His deals and promises are more akin to dew drops on a fig leaf on a windy autumn morning!
When you look at the leaf again a few minutes later, the dew drops are no longer visible!
So are his agreements and promises to Iran’s government. What he says vanishes in the hazy air of Washington, and something else appears in the sky of Iran.
He never blames himself for his actions and wars. But he has a short and easy way to follow: He lays all the blame on Iran.
–Nasir Khan
MEM, August 10, 2026 at 11:50 am
![Israeli settlers, joined by far-right ministers and lawmakers, march from the Yad Mordehay area in southern Israel toward the Gaza border, calling for the establishment of new Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by Israeli attacks in Yad Mordechai, located 10 km south of Ashkelon, Israel, on July 19, 2026. [Mostafa Alkharouf - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/AA-20260720-42018276-42018262-ISRAELI_SETTLERS_MARCH_TOWARD_GAZA_BORDER_DEMANDING_ESTABLISHMENT_OF_NEW_SETTLEMENTS-1.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
Israeli settlers, joined by far-right ministers and lawmakers, march from the Yad Mordehay area in southern Israel toward the Gaza border, calling for the establishment of new Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by Israeli attacks in Yad Mordechai, located 10 km south of Ashkelon, Israel, on July 19, 2026. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency]
Products linked to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories continue to enter European markets, raising questions about how they are exported, labeled and distributed and whether existing European rules are effectively preventing settlement-linked trade.
A June 2026 report by the Global Echo Litigation Center, Importing Occupation, has drawn fresh attention to these supply chains.
It says that goods made in Israeli illegal settlements have entered European markets through systems that hide their actual place of origin.
Here is how the system works.
How widespread is the trade?
The report focuses on agricultural exports, including dates, citrus fruits, herbs, fruit and vegetables, which previous research has identified as among the most common settlement products reaching Europe.
To illustrate how the trade operates, Global Echo examined the supply chains of three major Israeli exporters: Hadiklaim, Mehadrin Ltd. and Yonatan Packing and Marketing.
It traced products from illegal settlement farms through packing facilities and Israeli ports before they entered European markets.
Because neither Israel nor the European Union publishes comprehensive data on settlement exports, the true scale of the trade has remained unclear for years.
The report says it analyzed more than 30,000 export documents accompanying more than 6,800 agricultural shipments between October 2017 and February 2026. Of the 5,900 shipments destined for Europe, 17.2% contained settlement products. For the EU specifically, the figure was 19.2%
The report says that farm products from Israeli settlements are not unusual or occasional, but are regularly part of Israel’s agricultural exports to Europe.
READ: Israel orders uprooting of trees on 316 dunums in West Bank for settlement expansion
How do settlement products enter Europe?
According to the report, exporters use what it calls a “supply chain of obfuscation” — a system designed to hide the fact that products come from Israeli settlements and make their actual origin harder to identify.
The report describes three main methods.
The first is what it calls “hiding in plain sight.” In this method, exporters may include the actual settlement location, including its postal code, but still list Israel as the country of origin, obscuring the fact that the goods were produced in a settlement.
The report says European customs authorities, rather than Israeli exporters, are responsible for checking whether a postal code belongs to a settlement. It argues that this creates gaps that allow settlement produce to enter European markets without being identified as such.
The second method involves what the report calls “sham addresses.” Exporters use addresses inside Israel instead of the actual production site, making settlement produce appear to have originated in Israel.
READ: Israeli dates allegedly being sold in European market under different labels
The third method is “mingling.”
Illegal settlement produce is mixed with goods grown inside Israel at shared packing or storage facilities before export. Once combined, the shipment carries Israeli origin documents, making it difficult for importers and customs officials to identify which products came from settlements.
What steps have European countries taken?
European countries have taken different approaches toward products originating from Israeli settlements, ranging from national import bans to calls for stronger EU-wide restrictions.
At the European Union level, there is still no bloc-wide ban on imports from Israeli settlements. But the issue has moved closer to EU-level action. In July, the European Commission presented member states with options including a full or partial import ban, prohibitive tariffs and an import-licensing system. EU foreign ministers discussed the proposals on July 13, with a full ban receiving the most support, but no agreement was reached and further work was ordered.
The Netherlands has adopted a national ban on the import, purchase and sale of goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The measure also prohibits circumvention and is due to take effect on Sept. 22, 2026.
READ: Netherlands to ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements starting in September
Ireland has also advanced legislation to prohibit imports of goods originating in Israeli settlements. The government approved the Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2026 in May, and the bill subsequently passed through the Irish parliament in July. Once enacted and commenced, importing settlement goods will be an offence.
Spain has already banned the import of products originating in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory. Belgium has also approved a ban on imports from Israeli settlements, while supporting stronger EU-wide action.
France and Sweden have pushed for a common European approach rather than separate national measures. In an April 2026 letter to the European Commission, France and Sweden called for additional measures targeting settlement products, including tariffs and restrictions through export-licensing schemes.
Why does the system continue to function?
Global Echo argues that responsibility is divided between Israeli exporters and European authorities.
Researchers say they identified hundreds of origin certificates that appeared to relate to settlement products while claiming preferential treatment available under the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
The report also questions the validity of plant health certificates and organic certifications issued for products originating in occupied territory, arguing they may not comply with EU legal requirements.
The report argues that the current system places the burden of identifying settlement postal codes on European authorities rather than Israeli exporters, creating opportunities for settlement products to avoid detection.
Key federal officials attended the renaming ceremony for Joint Base Lindsey Graham in South Carolina on August 10, 2026.
(Photo by DOW Rapid Response/X.com)
Jessica Corbet, Common Dreams, Aug 10, 2026
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “can’t persuade Republicans to back his big budget,” but that didn’t stop him from pushing the $1.5 trillion proposal during a Monday event to rename Joint Base Charleston after the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.
When Graham, who served in the Air Force, unexpectedly died last month, critics remembered the South Carolina Republican as someone who “never met a war he didn’t want to send your kids to,” as well as “a bloodthirsty bastard who cheered the killing of Muslims and sold his soul to the fascists.”
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On Monday, Hegseth—who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq—fondly recalled meeting with Graham while part of the group Vets for Freedom. Joined at the base by the senator’s replacement, his sister Darline Graham, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is from South Carolina, the Pentagon chief declared that “it falls to us to complete the work that Lindsey Graham began and advocated for for decades.”
“As we gather here today, the War Department is seeking a historic, generational investment of $1.5 trillion for America’s warriors, and Lindsey himself said to me, in his office, ‘This is the best military budget I’ve seen since I’ve been in Congress,’” Hegseth claimed, using President Donald Trump’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.
“This department pays tribute to Lindsey Graham in the naming of this base, but there could be no greater tribute than for Congress to give and invest in our warriors for the full $1.5 trillion,” he added.
The GOP narrowly controls both chambers of Congress, but as Politico reported just hours before the event, “Hegseth hasn’t persuaded Republicans to steamroll Democrats and advance the record-breaking plan, despite regularly trekking to the Hill in recent weeks and hobnobbing with lawmakers. Instead, an increasingly vocal group of GOP lawmakers argue the administration hasn’t explained why Republicans should burn valuable political capital in pursuit of Trump’s vision—especially with the midterms just months away.”
“Several top Republicans are skeptical about the Trump administration’s two-track approach to clinching $1.5 trillion. This relies on the GOP using the partisan reconciliation process—which allows the majority to bypass Democrats entirely—to provide $350 billion, the bulk of the increase,” the outlet detailed. The Republican majority “has—mostly—had Hegseth’s back” since the battle to confirm him, despite widely condemned bombings of boats allegedly trafficking drugs on the high seas and the ongoing war on Iran.
Hegseth on Monday shared some supposed details from his last meeting with Graham, who chaired the Senate Budget Committee.
“Mr. Secretary, what do you need for a reconciliation?” Graham said, according to Hegseth. “I said: ‘Well, in total, sir, we’re going to need $350 billion for our military. That’s what we believe gets us to $1.5 trillion—$115 [billion] in the base budget, $350 [billion] in reconciliation, and we’ll be ready.’”
“He looked at me and said, ‘How’s $355 [billion] sound to you?’ He wanted to give even more than $350 [billion],” Hegseth continued. “I saw firsthand as a young first lieutenant, as a captain in a combat zone, and as a secretary, the unwavering commitment of Lindsey Graham.”
Hegseth’s recounting of their meeting isn’t the first time Graham’s pro-war ideology has been highlighted since he died. As Common Dreams reported late last month, footage filmed for a documentary that was in the works shows the then-senator joyfully reacting to Trump’s Iran War. He said: “I almost cried. I mean, like, how long have we been pushing this?”
Responding to the release of that footage, Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, said that “the warmonger got his wish and the result has been a catastrophe.”
Our new book tracks the growth over nearly eight decades, of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in US history
Ian Lustick and Eli Clifton, The Guardian, Sun 2 Aug 2026
In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped.
On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president’s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support the establishment of a Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. On the other were his top foreign policy and national security officials, led by the secretary of state, George C Marshall. Their unanimous recommendation was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, which they believed would trigger war in the Middle East and endanger the future of US relations with the Arab and Muslim world.
With the exception perhaps of George Washington, no diplomatic or military leader in American history had a reputation for patriotic virtue and skilled devotion to duty comparable to that of Marshall. Truman was in awe of the secretary of state, who, as chief of staff of the US armed forces, had been hailed by Winston Churchill as “the true organizer of victory” in the second world war. After the war, it had been Marshall who launched the plan named after him to rebuild Europe.
In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly but steadily against the Zionist movement’s proposals to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. He was concerned that American support would open opportunities for the Soviet Union to exploit Arab anger, put Middle Eastern oil supplies at risk in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and require the deployment of unavailable American troops to prevent bloodshed and instability in Palestine. These were, indeed, the strongly held views of virtually all of Truman’s most important military and foreign policy advisers.
Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the [Israel] lobby used enormous resources … to punish or reward politicians
Truman was personally and deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi “Final Solution”, but also irritated by and at times furious with the constant hectoring to which he was subjected by campaigners for recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine, including the World Zionist Organization and a host of other Jewish delegations, friends and politicians. Despite his personal exasperation, he could not ignore them. Coming in an election year that would pit him against Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, pressures from the Zionist lobby forced him into an excruciating and embarrassing position.
With Palestine engulfed by civil war, Arab states threatening to invade and the last British soldiers about to leave the country, Truman called a meeting of his top advisers on 12 May 1948. According to Marshall’s own account of the meeting, he warned Truman against adopting the policy strongly advanced by Clark Clifford, his main political adviser, to recognize the state of Israel before it was established.
Such a move, according to Marshall, would be a “transparent dodge to win a few votes”, he said, leaving the “great dignity of the office of the President … seriously diminished”. Marshall declared he would not personally be able to vote for Truman should he bow to political pressure on the issue. A shaken Truman closed the meeting by saying he agreed with Marshall.
However, within two days, exquisitely sensitive to the tenuousness of his hold on the presidency and the power of Zionist sympathizers to throw New York’s electoral votes to the Republicans, he ordered that the US recognize Israel.
Today, the influence of the groups loosely known as the Israel lobby has only become more powerful. Truman’s bind – caught between his sense of the national interest and the domestic political price of defying a powerful lobby – was something that, in the decades to come, president after president would experience.
To fast forward: Donald Trump’s decision to go to war on Iran earlier this year came after a sustained campaign by Israel to convince the US to join the disastrous operation. It also came in defiance of several of his top advisers, as well as the 45% of Republicans who hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That decision may be most quickly explained as yet another example of the erratic policymaking that define Trump’s two terms as president. But a closer examination of the experience of several of his predecessors reveals that this presidential decision is more the rule than the exception.
The fact is that from Truman to Trump, most American presidents have caved to the demands of Israel and its advocates. Driven by the fear of domestic political defeats, presidents have regularly rejected or abandoned foreign policies that both they and their most senior advisers believed were in the best interests of the US and at the expense of making meaningful progress in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Our new book, Israel’s Lobby, tracks the growth over decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in American history. Composed of a panoply of organizations, groups and individuals who advocate American policies that explicitly favor the interests of Israel, the lobby was nurtured – and has been encouraged and guided – by Israeli governments. Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the lobby used enormous resources and concentrated attention to punish or reward politicians at every level depending on their willingness to follow lobby instructions.
Over 20 years after the Truman episode, for example, President Gerald Ford launched what he referred to as a “reassessment” of US policy in the Middle East. The initiative had been advanced by Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as a way to escape from two years of embarrassing failures to move toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement. Both Ford and Kissinger had become intensely dissatisfied with Israeli stonewalling.
The reassessment was conducted by the committee of “Wise Men” convened by Kissinger: former government officials who had served as pillars of the postwar US foreign policy establishment. The unanimous recommendation of the committee was pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to achieve a comprehensive peace, in cooperation with the Soviet Union.
Clear indications that Ford intended to accept this recommendation triggered a powerful mobilization by leading Israel lobby organizations, such as the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). The lobby’s decisive achievement was a letter drafted by Aipac and delivered to Ford demanding that the president “make it clear … that the United States, acting in its own national interests, stands firmly with Israel in the search for peace in future negotiations”, signed by 76 senators.
Ford was “mad as hell” at what he believed to be an Israeli campaign to use the lobby to obstruct diplomacy. But he was cowed. To protect his chances for election the following year, Ford rejected the unanimous recommendation from the “Wise Men”, returning instead to the step-by-step process that had so infuriated him, a process of essentially buying slices of the Sinai Peninsula – seized from Egypt in 1967 – from Israel with increasing amounts of aid and then returning them to Egypt. Ford and Kissinger also vastly increased the scale and scope of US support for Israel.
That included a sweeping new collection of US political, economic, military and diplomatic commitments made in a US-Israeli Memorandum of Agreement that, along with secret annexes, was signed on 1 September 1975. Aides to Kissinger described the guarantees and concessions made to Israel in these negotiations as “mind-boggling” and “simply incredible”. In his memoir, Ford wrote bitterly about the Aipac letter signed by three-quarters of the Senate that had ruined his diplomatic plans and cast a pall on his election campaign.
Indeed, Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter. The lobby hoped Carter, who won 71% of the Jewish vote, would abandon aspirations for a comprehensive Middle East peace, but he was quick to disappoint. The president set his sights on a peace treaty resolving the core issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With high poll numbers and an American public that seemed ready for a commonsense, problem-solving president, Carter voiced his belief in March 1977 in the need for a “Palestinian homeland” as a key feature of the Middle East peace he wished to achieve.
The pro-Israel lobby immediately mobilized against Carter’s peace initiative. In a closely held 50-page memorandum for the president in early June, Carter’s senior adviser on domestic political affairs warned him that he would suffer serious consequences, including risks of failing to receive the renomination of his party, as a result of lobby opposition to his public consideration of a Palestinian homeland. Undeterred, Carter offered direct criticism of what he described in an Oval Office meeting as the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s increasingly inflexible positions. His differences with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in May 1977, were even sharper. Meanwhile Carter began intensive communications with Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian leaders.
In October 1977, the US secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, issued a joint communique with Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, committing the superpowers to achieving “as soon as possible a just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict”. Though fully expecting opposition to the president’s Middle East policy, the administration was stunned by the nearly apoplectic reaction to the US-Soviet statement by both the Israeli government and the lobby. Profoundly concerned with the political damage, Carter requested a meeting with the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, in New York. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, who was present at the meeting, “Dayan in effect blackmailed the President by saying that unless he had assurances that we would oppose an independent West Bank and that we would give them economic and military aid, he would have to indicate our unwillingness in his public statements here in the United States … ‘I can go,’ said Dayan, ‘to the American Jews.’” Faced with this threat, Carter surrendered.
The next day, Vance and Dayan issued a joint statement summarizing a US-Israeli “working paper” prepared in the early hours of the morning. The statement affirmed negotiations would be dramatically scaled back and would not frame a Palestinian homeland as a central issue. The end result was a celebrated “separate peace” between Israel and Egypt that earned Carter, Begin and Sadat Nobel peace prizes, but also led to the isolation of Egypt in the Arab world and the assassination of Sadat. It also set the stage for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and settlement projects that resulted in Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
It is likely, 13 years later, that President George HW Bush felt just as Carter must have felt when, faced with the Israel lobby’s ferocious opposition to his Arab-Israeli peace initiatives, he made public his frustration with its influence. In a failed effort to boost the prospects for the upcoming Madrid peace conference, Bush suspended US loan guarantees amounting to what Israel was spending on housing in occupied territories and faced ferocious opposition from the Israel lobby for doing so. In a press conference he described his exasperation.
“We’re up against very strong and effective, sometimes, groups that go up to [Capitol Hill]” Bush said. “I heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.”
The lobby’s ability to thwart presidential peace initiatives was on particularly powerful display again during the Obama administration. No president before him had entered the White House with such detailed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, such a record of personal engagement with both Jews and Palestinians, and such a sustained commitment to closer American relations with Arabs and Muslims. Fully embracing a “two-state solution” to the problem, he launched a high-profile peace initiative to be jumpstarted by a full-scale Israeli freeze on West Bank settlements.
But a storm of outrage in Israel and among leaders of Israel’s lobby in the United States, and the public feud that erupted between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, proved more costly to the former than the latter. Obama quickly reversed course, in effect replacing his peace process envoy George Mitchell, who was closely identified as friendly to the Palestinians, with Dennis Ross, a lobby insider, whose advice to ditch the effort altogether the president quickly implemented. Instead of pressing Israel to stop settlements, Obama made a personal call to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, threatening to pull $450m in American aid to the Palestinians if Abbas did not withdraw an anti-settlement resolution put forward at the UN security council. In Obama’s address to the United Nations, general assembly, in the first year of his second term, he shifted dramatically from language used in his previous UN speeches. Instead of criticizing Israeli settlements and pressing for a two-state solution, he identified himself with Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism, opposed any UN action contrary to Israel’s insistence on direct negotiations between the parties, and condemned challenges to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.
The reason for Obama’s dramatic retreat is easily inferable from his memoir, A Promised Land, in which he complains about Aipac’s ability to cow American politicians into obeisance by invoking fears of being labelled antisemitic, and emphasized his own particular vulnerability to such threats as “a Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan”.
In the wake of the genocide, the politics of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with passion to Israeli onslaughts
More recently, in Joe Biden, the Israel lobby found a president who genuinely believed the Jewish state deserved the “special relationship” with the US. The firmness of that commitment was put to the test by Israel’s response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Socialized into accepting the lobby’s mantra that any “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem would encourage Arab intransigence, and remembering the political punishment Obama received for showing “tough love” to the Israelis, Biden, quashed all recommendations from his top advisers to do something meaningful to stop the Israeli onslaught on Gazan Palestinians. When he did make limited complaints about excessive civilian casualties and implemented minor delays in American resupply of Israeli armaments, the Republican Jewish Coalition responded by slamming the administration for inserting daylight into the US-Israel relationship, while Aipac sent a detailed memorandum to members of Congress defending Israeli actions as limited, necessary and designed to reduce civilian casualties.
The experience of these administrations demonstrates the wisdom and extraordinary insight of America’s first president, George Washington. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned that the American system of government could all too easily be exploited by a group with a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country. In a system designed to rely on the mobilization of countervailing power to limit the effects of factions driven by self-interest or very particular points of view, Washington argued that since any faction committed to the interests of another country would not naturally find its influence checked by effective domestic opposition, it would therefore drive the United States into exaggerated and dangerous commitments abroad and implicate it in quarrels and wars contrary to the country’s interests.
In the wake of the genocide, the politics of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with passion to Israeli onslaughts in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. Biden and Kamala Harris paid heavy costs for knuckling to Israel and its lobby. Nearly a third of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Harris in 2024 said that ending Israel’s violence in Gaza was the top issue influencing their voting decisions. Across both parties, support for Israel has plummeted; 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, and a record number of Israel critics are winning congressional primaries.
But these losses have not deterred Israel or its lobby from working to reverse Trump’s 2024 campaign promises to avoid wars in the Middle East, to pursue even closer relations between the US and Israeli militaries, and to spend millions to thwart the rise of critics of the country.
To be sure, American supporters of Israel and its governments have every right to express their opinions and work to shape public policy, and the lobby is by no means the only vehicle for moneyed interests that warp American democracy. Moreover, American presidents have free will: the George W Bush administration was run by many who were in perfect ideological alignment with the Israeli right. An incompetent and gullible Trump is plainly responsible for yielding to Israeli pressure and dragging the US into the latest war.
But unless other groups are able to act freely with other interests in mind – and without the threat of antisemitism accusations – US policy in the Middle East will remain dangerously distorted. Both to secure and advance American interests abroad and to protect American freedoms at home, Americans must unite to prevent any foreign power from enjoying the influence over policy and public debate that Israel has exercised, both directly and through the faction operating on its behalf.
Consortium News, August 10, 2026
Those who challenge and protest U.S. policies are not foreign-paid terrorists; Rubio and other Trump appointees are using “McCarthy” tactics to stop dissent, says Ann Wright.
Downtown Minneapolis ICE-out demonstration on Jan. 23 following ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ fatal shooting of civilian Renée Good. (Lorie Shaull /Flickr/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
By Ann Wright
Thin-skinned and heavy-handed, the Trump administration apparently feels like it is being singled out by those who dissent from its policies. As a result, Trump appointees are taking drastic “McCarthy” tactics to stop dissent.
In less than one month, alleging that dissent and protests are part of attempts of other governments “to overthrow the government of the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sponsored two major initiatives to frighten those who oppose the Trump administration’s policies.
The first salvo was orchestrating a conference with 60 countries participating over “Threats From Left-Wing Terrorists.” The second was the report on Cuba that alleged virtually every group that has ever visited Cuba is paid by the Cuban government.
If You Are Not Outraged, You Aren’t Watching
These allegations of paid protest and travelling on the dime of another country are unfounded, untrue, and fly in the face of the history of protests in the U.S. and travel by U.S. citizens to see the effects of U.S. polices on other countries.
President Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy, including the disastrous attacks on Iran as a favor to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli war machine; attacks domestically cutting health and education; horrific treatment of migrants; daily outlandish statements on just about every subject; and disregard for facts in virtually every issue all provide good reasons for protests by outraged U.S. citizens.
I have not been paid by any country to protest U.S. policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid.
No one needs to be paid to be outraged!!!
Dissent Is Not Illegal, Nor Paid by Other Countries
Sen. Joe McCarthy, center, confers with Roy Cohn, chief counsel for House Un-American Activities Committee, Aug. 23, 1953. (Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons)
In particular, Secretary of State and National Security adviser Marco Rubio, who has authored the latest “McCarthy” report to quell opposition to illegal, immoral policies of his department and the Trump administration in general, seems to have lost his grasp on the history of dissent in the U.S.
From his 15 years in the U.S. Senate, he should remember that many of each administration’s domestic and international policies have been lawfully and non-violently protested by U.S. citizens in the U.S. Congress.
Having been a part of many protests since I resigned from the State Department in March 2003 in opposition to a war policy, President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, I know that these protests are NOT a part of attempts of other governments to “overthrow the government of the United States,” but are legitimate shows of concern about specific policies.
Rubio’s allegations of other countries’ influence in these protests are unfounded and untrue.
I was not paid by a foreign government to resign. I resigned because I felt the war on Iraq was illegal, immoral, and a dangerous action jeopardizing the national security of the United States.
I have not been paid by any country to protest U.S. policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid. Protest is a legitimate, time-consuming act of outrage about a policy that people use to bring attention to the policy, and hopefully effect change in the policy.
Rubio: Blame the Left, Ignore Right’s Violent Attack
The first attack against legitimate protest came in the U.S. Department of State sponsored conference on “Far-Left Terrorism” held in Washington, D,C,. in July, where Rubio and White House pit bull Stephen Miller harangued the representatives of 66 nations about terrorists from the left wanting to overthrow the U.S. government.
In his opening statement Rubio railed:
“This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Miller called left-wing extremism a growing threat aimed at “the overthrow of our system and form of government” that officials previously failed to sufficiently address. Miller railed:
“We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.”
A White House press release stated,
“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
Of course, neither Rubio nor Miller mentioned President Trump’s pardon of the over 1,500 persons who did try to violently overthrow the United States electoral process on Jan. 6, 2021 as they attacked the Capitol police and broke into and destroyed many offices in the U.S. Capitol.
The attempted overthrow of the 2020 election by seeking to nullify the election results through lawsuits in 62 federal and state courts was attempted by Trump’s loyal personal lawyers including the current acting U.S. attorney general and head of the U.S. Department of Justice Todd Blanche, and disgraced and disbarred lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Their cases of election fraud were stopped by rulings in all 62 federal and state lawsuits that no election fraud had occurred.
Untruthful Report About Cuba & Paid Protesters
Prisoners of the C.I.A,-backed Brigade 2506, after they were captured in the Bay of Pigs invasion, 1961. (Miguel Vinas / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
The most recent and most ludicrous allegations of left-wing violence and protests being funded by other countries is in Secretary of Rubio’s 10- page report on “Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism.”
Rubio accuses the National Network on Cuba, National Lawyers Guild, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, the People’s Forum, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, and the Democratic Socialists of America of being paid by the Cuban government whose goal, the report states, has been for 60 years the overthrow of the U.S. government.
Talk about turning the facts on their heads. As is well-documented, 13 successive U.S. presidential administrations since 1959 — Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama (first term, when C.I.A. policies were still in effect, but changing in Obama’s second term with diplomatic recognition), Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2 — have attempted to overthrow the Cuban government in the 60-plus years of its existence.
The current attempt of overthrow is centered on the U.S. brutal and total blockade of fuel going to Cuba, which has left Cuban citizens without electricity for operations in hospitals, for food preparation, and for the conduct of normal life.
Making life so miserable for the Cuban citizenry that they overthrow their government would fulfill the longstanding hopes of Cuban-American Rubio.
Rubio Dishonest About Cuban American Background
Marco Rubio has been less than forthright about his heritage as a Cuban American in his quest for the overthrow of the Cuban government.
Rubio, “Mr. Righteous against birthright citizenship,” is a “birthright citizen” born in the U.S. of noncitizen parents who had immigrated in 1956 from Cuba under the Batista dictatorship, not under the 1959 revolutionary government.
Rubio, “Mr. Tough on illegal immigrants,” ignores that his own grandfather entered the U.S. illegally and was ordered to be deported but was saved from deportation by an amnesty during the Cuban missile crisis.
Rubio, “Mr. Kill the Boat Drug Runners of the Caribbean,” disregards that his own brother-in-law was convicted of drug running and his sister implicated but never charged.
Rubio, “Mr. I Know All About Cuba Because I Am Cuban American,” has been to Cuba only once — where in Cuba did he go? A few hours at the U.S. prison on the U.S. Naval base at Guantánamo.
No doubt, more will come in the next two years as Rubio, Miller, and others in the administration seem to think they can get away with outrageous bullying of individuals and organizations that do not agree with them and that challenge them in non-violent ways, in contrast to the Jan. 6 gang.
In particular, there are always protests against the horrific effects of brutal sanctions that the U.S. government uses to make life so difficult for citizens of other countries that they will overthrow their own governments, whether it be Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, or Nicaragua.
Israel’s Paid Influence Seems OK With Rubio
Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivering joint statements in Jerusalem on Feb. 16, 2025. (State Department/ Freddie Everett)
However, Rubio must be thinking that since his buddies in the Netanyahu government have paid Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, millions of dollars in a specific program to influence U.S. public opinion to stop the massive decline in Israel’s “likability,” that other countries have paid off U.S. persons to work clandestinely on the same scale.
Parscale’s firm was hired by Israel for $6 million in September 2025 and then signed a $15 million contract with Israeli firm Havas to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Parscale and his team sent conservative influencers suggested positive language about Israel for posts on social media sites such as X, Instagram, and TikTok. The influencers are then compensated based on how many “likes” each post gets from readers.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has dramatically increased spending on influence operations. Earlier this year, Israel increased by four times its “public diplomacy” influence budget from $150 million in 2025 to $730 million in 2026.
But even The Times of Israel says it’s too late for a “face lift” as a Pew Research Center poll reported that 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37 percent viewing it favorably after Israel has committed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza; pillaged and plundered homes, farms, animals in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian West Bank; destroyed southern Lebanon; and got the Trump administration up to its neck in the war on Iran.
Keep Challenging Illegal, Immoral & Criminal Policies
The two recent major attempts of the Trump administration to quell dissent show how serious challenging illegal, immoral, and criminal policies has become and how important it is that we push back hard against these attempts to intimidate citizens to silence their dissent.
Despite these brutal, heavy-handed attempts, dissent is spreading to regular citizens. In a recent letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper Honolulu Star Advertiser, which serves a large U.S. military population, a resident of Hawaii summarized the challenge very well:
“The true domestic enemy includes those who monopolize political and economic power. The real enemy includes individuals who misinform, threaten, and disenfranchise the less powerful. The true enemy are those who are antidemocratic, have little or no concern regarding the welfare of others, and enrich themselves, family, and a few friends at the expense of the general population.”
Ann Wright served in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a colonel. She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience. She has been with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition since 2010, has been put in Israeli prison twice for attempting to break the illegal Israeli naval blockade on Gaza and has been on segments of flotillas in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2024.
A banner depicting US President Donald Trump and bearing messages was displayed in front of the Zolfaghar and Zolghadr ballistic missiles exhibited at Azadi Square in Tehran, Iran’s capital, on August 2, 2026.
(Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Stephen Prager, Common Dreams, Aug 09, 2026
President Donald Trump is now quietly conceding that he’s willing to walk away from his Iran war without meeting all of his demands if they agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But Iran won’t let him back out of the quagmire without a steep price.
Iran is in the process of negotiating a limited reopening of the critical waterway with Oman. But Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said on Saturday that “until America corrects its behavior, the Strait of Hormuz will not open.”
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He outlined a list of demands on Saturday, even harsher than those Trump walked away from when he abandoned the “memorandum of understanding” negotiated in June.
Zolghadr said the US must permanently end its war and naval blockade against Iran, and withdraw military forces from the region. He also said the US must fully compensate Iran for damages from the war, lift sanctions, and unfreeze assets abroad.
This demand for an end to US “aggression” applies not just to Iran, but to its allies in the region: Zolghadr also demanded an end to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, as well as an end to US and Israeli attacks against the Houthis in Yemen.
The Trump administration, which is not known to be in direct talks with Iran, has not yet responded to the demands. Trump told Axios on Sunday that “We are low-keying it” and “only semi-negotiating with Iran,” claiming that it was “in very bad shape” economically.
It’s clear, however, that the Iranians believe they have enough of an upper hand to make Trump grovel, especially as news emerges that the US has burned through nearly all its available stocks of long-range precision weapons, making the war increasingly costly, though the administration has denied this.
Domestic concerns are also weighing on Trump. Over the past month, as the war heated up again, average gas prices in the US have shot back up above $4 a gallon, a major liability for Republicans heading into a midterm election cycle in which many voters say the cost of living is a top concern.
Approval of Trump among Americans has fallen to a new all-time low of 34% according to a YouGov poll late last month. And just 28% of Americans say they approve of his handling of the war, according to an Associated Press/NORC poll.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, Trump has privately signaled a willingness to declare victory if Iran opens the strait, even without getting any sort of nuclear agreement, which was purportedly the reason he launched the war in the first place.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Trump was “showing his desperation for a deal before it is completed, so Iran predictably demand[ed] major new concessions,” adding that it was a “masterclass in how not to negotiate.”
“As time passes, Tehran appears increasingly confident that the pressure is shifting onto Washington,” said the Israeli national security analyst Danny Citrinowicz. “Iranian leaders seem to believe that the United States is now more eager than Iran to bring the confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz to an end, and, crucially, that Washington has few attractive military options for changing that equation.”
Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told CNN, “At this point, it is absolutely clear that there is no escalatory military path out of this war.”
“It’s been tried in several different variations, and it has not ended up particularly well,” Parsi said. “In fact, the US’s position has been weakened, in my view, by additional military action. And as a result, I think there needs to be a full dedication to the diplomatic pathway.”
He added that for the Iranians, “the promise and the credibility of sanctions relief will carry far more weight than threats of further bombings.”
MEM, August 9, 2026
![US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., United States, on July 14, 2026. [Mehmet Eser - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/image.png?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., United States, on July 14, 2026. [Mehmet Eser – Anadolu Agency]
Palestinian group Hamas reaffirmed Sunday its commitment to a roadmap agreed with mediators and the Board of Peace to complete the second phase of US President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, Anadolu reports.
In a statement, the movement said it remains serious about “responsibly engaging” on implementing the 15-point plan and establishing a clear timetable for it.
“The priority at this stage must be to ensure the implementation of all phases and obligations of the agreement,” Hamas said.
It added that the process should lead to a complete ceasefire, an end to Israeli attacks, the completion of Israel’s withdrawal, the reopening of crossings, the entry of humanitarian aid and shelter supplies, the start of reconstruction and enabling the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza to begin its duties.
Hamas called on the mediators, guarantors and the Board of Peace to “shoulder their responsibilities,” ensure that all parties comply with the agreement and prevent violations that could obstruct its implementation or undermine the ceasefire.
The group said it will continue to engage “positively and responsibly” with efforts aimed at completing the deal’s implementation, ending the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and “protecting their rights and national interests.”
Early Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu rejected the 15-point plan approved by the Board of Peace for Gaza, insisting that Israeli forces will not withdraw from the Palestinian territory until Hamas is disarmed.
