Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) lost his bid for re-election to primary opponent Ed Gallrein 54% to 45% with nearly all votes counted on Tuesday night.
Massie’s defeat will no doubt be seen as a triumph of both the continued durability of pro-Israel forces in the party, as well as the president’s own ability to dictate outcomes in intra-party races. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who voted to impeach Donald Trump during his first term, lost his primary election over the weekend against a Trump-endorsed candidate.
Massie, who had served seven terms representing his state, is a fiscal conservative and libertarian. He had emerged during Trump’s first term as a rare Republican who stood up to the president, notably opposing Trump on his massive $2.2 trillion COVID spending bill. More recently he proposed and helped to pass a law in November opening the Epstein files, and then supported a series of war powers votes as a major critic of Trump’s war on Iran. Massie has also opposed bills that would provide aid to Israel for its own wars.
This drew Trump’s ire. The president called the Kentucky incumbent “Worst Congressman in the History of our Country,” in a series of social media posts hours before the primary. Trump has also called him a “moron,” “bum,” “obstructionist,” and a “fool.”
The race also attracted the attention of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). PACs associated with both, with multi-million dollar contributions from powerful pro-Israel GOP donors Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson, helped it to become the most expensive primary election in the U.S. history. The two other most expensive primaries (in 2024) also featured AIPAC-backed candidates defeating incumbents (both Democrats) who were deemed to be too anti-Israel.
Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir on Wednesday sparked global outrage by posting a video showing the mockery and abuse of activists who were abducted by Israeli forces while attempting to bring aid to the besieged Gaza Strip via boat as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla.
The video, posted on X, shows Ben Gvir taunting the activists as they’re detained with their hands tied behind their backs and on their knees facing the floor. At one point in the video, the Israeli national anthem can be heard playing while activists are detained face down on what appears to be an Israeli vessel.
Several nations responded by summoning Israeli ambassadors to their capitals, including Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Canada, Al Jazeera reported.
“The images of the Israeli minister Ben Gvir are unacceptable. It is inadmissible that these demonstrators, including many Italian citizens, are subjected to this treatment that violates human dignity,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in a post on X.
“The Italian Government is immediately taking, at the highest institutional levels, all necessary steps to secure the immediate release of the Italian citizens involved,” Meloni wrote, adding that Rome demanded an apology from Israel and would summon the Israeli ambassador to Italy.
Jean-Noel Barrot, the foreign minister of France, said on X that the French government didn’t support the flotilla but that the French activists involved “must be treated with respect and released as quickly as possible” and that Paris was summoning the Israeli ambassador to “express our indignation and obtain explanations.”
Ben Gvir’s video went too far even for some members of the Israeli government, including Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who said that Ben Gvir “knowingly caused harm to our State in this disgraceful display.”
According to the Global Sumud Flotilla, 50 boats have been recently intercepted by Israeli forces, and 428 activists from all over the world have been taken captive in Israel.
Ahead of Wednesday’s incident, the US sanctioned four activists involved in the Global Sumud Flotilla. The US has not taken any action or imposed any consequences on Israel for continuing attacks on Gaza, maintaining restrictions on aid, and taking additional territory in the Strip, all violations of the President Trump-backed ceasefire deal signed in October 2025.
From left, President of the Eurogroup Kyriakos Pierrakakis, German Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister of Finance Lars Klingbeil, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, Canada’s Finance and National Revenue Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, Japan’s Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama, Italian Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, European Commissioner for Economy and Productivity, Implementation and Simplification Valdis Dombrovskis pose for a family photo at the G7 finance meeting in Paris, Monday, May 18, 2026. [AP Photo/Thibault Camus]
US President Donald Trump menaced Iran with another military onslaught on Tuesday, declaring, “We may have to hit them one more time.” Just hours after claiming to have “paused” an imminent resumption of the bombardment of Iran, Trump asserted that the US military was “locked and loaded,” and that he could make a decision on whether to attack by early next week.
Trump’s gangster-like threats are the authentic voice of world imperialism, which is determined to impose colonial chains on Iran and the entire region as part of the new redivision of the world among the major powers that is already well underway. The communique released by the G7 finance ministers yesterday after two days of consultations in Paris underscored this fact, with all members signing on to a statement that blamed the victim of the criminal US/Israeli war of aggression for the economic disaster it has produced.
The finance ministers and central bankers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US insisted that “a swift return to free and safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz and a lasting resolution to the conflict are imperative.” While not uttering a word about the unprovoked onslaught on Iran launched as negotiations were still ongoing on 28 February or the thousands of Iranian civilians slaughtered by indiscriminate American and Israeli bombing, the G7 finance ministers, displaying typical imperialist double-standards, hypocritically began their main communique with the statement, “We are united in our condemnation of Russia’s continued brutal war against Ukraine and escalatory actions aimed at undermining collective efforts to broker peace.”
The glaring inconsistency of the imperialists’ moral outrage manages to consistently coincide with the global predatory interests they are pursuing. American imperialism is determined to regain the domination over Iran it lost following the 1979 revolution as part of a drive to consolidate its hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East by sidelining its rivals, above all China. The European imperialists have endorsed the war because they hope to secure their own share of the spoils with a revival of the barbaric methods associated with colonialism and because they require continued US support for their war against Russia.
The governments supposedly engaged in “collective efforts” to “broker peace” are in fact the chief protagonists in a rapidly escalating third world war. Trump travelled to Beijing last week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in what was billed as a summit to stabilise relations between the world’s two largest economies. But behind the diplomatic niceties, the American financial oligarchy for which Trump speaks has no intention of permitting China’s steady economic rise at the expense of the US and is openly preparing for war with China.
Trump’s failure to reach any substantive agreement in Beijing is now being followed just days later with another round of threats on the part of Trump to exterminate Iran, which not coincidentally is one of China’s most important oil suppliers.
The erratic outbursts by Trump and frequent explosions of militarist violence are indications of US imperialism’s weakness, not its strength. For the past 35 years, Washington has sought under successive administrations to offset its precipitous economic decline by deploying brutal military force. This uninterrupted series of wars has only deepened American imperialism’s crisis, both by aggravating social tensions to the breaking point and exacerbating the rivalries between the imperialist powers as they compete to secure markets, raw materials, cheap labour and strategic influence under conditions of a worsening world capitalist breakdown.
Imperialism—whether of the American or European variety—can offer no way out of this crisis other than by further escalating wars.
Trump’s threats to resume the war on Iran have been punctuated with discussions on whether he will order an invasion of Cuba, which the White House is now absurdly accusing of playing host to Iranian military advisers and possessing 300 drones supplied by Russia and Iran. Military operations on the Caribbean island aimed at toppling the Castroite regime would mark the second US-led “regime change” operation in Latin America in less than six months, following January’s invasion of Venezuela to abduct President Nicolas Maduro and try him as a common criminal in a New York courtroom. Trump may be plotting a parallel scenario to seize the 94-year-old Raul Castro, who will reportedly soon be indicted in a US court.
In Europe, the continent’s imperialist powers are fuelling the war on Russia—a nuclear-armed power—with reckless abandon. Germany in particular has taken the lead in assisting Ukraine to develop drone technology and supplying it with long-range weaponry capable of hitting targets deep inside Russia. Kiev has felt emboldened over recent weeks to strike high-rise residential buildings in Moscow and energy infrastructure. These provocative acts of aggression, which have only increased after the Kremlin’s threat earlier this year to bomb manufacturing facilities in NATO countries, are designed to produce a retaliatory strike by Russia that can be exploited as justification to expand the war.
The European imperialist powers are subordinating all of society’s resources to waging war, with Germany approving €1 trillion for war spending and all NATO members committing to allocating 5 percent of their GDP for the military. The destruction of public services and worker rights needed to fund this mad rearmament drive is being justified with hysterical anti-Russian propaganda.
Carsten Breuer, the top commander of the German Armed Forces, declared in a joint interview with his British counterpart in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Russia—which has proven incapable after four years of war to conquer even half of Ukraine’s territory—could attack a NATO country by 2029. Europe’s rearmament drive is not only aimed at Russia, but is motivated at the most fundamental level by the ruling class’ recognition that US imperialism—long an ally—is now a rival in the struggle to carve up the world among the major powers.
The sharpening of inter-imperialist antagonisms and acceleration of a third world war confirm that the same basic features of capitalism identified by Lenin in his analysis of imperialism apply today with full force. Lenin wrote at the height of the bloody slaughter of World War I, “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.”
This understanding was central to Lenin’s conception of the epoch as one of wars and revolutions, i.e., not only a period of imperialist reaction, but one in which crisis-ridden capitalism had created the objective conditions for the working class to offer a socialist road out of the impasse.
The same capitalist contradictions propelling all of the imperialist powers to engage in world war are driving the only social force that can stop this catastrophe into struggle: the international working class. The US-instigated war on Iran has already, within less than three months, triggered sharp spikes in energy, fuel and food prices. Strikes and protests have involved workers across continents, from the ongoing national strikes against price rises in Kenya and Bolivia, to Monday’s one-day national strike that hit wide swathes of the Italian economy against war and the Gaza genocide.
The intensification of the class struggle demonstrates the urgency of the fight to build an international anti-war movement on the basis of a revolutionary socialist programme. The initial anger among workers expressed in the strikes must be developed into conscious opposition to imperialist war, linking the fight to defend jobs and living standards with the struggle against imperialist barbarism and the capitalist system that is its root cause. This movement must end the domination of society by the financial oligarchy and its relentless quest for profit and plunder by setting as its goals the conquest of political power by the working class and the socialist transformation of society.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted at a cabinet meeting that Israel has taken more territory in Gaza since the ceasefire was supposed to go into effect in October 2025, an acknowledgment of an Israeli violation of the truce deal.
When the deal was signed in October 2025, Israeli troops pulled back to an agreed-upon line, known as the “yellow line,” which left about 53% of Gaza under IDF occupation, but that area of control has expanded. “In Gaza now, we already control not 50%, but 60%,” he said, according to The Times of Israel, confirming reports that said Israel now controls 60% of the Palestinian territory.
Palestinians live in difficult conditions near the so-called yellow line east of Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on April 27, 2026 (IMAGO/APAimages via Reuters Connect)
The ceasefire deal that Israel and Hamas signed in October 2025 said that the “IDF will not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement,” and Hamas had fulfilled its side of the deal by releasing all living Israeli hostages and bodies that it had and working to recover other Israeli remains.
Israeli officials have claimed Hamas is violating the deal by not disarming, but the agreement didn’t commit Hamas to giving up its weapons. The two sides agreed to a US proposal that called for the “demilitarization” of Gaza as a framework for negotiations, but the issue of disarmament was meant to be worked out in follow-up negotiations.
For its part, Hamas has maintained that disarmament must be linked to a path toward a Palestinian state and has also stated that it won’t discuss the issue until the first phase of the ceasefire is actually implemented. Israel has constantly violated the agreement by launching daily attacks in Gaza, killing more than 870 Palestinians since it was supposed to go into effect, and it has also not consistently allowed the agreed-upon number of aid trucks to enter the besieged territory.
Despite the constant Israeli violations, the so-called “Board of Peace,” a US-led body meant to oversee the implementation of the agreement, has put the blame on Hamas’s unwillingness to disarm for the lack of progress in implementing President Trump’s plan for the Palestinian territroy.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued secret arrest warrants for three Israeli politicians and two military officials, Haaretz reported on 17 May, citing diplomatic sources.
The timing of their issuance is unknown. The ICC has often issued arrest warrants in secret, publicly announcing them only later to enable a possible arrest of the suspect.
Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry and State Attorney’s Office do not respond immediately to requests for comment.
The Hague-based court issued arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former War Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024.
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan requested that ICC judges issue the arrest warrants in May 2024, alleging that Netanyahu and Gallant were responsible for war crimes committed by the Israeli military in Gaza.
Netanyahu and Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, according to the ICC prosecutor.
In response to the issuance of the arrest warrants, the US and Israel carried out a campaign to pressure the ICC to prevent and cancel the arrest warrants issued against the Israeli leaders, Le Mondereported in August 2025.
The campaign, which targeted the ICC chief prosecutor Khan, began in March 2024 after he announced his intention to seek the indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant.
In response, the Israeli prime minister launched a campaign to use “all means” to stop the prosecutor with the help of his allies in London, Washington, and Berlin.
At the end of April 2024, a staff member at the ICC accused Khan of sexual assault.
A source speaking to Le Monde said the allegations were part of an effort to “get rid of the prosecutor” and “hijack the process” of arrest warrants.
In October 2024, while the judges were still determining whether to issue the arrest warrants, a mysterious account named “ICC Leaks” appeared on the social network site X.
The account publicized the allegations of sexual assault made against Karim Khan internally at the ICC the previous May.
The ICC finally issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on 21 November 2024.
In February 2025, Chief Prosecutor Khan was placed under sanctions by the US.
Netanyahu applauded the move, calling the court “anti-Semitic and corrupt.”
Khan continued to work on two other indictments against Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir and Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich.
However, Khan has been on temporary leave since 16 May 2025, pending the outcome of the investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations, which he strenuously denies.
During its genocide in Gaza, Israel has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, while destroying most of the strip.
Jewish settlers insist they will colonize Gaza, as they are colonizing the occupied West Bank.
“We are here on the way to new Jewish communities in Gaza,” settler leader Daniella Weiss stated in an interview at the border of the strip in late April.
“The 2 million or whatever number of Arabs, Gazans, who live here will not live in Gaza,” Weiss added. “It can take a week, it can take maybe a few months. They will not live here.”
https://www.youtube.com/embed/UoyDOx5KOWM?feature=oembed& When representatives of Palestinian resistance factions arrived in Cairo in mid-March for talks with Egyptian and Qatari mediators, they were not told in advance that Nickolay Mladenov would be waiting for them.
Mladenov is no neutral broker. The former UN official now serves as director-general of US President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace and its “High Representative for Gaza.”
According to Muhammad Shehada, Mladenov did not come to mediate. He came to deliver an ultimatum on behalf of Israel and the United States: Accept full unconditional disarmament or face a renewed Israeli onslaught.
On The Electronic Intifada Livestream on 7 May, Shehada said Palestinian factions saw Mladenov as “an emissary or an envoy of Benjamin Netanyahu,” the Israeli prime minister.
Citing accounts from participants, Shehada said Mladenov was “extremely condescending,” issuing a threat “that if you don’t accept my proposal, immediately, unconditionally, Israel would get a free hand in Gaza and would resume its military operations.”
A Palestinian writer and researcher from Gaza, Shehada is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
You can watch his full conversation with co-hosts Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman in the video above.
From the UN to the Israel lobby
Mladenov’s bias is hardly hidden. After leaving his post as UN special coordinator for the “peace process” in 2021, he immediately joined the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an offshoot of the Israel lobby group AIPAC.
His conduct in Cairo exposed what this whole process has really been about: forcing and formalizing Palestinian surrender.
In October, Israel agreed on paper to a ceasefire framework. The Palestinian resistance would ensure the return from Gaza of all living and dead Israeli prisoners of war and captives.
Israel, in turn, was supposed to stop its genocidal attack on Gaza, halt “all military operations,” pull back its forces, allow at least 600 aid trucks a day into the territory, permit 200,000 tents and 60,000 temporary homes, open the Rafah crossing and allow both an International Stabilization Force and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza – a Palestinian-run body meant to begin civilian governance – to enter the territory.
From there, negotiations on a second phase were supposed to begin.
Nickolay Mladenov at the launch of the Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum in January 2026. The former UN official, now acting as Board of Peace “high representative,” is seen by Palestinians as a messenger for Israel. (Photo by World Economic Forum/Benedikt von Loebell via Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
All this was set out in Trump’s so-called peace plan for Gaza, endorsed by the UN Security Council in November – in the face of united opposition from Palestinians who viewed the resolution as capitulating to Tel Aviv and Washington and violating fundamental principles of international law.
The Palestinian resistance nevertheless kept its side of the deal. Israel, to no one’s surprise, violated virtually all of its commitments, while the supposed mediators, especially the United States, did nothing.
As Shehada explained on the Livestream, the only item ever fulfilled was the release of Israeli captives.
Since then, Israel has continued killing Palestinians, choking off aid, blocking temporary shelters and preventing the Palestinian-run administrative committee from even entering the territory.
Yet Washington, the other so-called mediators and much of the media shifted the focus away from Israel’s violations and ongoing crimes and back onto the old colonial demand that Palestinians surrender all means to resist and defend themselves.
Palestinian factions rejected the ultimatum, infuriating Mladenov.
“Israel never fulfilled phase one of the Trump deal. How are you asking us to move to phase two when the first phase was never fulfilled?” Shehada said, summarizing the position Palestinian resistance representatives put to Mladenov.
Terms of surrender
In a recent +972 Magazine article, Shehada reports on two Arabic-language documents laying out Mladenov’s demands.
Mladenov set out a 250-day timeline ending with Palestinians handing over even personal weapons and, “only once an investigative committee verifies that Gaza is completely free of any weapons whatsoever – a very elusive process – would Israel make a limited and ‘gradual’ withdrawal over an undefined period of time to the ‘Red Line’ that would still leave it in control of about 38 percent of Gaza.”
“Rubble removal and reconstruction under Mladenov’s proposal would only begin on day 251,” Shehada adds.
The documents – reviewed by The Electronic Intifada – strip Hamas and the other factions of any governing role. They place Gaza under external control, similar to the colonial Mandate under which Britain ruled Palestine after World War I.
Israel would remain in control of Gaza deep into the process, with the final stage still preserving an indefinite Israeli “security perimeter” inside the territory.
The point is plain enough. Israel and the US want to keep using hunger, destruction, despair and blackmail to impose what Israel’s army – despite more than two years of genocide and devastation – could not impose by force.
Shehada summarized the logic clearly on Livestream. Mladenov, he said, demanded that Palestinians “become absolutely defenseless, weaponless,” and trust their lives to an occupier and its backers who have never stopped killing them.
What then is the endgame? According to Shehada, Mladenov’s proposals aim “to completely rewrite the Trump plan to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s satisfaction,” in order to render it unworkable and “give Israel an absolute free hand to do whatever it wants.”
While humanitarian relief and recovery were supposed to begin immediately in phase one, Mladenov is holding the civilian population’s most basic rights and their very survival hostage to total surrender by the resistance.
He is, according to Shehada, seeking the “destruction of everything that they [Palestinians] have that might be used as either defensive weaponry or as basic leverage in any future negotiations.”
Decommissioning vs. disarmament
Trump’s plan does not even mention disarmament. Instead it calls for “placing weapons permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning.”
That language comes directly from the Northern Ireland peace process. In practice, decommissioning meant armed groups did not immediately give up their weapons, but placed them out of sight and out of use so long as the political process advanced and Britain took reciprocal steps to withdraw its forces and dismantle its repressive apparatus in the north of Ireland.
The weapons remained an insurance card if commitments were violated. Indeed, the Irish Republican Army slowed, and at crisis points suspended, its participation in decommissioning to pressure the British government to fulfill its promises.
“Hamas was saying that we can do this,” according to Shehada. “Lock all the weapons up in depots for the next five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and then you need an agreement to end the Palestinian question, to end Israel’s apartheid.”
Actual disarmament – the final destruction of resistance weapons – would therefore be the result of a political settlement and a reciprocal process, not a precondition imposed only on one side.
As flawed and Israel-biased as it was, Shehada acknowledged that by adopting the concept of decommissioning, the Trump framework “was premised on the idea that you don’t have to surrender, you don’t have to capitulate.”
According to Shehada, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ireland and the United Kingdom support decommissioning as a mechanism for Gaza.
Netanyahu and Mladenov replaced that with demands for outright disarmament – meaning, as Shehada put it, “surrender everything you have. You have absolutely no leverage whatsoever.”
But the comparison has limits.
Northern Ireland involved a political process that at least formally recognized the rights and aspirations of all participants and established a path towards a united Ireland, the core objective of the Irish anti-colonial struggle.
With Palestine, even states backing decommissioning still start from the colonial premise that Palestinian resistance is the problem, not Zionist colonization, apartheid, siege and genocide.
Iran changes the power balance
This is why the regional dimension matters. The demand that the Palestinian – and for that matter Lebanese – resistance surrender rests on the assumption that the US and Israel still dominate the region so completely that they can dictate terms and everybody else must obey.
But the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, and Hizballah’s formidable resistance in Lebanon, have exposed real limits to that power.
Iran has not only withstood a full-scale joint assault by the world’s and the region’s strongest and most genocidal military forces, it has arguably emerged stronger.
Shehada said Trump’s Board of Peace “began to unravel” once the US and Israel attacked Iran.
He noted that Indonesia suspended its participation and said Gaza’s factions drew a blunt lesson from the regional confrontation: “If you stand your ground, if you hit back, you strike back, you maintain steadfastness, you will get your way.”
“That lesson was immediately caught by people in Gaza,” Shehada said. It made the resistance factions “even more uncompromising on accepting the Mladenov proposal.”
Despite the catastrophic humanitarian situation Israel deliberately maintains, Washington and Tel Aviv have not secured the regional omnipotence they claim.
The existence of Palestinian weapons is not the root problem, but the consequence of the root problem: Zionist occupation, land theft, apartheid and genocide, sustained by US imperial power.
This basic truth cannot be wished away.
Any plan that begins by demanding Palestinian submission while leaving Israeli colonial power intact is a fraud.
Palestine, especially Gaza, does not need more such scams dressed up as “peace.” Its people need liberation and the restoration of all their rights.
The durable Western support for Israel even as it has perpetrated genocide since 7 October 2023 underscores that liberation will not be a gift from the likes of Mladenov, nor a reward for what Israel’s arms suppliers and financiers consider Palestinian good behavior.
As in every anti-colonial struggle, liberation will be won by Palestinians through their own efforts and sacrifices – and through the broader regional struggle to end the US imperial domination without which the Zionist colony in Palestine would disintegrate.
Tens of thousands of Jewish settlers descended on occupied Jerusalem on 14 May to celebrate the so-called ‘Flag March,’ beating Palestinian residents in the Muslim Quarter of the city, damaging storefronts, and shouting anti-Arab slogans.
The event, also known as the Flag Dance, commemorates the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967.
Even before the parade began, Zionist youths pushed and cursed Palestinian residents and activists from “Standing Together,” an Israeli-Palestinian group established to protect Palestinians during the parade.
“When we put our bodies on the line, it oftentimes reduces the violence because settlers are less willing to attack when there are Jews there or when we document what’s going on,” stated Ori Shaham, the group’s international spokesperson.
The parade has long been marked by violence, extreme racism, and hate songs directed against the Palestinian residents of the Old City.
On Wednesday, the Knesset’s Aliyah, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee held a discussion on the violence directed against Christians during the annual parade.
The committee’s chairman, MK Gilad Kariv, stated that “there is nothing more ugly and offensive to the status of Jerusalem than the ugly behavior on the sidelines of the Flag Parade.”
“Every year we know what will happen … Muslim and Christian residents will close their shops, close their homes and schools, and lock themselves in their homes so as not to be exposed to violence? Is this the way of Judaism and the Torah of Israel?”
Last month, Haaretz reported that the Authority for Jewish National Identity in the Prime Minister’s Office provided nearly $200,000 in funding to organize the parade.
The remainder of the $400,000 budget was provided by the Foundation for the Renewal of Communities in Israel, an umbrella organization for several Torah groups.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir used the Flag Day march to make a provocative raid on the Temple Mount, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.
Professor Graham Allison’s concept has influenced the way scholars and leaders think about competition between global powers.
By Nora Delaney
Fall 2025
HOW SHOULD LEADERS AND POLICYMAKERS THINK about relative shifts in power between countries? Are there principles from history that countries can look back to that help understand geopolitical tensions when countries increase their political and economic power? These are the questions that help us navigate conflicts and understand prospects for peace.
Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and former Kennedy School dean, has argued that we can take a lesson from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BCE when the rising city-state of Athens challenged the dominant existing power of Sparta. Thucydides wrote, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
Allison has looked to Thucydides and his exploration of the tensions between a rising and established world power to understand the relationship between China and the United States. In his 2017 book “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap?,” Allison argues that history shows many instances where rising powers challenge established ones, and often these situations end in war—though not always. Allison’s Thucydides’ Trap has since become an influential metaphor in international relations as experts think about the friction between China and the United States—and ways that they might avoid devastating conflict. The Institute for National Strategic Studies and the National Defense University Press, for example, published analyses interpreting the Thucydides Trap in the context of U.S.–China dynamics. Allison’s analysis has also generated attention in China. President Xi Jinping frequently uses it to identify the challenge today’s two great powers face; for example, in his meeting with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer in October 2023, he said “The ‘Thucydides Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.” Indeed, during Allison’s quarterly visits to China, Xi and key members of his team have engaged him directly to explore opportunities for escaping the Thucydides Trap.
Allison chairs the Harvard China Working Group that includes faculty from across the university and is pursuing ongoing work at the Kennedy School that grapples with the nature and future of U.S.-China competition. The rivalry between the United States and China, Allison has argued, encompasses four key areas that he and his colleagues at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs have researched and reported on: rivalry in economics, technology, military power, and diplomacy. These reports were originally prepared as part of a package of transition memos for the Trump-Biden transition after the November 2020 election.
Allison and others at the Belfer Center and the Kennedy School continue to lead in our understanding of the ways the United States and China compete and cooperate as world powers.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that the Israeli leader made a secret visit to the United Arab Emirates during the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, though Abu Dhabi later denied the claim.
“In the midst of Operation Roaring Lion, Prime Minister Netanyahu secretly visited the United Arab Emirates, where he met with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed,” his office said in a statement. “This visit has led to a historic breakthrough in relations between Israel and the UAE.”
In response, the UAE’s Foreign Ministry said that it “denies reports circulating regarding an alleged visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the UAE, or receiving any Israeli military delegation in the country.”
President Trump, Bahrain Foreign Minister Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan sign the Abraham Accords on September 15, 2020 (White House photo)
“The UAE reaffirms that its relations with Israel are public and conducted within the framework of the well-known and officially declared Abraham Accords, and are not based on non-transparent or unofficial arrangements. Accordingly, any claims regarding unannounced visits or undisclosed arrangements are entirely unfounded unless officially announced by the relevant authorities in the UAE,” the statement added.
In response to the Israeli statement, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi suggested that Iran was aware of a visit by Netanyahu to the UAE. “Netanyahu has now publicly revealed what Iran’s security services long ago conveyed to our leadership,” he wrote on X.
“Enmity with the Great People of Iran is a foolish gamble. Collusion with Israel in doing so: unforgivable. Those colluding with Israel to sow division will be held to account,” Araghchi added.
The claim from Netanyahu’s office comes amid a series of revelations about the UAE’s ties with Israel and its involvement in the war on Iran.
“They were the first Abraham Accord member,” Huckabee said, referring to the UAE. “But look at the benefits that they have had as a result: Israel just sent them Iron Dome batteries and personnel to help operate them. How come? Because there’s an extraordinary relationship between the UAE and Israel.”
At the time of the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, which also included a normalization deal between Israel and Bahrain, US and Israeli officials were clear that one goal of the accords was to create a regional alliance against Iran.
The UAE has also launched direct strikes against Iran, including an attack on Iranian oil infrastructure that came after the ceasefire between Washington and Tehran came into effect.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators hold banners and signs as they protest outside the Microsoft Build conference at the Seattle Convention Center in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.
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Microsoft’s Israel subsidiary has announced that its general manager, Alon Haimovich, will be stepping down from his position on May 31, after an investigation into the subsidiary’s collaboration with the Israeli military.
Microsoft ordered an inquiry into its Israel subsidiary last year after a joint investigation by The Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call revealed the Israeli military’s extensive use of Microsoft’s Azure platform for surveillance.
The Israeli military, it was found, used Microsoft’s Azure cloud-based system to store millions of daily phone calls made by Palestinians, enabling it to capture a much larger pool of everyday Palestinian communication than possible on military servers. According to +972 Magazine, this has created “what is likely one of the world’s largest and most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group.” This has in turn shaped the Israeli military’s operations in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Though Microsoft claimed its leadership was unaware of how the Azure cloud system would be used, leaked documents revealed that Israel’s military surveillance gave specific instructions for its vision of a project that would store “A million [Palestinian] calls an hour.”
The Israeli military’s Unit 8200 — an intelligence unit comparable to the U.S.’s National Security Agency — had approached Microsoft’s CEO in 2021 to work with Microsoft’s Azure to create a specific database for its mass surveillance of Palestinians.
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Israeli military sources said that intelligence from the phone calls was then used to identify bombing targets in Gaza, and that the military’s use of Azure had increased during the course of the genocide in Gaza. Initially, the Israeli military had focused its use of the Azure cloud platform on the West Bank, creating a network of surveillance used to assist in the Israeli occupation’s domination there.
Microsoft’s inquiry has concluded, according to The Guardian, and has resulted in Microsoft Israel’s general manager, Haimovich, leaving the company.
Several other managers of Microsoft Israel have also left their positions amidst the inquiry.
Though it has not laid out its full findings, Microsoft’s inquiry concluded that the Israeli military intelligence unit violated Microsoft’s terms of service, which prohibit the use of its technology to facilitate mass surveillance. Microsoft then ended Unit 8200’s ability to access its cloud services and AI used to support its surveillance project.
Beyond the Azure cloud system, Microsoft is used in all major infrastructure in the Israeli military system.
In a statement sent to Truthout upon the news that Microsoft Israel’s general manager would be departing, No Azure for Apartheid, an activist group that is part of a broader movement of tech organizers, said the decision “comes at the heels of relentless pressure from our campaign” as well as that of other activists.
“Microsoft has tried to quietly say goodbye to war criminal Alon Haimovich, who oversaw the development of Azure tools for the Israeli military which helped accelerate the first AI-powered genocide,” the group said.
Contrary to claims that Microsoft’s leadership did not know how the technology would be used, No Azure for Apartheid asserts that Haimovich worked closely with Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella.
“Microsoft workers who continue to speak up about those war crimes are arrested, prosecuted, brutalized, fired and sanctioned,” the statement continues.
The statement also claims that Microsoft’s investigations have not stopped it from “continuing to supply cloud and AI arms to the Israeli military” and that the group “refuse[s] to allow Microsoft to scapegoat one or a handful of individuals to wipe its hands clean of its complicity in genocide.” Microsoft, they said, must “end this collusion and cut off all ties with the Israeli military and government immediately.”
Hossam Nasr, an organizer with No Azure for Apartheid and a former tech worker fired by Microsoft for speaking out against the company’s complicity with Israel’s military, told Truthout:
Over the course of the genocide, we’ve come to learn how deeply embedded Microsoft is within the Israeli military ecosystem. Microsoft supplies cloud, AI, computing, storage and advanced AI models to the Israeli military to be used not just by Unit 8200 but also Mamram, Ofek, and specific naval, air and ground units in the Israeli military. Microsoft has a footprint in all major military infrastructures in Israel.
Following a relentless campaign waged by No Azure for Apartheid — which included a worker petition signed by over 2000 employees, disruptions at key events, and an encampment and sit-in at the president’s office last summer — Microsoft became the first U.S. tech company to end some of its contracts with the Israeli military in September 2025, Nasr said. But although the company stopped selling some of its cloud and AI services to Unit 8200, “the vast majority of their contracts with the Israeli military remain intact.”
Microsoft continues to be a partner in not only Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but in the war on Iran and Israel’s war on southern Lebanon, Nasr said.
“This gives us even more fuel and motivation to continue our organizing. We’re not going to stop until all our demands are met — until Microsoft ends all of its contracts with the Israeli military.”
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