Pakistan-Iran corridor punches through the Hormuz blockade

By opening six overland routes for Tehran-bound cargo, Islamabad is turning transit trade into strategic leverage as US pressure reshapes the Persian Gulf’s commercial arteries

F.M. Shakil

MAY 8, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/pakistan-iran-corridor-punches-through-the-hormuz-blockade

When more than 3,000 Iran-bound containers began piling up at Karachi’s ports, the Strait of Hormuz crisis had already moved beyond the sea. It was now pressing on Pakistan’s docks, customs authorities, and border crossings. Soon after, Islamabad announced an overland transit mechanism for third-country cargo moving through Pakistan and into Iran.

This shift occurs as Washington’s influence over Persian Gulf and West Asian nations continues to decline, leading to new geostrategic adjustments throughout the region, affecting ports, pipelines, and defense diplomacy.

Energy security, military cooperation, and trade routes are being reassessed, while China and Russia quietly push alternatives that reduce US influence and open new regional linkages.

Analysts say the emerging pattern is visible in calls for a combined Muslim force, efforts by Gulf and Arab states to dilute dependence on Washington, and the growing push to replace the dollar in energy transactions. Each trend points to a region testing how far it can move beyond the old US-led order.

For Pakistan, the calculation is also domestic.

Transit trade promises customs revenue, port activity, and leverage at a time when Islamabad is squeezed by debt, energy costs, and security pressures along its western frontier. A corridor serving Iran can also support Pakistan’s ambition to become a connector between the Arabian Sea, Central Asia, and western China.

A land bridge for Iran

In line with these regional developments, Pakistan made a surprising and daring move last month by allowing Iran to carry its commercial shipments across six overland routes, ending at the Taftan border crossing with Iran.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Commerce issued the “Transit of Goods through Territory of Pakistan Order 2026” on 25 April, and three major seaports—Karachi Port, Port Qasim, and Gwadar Deep-Sea Port—were designated to receive and dispatch cargo to Iran and onward to Central Asian states.

Media reports framed the decision as a way for Iran to bypass the US blockade linked to the Strait of Hormuz, although Islamabad has avoided presenting it in openly confrontational terms.

Earlier last month, Pakistan sent a shipment of frozen beef to Uzbekistan via Iran, opening a new overland route through the Gabd-Rimdan border crossing between Iran and Pakistan. It was a test shipment, and officials said that the Iran corridor will facilitate trade between Iran and Central Asia via Pakistan's ports of Karachi and Gwadar.

Global media have suggested that the new arrangement could thwart US efforts to halt Iranian cargo shipments, a ploy primarily aimed at limiting Iranian oil exports, especially to China, and at tightening pressure on Tehran’s economy.

Speaking to The Cradle, Mushahid Hussain Syed, a former information minister and head of Pakistan's Senate Defense Committee, says:

“The unfair blockade has left thousands of Iranian containers stuck at Karachi ports, which has made it harder for people in Iran to get consumer goods. However, I disagree with the media reports suggesting that the overland corridors with Iran render the US blockade of Hormuz technically ineffective. The media intentionally or unintentionally made this facility seem like a way to help Iran get around the US blockade, even though it has a pure business consideration and has nothing to do with making things worse between the US and Tehran.”

Syed says that establishing six overland transit lines to Iran will have major political, economic, and diplomatic consequences. The corridor, he adds, has gained importance amid the US Navy’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz since 13 April.

The immediate result of Pakistan’s new regulations is the potential clearance of about 3,000 Iranian containers stranded in Karachi, after restrictions on ships traveling to and from Iran left essential food and consumer goods stuck in the Pakistani port city.

Washington’s silent consent?

Did the US allow Pakistan to provide Iran with land routes around the Strait of Hormuz blockade? Has the blockade become less effective now that Iranian cargo can move through Pakistan?

These questions have circulated on social media since The Economic Times of India published the headline, “Asim Munir’s double game: Pakistan punches a legal hole in the US naval blockade of Hormuz,” on 27 April.

Some observers see the development as evidence that backchannel peace talks are producing results. In that reading, Washington has accepted a partial easing of pressure while expecting Iran to reopen the Strait, thereby lowering the likelihood of a wider escalation.

On 1 May, US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he knew Pakistan had opened land routes with Iran. He replied that he was aware of it, while expressing respect for Field Marshal Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Majyd Aziz, President of the Employers Federation of Pakistan, tells The Cradle:

"Conventional wisdom and market intelligence suggest that China and Russia did play a role in this policy’s formulation. However, common sense indicates that the facility would not have been offered without tacit approval from Washington. The beneficial element is that despite UN economic sanctions, a constant smuggling system, and a 900-kilometer border, bilateral trade has the potential to become a normal conduit advantageous to both countries.”

Aziz explains that, in the case of China, the agreement would most likely enable China-Iran trade via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) rather than through Central Asian countries. Russia, always seeking access to warm-water ports, would also view Pakistan’s geography as an opportunity to bypass US and European sanctions.

He argues:

“The juxtaposition of China, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan is ideal for streamlined transportation via land routes. Therefore, China could have played a facilitative role in convincing Pakistan that it would provide all diplomatic support, given its critical mass to withstand any negative reactions from the US or even Europe.”

Aziz adds that a key bottleneck to implementation remains the hesitation of Pakistani commercial banks to support transit trade with Iran due to US sanctions. Without letters of credit, insurance coverage, and banking channels, the corridor could remain a narrow emergency route rather than the broader trade artery its supporters envision.

From Jebel Ali to Gwadar

Iran has been uprooting its logistics infrastructure from the Persian Gulf to shift its maritime trade—mostly handled by the UAE—to Pakistan’s overland corridor.

The movement of a large amount of Iranian-linked cargo, worth tens of billions of dollars, from busy hubs in the UAE—particularly Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port—to ports like Gwadar, Karachi, and Port Qasim indicates a clear shift in the regional trade scene, driven by increasing geopolitical tensions.

Iran has depended on the UAE's re-export systems for a long time, managing about US$22 billion in imports in the year 2025. Total bilateral trade has increased to roughly US$27 billion.

However, due to significant security concerns, including the need to avoid potential sanctions and disruptions to sea routes, as well as the increasing instability in the region that could affect trade, this setup is gradually being shifted to overland routes.

In a series of posts on X, The Tehran Times, Iran’s leading international daily, said the country has replaced the UAE’s Jebel Ali port with Pakistani seaports.

The newspaper argued that replacing the UAE route with the Pakistani overland corridor could accelerate cargo movement, reduce costs, and bring Iran closer to the $60 billion CPEC network and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), positioning Pakistan as a bridge between South Asia and Eurasia amid a period of contested sea power.

“Setting up six overland routes, such as Gwadar and Taftan, is a smart move that will help both Iran and Pakistan. The main goal of this corridor is to resolve the problem of Iranian cargo that is stuck and to make it easier for goods from other countries to enter Iran through Pakistan,” Syed opines.

Temporary fix or permanent corridor?

How long will the Hormuz crisis persist? Could it still escalate into shortages of oil, gas, and other commodities, deepening global instability? In Pakistani trade circles, the question now is what happens to the land-route mechanism with Iran if the Strait reopens for regular shipping. Aziz reveals:

“The argument over these variables continues, as the Strait became a tinderbox, exacerbating the front-loading shipping costs. A suspension of hostilities, the opening of the Strait, and the resumption of oil, gas, and commodity cargo would eventually release pressure on the global economy. However, the six land-route facilities to Iran will remain intact and eventually become permanent, even if the war ends. This will not only generate considerable revenue, but hopefully, the much-delayed Iran-Pakistan Gas Pipeline will start functioning.”

He adds that the underlying issue remains Tel Aviv's confrontational approach, rooted in Israel's substantial and unwavering influence over Washington.

“Netanyahu would be uncomfortable with the US backing down and Iran consenting to a sensible compromise; therefore, the battle will continue in a blow-hot, blow-cold phase,” Aziz remarks.

US Bombs Iran’s Qeshm Port and Bandar Abbas

Iran's military has said that the US violated the ceasefire by attacking ships and launching airstrikes on Iranian ports

by Dave DeCamp | May 7, 2026 

https://news.antiwar.com/2026/05/07/us-bombs-irans-qeshm-port-and-bandar-abbas/

The US bombed Iranian ports on Thursday, an attack that will likely plunge the region back into full-scale war.

Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin first reported that the US was behind strikes on a port in Iran’s Qeshm island in the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas, and a naval target in Minab, where the US bombed an elementary school on February 28, an attack that killed 120 children.

Iran’s military then released a statement saying that the US violated the ceasefire by attacking two commercial ships and bombing Iranian ports.

“The aggressive, terrorist, and bandit American army violated the ceasefire by targeting an Iranian oil tanker ship moving from Iranian coastal waters in the Jask region towards the Strait of Hormuz, as well as another ship entering the Strait of Hormuz, opposite the port of Fujairah in the UAE,” said a spokesman for the Iranian military’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters.

“At the same time, they carried out aerial attacks on civilian areas in cooperation with some regional countries on the coasts of Bandar Khamir, Sirik, and Qeshm Island,” the statement added.

Iran said that its forces responded to the US attacks in the region by targeting US warships, and US Central Command released a statement that said three US Navy destroyers came under attack while transiting the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM said that in response, it hit “Iranian military facilities responsible for attacking US forces, including missile and drone launch sites; command and control locations; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance nodes.”

CENTCOM framed the strikes as launched in “self-defense,” and the US official speaking to Griffin said that the US bombing Iran doesn’t mean the ceasefire is over. The Trump administration has attempted to frame its recent military operations, which include a blockade of Iranian ports, as “defensive” even though it’s all part of the war of aggression that the US and Israel launched against Iran on February 28.

The Iranian military said that its attacks on the US warships caused “significant damage,” but President Trump insisted in a post on Truth Social that the destroyers did not get hit.

“Three World Class American Destroyers just transited, very successfully, out of the Strait of Hormuz, under fire. There was no damage done to the three Destroyers, but great damage done to the Iranian attackers. They were completely destroyed along with numerous small boats, which are being used to take the place of their fully decapitated Navy,” the president wrote.

“These boats went to the bottom of the Sea, quickly and efficiently. Missiles were shot at our Destroyers, and were easily knocked down. Likewise, drones came, and were incinerated while in the air. They dropped ever so beautifully down to the Ocean, very much like a butterfly dropping to its grave!” he added.

The president called the Iranians “lunatics” and threatened Iran with heavier attacks if it doesn’t agree to US demands for a deal. “[W]e’ll knock them out a lot harder, and a lot more violently, in the future, if they don’t get their Deal signed, FAST!” he said.

Trump also told ABC reporter Rachel Scott that the US bombing of Iranian ports was a “love tap” and that the “ceasefire is going. It’s in effect.”

 

 Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech

by Jack Hunter | May 1, 2026

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/zionists-are-gunning-for-your-freedom-of-speech/

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States guarantees the right to free speech. This right has long differentiated the United States from other Western nations like the United Kingdom and Canada where laws against so-called “hate speech” laws exist and are enforced.

Thankfully, America is different. In our country, even alleged hate speech is protected speech to ensure democratic principles and debate.

In a 1929 dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the Constitution secured “freedom for the thought that we hate.” In 2011, Chief Justice John Roberts said in a ruling that the First Amendment serves “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

This constitutional protection has been increasingly threatened recently, particularly by pro-Israeli forces that have tried to frame any criticism of that government as “anti-Semitism” and thus hate speech punishable by law. This has included everything from arrests, to squashing campus debate to buying TikTok to an attempt to cover up human rights absuses in Gaza. President Donald Trump has even issued executive orders that use vague definitions of what constitutes “anti-Semitism” that comes with criminal penalties.

Mark Levin is an American-born Zionist radio host who is an outspoken advocate for Israel’s government, regularly calling anyone who criticizes the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and conflict in Gaza “Nazis.”

Toward this agenda, Levin recently appeared to not agree with his own country’s free speech rights. On his latest Sunday Fox News program, unironically called Life, Liberty and Levin, the neoconservative pundit explained why free speech liberties in the U.S. have gone too far.

Seemingly worried that certain speech is protected in the United States, Levin said in the wake of the Secret Service taking down a shooter at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Friday, “First time things like this have happened, but it really is problematic because so much of it is protected.”

“And you hear people say, don’t you believe in the First Amendment?” Levin said. “They don’t even know what the First Amendment believes.”

Certain “speech” is “problematic” because “so much of it is protected.” You could see where this was headed.

Levin then explained what he believes “the First Amendment believes.” “Do you want to de-platform people?” he ranted. “You know, the libs do that. I don’t have any problem with de-platforming Nazis or jihadis.”

“Nazis,” Levin says. Levin uses this term loosely, all the time, and that’s putting it mildly.

Prominent libertarian personality Josie Glabach, known most popularly as “The Libertarian Redhead,” made a telling list of the many people and groups Levin has called Nazis since 2024:

• The Democrats
• The Democrat media
• An Australian bakery
• The Pakistani defense minister
• Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton
• The entire Libertarian Party
• College students
• MMA fighter Jake Shields
• Nick Fuentes
• Putin’s buddies
• Influencer Dan Bilzarian
• The Houthis
• Comedian and libertarian personality Dave Smith
• Anyone who associates with Dave Smith
• Tucker Carlson
• Beirut
• Hezbollah
• A veteran who asked Mark to be more tolerant
• Influencer Myron Gaines
• The city of London
• Hamas
• The New York Times
• New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
• A New York Times correspondent
• Terrorists;
• The “woke reich”
• Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner
• The United Nations
• Harvard University
• The city of Amsterdam
• Columbia University students
• Iterations of the “Iranian Nazi regime,” the “Islamic Nazi regime,” the “Islamo Nazi regime,” the “Islamist Nazi regime,” and “All of Iran (the new Nazis)”
• The Ayatollah (presumably of Iran)
• Former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi
• A protestor on a subway
• Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
• President Joe Biden’s entire State Department
• Turkish Preisdent Recep Erdoğan
• College basketball analyst Bruce Pearl
• Certain Arab, liberals and journalists
• Reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro
• ISIS
• Seventeen random Twitter users

This eclectic group of entities great and small, many of whom are regular critics of Israel’s government, are “Nazis” in Levin’s view. As Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods succinctly put it, “Nazis’ includes everyone who mocks Levin.”

Levin continued his Sunday rant against “Nazis”:

“I don’t have any problem with de-platforming them. What does that mean, de-platforming them? A government law? No. It means that X or Twitter or Facebook or Amazon with Twitch and someone says you know what? You’re a low life we’re not paying, you know, get off our platform. What’s wrong with that?”

The neocon pundit appeared to say that private platforms should police speech according to the political views of Mark Levin. He is right that this is no violation of the First Amendment. Private companies can allow or restrict speech as they please. “It’s called private enterprise,” he said. “I got no problem with that.”

Then Levin basically said such speech was no different than pornography, which is not protected under the First Amendment. Levin continued, “I mean, what if they have this horrific pornography on? Is that okay? No, it’s not okay.”

“Because our kids have access to it,” he said. “People who are impressionable have access to it. “What if they had people screaming at the top of the lungs saying, assassinate this guy and assassinate that guy? Well, they shouldn’t do that.”

“Why? What’s the standard?” Levin went on. “You need to have a standard. What should the law be? What does the Constitution say?”

The Constitution says that all speech is protected, but “true threats” and obscenity are not.

But political opinions about Israel that go against Levin’s views are protected, whether he likes it or not.

That’s when Levin basically outright said that speech that criticizes Israel should be forbidden just like pornography. “I just think we’ve taken this too far because we’re not even talking about political speech, which is the most protected of all speech,” Levin said.

“We do limit speech,” he insisted. “We limit speech, pornography. We limit speech.”

What Levin, like so many other Zionists, truly want is for the First Amendment to be amended itself. They believe, whether they say it forthright or not (and Levin appears to be doing just that), that this legal provision designed by the Founders precisely to protect political speech should no longer protect speech that is critical of Israel’s government.

Americans have historically valued their free speech. American Zionists like Levin now want a carve out.

But the free speech guarantee enshrined in the United States’s governing charter is so integral to the American experience, to gut it for any reason would be to drastically alter the DNA of the soon to be 250-year-old country.

As an American, Mark Levin doesn’t seem to have a problem with doing just that—all in the service of a foreign country.

It might be better for Americans to instead wish other nations well, yet solely concentrate on our own affairs at home, and perhaps just as important, to stop listening to American pundits whose primary allegiance seems to be countries other than their own.

Trump’s war has destroyed the illusion of US military supremacy

Story by Trita Parsi

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/other/trump-s-war-has-destroyed-the-illusion-of-us-military-supremacy/ar-AA22eCTo

The war in Ukraine shattered a core assumption about great-power dominance: that size and military strength are enough to impose one’s will. Ukraine showed otherwise. With the right strategy, geography and resolve, a weaker state can survive and blunt – and in key respects even defeat – a much larger and stronger adversary.

The US now faces an uncomfortable parallel. The war with Iran is exposing similar limits to American power.

For decades, US grand strategy has rested on the belief that America’s unmatched military capabilities enabled it to uphold global stability and shape outcomes across entire regions.

After the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the mess in Iran, many Americans have reached a stark conclusion: the cost of that primacy is no longer sustainable, and no longer serves their interests.

A strategy that depends on military dominance everywhere, at all times, inevitably means being at war somewhere, all the time.

America’s endless wars are not an accident, they are the product of this approach. And if there is one rare point of agreement in an increasingly divided country, it is this: Americans are tired of war.

Yet, despite a war-weary public, mounting economic strain and politicians who promise to end endless wars, inertia – and powerful economic interests tied to war – have mostly kept this approach intact.

The question now being asked is whether Trump’s debacle in Iran will finally break this pattern. Early signs suggest its repercussions may exceed even those of George W Bush’s war of choice in Iraq.

The US actually won the Iraq war in under three weeks. Its military dominance was never in doubt. But it lost the peace, failing to stabilise the country once the insurgency took hold.

In Iran, however, the US hasn’t even won the military phase of the conflict, despite facing a far weaker conventional force.

Iran has leveraged geography and asymmetric tactics to blunt American power and inflict a strategic setback. Even more striking, early claims that US air strikes had significantly degraded Iran’s drone and missile capabilities now appear overstated.

The lesson is clear: control of the skies does not guarantee control of outcomes, and without the will to deploy ground forces – and without the ability to translate airpower into decisive results – US military hegemony begins to look increasingly hollow.

Meanwhile, as some experts have pointed out, even though the Iraq war ultimately failed, it did achieve its immediate goal: overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. In Iran, the opposite appears to have happened. Rather than damaging the regime, the war has likely strengthened it and reinforced hard-line control, at a time when it was looking weakened by domestic protests.

Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor, notes that while the Iraq war destabilised the region, its global repercussions were relatively contained. It did not trigger an oil crisis, widespread food shortages or major supply chain disruptions. Iran, by contrast, has already sent energy markets into turmoil, driving oil and gas prices to record highs and triggering energy emergencies in multiple countries.

It may also have fundamentally reshaped the geopolitical landscape of the Persian Gulf for years to come.

Military primacy for the US was always a choice, not a necessity. The Iran war suggests it may no longer even be a viable one. A strategy built on escalation dominance falters when escalation itself becomes too risky to use. One that relies on decisive victories breaks down when enemies can consistently push for stalemates.

What emerges instead is arguably a different kind of global order: one not defined by dominance but by mutual denial. In this world, great powers cannot simply impose their will, and smaller states can resist them at tolerable costs. The result is not chaos, but constraint.

The most likely outcome of the current US-Iran stand-off is neither a deal nor a return to active war, but a prolonged, uneasy equilibrium. That, too, is a sign of the times.

The Trump White House may walk away from negotiations, but it is unlikely to re-enter a full-scale war. Not because the US lacks the capability, but because it lacks the strategic freedom to use it.

For countries that largely depend on US protection, this should be a wake-up call.

This does not mean alliances will collapse, but it does mean they will change. Countries will hedge more, diversify their security relationships and place greater emphasis on regional balances of power rather than reliance on a single guarantor.

In that sense, Iran is not a rupture so much as a speeding up of a trend already well underway.

Iraq and Afghanistan exposed the limits of Western occupation and regime change. Ukraine exposed the vulnerability of large conventional forces. Iran now exposes the limits of military coercion itself.

As my colleague Monica Toft argues, other smaller powers don’t need a vital waterway like the Strait of Hormuz to effectively constrain a superpower the way Iran has done. The shaping of terrain and geography – like in Ukraine – is sufficient. In short: Iran’s strategy is replicable elsewhere.

These conflicts, taken together, point to a more multipolar world – not because new great powers have risen but because existing ones can no longer dominate as they once did.

The danger for the US is not irrelevance. It’s that it continues to pursue a strategy designed for a world that no longer exists. The same is true for countries, like the UK, that have largely chosen to rely on American military dominance. American hegemony promised control, but the Iran war revealed the limitations of American power.

In the gap between promise and reality lies the likely end of an era. The winners will ultimately be those who adjust.

The West’s Bubble of Illusion About Israel – and About Itself – Is Finally Being Burst

The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy.

by Jonathan Cook | May 5, 202

https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2026/05/04/the-wests-bubble-of-illusion-about-israel-and-about-itself-is-finally-being-burst/

For decades, two irreconcilable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.

On the one side, an official western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbors. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape.

Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.

A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.

A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”.

It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state – armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.

On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorize neighboring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force.

Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible.

The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighboring states like Lebanon and Syria.

Drunk on power

Here are two conflicting narratives in which each side presents itself as the victim of the other.

Two and a half years into a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, how are these two perspectives holding up?

Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making?

Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a western military client so drunk on its own power that it can no more limit its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming?

The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.

In a moment of imprudence last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson’s replacement as British ambassador to the US, let slip the reality. Washington, the West’s imperial hub, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies – apart from one.

Unaware his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students: “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.”

That special relationship requires that the political and media class in Washington’s other client states, such as Britain, shield the West’s Sparta in the Middle East from critical scrutiny.

So glaring have Israel’s atrocities become that the British government announced last month that it was shuttering its Foreign Office unit tracking war crimes – citing the need for cuts – rather than face further exposure of its collusion in those crimes.

If the British government refuses to monitor Israel’s war crimes, don’t expect more from the establishment media.

For months, Israel has been blowing up village after village in south Lebanon, driving millions of inhabitants from lands lived on for millennia by their ancestors, and it barely registers with our politicians and media.

Israel is destroying Gaza’s water supplies, as it earlier did the tiny enclave’s hospitals and health system, ensuring the further spread of disease, and our politicians and media have barely a word to say about it.

Israel kills journalists and emergency crews in Gaza and Lebanon week after week, month after month, and it raises barely an eyebrow from the political and media class.

Israel declares “yellow lines“ in Gaza and Lebanon, demarcating expanded borders that formalize its theft of other peoples’ lands, and this instantly becomes the new normal.

Israel continuously violates ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, spreading misery and inflaming yet more anger and bitterness, and once again, our politicians and media turn a blind eye.

Which western media outlets are pointing out a starkly revealing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine?

Media bias

An analysis by the Newscord media monitoring group last month confirmed earlier research: that the British media studiously avoid naming ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is Israel – rather than Russia – carrying them out.

Comparing the coverage of the most “serious” establishment British news outlets – the BBC, the Guardian and Sky – with that of Al Jazeera, the study found that UK media consistently choose to obscure Israel’s responsibility for its crimes.

Israel was identified as conducting attacks in Gaza in only around half of British news reports, in contrast to nearly 90 per cent of Al Jazeera’s. As Newscord noted: “Half the time, BBC readers aren’t told who killed the person in the story.”

That was graphically illustrated in a notorious BBC headline: “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”.

In fact, an Israeli tank had sprayed a stationary car with gunfire even though the Israeli military had known for hours that it contained a Palestinian girl – the sole survivor of an earlier attack – who emergency crews were desperately trying to reach. Israel killed the rescue team, too.

In another revealing finding, Newscord notes that four out of every five BBC reports on casualties caused by Israel’s attacks used the convoluted passive – rather than active – voice, clearly with the intent to downplay Israel’s culpability and savagery.

The British media also actively undermined the enormity of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza by regularly attributing the figures to a “Hamas-affiliated” health ministry – even though the numbers, currently at well over 70,000 Palestinians, are almost certainly a massive undercount, given Israel’s early destruction of the enclave’s government and its capacity to count the dead.

The fact that the United Nations has found the Gaza figures to be credible was mentioned in only 0.6 percent of reports.

Genocidal intent

Similarly, the BBC and the Guardian made the decision to humanize Israeli captives of Hamas twice as often as they did Palestinian captives of the Israeli state.

The inappropriateness of that double standard is underscored by continuing insinuations from politicians and the media that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out systematic rapes on 7 October 2023 – more than two years after those claims were utterly discredited.

Contrast that with the media’s effective burial of Euro Med Monitor’s report last month on the sickening practice by the Israeli military of raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs trained for that very purpose.

There has been a flood of accounts from Palestinians held captive by Israel of their systematic rape and sexual abuse, confirmed by human rights groups and by the testimonies of whistleblowing Israeli soldiers and medics. Little of this is making headway in the western media.

Newscord points to a further, veiled problem that skews western coverage: the omission of established but inconvenient facts that would present Israel in a depraved – that is, an accurate – light.

For example, observes Newscord, the BBC has entirely failed to report all but one of the hundreds of clearly genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down.

It is easy to understand why. Legal authorities usually struggle to make a conclusive determination of genocide because, crucially, it depends on divining intent, which is typically hidden by those committing atrocities.

Starkly, in Israel’s case, not only do its actions in Gaza look like genocide, but its leaders have been crystal clear that those actions are intended to be genocidal. That is behaviour only seen in those intoxicated by a sense of their own impunity.

Once again, the British media have obligingly taken it upon themselves to shield Israel from any legal jeopardy – all in the interests of objective reporting, you understand.

An old story

This is nothing new. It has been the same story since before Israel’s violent creation on the Palestinians’ homeland in 1948, when 80 percent of the native population were ethnically cleansed by Israel from the new, self-declared “Jewish” state. Or when, in the continuing language of deceit employed by western political, media and academic elites, some 750,000 Palestinians “fled”.

The aim has been to manufacture and maintain a bubble of illusion for western publics, one where our own crimes – and those of our allies – remain invisible to us.

Note in this regard the UK government’s determined exclusion of Israel from a recent “independent” inquiry, under former Whitehall bureaucrat Philip Rycroft, into malign foreign financial influence on British politics. It was, of course, Russia that was put chiefly under the spotlight.

Predictably, Keir Starmer’s government rejected in April a petition signed by more than 114,000 people calling for a similar public inquiry into the influence of the powerful Israel lobby.

That came as no surprise, given that any such investigation would have risked foregrounding the many hundreds of thousands of pounds known to have been received by Starmer and his ministers from pro-Israel lobbyists.

The same British political and media class so averse to investigating the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby is also ignoring Israel’s current, systematic destruction of villages and infrastructure across south Lebanon – in flagrant violation of a supposed ceasefire.

Israeli soldiers have told local media that their job is to target all structures indiscriminately, whether civilian or “terrorist”, with the goal of preventing the Lebanese inhabitants from returning to their villages.

That fits with Israel’s announcement that it does not intend to withdraw after the fighting ends, and widespread plans to colonize the occupied lands in Lebanon with Jewish settlers.

Were it not for videos of Israel blowing up Lebanese communities breaking through on social media, despite algorithmic suppression, we might not know about Israel’s wholesale efforts to ethnically cleanse south Lebanon.

Responding to these videos with a rare “mainstream” report on the campaign of destruction, the Guardian sugar-coated the horror faced by Lebanese families discovering their homes gone, along with priceless memories and heirlooms. This experience was described – absurdly – by the paper as “bittersweet”.

Critics note a consistent pattern. Israel is not only leveling south Lebanon; over the past 30 months, it has leveled almost every building in Gaza, too.

But the template for both is of much earlier origin, as every Palestinian learns from a tender age.

Having expelled most Palestinians from their homes in 1948, Israel spent years blowing up some 500 villages one after another – even as Israeli leaders publicly claimed to be begging the refugees to return and western leaders were extolling Israel as the “only democracy” in the Middle East.

Expulsions that the West still pretends did not take place eight decades ago are now being live-streamed. This time, they are impossible to deny, as well as the colonial, supremacist agenda behind them.

Vilify the messenger

If the message inhering in Israel’s atrocities can no longer be disappeared, laundered or normalized – as it was in an age before 24-hour rolling news and social media – then a different strategy is required: vilify the messenger.

This is the political task of our times.

The anti-racist left are demonized as Jew-hating bigots for trying to burst the West’s long-established bubble of illusion by noisily flagging both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities.

Last month, Starmer’s government forced through the Commons a law allowing the police to outlaw protests causing “cumulative disruption” – that is, repeat protests like those against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The media barely blinked.

This week’s attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, allegedly by a mentally ill man with a long history of violence, is being quickly exploited by the main parties to prepare for even tighter restrictions on the right to protest.

Britons who try to stop Israeli war crimes, whether by targeting Israel’s factories of death located in the UK or by holding placards in support of this kind of direct action, continue to be treated as “terrorists”, even after a court ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action is unlawful.

With juries often proving reluctant to convict, the British state has set about openly rigging the trials. Juries are blocked from learning about the reasons for the targeting of Israeli weapons factories – the accused’s main defence. Judges instruct juries to convict.

Members of the public who silently hold signs outside court are arrested for reminding juries of a long-established right in law to defy such instructions, follow their consciences and acquit – a police abuse contravening hundreds of years of legal precedent, and one the courts appear increasingly ready to condone.

There are gags, being dutifully obeyed by the media, on other secret malpractices designed to help the British government secure the verdicts it needs to stop activism against the genocide. We only know because Your Party MP Zarah Sultana has used parliamentary privilege to draw attention to them.

It was telling this week that, in the current repeat trial of six Palestine Action defendants, five of them dispensed with their barristers for the closing speeches. They noted, darkly, that their legal representatives could not properly represent them due to “decisions made by the court”.

Meanwhile, the Starmer government is pressing ahead with plans to finally rid itself of troublesome juries and let more reliable judges decide these political show trials alone.

Welcome to the rapid unravelling of Britain’s most cherished constitutional rights – needed chiefly, it seems, to protect a far-off country that, according to the International Court of Justice, commits the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and may plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.

Painful lesson

But, of course, the British government – like the US, German and French governments – isn’t hollowing out its liberal democracy just to protect Israel. It is being forced to such extremes out of desperation.

The West can no longer sustain the bubble of illusion – about its moral or civilizational superiority – in a world of diminishing resources, a world where western elites are willing to cause planetary immolation to protect the fossil-fuel profits on which they have grown obese.

The agenda of the Epstein class is ever more transparent at home, and ever more under challenge abroad. The genocide in Gaza, and the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, have exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy.

It is no surprise that a US empire on its last legs – an empire built on the control of fossil fuels – has chosen as the hill to die on the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s largest oil spigot.

Israel was, indeed, implanted in the region eight decades ago as a highly militarized client state whose primary job was to project western – that is, US – power into the oil-rich Middle East.

The US shielded Israel from scrutiny over its oppression of Palestinians and the theft of their homeland.

In return, “plucky” Israel helped the US construct a self-serving narrative that required the containment and overthrow of secular nationalist governments in the Middle East while protecting backward-looking monarchies that cosplayed opposition to Israel as they secretly colluded with it.

The region’s resulting states, embattled and divided, were ripe for control. They lacked the kind of accountable governments that would need to be responsive to their publics and might ally to protect the region’s interests from western colonial interference.

Now, Iran is stress-testing this decades-old system to destruction. It is forcing the Gulf states to choose: will they continue to serve the US, even though it has shown it cannot protect them, or ally with Iran as it emerges as a new great power, levying fees to pass through the strait?

The West is quickly learning that cheap drones can elude even its most sophisticated detection systems, and that a few mines and gunboats can choke off much of the fuel the global economy depends on.

The bubble of illusion has finally burst. The West is getting a rude and long-overdue awakening. The lesson will be painful indeed.