Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has entrusted Iran‘s top national security official with the survival of the country in the case of attacks or assassination, a report by The New York Times said.
According to the report published on Sunday, several senior officials and members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps told the daily that Khamenei has issued a series of directives aimed at securing Tehran’s governance.
This includes four layers of succession for military and government posts he appointed, alongside instructions given to senior officials to name up to four replacements.
In the case that communication with him is obstructed or he is killed, Khamenei has also delegated responsibilities to a close-knit group of confidants, based on information shared with the Times by senior officials, diplomats and military commanders.
Ali Larijani is named in the article among the handful of close political and military associates who will ensure the survival of Iran in the event of US-Israel attacks or the assassination of Tehran’s top leadership.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
The security chief was appointed in August as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the body that holds ultimate authority over the country’s security and foreign policy decisions.
During the 12-day war with Israel in June, Khamenei named three candidates who would potentially succeed him.
While Larijani is almost certainly not among the contenders for the title of Supreme Leader, as he is not a senior Shia cleric which is necessary for the role, he is among the top candidates for managing the country if Iran’s upper echelon is wiped out, the report said.
Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker, and former president Hassan Rouhani are also among those listed by sources as possible leaders.
What Larijani’s return as security tsar reveals about Iran
The report also makes mention of contact between Washington and Tehran amid the unrest in Iran.
According to the Times, American envoy to the region Steve Witkoff sought to reach the country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, following US President Donald Trump’s threats to strike Iran if it killed protesters.
Araghchi then asked President Masoud Pezeshkian for authorisation to communicate back to Witkoff, but was directed by Pezeshkian to get approval from Larijani instead, underscoring his role.
The report indicates that the president appears resigned to deferring authority to Larijani.
Against this backdrop of US-Iran tensions, speculation on Khamenei’s next moves comes amid growing tensions despite diplomatic talks this week between the two countries.
The talks were a last-ditch attempt to avert threatened military action by the US, with Khamenei warning Trump on Tuesday he would not be able to “destroy” the Islamic Republic.
According to AFP, talks were being held discreetly, with diplomatic police blocking the private access road to Oman’s residence in the municipality of Cologny.
The US ambassador also said that at some point, Iran may experience the ‘second kick of a mule,’ referring to another US attack
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, February 16, 2026 at 7:08 pm ET | Iran
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on Monday that the US and Israel are “absolutely aligned” on the need to “deal” with Iran as Washington continues building up its forces in the Middle East to prepare for a potential attack on the Islamic Republic.
Huckabee made the comments when addressing the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem, where he cast doubt on the idea that the US and Iran could reach a diplomatic deal and said that another US attack on the country is likely.
“At some point, the United States has to say, enough is enough,” Huckabee said, according to Haaretz. “Either Iran makes a radical change in direction, or it experiences what we call in the South the second kick of a mule. There is no education in the second kick. If you didn’t learn the first time, you won’t learn the second.”
The US and Iran are set to hold a second round of talks in Geneva on Tuesday. Israel wants any deal to involve restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missiles, a demand designed to collapse diplomacy since Tehran’s missiles are its only form of deterrence.
According to Iranian officials, the US has dropped the demand for an agreement that includes missiles, but President Trump and other Trump administration officials continue to push the issue. Huckabee said that the US and Israel have agreed that Iran cannot “continue building vast surpluses of ballistic missiles.”
President Trump has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran if a deal isn’t reached, echoing threats he made in the lead-up to the 12-day US-Israeli war against Iran that was launched in June 2025, just days before another round of negotiations between Washington and Tehran were scheduled to be held.
The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford sails in formation with the guided missile destroyers USS Winston Churchill, USS Mitscher, USS Mahan, USS Bainbridge and USS Forrest Sherman in the Atlantic Ocean, Nov. 12, 2024. [Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Jacob Mattingly ]
The US military is preparing for “sustained, weeks-long operations” against Iran if US President Donald Trump orders an attack, Reuters reported Friday, citing US officials. The planned campaign would mark a far larger US assault on Iran than anything previously carried out.
In a sustained campaign, the US military could hit “Iranian state and security facilities, not just nuclear infrastructure,” one of the officials said. The United States “fully expected Iran to retaliate, leading to back-and-forth strikes and reprisals over a period of time.”
Such a war could entail massive loss of life and have incalculable global consequences. It would be illegal under international law and take place in defiance of the popular will, with 85 percent of the American population opposed to a war against Iran, according to a YouGov poll.
Last June, the US launched “Midnight Hammer” in coordination with a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign that together killed over one thousand Iranians. Iran staged a limited retaliatory strike on a US base in Qatar. What is now being planned is qualitatively different—an air and missile campaign targeting the Iranian state itself, with the expectation of extended back-and-forth combat.
The buildup takes place just weeks after the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest and newest aircraft carrier, took part in the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3. The Ford, which has been at sea for more than 200 days, has now been ordered from the Caribbean to the Middle East, where it will join the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group already in the region. The same carrier used in the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela is being redeployed to wage war against Iran.
Trump, speaking to troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina on Friday, said it had “been difficult to make a deal” with Iran. “Sometimes you have to have fear,” he declared. “That’s the only thing that really will get the situation taken care of.” Asked if he wanted regime change, Trump responded: “Seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.”
The Ford strike group includes the guided-missile cruiser Normandy and destroyers Thomas Hudner, Ramage, Carney and Roosevelt. The carrier holds more than 75 military aircraft, including F-18 Super Hornet fighters and E-2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft.
Satellite imagery analyzed by Reuters shows a massive buildup at US bases across the Middle East. At Al-Udeid air base in Qatar, the largest US facility in the region, Patriot missiles have been placed in mobile HEMTT truck launchers, giving them rapid mobility in case of an Iranian attack. The base houses an RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, 18 KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft, and seven C-17 transport planes.
At Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan, images from February 2 show 17 F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers, eight A-10 Thunderbolt close air support aircraft, and four EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets—where none had been visible weeks earlier. Additional forces have been deployed to Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Dukhan base in Oman. Approximately 112 C-17 Globemaster cargo planes have reportedly arrived or made their way toward the Gulf region.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have warned they could retaliate against any US military base in the region. The US maintains bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Turkey and on Diego Garcia. Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, warned: “We will respond decisively to any adventurism—our military readiness is high.”
The military buildup coincides with the Munich Security Conference, whose organizers titled their annual report “Under Destruction.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz opened the conference by declaring: “This order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.” He warned that “a divide has opened up between Europe and the United States.”
But while European leaders condemned Trump’s tariffs and threats against allies, they have fully supported the US posture toward Iran. On January 29, the EU unanimously designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization—all 27 member states voting in lockstep with Washington’s escalation.
The Munich conference withdrew its invitation to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with Germany’s foreign ministry declaring his participation inappropriate. In his place, exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah overthrown in 1979, was given a platform. Pahlavi called for “humanitarian intervention” and an “equalizing factor”—that is, US military strikes to “neutralize the regime’s instrument of repression.” He told the conference that “help is on the way” from Trump and positioned himself as the leader of a post-regime transition.Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
Democratic Socialists of America Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Munich Security Conference on the subject of “The Rise of Populism.” In her entire appearance at the conference, she did not say a single word about Trump’s preparations for war against Iran—the most significant military escalation of his presidency.
What she did say is revealing. She warned that Trump is “looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianisms, of authoritarians… where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and try to bully around our own allies there.”
This is not opposition to war; rather Ocasio-Cortez condemned Trump as being insufficiently aggressive against “Putin”—i.e., being insufficiently committed to the war in Ukraine.
The Democrats have been silent as the administration amasses approximately 50,000 troops and the largest concentration of military firepower in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Their earlier statements on Iran amounted to endorsements of regime change in response to the emergence of localized protests against the government last month. Senator Mark Warner declared on January 11, “The Iranian regime is awful, and I stand with the Iranian people.” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that month, “The Iranian government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators is horrific.”
Far from opposing the war buildup, the Democrats have actively funded it. On January 30, the Senate passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act by a vote of 71 to 29, including $839 billion for the Pentagon—an $8.4 billion increase over the military’s own budget request. Twenty-three Democrats voted for the bill, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Minority Whip Dick Durbin and Vice Chair Mark Warner. In the House, the bill passed 341 to 88, with 149 Democrats voting yes and only 64 voting no. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee hailed the legislation as “America First, Fully Funded.”
In the space of weeks, the Trump administration has kidnapped the president of Venezuela, threatened to annex Greenland, backed the Israeli genocide in Gaza and is now preparing a sustained bombing campaign against a country of 88 million people. Each of these operations targets nations whose resources Washington seeks to control as part of its escalating confrontation with China—Venezuela’s oil, Iran’s oil and natural gas and the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes daily.
The working class cannot entrust the fight against imperialist war to any faction of the political establishment. The same administration threatening to devastate Iran is attacking immigrants, gutting social programs, and constructing a police state at home. Opposition to war must come from the independent mobilization of the international working class against the capitalist system that produces war, inequality and dictatorship.
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.
Adm. Rob Bauer previously said NATO countries should consider shifting to a ‘war economy‘
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, November 25, 2024
The head of NATO’s Military Committee has called on European businesses to prepare for a “wartime scenario” amid soaring tensions between the Western military alliance and Russia.
Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer said Western businesses must adjust to become less vulnerable to both Russia and China. “If we can make sure that all crucial services and goods can be delivered no matter what, then that is a key part of our deterrence,” Bauer said at a European Policy Centre event in Brussels, according to Reuters.
Bauer said energy supplies could be targeted or used as weapons of war. “We’re seeing that with the growing number of sabotage acts, and Europe has seen that with energy supply,” he said. “We thought we had a deal with Gazprom, but we actually had a deal with Mr Putin. And the same goes for Chinese-owned infrastructure and goods. We actually have a deal with (Chinese President) Xi (Jinping).”
US and European officials have accused Russia of weaponizing energy, but Moscow began reducing gas shipments to Europe in 2022 in response to Western sanctions meant to destroy the Russian economy.
Bauer also said Western economies were too dependent on China. “We are naive if we think the Communist Party will never use that power. Business leaders in Europe and America need to realize that the commercial decisions they make have strategic consequences for the security of their nation,” he said. “Businesses need to be prepared for a wartime scenario and adjust their production and distribution lines accordingly. Because while it may be the military who wins battles, it’s the economies that win wars.”
Last year, Bauer called for NATO countries to consider shifting to a “war economy” where civilian factories would begin producing military goods, similar to what the US did during World War II. “Those priorities should be discussed about, partially, a war economy in peacetime,” he said in January 2023.
Bauer also said at the time that NATO was “ready” for a direct confrontation with Russia. Today, that confrontation is much more likely following the US authorization of long-range strikes on Russian territory with NATO missiles, a step Moscow has made clear risks a nuclear escalation.
A new report by the Israeli outlet Calcalist reviewed Israeli military spending on wars since October 7, finding that Washington is funding 70% of Tel Aviv’s military costs. In a little over a year, the US has provided Israel with more than $20 billion in military aid.
“The scope of American aid since the beginning of the war is about 85 billion shekels… According to official estimates by the Bank of Israel, the total cost of the war is…approximately NIS 118 billion.” It continues, “Therefore, according to a simple calculation, The Americans financed about 70% of the war effort.”
According to the Cost of War Project, the US has given Israel $22.57 billion in military aid since the Hamas attack. Calcalist concludes without US support, Tel Aviv’s war would simply be unaffordable.
“There is no doubt that without the American aid the government deficit for the years 2024-2025 (which is one of the highest in the country’s history), would have increased by about 4.3 % GDP, which would have made it unfinanceable,” it says. “Therefore, it is doubtful whether this war would have been conducted as it is – neither in intensity nor in scope – without the American assistance.”
The US has sent Israel tens of thousands of bombs, artillery rounds, and tank shells. Those weapons have been used to commit countless war crimes against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
The official death toll in the besieged enclave now exceeds 43,000. However, a group of American healthcare workers who have spent time volunteering in Gaza estimate the actual death count to be over 118,000.
Dr Tammy Abughanim, a pediatric intensive-care surgeon, said, “We cannot do our jobs, because Israel has made our jobs impossible, and Israel has made our jobs impossible with the direct support of the United States.” She added, “We all know the obvious step is to stop supplying Israel with the arms that it is using, the weaponry that it is using to target and kill civilians.”
In a major escalation of the imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East, Israel launched three waves of airstrikes on Iran Saturday morning in coordination with the Biden administration.
A view of Tehran capital of Iran is seen, early Saturday, October 26, 2024. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
The White House quickly endorsed Israel’s illegal attack on Iran, declaring, “We understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran as an exercise of self-defense.”
A White House official further endorsed the illegal attack in a statement to Bloomberg, calling it “targeted and proportional.” The official told Bloomberg, “The president and his national security team, of course, worked with the Israelis over recent weeks” to plan the illegal act of war.
Rather than self-defense, the attack is a calculated provocation aimed at eliciting a military response by Iran that can be used to justify further US-Israeli aggression, including the deployment of even more combat troops to Israel and a further military build-up throughout the region.
The Iranian military confirmed that airstrikes targeted bases in Ilam, Khuzestan, and Tehran provinces, and commercial flights were suspended throughout the country.
The attack follows the October 9 discussion between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the American president signed off on the strikes, along with a series of discussions with the Pentagon and White House Friday night.
The attack took place just days after US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that US combat troops had arrived in Israel, in the role of air defense support for the operation.
The attack took place as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East after extensive discussions with Netanyahu in which he reviewed both the planned attack on Iran and Israel’s so-called “generals’ plan” to starve, displace, or exterminate the remaining population of Northern Gaza.
The Israeli-US attack on Iran took place just 11 days before the November 5 US presidential election. Earlier this month, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the Biden administration was planning an “October conspiracy” to escalate the war with Iran. We wrote:
There is a long history of events taking place in October that have major effects on an upcoming US presidential election. By deploying US troops to Israel, the Biden administration is not so much seeking to impact Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects as to ensure that plans for military escalation are underway before the election takes place. Instead of an “October surprise,” it is an “October conspiracy” to massively expand US involvement in war throughout the Middle East.
These warnings have now been confirmed. While the scope of the Israeli attack is at this point unclear, it is evident that the Biden Administration is recklessly seeking to escalate war throughout the Middle East targeting Iran.
Israel’s attack on Iran is part of its rampage throughout the Middle East, supported by the imperialist powers, with the aim of reimposing colonial domination over the oil-rich region as part of their effort to dominate Russia and China.
The most horrific consequence of this imperialist offensive throughout the Middle East is the genocide in Gaza. The official death toll of the Gaza genocide stands at 42,847, with over 100,544 wounded. The real death toll is likely to be far higher, with an article in The Lancet estimating it at 186,000 or more in July.
This month, Reuters reported that Israel had suspended all commercial food shipments into Gaza, leading the availability to fall to the lowest level since the start of Israel’s onslaught, as human rights organizations warned of imminent mass starvation.
The attack on Iran follows a campaign of illegal assassinations targeting all of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as leading Iranian figures, as the US and Israel expand their military onslaught throughout the region. On October 16, Israel murdered Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed by more than 80 Israeli 2,000-pound bombs in Lebanon last month, and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July.
Israel simultaneously continued its ground invasion and daily bombardment of Lebanon Friday, with the Lebanese death toll rising to 2,634.
The so-called defense system will allow Israel to strike Iran without fear of retaliation, experts say.
By Sharon Zhang, Truthout, October 21, 2024
Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system is in place in only a few places around the world. Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system is in place in only a few places around the world. Lockheed Martin
A U.S. weapons system has landed and is “in place” in Israel, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin said on Monday, as the Biden administration beefs up U.S. support of Israel and Israeli forces prepare to attack Iran and continue their bombardments of Lebanon and Gaza.
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, worth between roughly $1 billion to $1.8 billion and made by Lockheed Martin, is an anti-missile system that can intercept ballistic missiles at high altitudes. The powerful weapon, deployed in only a few places around the world, will help bolster Israel’s ability to withstand air attacks after Iran’s missile attack on Israel earlier this month.
Austin said that the THAAD is expected to be operational soon. “We have the ability to put it into operation very quickly and we’re on pace with our expectations,” he said.
The U.S. announced last week that it was sending the THAAD as well as 100 U.S. troops to Israel. This is a significant escalation of the U.S.’s involvement in Israel’s aggression, marking the first time that U.S. troops have been directly deployed to Israel amid its genocide in Gaza and attacks across the Middle East. The U.S. announced last month that it is sending an additional 2,000 to 3,000 troops to the Middle East to bolster the 40,000 troops already stationed in the region.
U.S. officials said that the deployment of THAAD and the troops represent “another visible statement of our commitment” to Israel, per Army Secretary Christine Wormuth.
The deployment comes as a tranche of leaked classified documents reportedly prepared by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, meant to be seen by the “Five Eyes” allies, shows that Israel is preparing to strike Iran. This includes plans to launch ballistic missiles and conduct drone operations.
U.S. officials have said that they are investigating the leak, which initially emerged on Telegram. Officials have reportedly acknowledged that the documents are legitimate, according to The New York Times.
The addition of yet more weapons systems like Israel’s Iron Dome that can intercept missile strikes will give more leeway to Israeli forces to strike other countries in the Middle East without fear of retaliation. These supposed “defensive” weapons, as anti-Zionist advocates have pointed out, make it far easier for Israel to conduct its offensive moves.
Indeed, Haaretz reports that Israel is clearly waiting for the THAAD system to be deployed before it carries out its attack on Israel. Harrison Mann, who resigned from his position as a U.S. Army intelligence officer because of Israel’s genocide, has said that, in fact, the THAAD and troop deployment will only help escalate tensions between Iran and Israel.
“To introduce troops into hostilities, per the 1973 War Powers Act, you either need an authorization from Congress, or there needs to be some urgent and imminent self-defense threat. In this case, the supposed self-defense threat is an Iranian missile attack. But the irony here is the Iranian missile attack is only going to happen if we help Israel strike Iran first,” Mann said to Democracy Now! last week. Join us in defending the truth before it’s too late
As we face a slew of right-wing attacks on democracy, the future of journalism is uncertain. To ensure Truthout remains fearless, tough, and 100 percent independent we need to raise $23,000 in the next 48 hours. Every dollar raised goes directly toward the costs of producing news you can trust.
Please give what you can — because by supporting us with a tax-deductible donation, you’re not just preserving a source of news, you’re helping to safeguard what’s left of our democracy.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license. Sharon Zhang
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.
‘I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.’
Arundhathi Roy accepts the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. She is holding a portrait of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, named Writer of Courage by her. Photo: http://www.englishpen.org
Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.
I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.
My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.
Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.
Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.
When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.
I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:
“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’
“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”
Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.
And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.
To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.
Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.
‘What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?’. Photo: X/@UNRWA
Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.
The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?
What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?
The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.
So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…
I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.
When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’
Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.
I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.
I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?
Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.
‘Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this.’ Photo: Ahmed Abu Hameeda/Wikimedia commons
Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.
Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.
Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.
When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.
But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.
Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.
‘Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams’. Photo: Shome Basu in Dhaka.
The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.
If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.
As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.
“The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.”
As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—
From the river to the sea
Palestine will be Free.
It will.
Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.
That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.Donate
Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things. Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India’s Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron’s activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.In response to India’s testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government’s nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India’s massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’, but declined to accept it.
Smoke billows from the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the southern Lebanese village of Khiam on October 17, 2024, amid the continuing war between Irsael and Hezbollah. (
(Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Having full U.S. government backing, including weapons and political cover to continue the carnage, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands—whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque—and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”
Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.
No matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met—such as not violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid. Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major benefactor, the United States government.
Israel has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.”
The White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades, bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption.
Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
Biden, who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel Government Can Do No Wrong” Lobby in the U.S.—to which he has been indentured for his entire 50-year political career. This includes Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll … and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been assigned there for decades.
Having full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power, with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,” silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic priorities.
That is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both major parties. The power structure—the corporate state—or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”
Here is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65 American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times on Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says no way.
These brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has no interest.
President George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”
Common Dreams is powered by optimists who believe in the power of informed and engaged citizens to ignite and enact change to make the world a better place.
We’re hundreds of thousands strong, but every single supporter makes the difference.
Your contribution supports this bold media model—free, independent, and dedicated to reporting the facts every day. Stand with us in the fight for economic equality, social justice, human rights, and a more sustainable future. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover the issues the corporate media never will.
about:blank
about:blank
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).
By 
Peace and Justice Post 
