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.

Greater Israel and Israeli Hegemony in the Middle East

These two are the true objectives of the wars in the Middle East since 1967.

For international Zionism and for the various Israeli governments, the ultimate goal is for Israel to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East, with its adversaries mired in chaos and Balkanization (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, and soon Turkey and Saudi Arabia), leaving the State of Israel as the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the region, with the most powerful conventional army; as a communications and trade hub between Asia and Europe; as the leading technological and scientific power; and all of this guaranteed by the military-economic might and the political and diplomatic support of the United States.

In the second half of the 20th century, the Israeli political-military leadership disguised these objectives by claiming that what it wanted was to avoid its “destruction” at the hands of its enemies in the region and therefore required the military support of the United States and Western Europe; as well as armed forces vastly superior to those of its opponents.

But once, throughout the 21st century, successive US administrations have fulfilled Israel's wishes to eliminate its adversaries in the region (from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to the war against Iran in 2026), the Israeli political-military-religious leadership has abandoned the "defensive" explanation of its Middle East policies and now states, without euphemism, that its objective is not only to expand Israeli territory (annexing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and southern Lebanon and Syria), but also to establish political and military hegemony over the countries of the region through constant military intimidation (always supported by the United States) that will force them to follow Israeli political and economic directives.

Thus, Israel will apply the same strategy it has used against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon: “mown the lawn.” That is, to prevent peace and development among its adversaries in the region through wars and military interventions that hinder their ability to recover economically and militarily, thereby keeping them permanently in a state of underdevelopment and constant threat.

This implies a kind of Spartan state, as Netanyahu himself indicated in September 2025, when he spoke of turning Israel into a “super Sparta.”

While Netanyahu made this statement in light of Israel’s growing isolation in the international community due to its constant violations of international law, with the aim of preparing Israeli society to live in a constant state of war, the reality is that the prime minister was aware that this strategy is only possible if the United States continues to fund and provide military aid to Israel.

Therefore, the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is key to Israel’s continued territorial expansion. It can continue to maintain a significant advantage in conventional weapons and be the only country with nuclear weapons in the region; and it can become (as is its objective) the main economic, commercial, communications, and transportation hub between Europe and Asia.

If the Zionist magnates in the United States can maintain control of the government of the world's leading power (as they have managed for over 60 years), so that it serves Israel's grand objectives, it is very likely that we will see even more wars and instability in the Middle East in the coming years, since Netanyahu and the Israeli political-military establishment in general agree that not only must Iran fall into chaos and destabilization, but Turkey and Saudi Arabia must follow.

They care little that all of this generates a constant economic crisis worldwide, and even less that chaos persists in the Middle East, since for them the most important thing is to eliminate and/or weaken the countries that, from their perspective, could undermine their hegemony and halt their expansionist plans.

So, as long as the United States remains a subordinate piece of Israel's expansionist and hegemonic strategy; as long as Europe is unwilling or lacks the means to intervene and prevent this strategy; and as long as China and Russia have other priorities in their respective spheres of influence and prefer not to confront the United States and Israel in the Middle East, the region will most likely remain in a permanent state of conflict, with pauses and "truces" that will not last long, because Israel is determined to achieve the grand objectives that Zionism set for itself in the 19th century, and which it now sees as feasible to achieve with the acquiescence and help of the world's leading power, the United States.

US-Germany spat over Iran intensifies as Hegseth orders troop removal

German defence minister says Europe must look after itself, as 5,000 American troops set to leave Germany

By MEE staff

Published date: 2 May 2026

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-germany-spat-over-iran-intensifies-hegseth-orders-troop-removal

The spat between the US and Germany over the war on Iran is intensifying after Washington announced the withdrawal of 5,000 American troops from German soil. 

Responding to US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth's order on Friday, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Saturday that "Europeans must take responsibility for our own security".

Pistorius said the US move to withdraw troops from Germany, its largest European base, had been expected.

US President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have been sparring all week over the war on Iran. 

Merz has said that the US is being "humiliated" by Iran's leadership and has suggested that Tehran is outwitting the White House at the negotiating table. 

The German leader has criticised the US for entering the war without a clear plan, saying that this complicates efforts to bring the conflict to an end.

“The problem with conflicts like these is always the same: it’s not just about getting in; you also have to get out. We saw that all too painfully in Afghanistan, for 20 years. We saw it in Iraq,” he said last week.

Merz's interventions have infuriated Trump. “The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Trump posted earlier this week.

The US president also threatened to withdraw forces from Germany in response to Merz's remarks.

German military infrastructure

The New York Times, citing defence officials, reported that the US relies heavily on its bases in Germany to conduct operations across the Middle East, Europe and Africa, underscoring the strategic importance of the deployment. 

The US presence includes the vast Ramstein Air Base and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, both of which have supported operations related to the war on Iran, as well as previous conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pistorius said the partial withdrawal would affect a current US presence of almost 40,000 soldiers stationed in Germany, Reuters reported. Other estimates put the active-duty troop presence at around 35,000.

“Germany is on the right track,” Pistorius said, referring to his country's plans to expand its armed forces, speed up military procurement and build military infrastructure.

Trump has consistently - even before entering politics - complained about what he sees as excessive US support for its allies.

In 1987, the then-real estate developer spent nearly $100,000 on an advert criticising US foreign policy in major American newspapers.

“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” the letter stated. “The saga continues unabated as we defend the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent.

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

Germany wants to boost the number of its active-duty army soldiers from a current 185,000 to 260,000, Reuters reported, though critics of Pistorius have called for further expansion in response to what is widely seen as a growing threat from Russia.

Nato members have pledged to take on more responsibility for their own defence. However, tight budgets and significant gaps in military capability mean it will take years for the region to meet its security needs.

Israel pours $730m into global propaganda machine as reputation collapses

Experts agree that the mass spending on 'Hasbara' will do little to reverse Israel's reputational freefall

News Desk

MAY 1, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-pours-730m-into-global-propaganda-machine-as-reputation-collapses

Israeli lawmakers last month approved a sharp increase in the 2026 public diplomacy budget, allocating roughly $730 million to the global messaging apparatus, also known as “Hasbara,” according to a report by the Jerusalem Post on 29 April.

Surveys point to a deepening collapse in international support, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and continued aggression toward its neighboring countries have sent the Tel Aviv's reputation into freefall on the global stage.

The funding accounts for more than four times the previous year’s allocation, and forms part of a broader push led by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who characterized the effort as a strategic imperative, saying it should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors” and calling it “an existential issue.” 

The campaign spans large-scale digital outreach and political engagement aimed at bending perceptions and influencing narratives around Israel.

Around $50 million is being funneled into social media advertising, and roughly $40 million is going toward flying in foreign delegations such as politicians, clergy, and influencers as part of the outreach effort.

Officials insist the strategy improves perceptions abroad, with Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, Israel Bachar, claiming that “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you must fly out a lot of people.”

However, polling data cited in the reports shows a sharp collapse in public opinion towards Israel, particularly in the US.

A Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of US respondents now view Israel unfavorably, with declines cutting across political, religious, and demographic groups.

Analysts and researchers dismiss the spending outright, arguing it cannot offset the impact of Israel’s actions on the ground. 

Communication scholar Nicholas Cull said, “Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” referring to Israel’s policy of genocide and apartheid, and its broader military conduct as a central pillar of its expansionist agenda.

“Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.” 

“The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore,” said Ilan Manor, another expert cited in the report, warning that increased funding may expand reach but will not restore trust.

That push is reinforced by what Israeli officials describe as a parallel “Eighth Front” – a so-called “Digital Iron Dome” that combines mass reporting campaigns, AI-driven targeting, and coordinated influencer networks to suppress dissenting content and flood platforms with state-approved narratives in real time. 

Israel had invested millions in coordinated digital influence campaigns, including a $6-million contract to shape AI outputs, targeted Gen Z messaging, and large-scale ad buys, in an effort to control online narratives and counter declining public support in the US.

The country’s propaganda arm had previously deployed a large network of at least hundreds of fake social media accounts and fabricated news sites to spread unverified claims linking UNRWA to Hamas's 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in order to undermine its humanitarian mission in Palestine.

US military equipment worth billions of dollars destroyed in Iran war

The United States lost aerial equipment worth up to $2.8bn, according to a US-based think tank.

By Alia Chughtai

Published On 30 Apr 2026

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/30/us-military-equipment-worth-billions-of-dollars-destroyed-in-iran-war

Speaking at a televised Cabinet meeting on March 26, the US secretary of defense boasted of US military successes against Iran in the ongoing war. “Never in recorded history has a nation’s military been so quickly and so effectively neutralised,” he said, seated next to US President Donald Trump.

The very next day, Iran fired missiles and drones that struck a US base in Saudi Arabia, wounding several US soldiers and destroying a radar surveillance plane that cost $700m.

It was no one-off hit. Iran’s missiles and drones, and one devastating instance of so-called friendly fire, have destroyed US military equipment worth between $2.3bn and $2.8bn, the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies has calculated.

The CSIS estimate is the first detailed tabulation by a major international research group of US military losses in the war that began on February 28, and Al Jazeera is the first to report it.

This estimated costing does not include losses incurred at US bases in the region, or any of the specialised equipment or naval assets.

Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Defense and Security Department at CSIS, carried out the calculations. He said that he was also looking at damages to bases used by the US in the Gulf. But that exercise has been more challenging. Planet Labs, a global service provider for satellite imagery, has blocked all satellite images for public and media usage at the request of the US government since February 28. Iranian satellite imagery, however, has been available.

“We can see from the overhead photographs, you know, what, what buildings were struck,” said Cancian, of the bases used by the US. “It’s hard to know what was in the building.”

What were the losses?

Some of the losses were the result of “friendly fire”. Three F-15 jets were shot down in one such incident in Kuwait in early March.

But most of the US aircraft and radar destroyed in the war were targeted by Iran. Two instances, in particular, stand out. On March 1, the US lost at least one powerful missile defence radar that uses the THAAD system to detect missiles and some hypersonic threats, and feeds targeting data to other defence systems. Some reports suggest two radars were destroyed. The total bill: Between $485m and $970m. The location has not been specified. The US armed forces are hosted by several Gulf nations where THAAD systems were implemented.

And on March 27, the attack on Prince Sultan airbase in eastern Saudi Arabia, fewer than 24 hours after Hegseth’s boast, destroyed the $700m E-3 AWACS/E7 radar detection aircraft. Essentially an airborne command centre, it can detect aircraft and missiles hundreds of kilometres away, and coordinate battles in the sky.

“At this point, I don’t think the Trump administration would want to be looking like losing equipment [and] personnel,” Ashour told Al Jazeera, adding that there might be a “price” to pay “at the [midterm] elections in November“.

The US, he said, had a history of achieving operational victories in conflicts around the world — only to then fail strategically.

“In Vietnam, they did a series of operational victories. In Afghanistan, they did. But then [they suffered] the strategic loss in the end. Because the operational victories did not serve the strategic ends,” he said.

“In this case, the strategic ends are very political,” Ashour added, referring to the proclaimed goals of regime change and denuclearising Iran.

He emphasised that at the moment, the US troops deployed to the region do not constitute even a 10th of the force used to invade Iraq in 2003. It also does not have the number of aircraft carriers used against Iraq.

How did Iran retaliate?

Cancian said that he was surprised at Iran’s decision to strike Gulf nations — and not just the US bases they host.

“I think that was a strategic error on their part. They thought that that would split the Gulf states away from the United States, but it drove them closer to the United States,” he argued.

For the US, he said, the failure to keep the Strait of Hormuz open was a humbling reminder of what can happen when a navy is unprepared. Iran enforced restrictions on the passage of most vessels through the strait early in the war, and on April 13, the US launched its own naval blockade of Iranian ports and ships trying to transit through the waterway.

“It’s surprising because we’ve been thinking about this with the United States military for 45 years,” he said, before referring to his own time in the military. Cancian is a retired colonel from the US Marines, and his military career spanned over three decades. He served in multiple roles in Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War – Desert Storm, and the Iraq war.

Cancian recalled participating in amphibious planning exercises to capture Qeshm Island, where Iran is believed to hold several of its missiles in an underground facility. “So it’s not that this just popped up unexpectedly.”

But when the US launched the current war, he said, “They didn’t have the forces in place.”

“They do now, but they did not initially. And then, you know, apparently for whatever reason, they don’t have the capability or are not willing to take the risk to open it,” he added.

Ashour said that Iran, too, has suffered severe damage to its military. He says the US-Israeli operation in this case has degraded the country’s conventional military architecture, but was unable to wipe out its missiles, munitions and drones.

“That claim that the [Iranian] navy got obliterated,” he said, was “far from the truth”.

“You can still fight in the sea without a conventional or without the blue water navy,” he said. “They were degraded. But it’s far from defeated, and they’re far from down.”

Israel’s New World Order: Nothing but the Threat of Endless Death

by Andy Worthington | Apr 30, 2026 

https://original.antiwar.com/worthington/2026/04/29/israels-new-world-order-nothing-but-the-threat-of-endless-death/

For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has unilaterally — and with jaw-dropping illegality — reimagined warfare as a religiously-mandated existential struggle against alleged “forces of darkness” in which there are no rules, and no sense of proportionality or restraint.

Everyone in the Gaza Strip — 2.3 million people at the start of this “conflict” — has been regarded as, in one way or another, “associated” with Hamas, the administrative government of Gaza whose military wing, along with other armed factions, broke out of the “open-air prison” of Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing hundreds of Israeli security personnel, and hundreds of civilians.

Completely supported by almost all the nations of the west, who approved the shamefully ill-defined notion that Israel had “the right to defend itself”, Israel has reinterpreted “self-defense” to mean genocide, inflicting such disproportionate destruction on Gaza that almost its entire built environment has been destroyed, and over ten percent of its population — a quarter of a million people — have been killed or wounded.

As of today, the official death toll, as assessed by Gaza’s shattered health ministry, is 72,594, with 172,404 people injured, and with, of course, many of those injured suffering life-changing and in many cases life-threatening injuries.

Even since a ceasefire was declared six months ago, Israel has continued to directly kill and wound Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, breaking the ceasefire on thousands of occasions, leading to another 818 deaths, and 2,301 injuries.

On April 20, UN Women published an article, “Who are the women and girls behind Gaza war’s horrific casualty toll?”, pointing out that over half of those killed were women and girls — at least 22,000 women and 16,000 girls, proportions much higher than in previous conflicts in Gaza.

As the article also explained, “Nearly 11,000 women and girls in Gaza have sustained injuries so severe they now face lifelong disabilities.” In addition, “Nearly one million women and girls have been displaced in Gaza, with many being forced into displacement an average of four times. Access to water and food has been severely limited, with nearly 790,000 women and girls experiencing crisis-level or catastrophic levels of food insecurity.”

Nor must we forget the men and boys who make up the other 34,000 victims of Israel’s genocide, of whom at least 10,000 were children, while the majority of the men were also civilians.

Israel itself admitted, in documents released last year, and subsequently analyzed by Israel’s +972 Magazine and the Guardian, and which I wrote about here, that, by its own assessment, 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians, having only been able to verify that 7,330 individuals had been combatants.

Moreover, numerous responsible analysts have also undertaken detailed research establishing that the true death toll is many times higher than the figure compiled by Gaza’s health ministry — perhaps, as I have discussed at various times over the last two years, anywhere between 150,000 and several hundred thousand.

These much higher figures rely, primarily, on assessments of the number of secondary deaths in addition to those resulting from direct military attacks — caused by the collapse of healthcare services, shortage of food and clean water, and the spread of diseases.

Israel’s ongoing efforts to increase the death toll in Gaza, despite a ceasefire

On every front, Israel has, over the last 30 months, maximised its efforts to create as many secondary deaths as possible, through prolonged sieges on all supplies of food, water, fuel and medical supplies, through the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and its entire healthcare sector, through the destruction of Gaza’s sewage systems, and, most recently, through a refusal to allow in any kind of machinery for clearance and reconstruction, most urgently needed for the mountains of garbage that have built up and that have become a significant health hazard.

As the poet and writer Omar Hamad reported on X just yesterday, “Gaza is witnessing over 17,000 cases of rodent-related and parasitic infections among its displaced population. This is the reality left behind by the genocide, an environment forced upon Gaza by Israel’s destruction and its total ban on the entry of insecticides and life-saving medicines.”

As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported just last week, there is “a proliferation of rodents, cockroaches, flies, and other pests, contributing to disease transmission, with a high prevalence of scabies, lice, and skin infections. The scale and persistence of such public health risks are linked to overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and limited access to hygiene services.”

Investigations of the various displacement sites in which the majority of the population are living “indicated that rodents or pests were frequently visible in 1,326 of the 1,644 assessed sites (81 per cent), affecting about 1.45 million people. Additional alerts highlighted persistent sanitation‑related risks, including sewage in surrounding streets (61 per cent of sites), accumulated solid waste (56 per cent), and flooding or stagnant water (24 per cent). Traces of open defecation and dead animals were also reported. Only 3 per cent of sites indicated no visible environmental health hazards within or around the site perimeter.”

As the report added, “These environmental conditions are closely mirrored in reported household‑level health concerns. A total of 1,322 sites (81 per cent) reported the presence of skin infections or rashes, including scabies, lice, bedbugs, or other ectoparasitic infestations. Skin infections or rashes were reported in nearly two‑thirds of sites, lice in over 65 per cent, and bedbugs in more than half. Other ectoparasitic infestations were identified in over one‑quarter of sites. According to health partners, more than 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations have been reported so far in 2026.”

Aid agencies are doing what they can, but are restrained by deliberate Israeli obstruction, either because they “rely on items that are largely unavailable in Gaza”, or because they are “often difficult to take in”, because “implementation requires lengthy processes including procurement, approvals, shipment, deployment and safe application.”

The genocide, in other words, still grinds on, deliberately maintained by Israel, which is clearly still trying to kill as many Palestinians as possible.

Israel still wants everyone in Gaza to die

When pushed, Israeli officials still talk about their hopes for the “voluntary migration” of the population, as though it is some kind of humanitarian option, but it has always been a mirage, because no country will take in significant numbers of the Palestinians, either because of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, or because it would so clearly involve the crimes of ethnic cleansing or forced displacement on a significant scale.

When Israel reluctantly re-opened the Rafah Crossing with Egypt in February, it was an opportunity for senior Israeli officials to demonstrate their commitment to their claim of wanting to encourage people to leave, but, instead, they have persistently restricted the numbers of those allowed out, which, yesterday, prompted the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom to ask, “Why is Israel preventing Gazans from leaving?”

Polling conducted last year, by what Reuters called “a think tank based in Ramallah and funded by Western donors”, which may not have been reliable, apparently found “that 49% of those surveyed declared that they would be willing to apply to Israel to help them emigrate via Israeli ports and airports, against 50% who said they would not be willing to do so.”

The reason Israel doesn’t want to make even the most cursory efforts to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza, is, as senior officials, pundits and far too many Israeli citizens have made all too clear, with relentless barbarism, since October 7, is because they want everyone in Gaza to die, as I first pointed out nearly a year ago, when Israel stepped up its relentless extermination in Gaza, after deliberately breaking a six-week ceasefire in January and February, in an article entitled, Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in Gaza.

Not only did the Israelis admit it themselves, but numerous international organizations and genocide experts have, since January 2024, when the International Court of Justice warned of a “plausible” genocide being undertaken in Gaza, concluded, with increasing certainty, that the cumulative effect of all Israel’s actions since October 2023 has been undoubtedly and deliberately genocidal in intent, fulfilling four of the five indicators of genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention; namely, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, by “killing members of the group”, by “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, by “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, and by “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

To cite just a handful of examples, Amnesty International concluded that Israel’s actions constituted a genocide in December 2024, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel reached the same conclusion in September 2025, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, has published a series of reports (“Genocide as colonial erasure”, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”, “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” and “Torture and genocide”), defining the contours of Israel’s genocide, and its support through governments in the west and businesses worldwide, and in July 2025 the prominent US-Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov wrote, in “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”, an article for the New York Times, “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

In November 2024, Israel was finally hit with a legal blow that it couldn’t simply shrug off, when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Although devious efforts were subsequently made to topple the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, in a manufactured sexual harassment scandal, and although the US has obligingly waged warfare on the court through the imposition of sweeping sanctions on its judges, the arrest warrants still stand, and both Netanyahu and Gallant are, as a result, unable to visit the 125 countries who are signatories to the Rome Statute that initiated the ICC in 1998.

From demands for silent compliance to AI-facilitated mass slaughter

The most grotesque innovation of the last 30 months has involved the use of AI (artificial intelligence) in military targeting.

For most of the 16 years before October 7, 2023, Israel sought to control the trapped population of Gaza through an insistence on silent compliance. Despite its total control of the border, not only preventing the entry and exit of the population, but also restricting the supplies that were allowed in, the Palestinians were meant to endure these persistent and deliberate deprivations in total silence.

When they did respond — primarily through militants firing missiles at Israel — the response was brutal, via intensive bombing campaigns that were sickeningly described by Israeli officials as a regular process of “mowing the lawn.” Every few years, these “wars” took place — Operation Summer Rains, a four-month offensive in 2006, Operation Cast Lead, a brutal three-week assault in 2009, the week-long Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, the 50 harrowing days of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and the three-day Operation Black Belt in 2019.

Some of these attacks involved specific targeting, because Israel has controlled the Palestinian population registry for Gaza and the West Bank since its illegal occupation began in 1967, with any changes — including the registration of births, marriages, divorces, deaths or changes of address — requiring its approval.

With this vast database at its disposal, the opportunities for mass surveillance offered by smartphone technology, and the dawning capabilities of AI programs to process information more rapidly than human analysts, meant that, by 2021, when Israel launched Operation Guardian of the Walls, which lasted for eleven days, it was triumphantly described as “the world’s first AI war”, with the Jerusalem Post enthusiastically explaining how, “in the years prior to the fighting, the IDF established an advanced AI technological platform that centralized all data on terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip onto one system that enabled the analysis and extraction of the intelligence.”

As the article proceeded to explain, “Soldiers in Unit 8200, an Intelligence Corps elite unit, pioneered algorithms and code that led to several new programs called ‘Alchemist’, ‘Gospel’ and ‘Depth of Wisdom’, which were developed and used during the fighting”, with data collected through “signal intelligence (SIGINT), visual intelligence (VISINT), human intelligence (HUMINT), [and] geographical intelligence (GEOINT)”, including information collated “in real time.” The article enthused about how the IDF stated its belief that “using AI helped shorten the length of the fighting, having been effective and quick in gathering targets using super-cognition.”

Aviv Kochavi, then the head of the IDF, captured most compellingly how the new technology was transforming Israel’s concept of warfare. “in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets in a single day”, he said in admiration.

By October 2023, Israel had had another two and a half years to expand its AI-driven military targeting, and the result was devastation on an unprecedented scale, as apartment block after apartment block was levelled, and entire neighbourhoods were destroyed. The attacks looked remarkably like arbitrary carpet-bombing, but when some of those involved in the AI-driven military targeting programs publicly expressed their misgivings in revelatory investigations published in November 2023 and April 2024 (which I wrote about here and here), they revealed that what looked like random carpet-bombing was actually the result of a giddy enthusiasm amongst military commanders for the alleged accuracy of these apparently miraculous technological developments that allowed them to target and kill at a rate that was previously inconceivable.

While the commanders viewed the programs as a miracle, however, those who were perturbed behind the scenes recognized fundamental problems that were irreconcilable with notions of proportionality and accuracy that ought to underpin any military operations.

These whistleblowers identified a 10% error rate, which is shockingly high, but, more fundamentally, they were alarmed by the parameters set by those who were establishing the targeting programs, primarily because they included “low-level” targets, who may have been nothing more than employees of Hamas’ civilian administrative government, who were not legitimate targets, but also because “a system of mass surveillance”  had been established which assessed and ranked the likelihood of activity in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad), assigning “almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.”

As I explained in an article last month, The Horrors of AI-Driven Military Targeting, From Gaza to Iran:

Having learned “to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data”, the program then located similar “features” amongst the general population. Those with “several different incriminating features” would “reach a high rating”, and would automatically become “a potential target for assassination.”

Alarmingly, however, “These ‘features’ might include ‘being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently’ — even though the former is no guarantee of militancy, and the latter two might well involve no militancy whatsoever. As the sources explained, the AI program ‘sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once [unknowingly] belonged to a Hamas operative.’”

As a result, in the early weeks of the genocide, the AI program “clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants”, identifying them, and their homes, as “targets for possible air strikes”, even though that figure was more than the entirety of Hamas’s military membership, according to official Israeli statements.

Another key aspect of the programming was the tolerance of mass civilian casualties when pursuing “high-value” targets, via unheard-of rates of “collateral damage.” One, early on, involved “the killing of approximately 300 civilians” in an attack aimed at one individual, a figure that appalled an international law expert at the US State Department, who told the Guardian that they had “never remotely heard” of even “a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable.”

In addition, another program, the sickeningly-named “Where’s Daddy?”, deliberately targeted individuals “while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity”, because, “from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.”

As one of the sources explained, “In practice, the principle of proportionality did not exist.”

Nor too did any meaningful human oversight. One source, as I described it, “stated that human personnel often served only as a ‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about ’20 seconds’ to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.”

That 20-second review was therefore, the only measure of human oversight that prevented what was, in essence, a policy that I have described as “automated genocide.”

Legally, of course, this is a nightmare, as those involving in assessing the legality of war are increasingly recognizing. An article for the Georgetown Security Studies Review, for example, stated that, “By relying on AI, in some cases almost granting it executive authority, Israel is undermining principles of proportionality, distinction, and precaution”, as identified in a UN report in June 2024, which assessed attacks on civilian infrastructure in the first three months of Israel’s genocidal assault, before the central involvement of AI-driven military targeting had even been established.

As the Georgetown article noted, huge questions need to be asked about the conduct of war in the AI era when “the fate of thousands of lives [is] at the discretion of an automated system”, and when the removal of “even the slightest shred of humanity from it leaves us all as potential targets.”

Israel expands its depravity from Gaza to Lebanon and Iran

What we still don’t know, as Israel has eviscerated all sense of proportionality in its attacks on civilians, and has deliberately erased distinctions between militants and administrative workers in Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, is how much its other deadly targeting of key protected individuals — medical personnel and journalists — has involved AI-driven “terrorism” assessments, or whether these have been cynically grafted on after they were identified and killed.

What is clear, however, is that there has never been a conflict in which so many medical personnel and journalists have been killed, with so much deliberate misinformation invented afterwards in a sickening effort to justify their slaughter. Over 270 Palestinian journalists have been targeted and murdered in Gaza, and in September 2025 the health ministry reported that 1,722 health workers have been killed, with this figure including some of the 562 aid workers who have also been killed.

What we also know is that Israel has expanded the depraved, disproportionate model it established in Gaza to Lebanon, which has been suffering from Israeli depredations throughout the long blood-soaked decades of Israel’s existence.

In September 2024, stepping up its attacks on Hezbollah, which has long supported the Palestinians and has repeatedly engaged in attacks on Israel, a truly depraved mass attack, involving booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, was initiated, with the support of the US tech firm Palantir, which was reportedly aimed at Hezbollah militants, but which, in reality, killed, maimed and mutilated numerous civilians. UN experts, who condemned the attacks as “terrifying” violations of international law, noted that the attacks “ killed at least 32 people and maimed or injured 3,250, including 200 critically. Among the dead [were] a boy and a girl, as well as medical personnel. Around 500 people suffered severe eye injuries, including a diplomat. Others suffered grave injuries to their faces, hands and bodies.”

Israel followed up by assassinating Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, in an attack in Beirut, during a sustained period of savage attacks on Lebanon that resembled the destruction rained down incessantly on Gaza. On the deadliest day, September 23, 558 people were killed, including 50 children and 94 women, and 14 ambulances and fire engines were also targeted and attacked, and on October 1 Israeli troops invaded Lebanon for the sixth time since 1978.

Although a ceasefire was declared in November, Israel treated it with the same scorn it has applied to ceasefires in Gaza, and on March 2, two days after Israel persuaded the US to foolishly initiate a war on Iran, it resumed full-scale attacks, also, as in Gaza, imperiously ordering the mass evacuation of Lebanese civilians, creating over a million internal refugees.

On March 16, Israel followed up by invading southern Lebanon, aiming to occupy the whole of the land up to the Litani River, and, as was explained in the Guardian by Mohamad Bazzi, the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University, “pledging to clear frontline villages of their inhabitants and establish a new ‘security zone’ that would be devoid of people and occupied by Israeli troops.”

Israel’s fanatical defense minister, Israel Katz, explicitly promised another Gaza, stating that his forces would destroy “all houses” in Lebanese border villages “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun”, towns in Gaza whose existence has been completely erased.

The perilous refusal of Israel to submit to any kind of restraint, and why it must be stopped

Israel’s behavior over the last six weeks has, above all, demonstrated its extraordinary arrogance. Having seduced Trump into attacking Iran based on promises that another assassination — of Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khameini — would sow discord and lead to regime change, the US soon discovered, to its dismay, that Iran was a formidable adversary, and had been preparing, since unprovoked attacks last year, for retaliation. After successfully targeting US bases throughout the Middle East, Iran proceeded to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global energy crisis whose magnitude is being deliberately hidden by politicians and the media throughout the west, but which was significant enough for Trump to recognize the need for a ceasefire.

For Iran, any ceasefire deal also had to include Lebanon, but Israel refuses to be constrained by anyone, including the US or Iran, because it simply doesn’t care about anyone or anything other than itself.

This was made clear when, last September, as Gaza ceasefire negotiations were taking place, Israel brazenly targeted Hamas officials who were meeting in Doha, in Qatar, violating the powerful Gulf state’s sovereignty, and requiring frantic diplomatic efforts by the US to limit the attack’s political damage.

It has also been made clear in the responses, within the US, to the deadly attack on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, in Iran, on the very first day of the “war”, when, it seems, Palantir-developed AI technology misidentified the school as a military target. The attack killed 168 people, mostly schoolgirls, and, in the US, it has led, at the very least, to some hand-wringing, and to noticeable unease within parts of the US military.

In contrast, within Israel, and with the handful of exceptions noted above, there has been no meaningful discussion about the extent to which AI-driven military targeting is not a miracle, but a flawed system that has contributed to the colossal and unjustifiable slaughter of civilians in vast numbers, and which needs serious oversight before it proceeds any further.

Israel’s most disturbing actions over the last two months, however, took place on April 8, when, in a deliberately provocative snub to the US-Iran ceasefire deal, it launched the most devastating attacks ever seen on Beirut and southern Lebanon, striking over a hundred targets in a ten-minute period, claiming it was targeting Hezbollah strongholds without, of course, providing any evidence, and killing at least 357 people, who seemed quite clearly not to be the 250 Hezbollah “operatives and commanders” that Israel claimed to have killed.

Despite the threat that Israel’s actions pose to the Iranian ceasefire, it has still continued to engage in the destruction of southern Lebanon, is still destroying village after village, and also attracted global condemnation last week through its deliberate targeted killing of the renowned and tenacious Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, who, of course, it subsequently smeared as a “terrorist.”

Whereas the US still has allies throughout the Middle East which it needs to placate, even with Donald Trump’s tendency to insult and belittle even those closest to him, Israel has no friends or allies whatsoever, just a handful of countries that it manipulates — largely through infiltration — to fulfil its aims.

As its arrogance and its derangement have grown over the last 30 months, this now means endless war on as many fronts as possible not only against military targets, but against entire civilian populations who are all, following the Gaza model, regarded as, in one way or another, “associated” with Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the Iranian “terror state”, or even just through ever more hysterical interpretations of antisemitism, which the Israeli state has long insisted means any criticism whatsoever of its actions.

What the last 30 months have also shown us is that Israel’s predatory notions of “self-defense” extend far beyond the Middle East, via high-level influence over compliant governments in the west, and especially the US, the UK and Germany, which, as well as being Israel’s main arms suppliers (in the case of the US and Germany), have also obligingly initiated draconian clampdowns on free speech, protest and direct action in defense of Israel, and where (again, in the US and Germany) alarming efforts are also being made to make citizenship or employment dependant on allegiance to Israel.

Most alarmingly, as the dark forces behind the AI revolution openly manifest their true ugliness, not just via their enthusiasm for AI-driven warfare, but also for the surveillance and control of entire populations, Israel’s reach also now threatens all of us, wherever we are.

As Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the fanatically pro-Israeli Anti-Defamation League (ADL), explained at an event held by the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles in March, the group has analysts “working round the clock” to “take down” those regarded as “extremists” through monitoring social media and other platforms, sharing the information it gathers with the FBI. The extensive surveillance operation that he outlined “tracks activity across social media, messaging apps, video games, cryptocurrency platforms, podcasts, short-form video, Wikipedia and large language models.”

For those paying attention, it has been clear throughout the last 30 months that what has been happening in Gaza will not stay in Gaza. Instead, the genocide in Gaza is a template — for a world of limitless slaughter, and of total surveillance and control, that will persist as long as Israel, and those backing it, continue to be allowed to wield their depraved power.

For all our sakes, Israel and its backers need, across their many spheres of influence, to be restrained and disarmed.