A campaign of ethnic cleansing and ‘tectonic’ new legal measures are killing the two-state solution to which other governments pay lip serviceThu 12 Feb 2026 20.05 CET
Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.
With Israel heading to elections in months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes. They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A and B.
The White House has reiterated Donald Trump’s opposition to annexation, but talks with Mr Netanyahu in Washington on Wednesday focused on Iran. To the extent that the US president thinks about Palestinians at all, he thinks about Gaza. Yet this cannot be treated separately from the West Bank. Arab and Islamic states central to his peace plan have warned that the new measures will “inflame violence, deepen the conflict and endanger regional stability and security”.
The declaration of a ceasefire in Gaza – which has not stopped the Israeli military killing Palestinians there either – has reduced the political pressure on other governments to act. There are no signs that the outrage at last Sunday’s decision will translate into action. The UK “strongly condemns” the measures. The EU said that sanctions were “still on the table” but is clearly in no hurry to act. Within Israel, only a handful dissent.
Hunger and desperation endure in Gaza while the Trump administration promotes fantastical visions of a glittering skyline. Israel has demolished the East Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), the UN body which supports millions of Palestinian refugees, and is booting out NGOs, including Médecins Sans Frontières, from across occupied Palestine.
In 2024, the UN’s international court of justice ruled that Israel should end its illegal occupation as quickly as possible. Last year international outrage over Gaza forced multiple governments, including the UK, to recognise a Palestinian state, dragged by their publics. Those symbolic announcements look increasingly hollow. Real action cannot wait, for Israel’s government will not.
President Donald Trump listens as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during an arrival at his Mar-a-Lago club, Monday, Dec. 29, 2025, in Palm Beach, Florida. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]
US President Donald Trump held a three-hour war council at the White House Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss plans for a massive military assault on Iran. America’s would-be dictator has repeatedly vowed that a new war would dwarf last June’s 12-day US-Israeli aerial bombardment of Iran, which killed more than a thousand Iranians, the vast majority of them civilians.
The US has surged vast amounts of military personnel and firepower to the region since the beginning of the year, while Trump and his aides have issued a steady drumbeat of bellicose threats.
Led by the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, an American armada now surrounds Iran’s shores. Warships bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles and F-35 and F-18 fighter jets are deployed in the Arabian Sea, at the Strait of Hormuz and further north in the Persian Gulf off Qatar. Tracking data also indicates a massive influx of Globemaster C-17 US military cargo planes arriving at US military bases across the region, bearing no doubt all manner of weapon systems, missiles and other munitions.
On Tuesday, Trump said he may soon dispatch a second “armada,” that is, a second aircraft carrier battle group to the region. According to reports, the US Navy is now poised to start seizing tankers transporting Iranian oil, ratcheting up Washington’s decades-long campaign to strangle the Iranian economy through sweeping sanctions that are themselves tantamount to an act of war.
The US started seizing tankers off Venezuela shortly before last month’s illegal attack on the South American country, the kidnapping of its president and Trump’s announcement that Washington has seized its vast oil reserves.
The pathological liar Trump claims that he is pursuing “negotiations” with Iran in the hopes of avoiding a military clash. What a monstrous fraud! The talks are a mafia-style “shakedown,” with Tehran being given the choice between capitulation and war.
Following Wednesday’s meeting with Netanyahu, Trump said his “preference” would be for a “deal,” then menacingly added, “Last time Iran decided that they were better off not making a Deal, they were hit with Midnight Hammer (the US military’s name for its June 21-22 attack on Iranian nuclear facilities). That did not work well for them.”
Earlier Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance similarly threatened Iran. At the end of a trip to Iran’s northern neighbours, Armenia andAzerbaijan, Vance told reporters that Trump has “a lot of options” to attack Iran “because we have the most powerful military in the world.”
Driven by predatory imperialist aims, this policy is not just aggressive. It is reckless and could rapidly culminate in a catastrophic war.
The massive deployment of US military power to the region has its own political and military logic. With ships carrying thousands of military personnel and billions of dollars in weaponry deployed to the region, pressure to use them will grow. The most aggressive sections of the financial elite and military-security establishment will argue that failure to act carries its own risks, from a potential preemptive Iranian attack to appearing “weak.”
In the event of Iranian counterstrikes from any action, the resort of a rattled Trump administration to the use of tactical nuclear weapons is entirely possible.
Washington is demanding Iran forsake its sovereign right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to a civil nuclear program; cease all support to Hamas, Hezbollah and the other members of its “Axis of Resistance”; and accept sweeping limits on its ballistic missile program. Acceptance of these demands would leave Iran defenceless and powerless in the face of US and Israeli aggression and reduce it effectively to the status of a semi-colony.
Iran is a historically oppressed country whose development has been indelibly misshaped and thwarted over the past century and a half by its encounter with first British and then US imperialism. It must be defended against imperialist aggression irrespective of the anti-working class character of its Shia clergy-led, bourgeois nationalist regime.
With the support of the Democratic Party and the pliant corporate media, Trump has advanced various pretexts to justify the escalating military aggression against Iran. From stopping nuclear proliferation to “defending” the Iranian people from state repression, each is more grotesque than the last.
Ten years ago, under the UN-backed Iran nuclear accord, Tehran agreed to dismantle most of its civil nuclear program and to subject the remainder to the most intrusive regime of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) surveillance ever devised. Yet in 2018, Trump torpedoed the accord and unilaterally imposed a punishing regime of sanctions, enforced through Washington and Wall Street’s control of the world financial system, with the express aim of crashing Iran’s economy and triggering regime change.
The US ruling class and its political representatives, Democratic and Republican alike, have no more interest in the democratic rights of the workers and rural toilers of Iran than they do those of the Palestinians, or those who live under the Gulf state absolutist monarchies and the blood-soaked dictatorship of Egypt’s General el-Sisi.
Washington has never reconciled itself to its “loss of Iran” as the result of the 1979 anti-imperialist upsurge that toppled the tyrannical regime of the US-installed Shah. For decades it has relentlessly pursued regime-change through sanctions, threats, sabotage and military aggression.
The impending attack on Iran arises directly out of the bipartisan project—initiated under Biden and continued seamlessly under the second Trump administration—to violently fashion a “New Middle East,” using Israel as American imperialism’s attack dog. Since October 2023, Washington and Israel have gone on a rampage across the region, using aggression, war and, in Gaza, outright genocide to establish a Greater Israel within a Middle East under unbridled US domination.
By seizing control of the Middle East, which in addition to being the world’s most important oil-exporting region lies at the juncture of three continents containing more than 90 percent of the world’s population, American imperialism hopes to gain a stranglehold over all its great power rivals, beginning with China.
Terrified of the working class, Iran’s beleaguered bourgeois regime is incapable of making any progressive appeal to the masses of the region, let alone the workers of the world, for a joint struggle against imperialism. When Trump boasts that Tehran is desperate for a deal, he no doubt for once speaks the truth. On Wednesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stated that the country would open up its nuclear sites for “any verification,” in an apparent attempt to reach some sort of accommodation. Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
But the Islamic Republic’s repeated attempts to negotiate a rapprochement with Washington stretching back to the early 1990s have been rebuffed time and again.
American imperialism, meanwhile, has suffered a massive erosion of its global economic power making it only the more desperate and predatory. The gangster Trump is the personification of its harebrained ambition to rule the world.
Based on its publicly stated positions, Tehran views acceptance of Trump’s demands as regime suicide. In the event of an attack, it has vowed to strike back at US bases across the region and at Israel. On Wednesday, the 47th anniversary of the Shah’s overthrow, millions, including many who no doubt have profound grievances with the current regime, took to the streets across Iran to voice their opposition to US imperialist aggression.
The course of events in the next days and weeks remains uncertain. But Trump and US imperialism could at any time set the Middle East ablaze, recklessly initiating a regime-change war against a country of 93 million people that could rapidly engulf the entire region and draw in other great powers.
The Trump administration, moreover, is beset by crisis. It confronts mass opposition to its ICE-led terror campaign against immigrants and, more broadly, its drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, and a growing strike movement involving teachers, health sector and other industrial workers. The Epstein scandal has implicated the entire political and financial elite—and Trump, members of his cabinet and key billionaire supporters directly—in a network of venality and criminality, where obscene wealth provides impunity.
Trump could well see a foreign war against an enemy long vilified by the American media as a means of extricating himself and his administration from its myriad crises. Undoubtedly, he would seize on a war with Iran to intensify his operation dictatorship, including by labeling antiwar protesters treasonous.
War is a well-trodden path for governments and ruling classes facing intractable problems and mounting social opposition. That was the gamble many of Europe’s leaders took in 1914, most famously Nicholas II, the Russian Czar toppled in the first stage of the revolution that brought the working class to power under the Bolsheviks in October 1917.
A jackal is never more vicious and dangerous than when it is wounded. American imperialism and the global capitalist system that it has politically and economically backstopped for most of the past century are visibly rotting on their feet. The same objective processes that are impelling imperialism, led by the United States, to aggression and world war, are fueling a global upsurge of the working class that can and must be infused with a socialist perspective.
Workers in the United States and around the world must come to the defence of the Iranian people, demand the immediate withdrawal of all US military forces from the Middle East and the rescinding of all sanctions on Iran as part of the development of a global movement against war.
The fight against war is a fight against capitalism. It must be based on the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class. Opposition to rearmament and war must be linked to the struggle to defend workers’ living standards and social and democratic rights, oppose oligarchy and dictatorship and for social equality.
“We have a master plan … There is no Plan B,” remarked Jared Kushner last month, during a Board of Peace (BoP) presentation about Gaza reconstruction at the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos. What has become apparent is that no coherent Plan A exists either.
Although Kushner’s father-in-law, US President Donald Trump, was granted the legitimacy to build what he calls the BoP on the back of pledges to implement his “20-point peace plan” and Gaza ceasefire, the BoP’s charter is notably absent of any reference to Gaza.
Furthermore, United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 2803, which legally authorized the BoP and was explicitly about the Gaza ceasefire, was deliberately vague on how any concepts proposed in the resolution would be implemented. It deliberately avoided outlining any mechanisms or obligations for reconstruction. Instead, two parallel schemes emerged.
The first was the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust (GREAT Trust) – a 38-page document proposing to pay Palestinians $5,000 each to leave the territory. Crafted by Israeli figures previously involved in the discredited Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the plan, which envisions “AI-powered, smart cities,” was less a roadmap for peace than a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.
That same foundation, backed by US private military contractors (PMCs), had already drawn international condemnation for herding civilians into “aid zones” only to open fire. More than 2,000 Palestinians were killed in those operations.
PowerPoint colonialism
Later, in December, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) exposed that another proposal was put into circulation among US-allied nations in the Arab and Muslim world. The 32-page PowerPoint presentation, titled “Project Sunrise,” was set forth by Kushner and US envoy Steve Witkoff.
Like the preceding proposal, the new vision outlined a similar AI-smart city model, but added even more elements, such as high-speed rail infrastructure. According to the PowerPoint slides, the total cost of this 10-year reconstruction endeavor would amount to $112.1 billion, for which the US would commit to footing 20 percent of the bill.
Back then, Steven Cook, a senior fellow for the Middle East Program at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, told WSJ that “they can make all the slides they want,” adding that “no one in Israel thinks they will move beyond the current situation and everyone is okay with that.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had even expressed his concerns over how realistic the plan will be, especially when it comes to potential foreign investment.
Then came Kushner’s presentation at Davos, which instantly made headlines and was presented as a brand new proposal called the “master plan.” According to Kushner, the project for a “new Gaza” would now only cost $25 billion.
However, upon further investigation, it is clear that what Kushner was presenting was simply “Project Sunrise,” which was evident as the PowerPoint he used was filled with the same exact slides from December. In other words, nothing particularly new was being placed on the table that had not already been released over a month prior.
“New Gaza” is a lab rat colony
Speaking to The Cradle, Akram, a Gaza resident from Al-Bureij, states that the situation on the ground does not reflect any of the positivity that appears in the media. “The Israelis won’t let us even have mobile homes or proper structures to live in, they still bomb us every day, and then we see AI images of Gaza becoming richer than Israeli cities?” he says, with bitter sarcasm. He added:
“Listen, do you really think they carried out genocide for two years and destroyed all our homes, only to build us a paradise, and that this will all happen if the resistance gives up its weapons? No. They are trying to tease us, like they always did, by saying, ‘if you give up your weapons, you will become Singapore.’ Nobody believes it.”
Shortly after Akram spoke to The Cradle, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech to a special session of the Knesset, in which he made it clear that “the next stage is not reconstruction.” Instead, he asserted that disarmament would characterize Phase 2 of the ceasefire.
These figures are also dated, having been produced in July 2024, so they do not account for over a year of destruction. Israel has not stopped its round-the-clock demolition of Palestinian infrastructure since the so-called ceasefire took effect on 8 October 2025.
A humanitarian NGO official working in Gaza tells The Cradle that even the ceasefire’s Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC), ostensibly set up to enforce humanitarian standards, now functions as a system of “intimidation” that “violates basic morality.”
On 21 January, Drop Site Newsreported on leaked documents that revealed plans to create an “Israeli Panopticon” city, to be constructed in territory remaining under its control in southern Gaza’s Rafah. The Guardian then reported that the UAE is seeking to bankroll the project. The leaked blueprints described a “case study” city where residents would be monitored around the clock, like lab rats, and forced to submit biometrics to enter.
Rafah as the prototype prison
The UAE has been accused of backing the five ISIS-linked militant groups Israel created to fight Hamas, which it previously intended to rule over a similar style concentration camp city in Rafah. In fact, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had even ordered the construction of such a “community” during the 60-day ceasefire in early 2025. The Israelis have long intended to displace 600,000 Palestinians to such a gated facility.
The Emirati connection in this scheme goes beyond its recent offer to fund such a concentration camp city; it dates all the way back to January 2024, when it officially opened six water desalination plants along the Egyptian side of the Gaza border area, coincidentally capable of supplying 600,000 people with water.
Prior to the ceasefire and the collapse of the privatized aid scheme, the plot was to use the GHF PMCs in order to lure civilians into such a city area. Once they get there, the Palestinians who enter would be under the rule of Israel’s ISIS-linked proxy militias.
According to forensic architecture analysis, Israel is once again preparing land in order to implement such a project. Meanwhile, UG Solutions – the firm that hired the GHF’s PMCs – is again advertising job opportunities in the besieged territory.
Dispossession in disguise
Despite the dizzying array of slogans – BoP, GREAT, Sunrise, Panopticon – the outcome remains the same with no reconstruction, no sovereignty, and no end to occupation. The various schemes are less about peace and more about forcing Palestinians into containment zones policed by Tel Aviv and its regional clients.
From “Gaza Riviera” fantasies to proposals limiting reconstruction to areas under Israeli military control, what’s on offer amounts to PowerPoint projectionism. A revolving door of schemes and slogans has produced nothing substantive. Instead, the Israeli military continues its daily war of erasure on Gaza’s land, people, and future.
Even Kushner’s $25-billion fantasy is just that: a fantasy. In the three months since the UN resolution, all Washington has offered is AI-generated cityscapes and recycled decks. The only real plan on the table remains the one being implemented daily – the destruction of Gaza.
England’s High Court has ruled that the UK government’s ban on Palestine Action is “unlawful” after a months long legal battle with the British government.
Justice Victoria Sharp has told the court that the proscription of Palestine Action “did result in a very significant interference with the right of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly”.
The ruling found that the decision to proscribe the group was discriminatory, however the ban remains in force until a further order by the court.
The judgement ruled that “a very small number of Palestine Action’s activities amounted to acts of terrorism” as defined by terror legislation.
Friday’s judgment follows a judicial review challenging the July 2025 ban brought by Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori.
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Ammori hailed the landmark ruling as a “monumental victory both for our fundamental freedoms here in Britain and in the struggle for freedom for the Palestinian people, striking down a decision that will forever be remembered as one of the most extreme attacks on free speech in recent British history”.
Ammori added that the ban resulted in “unlawful” arrests of “nearly 3,000 people – among them priests, vicars, former magistrates and retired doctors” under terrorism laws for holding signs in support of the direct action group.
“It would be profoundly unjust for the government to try to delay or stop the High Court’s proposed order quashing this ban while the futures of these thousands of people hang in the balance,” she said.
Responding to the ruling, UK director of Human Rights Watch Yasmine Ahmed said it was a “shot in the arm for British democracy at a time when it is facing a barrage of attacks by this government to undermine our rights to freedom of assembly, expression, and speech”.
“Palestine Action is not a terrorist organisation and should never have been designated a terrorist organisation,” she said.
“Today’s verdict reinforces what many of us having been saying all along – that the government’s misuse of terrorism legislation was a brazen and gross abuse of power that served to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel and those profiting from its atrocities.”
The ban, introduced in July 2025, made membership of the group, public expressions of support for it, or the display of its symbols criminal offences punishable by up to 14 years in prison under Britain’s terrorism laws.
Since the ban on Palestine Action, hundreds of people protesting the proscription and Israel’s genocide in Gaza have been arrested and charged with terror charges.
The government outlawed the group days after activists, protesting the genocide in Gaza, broke into an air force base in southern England and targeted aircraft with paint and crowbars that Palestine Action alleged were used to support the war. The British government alleged that the incident caused an estimated £7m ($9.3m) of damage to two aircraft.
In written court submissions, the Home Office argued that actions “can constitute terrorism if they involve serious property damage even if it does not involve violence against any person or endanger life”.
“Proscribed organisations are deprived of the oxygen of publicity as well as financial support,” the government submissions noted.
Meanwhile, the Home Office’s lawyer Natasha Barnes argued the ban “has not prevented people from protesting in favour of the Palestinian people or against Israel’s action in Gaza”.
Vance says ‘another option on the table’ if no nuclear deal reached with Iran
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Iran has accused Israel of sabotaging negotiations with the United States over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Iran’s security chief Ali Larijani claimed Israel is attempting to “destabilise the region” after prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Donald Trump on Wednesday.
The Israeli leader has reportedly been urging the US president impose the strictest-possible terms in any agreement reached with Tehran in nuclear talks.
Commenting on the nuclear discussions with the US, Larijani told Al Jazeera: “Our negotiations are exclusively with the United States – we are not engaged in any talks with Israel.
Iran’s security chief Ali Larijani (C) has accused Israel of sabotaging negotiations with the United States over Tehran’s nuclear programme. (WANA)
“However, Israel has inserted itself into this process, with their intent on undermining and sabotaging these negotiations.”
He added that he believes Israel’s agenda “extends beyond its alleged concerns about Iran”, and claimed it wanted to “destabilise the region”
“They are gambling not only with Iran, but also Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey,” he added, warning regional leaders to “be aware of this.”
Israel has yet to respond to the security chief’s remarks.
Following the meeting in Washington, Trump said no ‘definitive’ agreement was reached on how to move forward with Iran, but he insisted negotiations with Tehran would continue to see if a deal can be achieved.
Donald Trump met with Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House this week (file photo) (Getty Images)
Netanyahu, who had been expected to press Trump to widen diplomacy with Iran beyond its nuclear program to include limits on its missile arsenal, stressed that Israel’s security interests must be taken into account but offered no sign that the president made the commitments he sought.
”The Prime Minister emphasized the security needs of the State of Israel in the context of the negotiations, and the two agreed to continue their close coordination and tight contact,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement after Wednesday’s talks.
Trump has threatened strikes on Iran if no agreement is reached, while Tehran has vowed to retaliate, stoking fears of a wider war as the US amasses forces in the Middle East.
On Wednesday, Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian insisted that his nation was “not seeking nuclear weapons … and are ready for any kind of verification”.
Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian has insisted that his nation was “’not seeking nuclear weapon’ (Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
In a speech marking the 47th anniversary of the Islamic Republic, Pezeshkian said: “The high wall of mistrust that the United States and Europe have created through their past statements and actions does not allow these talks to reach a conclusion.
”At the same time, we are engaging with full determination in dialogue aimed at peace and stability in the region alongside our neighbouring countries.”
Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan – who has been involved in the talks between the US and Iran – also said both sides are showing flexibility.
He told the Financial Times: “It is positive that the Americans appear willing to tolerate Iranian enrichment within clearly set boundaries.
“The Iranians now recognise that they need to reach a deal with the Americans, and the Americans understand that the Iranians have certain limits. It’s pointless to try to force them.”
Berlin’s sovereignty has been deeply compromised, and no talk of ‘collective guilt’ or ‘reason of state’ can explain this away
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz leave after a joint news conference in Jerusalem on 7 December 2025 (Ariel Schalit/AFP)
Just one month after the announcement of a “ceasefire” in Gaza, with the whole world aware that its sole purpose was to enable Israel to continue its genocide, Germany once again spread a veil of silence over the process, launching a “normalisation offensive”.
Last November, after having met his Israeli counterpart Gideon Saar in Tel Aviv, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul declared that his “confidence in the peace process as a whole has grown” and that “the situation has stabilised noticeably”.
A few days later, 160 “young leaders” from Germany were not above accepting an invitation from Israel to soak up Zionist propaganda.
And in early December, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal, thus paying homage to a murderous regime that he continues to call a democracy, while assuring Berlin’s continued unconditional support for Israel’s crimes against humanity.
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German police followed suit, eager to “learn from Israel” – apparently fascinated by the weapons tested on Palestinians in Gaza, which they would soon have at their disposal.
And then 2026 began, with German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt travelling to Israel to sign a pact on “the development of a joint ‘Cyber Dome’ system, an artificial intelligence and cyber innovation centre, drone defence cooperation, and improved civilian warning systems”. Israel, Dobrindt said, was “a premium partner”.
All this “normalisation” – the veiling of genocide by the German government, young German “leaders” and the police wishing to “learn” from war criminals and a minister making pacts with them as “premium partners” – allows for little other conclusion than that the Zionist police and surveillance regime has become a role model for Germany.
Collective guilt narrative
Indeed, Germany’s transformation is already underway. After Berlin police prohibited Palestinians and their supporters from gathering in remembrance of the Nakba under dubious justifications, the courts – both the administrative court and the high administrative court – legally confirmed this massive infringement of civil rights.
Alongside the brutal actions of Berlin’s militarised riot police against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, strongly reminiscent of those carried out by Israeli security forces against Palestinians, this should deeply concern everyone living in Germany.
After Nazi rule, nothing was more important for West Germany than “normalising” relations with the newly formed state of Israel, which had just committed crimes against humanity in the Nakba.
Pretending that everything is ‘normal’ as Israel continues its daily slaughter of Palestinians comes at a high price: the ‘normalisers’ lose their own humanity
In a 1966 interview, former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, an enthusiastic supporter of Zionist settlement in Palestine who paid reparations to Israel, said: “We had done so much injustice to the Jews, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired, if we were at all to regain our international standing … Furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”
Author Daniel Marwecki pointed out that this “illustrates the way in which the objective of German rehabilitation was closely intertwined with a central idea of modern antisemitism: that of Jewish power” – and Adenauer’s fear, as historian Tom Segev has shown, was exploited by the Zionists in these negotiations.
Marwecki also shows how the reparations had nothing to do with forgiveness on the part of Israel or German atonement. Instead, one has to conclude, Germany allowed its sovereignty to be compromised to facilitate its return to the international stage as quickly as possible, while instilling a collective sense of guilt in its own citizens, ensuring they would accept Germany’s future subservience to Israel.
When these politics of collective guilt became implausible for subsequent generations who had done nothing to feel guilty about, former Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2008 trotted out the narrative that Israel’s security was “part of Germany’s reason of state”.
Proclaimed as if by an absolutist monarch and repeated like a mantra by Germany’s loyal public and liberal media, any democratic debate on this subject was to be nipped in the bud – which is why today, any dissenting opinion on Germany’s support for Israel’s genocide can easily be criminalised.
International law discarded
Interestingly, other parts of the alleged reason of state, that might also from the experiences of Nazi rule, are never mentioned: defending the dignity of every individual, complying with international law, obeying the decisions of global courts, defending human rights by all means, and treating those who commit genocide as nothing less than war criminals.
As the old saying goes: If you dance with the devil, you don’t change the devil. The devil changes you
Nothing remains of such maxims today, as the Scholz and Merz administrations have willingly disregarded them in order to support the genocide being carried out by the regime whose “security” is so dear to Germany.
Not only has this enabled the destruction of Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of Palestinians, but Germany has also significantly contributed to the destruction of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and international law, which all stand in the way of neoliberal imperialism.
As nothing remains from these high maxims but the alleged obligation to protect Israel’s security, Germany is doing the “dirty work” for the Zionist regime by “normalising” a state that commits genocide in Gaza, ethnically cleanses the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, that systematically neglects Palestinian citizens of Israel and now introduces the death penalty for Palestinians only, intending to execute them not for what they allegedly have done but for what they are.
Berlin is further protecting a racist ideology that feeds the fascist delusions of the vast majority of Jewish Israelis, who welcome the extermination of the Palestinian people. It is also normalising a “moral” army of war criminals, sadistic torturers and rapists reduced to their lowest instincts.
Finally, Berlin normalises paramilitary militias and fascist hordes of Zionist settlers terrorising Palestinians in the West Bank and causing a second Nakba.
While Germany behaves as if all this were “normal”, Israel has become radicalised within a specifically settler-colonial dynamic; first, as Patrick Wolfe has made clear: “Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.”
What is behind Germany’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide?
World-leading genocide experts as well as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian territories, leave no doubt that Israel today is such a genocidal regime.
Second, French-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi points out that “every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom” – and this seed has undoubtedly taken root in Israel, as Holocaust survivors also explain.
Over time, the normalisation of Germany’s relations with Israel has developed into a normalisation of all Zionist crimes, no matter how repugnant. No talk of “collective guilt” or “reason of state” can explain this away; it is a product of deeply compromised sovereignty.
The veil of silence that Germany has cast over Israel’s atrocities for decades has become a blood-soaked shroud.
Pretending that everything is “normal” as Israel continues its daily slaughter and dehumanisation of Palestinians comes at a high price: the “normalisers” lose their own humanity.
As the old saying goes: If you dance with the devil, you don’t change the devil. The devil changes you.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Jurgen Mackert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He was a temporary Professor for the Structure of modern societies at the University of Erfurt, Germany and a visiting professor for Political Sociology at Humboldt University Berlin. His latest books include On Social Closure. Theorizing Exclusion, Exploitation, and Elimination (Oxford University Press 2024). Siedlerkolonialismus. Grundlagentexte und aktuelle Analysen (edited with Ilan Pappe; Nomos 2024).
Israeli soldiers repair a tank near Gaza in April 2025, when thousands of British nationals were serving in the IDF, new data (left) reveals. (Photo: Jim Hollander / Alamy)
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More than 2,000 Britons served in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) during the Gaza genocide, it can be revealed.
The information was obtained by Declassified via a Freedom of Information request issued to the IDF by lawyer Elad Man from the NGO Hatzlacha.
The data outlines the number of people with dual and multiple nationalities who were IDF service members as of March 2025.
It shows how 1,686 British-Israelis and a further 383 people with British, Israeli, and another nationality served in the IDF amid the annihilation of Gaza.
They were among over 50,000 IDF soldiers with Israeli and at least one other nationality.
The largest cohorts come from the US, Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany.
Prior to this, data was only available on the number of Britons without Israeli citizenship serving in the IDF, so-called lone soldiers, a figure that was as low as 54.
‘Authorities must investigate’
The revelation that far more UK passport holders served in the IDF will raise serious legal questions for the British authorities, which have thus far failed to prosecute any citizens returning home after fighting in Gaza.
Paul Heron, a lawyer with the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), told Declassified: “There must be no impunity where credible evidence links British nationals to grave breaches of international law.
“The UK has clear duties to prevent genocide and avoid assisting unlawful military action.
“Where dual nationals have served in units implicated in atrocities, the authorities must investigate promptly and, where the evidence meets the threshold, pursue arrest and prosecution like any other serious crime”.
Declassified contributor Hamza Yusuf previously exposed how Britons were serving in some of Israel’s “craziest” combat units in Gaza where they viewed Palestinian fighters as “rats” and “animals”.
Among the Britons identified by Yusuf was Levi Simon, who was seen “rummaging through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women forced to flee their homes” in Gaza.
Another was master sergeant Sam Sank from London, who filmed himself fighting in Gaza between December 2023 and January 2024.
Sank had toldThe Times that “based on the number of his friends in the IDF, which includes a Scot in his own small unit, [he] believes there are hundreds, if not thousands, more Britons fighting in Israel.”
His estimates match with the data Hatzlacha has now obtained from Israeli authorities.
The UK Foreign Office declined to comment on the new data but confirmed that it does not collect information on the number of Britons in the IDF.
The Metropolitan police’s war crimes unit was handed a complaint against ten Britons serving in the IDF last year.
Although their names were not made public, the 240-page dossier accused the British suspects of “targeted killing of civilians and aid workers, including by sniper fire, and indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas”.
It was submitted by the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) and the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
“British nationals are under a legal obligation not to collude with crimes committed in Palestine. No one is above the law”, said Michael Mansfield, one of the lawyers who issued the complaint.
Heron told Declassified: “In our report to the Metropolitan Police, we set out credible evidence that 10 British nationals served in the Israeli Defence Forces and were involved in war crimes and acts giving rise to genocide.”
He said our findings showed “the issue is far deeper than we could ever believe.”
The Metropolitan Police did not respond when Declassified asked last year whether the people referred by PILC would be investigated for potential involvement in war crimes.
Lone soldiers
In addition to dual nationals, over 50 “lone soldiers” from Britain – defined as IDF members without family in Israel to support them – have served for Israel amid the genocide.
That data was released last year in a report on “lone soldiers” published by the Knesset Research and Information Center within Israel’s parliament.
“Lone soldiers” also include immigrants who arrive in Israel alone and volunteers from abroad.
The Knesset report detailed how 54 Britons were among around 3,000 lone soldiers serving in the IDF in August 2024.
Thirty-three of those Britons joined through the Tzabar programme, which is an Israeli support system for young Jewish adults to “make Aliyah” (emigrate to Israel) and serve in the IDF.
In the past, the UK government itself has offered support to “lone soldiers” in Israel.
Chaim Schryer, originally from Manchester, served in Netzah Yehuda, an Israeli military unit which the US considered sanctioning in 2024 over evidence of gross human rights violations.
Schryer was invited onto a British Royal Navy ship in 2021 alongside other British ‘lone soldiers’ who joined the IDF without family in Israel to support them.
He was pictured walking onto the HMS Richmond wearing his Netzah Yehuda uniform, before being given a tour of the boat and meeting Britain’s defence attaché in Israel, Colonel Jim Priest.
Schryer is among at least three Britons identified by Declassified, using open-source data and facial recognition software, who served with Netzah Yehuda over recent years.
Chaim Schryer (right) boards HMS Richmond in 2021. (Photo: Royal Navy / X)
Legal concerns
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice handed down its advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
The court advised that all UN member states – including the United Kingdom – were obligated to refrain from assisting Israel in maintaining its occupation.
In January 2024, the ICJ also put all member states on notice of the serious risk that genocide was being committed by Israel in Gaza.
“The duty to prevent genocide was triggered due to the actual or constructive knowledge of the immediate plausiblity that genocide was being or was about to be committed”, the UN commission of inquiry subsequently wrote.
To this end, the UK government’s failure to investigate or even monitor the activities of Britons serving in the IDF could be interpreted as tacit support for Israel’s military campaign.
Britain’s recent recognition of a Palestinian state might also mean that British nationals serving in the IDF could be in breach of the Foreign Enlistment Act.
This law, passed in 1870, makes it an offence for Britons “to fight for a foreign state at war with another state with which the UK is at peace”
A spokesperson for the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) said: “No one in the UK wants to live next door to a potential war criminal.
“And yet, British people who fought in the IDF are allowed to return to this country and live freely amongst us, despite fighting for an army that is committing genocide.
“It is utterly inexcusable that the UK government is failing to take action to hold citizens accountable for potential violations of international and domestic law”.
John McEvoy is Chief Reporter for Declassified UK. John is an historian and filmmaker whose work focuses on British foreign policy and Latin America. His PhD was on Britain’s Secret Wars in Colombia between 1948 and 2009, and he is currently working on a documentary about Britain’s role in the rise of Augusto Pinochet.
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The government of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced the shipment of 814 tons of milk, meat, beans, rice, and other foodstuffs to Cuba on Sunday, February 8. The move came days after Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel presented a series of emergency measures being adopted by his government to mitigate the impact of the severe fuel shortage facing the island.
Cuba is currently facing a serious crisis, provoked by recent maneuvers from the US government which, emboldened by its massive military build up in the Caribbean and its recent bombing of Caracas, has sought to further tighten the blockade on the island, hoping to finally force the overthrow of the government. On January 29, Trump announced an executive order under which any country that trades hydrocarbons with Havana will see a 10% increase in tariffs on its products exported to the United States. The executive order was said to have targeted Cuba’s main energy suppliers: Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia.
Venezuela was already effectively forced to halt oil shipments to Cuba due to the naval blockade imposed by the US against Venezuela, which already resulted in the illegal seizure of a Cuba-bound Venezuelan oil tanker.
Russia, a country which, due to heavy sanctions, is the most decoupled from the US economy, has declared that it will continue supplying fuel to Cuba. The government has said that “the situation in Cuba is truly critical” and top government spokesperson Dimitry Peskov, said “We are in close contact with our Cuban friends through diplomatic and other channels.”
Mexico, for its part, announced that it was engaged in negotiations with the US over oil shipments. President Claudia Sheinbaum has openly declared her rejection of the Trump measure: “You can’t suffocate people like that. It is very unfair.”
She also promised that Mexico would continue to help Cuba in any way possible: “We will continue to support Cuba and take all necessary diplomatic action to resume oil shipments.” In recent days, after learning of the Trump administration’s “threat”. Mexico, one of the few countries that sent oil to Cuba, said it would consult with Washington to determine the extent of possible retaliation.
According to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, not a single drop of oil has entered the island in 2026, posing a serious threat to a country that depends heavily on fuel for its power grid and to keep transportation, health, education, and other key systems functioning. Government officials and political analysts have claimed that the recent measure seeks to annihilate the Cuban people.
Former Colombian President Ernesto Samper shared this opinion in a post: “SOS for Cuba. The genocide of the Cuban people is being prepared by suffocating their vital conditions for survival. A United Nations humanitarian mission could lead a deployment of humanitarian ships loaded with the fuel that the island needs today, like the oxygen we breathe every day to stay alive.”
Mexican solidarity with Cuba
For his part, the Cuban president said, regarding the Mexican shipment that departed in two ships from the port of Veracruz: “Thank you, Mexico. For your solidarity, affection, and always warm embrace of Cuba.”
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez wrote on X: “We thank the Government of Mexico, under the leadership of President Claudia Sheinbaum, for sending more than 800 tons of aid to Cuba, amid the intensification of the blockade following the recent Executive Order by the US government. While some try to suffocate our population, sister nations extend their hand in solidarity.”
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Tehran’s intervention comes as the Israeli prime minister heads to a hastily arranged White House encounter
The Guardian, Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor 10 Feb 2026 20.34 CET
Tehran has told the US not to allow Israel to destroy the chance of reaching an agreement over Iran’s nuclear programme amid speculation that Benjamin Netanyahu intends to use a hastily arranged White House meeting with Donald Trump on Wednesday to divert negotiations.
Iran’s intervention came as the Israeli prime minister flew to Washington to plead with Trump not to negotiate a deal with Tehran if it excludes limiting the country’s ballistic missile programme, dropping its support for proxy forces in the region and curtailing human rights abuses at home.
Netanyahu is deeply concerned that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, are prepared to strike a deal confined to limiting the scope of Iran’s nuclear programme, which in Israel’s view would do nothing to rein in the long-term threat Tehran poses to the region.
Iran’s security chief, Ali Larijani, said Washington ‘must remain vigilant regarding Israel’s destructive role’. Photograph: Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images
Speaking before leaving for Washington, Netanyahu said he would “present to the president our approach around our principles on the negotiations”. He is expected to provide Trump with fresh intelligence about Iran’s military capabilities, including new long-range ballistic missiles.
Netanyahu faces a delicate task in setting out his stall because he risks being seen as challenging two of Trump’s most respected aides by mapping out a set of demands that could force the US into prolonged conflict with Iran.
He also risks angering Trump by opening up divisions in the Republican party, especially if he reminds the US president that he made repeated unfulfilled promises to come to the help of Iranian protesters.
Netanyahu’s turbulent relationship with Trump was already entering another rough patch as he continues to stall on his Gaza peace plan by barring a Palestinian technocratic body from entering the strip, and seeking in effect to annex the West Bank.
Benjamin Netanyahu. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA
In a sign that he knows he is treading on thin ice, Netanyahu agreed to take the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, with him. Before heading to Washington, Huckabee said there was “an extraordinary alignment between US and Israel on Iran”, and that as far as he knew the two sides shared the same red lines.
Iran expressed its anger at Israel’s intervention. Ali Larijani, the the head of the Supreme National Security Council, the body overseeing Tehran’s negotiating strategy, said: “The Americans should think wisely and not allow him, with his posturing, to create the impression before his flight that he is going to the United States to set the framework of nuclear negotiations. They must remain vigilant regarding Israel’s destructive role.”
Larijani met the mediators between Washington and Tehran in Muscat to discuss the agenda for further talks.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, said in his weekly press briefing: “Our negotiating party is America. It is up to America to decide to act independently of the pressures and destructive influences that are detrimental to the region.”
The Iranian government also still faces political challenges at home, with more reformist groups and academics issuing statements protesting against the suppression of dissent and, in particular, the arrest of leaders of the Reformist Front.
The front issued a further statement expressing its shock, and warning that the regime’s exclusionary approach and baseless accusations would worsen the political deadlock and “strengthen the violent and war-mongering factions supporting Israel”. It called on Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, to intervene urgently to secure the release of its leadership.
Even if the planned second round of talks are confined to Iran’s nuclear programme, as Tehran wants, there is no guarantee of success because it insists on maintaining its right to enrich uranium as fuel for nuclear power plants, something the US permitted under the 2015 deal but Trump has appeared to rule out.
Trump has sent the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and three accompanying warships to the region, which are capable of hitting a huge range of Iranian military and economic sties. The US has also buttressed the air defences of US bases across the region.
The head of Iran’s atomic energy authority has said Tehran may be prepared to dilute its stock of highly enriched uranium to 60% purity, a limited concession given the 2015 deal limited it to enriching to 3.75% purity.
TEL AVIV, February 5, 2026 (WAFA) — Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said a “violent and criminal attempt at ethnic cleansing” is taking place in the occupied West Bank, accusing Israeli police, the army and the Shin Bet security service of involvement and support for attacks carried out by extremist settlers.
In an article published in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Olmert said that armed and violent settler groups are persecuting, injuring and killing Palestinians living in the area. He said the attacks include burning olive groves, homes and vehicles, breaking into houses, physically assaulting residents, harming livestock, dispersing sheep herds and attempting to steal them.
Olmert stated that “Jewish terrorists” are attacking Palestinians with hatred and violence for a single purpose: forcing them to flee their homes in order to prepare the area for Jewish settlement and advance a dream of annexing all the land.
He said the attacks are taking place in front of the closed eyes of police officers and soldiers, arguing that hundreds of violent youths would not have been able to carry out such acts had they not been equipped with weapons through the initiative and encouragement of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
According to Olmert, militias operating in the West Bank are acting with direct backing and assistance from Israeli government officials, adding that the Israeli police also serve as a source of encouragement for “Jewish terrorism.”
He further argued that the Shin Bet does not employ against Jewish extremists the same tools it uses effectively against Palestinians, and fails to act decisively to prevent attacks, identify rioters, or locate and arrest the leaders of these groups.
Olmert said the issue goes beyond the Israeli army’s failure to prevent unrest in the occupied territories, suggesting that in many cases soldiers cooperate with rioters or remain nearby, watching events unfold without intervention.
He called on the international community to take political measures to compel the Israeli government to activate mechanisms to stop what he described as crimes against humanity committed under its sponsorship, protection and support.
Olmert concluded by saying there may be no option other than expecting the International Criminal Court to become the inevitable address for investigation, exposure of those responsible, and steps that could ultimately lead to their arrest and prosecution.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
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