Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat-New York, right, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat-New York, outside the White House in Washington, September 29, 2025. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
There are moments that expose the fundamental character of the political system in the United States, that notwithstanding the daily infighting between the Democrats and Republicans, when it comes to the basic interests of American imperialism, the two parties of American capitalism are united.
The publication Thursday of the terms of the memorandum of understanding between the Trump administration and Iran is such a moment. It has triggered an outpouring of criticism from both the Democratic and Republican parties on the grounds that the war US President Donald Trump launched against Iran in February failed to secure American imperialism’s objectives in dominating the Middle East.
Republican former Vice President Mike Pence called the deal “appeasement” this week and demanded that, short of a harsher settlement, “we should let our Armed Forces finish the job on our terms.”
The Democrats joined the Republican condemnation of the agreement, criticizing it in much the same language. Senator Adam Schiff of California called it “a thorough capitulation,” writing that “Iran gets sanctions relief… and a $300 billion reconstruction fund.” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut called it “essentially a surrender to Iran.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared that “Iran is stronger and America is less safe” as a result of the agreement.
The New York Times, in an editorial headlined “President Trump Lost This War,” called the agreement “a humiliating comedown” and named Iran “the strategic winner of the four-month war.”
Jacobin magazine, the semi-official publication of the Democratic Socialists of America, criticized Trump’s deal with Iran in language indistinguishable from that of the Republicans and the Democratic leadership.
Jacobin’s article, titled “Donald Trump Has Nothing to Show for His War With Iran,” took the form of an interview with Andreas Krieg, a professor of “defense studies” at King’s College London. The article states that Trump “has ended up in a weaker strategic position than when he started.”
Krieg told the magazine the war had produced “tactical degradation but strategic regression.” Iran, he noted, had not surrendered its enrichment program, its government had not collapsed and “its ability to close Hormuz has been proven rather than deterred.” It offers neither a word of condemnation of the war itself nor any call to oppose it.
The Trump administration waged an illegal war of aggression against Iran, in violation of international law. The war opened with a series of assassinations, including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the country’s military and political leadership. This act of murder and perfidy under cover of negotiations met with approval from both parties. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the time, “I will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei,” while Jeffries called Iran “a bad actor” that “must be aggressively confronted.”
Throughout the war, the Democrats sought to stifle broad popular opposition to it through a series of meaningless procedural votes, intended to fail. In the massive demonstrations of millions of people under the banner of “No Kings,” Democratic Party organizers worked to deliberately exclude any reference to the war.
But now that the war has failed to achieve Trump’s objectives, the Democrats have found their voice, condemning his “capitulation” to Iran. This is the same party that spent the last year and a half presenting Trump as a colossus whose social and economic policies could not be opposed because he had a “mandate” from the electorate.
In reality, the Democrats, who speak for the same ruling class as Trump, agree with broad sections of Trump’s domestic agenda. Whatever their rhetoric, they believe, together with Trump, that fundamental social programs must be slashed to fund the expansion of the military and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
It is in defense of the interests of American imperialism that they are intractable. During his first term, the Democrats chose to impeach Trump not over his assault on democratic rights, but, in 2019, for his insufficient commitment to war with Russia and his withholding of military aid to Ukraine.
Trump’s deal has settled nothing. It is a temporary retreat, and the war could erupt again at any moment. The logic of the Democrats’ position is that were Trump to resume bombing Iran, they would support it.
The Democratic response to the agreement makes clear that their claim to represent any sort of “progressive” opposition to the fascist Trump is a lie. They are ferocious defenders of American imperialism, and should they come to power, there would be no fundamental change in foreign policy.
A world separates the working class from these parties. From the first day of the war, the World Socialist Web Site, the organ of the International Committee of the Fourth International, defined the war by its social character, calling it “a criminal war of aggression by an imperialist power against an oppressed former colony, aimed at plundering its oil wealth and establishing control of the Persian Gulf.” The Socialist Equality Party declared in a statement that it “condemns this war unconditionally and calls on the working class of every country to oppose it,” insisting that “the main enemy is at home” and that American workers “have no interest in a war against the people of Iran.”
The war against Iran is the product of the crisis of American imperialism, which sees no escape from its impasse except war. Every American war since 1991—against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Iran—has ended in failure, and each defeat has prepared the ground for the next. There is every reason to believe that the debacle in Iran, which has only deepened that crisis, will propel new wars.
But the war has also detonated a social crisis at home. It drove inflation to 4.2 percent in May, the highest in three years, gutting real wages and setting off a rebellion across American industry. Thousands of auto parts workers at Nexteer, Dana and Bridgewater have rejected one concession contract after another—the Dana local in Paris, Tennessee, voting one down by 288 to one—while 1,000 American Axle workers walked out on June 1 in their first strike in 18 years, 1,700 railroad workers across 11 states tore up a nine-year contract and nurses from Boston to Chicago voted to strike.
The movement is not confined to the United States. In Spain, 78,000 teachers in Valencia walked out this spring; Italy and Portugal have each been stopped by a nationwide general strike.
It is this growing eruption of social struggle, centered in the working class that has been made to pay for the war, that is the means to oppose the global offensive of American imperialism. The development of this movement requires a break with both capitalist parties and the building of the Socialist Equality Party, the United States section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Israeli attacks in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire deal was signed in October 2025 have now killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, as the IDF has continued its constant violations of the agreement.
The Health Ministry said that over the previous 24 hours, Israeli attacks killed two Palestinians in Gaza, and six Palestinians who succumbed to wounds from previous strikes were added to the death toll, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed since the deal was signed to 1,005.
Another 3,157 Palestinians have been wounded in the time, meaning there have been more than 4,000 Palestinian casualties in the eight-month period.
Mourners react during the funeral of six-year-old Palestinian girl Mennatallah Abu Libda, who was killed in an Israeli strike on a tent encampment for displaced families, according to medics, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, May 25, 2026. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Israeli attacks continued in Gaza on Wednesday, with witnesses telling the Anadolu Agency that an Israeli strike hit beachgoers in the al-Mawasi tent camp in southern Gaza. At least two Palestinians were killed, and six were wounded.
The report said that the area that was bombed was “crowded with beachgoers and displaced families, many of whom had sought refuge by the sea as their only escape from soaring temperatures and deteriorating living conditions in displacement camps.”
Besides the constant strikes, Israel has also violated the deal by taking more territory in Gaza. After the ceasefire agreement was signed, IDF troops occupied about 53% of Gaza, but that has increased to about 60%, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he ordered the military to expand it to 70%.
In recent days, Palestinians have reported IDF troops advancing the “yellow line,” the vague boundary that separates the IDF-occupied side of Gaza from the rest of the Strip, and several families were reportedly displaced in Gaza City on Tuesday as Israeli troops pushed tanks into the area.
The US and Israeli officials have accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire deal by not laying down its weapons, but the agreement that was actually signed didn’t commit Hamas to disarmament.
The two sides agreed to a US proposal that called for the “demilitarization” of Gaza as a framework for negotiations, but the issue of disarmament was meant to be worked out in follow-up negotiations. Hamas has also maintained that it won’t disarm unless there is movement toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Negotiations on implementing the US plan for Gaza have been ongoing, but there’s been no sign of progress.
A thick plume of smoke rises from an oil storage facility hit by a U.S.-Israeli strike in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, March 8, 2026. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
On Sunday, the United States and Iran announced a ceasefire agreement in the war that the Trump administration launched on February 28. Despite killing more than 3,000 Iranians and triggering a global food and energy crisis, the United States has failed to achieve the objectives for which it went to war.
A “memorandum of understanding” was digitally signed on Sunday, and a formal signing ceremony is scheduled for Friday in Switzerland. The 60-day framework reportedly provides for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the removal of the US naval blockade and the immediate suspension of military operations, including in Lebanon. It commits both sides to subsequent negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions and regional security.
Whether the agreement actually holds remains uncertain. The actual text has not been released. Iran has claimed that some $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets have been unfrozen, which the US has disputed. Trump has reiterated that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon” and warned that the United States “could attack Iran again if negotiations fail.” Israel, not a party to the agreement, has rejected it and continued strikes on Lebanon the same day.
Regardless, the outcome represents an unqualified debacle for American imperialism. It is a case of a schoolyard bully picking a fight and winding up with a black eye. The Iranian government remains in power. Its nuclear program is intact. The most concrete deliverable is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a reversion to the prewar status quo.
There is a staggering chasm between the braggadocio with which the war was launched and the reality of its outcome. Trump promised the war would end with Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared on March 2 that the United States was waging “the most lethal … air power campaign in history” with “no stupid rules of engagement.” Days later he promised reporters “death and destruction from the sky, all day long.”
Having spent the year trying to bring the Iranian government down and calling on Iranians in February to “take over your government,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday: “I never cared about regime change.”
The media is filled with commentary about the defeat of American imperialism. The Wall Street Journal has called it “a strategic retreat short of achieving his war aims.” It is the operational demonstration, before the world, that the period of unchallenged American dominance that began with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 has come to an end.
The political character of the American ruling class’s response is captured in the editorial published by the New York Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, under the headline “President Trump Lost This War.” The Times’ concern is not that the war was waged through mass murder and assassination, but that it failed.
“Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war,” the editorial declares. “He prosecuted it recklessly and in open defiance of the law. The United States is emerging weaker—militarily, diplomatically and economically—and will pay strategic costs for years to come.” The Times bemoans the fact that “On balance, Iran emerges the strategic winner of the four-month war.” The American military “has shown itself unable to quash a much smaller opponent even as it burned through many of its long-range precision missiles and interceptors. The outcome damages this country’s ability to deter other potential adversaries.”
The editorial’s prescription boils down to the statement: “The Pentagon will also need to modernize and prepare for the wars of the future.”
The wars of the future. The Times takes for granted the framework of permanent imperial confrontation, above all, with China and Russia, for which the Pentagon must “modernize and prepare.” What is in question is only the competence with which the framework is administered.
The Democratic congressional response operates within the same framework. Senator Chris Murphy called the deal “essentially surrender to Iran.” Representative Seth Moulton called it “basically a surrender document from Donald Trump to the supreme leader of Iran.” Senator Jack Reed complained that the United States was getting “less than what we had under the JCPOA,” the Obama-era nuclear deal. The Democrats endorsed the war when it was launched. They complain about it now only because it ended without Iran being destroyed.
There was enormous popular opposition to the war, but this found absolutely no expression within the framework of official politics.
The end of this stage of the war does not mean the end of the war. American imperialism will prepare new wars to recover its position. The 2015 JCPOA framework established under Obama was ended by Trump in 2018 and paved the way for the 2026 war. The 2026 ceasefire framework will pave the way for the war that follows.
The most significant consequences of the debacle, however, will be the consequences within the United States.
The war was launched, in part, in an attempt to stop the structural decline of American capitalism. The European Central Bank reported this month that gold has overtaken the euro to become the world’s second-largest reserve asset, at 27 percent of global reserves, up from 20 percent a year earlier. The federal debt crossed 100 percent of GDP in March for the first time since 1946. The failure of the war has accelerated the dollar’s decline and deepened the structural crisis the war was meant to resolve.
The war was launched against the backdrop of escalating social conflict. In the weeks before the war began, mass demonstrations against ICE intensified after the murder of Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, by federal agents in Minneapolis. The Trump administration’s launching of the war was, among other things, an attempt to deflect this mounting opposition into the channels of patriotic war fever.
Social opposition will now escalate, and it will be increasingly centered in the working class. Auto parts workers at American Axle struck this month. Railroaders, meatpackers, teachers and nurses have walked out. Wall Street rose on news of the deal Sunday, but fuel and food prices remain far above their prewar levels. PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditures) inflation has hit 3.8 percent, the fastest pace since 2021. Consumer sentiment is at all-time lows, worse than during the Great Recession or the pandemic.
Workers have absorbed the costs of the war through rising prices while the corporations profited. The economic impact will provide fuel for class conflict for years to come, in the United States and internationally. The same crisis that produces the war is producing a global movement of the working class against it.
The Trump administration will respond to deepening social opposition with the methods it has demonstrated: ICE raids, mass detention infrastructure, the deployment of the National Guard against domestic protest, the criminalization of political opposition and the consolidation of authoritarian state power. The defeat in Iran will not moderate this trajectory. It will intensify it. The American ruling class, confronted with the failure of its imperialist offensive abroad, will turn with renewed savagery against the working class at home.
The task is the construction of an independent political movement of the working class that is international in scope, socialist in program and politically conscious in its objectives.
There is a popular view that this is a pointless war, being fought for nothing. But that is wrong—there is a purpose. Actually, there are several. You’re just never told what they are.
On June 1st, despite a ceasefire ostensibly underway in the US-Israeli war on Iran, Israel’s prime minister launched a major escalation against Lebanon, including threatening airstrikes against the Lebanese capital. The US president called the Israeli leader, furiously demanding an end to Israel’s escalation. Six days later, Israel attacked Beirut’s southern suburbs, long understood to be a red line for Hezbollah. The Lebanese resistance organization launched a limited response, sending 11 rockets towards Israel, almost all of which were intercepted; no one was hurt or killed. Trump called Netanyahu again, telling him in a brief call that now that Iran and Israel had each “had their fun,” that Israel should stand down.
Commentators across the Middle East and beyond debated whether Netanyahu would abide by Trump’s demand. What virtually none of them mentioned was that Trump had refused to even mention his most important pressure point: that if Israel resisted his order to stand down, the US would simply stop sending tons of weapons and tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli military. The close but sometimes divergent interests of the Middle East’s two powers, the global and the regional, was on full display.
It’s now been 106 days since Trump launched his preemptive and illegal military attack on Iran. On February 28, 2026, the world awoke to the fury of a new war in the Middle East after the United States and Israel had launched their joint assault against Iran, with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu standing shoulder to shoulder against their common foe. Claiming unbridled hegemony was on the agenda for both.
The US-Israeli war on Iran is rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals.
Today, with yet more fresh promises of a so-called “peace deal” that is nearly ready to be signed by Trump and Iranian leadership, the Israeli military is bombing the suburbs of Beirut despite ongoing claims of a “ceasefire.” Trying to understand the current doom loop, it’s vital we remember how we got here.
In the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, along with an unknown number of other top military and political leaders, was assassinated with a ballistic missile. Just an hour later, the US fired a Tomahawk missile directly at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the northern Iranian city of Minab—killing 156 people, 120 of them children, and destroying the school. The war’s official reasons, initially, were to eliminate the ostensible threat of Iran creating a nuclear weapon, and to destroy its conventional military capacity. The no-daylight US-Israeli partnership, Trump and Netanyahu as BFFs, the collaboration between the US and Israeli warplanes, bombers, drones, missiles… all seemed seamless and perfect.
Three months later, and half a dozen or so “ceasefires” announced, renounced, ignored and denounced, headlines around the world gleefully recounted a Trump phone call with Netanyahu. Focused on Israel’s escalating bombing of Lebanon threatening to derail the latest US-Iran ceasefire, the June 1 call reportedly started with Trump telling Netanyahu “you’re fucking crazy—you’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.“ The US president then went on to his ”Everybody hates you now“ remark. ”Everybody hates Israel because of this,“ he reportedly said.
Trump acknowledged saying it, and then, as is his usual style, moved on, quickly reclaiming his friendship with the Israeli prime minister. As was true with so many earlier ceasefires, Israel continued its massive bombing and its brutal occupation of south Lebanon, making a US-Iran ceasefire impossible. In the meantime, throughout the months of the war, commentators, politicians of all stripes, journalists and analysts across the globe were struggling to figure out what that war was actually being fought for.
War for What?
Real fear of an actual nuclear bomb was certainly not the answer. After all, US intelligence agencies have agreed for years that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
Despite that clear assessment, US B-2 stealth bombers still dropped 14 of their 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs on Iran’s civilian centrifuges at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz at the end of Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025. Trump and his supporters bragged of having “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. And then, eight months after that, in the early days of the US-Israeli 2026 war, those B-2s were back in the air, dropping more 30,000-pound and some smaller versions of the bunker-busters on Iran. Seems they don’t believe even their own intelligence agents.
They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game.
Rationales for the sudden war in 2026 (launched in the midst of US negotiations with Iran for a long-term ceasefire) were tossed around like confetti, ranging from stopping a nuclear threat (which of course didn’t exist because Iran didn’t have, wasn’t trying to make, and hadn’t even made a decision to try to build a nuclear weapon), to ending Iran’s support for its regional allies, to destroying Iran’s navy, to crippling its missile capacity, to protecting Iranian civilians or maybe encouraging a popular uprising, or perhaps even full-scale regime change. Later, once Iran had responded to the attacks by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump shifted to trying to justify the war as a means of forcing the reopening of the Strait, in effect waging the new war to get back to the situation that had existed until the US and Israel launched the war in the first place.
Not a Senseless War
None were very convincing arguments. The popular view emerged that this was a pointless war, being fought for nothing. But that was wrong—there was a purpose. Actually, there were several. The Israeli prime minister has shaped his political career, for more than 35 years, around the claim that only he could bring down the Iranian regime, falsely claiming it as an “existential threat” to Israel. (In fact, even if Iran changed its internal decisions and decided to try to build a nuclear weapon some day, it would not represent an existential threat to Israelis but only to Israel’s 47-year-old nuclear weapons monopoly in the Middle East.) Netanyahu needed the war to continue—any ceasefire, under any conditions, would weaken him politically.
On the US side, some of the war’s goals had to do with the personal obsessions of the president and his minions. Trump’s fixation on expanding US power around the world, and more importantly being seen as presiding over a return to the glory days of unchallenged US global domination, remain a driving force—as does his determination to “get a better deal” than Obama did with the successful Iran nuclear deal in 2015. For his self-defined “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, the pageantry of a powerful military—not only “the most lethal” force in the world but more white, more male, and even more slim than any other army—could compensate for Hegseth’s lack of experience. For Secretary of State Marco Rubio, all roads lead to regime change in Cuba—and supporting all of Trump’s military assaults, including attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean, kidnapping the president and seizing the oil resources of Venezuela, bombing Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria, all help set the stage for his life-long goal of destroying the Cuban revolution.
The Search for Hegemony
All those personal obsessions likely played some roles. But the US-Israeli war on Iran is also rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals. While Trump has shown himself for years as far more committed to maximizing his own and his family’s wealth and power than he is accountable to any particular faction of US capital or US elite power (except perhaps “the billionaires,” writ large), the trajectory of imperial expansion, especially in an era of greater and rising powers around the world, continues to shape much of US policy.
That is where the search for hegemony comes to the fore. For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon. That means asserting its power—a derivative power, given its strategic dependence on the United States, but power nonetheless—to seize land, dispossess and expel whole populations, and exert permanent control over countries, economies, and people—whenever, wherever, and for however long it chooses. Without being held accountable.
For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon.
To be recognized as the regional hegemonic power in the Middle East, Israel needs to not only “mow the grass” in Lebanon and in Gaza (as well as arming and empowering ideologically driven settlers in the West Bank to escalate their violent seizure of Palestinian land and ethnic cleansing of its population), it needs to continue to weaken, threaten, and when possible (with US backing) go to war against Iran, its sole challenger for regional control.
Mowing the Grass
Israelis—military and government officials, academics, journalists and others—routinely use the term “mowing the grass” to describe Tel Aviv’s consistent attacks against Israel’s neighbors. The phrase was first coined to describe Israel’s brutal 22-day assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, that began the day after Christmas 2008 and killed more than 1400 Palestinians, most of them civilians and including 300 children. Since then, it describes the frequent attacks on Gaza or Lebanon—ostensibly aimed at militant organizations but designed originally to kill massive numbers of civilians, displace hundreds of thousands or millions from their homes, and destroy huge swathes of homes, schools, churches, mosques, businesses—to remind everyone who it is who actually holds power.
Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.
Iran has historically been the main obstacle preventing Israel from consolidating that regional hegemonic role, and part of Netanyahu’s political power depends on his ability to keep the US-Israeli “special relationship” strong and to deal effectively with Iran. So going to war against Iran in complete and willing partnership with the United States serves to strengthen his still-shaky political position. What’s different now is that Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.
So Netanyahu remains committed to continuing this war against Iran, opposing ceasefires regardless of their terms—and most recently, escalating attacks against Lebanon precisely because they could prevent or shatter any ceasefire. Following the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in 2024, UN peacekeepers on the ground documented more than 10,000 Israeli violations of the agreement in just the first year. When a wobbly US-Iran ceasefire was announced on April 8, 2026, Israel responded with massive force against Beirut, launching more than 100 airstrikes within 10 minutes across the capital and killing 357 people, many of them civilians and at least 101 of them children and women.
Back in the USA….
For the United States, going to war against Iran could strengthen Washington’s longstanding commitment to maintaining global domination—a goal particularly relished by its power-obsessed and erratic president. The war was designed to both demonstrate and bolster the US role as unchallenged global hegemon. And doing so arm in arm with Israel, the regional version.
What a team they thought they would make. What they didn’t reckon with was the reality of Iran—its military, its government, its people. While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.
While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.
For example, Iran’s relatively few strikes on US bases and sometimes domestic facilities in the surrounding US-backed Gulf states had political consequences beyond their comparatively low levels of casualties. They showed how “protection” in the form of US military bases, weapons and troops in those countries did not keep their people safe, but rather laid a target on their backs. Most especially, Iran’s few direct attacks on ships attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz early in the war, had the much broader effect of shutting down the vital waterway entirely, as shipowners and insurance companies refused to take the risk.
Miscalculations
When Israel carried out its guided missile attack on the first day of the war, killing the supreme leader and a number of other top officials, the cheering in Washington and Tel Aviv reflected the assumption that the decapitation of the government would lead to chaos and its inability to function. The cheerleaders were wrong. As Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr noted in Foreign Affairs, the US and Israel “expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over.” Not only did Khamenei’s son take over his father’s position, but younger military, political, and business leaders filled in the gaps across the structures of power.
And while the Iranian leadership had been significantly weakened by public mobilization against both governmental inability to solve the escalating economic crisis and its increasingly repressive attacks against protesters, it appears it was not further weakened by the US-Israeli assault. As Nasr and Bajoghli describe the situation, the public anger of January 2026 in response to escalating repression of the mass uprisings, didn’t disappear with the US-Israeli assault. They wrote:
The war’s destruction has been vast: public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historic monuments, and even entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. As Israeli and American bombs and missiles pummeled the landscape, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy and annihilate its civilization. Together, these military and rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger has not disappeared. The grief, frustration and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire in the 4th century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the 7th century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.
Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war has not sparked street demonstrations. The longer it went on, the less the regime appeared threatened by public uprisings. Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it, holding daily rallies across the country, forming human chains and gathering on bridges threatened by Trump. The sharp divide between state and society that had characterized Iran in January blurred—not through persuasion or repression, but through the shared experience of living through the bombing and witnessing its destruction.
Palestine
There was another reason for the US-Israeli war, that explains at least the timing, if not the overall rationale—Palestine. Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza for two years and eight months. There are now more than 73,000 known, identified, named Palestinians in Gaza who have been killed by Israeli bombs, tanks, bullets, drones, missiles, almost all paid for (and to a large degree produced) by US taxpayers. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what were once the cities, towns, refugee camps of the decimated Gaza Strip. The statistics belie the lives lost—babies, elders, children. Journalists and health workers in staggering numbers. And Israel’s genocide continues, people are still being killed by Israeli bombs, tanks and drones, as well as deliberately-imposed shortages of water, food, medical supplies, shelter.
The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler. It is precisely the level of impunity, the absolute lack of accountability for any of the perpetrators of this crime against humanity, that has given Israeli and US leaders the confidence to go ahead with what many have called the “Gazafication of Iran” and the “Gazafication of Lebanon” without fearing there might be a price to be paid.
The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler.
The international arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli leaders (Israel assassinated the Hamas leaders who were similarly charged) are ignored in most of the US-allied countries that Netanyahu and his former defense minister might want to visit. South Africa’s unprecedented effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice for its violations of the Genocide Convention resulted in a powerful preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions plausibly do constitute genocide. Israel was ordered to carry out specific actions—starting with an end to killing people in Gaza—but it has yet to face any consequences for ignoring those orders. And no one knows when the final ruling might be issued—or if it will lead to some level of enforcement, either in the United Nations, by a coalition of governments, or, most likely by a newly-enraged, newly-engaged global civil society ready to move with ever greater energy, strategic clarity and political power to impose serious consequences on the governments and individuals responsible for the first genocide in history to be carried out openly, proudly, and visible to the world.
War Over War
For now, while the war against Iran continues, it looks like both Israel and the United States are moving into a different phase. They are still looking to claim power, still working to reshape political relations and consolidate regional and global power across the middle east. But rather than simply escalating again, as Israel still is in Lebanon, or continuing a grinding daily assault as it still is in Gaza—both actions armed and paid for by the US—they are facing some changed circumstances. Just maybe Washington and Tel Aviv are finding that it’s harder than they thought to re-order the whole Middle East—and to do that in tandem is harder than ever.
Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely. Turns out Iran is not Venezuela. Netanyahu has massive public support among Jewish Israelis for continuing the war in Iran, though support for the war in Lebanon is not so popular. (It should not be forgotten that after 18 years of occupying South Lebanon, Israeli troops were finally pulled out in 2000 primarily because the government could not survive the mobilization of Israeli mothers angry that their sons in the IDF were occasionally being killed by Hezbollah’s retaliation actions..)
Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely.
At home Netanyahu may be able to get away with claiming victory over Iran even if a ceasefire is imposed, by continuing Israel’s longstanding practice of assassinating Iranian scientists and political/military leaders, and occasional bombing raids. But Israel’s plummeting losses in the war of global legitimacy are certainly not likely to be reversed any time soon. The most recent Pew survey indicates sky-high majorities holding negative views of Israel and Netanyahu around the world—up to 95% in Pakistan, 78% negative in Sweden and Spain.
The global Palestinian rights mobilizations and the even broader movements for ceasefire and an end to genocide of course play a major role. Social movements and civil society activists around the world will continue to hold up the ICJ decisions and the UN General Assembly resolutions requiring governments to impose arms embargoes, boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.
And as the Strait remains closed and food shortages mount in the poorest countries, as Arab governments fearing public opposition at home reduce their ties with Israel and reject expansion of the Abraham Accords, and as Israel continues to kill Lebanese and Palestinian families, Trump’s claims will be less likely to be believed. With the mid-terms only a few months off, his claims of “We’re the winner, we won” are already ringing increasingly hollow. It doesn’t mean he won’t make the claims, it just means they’re not going to work.
For Trump, given the unexpected level of resilience in Iran, Tehran’s access to a virtually unlimited supply of cheap drones that are doing real damage to Gulf Arab states hosting US bases and troops, and its willingness to close the Strait as a pressure point with global ramifications, it’s going to be difficult to claim this war as a victory.
The search to consolidate regional and global power continues. It’s a big part of the reason the US and Israel are launching new wars and escalating longstanding attacks. People are still losing lands and lives as these hegemons rely on war to consolidate their positions. But neither Israel in the Middle East nor the United States in the world are unchallenged. They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game. The search for hegemonic power is far from settled.
In the wake of the US and Iran announcing a Memorandum of Understanding to end the conflict between the two nations that includes a ceasefire in Lebanon, Israeli ministers have said Israel isn’t bound by the agreement.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed that the IDF will not withdraw from its so-called “security zones” in southern Lebanon, which include a major swathe of Lebanese territory, and will also continue the occupation in southwest Syria and Gaza.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I are leading a clear policy that determines that the IDF will remain in the security zones in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, without any time limit, to protect, from there, the border and Israeli communities against jihadist elements,” Katz said.
Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon in April 2026 (IDF photo)
The Israeli defense minister said that the IDF will continue its destruction campaign in southern Lebanon and its forced displacement of Lebanese civilians. “We oppose an IDF withdrawal from Lebanon, despite all the existing pressures and those that will still come,” he said.
Katz added that Netanyahu “made these points clear to US President Trump and to other senior American officials,” which aligns with a report from Ynet that said Netanyahu told Trump that Israel is not bound by the Lebanon clause of the US-Iran MOU. Katz also said that if Iran strikes Israel over its continued war in Lebanon, Israel will hit Iran “with full force.”
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich slammed the agreement Trump reached with Iran, saying it is “bad for Israel and for the entire free world. Period.” Israeli opposition leaders also attacked Netanyahu, with former Prime Minister Yair Lapid saying there has “never, ever, been a more absolute failure than Netanyahu’s diplomatic failure on the Iranian front.”
Iranian officials on Monday reaffirmed that an end to Israel’s war in Lebanon was key to a lasting deal with the US. “Lebanon and the termination of the war in Lebanon are an inseparable part of the understanding on ending the [US-Israeli] war [on Iran]. We have shown that we are determined in this regard and have proven in practice that we are serious, and we will continue to monitor developments carefully in the future,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei.
“The word Lebanon is used three times in the understanding. It is mentioned that ending the war includes Lebanon and respecting the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity … The United States must honor its commitments and ensure that the Zionist regime fulfills its obligation not to attack Lebanon,” he added.
Workers clear debris near an apartment building damaged in an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburbs, Lebanon, Sunday, June 14, 2026. [AP Photo/Bilal Hussein]
The United States and Iran announced a ceasefire agreement Sunday, suspending, for now, a war that the Trump administration began on February 28 and that has killed thousands of people. “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social, ordering the lifting of the US naval blockade of Iran and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. “Ships of the World, start your engines,” he wrote. “Let the oil flow!”
While the terms of the settlement remain undisclosed, this much is already clear: The Trump administration achieved none of the aims for which it went to war. It set out to overthrow the Iranian government, destroy its nuclear program, break its military and seize the Strait of Hormuz. It accomplished none of this.
Trump responded to the failure by denying he had ever sought to overthrow the Iranian government. “As far as regime change, I never cared about regime change,” he told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
In reality, his administration had spent the entire year trying to bring the government down. Early on, it funded and armed protesters inside Iran. “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them,” Trump said in April.
When this failed, the United States and Israel turned to assassination. The opening strikes on February 28 killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Pakpour and Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, along with much of the military command. The government did not collapse. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba succeeded him, and it was the younger Khamenei’s national security council that approved Sunday’s deal.
There followed a bombing campaign across Iran that has killed at least 3,468 people, by the Iranian health ministry’s count, and a naval blockade imposed on April 13. American warplanes destroyed water reservoirs in Sirik that supplied more than 20,000 people and fired on oil tankers running through the blockade, killing three Indian sailors aboard the Settebello this week. After two months, the blockade failed to force Iran’s surrender, and the Strait of Hormuz remained shut by Tehran’s decree until Sunday.
No agreement with American imperialism is worth the paper it is written on. In 2015, the Obama administration signed the nuclear accord known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which Iran accepted strict limits on enrichment and intrusive inspections. Iran kept to its terms—the International Atomic Energy Agency certified as much in report after report—but in May 2018 Trump tore the agreement up anyway, calling it a “horrible, one-sided deal.” Obama, who signed that accord, said Sunday it was “doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place… before we, the United States, pulled out of it.”
The pattern was repeated last year. Trump announced a “Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” in June 2025 to end the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran. That truce held until February 28, when the United States and Israel broke it, launching the war that has now been paused.
Even as he proclaimed peace on Sunday, Trump threatened to resume the war. The New York Times reported that in a phone call he said he would “restart military attacks on Tehran” if Iran failed to reach a final nuclear accord, or else make the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in exchange for 20 percent of the region’s revenues.
Trump’s claims about the settlement were as hollow as his account of the war. He boasted that the Strait of Hormuz would be “permanently toll free,” but the memorandum suspends tolls for only 60 days. Iran charged no tolls before the war—the deal restores the prewar status quo. Trump said the inspection of Iran’s nuclear material could wait: “We’ll get the nuclear dust later on when we’re ready to go in and do it… there’s no rush.”
The agreement nominally covers Lebanon, where Israel has waged a parallel war that has killed more than 3,700 people. Hours before the announcement, Israel bombed the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing three, in a strike that nearly wrecked the deal. Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had shown “no judgment” and told all sides to “stand down.” Israel, which was not a party to the talks, has not endorsed the agreement, and Israeli politicians across the spectrum denounced it.
The Democrats’ response to Trump’s moves toward an agreement with Iran centered on the accusation that he had failed to secure the interests of US imperialism. Democratic Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts called the emerging terms “basically a surrender document from Donald Trump to the supreme leader of Iran.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” complained that the war had left the United States worse off: “Things aren’t better for us. They’re worse. In fact, Iran is stronger right now.”
A warning must be made. Whatever the failures and setbacks of the past four months, American imperialism will only redouble its efforts to dominate the Middle East and the world by military force.
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It’s important to understand that, contrary to Donald Trump’s quip to Barak Ravid that Netanyahu has “no f***ing judgment,” the Israeli Prime Minister knows exactly what he is doing: With a set of strikes at the Dahiyeh neighborhood in Beirut, he is trying to kill both the pending US-Iran peace deal and the fragile peace between Israel and Lebanon that would come with it.
There is a further strategic dividend. Netanyahu is also seeking to preempt Iran’s attempt to establish a new regional deterrence equation – one in which attacks on Beirut, and potentially on Lebanon more broadly, would trigger a direct Iranian response against Israel. By striking now, he is not merely targeting an adversary; he is challenging the emergence of a regional order that would constrain Israel’s freedom of military action.
Netanyahu even posted a video on his Twitter bragging about the attack:
תקפנו בדאחייה בביירות מטרות טרור של ארגון הטרור חיזבאללה. ישראל לא תסבול ירי לשטחה pic.twitter.com/wVARFCkDQe
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) June 14, 2026
The exchange of fire between Israel and Iran last week was about far more than retaliation. After Israel defied President Trump and struck Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood, Iran responded by attacking Israel directly – the first time Tehran had launched strikes on Israel in response to an Israeli attack on Lebanon. Israel defied Trump once more and retaliated against Iran, prompting another Iranian response, after which Israel confined its next strike to southern Lebanon rather than Beirut.
The cycle reflected Iran’s attempt to establish a new regional equation: that attacks on Lebanon would no longer be cost-free for Israel, but would carry the risk of direct Iranian retaliation. For the first time in decades, a major regional power was seeking to place hard-power constraints on Israel’s freedom of military action beyond its borders.
Having reestablished its own deterrence, Tehran was now attempting to establish extended deterrence to its partners as part of a broader effort to rebuild its forward-defense posture. Israel, unsurprisingly, viewed this as a direct challenge to its long-standing freedom of maneuver and moved quickly to prevent the new doctrine from taking hold.
Of course, extended deterrence can not be established through a single exchange of fire. At a minimum, it would require several rounds of action and reaction before either side accepted it as a new reality. And even then, it would never be foolproof. Tehran understands that its purpose cannot simply be to eliminate Israeli strikes on Lebanon, but to force Israeli leaders to think twice before authorizing them by attaching a new and significant cost: the likelihood of direct Iranian retaliation.
It was therefore clear that Netanyahu had not abandoned the fight. Yet for several days, even as Hezbollah and Israel continued to exchange fire, he refrained from striking Beirut’s southern suburbs and testing Iran’s new red line.
But today, just hours before President Trump was expecting Iran to sign a memorandum that would end the U.S.-Iran war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Netanyahu crossed both Tehran’s and Trump’s red line: keeping Beirut out of the conflict.
Netanyahu clearly timed this for maximum impact. With a single set of strikes, Netanyahu may have advanced two goals at once – torpedoing Trump’s peace deal and preventing the emergence of a new deterrence equation that would impose meaningful constraints on Israel’s military operations in Lebanon.
A diplomat involved in the talks told Fox News that: “This is a clear attempt by Israel to sabotage the President’s deal and drag the United States back into war.”
Trump, meanwhile, is once again reportedly “pissed off” at Netanyahu. In a Truth Social post, the president declared that the strike on Beirut “should not have happened,” while pointedly questioning whether it was a proportionate response to Hezbollah’s latest attack on Israel.
“Israel has the right to defend itself against threats,” Trump wrote, “but the attack it was responding to was very small and meaningless. Nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and it should not disrupt this important process.”
The statement was notable not merely for its criticism of Netanyahu, but for what it implied: that Israel’s strike was neither militarily necessary nor diplomatically prudent at a moment when a potential breakthrough with Iran appeared within reach.
Washington is frustrated by Tehran’s insistence that Trump rein in Israel, even as American officials believe Iran has failed to similarly restrain Hezbollah. It is equally frustrated that a deal it urgently wants with Iran is now being held hostage by Israel, ironically at the request of the Iranians, since it is Tehran that insists that any ceasefire must be region-wide and prevent Israel from having the ability to restart the war.
That frustration is understandable. But Washington must also recognize a basic reality: the only way to delink a U.S.-Iran agreement from the Israel-Lebanon conflict is to delink the United States itself from Israel’s recurring resort to military escalation.
As long as Israel retains the capacity to drag the United States back into conflict, Tehran will see little reason to separate diplomacy with Washington from the wars Israel chooses to start and pull the US into.
Indeed, the principal reason Tehran insists on a region-wide ceasefire is to deny Israel the ability to draw the United States into yet another war with Iran itself.
If Trump were to clearly establish that the United States would neither participate in nor defend an unjustified Israeli military escalation, Tehran might no longer see the need to link a U.S.-Iran accord to the Israel-Lebanon front.
Such a calculated distancing from Israel would serve American interests in any case. But the need for it has rarely been more apparent than it is today.
Trita Parsi is the Executive VP of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an award-winning author. Washingtonian Magazine has named him one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy. Noam Chomsky calls him “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran”
While talks in Cairo center on disarming Hamas, Israel has kept killing hundreds of Palestinians without accountability and is expanding its control over the strip despite an alleged ‘ceasefire’
The US military has begun constructing a “huge base” on the Gaza envelope to implement US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the strip, Israel Hayom reported on 13 June.
The US base, being built near the Israeli military base at Reim settlement, will function as both a military and civilian headquarters for the organizations and forces arriving in the area to implement the Trump plan.
In February 2025, Trump proposed a US “takeover” of the Gaza Strip.
The plan called for the forced displacement of approximately two million Palestinians to neighboring lands and redeveloping the territory as a high-tech business and tourism hub that Trump said would become the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The new base will replace the US facility in the Israeli town of Kiryat Gat, established under the direction of Trump’s Board of Peace in the wake of the October 2025 “ceasefire.”
Representatives from more than 24 countries staffed the multinational headquarters and were tasked with overseeing the ceasefire and the entry of humanitarian aid.
The Kiryat Gat base was also meant to direct the operations of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) tasked with providing security in Gaza.
However, Israel has continued to severely restrict the entry of aid into Gaza, recently suspending all shipments, while the ISF has yet to be formed.
After the US and Israel launched a war on Iran on 28 February, the overwhelming majority of personnel left Kiryat Gat.
Israel Hayom noted that plans for the new US base include the construction of a tower intended for the command and control of forces in the field.
The US military has already begun issuing tenders to private contractors, including for the supply of mobile structures to house personnel and serve as a headquarters until permanent buildings are established at the site.
The new base will also host troops from the ISF if it is formed.
Five countries previously agreed to send forces to Gaza, namely Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania. Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Azerbaijan have expressed a willingness to participate but have made no firm commitment.
Currently, no countries are willing to send troops due to fears that their forces will be tasked with disarming the Palestinian resistance, as well as concerns about the ongoing US-Israeli conflict with Iran.
The construction of the new US base is being fully coordinated with the Israeli Defense Ministry. Military officials expect the base to be constructed and staffed within a few months.
The report comes as talks continue between Hamas and Israel via negotiators in Cairo.
Israel persists in demanding Hamas disarmament before progressing the ceasefire, while simultaneously continuing to kill Palestinians in Gaza without consequences and expanding its occupation rather than withdrawing from the territory seized during the genocide.
Israel has killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza and expanded its control of the strip from 50 percent to at least 60 percent since the ceasefire.
One security source told Israel Hayom that the “chance of renewed fighting in the Gaza Strip is greater than the possibility that Hamas will actually be disarmed through a diplomatic agreement.”
“Demilitarizing Gaza became a bigger aim than stopping Israel’s genocide; such is the absurd truth,” wrote author Ramona Wadi.
While “colonial expansion as the reason behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza, utterly exposed for the entire world to see, [it] is never discussed by the international community. On the contrary, the Board of Peace promotes it and sets the conditions that justify colonialism instead of preventing it, using an extension of the same narrative Israel used to destroy Gaza,” Wadi added.
The Palestinian Authority’s war on the resistance is the continuation of a collaboration with colonialism that Palestinian elites have practised for more than a century
A member of the Palestinian Authority security forces fires tear gas towards a protest against their security operation in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on 16 December 2024 (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP)
Amid the ongoing Israeligenocide in Gaza and its terror in the West Bank and Lebanon, the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance must confront not only their Israeli enemy, but also their own elites who are collaborating with that enemy.
The historical reaction to colonial conquest and imperial control across much of the world has been threefold.
First, radical resistance by the majority of poor peasants and workers, and by a substantial sector of the urban middle class.
Second, cooperation and compromise by much of the wealthy elite and some sectors of the middle class, justified by the belief that such cooperation would lead to colonial concessions and avert an outright confrontation in which the colonised would surely be the losers.
Third, complete subservience and collaboration by another sector of the wealthy, hoping to receive preferential treatment over rival elite cooperators and compromisers, based on the logic that the persistence of colonial control benefits the elite as local agents of colonialism.
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These responses have been recorded across the colonised and post-colonial world – from Asia to Africa.
The Arab world – including the Palestinians – has been no exception.
Pre-Nakba Palestinian society responded to British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism by following this script exactly
Indeed, pre-Nakba Palestinian society responded to British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism by following this script exactly, as it would after the Nakba.
Since the early 1920s, while divided among themselves, wealthy Palestinian elites broadly agreed that resisting Zionist colonialism required cooperation with the British occupiers.
The strategy was led by the Arab Executive and the Supreme Muslim Council, both dominated by major wealthy Jerusalem, Jaffa and other urban Palestinian families.
They were opposed by other elites, mainly a rival Jerusalem family and other families marginalised within these two bodies, who supported full collaboration with the British and the Zionists.
The latter, with Zionist funding and support, established the “Agricultural Party” (al-Hizb al-Zirai), the National Muslim Society and later al-Hizb al-Watani (the National Party).
The majority of peasants and workers chose resistance, with substantial support from the urban middle classes.
The independence movement
Middle-class intellectuals were so dismayed by Palestinian elites – whether the outright smaller group of collaborators or the larger group of “cooperators” – that they formed Hizb al-Istiqlal (the party of “independence”) in 1932.
The party supported peasant and worker resistance and launched a civil rights movement of demonstrations, boycotts and civil disobedience.
A story of a 1930s uprising against British colonialism is key to understanding Gaza today
Hamdi al-Husayni of Gaza (unrelated to the elite Jerusalem Husayni family) and other young Istiqlal leaders were inspired by other anti-colonial struggles, especially Gandhi’s activities in India.
Emulating Gandhi, the Istiqlal Party leadership, including Husayni and Akram Zuaytar, a young schoolteacher from Nablus, Izzat Darwazah, a nationalist publicist and teacher, and the lawyer Awni Abd al-Hadi, who was also a secretary of the elite-controlled Arab Executive after 1928, called for non-cooperation with the British rulers of Palestine.
They borrowed tactics, including Gandhi’s March 1930 month-long Salt March across India, as well as boycott and civil disobedience.
Soon after forming the party, Istiqlal leaders openly criticised elite Palestinians for complicity with British rule.
At the party’s first mass meeting in December 1932, its leaders called for independence, denounced Britain and Zionism, and called for cooperation with newly independent Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Accusing the Arab Executive of passivity, they demanded its leaders refuse cooperation with the British Mandatory authorities.
The following year, Istiqlal’s capacity for mobilisation peaked, as British suppression, Zionist apartheid, evictions of Palestinian peasants and Jewish immigration to Palestine reached unprecedented levels.
Resistance and repression
Failing to persuade the Arab Executive to adopt non-cooperation, the Istiqlal Party mobilised demonstrations in October 1933, protesting British policy and Jewish colonisation.
The executive eventually relented and backed calls for demonstrations, despite “opposition” from the collaborationist elite faction.
Thousands marched across Palestine, including 8,000 in Jaffa alone – among them 600 Palestinians from Wadi al-Hawarith whose lands were taken over by Zionist colonists a few months earlier. Rampaging British police killed 26 unarmed demonstrators in Jaffa and Haifa and injured dozens more.
Palestinian elites began to organise political parties that competed for British favour and to curry favour with the Zionists
British authorities, wealthy elite Palestinians of both camps and Zionists all saw a common interest in suppressing the Istiqlal Party.
Their combined efforts succeeded in all but destroying what had become the most popular Palestinian anti-colonial party by 1934-1935.
Still, younger Palestinian activists, including former members of Istiqlal and the Congress for Youth, intensified their calls on Palestinian elites to abandon their futile efforts to win British support against Zionism and adopt non-cooperation instead.
By 1936, Palestinian workers launched multiple strikes that elite leaders opposed, costing them further support among the youth movement, the rump of the Istiqlal Party and its working-class supporters.
As elite politicians continued talks with the High Commissioner about establishing a legislative assembly, new meetings – led by Istiqlalists such as Hamdi al-Husayni and joined by urban workers – culminated in a major general strike declared on 19 April 1936.
Lasting for six months, it remains the world’s longest general strike to date.
Highly mobilised Palestinians, led by Istiqlalists and youth groups, including the Young Muslim Men’s Association, moved to the forefront of political life.
Their momentum compelled elite politicians – among them the Mufti Amin al-Husayni, who had initially opposed the strike – to establish the Arab Higher Committee a week later as a coalition to replace the defunct Arab Executive, which had been dissolved in August 1934 amid elite factionalism.
The Higher Committee sought to moderate demands for civil disobedience, while the British High Commissioner reminded the elite leadership of their role in restraining the masses.
The 1936 Palestine strike: A history of Palestinian revolt
The mufti’s reticence to support the general strike and the broader Palestinian revolt lasted well into the summer of 1936.
Meanwhile, Palestinian elites began to organise political parties that competed for British favour and, in the case of the collaborationist National Defence Party, to curry favour with the Zionists.
Amid the commitment to resistance among peasants, workers and middle-class youth and intellectuals, and the elite’s continued cooperation and collaboration, the Palestinians’ Great Revolt erupted and lasted until its final brutal suppression by the British and their Zionist colonial settlers in 1939, with more than 8,000 Palestinians killed.
Palestinian elite collaborators formed a counter-revolutionary militia called the “peace bands” to kill Palestinian revolutionaries.
The defeat of the Revolt led to the 1948 Nakba nine years later.
Oslo’s heirs
These dynamics re-emerged in the post-Nakba period.
The children of expelled Palestinian peasants and workers, alongside some of the middle classes, launched a new political struggle in the late 1950s, which transformed into an armed resistance movement by the late 1960s.
Elite Palestinians would soon co-opt the movement, ostensibly to help it gain “international” legitimacy, first by interceding with Arab regimes to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1974 as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”.
Funding from Arab regimes soon domesticated the PLO.
Replicating the strategy of the pre-Nakba Palestinian elite, the PLO sought to cooperate with the US and Europe by “moderating” its demands for Palestinian liberation from Zionist settler-colonialism to calling instead for a “two-state solution”.
Secret channels with the US and open channels with Europe ultimately diminished the erstwhile PLO agenda from total liberation to demanding a mini-state on a fraction of Palestine’s territory.
But if the PLO after 1974 replicated the role of elite Palestinian cooperators and compromisers between the 1920s and 1940s, the signing of the 1993 Oslo accords transformed the PLO yet again into that other part of the 1920s-1940s elite – including the Agricultural Party and the National Defence Party – who collaborated outright with the Zionists and their colonial sponsors.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) today is a mirror image of these collaborator forces.
Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat’s PLO and the successor PA have tried to extinguish all attempts to reinvigorate the struggle championed by the Istiqlal Party and the peasant revolutionaries, which was initially espoused by the PLO’s “rejectionist front” since the mid-1970s, as well as by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and what remained of the PLO left since the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This culminated in the coup against the elected Hamas government in 2007, organised by the US, Israel and the PA, echoing how a similar coalition ganged up against the Istiqlal Party in the 1930s.
The PA security forces played the role of the 1930s “peace bands”. This is the situation that the Palestinian people have found themselves in since 1993.
Their struggle today continues to be one between a collaborationist PA and a pro-liberation resistance intent on ending settler-colonialism.
The Gaza genocide is how Israel and its western sponsors have responded to the Palestinian resistance, while their PA proxy has intensified its war and repression against the resistance in the PA-controlled West Bank areas during the genocide.
The PA is aided in its efforts by the Israeli occupation army and armed Jewish colonial settlers.
But just as the collaborating and cooperating Palestinian elites of the 1920s to 1940s were unable to halt the resistance, the current PA collaborators are failing at their assigned task of vanquishing the spirit of resistance among Palestinians.
It is this ongoing resistance to Israel and its western sponsors, and the collaborating PA and the wealthy Palestinian elites who support it, that will ultimately decide the future of the Palestinian people.
After more than a century of collaboration and resistance, and Israel’s refusal to halt its genocide, the scales continue to tip persistently in favour of the resistance.
Obstacles to the aggressors’ expansion and occupation in the Middle East are Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shia militia in Iraq. They are presented as “threats” rather than defenders of their dignity, sovereignty and land.
U.S.-Israel biennial command post simulation and training exercise, October 2010. Then IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz and Deputy EUCOM Commander U.S. Lt. Gen. John D. Gardner (IDF/Flickr)
If you understand who the aggressor is, you are on your way to understanding the mad and perilous times we live in.
Once you get that, what you’ve been taught all your life starts to lose its hold on you.
Establishment education and media try to confuse you. Independent media like Consortium News try to clarify.
Establishment education and media portray the aggressor as the defender, and the victim as the threat. Consortium News endeavors to show you the “threat” is really an obstacle. An obstacle to aggression and occupation. An obstacle to expansion. Locally and globally.
Few would agree with aggression, paid for with your taxes in a so-called democracy. So obstacles to aggression become threats you’re supposed to be afraid of. Offensive action is made to appear as “defense” to protect you from the “threat.”
There’s nothing new in this. The Romans dressed up their imperial aggression as self-defense against fake threats. Rome provoked tribes, first in Italy and then Gaul and Germania, into forming alliances to protect the tribes’ sovereignty, and then Rome presented these alliances as “threats” that had to be destroyed, justifying war against them.
Rome would also provoke an adversary into invading or launching an attack to obtain the casus belli needed to start a pre-planned war. For instance, Roman ally Masinissa of Numidia repeatedly raided Carthage to provoke it into finally responding militarily in violation of a treaty it had with Rome. The empire used this as a pretext for total destruction and annexation — even though Carthage, an obstacle to Roman expansion, posed no realistic, existential threat.
In the earlier U.S. imperium, Mark Twain explained it this way:
“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
Today the obstacles to the aggressors’ expansion and occupation in the Middle East are Iran plus the legal, armed resistance to Greater Israel and Greater America: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shia militia in Iraq. They are presented as “threats”rather than defenders of their dignity, sovereignty and land. Nazi Germany portrayed resistance fighters in France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and elsewhere as a “threat,” as “terrorists” and “bandits” to delegitimize legitimate obstacles to total domination.
In Asia the “threat” is China. Beijing protecting its sovereignty in its own region is somehow a threat to U.S. warships near China’s waters and to Taiwan, which the U.S. agrees is part of China.
In Europe years of NATO expansion, refusal to negotiate a mutual security treaty, rehabilitation of fascism, a coup, and civil war in Ukraine against ethnic Russian coup-resistors provoked Russia to intervene, much as the Romans provoked Carthage.
Getting Russia to invade Ukraine allows the portrayal of Moscow as the aggressor and a “threat” to all of Europe and not as an obstacle to the U.S. and Wall Street return to their 1990s dominance of Russia. (Now there is constant talk of direct NATO war with Russia. The fear is another provocation to get Russia to start it.)
All of these obstacles to U.S. global hegemony are presented to you as existential threats that only the mighty United States, NATO and Israel can protect you from. There’s nothing in it for them, of course, except saving your life, we’re expected to believe. Except you don’t have to believe it. You have alternative media like Consortium Newsto expose the deceptions on a daily basis.
That’s why pro-establishment social media companies and so-called anti-disinformation services have tried to hurt us. And that’s why we need your help. So …
(Photo credit: REUTERS/AMMAR AWAD)
Peace and Justice Post 
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