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 …
Buried deep inside a 192-page intelligence authorization bill is Section 622, titled “United States-Israel Intelligence Sharing Enhancement.” It would require the president, acting through the director of national intelligence and as necessary the secretary of defense, to “expand and enhance intelligence sharing with the Government of Israel” on a list of subjects that encompasses almost every topic of intelligence interest in the Middle East.
The bill, put forward by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would prohibit any suspension, reduction, or limitation of such sharing “except on the basis of a specific and identifiable national security concern determined by the President.” Any such exception would require a report to Congress within fifteen days detailing not only the reason for the change but also the categories of information involved. The same report would require an assessment of the anticipated impact on regional security and various other matters.
This proposal is one of several recent moves by those in Washington who carry the Israeli government’s water to keep the United States tied to Israel despite plummeting support for the country among the American public. The most salient form of U.S. support to Israel has been more than $300 billion in economic and especially military assistance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to get ahead of the declining public support and avoid embarrassing losses by suggesting it would be fine with him to phase out the military aid.
Israel’s strategy and that of its U.S. supporters is now to rely on ties with, and support from, the United States that are not as salient as the military aid with its prominent price tag. The strategy includes forms of military integration that are less visible than congressionally appropriated grant aid and therefore less publicly accountable. Section 224 of a defense authorization bill currently in the House of Representatives embodies this form of integration.
The mandating of intelligence sharing carries this strategy further by moving it into the shadowy world of relations between intelligence agencies. That world is even farther removed from public visibility and accountability than the defense integration, and even less likely to stimulate thoughts about American taxpayers’ money going to a foreign country. So far, Section 622 of the intelligence bill has received less attention than Section 224 of the defense bill.
The notion of legislating an intelligence liaison relationship in this way, with any foreign country, is bizarre. Liaison with counterpart foreign services, including exchanges of information, is an important but complex part of the intelligence business. The nature of a liaison relationship depends partly on the temperature of the overall political relationship with the country in question but also on other factors known mostly to intelligence officers. These include the collection requirements levied on them, their ability or inability to meet those requirements with national resources, their assessment of the foreign service’s ability and willingness to fill collection gaps, the role that any trading of information plays as quid pro quos in operational cooperation, and the risks of compromising intelligence sources and methods.
Moreover, no single liaison relationship exists in isolation. The U.S. intelligence services need to consider possible implications for their other foreign relationships. For example, one generally does not share with country A information about country B if the United States has a relationship with B that is about at the same level as it has with A. Intelligence liaison involves a hierarchy of relationships, ranging from extensive cooperation with close allies to carefully limited ad hoc exchanges with adversaries. The intelligence community has a staff with the full-time job of monitoring and managing this set of relationships to prevent crossed wires. A congressional mandate regarding a single relationship increases the chance of crossed wires.
An irony is that the Congress considering this mandate is the same Congress that has in effect surrendered to the president its powers under Article I of the Constitution to set tariff rates and to decide whether to wage war. And yet, Section 622 would involve congressional micromanagement of a matter that by its nature needs to be the business of the executive branch and especially the intelligence agencies.
In intelligence, Israel is more of an adversary than an ally. Being an adversary in intelligence means indulging in the hostile act of espionage. Israel has a long record of conducting that type of hostile act against the United States. The best-known case involves the spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole such an overwhelming volume of U.S. secrets that then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stated to the court that sentenced Pollard that it was difficult “ to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don’t miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.
Invalid emailEnter your email
When Pollard completed his prison sentence and parole in 2020, he was given a hero’s welcome, led by Netanyahu himself, on his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. There was nothing noble in Pollard’s actions. Although he liked to say he was motivated by concern about Israel’s security, before selling his espionage services to Israel he offered to sell U.S. secrets to three other countries and made the same offer to a fourth country even when spying for Israel.
The Israeli espionage threat to the United States has only intensified. Last week, NBC News reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency raised the threat level for such espionage, evidently a reflection mostly of U.S.-Israeli differences over the Iran war. The New York Times quotes an official saying that Israeli intelligence operations aimed at senior U.S. officials during the second Trump administration have become so aggressive as to be “unhinged.”
Any sensitive information, including intelligence secrets, shared with Israel entails a high risk of Israel passing it to other countries, including U.S. adversaries. Israel has a long record of that, too, and not just because Israel probably passed some of the secrets Pollard purloined to the USSR, in exchange for Moscow allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate. Israel’s sharing of U.S.-origin military technology with China has been an issue. That the partner may be a rogue state has not stopped Israel from military and technical cooperation, as demonstrated by its relationship with apartheid-era South Africa, which extended even to the development of nuclear weapons.
The risk of Israel passing sensitive U.S. information to other states continues partly because Israel is hungry for cordial relationships — and especially establishment of new formal diplomatic relations — with any country willing to have such relations despite Israel’s continued subjugation of the Palestinians. Secrets from U.S. intelligence would be very attractive to some of Israel’s partners or potential partners, and thus attractive to Israel as trading material. Those other countries may include China, with which Israel continues to have extensive technical cooperation, and Russia.
Even without any passing to third countries, Israel’s own use of much U.S. intelligence is apt to be contrary to U.S. interests and the interest of peace and security in the Middle East, and for many of the same reasons underlying the reduced popularity of Israel among the U.S. public. Israel has started more wars and attacked more nations than any other country in the Middle East. In recent years it has inflicted more death and destruction on civilians through military operations than any other Middle Eastern state. It uses violence to seek regional hegemony and destroy Palestinian nationhood in ways that are inconsistent with U.S. interests.
The current ill-advised war with Iran demonstrates the sharp divergence of U.S. and Israeli interests. After being the principal influence on President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war, Netanyahu’s government has been sabotaging efforts to end it. It currently is doing so mainly with relentless attacks in Lebanon that have killed thousands and displaced over a million people. The divergence of objectives was reflected in an expletive-laden phone call last week between Trump and Netanyahu that was mainly about those attacks.
Attacks that sabotage diplomacy are among the Israeli operations that might use shared U.S. intelligence. The United States also will be blamed for aiding other violent Israeli operations because of the “enhanced” intelligence sharing, even if it were no longer paying for Israeli arms.
The supposed escape clause in Section 622 of the intelligence bill would in practice be so cumbersome as to be useless. The required report to Congress would dump the issue on Capitol Hill, where the Israel lobby would quickly depict it as a question of being for or against the security of Israel. The mandated intelligence sharing in the bill thus would tie the president’s hands and prevent any administration from using management of the intelligence liaison relationship as leverage to deter destructive conduct by Israel.
Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.
In Lebanon, Israel is reusing the same strategy as in Gaza and the West Bank. Demanding the “evacuation” of the population and destroying civilian architecture, it wants to make it impossible for residents ever to return.
People carry their luggage as they cross on foot into Syria through a crater caused by an Israeli air strike to cut the road between the Lebanese and the Syrian checkpoints, at the Masnaa crossing, in the eastern Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, October 4, 2024
In 1895, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary that the penniless population of Palestine must be “spirited across the border,” discreetly and circumspectly. In 1948, that vision became policy. With the Nakba, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, their land absorbed by the newly declared state of Israel. In 1967 came the Naksa. In 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006, it happened to southern Lebanon. Each time the world called it a “crisis”; each time it was Israeli strategy.
Since Israel’s latest assault on Lebanon began this March 2, more than 1.3 million people — nearly one in four of the entire Lebanese population — have been displaced. More than three hundred thousand of them are children. In the first weeks of the assault alone, UNICEF recorded at least nineteen thousand girls and boys forced from their homes every single day. More than 3,400 Lebanese have been killed and over ten thousand wounded, a toll that surged dramatically when Israel launched Operation Eternal Darkness — over a hundred strikes across the country in a single ten-minute window, killing at least 357 people and wounding over 1,200, with many more believed buried beneath the rubble. At least nine bridges over the Litani River have been struck, seven destroyed, fifty-five primary health care centers and hospitals have been forced to shut down, fuel depots, water stations and schools have been targeted, a systematic severing of the south from the rest of the country, cutting tens of thousands of people off from humanitarian aid.
Israel’s own Defense Minister Israel Katz explicitly described this as the “Beit Hanoun and Rafah model,” invoking the ongoing destruction of Gaza. This is not collateral damage but the same playbook; Israel is not even hiding it. And still it continues: on June 1, Israeli forces struck Tyre — the ancient Mediterranean port city and UNESCO World Heritage Site — triggering a fresh wave of mass displacement as families fled north. A ceasefire, extended for forty-five days and currently being renegotiated in Washington, has stopped nothing.
What is unfolding in Lebanon today is neither new nor an escalation but in continuity with these past offensives. Displacement is not a by-product of this war. It has always been the point. To understand what is happening today in Lebanon, we must understand Gaza. And to understand Gaza, we must go further back.
The Gaza Playbook
Displacement has been a deliberate instrument of Israeli governance since 1948. The historian Patrick Wolfe put it plainly: “Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” Elimination, he argued, is “an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off occurrence,” pursued through the annexation of land, the renaming of places, the demolition of buildings and the erasure of historical heritage, all in service of building an entirely new civilization on expropriated ground. “Settler colonialism,” he wrote, “destroys to replace.”
Following the October 7, 2023, attacks, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza produced near-total displacement. By early 2024, Israel had dropped more than twenty-five thousand tons of explosives on Gaza, the equivalent, the United Nations confirmed, of two nuclear bombs. By April 2024, the total had surpassed seventy thousand tons, exceeding the combined tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II. By May 2024, more than 90 percent of Gaza’s population, around 1.9 million people, had been displaced at least once. Many had been displaced ten times or more.
Israel boasted of its evacuation orders as evidence of its humanitarian conduct, distributed by leaflet, SMS, QR code, and radio broadcast, and cited repeatedly at the International Court of Justice as proof that it was protecting civilians. In reality, the orders directed entire districts to relocate within impossibly short time frames, often into areas without food, water, or shelter, and often into areas that were then deliberately bombed. Forensic Architecture’s landmark investigation found that the evacuation system had produced not safety but “mass displacement and forced transfer,” with Palestinians “being bombed, shot at, executed, arrested and tortured” along the very corridors Israel designated as safe. The areas Israel told people to flee to were attacked immediately after they arrived. On July 13, 2024, Israel dropped eight two-thousand-pound bombs on the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone it had itself created, killing at least ninety people, many of them burned alive in their tents.
Human Rights Watch concluded that these evacuations constituted the war crime of forcible transfer. B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reached the same conclusion in its report “No Place Under Heaven,” documenting that displacement was a central tool of the assault on Gaza. The report’s title comes from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s own words, spoken at a government security cabinet meeting in April 2024, calling for the “total annihilation” of Gaza’s cities: “You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven — there’s no place under heaven.” The reference to Amalek, the nation the Hebrew Bible commands the Israelites to exterminate entirely, man, woman, and child, was not incidental. Benjamin Netanyahu had used the same comparison in the first days of the war, and it was cited by South Africa in its genocide case at the International Court of Justice as evidence of genocidal intent. Smotrich also described Gaza City as a “real estate bonanza,” stating: “The demolition, the first stage in its renewal, we have already done. Now we need to build.” This bluntly posed Israel’s agenda in the language of colonial dispossession.
From the West Bank to Lebanon
The same logic has spread beyond Gaza. Since October 2023, scholars and analysts have described the “Gazafication” of the West Bank: the extension of governance practices long characteristic of Gaza — military siege, aerial bombardment, the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure — into the occupied territory. Armed drones carry out targeted killings, fighter jets strike densely populated areas, and homes are demolished.
More than forty thousand Palestinians were internally displaced in the West Bank in 2025, the highest annual figure since 1967. Senior Israeli ministers have called openly for annexation and the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians, language that legal scholars identify as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Leading Zionist figures explicitly discussed demographic transfer in the 1920s and 1930s, using terms like “transfer,” “relocation,” and “voluntary migration” — the same vocabulary in use today.
Settler violence has risen sharply alongside this rhetoric. According to data recorded jointly by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, settler attacks increased by 27 percent in 2025, while severe attacks — shootings, arson, violent assault — rose by more than 50 percent. Accountability remains almost nonexistent. Settlement expansion has accelerated to unprecedented levels, with outposts legalized retroactively and construction advancing deep inside Palestinian territory.
In this, Lebanon is not a new front but an old one, today reopened with new ferocity.
The people in southern Lebanon have been displaced before: in 1978, when Israel first invaded; in 1982, when it laid siege to Beirut and its Palestinian refugee camps, a siege that culminated in the Sabra and Shatila massacre; in 1993, during Operation Accountability; in 1996, during Operation Grapes of Wrath, which culminated in the Qana massacre; and in 2006, when nearly one million people fled, most returning within weeks of a ceasefire. Today, those same communities are being uprooted again.
What we are witnessing is the same architecture of control applied more extensively. Evacuation orders are being issued with the same design as in Gaza, and civilian infrastructure targeted to prevent people ever returning. This means deliberately making the population precarious, unable to settle, unable to rebuild, unable to plan. Here, we see that Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon are not three separate crises.
European Blind Spot
And what has the international community’s response been? The International Court of Justice, in its landmark advisory opinion of July 19, 2024, concluded that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories — the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza — is unlawful under international law and must be brought to an end as rapidly as possible. It has separately ruled that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza. The UN General Assembly followed in September 2024, demanding Israel end its unlawful presence within twelve months. Israel has ignored both. The United Nations Security Council has been rendered structurally incapable of acting: the United States has now vetoed ceasefire resolutions seven times, each time casting the sole vote against resolutions supported by fourteen other members of the council.
Meanwhile, the United States has provided at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project — the highest annual total of military aid to Israel ever recorded. Arms transfers from several European states have continued alongside this. The weapons that have flattened Gaza’s neighborhoods, bombed its hospitals, and burned civilians alive in tent camps have been supplied, in large part, by those same governments now expressing concern about humanitarian conditions in Lebanon.
I have spent years researching migration, borders, and displacement across the Mediterranean region. Since March, journalists across Europe have been asking me some version of the same question: Will we face a new refugee crisis? Should Europe be worried about the flows?
The question reveals everything. For most European publics and their governments, the primary concern is not what is happening to the people of Lebanon. It is how to keep those people away. How to avoid a repeat of the aftermath of the Syrian civil war and the so-called refugee crisis of 2015. During the carpet bombing of Gaza since October 2023, this anxiety was all but absent, for Gazans had nowhere to flee: they were contained inside the Strip. For some European governments, even medically evacuating critically ill children was not on the table. Denmark refused to do so despite a formal World Health Organization appeal to EU member states, and despite evacuating and treating over two hundred Ukrainian patients — citing, in a written reply to Parliament, migration concerns. In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to reassure the public that Palestinian refugees wouldn’t be welcome in Britain under a scheme for war refugees. Europe’s fear of displacement only activates when movement becomes possible.
In May 2024, the European Commission pledged €1 billion in support to Lebanon for the period up to 2027. This package included funding for border management and anti-smuggling operations, with the first €500 million explicitly linked to reducing irregular sea departures toward Cyprus and to exploring “voluntary return” frameworks. Lebanon was positioned not only as a host country in crisis but as a frontline partner in Europe’s own strategy to contain migration flows. This is the increasingly common practice of externalization: the outsourcing of displacement management to third countries outside Europe, while the conditions producing displacement go unchallenged.
Lebanon already hosts one of the highest numbers of refugees per capita in the world, with long-standing Palestinian communities and over a million Syrians displaced since 2011. Funding this state to police its own borders in the middle of an Israeli assault that is actively producing new displacement is the same containment logic that operates in Gaza and the West Bank.
What is unfolding across Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon is not a sequence of emergencies. It is a deliberate and recurring strategy of Israeli governance, rooted in decades of settler-colonial and military control. Evacuation orders, cycles of flight and forced return, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, are today the instruments of war and Israeli expansionism.
The displacement created in Gaza and in Lebanon has been normalized precisely because the international community has consistently chosen migration management over accountability. What looks like crisis is the effect of deliberate policies, and what looks like a humanitarian response is, too often, the infrastructure of containment dressed in the language of protection.
The question is not whether Europe will face a refugee crisis. The question is whether the world will finally treat the deliberate production of displacement as what it has always been, a strategy of governance, and respond with the recognition, accountability, and rights-based redress it demands.
An aerial view of destruction in Sheikh Ridwan neighborhood following the Israeli forces’ withdrawal with the ceasefire agreement in Gaza City, Gaza on October 17, 2025. [Mohammed Abu Samra – Anadolu Agency]
Since the launch of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, Tel Aviv—heavily shielded by Western political pressure and strategic intimidation against any state rejecting its actions—has faced widespread regional rhetorical backlash. Almost all Arab states, including those with formal ties to Israel, have issued varying forms of public condemnation. Yet behind the theatre of diplomatic outrage, a far more cynical reality has solidified: the core normalizers—including the Abraham Accords signatories, alongside Jordan and Egypt—have fiercely protected their foundational ties to Tel Aviv, ensuring that the machinery of state relations remains fundamentally uninterrupted.
In other words, business continued as usual, albeit with varying degrees of public caution. Shockingly, not a single normaliser country took concrete diplomatic or legal steps that could amount to the actions taken by non-Arab European nations.
While European governments like Spain and Norway formally recognised the State of Palestine, and Madrid officially intervened in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Arab capitals remained entirely absent from these legal mechanisms.
Even the United Kingdom, a staunch Western ally of Tel Aviv, moved to partially suspend arms export licenses over international humanitarian law concerns. By contrast, the Arab normalizers refrained from any punitive measures—whether legal, economic, or diplomatic—that could fundamentally disrupt their bilateral frameworks with Israel.
The profound irony lies in the stark divergence between rhetoric and responsibility. From the constituent members of the League of Arab States (LAS), the regional public naturally expected serious, immediate, and material reactions to the catastrophe in Gaza. After all, the Palestinian struggle is explicitly enshrined in almost every single LAS document as the supreme, ‘central cause’ of the Arab world—a boilerplate phrase mechanically inserted into nearly every summit declaration, including those ostensibly dedicated to economic reform or environmental cooperation. Yet, despite the immense, unyielding public rage boiling across the Arab streets, these governments stood their ground.
Instead of translating their institutional mandates into punitive diplomatic, legal and economic actions against Israel, they chose to hide behind empty rhetoric and meaningless communiqués, weaponising the Palestinian cause as a convenient distraction to pacify local populations while ensuring that their actual state policies remained entirely unchanged.
Even the official media apparatuses of the LAS countries actively collude in disillusioning the Arab audience. They tirelessly repeat empty government slogans and safe debates on Israeli aggression—though even this minimal coverage is heavily sanitized or absent in the UAE and Bahrain, and strictly curtailed in Morocco. Crucially, these networks enforce an absolute embargo on debating their own governments’ shameful positions. As a frequent guest on these regional talk shows, I have witnessed this systemic paralysis firsthand. I repeatedly pleaded with a Libyan TV station to dedicate a few episodes of its flagship program to analysing these regional diplomatic failures. They never did. The explanation they gave me was chillingly simple: ‘We are based in Jordan, and doing anything like that is highly likely to generate severe problems for us with the host authorities. The same happened with another one based in Istanbul.
Nowhere is the disconnect between moral posturing and material reality more visible than in the ledger of regional trade. As I have previously argued in these pages, Arab capitals possess immense economic and financial levers—ranging from sovereign wealth divestments to the suspension of market access—that could exert genuine pressure on Tel Aviv. Yet, they have deliberately chosen not to leverage them. Instead, the economic machinery has hummingly defied all expectations.
The UAE-Israel Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which systematically removed tariffs on 96 percent of goods and was signed just months before October 2023, went into full force implementation within months as if nothing was happening, and it remains so today.
According to the UN Comtrade Israel-UAE Registry Israel-UAE Registry, bilateral commerce did not freeze nor even slow; it thrived. The UAE alone exported over $1.6 billion worth of goods to Israel. Most damningly, this transactional pipeline included hundreds of millions of dollars in refined petroleum—highly needed to keep Israel’s killing machine turning—beside vital industrial metals. While the streets of Amman, Cairo, and Casablanca burned with indignation, the normalisers ensured that the fuel, funds, and supply lines keeping the Israeli economy resilient were never compromised.
This absolute insulation of state policy from popular will exposes the grim effectiveness of the modern Arab security state. Historically, authoritarian regimes across the region approached the Palestinian cause very cautiously, fearing that a failure to project nominal solidarity had the potential to become a lightning rod for domestic uprisings. Today, that calculus has fundamentally shifted. Through sophisticated digital surveillance networks—frequently utilising Israel’s own advanced cyber-intelligence and surveillance products—intense policing, and a strategic pivoting toward hyper-nationalistic or purely transactional domestic development projects, such as the UAE’s tech-driven economic models, these ruling elites have effectively decoupled public sentiment from executive state actions. In countries like Egypt and Jordan, security apparatuses are highly adept at acting as pressure valves. They systematically permit tightly controlled, heavily policed street protests within designated perimeters, allowing the public to exhaust its emotional fury and chant anti-normalisation slogans for the cameras. Yet, the moment that popular outrage attempts to cross the line from performative condemnation to demanding actual structural policy changes—such as the blockage of transit corridors or the total severance of treaties—the state security fist clamps down instantly. The message written into this enforcement strategy is as clear as it is cynical: public rage is tolerated as an emotional outlet, but it will never be permitted to interfere with the permanent geostrategic and economic architecture of the state. Even a country like Libya, despite its long history of unyielding ideological, financial, and military support for Palestine under the late Muammar Gaddafi, has been neutralised by internal division; today, its fragmented authorities are no more active or effective in confronting Tel Aviv than, say, Egypt.
Ultimately, the ongoing tragedy in Gaza has pulled back the curtain on a profound structural mutation in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
The era in which the Palestinian struggle served as the ultimate litmus test for Arab state legitimacy is effectively over, replaced by cold, hyper-transactional policies.
Even the LAS’ usually empty statements now hardly criticise Israel more openly than some of its individual members do, showcasing a total institutional breakdown. By protecting the underlying architecture of normalization, keeping the trade pipelines operational, and managing domestic anger as a security threat rather than a political mandate, the region’s leaders have sent an unmistakable signal to the global community: business as usual is outlasting a genocide. While the modern security apparatus can successfully suppress the rage of the Arab street today, building a regional order on such a cavernous moral vacuum is a dangerous gamble. In their desperate bid to secure immediate geostrategic alignments, the Arab normalisers may have preserved their treaties, but they have undeniably sown the seeds of deep, systemic instability for generations to come.
What followed was an attempt by the remaining Christian population to flee northward, an effort that would’ve been a lot easier if Israel hadn’t destroyed the bridge over the Litani River that is directly north of the city over a month ago. The locals are trying to reach Sidon and in some cases Beirut.
Meanwhile, attacks on Tyre continued apace, killing at least 9 and wounded dozens of others. At least 15 strikes were reported against Tyre on Tuesday morning alone, with no signs that the attacks are slowing, and no signs that any of the people hit in the airstrikes are actually anything to do with Hezbollah.
People inspect the damage in the aftermath of an Israeli strike that hit near Jabal Amel Hospital on Monday, in Tyre, Lebanon, June 2, 2026. REUTERS/Aziz Taher
Christian leaders further disputed the claim that Hezbollah was operating in the Christian neighborhood in the first place, saying it was a fabricated Israeli pretext to justify attacking that part of the city, which had previously been largely left alone.
Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.
Israel’s Health Ministry reported 77 new casualties in the past 24 hours, bringing the total since February to 9,119.
Israeli authorities acknowledged 1,219 casualties linked to the Lebanon front since the ceasefire with Iran took effect in April.
Iranian officials warned that any future attacks on Iran or the Resistance Axis would trigger a decisive and costly response.
Israeli Casualties
Israel’s Health Ministry announced on Monday that 77 new casualties had been recorded over the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of casualties since the outbreak of the US-Israeli war against Iran in February to 9,119.
The figures were released as fighting and military operations continue across multiple fronts involving Iran, Lebanon and Yemen, following months of regional escalation.
According to the ministry’s latest update, casualty numbers have continued to rise despite repeated announcements of ceasefire arrangements.
The Lebanon Front
Israeli health authorities reported that 1,219 casualties have been recorded in connection with the Lebanon front alone since the ceasefire with Iran took effect on April 8.
The ministry also acknowledged that 803 casualties have entered Israeli hospitals since the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon was announced on April 17.
The figures come as the Lebanese resistance continues to carry out military operations against Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon, citing ongoing Israeli attacks and repeated violations of the ceasefire agreement.
Israeli attacks on Lebanon also continued on Monday.
According to Al Mayadeen correspondents, Israeli warplanes carried out strikes on Nabatieh, Deir Qanoun Ras al-Ain and areas around Tyre, while artillery shelling targeted towns in southern Lebanon.
Lebanese security officers gather at the site where an Israeli airstrike hit a building in Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburb, Lebanon, Sunday, June 7, 2026. [AP Photo/Hassan Ammar]
One hundred days ago, on February 28, the United States and Israel launched an illegal war of aggression against Iran. The war is being waged by the world’s most powerful imperialist powers against a historically oppressed nation.
The resistance of the Iranian people, notwithstanding the reactionary character of the clerical regime, is politically legitimate and of a heroic character. The working class internationally must defend Iran unconditionally against imperialist subjugation.
The “negotiations” currently being carried out by the Trump administration at gunpoint are a fraud. In an interview this weekend, Trump declared that if Iran does not accept his demands, “I’m going to blow the hell out of them.” Even if the Trump administration agrees to a “ceasefire,” any agreement with the gangsters in the White House will just be as meaningful as the “peace” deal in 2025 that set the stage for this year’s war.
On Sunday night, Israel attacked Tehran. In Lebanon, the Israeli bombardment, escalating even amid the supposed negotiations, has killed at least 3,593 people and driven over a million from their homes—a toll that exceeds the 3,468 Iranians killed, among them seven infants and 376 children, with more than 26,500 wounded.
In the course of the war, imperialism plumbed new depths of barbarism. Trump’s threats to extinguish “a whole civilization” and Hegseth’s vow to wage war with “no quarter, no mercy” will go down in history as expressions of an oligarchy that has abandoned all pretense to legality. The imperialist powers now wage wars of oppression and subjugation in the open, with methods pioneered by the Nazis.
Despite the brutal and murderous character of the US-Israeli onslaught, however, imperialism has failed to achieve a single one of its aims. It has not overthrown the Iranian government, broken Iran’s military or seized control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The war has had two major effects: a deepening of the global crisis of the capitalist system and an enormous escalation of the global class struggle, not least within the United States.
The US debacle in Iran has accelerated the crisis of the US-led economic order. The European Central Bank reported in June that central banks are fleeing US Treasury bonds for gold, which has overtaken the euro to become the second-largest reserve asset—27 percent of global reserves, up from 20 percent a year earlier. The US national debt has passed $39 trillion.
It is the working class—in the United States and internationally—that is bearing the cost of the war. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven gas at the pump up by more than 50 percent, the price of staples like tomatoes by nearly 40 percent and inflation to 3.8 percent, its highest since 2023.
Trump has seized on the war to intensify his assault on social programs, declaring in April that “we’re fighting wars” and that it is therefore “not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” The World Food Programme warned that the war could push an additional 45 million people into acute hunger, a record level, with the poorest, import-dependent countries of Africa and Asia hit hardest.
In response to the surge in prices and the escalating cost-of-living crisis, the working class has begun to fight back. The past three months have seen a significant growth of working-class struggle in the United States: the first strike on the Long Island Rail Road in more than three decades; a three-week walkout by 3,800 meatpacking workers at JBS in Greeley, Colorado, the first in the industry in more than 40 years; strikes by teachers in California and a statewide walkout in North Carolina; strikes by nurses in New Orleans and California against unsafe staffing; a strike by graduate students at Harvard University; and the rebellion now sweeping the auto parts industry.
The class struggle is erupting internationally—in the mass anti-government protests in Kenya, the rebellion of tens of thousands of workers in the industrial suburbs of Delhi and the hunger strike of coal miners in Turkey. In the first quarter of 2026, eight European countries recorded 458 strikes, among them national general strikes in Belgium and Italy, and regional general strikes in Spain’s Andalusia and Basque Country. Argentina mounted a national general strike against the Milei government in February, and 1.7 million government employees walked out across the Indian state of Maharashtra.
The contradictions that are driving imperialism to war are also driving the working class into struggle. The growth of the class struggle springs from the same crisis that produces the war. Out of that crisis emerges the only social force capable of putting an end to it. War and social revolution are two sides of the same historical process.
Enormous and growing opposition is developing in the United States and throughout the world to the US–Israeli war of aggression against Iran and to the broader drive toward war, austerity and dictatorship. But opposition, left to itself, is dissipated and diverted. It must be armed with a program, perspective and leadership.
The fight against war cannot be waged through appeals to the governments and parties that are waging it. In the US, the Democratic Party greeted the murder of Iran’s leaders with cheers and financed Trump’s military budget. The European imperialist powers have backed the war and politically justified it, while pouring €800 billion into rearmament as they escalate the proxy war against Russia, which they arm and direct.
Opposition to imperialism requires developing struggles of workers in the United States, Europe and across the world—against war, austerity and dictatorship—into a conscious political movement armed with a socialist program. To put an end to war and barbarism, the capitalist system must be abolished.
This is the perspective of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International. We call on every worker and young person who opposes this war to take it up and to build the revolutionary leadership the working class needs.
Published date: 6 June 2026 19:49 BST | Last update:21 hours 49 mins ago
The Pentagon has raised Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to its highest category, amid growing alarm that Washington’s supposed closest Middle East ally is intensifying efforts to spy on senior US officials.
The warning, reported by NBC News and The New York Times on Saturday, exposes behind the scenes tensions in a relationship Washington often treats as untouchable.
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency recently issued the new assessment as tensions grow between the Trump administration and Israel over the Israeli-US war on Iran.
US officials told NBC that the DIA posted an internal message raising Israel’s threat level to “critical”.
The designation signals alarm inside the Pentagon that Israel is working to monitor top US officials and obtain information about internal Trump administration deliberations on wars across the Middle East.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
The New York Times reported that US intelligence has focused on Israeli efforts to eavesdrop on senior officials, including Steve Witkoff, Trump’s top negotiator, Elbridge A Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, and Michael P DiMino IV, one of Colby’s main deputies.
Colby has in the past called for a “reset” on the US relationship with Israel.
Israel’s counterintelligence threat level now stands higher than that of any other US ally and even higher than some adversarial states, the Times reported.
One senior official described Israel’s intelligence collection against top US officials during the second Trump administration as “unhinged”.
‘Critical threat’
The DIA assessment includes a seven-page document and a chart, one US official told NBC. The document says Israel’s ability to conduct human espionage and technical collection has reached a “critical level” and lists specific incidents that sharpened US concern.
Current and former US officials told NBC that Israel’s recent activity has moved far beyond routine espionage between allies.
Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard suggests Egypt and Turkey are next targets for war
The warning comes as Israel pushes for deeper military integration with the United States. A provision before Congress would bind the US and Israeli militaries more closely on weapons research, production and technology – a move expected to benefit Israel heavily.
The Pentagon’s assessment could now complicate efforts to expand war planning between US Central Command and Israel, especially if officials restrict the information shared with Israeli officers.
Since a ceasefire took effect in early April, Trump has pursued diplomacy with Iran to end the war the US and Israel launched on 28 February. Israel has openly pushed for Washington to restart the war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed for renewed bombing of Iran and clashed with Trump, who has urged him to scale back attacks on Lebanon.
The episode revives a long-running concern in Washington. In the 1980s, US Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard spent 30 years in prison after selling suitcases of top-secret documents to Israel.
Wide view of a large crowd holding a banner reading Free Hussam Abu Safiya during a pro Palestine demonstration in Paris Ile de France France on April 18, 2026.
(Photo by Djoudi Hamani/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)
“The international community cannot remain silent while a respected physician is reportedly subjected to harsh conditions, denied adequate medical care, and isolated from the outside world.”
A prominent human rights group on Friday sounded alarms upon learning that Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, has been sent to solitary confinement.
As reported by Haaretz, Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) said it learned on Thursday that Abu Safiya was moved to solitary confinement this week without any explanation.
According to a report from The Palestine Chronicle, an attorney representing Abu Safiya claimed that his client was placed into solitary confinement in retaliation for appealing his continued detention.
Abu Safiya was first taken into custody by Israeli forces in December 2024 and has been held since then without being charged with any criminal offenses.
In a Friday statement, the Council of American-Islamic Relations said news of Abu Safiya’s solitary confinement was “deeply disturbing” and raised “even more urgent concerns about his welfare and basic human rights.”
“Congress must demand his immediate release and insist that Israel end the arbitrary detention, abuse, and mistreatment of Palestinian medical professionals and civilians,” CAIR added. “The international community cannot remain silent while a respected physician is reportedly subjected to harsh conditions, denied adequate medical care, and isolated from the outside world without any legal justification. Dr. Abu Safiya must be released immediately.”
PHRI has for months been raising concerns about Abu Safiya’s detention, long before he was transferred to solitary confinement.
While demanding the physician’s release in April, for instance, PHRI said Abu Safiya was being held “in harsh conditions, without access to medication or medical care, as his health continues to deteriorate.”
A 2025 report from Amnesty International, which has also called for Abu Safiya’s release, said that the Gaza-based physician “was detained in the course of caring for his patients and carrying out his medical duties.”
Amnesty also noted that, prior to his detention, Abu Safiya and other colleagues at the Kamal Adwan Hospital had “provided human rights and humanitarian organizations with reliable information about the health situation” in Gaza, which has been left devastated by years of Israeli attacks that have killed at least 72,000 Palestinians.
As Washington and Tehran edge towards a ceasefire, the Israeli prime minister is determined to sink it, believing any settlement that leaves Iran standing amounts to defeat
A protester holds a placard depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a demonstration in Milan on 21 May 2026 (Piero Cruciatti/AFP)
Israeli prime minister and indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu does not adapt to imposed realities.
He tries to smash them through brute force, permanent escalation and manufactured crises. Throughout his career, war has been a favoured strategic instrument for preserving Israeli supremacy and his own political survival.
Most recently, his priority is to prevent US President Donald Trump from signing a near-complete memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Should diplomacy prevail, he will deploy every political, military, diplomatic, media and lobbying tool to sabotage it.
His obsession with what he calls “absolute victory” reflects a rigid doctrine that rejects compromise. No settlement is acceptable to him unless it disarms Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, dismantles Hezbollah in Lebanon, and ends in the neutralisation or destruction of the Iranian state itself.
His horizon extends well past temporary ceasefires to the end of all resistance and a region restructured around Israeli dominance under American protection.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
The wars across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran were never isolated confrontations. They are part of a single offensive to establish “Greater Israel” and consolidate Israeli regional hegemony.
Netanyahu knows these goals remain unfulfilled despite vast destruction. Rather than prompting a rethink, that failure has convinced him the problem is an insufficient application of force, not the objectives themselves.
For him, the war is far from over, and what force could not achieve yesterday becomes the target of wider escalation tomorrow.
Having already drawn Trump into earlier confrontations with Iran, Netanyahu appears convinced he can pull the lever again – this time aiming past a limited strike for a decisive, total war that permanently shifts the regional balance of power.
A divided home front
Trump faces a more complicated reality. He may believe earlier confrontations weakened Iran and the axis of resistance, but the political landscape is shifting fast at home and abroad.
Domestically, a growing share of the public openly questions the wisdom of these wars. Recent polling shows support for prolonged Middle Eastern entanglements falling steeply, alongside deep scepticism of “forever wars” seen as serving foreign agendas rather than American interests.
This anti-interventionist sentiment has crossed party lines and is fracturing Trump’s own coalition. Influential voices around the Maga movement, including political commentators Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan, have questioned policies that subordinate American blood and treasure to Netanyahu’s agenda.
More Americans are asking why the US should bear the economic, military and political costs of another regional war for a foreign power, with vague aims and doubtful benefits
The campaign to unseat Congressman Thomas Massie and other non-interventionist conservatives who question pro-Israel policies reflects these tensions.
More Americans are asking why the US should bear the economic, military and political costs of another regional war for a foreign power, with vague aims and doubtful benefits.
These questions sharpen amid mounting economic strain. Energy markets remain vulnerable, and inflationary pressures are rising again.
Petrol prices have become a political landmine: reports in early May put the national average near $4.50 a gallon, up sharply from the sub-$3 level before the war. Driven by energy costs and supply chain disruptions, inflation has accelerated, weakening consumer confidence and turning the economic mood toxic for the White House.
Trump knows foreign adventures cannot be detached from domestic realities, and with the midterms approaching, blunders carry immediate consequences. Both the House and the Senate are within reach of Democratic majorities.
If he loses Congress, the rest of his presidency will be paralysed, and the threat of impeachment will return to the centre of Washington politics.
What Hormuz exposed
Internationally, the pressures are even more severe. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz transformed the strategic landscape.
Before the attacks intensified after 28 February, Hormuz was the vital maritime artery of global energy, carrying about a fifth of the world’s oil flows and liquefied natural gas trade, with Qatar‘s LNG exports acutely exposed. Its disruption laid bare the vulnerability of the Arab Gulf states and the wider global economy.
As shipping routes faced chaos, insurance premiums surged, energy markets reacted sharply and supply chains buckled. More than that, it shattered decades of assumptions about American power.
Iran has won the war. Trump and Netanyahu now face a reckoning
For generations, Washington had sold itself as the indispensable guarantor of Gulf security and freedom of navigation. Yet the crisis exposed the limits of military superiority in the face of unforgiving geography, asymmetry and political complexity. America could strike, bomb and threaten, but it could not force Hormuz open without triggering a global economic shockwave.
The military record is more revealing still. During the 39-day war, Iranian and allied strikes damaged at least 16 US military bases across eight countries, leaving several nearly unusable.
A Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery found Iranian strikes damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures and pieces of equipment at US bases across the region: hangars, fuel depots, aircraft, radar networks, communications gear and air-defence assets.
This marks a foundational shift. For decades, the US used its network of Gulf bases as instruments of deterrence and intimidation, platforms to punish adversaries and shield allies. The war showed these bases are now exposed targets, calling into question the architecture of American regional dominance.
Strain on US missile defences compounded the crisis. Reports after the 39-day war indicated serious depletion of interceptor stocks, including Patriot, Thaad, Tomahawk and other missiles.
The Pentagon has warned that rebuilding these inventories could take years, with some not likely to be replenished until the decade’s end. That is a dangerous vulnerability for a country that must also plan for confrontations with Russia and China. A war meant to project dominance instead exposed industrial and technological limits.
A strategic deadlock
Washington and Tel Aviv entered with maximalist goals: force Iranian capitulation, dismantle its nuclear infrastructure, end enrichment, seize its enriched uranium, destroy the axis of resistance, and topple or fragment the Iranian state.
None of these goals has been met. Iran did not surrender, its government did not collapse and its regional alliances, though under heavy pressure, were not eliminated. Iran and its allies absorbed painful blows, but damage is not defeat: a state can suffer heavy losses without surrendering its core objectives.
Robert Kagan, an establishment strategist, recently acknowledged this gap between American ambitions and what military force can actually achieve. His warning carries weight because it comes from the heart of the interventionist establishment.
The dilemma is the inability to translate military superiority into a durable political order, however powerful its forces remain.
It recalls the Suez crisis of 1956, when Britain and France discovered that military victory could not stop the collapse of their imperial power. The same limit now confronts the US.
American threats and Trump’s ultimatums failed to produce Iranian submission because they lacked credibility. A threat works only when the adversary believes defiance will cost more than compliance.
For its part, Tehran had no reason to think concessions would buy safety.
It had watched Washington abandon the nuclear agreement in 2018, expand sanctions during talks and carry out assassinations and sabotage alongside the Zionist regime, even as talks continued.
Iran, therefore, chose to expand the battlefield, raise the cost of escalation, threaten global energy flows and deny the US and Israel a clean victory. Its alternative to capitulation was resistance under pain, and that transformed the bargaining structure.
Washington and Tel Aviv wanted a one-sided outcome in which Iran surrenders its nuclear assets, missiles and regional influence for temporary, easily reversible sanctions relief. Tehran knew that reversible relief is not security and refused to give up its deterrence, thereby forcing a deadlock.
Neither side could impose its outcome without paying a price it was unwilling to bear. The US could escalate, but only by threatening the global economy, draining its stockpiles, exposing its bases and widening domestic opposition.
Iran could endure and retaliate, but could not defeat a superpower conventionally. Each constrained the other in an unstable equilibrium.
Within that equilibrium, asymmetry favours the defender. The US needs a visible, triumphant success to justify the war to its public; Iran needs only to avoid defeat, keep its sovereignty and deny the enemy its political aims. For a state facing overwhelming force, survival with its agency intact is itself a victory.
Indeed, Netanyahu understands this threat to his expansionist project – and he fears it. A negotiated ceasefire would confirm a result Israel cannot accept, in which the war would end not in its triumph but in Iran’s endurance.
An imperfect opening
The present negotiations, reportedly mediated by Pakistan and backed by several Arab and Islamic states, have produced a near-final framework.
At its core is the expansion of the current truce into a multi-front suspension of hostilities for at least 60 days, Lebanon included. Driven by economic pressure, energy instability and fear of a wider war disrupting events like the coming World Cup in North America, Washington needs calm. This retreat, therefore, is not a product of victory but of necessity.
Alongside the truce, a package of measures aims to stabilise the region in the interim, including securing navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, easing restrictions on Iranian shipping, granting partial access to frozen Iranian assets, and initiating talks on broader normalisation. Reports on financial compensation vary, with early figures ranging from $12bn to $24bn, though details remain fluid.
The framework signals that the US will concede several Iranian demands for regional stabilisation and the reopening of Hormuz
The nuclear issue has been deferred. Rather than immediate dismantlement, the framework relies on an Iranian commitment not to pursue weapons while talks continue on enrichment levels and verification.
The framework signals that the US will concede several Iranian demands for regional stabilisation and the reopening of Hormuz.
For Netanyahu, this is intolerable, as it gives Iran economic breathing room while leaving its missiles and alliances intact, giving Tehran greater leverage in future talks.
This explains the intensity of his pressure on Trump, and why recent exchanges between the two have been described as tense and uncharacteristically heated. He has opposed the diplomatic drift, pressing instead for renewed escalation across Gaza and Lebanon.
The latest developments around Lebanon reinforce the point.
Trump has personally intervened to restrain Netanyahu from launching a wider invasion of Lebanon, while speaking of an impending ceasefire there – moves that reveal growing tensions beneath the show of strategic unity.
The restraint followed Iran’s suspension of negotiations and warnings that further escalation in Lebanon could ignite northern Israel and widen the confrontation beyond Washington’s control.
Faced with collapsing talks and a prolonged closure of Hormuz, Trump moved to contain Netanyahu and head off a regional war that could drag in the US. The episode offers an early glimpse of the competing calculations now shaping American and Israeli policy.
Israel’s own military record reveals the bind: despite vast destruction, it has failed to secure decisive political outcomes. Gaza lies devastated – more than 76,000 Palestinians killed and over 180,000 wounded – yet the violence has not produced political closure.
In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has reasserted itself militarily and politically despite heavy blows, contesting Israeli border moves and inflicting casualties over the past two months. No amount of destruction has delivered the absolute victory the Zionist regime craves.
The deeper illusion
Netanyahu is left with limited, dangerous options. If he cannot block diplomacy outright, he will try to sabotage its implementation. Lebanon remains the active arena, where targeted escalation, assassinations or efforts to spark internal instability could derail diplomatic momentum.
Netanyahu may calculate that fresh massacres in Gaza, an intensified siege or provocations around holy sites in the occupied West Bank could fracture the ceasefire, placing Trump under renewed pressure to realign with Israeli demands.
Suez was the death knell for the British empire. Hormuz may do the same for the US
Yet Trump’s continued rhetoric about normalisation under the Abraham Accords reveals a persistent disconnect from reality.
No meaningful path to broad Arab normalisation exists while the Palestinian question remains open.
The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 conditioned normalisation on Palestinian statehood, and after Gaza, the gap between rhetoric and reality has only widened.
The region stands at a perilous crossroads. One path offers an imperfect diplomatic opening, the product of mutual exhaustion and shifting leverage; the other leads to a wider confrontation neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can control.
To assume Netanyahu will quietly accept a deal that contradicts his core convictions is a dangerous illusion. But the deeper illusion is the belief that brute force can indefinitely preserve a regional order whose political, moral and strategic foundations are crumbling.
Trapped between ideological obsession and strategic failure, Netanyahu may yet make one last fatal gamble and continue widening the war until the whole structure collapses with him.
![An aerial view of destruction in Sheikh Ridwan neighborhood following the Israeli forces' withdrawal with the ceasefire agreement in Gaza City, Gaza on October 17, 2025. [Mohammed Abu Samra - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AA-20251017-39440420-39440381-SHEIKH_RIDWAN_NEIGHBORHOOD_SUFFERS_EXTENSIVE_DAMAGE_FOLLOWING_ISRAELI_FORCES_WITHDRAWAL.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
Peace and Justice Post 
You must be logged in to post a comment.