Nasir Khan blog

Thursday, July 02, 2026

Iranians believe Israel will restart war before its October elections

Whether the Trump admin is coordinating with Israel remains unclear to Tehran. But suspicions surrounding Marco Rubio run particularly deep.

Trita Parsi, Jul 01, 2026

Will Israel restart the war with Iran before the October elections? This is the consensus view emerging within Iran’s internal national security debate over the past week.

Several factors are driving Tehran to this conclusion. Beyond its deep — and not entirely unwarranted — suspicion of President Donald Trump’s intentions, heightened by Vice President JD Vance’s recent remark that Trump wants to use the MOU to replenish global oil reserves and then “see where the hand is,” two developments stand out: the recent Israeli-Lebanese agreement and its impact on Hezbollah’s military posture over the coming months.

From Tehran’s perspective, the agreement hands Israel a significant advantage in any renewed war with Iran — one it lacked in February. By allowing Israeli forces to remain in parts of southern Lebanon, the deal appears to contravene the MOU while fundamentally reshaping the military balance. Israel’s continued presence in these strategic positions would make it far more difficult for Hezbollah to mount the kind of offensive operations that proved critical during the previous round of fighting.

That matters because, in February and March, the Iranians say they used only about 40 percent of their offensive capabilities against Israel, because Hezbollah carried much of the remaining burden. At the time, pundits in the West were debating why Tehran hit the UAE harder than it did Israel.

Part of it was because of Israel’s much higher pain tolerance compared to the GCC states. Tehran was aiming to reach the most accessible pain threshold to pressure the U.S. to end the war. But part of it was the critical role Hezbollah played in the war, contrary to much of the press coverage at the time. It played a critical role in stretching Israel’s defenses, complicating its targeting decisions, and forcing it to divide resources across multiple fronts.

That role, however, was poorly understood because Israel imposed near-total military censorship during the war — far stricter than the censorship regime in June 2025 — which sharply limited public visibility into Hezbollah’s operations and their impact. As a result, the degree to which Hezbollah shaped the course of the war has been significantly underestimated.

Unlike the MOU, the current Israeli-Lebanese agreement does not require Israel to withdraw from Lebanese territory until Hezbollah has been disarmed. Since that outcome is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future, Israel is poised to retain its positions inside Lebanon, enabling it to renew the war with Iran without facing the same pressure from its northern front that constrained it during the previous conflict.

Netanyahu’s motivations are clear. Beyond his long-standing desire to use American force to subjugate Iran to Israeli domination and achieve a regional balance favourable to Israel, he now also has stark political and personal reasons to restart the war.

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The MOU has come at a steep political cost for Netanyahu. His prospects for reelection in October are weaker than they have been in months. Once seen as the Israeli leader uniquely capable of delivering President Trump, he now confronts the prospect that both the war and the ensuing diplomacy will leave Israel in a strategically weaker position — undermining the very case he has made for his leadership.

And of course, if he loses the elections, he will likely spend the next few years in jail, as he will lose his immunity as Prime Minister and face trial over corruption charges.

Whether the Trump administration is coordinating with Israel on such a strategy remains unclear to Tehran. But suspicions surrounding Secretary of State Marco Rubio run particularly deep, given his role in brokering the Israeli-Lebanese agreement, his support for the war, and his perceived opposition to the MOU.

From Tehran’s perspective, there are three plausible scenarios. The first is that the White House is aware of Israel’s plans and helped broker the Lebanese agreement in part to facilitate them. The second is that Washington is unaware of Netanyahu’s intentions but would nonetheless come to Israel’s defense — and perhaps even join the offensive — once Netanyahu resumes the war. The third is that the administration is caught by surprise, chooses not to restrain Israel, but also refrains from direct military involvement in the conflict.

Tehran does not believe Israel’s advantage in Lebanon will prove decisive. Iranian officials remain confident they can impose severe costs on Israel and deny it its broader strategic objectives. But a renewed war could still achieve Netanyahu’s most immediate aim: killing the MOU. Given his mounting political and legal pressures, Netanyahu may be desperate enough to be willing to challenge Trump directly to ensure precisely that outcome.

The question is, once again, not how Trump will react, but if Trump will prevent Netanyahu from deliberately shaping and limiting Trump’s options. This is the test Trump has repeatedly failed.

This article was republished from Trita Parsi’s substack

Trita Parsi

Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.

The U.S. oligarchy’s crime boss: Trump pocketed $2.2 billion in 2025

Barry Grey, WSWS. ORG, 2 July 2026

President Donald Trump speaks at a news conference, Monday, March 9, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. [AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump released his mandatory financial disclosure for 2025. It showed that he more than tripled his personal income during the first year of his second term, from $622 million in 2024 to at least $2.2 billion last year.

The scale of Trump’s self-enrichment renders the great corruption scandals of American history almost quaint by comparison. The Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s, which stood for a century as the byword for political criminality, centered on roughly $400,000 in bribes—about $8 million in today’s dollars—accepted by Interior Secretary Albert Fall in exchange for leasing naval oil reserves. Fall went to prison. Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in 1973 over kickbacks totaling perhaps $250,000, collected in envelopes of cash from Maryland contractors. By Trumpian standards, small potatoes.

The report provided some indications of the flagrant self-dealing and corruption that enabled the real estate swindler and media huckster-turned-US president to massively expand his fortune and that of his family. By last September, the collective wealth of the Trump family stood at an estimated $10 billion, having nearly doubled since the November 2024 election. Donald Trump Jr.’s wealth went from $50 million to $300 million, and that of Eric Trump rose tenfold to $400 million.

In the same year, labor’s share of the national income fell to its lowest level since records began. In the third quarter of 2025, labor’s share fell to 53.8 percent, down from 70 percent in 1947. These statistics translate in real life into poverty wages, impossibly high rents and living costs, and longer working hours for tens of millions of workers.

An annual income of $2.2 billion is equivalent to the incomes of 37,931 US autoworkers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ estimate of the average autoworker’s wage, based on a 40-hour workweek. An annual income of $2.2 billion computes to $251,000 per hour. At that rate, someone takes in $70 per second, more than twice what a UAW autoworker earns in an hour.

No wonder that at an Oval Office event this week Trump defended his refusal to sign a bill to increase low-income housing, demanding that Congress first pass his plan to disenfranchise millions of working class voters and calling the housing bill a “big yawn.”

In his first term, between 2017 and 2021, Trump broke with the practice of modern presidents who put their financial affairs in blind trusts. He refused to divest from his businesses and placed them in a trust he could still access. He used his Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. as a cash cow, encouraging foreign delegations, lobbyists and Republican officials to spend money that flowed into his personal bank accounts. He granted his daughter Ivanka multiple Chinese trademarks while she served as a White House adviser, at the same time that US-China trade talks were underway.

That, however, pales in comparison to Trump’s second term. He refused to sign the ethics pledge he had taken in his first term, rescinded Biden’s presidential ethics rules, and fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics early in 2025, leaving it without a permanent director.

Trump made the bulk of his 2025 income from his cryptocurrency businesses, which accounted for some $1.4 billion. According to an analysis in the New York Times, his crypto venture World Liberty Financial, which sells a digital currency called $WLFI, took in $799 million last year, compared to $57 million in 2024.

Three days before his second inauguration, Trump helped launch a memecoin, $TRUMP, which has generated another $636 million. He made $77 million from Mar-a-Lago last year, compared to $50 million in 2024, and $122 million from his Trump National Doral golf club, an increase of $11 million. He holds shares in his Trump Media & Technology group worth $875 million. At the end of 2025, Trump had investment assets of at least $857 million, compared to $236 million the prior year.

Trump’s crypto businesses directly benefited from his policy decisions as president. In January 2025, three days before his inauguration, an investment firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, generating $23 million in profits for the Trump family. Soon after, the Trump administration struck a deal for the US to export computer chips that power artificial intelligence to the UAE.

Trump’s memecoin business directly benefited from a February 2025 Securities and Exchange Commission statement notifying the industry that such tokens would no longer be subject to the agency’s oversight, reversing the position of the agency’s chairman during the Biden administration. And Trump signed legislation last July to promote a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins four months after his family-backed firm introduced its own stablecoin.

Last October, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the richest man in crypto, who had pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money laundering laws and served four months in prison. Binance has since become a critical business partner to the Trump family’s own crypto venture.

Crypto, however, is by no means the only area where Trump has used the White House to promote his business ventures and increase his personal wealth. He has licensed the Trump name to properties in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for Trump in 2025.

Last Sunday, the New York Times published an exposé about a multi-billion-dollar deal between the US and Kazakhstan for the development of tungsten mines in the former Soviet republic. The project directly involves the sons of Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Billions in loans from the U.S. Commerce Department and the Export-Import Bank are being allocated to finance a venture that stands to generate untold millions in profits for the two families, as well as other billionaire cronies of the president.

Then there are the millions being made by members of the financial elite from bets in predictive markets on oil prices based on advance notice of White House announcements of bombings and/or peace talks with Iran. In a world dominated by oligarchs and their gangster representatives such as Trump, the lives of countless thousands become the stuff of profiteering from manipulated markets. Investigative reports have documented how Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has used his role in negotiations and Middle East policy to secure massive sums from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies for his private investment vehicles.

This is all in addition to the more mundane corruption of the Trump administration, including no-bid contracts to donors with business before the government for projects such as the White House ballroom and the Reflecting Pool.

Trump is not merely breaking the rules; he is rewriting them so that his enrichment ceases to be legally classifiable as crime. Corruption raised to the level of state policy—the legalization of the loot as it is looted.

These are not the crimes of a single individual. The staggeringly wealthy and parasitic financial oligarchy has installed Trump, a fascistic product of the New York real estate and gambling mafia, as the head of state. Nothing reveals the mores of this new aristocracy more than the Epstein scandal, which implicates the heights of official society and whose cover-up unites Trump, the corporate media and virtually the entire political establishment.

As for the nominal opposition party, the Democrats, they wring their hands and complain but do nothing to stop the plundering or hold the criminals accountable, because they are controlled by the same class of oligarchs and defend their system based on the private ownership of the means of production and production for profit.

This entire class must be expropriated, and the wealth produced by the working class must be used to meet social needs.

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

Palestinians Report Intensified Israeli Military Operations in the Gaza Strip

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Tuesday that at least eight Palestinians were killed over the previous 24 hour period

by Dave DeCamp , Antiwar. com, | June 30, 2026 at 1:30 pm ET | Gaza, Israel

The Israeli military has intensified its military operations across Gaza, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported on Tuesday, citing its correspondents in the Strip, as the IDF continues its constant violations of the US-backed ceasefire deal.

The report said that the ramped-up activity included the large-scale demolition of homes and civilian infrastructure in the eastern and northeastern areas of the southern city of Khan Younis. In the nearby city of Rafah, WAFA reported heavy artillery shelling and gunfire toward Khan Younis.

In Gaza City, the report said that “Israeli forces detonated a booby-trapped robot loaded with a large quantity of explosives, targeting homes in the Tuffah neighborhood in the northeast of the city” and that there was also “heavy gunfire from military vehicles” in the area and “sporadic explosions.”

Mourners attend the funeral of Palestinian woman Diana Abu Daraz and her one-year-old daughter, Sewar, who were killed in an Israeli strike on tents, according to medics, outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 30, 2026. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

The news agency also reported that at least two people were killed by an Israeli airstrike near Khan Younis and multiple people were injured by Israeli attacks in Gaza City. Gaza’s Health Ministry said in its daily update that it recorded the Israeli killing of at least eight Palestinians and the injury of 26.

In recent days, Israeli forces have killed multiple children, including a one-year-old girl who was killed alongside her mother in an airstrike targeting a tent in southern Gaza. Palestinians held a funeral for the child and her mother at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Tuesday.

The escalation in Israeli attacks comes as the IDF has been taking more territory in Gaza, a clear violation of the ceasefire deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month that he ordered the Israeli military to take 70% of Gaza’s territory, up from 60%, and Israeli military officials said last week that the IDF has achieved that goal.

Since the so-called ceasefire deal was signed, the Health Ministry has recorded the Israeli killing of 1,053 Palestinians and the injury of 3,406. “A number of victims are still under the rubble and in the streets, as ambulance and civil defense crews have been unable to reach them so far,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.

Palestinians Are Being Denied Return to West Bank Refugee Camps After Israel Bulldozed Their Homes

In Jenin, Israel is building the first permanent military base in Area A since the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.

ASEEL MAFARJEH, Drop Site Post, 30m June, 2026

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Israeli soldiers deployed in Tulkarm refugee camp in the occupied West Bank look on as displaced Palestinians granted temporary permits retrieve belongings from their destroyed or heavily damaged homes on June 21, 2026. Photo by Aseel Mfarajeh.

JENIN, Occupied West Bank—It took Omar Qalib more than a decade to finish his family’s three-story house in Jouret al-Dahab, a neighborhood in the heart of the Jenin refugee camp. A construction worker, he built it himself, brick by brick. But it was worth it, he thought. The property fell within Area A, a zone within the occupied West Bank where the Palestinian Authority nominally controls both civil and security affairs.

But in January 2025, Qalib was forced from his home, along with tens of thousands of other Palestinians, as Israel launched a large-scale military operation dubbed “Iron Wall” targeting refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams. More than 30,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes over the ensuing months, in the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank in a single operation since the 1967 war.

After invading and occupying the camps in February 2025, the Israeli military campaign flattened entire neighborhoods, turning them into wastelands. Where narrow alleys once ran between tall buildings so close they blocked the light, wide dirt roads now cut through the heart of the camps, carved out by Israeli military bulldozers.

As part of the campaign, the camps have been cordoned off. Just to see what’s left of his home, Qalib needs a permit from the Israeli military. Few Palestinians are able to obtain them. And the permits only grant one-time, temporary access. Two weeks ago, Qalib was one of the lucky few who obtained a permit to visit his destroyed home.

“The house is gone,” said Qalib “My house and my son’s house. A whole life of work, gone.”

Qalib, 56, now shares two rooms with his wife, two adult sons and their families, packed together in a dormitory connected to the Arab American university in the city of Jenin. “I had a whole family in that house,” he said. “Now we are all in two rooms waiting for something we don’t know when will end.”

Every morning Qalib heads out looking for work as a day laborer, the principal breadwinner responsible for rent, food, electricity, water, and transportation costs for an entire household. Those costs have nearly doubled since they were displaced.

Both of Qalib’s sons were shot by Israeli soldiers during the military invasion of the camp. One was left half paralyzed, with damage to his kidney, spleen, and lung, and is unable to work. His other son recovered from his injuries and is able to physically work though he has been able to find a job since they left their home, nearly a year and a half ago.

Recently, some Palestinians have been granted limited access to enter their old neighborhoods, mainly to scavenge in their destroyed or heavily damaged homes for items they left behind. What they described to Drop Site are neighborhoods made unrecognizable: men who spent their lives in these alleys wander in the middle of emptied out dirt roads, looking for a mosque that used to mark the turn, the building that used to anchor their route. The landmarks are gone. Some cannot even locate where their own homes once stood.

The First Permanent Israeli Military Base in Area A Since Oslo

Alongside the large-scale destruction, the Israeli military is engaged in unprecedented construction. In May, the commander of Israel’s Central Command signed an order to seize land in the city of Jenin, near the Jenin refugee camp, and construct a permanent military base, according to documents first revealed by Haaretz. It marked the first time since the Oslo Accords in 1993 that the Israeli military has built a permanent post in Area A.

While the Israeli military has staged regular incursions into cities and towns in Area A for years, despite it technically being under Palestinian civil and security control, the establishment of a permanent Israeli military base represents a major shift. “The Area A designation was the foundational pillar of the concept of Palestinian self-governance,” said Ibrahim Abras, a political analyst and academic. “A permanent military base inside these areas signals a shift in the nature of Israeli control, a gradual transition from managing the conflict through temporary incursions to imposing a long-term field presence that raises serious questions about the future legal and political status of these areas.”

Putting a base in Jenin is “a mechanism for reshaping control over the land,” said Ismat Mansour, a specialist in Israeli affairs. “A permanent base near Jenin gives Israel far greater leverage over the security and political landscape of the entire region.”

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank remain displaced from their homes, with no legal justification offered for blocking their return, according to ACRI, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which has described the situation as a systematic violation of the rights of an entire displaced population.

In late March, the Israeli security cabinet secretly approved 34 settlements across the West Bank, including six of them that form a ring around Jenin. It marked the largest number of settlements and outposts approved by any Israeli government at one time.

“Many of the current settlements began as military positions or outposts before being converted into permanent civilian communities,” said Khalil Tufakji, a settlements expert who has spent decades mapping the relationship between military infrastructure and settlement expansion.

The pattern, said Tufakji, is not new. “Reactivating evacuated outposts in the northern West Bank simultaneously with a permanent military base demands a wider reading about the future of the entire area.”

The establishment and fortification of new Israeli settlements comes in parallel with the all but total restriction of permits for Palestinians to return to their homes. To enter a refugee camp a Palestinian was born in, grew up in, and subsequently displaced from, now requires Israeli military authorization. Palestinians who have managed to obtain a permit describe it as a one-time authorization that comes with no guarantee it will be granted again. The displacement has effectively become permanent.

“When will we go back to our house?”

Um Faris, 42, left Nur Shams camp in January 2025 with her five children, each carrying a piece of home in their hands.

Faris, 17, carried a small bag with the family’s documents. His mother warned him not to lose it no matter what. The younger children each held onto something too: Ahmed, 14, keeps photos of the camp on his phone and spends hours looking at them. Layan, 8, brought a small cloth doll, the last piece of her old room. She goes to sleep every night holding it.

They left a big house with a backyard and now live in a small rented apartment with thin walls on the outskirts of Tulkarm. Before being displaced, her husband worked in construction. The road closures and movement restrictions ended that. Faris was forced to drop out of school to find work; he has stopped talking about finishing school and going to university. His younger siblings also eventually dropped out because they were unable to attend classes as a result of the severe restrictions on movement imposed by the Israeli army.

Um Faris has documents proving ownership of her home. But she does not have the permit to enter the area where it once stood. She’s not sure what is even left of it. Every morning, her youngest child asks the same question: “When will we go back to our house?”

In Fahma, south of Jenin, 35-year-old Ahmed lives in a rented house with his family. He declined to give his last name for fear of Israeli retribution. Six of them share just two rooms, a space half the size of the home they left in the Jenin camp. The family shop that provided part of their household income is gone. Lately rents have been rising, and humanitarian assistance is being reduced. With no stable income, covering rent, food, and other household expenses has become a daily struggle.

Ahmed keeps the key to his old house in his pocket, hoping to return. On one of the rare occasions when he was briefly granted access, Ahmed walked through the alleys he grew up in.

Or, he tried to. “I thought I knew every stone,” he said. “But I felt like a stranger. The streets I had memorized were gone. Buildings that had been fixed points in my memory had disappeared. Entire neighborhoods looked like they had been erased.”

“The continued prevention of thousands of Palestinians from returning to their camps for months creates a new reality on the ground,” said Ashraf al-Akka, a political analyst. “The social and economic fabric begins to break down gradually while physical changes inside the emptied areas continue. The prolonged displacement cannot be separated from broader Israeli policies aimed at reshaping Palestinian geography in the West Bank.”

Worse yet, the periodic orders forcing displacement show no signs of stopping. In Qalandia and other camps across the West Bank, multiple residents told Drop Site that Israeli soldiers used loudspeakers to blare out a chilling warning during raids: “Prepare yourselves. What happened in Jenin and Tulkarm will happen to you.”

This story was reported and produced in collaboration with Egab.

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

‘Response to Antisemitism is Decolonization of Palestine’: Pappé on Zionism and Europe

The Palestine Chronicle, June 27, 2026

Pappe_Jazic2_Keynote_PC — Ilan Pappé addressed the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress. (Photo: The Palestine Chronicle)

By Romana Rubeo

Addressing the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, Ilan Pappé urged Jewish anti-Zionists to challenge Zionism while advancing Palestinian liberation.

‘Universal Voice for Palestine’

DUBLIN – Opening his keynote address at the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Dublin, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé admitted that, after more than four decades of activism, he had often questioned whether a specifically Jewish anti-Zionist movement was necessary at all.

After all, he reflected, the struggle for Palestine should never depend on religious or ethnic identity.

“What we need is a universal voice for Palestine,” Pappé said during his address. “Who cares whether you are Jewish, Muslim or Christian? If you are a human being with even a modicum of decency, how can you remain indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian people?”

Yet, he acknowledged, recent political developments had convinced him that a distinct Jewish anti-Zionist voice remains indispensable—not because Jews bear greater moral responsibility than others, but because Judaism continues to be invoked to justify Israel’s policies and silence criticism of them.

Referring to the appointment of a prominent pro-Israel lobbyist as chief adviser to Britain’s incoming prime minister, Pappé argued that whether such lobbying networks possess the extraordinary influence often attributed to them is almost secondary. What matters politically, he said, is that governments believe they do.

That perception, he argued, continues to shape Western policy, where accusations of antisemitism are routinely weaponized to shield Israel from accountability despite overwhelming evidence documenting occupation, apartheid and genocide.

“This is abnormal,” Pappé said. “It is unjust. It is immoral.”

For that reason, he argued, Jewish anti-Zionists carry a particular responsibility to dismantle the idea that Zionism represents Judaism itself.

“If we fail to challenge the idea that Zionism represents the only authentic expression of Judaism,” he warned, “we should not be surprised if others eventually conclude that this is what Judaism itself represents.”

Solidarity Begins by Listening

Although much of his address focused on challenging dominant political narratives, Pappé repeatedly returned to a simpler principle: solidarity begins by listening to Palestinians rather than speaking for them.

“This Congress is devoted to action,” he said, referring to its theme, From Words to Action. “Solidarity does not consist of telling Palestinians what they need.”

Instead, he argued, Palestinians themselves must define the priorities of the international solidarity movement.

“Our role is to listen,” Pappé said, expressing concern that even within progressive circles, authentic Palestinian voices are still too often marginalized by what he described as lingering colonial—and sometimes Islamophobic—assumptions.

“The stage belongs to Palestinians,” he insisted, “not only to describe their suffering—but to articulate their political vision.”

That responsibility, he argued, extends beyond immediate solidarity work.

Jewish anti-Zionists must also continue dismantling two narratives that remain deeply entrenched across Western societies: the claim that Zionism is the natural expression of Judaism, and the assertion that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic.

Both, he said, require sustained historical education rather than political slogans.

“This requires patience,” Pappé observed. “It requires education. It requires historical work.”

Those conversations, he argued, must move beyond audiences already sympathetic to Palestine and reach ordinary people whose understanding of the conflict has largely been shaped by decades of political mythmaking.

Europe’s Unfinished Reckoning

Moving beyond the present, Pappé devoted much of his address to what he described as Europe’s unresolved historical responsibility for Palestine.

The international order established after the Second World War, he argued, presented itself as universal through institutions such as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the people designing that order were almost exclusively representatives of colonial powers, while the colonized world remained absent from the conversation.

That omission, he suggested, became decisive when Europe confronted what it called “the Jewish question.”

“When those same leaders confronted what they called ‘the Jewish question,’ almost none of them proposed the obvious solution,” Pappé said. “Almost nobody said: ‘Let us invite Europe’s Jews back into Europe.’”

Instead, he argued, European governments embraced Zionist colonization in Palestine, transferring the consequences of centuries of European antisemitism onto a people who bore no responsibility for those crimes.

Germany, he said, occupies a central place in that history.

Contrary to the dominant postwar narrative, Pappé argued that Germany “was not denazified” in any meaningful political sense. Instead, he said, the country’s relationship with Israel became a substitute for confronting the deeper structures that had produced Nazism and antisemitism.

According to Pappé, postwar reparations did more than compensate Holocaust survivors. They also helped build Israel’s military establishment, while subsequent German political and military support—including assistance that strengthened Israel’s strategic capabilities—cemented a relationship that continues to shape European policy today.

“This historical relationship still shapes contemporary politics,” he said, arguing that Europe has “never fully reckoned with the consequences of exporting its own historical crimes onto the Palestinian people.”

For Pappé, acknowledging that history does not mean imagining that Israeli Jews should somehow return to Europe. Rather, it requires Europe to recognize that Palestinians paid the price for crimes committed on another continent.

Recovering another forgotten history, he continued, is equally important.

Long before Zionism, Palestine formed part of a broader Arab world in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together despite inevitable tensions and inequalities.

“There was a Jewish presence in Palestine,” Pappé recalled. “There were Arab Jews.” Almost nobody, he said, believed that the future required an exclusively Jewish state.

That history of coexistence was fractured by colonialism and Zionism, yet it remains one of the strongest challenges to the ideological foundations of the Israeli state.

“Recovering the history of Arab Jewish life,” he argued, “is one of the most powerful ways of dismantling Zionist mythology,” because it demonstrates that coexistence existed before colonialism intervened—and therefore can exist again.

Returning to the central theme of his address, Pappé rejected the idea that nationalism or ethnic supremacy could ever constitute a meaningful response to centuries of antisemitism.

“The greatest response to antisemitism today,” he concluded, “is the decolonization of Palestine.”

That, he argued, requires dismantling Zionism “as a colonial political project” while allowing Palestinians to live as free people “on their own land.”

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.

Monday, June 29, 2026

‘We Should Go to Court’: Khanna Says Latest US Bombings of Iran a ‘Blatant Violation’ by Trump

Ro Khanna 1/15/26

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., talks with reporter after the last votes of the week outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, January 15, 2026.

(Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“Trump must stop this war now—or we will take him to court to compel him to do so.”

Jon Queally

Jun 28, 2026

Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna on Sunday reiterated his position that new bombings of Iran by the US military over the weekend are a direct violation of a War Powers Resolution passed by Congress earlier this month and said legal action was in the works to challenge the president’s ability to carry on with the unprovoked war he first launched alongside Israel in February.

“These strikes are a blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution that we passed,” Khanna said in a social media post Saturday after Trump acknowledged strikes on numerous Iranian targets. “Trump must stop this war now—or we will take him to court to compel him to do so.”

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In a Saturday statement on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the US had “struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN!”

“It is very possible that they will never learn!” the president exclaimed. “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

The latest direct exchange of hostilities—that began with US bombings of Iranian targets Friday and included Iran targeting US allies in Bahrain and Kuwait on Sunday—come over lingering disagreements about how vessels will or will not pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

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“Congress passed the first War Powers Resolution in history, legally compeling an end to war on Iran,” the anti-war group Just Foreign Policy said following Friday’s strikes. “This means Trump’s strikes today are an unprecedented Constitutional violation **Trump must be taken to court** to honor the American people’s demand that we exit this war — NOW.”

Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that “interference in [the Strait], any attempt to establish new or separate arrangements from those currently being carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran, will only lead to further complications, delay the reopening of the strait of Hormuz, and increase the level of tension.”

Araghchi called for a regional agreement to settle the issue of passage through the Strait, but indicated the US should have no role in determining the outcome of the settlement. On Saturday, the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) said that the US—“whose very nature is characterized by breaking commitments and violating agreements”—was guilty of firing on coastal targets but that such attacks would not deter the Iranian military from exerting control over the Strait.

“Henceforth,” said the IRGC, “vessels found to be in violation will be dealt with more firmly than before.”

On June 23, a 50-48 vote in the Senate saw a war powers resolution pass the upper chamber after the House also passed a similar resolution on June 3 to bring an end to the war started by the US and Israel on February 28. But as Khanna explained Sunday, speaking with journalist David Sirota, these votes have not been enough to curb the president’s actions.

NEW: Congress just passed resolutions to block Trump from continuing the Iran War. The resolutions carry the force of law under the text of the 1973 War Powers Act. Now, @RoKhanna tells me he is working to organize lawmakers to bring an historic court case to enforce the law. pic.twitter.com/IBH7dbKcxG
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 28, 2026

Asked by Sirota what he would be doing to compel Trump to adhere to the congressional opposition to Trump’s ongoing aggression against Iran, Khanna said, “we should go to court.”

Noting that former Republican Congressman Tom Campbell, back in 1999, had taken former President Bill Clinton to court for violating a War Powers Resolution during the US-backed NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Khanna said he is preparing to follow a similar course.

“This is something that we should try to enforce,” Khanna said. “And I’m working with my colleagues to see how we can get a group to take this case to the courts.”

Sunday, June 28, 2026

No ‘Total Victory’: Hezbollah, Iran are Defeating ‘Greater Israel’ Project Once and for All

The Palestine Chronicle, June 26, 2026

Hezbollah_Israel_PC — Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Naim Qassem and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

By Robert Inlakesh

The Iranian-led Axis of Resistance has used its joint power in order to successfully confront all the challenges before it.

The goal of the war on Iran was to pave the way towards “Greater Israel” and total US-Israeli dominance through achieving regime change, yet the outcome of the war may have just buried this project forever.

Hezbollah’s unprecedented comeback, combined with Iran’s impressive performance, has shifted the balance of power so dramatically that the Israelis are being cut back to size.

From the outset of the attack on Iran, it was clear that the goal was to overthrow the Islamic Republic and, by default, achieve the “total victory” across “seven fronts” that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pledging to reach for over two years. Very quickly, Iran’s military response, followed by its carefully calibrated strategy involving its regional allies, threw the goal of regime change into the meat grinder.

In a recent opinion poll conducted by the Israeli public, roughly 92% of the population said they believe that Iran has emerged as the winner of the war. When we compare this to the various opinion polls conducted following Israel’s initial 12-day war in June of 2025, the outcome couldn’t be more stark. The majority of Israelis not only supported the war on Iran last year, but were also satisfied with the way it was managed.

This time around, Iran is using the threat of continued hostilities and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as its weapons to secure a victory that has become a political nightmare for the Israelis.

Under the current Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the US has ceded to Iran on countless points– Tehran will rake in billions in fees collected from those transiting the Strait of Hormuz, it will get its frozen assets, have all the sanctions lifted, and even get access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund.

If these pledges were to be met by the United States, then Iran would be able to thrive economically for the first time since its Islamic Revolution in 1979. However, the economic benefits are not even the biggest achievement.

While the Israelis managed to ride on the wave of delusion, in using their blows dealt to Hezbollah back in 2024 as evidence of a historic victory against the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance, this narrative has now collapsed. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has managed over the past months to effectively deter Israeli actions inside Lebanon through the threat of force. Even if the Israelis seek to challenge this, it has for now successfully achieved a deterrence equation whereby Tel Aviv fears bombing the Lebanese Capital.

On the ground, Hezbollah has managed to deal devastating blows to the Israeli military, dragging it deep into southern Lebanon and using asymmetric warfare tactics that have left the Israeli public disgusted with its leadership and led to a loss of confidence in the army’s ability to defend the northern settlements.

A reality that has now started to set in, as Israel repeatedly fails to capture areas such as the Ali Al-Taher Hills, instead resorting to figuring out a method that will allow them to extract the charred remains of their soldiers, trapped inside destroyed tanks that still remain inside Hezbollah-controlled territory.

The Iranian-led Axis of Resistance has used its joint power in order to successfully confront all the challenges before it. This includes the coordination with Yemen’s Ansarallah to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait to Israeli shipping, even threatening to blockade it completely in the event of the war escalating once again.

Arab Gulf States have also taken notice of the changes in regional power dynamics, with the neighboring nations attempting to repair their relations with Tehran. This even appears to be including the UAE, which was actively bombing Iran only months ago. Now the model of Oman, which remained somewhat neutral – some may say they leaned towards Iran – during the conflict, appears to be the most favorable one amongst the GCC States.

Israel had hoped that the war would collapse, or at the very least severely weaken the Iranian State, which would lead to all of the Arab States lining up to normalize and build closer relations with it. Instead, this war appears to be deterring future normalisation efforts.

The Greater Israel Project, of expanding the borders of the Israeli regime, depended upon the collapse of the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance, or at the very least its weakening. The only real option that could help Israel survive today is securing a Two-State Solution, but even that could lead to internal chaos because of how radicalized Israeli society has become.

The Two-State Solution is the pro-Israel outcome. The only other option is that they continue to fight endless wars they cannot win, until they reach the point of total collapse, whether that be at the hands of resistance forces or their own public. Any sane nation would see the writing on the wall and embrace diplomacy, but we are not dealing with a sane nation.

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.