality of Israel in American political life directed at Senator Ted Cruz are not born of solidarity with Palestine, but of exhaustion—an exhaustion nonetheless symptomatic of a wider unease. Let us be clear: this is not the emergence of a coherent pro-Palestinian mainstream. Far from it. But what is beginning to erode is the sanctity of Israel’s place in American moral life. The shift, at this stage, is not from marginality to centrality for Palestine—but from unquestioned centrality to uneasy displacement for Israel.

For instance, one should resist the temptation to assume that the relentless deployment of antisemitism accusations by Israeli hasbara is primarily about silencing criticism of Israel. On the contrary, what we are witnessing is something far more interesting: the obscene excess of this rhetorical strategy is beginning to backfire—not because people suddenly become more pro-Palestinian, but because they are growing tired, even disgusted, with being forced to perform the ritual of exceptional concern for Israel’s symbolic centrality. Let us be clear: this exhaustion is not the result of some decolonial awakening. Rather, it is the inevitable result of ideological overproduction. When every critique becomes a potential hate crime, when every call for ceasefire is labeled incitement, and when every protest is framed as an antisemitic gathering—something begins to shift in the symbolic order. The very machinery meant to preserve Israel’s hegemonic position in American moral life begins to unravel it. The more Israel insists on its unique status, the more visible its violence becomes. The more it accuses, the more it reveals, the more it demands silence or fealty the more it weakens. And here is the twist: the current dislocation of Israel’s symbolic place in the American imaginary is not only the result of pro-Palestinian activism. It is also—perhaps primarily—the result of Israel’s own actions: its insistence on exceptionalism, its ongoing genocide in Gaza, and its attempt to drag the United States into a region-wide war.

In the end, the shift we are witnessing is not the triumph of an alternative narrative, but the slow implosion of the dominant one under the weight of its own excess. What we are living through is not merely a crisis of legitimacy, but a crisis of legibility—a moment when the coordinates that once made support for Israel appear natural, moral, even inevitable, begin to blur. And paradoxically, it is not anti-Zionist discourse that has produced this rupture, but Zionism itself—its saturation of the symbolic space, its demand to be centered in every moral reckoning, its compulsion to speak even when no one is asking. This is the logic of ideological overproduction: when a system can no longer sustain its own fictions, not because they have been disproven, but because they have been repeated too often, too loudly, with too little shame. In that moment, ideology ceases to function as belief and begins to curdle into farce. And perhaps that is where we are now: not in the presence of a victorious counter-hegemony, but in the ruins of a narrative that exhausted itself by insisting too much, too often, and at the expense of everything else.

'Vindicated': Unscathed by war, Gulf states look to capitalise on Israel and Iran's losses

For the first time in a generation, Arab rulers got to see how Israel fared in a conventional conflict. Now, their leverage has increased

By Sean Mathews

Published date: 27 June 2025

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/vindicated-unscathed-war-gulf-states-look-capitalise-israel-and-irans-losses

The Gulf states see two losers in the conflict between Israel and Iran, analysts and Arab officials tell Middle East Eye.

Having squeaked through the hostilities with little damage themselves, leaders in the energy-rich Gulf are now in a position to tap their relative advantages in Israel and the Islamic Republic. 

Watching the smoke rise from Tehran was a change for leaders in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who just a few years ago were fending off drones and missiles launched at them from Iran’s allies, the Houthis in Yemen.

Israeli warplanes made hay of Iran’s weak air defences. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals were assassinated, and ballistic missile launchers and arms factories were destroyed. The war culminated in the US bombing Iran’s Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities.

And that is the aspect that US and Israeli officials are hammering home about the conflict in their interactions, three Arab officials told MEE.

But for the first time in a generation, Arab rulers got to see how Israel would fare against a conventional army.

Israeli encroachment stopped

“The Israelis showed strong spirit in supporting their military…They were brave. However, the home front in Israel couldn’t take more than two weeks of missile strikes,” one Arab official told MEE, sharing an assessment of the war review in a leading Arab capital.

MEE spoke with officials representing three Arab capitals for this article. All said that in their country’s corridors of power, the assessment is that Israel was the first to signal it was ready for a ceasefire after having exhausted its list of military targets and seeing that the Islamic Republic was not facing collapse.

“Benjamin Netanyahu was on a rise until now,” Bader al-Saif, a professor at Kuwait University, told MEE. “Of course, Israel demonstrated military superiority over Iran’s skies. But Iran stopped the Israeli encroachment and hit back. The image of an invincible Israel with flawless air defence is broken.”

The perception of Israeli vulnerability is important to understand how the US’s Arab allies will approach Israel in the future, experts say. It could give them more leverage with Israel, including states that normalised ties with it in 2020 under the Abraham Accords.

The same goes for Tehran, the Arab officials told MEE. They expect Gulf leaders to offer investments to Tehran and are not ruling out high-level visits in the coming months.

In April, Saudi Arabia’s defence minister and brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Tehran.

Despite saying Iran’s nuclear programme has been “blown up to kingdom come”, US President Donald Trump says his administration will restart talks with Iran. Iran says its nuclear programme is "badly damaged".

Either way, the Gulf states backed the nuclear talks, and their sway in Tehran could increase even more now, Arab officials told MEE. 

“The Gulf gets a hearing in Washington. At the end of the day, that remains the tremendous leverage it has with Iran - calling up Trump in the middle of the night and him answering the phone,” one Arab diplomat told MEE.

The UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia sealed deals for hundreds of billions of dollars with the US when Trump visited the region in May. At the time, they appeared to get concessions. Under pressure from Saudi Arabia, Trump stopped US attacks on the Houthis in Yemen, MEE revealed. He also lifted sanctions on Syria.

The Gulf states were unable to stop Israel's attack on Iran. For a moment, it looked dicey.

Although the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have differing priorities, experts say none of them wanted to see the US directly join Israel’s offensive.

In the end, all the Arab officials who spoke with MEE characterised the US strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities as “limited" or "minimal".

Iran’s retaliatory strike on al-Udeid military base in Qatar was coordinated well in advance with Gulf states, MEE reported.

“This crisis has really elevated the Gulf states' leadership,” Ayham Kamel, Middle East president at Edelman Public and Government Affairs, told MEE.

“They were able to play a behind-the-scenes diplomatic role and avoid any significant attack on their territory. They triangulated their cooperation to be inclusive of key states in the broader region, particularly Iran, Turkey and Israel,” he added.

Sympathy with Iran?

For years, the US tried to recruit Gulf states into an alliance with Israel to counter Iran.

When Hezbollah dominated Lebanon, Bashar al-Assad ruled Syria, and the Houthis were lobbing missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia - that pitch was attractive. It reached its peak before the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, when US Central Command tried to create a “Middle East Nato” linking Israel to Gulf states and Egypt’s air defence.

But when Israel and Iran came to blows, instead of joining in Israel’s offensive, the US’s Arab allies lobbied Trump to stop the war.

Israel and Iran exchanged direct fire twice in 2024. The US did receive some Saudi and Qatari support defending Israel last year. But Iran choreographed its missile barrages then.

This round was the first bare-knuckled battle between them, with Israeli jets pounding Tehran and Iran hammering major cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia all condemned Israel’s attack on Iran. Qatar has historically maintained closer ties to the Islamic Republic, in part because they share the world’s largest natural gas field.

But this conflict saw the UAE and Saudi Arabia publicly and privately press for a ceasefire, two Arab officials told MEE.

“US and Israeli officials may not have anticipated how serious the Gulf is about de-escalation. They know now. Saudi Arabia is on the top of that list,” Patrick Theros, a former US diplomat who served as ambassador to Qatar and a high-ranking official in the UAE, told MEE.

“Right now, even among the ruling classes, including Saudi Arabia, there is more sympathy with Iran than there has been in a long time,” Theros said.

Not so long ago, Israel may have been able to convince Saudi Arabia to join in its attack. In 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman compared Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler and said he was trying to “conquer the world”.

Then, Saudi Arabia became bogged down fighting Iran’s allies in Yemen. In 2019, two major Saudi oil facilities were attacked. At the time, President Trump shrugged off the assault, which emanated from Iran. In the following years, Saudi Arabia moved to patch up ties with the Islamic Republic.

In 2023, China brokered a rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran. It worked for everyone during the war. The Strait of Hormuz, which China relies on for its oil shipments, remained open. Iranian oil exports soared despite Israeli attacks, and Saudi Arabia’s oil installations were safe again.

“The Gulf isn’t where it was at in 2019,” Saif, at Kuwait University, told MEE. "We [the Gulf] feel vindicated that we did not join the war.”

Gaza ceasefire and normalisation

The Gulf states' main focus is reducing their economies' dependence on oil revenue. Saudi Arabia has pushed through liberalising social reforms and is pursuing an ambitious Vision 2030 agenda that includes luxury Red Sea tourism. Both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi want to build AI data centres.

One overlooked element of the change, Theros told MEE, is that the sectarian tensions that feed into the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran in spheres of influence like Yemen and Syria have ebbed, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pursues modernising social reforms.

“Now that Mohammed Bin Salman has de-Wahhabised Saudi Arabia, the rhetoric out of the clerics about the Shia has been curbed,” Theros said. “That makes it harder for Israel to bring Saudi Arabia along.”

If anything, public opinion in the Gulf has turned more negative towards Israel over its war on Gaza, where over 56,000 Palestinians have been killed. A poll released by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy in the first months of the Gaza war revealed 96 percent of people in Saudi Arabia oppose normalisation with Israel.

Trump signalled on Wednesday that he wants to build out his fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran to Gaza, where he said “great progress is being made” to end the war.

Ending that conflict is a prerequisite to any talk of normalising ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Under Saudi pressure, Trump refrained from lobbying the kingdom to cut a deal with Israel during his visit to Riyadh in May, but told Saudi Arabia, “you’ll be greatly honouring me” by doing so.

Saudi Arabia says it needs to see Israel take irreversible steps towards a Palestinian state to normalise relations. Diplomats say that after the Israel-Iran war, the price Saudi Arabia will demand is going up.

“Saudi Arabia has a very good sense of where the Arab street is going,” one Arab official told MEE. “It will insist on something serious.”

The Real Winners: The Strategic Fallout of the Israel-Iran War

by Ramzy Baroud | Jun 27, 2025 

https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2025/06/26/the-real-winners-the-strategic-fallout-of-the-israel-iran-war/

On June 24, US President Donald Trump announced a truce between Israel and Iran following nearly two weeks of open warfare.

Israel began the war, launching a surprise offensive on June 13, with airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, missile installations, and senior military and scientific personnel, in addition to numerous civilian targets.

In response, Iran launched a wave of ballistic missiles and drones deep into Israeli territory, triggering air raid sirens across Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba and numerous other locations, causing unprecedented destruction in the country.

What began as a bilateral escalation quickly spiraled into something far more consequential: a direct confrontation between the United States and Iran.

On June 22, the United States Air Force and Navy carried out a full-scale assault on three Iranian nuclear sites – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – in a coordinated strike dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer. Seven B-2 bombers of the 509th Bomb Wing allegedly flew nonstop from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to deliver the strikes.

The following day, Iran retaliated by bombing the Al-Udeid US military base in Qatar and firing a new wave of missiles at Israeli targets.

This marked a turning point. For the first time, Iran and the United States faced each other on the battlefield without intermediaries. And for the first time in recent history, Israel’s long-standing campaign to provoke a US-led war against Iran had succeeded.

Strategic Fallout

Following 12 days of war, Israel achieved two of its goals. First, it pulled Washington directly into its conflict with Tehran, setting a dangerous precedent for future US involvement in Israel’s regional wars. Second, it generated immediate political capital at home and abroad, portraying US military backing as a ‘victory’ for Israel.

However, beyond these short-term gains, the cracks in Israel’s strategy are already showing.

Netanyahu did not achieve regime change in Tehran – the real objective of his years-long campaign. Instead, he faced a resilient and unified Iran that struck back with precision and discipline. Worse still, he may have awakened something even more threatening to Israeli ambitions: a new regional consciousness.

Iran, for its part, emerges from this confrontation significantly stronger. Despite US and Israeli efforts to cripple its nuclear program, Iran has demonstrated that its strategic capabilities remain intact and highly functional.

Tehran established a powerful new deterrence equation – proving that it can strike not only Israeli cities but US bases across the region.

Even more consequentially, Iran waged this fight independently, without leaning on Hezbollah or Ansarallah, or even deploying Iraqi militias. This independence surprised many observers and forced a recalibration of Iran’s regional weight.

Iranian Unity

Perhaps the most significant development of all is one that cannot be measured in missiles or casualties: the surge in national unity within Iran and the widespread support it received across the Arab and Muslim world.

For years, Israel and its allies have sought to isolate Iran, to present it as a pariah even among Muslims. Yet in these past days, we have witnessed the opposite.

From Baghdad to Beirut, and even in politically cautious capitals like Amman and Cairo, support for Iran surged. This unity alone may prove to be Israel’s most formidable challenge yet.

Inside Iran, the war erased, at least for now, the deep divides between reformists and conservatives. Faced with an existential threat, the Iranian people coalesced, not around any one leader or party, but around the defense of their homeland.

The descendants of one of the world’s oldest civilizations reacted with a dignity and pride that no amount of foreign aggression could extinguish.

The Nuclear Question

Despite the battlefield developments, the real outcome of this war may depend on what Iran does next with its nuclear program.

If Tehran decides to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – even temporarily – and signals that its program remains functional, Israel’s so-called “achievements” will be rendered meaningless.

However, if Iran fails to follow this military confrontation with a bold political repositioning, Netanyahu will be free to claim – falsely or not – that he has succeeded in halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been.

A Manufactured Farce

Some media outlets are now praising Trump for supposedly “ordering” Netanyahu to halt further strikes on Iran.

This narrative is as insulting as it is false. What we are witnessing is a staged political performance – a carefully orchestrated spat between two partners playing both sides of a dangerous game.

Trump’s Truth post, “Bring your pilots home,” was not a call for peace. It was a calculated move to reclaim credibility after fully surrendering to Netanyahu’s war. It allows Trump to pose as a moderate, distract from Israel’s battlefield losses, and create the illusion of a US administration reining in Israeli aggression.

In truth, this was always a joint US-Israeli war – one planned, executed, and justified under the pretext of defending Western interests while laying the groundwork for deeper intervention and potential invasion.

Return of the People

Amid all the military calculations and geopolitical theater, one truth stands out: the real winners are the Iranian people.

When it mattered most, they stood united. They understood that resisting foreign aggression was more important than internal disputes. They reminded the world – and themselves – that in moments of crisis, people are not peripheral actors in history; they are its authors.

The message from Tehran is unmistakable: We are here. We are proud. And we will not be broken.

That is the message Israel, and perhaps even Washington, did not anticipate. And it is the one that could reshape the region for years to come.