Riyadh Phones Tel Aviv: From Petro-Power to Palace Panic

 by Junaid S Ahmad, Countercurrents, 16/09/2026

Sometimes an entire political order confesses itself in a single telephone call.

Saudi Arabia, custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, self-appointed pillar of Arab leadership and purchaser of some of the most expensive weaponry ever manufactured, has reportedly found itself seeking Israeli intelligence assistance through US Central Command against Ansar Allah in Yemen. The Jerusalem Post reports that CENTCOM-mediated discussions concerned intelligence that could help Riyadh understand Houthi deployments and future operations.

There is something almost indecently perfect about the image.

For decades, the Saudi state cultivated the mythology of sovereignty while constructing one of the most elaborate systems of strategic dependency in modern history. Washington supplied the security architecture. Western contractors supplied the weapons. Foreign technicians sustained the machinery. American bases anchored the regional order. Oil revenue financed the spectacle.

Riyadh bought nearly everything power was supposed to look like.

It apparently forgot to buy power.

That omission becomes difficult to conceal when a Yemeni movement battered for years by Saudi airpower, American and British strikes, and Israeli attacks can still impose strategic costs on a kingdom whose military expenditure dwarfs its own. Whatever one thinks of Ansar Allah’s ideology or domestic rule, its endurance has transformed it from a movement Riyadh once imagined it could bomb into submission into a force capable of shaping Saudi calculations.

The contrast is brutal: one side possesses palaces, Patriot batteries, consultants and procurement contracts; the other possesses missiles, drones, geography, discipline and a demonstrated willingness to endure.

Only one of those packages automatically generates strategic autonomy.

Saudi Arabia’s predicament became still more vivid after drone attacks damaged its East-West oil pipeline, forcing shipment reductions and suspending loadings at Yanbu. The artery designed to insulate the kingdom from Gulf vulnerability suddenly became another vulnerability. European customers scrambled for replacement barrels while Riyadh confronted the elementary fact that infrastructure worth billions remains infrastructure somebody can hit.

This is where the cliché of the “Shia Crescent” becomes analytically revealing.

Washington, Tel Aviv and their regional partners have traditionally presented Iran’s network of allies as an aberration to be dismantled: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraqi armed factions, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and other forces clustered around what supporters call the Axis of Resistance. Yet the durability of that network has exposed something the Gulf security model would prefer not to discuss.

Iran built influence through relationships capable of surviving punishment.

The Gulf monarchies built influence through invoices.

One model is far poorer, far rougher and frequently coercive. The other possesses sovereign wealth funds, skyscrapers and excellent branding departments. But when regional power is measured by the ability to alter an adversary’s behavior, absorb retaliation and continue operating, the supposedly primitive model has repeatedly proved harder to neutralize than the gleaming one.

That is precisely why Riyadh turning toward Israeli intelligence is so politically revealing.

Israel is not entering this architecture as some neutral technical consultant. It is a military power whose regional strategy is deeply intertwined with American primacy and whose mass murder campaigns have generated extraordinary political anger across the Arab and Muslim worlds. Yet portions of the Arab security establishment are becoming more operationally intertwined with it. Military chiefs from Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt recently met in Germany under CENTCOM auspices to discuss regional security cooperation and the conflict with Iran.

So much for the old theatre.

For years, Gulf rulers perfected the choreography of denouncing Israel rhetorically while embedding themselves ever more deeply inside the American security architecture that guarantees Israeli military predominance. Palestine supplied the speeches; Washington supplied the command structure; Western arsenals supplied the hardware.

Now even the choreography is becoming unnecessary.

The deeper indictment belongs to the imperial system that produced this dependency. American power in West Asia has rarely required formal colonies when client states, military bases, arms dependence and security guarantees could accomplish much the same strategic purpose more elegantly. The genius of modern empire is that the subordinate is permitted a flag, an anthem and a sovereign wealth fund.

What it is not permitted is genuine strategic independence.

The Saudi monarchy embodies that contradiction exquisitely. It possesses almost unimaginable wealth yet repeatedly discovers that wealth cannot manufacture legitimacy, geographic depth, political cohesion or autonomous deterrence. Its rulers can purchase aircraft by the squadron and consultants by the battalion, but neither can solve the underlying problem: a state dependent on an external hegemon for its security remains dependent however magnificent the palace.

Meanwhile, the resistance axis that Washington, Israel and Riyadh have spent years trying to isolate persists precisely because destruction has repeatedly failed to produce submission. That does not make every actor within it virtuous. It does make the central strategic fact impossible to dismiss.

They endured.

And endurance has become the currency their adversaries cannot print.

That is why the reported Saudi appeal for Israeli intelligence matters. It is not merely a wartime arrangement. It is an X-ray of the regional order.

The palaces have the money. Washington has the architecture. Israel has the intelligence.

And the men they spent years dismissing as an expendable nuisance have somehow acquired the one thing no arms contract can deliver:

the power to make the palace call for help.
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Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID – https://csidpk.org), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
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NAZA: How a film became an ‘eighth front’ shaking ‘Israel’ from within

 By Al Mayadeen English

• Source: Al Mayadeen Israeli Affairs Department
• 15 Sep 2026 13:00
• 9 Min Read

Built on testimonies from Israeli military personnel, NAZA has triggered a political and security uproar over how Gaza’s war was conducted.

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An Israeli documentary has triggered an unusually fierce political, media, and cultural backlash inside “Israel”, despite not relying on footage of Gaza’s destruction or images of thousands of victims to make its case, Al Mayadeen‘s Israeli Affairs Department revealed.

Titled NAZA, or Collateral Damage, the film by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor has quickly moved beyond the cinema world to become a “national security” controversy, a legal matter, a diplomatic challenge, and part of a wider internal struggle over how “Israel” portrays its war on Gaza.

The film’s impact has been such that the Israeli occupation military convened an emergency meeting attended by senior intelligence, air force, and operations commanders, as well as occupation military prosecutors. The Foreign Ministry also moved to address the fallout, while Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar called for the filmmakers’ citizenship to be revoked. A police complaint was subsequently filed to examine whether classified security information may have been disclosed during the film’s production.

The documentary, which premiered internationally on September 10, 2026, in the main competition of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, was the only documentary competing in the main section. It later received the festival’s Special Jury Prize. Its screening was followed by nearly 25 minutes of applause, making it one of the most notable moments of this year’s festival.

The controversy surrounding NAZA has been framed by some Israeli figures as part of an “eighth front”, a battlefield beyond direct military confrontation, encompassing media, public opinion, international legitimacy, and the image of “Israel” around the world, according to Al Mayadeen‘s department. 

From the occupation military establishment to the screen

Rather than focusing primarily on images of destruction in Gaza, NAZA examines the mechanisms through which military decisions are made, including intelligence gathering, surveillance systems, target generation, and the assessment of what the Israeli military refers to as “collateral damage”,  the number of civilians expected to be killed during an attack on a military target.

The film is based on interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and officers whose identities were concealed, with their faces and voices altered for protection. According to its filmmakers, some of those interviewed served in intelligence positions connected to information gathering and target identification. The interviews were conducted on rooftops in Tel Aviv during the war in an effort to protect the participants’ identities.

The documentary also draws on previous investigations published by +972 Magazine and The Guardian.

Institutionalized process behind killings

According to the film and the testimonies presented in it, the issue extends beyond isolated incidents involving individual soldiers. Its creators examine an institutionalized process for generating, selecting, and hitting targets, including the use of computerized systems and artificial intelligence to produce large numbers of targets and the incorporation of anticipated civilian casualties into the decision-making process.

That is where the film’s central sensitivity lies. Rather than asking only who was killed, it examines how the decisions that led to those deaths were made, who knew about them, who approved them, and how many civilian deaths were anticipated before an attack was carried out.

Why did the film alarm ‘Israel’?

One of the most striking aspects of the controversy is that much of the Israeli backlash emerged before the military had even watched the full documentary.

On the day after its screening, the Israeli military said it had not received the complete film and had only seen promotional footage. Nevertheless, Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir convened an exceptional meeting attended by the deputy chief of staff, senior air force and intelligence commanders, Unit 8200, the head of the Operations Directorate, the military advocate general, and other officials.

The meeting ended with instructions to examine possible legal action against the film and those behind it, as well as whether classified material had been leaked during its production.

An attack on ‘Israel’?

Zamir said the film, based on what had been published about it, was not an attempt to uncover the truth but consisted of “blood libels, deliberate distortions of reality and dangerous false accusations.” He said it was an attack on “Israel”, rather than merely on the military, and ordered an intensified media campaign inside and outside the entity in coordination with the Foreign Ministry, military prosecution, and other government bodies.

Israeli occupation military spokesperson Avichay Adraee also said the full film had not yet been released, while arguing that “the claims” appearing in its trailer “were false”. He called on the filmmakers to provide the military with the complete version so that it could respond to each allegation individually.

The speed and scale of the response, however, raised a broader question: why would a documentary that the military said it had not fully watched warrant a meeting involving the highest levels of the General Staff?

The debate inside “Israel” offered its own answer: the controversy had already moved beyond cinema.

The ‘eighth front’

Former Mossad official Segev Asolin went further on Channel 14, describing the controversy as an “attack on consciousness.” He said the battle being waged against “Israel” internationally constituted an “eighth front”, arguing that while “Israel” has achieved gains on other military fronts, it is repeatedly “losing” on this one.

The description reflects a broader shift in how the war is being understood inside “Israel”. The battlefield is no longer seen as limited to physical territory and military operations, but also extends to imagery, meaning, legitimacy, and collective memory.

The occupation military can destroy a target, but it cannot necessarily control how that destruction will ultimately be interpreted.

Netanyahu and Zohar escalate response

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sharply condemned the film, arguing that incitement becomes “unbearable” when it comes from within and linking the documentary to “international incitement against Israel.”

Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar went further, saying he would work to revoke the Israeli citizenship of Abraham and Szor on accusations of “treason”. His remarks triggered further debate over the limits of political punishment and democratic rights.

The confrontation subsequently moved into the legal sphere after a complaint was submitted to police to investigate whether the collection and publication of material for the film involved the disclosure of prohibited security information.

A film that became a threat before it was seen

One of the most revealing contradictions in the controversy is that some of the documentary’s most vocal critics had not watched it in full. Israeli journalists themselves acknowledged that they had seen only promotional excerpts, yet the political debate had already escalated to accusations of treason, incitement, and “national security threats.”

This suggests that the concern may extend beyond the film’s actual content to its ability to reach audiences before being filtered through the official narrative.

The documentary has already reached an international audience through Venice, where it received a major award, and is expected to appear at additional festivals before reaching wider audiences. The more forcefully the Israeli authorities respond, the greater the international attention surrounding the film is likely to become.

How can one film be more damaging than thousands of images?

The distinction lies in what the film attempts to document.

Images from Gaza show the consequences of the war. NAZA seeks to examine the mechanisms behind them. Statistics establish that civilians were killed; the testimonies presented in the film ask who knew, how decisions were made, what casualties were anticipated, and how civilian lives became numerical calculations within a targeting system.

From the perspective of the battle over public consciousness, this represents a significant shift in the source of the narrative.

The account is no longer coming solely from Gaza, human rights organizations, or foreign media outlets that “Israel” usually dismisses through accusations of bias or antisemitism. Instead, the documentary features Israelis speaking in Hebrew about institutions in which they served, while its Israeli filmmakers argue that their purpose is to force Israeli society to confront realities that are difficult to ignore.

That may ultimately be where NAZA derives much of its power. The film is not simply attempting to influence international perceptions of the Gaza genocide; it is seeking to penetrate Israeli consciousness from within.

Because internal testimony is hard to dismiss

An image can be countered with another image, and a statistic can be challenged with another statistic. An internal testimony is more difficult to dismiss because it can become part of the historical record and potentially serve as material for future research, documentation and accountability.

NAZA has therefore moved from being a film to becoming a political controversy, from a controversy into a battle over the narrative, and from that battle into what some Israeli voices themselves have called an “eighth front”.

On that front, the power of military force is measured not only by what it can destroy, but also by who can determine the meaning that remains after the war ends.

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Where the Hell Is the Oil Money Trump Stole From the People of Venezuela?

A woman holds a placard with the words “Stop the war” and the image of US President Donald Trump drinking from a barrel of Venezuelan oil during a protest.

(Photo by Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Did Trump take the oil and the money from the oil? Bessent refuses to say. Trump refuses to say. Nobody, in fact, in the Trump regime will tell us where that money is or who controls it or even who’s making the money accrued on its interest.

Thom Hartmann

Sep 18, 2026 Common Dreams

At any other time in American history, it would end the career of somebody like Scott Bessent, our limited-intelligence Treasury Secretary. It came out yesterday when Illinois Congressman Sean Casten was questioning him about the “billions of dollars” that Trump keeps claiming America is “getting” from selling Venezuelan oil.

Bessent agreed with Trump, saying the oil and oil money we’ve seized from that country is “one of the largest assets to ever go on the U.S. balance sheet.” Billions and billions of dollars.

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So Casten asked him a simple question: Can you tell us who controls that money and where it is? Can you confirm “whether or not those [funds] are flowing to U.S. persons?”

Bessent’s answer was a shocking single word: “No.” He ain’t talkin…

Did Trump take the oil and the money from the oil? Bessent refuses to say. Trump refuses to say. Nobody, in fact, in the Trump regime will tell us where that money is or who controls it or even who’s making the money accrued on its interest.

Here’s what we do know:

Three days after Trump kidnapped President Maduro and his wife, he went on his Nazi-infested social media site and wrote that Venezuela’s oil revenues would be controlled by him personally “as President of the United States.”

Three days after that, he signed an executive order declaring a “national emergency” involving that oil so no court or creditor could touch the money, screwing the bondholders and oil companies to which Venezuela owed roughly $150 billion.

Then Trump started selling the oil we’d seized from Venezuela. The first load, according to Reuters and Semafor, went to commodity trading companies Vitol and Trafigura for about $500 million, groups that the Washington Post said both carry histories of bribery schemes tied to oil sales.

And that money didn’t go to the Treasury account that was described in Trump’s own executive order. Instead, it went to a bank account in Qatar, right after that country’s leaders gave him a $400 million jet. A senior official explained to Semafor that Qatar was chosen as a “neutral location” where money “can flow freely” without risk of seizure.

Senator Elizabeth Warren was outraged, and told the world what most of us were thinking at the time:

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military. That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified to the Senate that $300 million had been sent to Venezuela to cover government payroll needs and another $200 million was “still sitting” in Doha. He referred to the entire operation as “novel” and “a short-term mechanism.”

But a month later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNBC that the account had been closed and no more money would be flowing to or through Qatar…and nobody has identified where it went, or where it is, since then.

Where’s the money?

House Foreign Affairs committee ranking member Gregory Meeks called it “an offshore slush fund.” Bessent, questioned by Casten back in February refused to say which accounts the Treasury Department was even using, even though Trump’s executive order had named him/Treasury as the custodian for the funds. Casten and Senator Chris Van Hollen again demanded to know where the money was in March, and were again stonewalled. And then again this week.

Meanwhile, the pile of money is growing, particularly given the oil crisis provoked by Trump’s idiotic war against Iran. Using Bloomberg tanker-tracking data, the Council on Foreign Relations published an April estimate that:

“In the first four months of the United States exerting control over Venezuela’s oil exports, almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.”

A State Department official testified to Congress back in April that around $3 billion had gone back to Venezuela, but Trump boasted in July that the US had sold more than $13 billion in stolen Venezuelan oil and suggested he could divert those funds to the American military or anywhere else he wanted.

Back in June, Marco Rubio tried to assuage Congress’ concerns by saying that accounting firm KPMG “audits every disbursement.” But when the libertarian Reason Magazine dug into it in August they found that neither the agreements nor the audits have been published.

And the so-called “Transparent Sovereignty” website the Venezuelan government set up to show the world its oil transactions only lists one single sale. Apparently, Trump is not even telling them what he’s done with their oil, or where their money went.

And it’s not just oil. In March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum flew a planeload of American mining executives to Caracas and came home bragging about having made off with over $100 million in gold. He set up a deal to sell it to reportedly bribe-friendly Trafigura with the proceeds going into, well, nobody knows where.

This is an old script that Trump appears to be following here, one many corrupt petrostates pioneered long ago.

For example, in 2014 Nigeria’s central bank governor, Lamido Sanusi, accidentally revealed to his Senate that roughly $20 billion in oil revenue had never made it into the national treasury. President Goodluck Jonathan’s response was to fire him and call the money a “phantom.” When PriceWaterhouseCoopers finally audited the books, it found at least $1.48 billion was simply gone.

I’ve done international relief work in some of the most corrupt nations in the world, been offered bribes and threatened for not taking them, and the pattern I’m seeing here is eerily familiar. They never announce the looting; they just stop letting you know where anything went or who ended up with it. Most people figure that it must be okay since it’s not being reported or discussed, and the conversation dies away.

So, here we are. Trump:

— announced that he’d taken the oil,
— then that he’d taken the money from the sale of the oil and put it in a bank with the country that had given him a free 747 jet,
— hired traders with bribery records,
— refused to publish the contracts,
— put his own hand-picked cabinet members in charge of both the disbursements and oversight, and
— then sent Bessent to Congress to say, “No” when asked if we could please, please know where it’s all gone.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress seem to have developed a sudden case of lockjaw.

Congressmen Casten and Joaquin Castro have introduced into the House the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act to force the GAO to audit the Qatar account and whatever’s followed it. Republicans refuse to let it out of committee, and Mike Johnson won’t give it a chance on the floor.

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Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream” (2020); “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

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UN investigators find ‘reasonable grounds’ US committed war crimes in Iran

 US launched ‘indiscriminate’ attacks with the Minab elementary school strike, not due to an errant missile, the United Nations finds

 

The graves of people and children killed in the US strike on a primary school are seen in Minab, Iran, on 10 August 2026 (Atta Kenare/AFP)

MEE staff

Published date: 17 September 2026 19:31 BST | Last update:14 hours 29 mins ago

The United Nations has “reasonable grounds” to believe the US committed a war crime with its strikes on the Minab elementary school and a sports centre in the opening days of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The US attack on the Minab school killed at least 150 people, including approximately 120 children. Another strike hit a “clearly identifiable sports complex and residential area” in the southern Iranian city of Lamerd.

“The Mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks resulting in the loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects,” a UN fact-finding mission wrote in a report released on Thursday.

The report is not a judicial ruling, but has been submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The UN investigators noted that the Minab school was struck by a Tomahawk missile as part of ongoing strikes on an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base. The researchers noted that the strike was not due to an errant missile.

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“The nearest IRGC facility [was] located approximately 72 metres from the school building,” the authors said.

“The Mission concludes that the building of the school was the intended point of impact and that the damage did not result from an errant strike or collateral damage from the attack on the adjacent IRGC compound,” the report said.

The New York Times reported that officers at US Central Command had created the target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, citing people briefed on the investigation.

Exclusive: Iranian girls killed by ‘double-tap’ strikes on Minab school

Read More »

The US investigators probing the attack said the US military was most likely responsible for the strike, but the Trump administration has deflected any responsibility.

The UN fact-finders said another US strike hit a “clearly identifiable sports complex and residential area” in the southern Iranian city of Lamerd.

The New York Times revealed in March that the US used a previously untested ballistic missile in combat to attack the sports hall. The Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, detonates just above its target, launching thousands of tungsten pellets.

“The Mission concluded that the US by choosing to use the PrSM missile in a populated civilian area, under the prevailing circumstances, launched an attack that struck civilians and civilian objects reckless as to the likely extent of death or injury,” UN fact-finders said.

The UN said that the US’s attacks were “indiscriminate” and violated “the principle of distinction” in international humanitarian law.

The report noted that the US used a weapons system that distributed approximately 180,000 tungsten pellets in an area with many civilians. The attack “could not be directed at a specific military objective and its effects on civilian and civilian objects could not be limited,” the UN researchers said.

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Ralph Nader Rips ‘Feeble, Weak, Cowardly’ Democrats for Eschewing Trump Impeachment

 

Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader listens during a news conference July 2, 2012 at Public Citizen in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“The Democrats and electorally frightened Republicans pushed Richard Nixon out in 1974 for far, far lesser transgressions than those committed by Trump in a week.”

Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, ep 17, 2026

As Democrats campaign for the November midterm elections after helping kill the latest congressional effort to impeach President Donald Trump, progressive consumer advocate and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader this week renewed attacks on the party’s leadership for abandoning their constitutional responsibility to hold the president accountable.

In a September 14 essay published by Current Affairs, Nader argued that Democratic leaders have effectively given up on impeachment even as Trump’s second administration faces continuing allegations of executive overreach and misconduct.

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“The chronic prevaricator and delusionist Donald J. Trump knows that the worse his outlaw actions become, the less likely the Democrats in Congress are to impeach him,” the Public Citizen co-founder wrote. “The massive number of blatant, impeachable acts by the lawless, corrupt, violent, systemically racist, unstable, dangerous tyrant increases by the day.”

“The American public knows it,” Nader continued. “The majority of Americans favor impeaching Trump. Among Democrats, it’s 84% in favor, as well as a majority of independents. Polling even shows that most Americans think Trump is a ‘dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.’”

Yet, “when asked about impeachment, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries [D-NY] replied: ‘We haven’t ruled anything in and we haven’t ruled anything out,’” he noted. “What? Every day, the mega-arsonist is burning down our republic and its Constitution, with tens of millions of Americans suffering and endangered. Yet Jeffries has been noncommittal about whether Democrats would pursue impeachment even if they had a congressional majority.”

In a column republished by Common Dreams earlier this month, Nader wrote, “What must Tyrant Trump be thinking about his opponents’ feeble, weak, cowardly responses to his daily torrent of serious, impeachable offenses?”

“Even his egomaniacal narcissism cannot fully explain his amazing good luck,” he opined.

Earlier this week, the House of Representatives voted 232-147 to table an impeachment resolution introduced by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), effectively ending the measure’s consideration. Eighteen Democrats joined Republicans in voting to table it, while 46 Democrats—including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—voted “present.”

Green’s resolution accused Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors arising from the administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown, including alleged violations of civil liberties and due process. Green said before the vote that the Constitution contains no provision requiring Congress to wait before confronting impeachable conduct.

Democratic leaders have attempted to justify their decision not to support Green’s resolution by arguing that impeachment requires a substantial investigative record, hearings, witness testimony, and document review. Jeffries, along with Democratic leaders Katherine Clark of Massachusetts—the House minority whip—and Pete Aguilar of California, the House Democratic Caucus chair, said they would vote “present” because “none of that serious work has been done,” as they jointly explained.

Nader rejects that reasoning. In Current Affairs, he argued that saying Democrats “don’t have the votes” misses the purpose of a sustained impeachment campaign, which he described as a way of building public pressure and organizing voters.

“Impeachment is a mobilizer for get-out-the-vote efforts,” he wrote, as well as “for educating and energizing the people back home.”

Trump has already been impeached twice by the House, although the Senate failed to convict him either time. No other president has been impeached multiple times. Nader has pointed out that Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors are more grave than those for which then-President Nixon resigned from office in 1974 rather than face impeachment, and that Democrats’ fear of the consequences for impeaching Trump again is no excuse for their cowardice.

“The Democrats and electorally frightened Republicans pushed Richard Nixon out in 1974 for far, far lesser transgressions than those committed by Trump in a week,” he wrote.

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How Israel’s arms industry is integrated into Britain’s military

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Ed Miliband’s decision to leave the military relationship with Israel intact raises serious concerns about Britain’s compliance with international law.

JOHN McEVOY
10 September 2026

Elbit has an MoD contract to provide a simulation trainer for Challenger 3 tanks (Photo: Stephen Bardens / Alamy)

1.1x

0:00 / 11:46

Just days before Ed Miliband announced trade sanctions on Israeli settlements, more than 300 British soldiers participated in a “landmark” training exercise facilitated by Israel’s largest arms firm.

Elbit Systems UK boasted about its “key role” in the three-day training exercise which saw the soldiers battling against simulated forces in one of the largest ever exercises of its kind in the UK.

The exercise, named Pegasus Athena, represented a “step change in capability for the armed forces”, according to the company, because it allowed troops to train “without the need for external assets and… ammunition stockpiles”.

This training is just one small example of the enduring and tightly entangled role of the Israeli arms industry in Britain’s defence sector.

Declassified has found how over recent years the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded scores of major tenders to Israeli weapons firms, worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Israeli technology can be found in one of Britain’s key air defence systems as well as in missiles used by the Royal Air Force, while the Royal Navy relies on Israeli-made anti-missile systems and British soldiers train on simulators designed by Elbit.

In Miliband’s speech, the British foreign secretary said Britain’s finding that the Israeli occupation is unlawful brings it in line with the advisory opinion handed down by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024.

That ruling found Israel’s occupation unlawful, but also obligated all states “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation” created by the occupation.

The Israeli arms industry is tightly bound up with the Israeli state, and profits from the occupation by supplying the military hardware, ammunition, and surveillance used to enforce it.

It follows that international clients, including Britain’s MoD, are sustaining the occupation by awarding contracts to Israeli arms firms while benefitting from the occupation by purchasing items that have been “battle tested” on Palestinians.

The closeness of Israel’s arms industry with Britain’s military raises further questions not only about how difficult it would be to separate the two, but also the extent to which defence integration limits the prospects for meaningful diplomatic pressure on Israel.

Genocide scholar Martin Shaw told Declassified: “The government’s acceptance that the occupation is illegal means that it should act against Israel itself, not just the settlers it has installed. 

“The ICJ was clear that states must do nothing that provides ‘aid or assistance’ to Israel in maintaining the occupation, and must ‘ensure that any impediment’ that the occupation causes to the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination ‘is brought to an end’. 

“Through the UK’s military alliance with Israel and its comprehensive military-industrial cooperation, Labour still appears to be failing in these legal duties, despite Miliband’s announcements”.

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British military made at least 49 trips to Israel during…

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Training exercises and simulations

Pegasus Athena was far from the first British military exercise assisted by Elbit.

In 2023, Elbit won MoD contracts to “develop and provide artillery and mortar training simulators” for the army and to “design, provide, maintain and operate” a simulation trainer for Boxer armoured vehicles and Challenger tanks.

The company’s Interim Combined Arms Virtual Simulation has also been “benefiting the British army since 2022” and was deployed that year in what it said was “the largest field army exercise in Europe for the past decade” involving 3,500 troops and up to 800 vehicles.

Another asset developed by Elbit Systems, the Joint Fires Synthetic Trainer, has “delivered over 12,000 hours of training to British armed forces and NATO allies” over recent years.

In addition to simulations, Elbit Systems won a five-year MoD contract in 2021 worth £102m for a Dismounted Joint Fires Integrator which “allows frontline soldiers to detect and engage enemy targets in seconds”. 

Last year, Elbit UK delivered Ground Based Surveillance Radar systems to the UK’s Royal Artillery under a £14m contract signed in 2023, which “enhance the situational awareness of personnel on the ground”.

In 2021, Elbit UK became part of a joint venture named Affinity Flying Training Services Ltd to be awarded a £65m contract lasting 12 years for the operation of Texan T-C6 trainer aircraft for the UK Military Flying Training System program. 

Another major MoD programme facilitated by Elbit, the Maritime Electronic Warfare System Integrated Capability, is helping British navy ships with anti-missile defence. This followed a £103m contract awarded to Babcock and Elbit in 2021.

The system “will be installed on current and future warships including the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, Type 45 destroyers and Type 26 and Type 31 frigates currently in build”, the government said last year.

Subsidiaries of Elbit UK have also played a key role in supplying the MoD over recent years.

In 2021, Instro Precision won a £11.5m contract to supply the British army with night vision goggles, with further purchase orders totalling over £16m made over subsequent years.

U-TacS, a joint venture between Elbit UK and French arms firm Thales, oversaw the £2bn Watchkeeper programme which supplied the British army with deficient drones. 

Elbit’s Hermes 450 drones were also procured by the British army in 2007 under Project Lydian for operational support in Afghanistan at a cost of around £200m.

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, told Declassified: “This important investigation exposes precisely why the UK government’s recent measures are largely performative and designed to whitewash the multifaceted, shameless complicity of the UK with Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide.

“The UK has failed to end the economic relationships, trade agreements and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory, as it is obliged to do in order to comply with the ICJ ruling. 

“It is absurd for the UK to sanction settlements while simultaneously purchasing and integrating Israeli surveillance and weapon systems that are field-tested on Palestinians into its own armed forces.

“Comparing these largely symbolic measures with the far-reaching sanctions imposed by the UK on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine affirms the UK’s colonial hypocrisy and loss of credibility on the international stage”.

Rafael

Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, Israel’s largest state-owned arms firm, has also been awarded major contracts by the MoD over recent years.

In 2024, the company was part of a consortium awarded a £38m tender for the procurement of systems to develop counter-drone capabilities for combat soldiers.

Rafael also won a £20m contract alongside Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land in 2023 for “cutting-edge new rocket and missile protect systems for Britain’s Challenger 3 tanks”, which are scheduled to enter into service next year.

In addition to this, the Israeli state-owned company supplies the “brains” for Britain’s Sky Sabre air defence system, which is deployed at sensitive sites such as the Falklands.

When Rafael won the Sky Sabre contract in 2017, a defence executive said: “Everybody was extremely surprised the MoD opted for Rafael. Politically, industry thought that was a route the UK government wouldn’t go down…It makes you wonder just what parts of the local defense industry the government is willing to defend”.

Rafael also manufactures Litening pods which are used by the Royal Air Force’s Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets for precision targeting capabilities.

Closer to home, Rafael owns a subsidiary named Pearson Engineering in Newcastle which recently won a £10m contract to supply the British army with “26 Track Width Mine Ploughs”.

The contract was awarded without any competition for “technical reasons”, indicating how no other provider was able to supply the items.

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Project HEZUK

Documents published by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) have indicated the value that the MoD has placed on UK-Israel defence collaboration.

Around 2019, the British defence attaché in Tel Aviv, Jim Priest, prepared a presentation on Project HEZUK, a secret defence plan between the UK and Israel aimed at countering Iran and Hezbollah.

One of the slides focussed on joint UK-Israel defence collaboration, naming several of the “existing programmes” such as the Sky Sabre and MFTS.

Notably, Priest also outlined several “UK-ISR Joint Areas of Investigation” which included “autonomous warfare”, “space”, and “maritime”.

Next to a bullet point on Research and Development (R&D), Priest further outlined “Quantum, Additive Manufacturing, poss[ible] investigation on energy weapons and novel defence systems”.

One of the slides prepared by the British defence attaché in Israel around 2019

In addition to military collaboration, Britain’s intelligence relationship with Israel will be untouched, according to Miliband, and there are no signs that either the 2020 UK-Israel military cooperation agreement, nor the 2023 Road Map for UK-Israel bilateral relations will be suspended.

In response to Britain’s sanctions, Israel has said it will close the British consulate in East Jerusalem, remove UK representatives from the International Gaza Support Centre in Kiryat Gat, and terminate Britain’s role in training Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank.

Omar Barghouti added: “The UK has very clear obligations under international law, as triggered by the ICJ decisions of 2024 about Israel’s plausible genocide and its illegal occupation and apartheid.

“The UK must end all military, intelligence, trade, financial, academic and other relations with Israel that enable its illegal occupation, apartheid or genocide, as the ICJ has called for”.

Declassified asked the MoD how the awarding of arms contracts with Israeli firms which help sustain the illegal occupation of Palestine comply with the ICJ ruling, and whether it would commit to sanctioning the firms and cancel or not renew such contracts. 

A government spokesperson responded: “As the Foreign Secretary has set out, we are taking clear action, including banning the import of goods from illegal Israeli settlements into the UK, and creating new designation powers to go after individuals and companies that support, facilitate or profit from illegal settlement activity. We are also banning the advertisement or promotion of land in the illegal settlements.

“We have robust processes in place to ensure all contracts are awarded fairly and transparently. All suppliers are subject to rigorous due diligence and must deliver value for money while complying with our security and legal obligations.”

TAGGED:

• Elbit Systems
• Israel
• Military Training
• Palestine
• Rafael

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John McEvoy is Chief Reporter for Declassified UK. John is an historian and filmmaker whose work focuses on British foreign policy and Latin America. His PhD was on Britain’s Secret Wars in Colombia between 1948 and 2009, and he is currently working on a documentary about Britain’s role in the rise of Augusto Pinochet.

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Speaker Johnson Cancels Thursday House Session, Pushing Hegseth Impeachment Vote Until After Midterms

The move came after seven House Republicans voted in favor of a resolution to end the Iran war

by Dave DeCamp | September 16, 2026 at 12:54 pm ET

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced he has canceled a planned House session for Thursday, sending lawmakers for an early seven-week recess and pushing back a vote to impeach US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth until after the midterm elections.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who introduced the resolution to impeach Hegseth, suspected Johnson might take drastic measures to avoid the vote, so he didn’t inform GOP leadership of his plan to introduce the resolution, which he did on the House floor on Tuesday.

“And there it is. Just as I predicted. They’re canceling Congress tomorrow to avoid the vote on IMPEACHING [Hegseth]. It will also make it harder for us to reach 218 signatures on the Epstein Discharge Petition before the election. We were at 190+ signatures last night,” Massie wrote on X after Johnson canceled the votes.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson talks with reporters about the House finishing votes today instead of on Thursday, in the US Capitol on Wednesday, September 16, 2026. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect)

While Johnson didn’t explicitly say the Hegseth impeachment was the reason for canceling Thursday’s votes, Reese Gorman, a reporter for The Washington Sun, reported right before the cancellation was official that some in House leadership “want to avoid a vote on the Hegseth impeachment set to come up tomorrow since it’s privileged.”

Johnson’s move also came after seven House Republicans voted against the Iran war by voting in favor of a War Powers Resolution that would direct President Trump to end the conflict. The bill passed 220-204, with all 213 Democrats present voting in favor.

The House has held multiple votes on the Iran war, but the Tuesday night vote had the highest number of Republicans supporting a resolution to end the conflict, signaling that Massie may get some Republican support over the Hegseth impeachment since it’s centered on the conflict with Iran.

Both the House and the Senate have already passed a concurrent Iran War Powers Resolution, which, under the 1973 War Powers Act, should direct the president to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran.

Massie argued in his eight articles of impeachment for Hegseth that passing the concurrent War Powers Resolution was one of the multiple ways Hegseth and the administration are breaking the law by continuing the Iran war.

The articles also address how Hegseth has ignored US laws designed to mitigate civilian casualties, his role in extrajudicial executions at sea (strikes on alleged drug-running boats), the attack on Venezuela to abduct President Maduro, the bombing campaign in Yemen last year, and his efforts to chill free speech.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

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