I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
President Trump on Thursday shared a post
calling for the killing of Iranian leaders who won’t accept US demands,
ramping up his threats against the country amid a very fragile
ceasefire.
The post Trump amplified was written by
Marc Thiessen, who served as a speechwriter for the George W. Bush
administration. “If there are two factions in Iran, one that wants a
deal and one that doesn’t, let’s kill the ones who don’t want a deal,”
Thiessen said in a post on X where he was quoting himself from an
appearance on Fox News.
In the piece, Thiessen argued that Trump
should restart the bombing campaign against Iran. “Right now, the
remnants of the Iranian regime are under the misimpression that Trump
wants a deal more than they do,” he wrote.
“Trump needs to disabuse them of that
notion. He has reportedly told Iran that it has three to five days to
make a serious counteroffer. If it fails to do so, he should resume
combat operations — starting with strikes targeting Iran’s recalcitrant
leaders. If the Iranian regime is really ‘fractured’ between a faction
that wants a deal and a faction that does not, there is a simple
solution: Kill the faction that does not,” Thiessen said.
Thiessen said the US should maintain the
blockade and claimed the US military could open the Strait of Hormuz by
force and that it just needed 14 more days to “finish the job” against
Iran.
The Trump administration has pushed the
narrative that Iran’s military has essentially been obliterated, but
Iran was able to continue missile and drone attacks throughout the
entire war, and according to US officials speaking to The New York Times, US intelligence assesses that Tehran likely has access to the majority of its missiles and launchers.
Published date: 23 April 2026 15:40 BST | Last update:1 hour 50 mins ago
Amal Khalil, the seasoned journalist, was born during a years-long Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. She was killed there four decades later by invading Israeli forces.
“Amal was present in every home. Every home in Lebanon has lost her,” Ali Khalil, her brother, said tearfully a day after she was targeted and killed by Israel.
“Amal resembles the south in all its
details – its sweet breeze, its valleys, its mountains, and its old
houses. She resembles all of that.”
Khalil is remembered fondly by her colleagues as generous, fearless and pioneering.
“I want to express gratitude for
everything she did for us young journalists,” Hussein Chaabane, a
Lebanese investigative and legal journalist, told Middle East Eye.
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“She was so generous even if we were
competitors. She never hesitated in sharing a contact, a key – and she
had all the keys in the south.
“She knew it like the palm of her hand and she shared this love and dedication with everyone who needed it.”
Khalil, 42, was killed on Wednesday as she went to cover an earlier Israeli attack in the town of al-Tayri.
‘She knew [the south] like the palm of her hand and she shared this love and dedication with everyone who needed it’
– Hussein Chaabane, journalist
An initial strike hit a vehicle in front
of Khalil and freelance photographer Zeinab Faraj, prompting the pair to
take shelter in a nearby house.
A second strike then hit the house,
according to the health ministry. Rescuers retrieved Faraj, who
sustained a head wound, but were fired on before they could reach
Khalil.
Hours later, they found Khalil dead under the rubble.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam
described the killing as a war crime and said Lebanon would spare no
efforts in pursuing the culprits internationally.
“The killing of Amal was the killing of a woman of resistance,” Lebanese filmmaker Bachir Abou Zeid told MEE.
“Israel killed her because she was a journalist of resistance, not simply because she was a journalist.”
Writer shaped by occupation
Khalil was born in 1984 in al-Baisariyah, in the Saida district of southern Lebanon.
She grew up during the civil war and
Israel’s occupation of large parts of southern Lebanon, and recounted
seeing occupied villages in the distance when she was a child. Her own
town was retaken from Israeli forces shortly before her birth.
Khalil grew up reading As-Safir, a now
defunct popular Lebanese newspaper, through which she says she learnt
about everyday people’s struggles, about prisoners and the forcibly
disappeared, and about the civil war.
She studied Arabic literature in the city
of Saida, and – without the knowledge of her parents – travelled to
Beirut, where she became involved in communist activism.
It was then that her writing career began to take off, and she wrote several pieces for al-Hasnaa magazine.
“One story I particularly remember was for
the Valentine’s Day special issue, about how queer people celebrated
love in a conservative society,” she recalled in an interview in January with The Public Source, a Beirut-based outlet.
Khalil joined the nascent Al-Akhbar
newspaper in April 2006, a few months before the first issue went to
print. She would go on to work there for 20 years.
Weeks after she joined, Israel launched a 33-day war on Lebanon – a moment which Khalil described as a turning point in her career.
She had initially joined the paper to
write about women’s and cultural issues. But amid the backdrop of war,
she collected the stories of those displaced and bombarded by Israel.
It was a theme that would continue throughout her professional life.
‘The pressure to break me was relentless, but I didn’t yield’
– Amal Khalil
Khalil was largely based in the city of Sour, also known as Tyre, where she pursued public interest stories.
“Going after corruption cases and social
issues in the area, sparing no one – not even my family – led to
confrontations,” she recounted.
“I was threatened, assaulted, and intimidated. The pressure to break me was relentless, but I didn’t yield.”
Although al-Akhbar has provided favourable
coverage of Hezbollah and resistance against Israel, she said she did
not write with limitations.
She recalled al-Akhbar defying a request
by Hassan Nasrallah, then Hezbollah’s leader, to not publish a WikiLeaks
documents about Nabih Berri, the parliament’s speaker, back in 2011.
Over time, she became al-Akhbar’s go-to
field reporter for the whole of the south, covering Sour, Bint Jbeil and
Nabatieh, among other areas.
Face to face with Israeli troops
Khalil knew all too well that Israeli forces have a habit of targeting Lebanese journalists.
In 2010, she wrote an obituary for her slain colleague Assaf Abu Rahhal, who was killed by Israeli shelling.
She recalled a Lebanese soldier handing
her Abu Rahhal’s blood-stained ID card. “It was all that remained of
Assaf. I will never forget that day,” she said.
Khalil was unwavering in her support for leftism and resistance against occupation.
In more recent years she began to produce
more video content, learning to edit the films herself, even though she
was insistent that she did not want to appear in them.
‘I’m here to tell the stories of the people, not to become the story myself’
– Amal Khalil
“For me, it was simple: I’m here to tell the stories of the people, not to become the story myself,” she said.
During Israel’s 2023-2024 war on Lebanon, which broke out when Hezbollah attacked Israel in solidarity with Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza, she documented evidence of Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure.
“From the very first day of the genocide, Amal confronted Israel through her coverage,” said Abou Zeid.
“Her documentation, her movement from one
area to another, and her amplification of the story of the people in the
land and the south.”
After a ceasefire was announced in February last year, she reported on Israel’s near-daily violations of the truce.
Khalil was confronted by Israeli forces on
a number of occasions during her career. The closest shave, she said,
was in November 2024, when Israeli forces fired volleys to drive her and
colleagues back from a bulldozer.
‘Never accepted Israeli limitations’
Colleagues and friends remember that Amal refused to bow to Israeli orders or limitations on her movements.
“Not for a single moment did Amal abide by Israeli instructions about where she could go,” said Abou Zeid.
“Amal was not a journalist in the
conventional sense of the profession. Her love for the land and for her
people outweighed everything.”
Khalil said
herself following the 2024 war that people had advised her to restrict
her movements, but that her faith and her revolutionary upbringing
taught her to stand “in the face of oppression”.
‘Her love for the land and for her people outweighed everything’
– Bachir Abou Zeid, filmmaker
“My alignment with the people of the
south, my presence among them since the July 2006 war, has always been
the right choice. They have always lived up to that faith placed in
them,” she said.
“They will grow stronger, more steadfast, and more committed to this unwavering compass, toward truth, and toward Palestine.”
Rabbi Avraham Zarbiva operated a bulldozer in Gaza and has called for Israel to ‘flatten’ the Palestinian territory
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, April 22, 2026 at 4:52 pm ET | Gaza, Israel
During an independence day ceremony in
Israel on Tuesday, the Israeli government honored an extremist rabbi
known for bulldozing homes in Gaza and calling for Israel to “flatten”
the Palestinian territory. According to The Guardian, Rabbi Avraham
Zarbiv was one of fourteen people chosen by the Israeli government for
their “extraordinary contribution to society and the state” to light a
torch at the ceremony. Zarbiv serves as a rabbinical judge for an
illegal Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and an
Israeli state ombudsman recently ruled that he violated ethical
guidelines by expressing “extremist views,” which included his call to
flatten Gaza and boasting about the destruction of civilian homes and
the IDF’s mass killing of Palestinians. “Israel, let me tell you, we
have crushed them. There are tens of thousands of dead. The dogs and the
cats ate them because no one collected them,” Zarbiv said in a TV
interview last year. “Tens of thousands of families – they have not a
piece of paper, no childhood photo, no IDs, they have nothing. No home,
there is nothing. They come, they have no idea where their house is.
It’s something unbelievable.” Zarbiv became well known in Israel for
posting videos of himself destroying homes in Gaza, and his name has
become slang for destruction. “We’re here in Beit Hanoun attacking this
cursed village until we finish it,” Zarbiv said in one of his videos,
which was shared by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem. “All the way to
victory, to settlement. We will not give up until this village is
erased.” B’Tselem strongly condemned the Israeli government’s move to
honor Zarbiv. “Bestowing one of the highest civilian honors in Israel
on a citizen who committed war crimes illustrates how deeply the
dehumanization of Palestinians has taken root in the Israeli mainstream.
It is yet another terrifying signal that genocide has officially become
part of the national ethos,” the group said.
Less
than two months after fascist US President Donald Trump launched the
criminal US/Israeli war against Iran in the dead of night on February
28, the conflict is having a devastating economic impact on tens of
millions of workers around the globe.
American imperialism’s
determination to consolidate its dominance over the Middle East, one of
the world’s most critical energy-producing regions, has already claimed
the lives of thousands of Iranians in six weeks of brutal and
indiscriminate bombardment. But the economic fallout from the
US-instigated war and blockade of the Strait of Hormuz could prove even
more deadly.
Prior to the war’s outbreak, the Strait of Hormuz
accounted for some 20 percent of global oil traffic and a significant
portion of natural gas shipments. The consequences produced by the
disruption of these energy supplies are already reverberating across the
world economy. They include rising fuel costs, higher electricity
prices and escalating transportation expenses for billions of people.
The
Middle East is also a major producer of fertilisers, so prices have
jumped amid the planting season for farmers in the northern hemisphere.
The result is both increased production costs for crops and reduced
harvests, as farmers plant less to cut costs or use less fertiliser,
which will fuel a food-price spiral over the coming months and into
2027.
Shipping disruptions, compounded by heightened insurance
premiums and rerouted trade flows, have further increased the price of
food imports. The Containerised Freight Index rose 10 percent within a
month of the war’s outbreak, underscoring that even traffic not directly
impacted by the Strait of Hormuz blockade is affected.
On top of
the destruction of schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure
by US and Israeli missiles, the working class in Iran is bearing the
economic brunt of the war. A government spokesman admitted that
approximately 2 million workers have lost their jobs as a direct
consequence of the conflict.
The impact of the war has been
particularly acute across the Asia-Pacific region, due to its heavy
reliance on oil imports from the Middle East. Over 80 percent of crude
and LNG normally transiting the Strait of Hormuz is destined for
countries in the Asia-Pacific, including major industrial economies like
China and Japan. Fuel prices have risen sharply in India’s major
cities, with petrol and diesel costs increasing by roughly 10-15 percent
within weeks.
In Indonesia, nickel producers have cut output by
at least 10 percent due to shortages of natural gas and sulphur, which
are required to produce the high temperatures necessary for extraction
and refining of the metal. Severe disruptions to the garment factories
of Bangladesh have also been reported due to a lack of polyester and
nylon, fossil fuel byproducts used to make clothing.
Another
critical channel of impact is the disruption of remittances. Millions
of workers from South Asia and Africa are employed in the Gulf region,
sending vital income back to their impoverished families. The war has
disrupted these flows, as economic activity slows and employment
opportunities shrink.
Motorists
queue up to get fuel at a pump, fearing a possible fuel shortage due to
the US Iran war, in Ahmedabad, India, Monday, March 23, 2026. [AP Photo/Ajit Solanki]
The
United Nations Development Programme estimated in a recent report that
the war on Iran could cost 36 countries in the Asia-Pacific nearly $300
billion and plunge up to 8.8 million people into poverty. Five million
of these people live in Iran, where the human development index has
already lost 1–1.5 years due to the war.
The New York Times
worried in a lengthy analysis published April 20 that countries
throughout the Asia-Pacific may face “shortages [that] could push
several countries into convulsions of unrest, followed by recession,” if
the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked for just a few more weeks. Even
high-end production, including of semiconductors essential for producing
chips built in Taiwan, faces problems. Prior to the war, Qatar produced
a third of the world’s helium, a critical component of the
semiconductor production process. But it stopped production on March 2
after an Iranian retaliatory attack hit its gas facilities. As the Times put it, cuts to chip production “would roll through everything from electronics to cars.”
In
Africa, Nigeria has seen fuel prices rise by over 50 percent, despite
the country being a massive oil producer and exporter. Since the country
of some 240 million people is heavily dependent on imports of refined
oil products, petrol prices have risen significantly, leading to
increases in public transport costs and the price of staple foods. In
Kenya, the fuel price regulator hiked petrol prices by over 16 percent
and diesel prices by over 24 percent in mid April, following a 68
percent increase in the cost of oil imports.
Many African
countries depend on imported fertilisers. The surge in natural gas
prices has driven up costs for farmers, threatening lower crop yields
and outright famine in areas where subsistence farming prevails. At the
same time, currency depreciation in several countries is amplifying the
impact of global price increases, making imports even more expensive,
eroding real wages and pushing up already crippling debt repayment costs
for financially strapped governments.
In Europe and North
America, fuel prices have also risen sharply, placing yet another burden
on working people’s budgets amid stagnant economic growth, mass layoffs
and social attacks by the ruling elites in every country to pay for
bloated military budgets and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
In Germany, national airline Lufthansa announced the immediate closure
of its CityLine subsidiary amid a strike by thousands of airline workers
for job security and pay increases. The continent’s governments are
investing trillions of euros in their own war machines to prosecute
their predatory imperialist interests at the expense of workers’
livelihoods and social programmes.
Across the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal has announced the era of the “mega layoff,” with job cuts in finance, technology, entertainment and manufacturing.
By
contrast, the war is proving to be a bonanza for the corporations and
financial oligarchy. According to one investigation, the world’s major
oil conglomerates will pull in additional profits of over $230 billion
in 2026 alone.
The World Socialist Web Site has insisted
that US imperialism’s war on Iran is one front in the early stages of a
third world war, which includes the US/NATO war on Russia in Ukraine and
preparations for a military conflagration with China. As the
imperialist powers in North America and Europe scramble for the upper
hand in the redivision of the world, they are totally indifferent to the
impact on billions of workers from the global economic and social
disaster produced by crisis-ridden capitalism and their crazed policies.
But this very disaster creates the material conditions for the
development of a working class movement to end the war and the
capitalist profit system which is its root cause.
The parallels to
World War I are striking, when food riots across Europe during 1916 and
1917 gave an initial expression to growing popular opposition to the
imperialist slaughter. The most consequential of these were protests
that erupted demanding bread in Petrograd in early 1917, marking the
beginning of Russia’s February Revolution. Eight months later, the
Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky led the working class to power on a
socialist programme that would bring the world war to an end.
Today,
the world economy is integrated to such a degree that initial
expressions of social unrest provoked by the war have already erupted in
its first weeks. Beginning on April 10, tens of thousands of industrial
workers in India’s national capital region launched strikes and
protests against price hikes triggered by the war. Workers demanded
wage increases to cover higher rents, fuel costs, and food prices.
Protests have also erupted in countries as diverse as the Philippines
and Ireland.
Now, as in 1917, the decisive tasks are the fight to
develop a conscious, unified movement of the international working class
and build a mass revolutionary party capable of leading the struggle
for workers’ political power.
The global nature of the crisis
demands an international response, transcending national divisions and
opposing militarism. Workers in Iran, the United States, Europe, Asia
and Africa share a common interest in ending the war and the bankrupt
capitalist order that gave rise to it. This requires the independent
political mobilisation of the working class on a socialist programme to
place the commanding heights of the economy under democratic workers’
control, ensuring that production is organised to meet human needs
rather than private profit.
Under these conditions, the upcoming
International May Day Online Rally 2026 assumes critical importance. It
will articulate the revolutionary socialist programme and perspective
workers around the world require to fight imperialist war and its
barbaric consequences. Register today to participate, and encourage your work colleagues and friends to do the same.
On 20 April 2026, I was on “The Chris
Hedges Report” talking about where the Iran war is headed. Chris and I
mainly concentrated on trying to make sense of what President Trump is
doing to end the conflict on favorable terms for the US. Although many
believe that he will escalate after the two-week ceasefire expires on
Wednesday (April 22), I made the case that I thought that was unlikely
for two reasons. First, he cannot win a military victory if he goes up
the escalation ladder as the Iranians hold most of the cards. Second,
escalation would prolong the war and further reduce the oil and gas
flowing out of the Persian Gulf (and probably the Red Sea), which is
likely to take the world economy off the precipice.
Given this ominous prospect, Trump has a
powerful incentive to cut a deal with Iran as soon as possible. But the
chief problem he faces is that Israel does not want a deal. It wants the
US to continue the war and try to beat Iran into submission. Given the
stranglehold the Israel lobby has on Trump, he does not have much
maneuver room. All of this is to say, even if he cuts some sort of deal
with Iran, Israel and its minions in the US will work overtime to
undermine it. Trump is boxed in and he knows it, which I think explains
much of his erratic and outrageous behavior in recent weeks.
In short, Israel and its lobby bamboozled Trump into starting a losing war against Iran and now they won’t let him end it.
If the objective of the U.S. war upon Iran
is to ensure that that country does not develop nuclear weapons, that
goal was attained more than a decade ago through a far different
approach than the one now being followed by the Trump administration.
Iran, as a signer of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, had agreed to forgo the development of
nuclear weapons. Even so, fears grew during the early 21st
century that Iran’s uranium enrichment program, used for peaceful
purposes, might be diverted to the development of the Bomb, thereby
throwing the volatile Middle East into yet another crisis, including a
frenzied nuclear arms race.
As a result, the five permanent members of
the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and
France) and Germany began lengthy negotiations with Iran, offering it
various incentives to halt uranium enrichment. A key incentive was the
lifting of international sanctions, which were having a severe impact on
sales of Iran’s oil and, thus, its economy. After the election in 2013
of an Iranian reformer, Hassan Rouhani, as president, the negotiators
came to a preliminary accord to guide their talks toward a comprehensive
nuclear agreement.
The final agreement, formally known as the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was negotiated by the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European
Union. Signed in July 2015, it granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange
for significant restrictions on its nuclear program. These included
Iran’s agreement to ban production of highly enriched uranium or
plutonium, ensure that its key nuclear facilities pursued only civilian
work, and limit the numbers and types of centrifuges that it could
operate. In addition, Iran agreed to allow inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog,
unfettered access to its nuclear facilities and undeclared sites.
In the United States,
the Iran nuclear agreement was strongly supported by the Obama
administration, which played a key role in securing it, and by
Democrats, but denounced by Republicans. Jeb Bush, then a leading
presidential contender, called it “dangerous, deeply flawed, and
short-sighted,” while U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that it was a
“death sentence for the state of Israel.” Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu,
Israel’s Prime Minister, lobbied ferociously against U.S. acceptance of
the Iran agreement, furiously attacking it as a “historic mistake.”
Despite the opposition, the agreement went into effect in January 2016 and, initially, had smooth sailing.
The IAEA certified that Iran was keeping its commitments, nations
repealed or suspended their sanctions, Iran’s oil exports surged, and
the United States and European nations unfroze about $100 billion of
Iran’s frozen assets.
In May 2018, however, Donald Trump, Obama’s successor as President, breaking with America’s European allies, unilaterally withdrew the U.S. government from the Iran agreement
and announced the reimposition of oil and banking sanctions. “It is
clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the
decaying and rotten structure of this deal,” Trump announced. Assailing
the Iran agreement as “defective to its core,” Trump condemned it
for failing to deal with Iran’s ballistic missile program and its proxy
warfare in the Middle East, as well as for the agreement’s 10-year
sunset provision.
In response, Iranian President Rouhani,
stating that the U.S. government had failed to “respect its
commitment,” declared that he had “ordered the Atomic Energy
Organization of Iran to be ready for action if needed, so that if
necessary we can resume our enrichment on an industrial level without
any limitations.” Even so, he promised, he would wait to speak about
this with allies and the other signatories to the agreement.
Thereafter, things went downhill. Although
France, Germany, and Britain sought to keep the agreement alive by
evading the U.S. banking sanctions through a barter system, this effort
eventually collapsed. Meanwhile, Trump got into a verbal brawl with
Rouhani, threatening Iran with what he called “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Ultimately, Iran began exceeding the agreed-upon limits to its stockpile, enriching uranium to higher concentrations, and developing new centrifuges.
Although Joe Biden, as a 2020 presidential candidate, promised
to rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement and “to work with our allies to
strengthen and extend it,” by the time he was in office the relationship
with Iran had deteriorated too far
to make this feasible. Coming under a new, more reactionary leadership,
the Iranian regime grew more repressive, as well as more distant from
the United States and more politically toxic. As a result, a new
agreement was increasingly out of reach.
In retrospect, are there any lessons that can be learned from these events?
One is that, to the degree that the
development of nuclear weapons by Iran is a currently a problem, it is a
problem of Trump’s making. Or as Biden put it years ago, Trump’s pullout from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement was “a self-inflicted disaster.”
Another is that getting a country to forgo
nuclear weapons development is easier to accomplish through
international―and especially UN Security Council―action than through
unilateral action. A threat from one nation to another can easily be
viewed and dismissed as bullying. But pressure from a worldwide
organization representing the community of nations has greater impact.
More generally, if nations are going to be
asked (or pressured) to forgo development of nuclear weapons, it is
useful to have a framework that treats nations equally. The Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty fosters this equality through a bargain, in
which the non-nuclear nations forgo building nuclear weapons in exchange
for the nuclear nations eliminating their own nuclear arsenals. The
next time Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu threaten to annihilate Iranian civilization, someone might remind them of that.
Joe Gill, MEE, 21 April 2026 09:07 BST | Last update:8 hours 4 mins ago
Comparisons between the US-Israeli
war on Iran, the Gaza genocide, and Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union
are being made by scholars
A picture of US President Donald Trump and
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on fire during a protest
against the US-Israeli military action in Iran, near the US Embassy in
Manila, Philippines, 9 April 2026 (AFP)
It has long been considered offensive and antisemitic to draw comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel, but on the specific question of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its wars of expansion, including the war on Iran, the dam has broken.
Norman Finkelstein, the eminent American
Jewish scholar and son of Holocaust survivors, drew the direct
comparison between Hitler’s war in the east and the war launched by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran on 28 February in a recent Middle East Eye interview.
I have long thought the comparison is merited, for a number of reasons, beginning in 2023 with the start of the war on Gaza.
Like Hitler’s Germany, Israel’s leaders
made the fatal error of not knowing when to stop, and opening up several
fronts – seven at one point. Each tactical victory – against Hamas,
then Hezbollah, encouraged further audacious attacks. Having waged a
genocidal campaign in Gaza, colonial expansion in the West Bank, and
relentless attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, Prime Minister Netanyahu
turned to Iran in 2025.
Why? A messianic ideology of Jewish supremacy
that drives the prime minister and the settler politicians on whom he
depends. The politics of ethnonationalism, territorial expansion and
hyper militarism are similar, if not identical, to the ideology of the
Second World War fascist axis led by Nazi Germany. And this ideology of
ethnic supremacy leads to overreach.
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Trump, as a white nationalist who believes in US exceptionalism,
shares the same inflated belief in unlimited US power, but is less
unequivocally bent on permanent war. (Trump bears some comparison with
Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose record of failed imperial adventures more closely resembles Trump’s.)
Iran and the Soviet Union
Finkelstein, speaking of the Iran war,
compared it to how the war of extermination waged by Hitler on the
Soviet people inspired them to rally and defend the country. “This was
the same mistake made by Trump. The more Trump turned it into a war of
extermination like the Nazis did with Russia… the people rallied, it was
the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic war, a second time.”
Another parallel to the Second World War
is that the West’s enemy is a revolutionary regime which is facing
severe internal pressures. The Soviet Union in the 1930s was perceived
as being weak due to violent internal upheaval; the similar position of
Iran before the war encouraged Netanyahu and Trump to believe that a
surprise attack would lead to a rapid victory.
The Soviet Union in the 1930s was
perceived as being weak due to violent internal upheaval; similar to the
position of Iran before the war
Both the Soviets and Iran lacked major
global allies prepared to come to their defence. Like the Soviet Union,
Iran had non-state groups in different countries that supported its
international vision, but these groups pose a limited threat to the
world’s most advanced military, and a nuclear-armed regional military
power.
Like Iran, the Soviet Union had sought to avoid war by making agreements with its chief enemy, Germany, in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. In the case of Iran, the 2015 nuclear deal was supposed to end the threat of conflict. But Trump ripped it up in 2018.
Both Iran and the Soviet Union had been
through very difficult years preceding this frontal military attack.
Iran had faced comprehensive sanctions, which helped to spark three
major uprisings against the regime, in 2019, 2022 and lastly in January
2026.
The Soviet regime, while in the process of rapidly industrialising, had waged a terror campaign against kulaks, national minority groups, and swathes of the Bolshevik administration, including the officer corp of the Red Army, in which millions died
– a point explicitly made by Finkelstein (although he exaggerated by
saying “tens of millions” died). As a result, Hitler saw Soviet Russia
as weak and vulnerable. He predicted a sweeping victory over Stalin.
As Finkelstein explained: “The first
months of the war were a cake walk, disaster for the Soviets… but the
Germans made one big mistake: they wanted what was called living space,
lebensraum, and [that] means they had to get rid of the people living
there, and so they embarked on a war of extermination… Notwithstanding
the brutality of Stalin’s regime, notwithstanding collectivisation and
the purge trials, which eliminated the entire military and political
leadership, the people embraced the “Great Patriotic War”.
Like the Israelis and the Trump White
House, the Nazis had a racial contempt for their Slavic enemies who they
considered to be inferior and not able to resist the advance of the
German armed forces. Trump and Netanyahu likewise consistently belittle
the capacity of their enemies, believed the Iranian regime would crumble
under direct assault, and see their technological and military
superiority as decisive over the “Arabs” and Iran. Trump called the
Iranians “animals”.
These Iranians supported the US-Israeli war. Now they realise their mistake
The killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
on the first day of the war was supposed to be the knockout blow. It
would be as if Hitler had a rocket system that could accurately target
Stalin’s rooms in the Kremlin and wipe out the dictator and his
politburo. Would that have caused the Soviet regime to collapse amid
invasion? Unlikely.
The first year of the Nazis’ invasion saw a
devastating series of retreats and defeats for the Soviets. The
Wehrmacht rolled through Ukraine, where the famine and terror of the
previous decade had drained support for the Soviets, allowing the
Germans to march rapidly on to the Russian steppe; in the north the
Nazis advanced through Belarus to the gates of Moscow and Leningrad,
imposing a brutal siege on the latter. Hitler had every reason to think
victory over the Communist regime in Russia was all but certain.
But to successfully overthrow a regime one
needs to find new, pliable rulers who are able to replace the old ones.
This has not proved possible in Iran, with Reza Pahlavi shown to be wholly inadequate to the task, lacking political skills and wide popular support in Iran.
Germany, and the US and Israel, overlooked
the lack of strategic route to defeat their enemies in the long run. In
the short to medium term, they win based on superior air power,
intelligence, and destructive offensive forces, but in the longterm, the
outlook is more problematic, as people constantly attacked in their own
lands are certain to resist.
Iranians have come to realise that Trump
and Netanyahu are not interested in their liberation – they wish to
destroy the country’s independent existence and to fragment it along
ethnic lines.
Iran’s new leaders
Moreover, in the case of Iran, the wiping
out of the older generation of leaders and commanders has changed the
calculus of the regime, brought in new commanders, and if anything ended
the restraint that was the policy under Khamenei. The attacks on Gulf
states, the blockade of Hormuz, and the insistence that Lebanon must be
part of a lasting ceasefire deal show how much Iran, post-February, is
no longer afraid to directly confront the encirclement imposed by the US
and its allies.
The wiping out of the older generation of
leaders has changed the calculus of the regime, ending the restraint
that was the policy under Khamenei
Iran, like Russia, is a vast continental
nation, and presents huge challenges for any foreign power wishing to
conquer or dismember it. Hitler openly saw the Soviet Union as part of
the future Third Reich, as a vast colonial territory providing resources
and agricultural lands to feed the empire, while turning its people
into little more than slaves. After the victories of the first year of
the war in the east, things turned sour for the Nazis at Stalingrad in late 1942.
Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders long
declared their intention to remove the Iranian regime, using agents on
the ground, assassinations and sabotage, and imploring Iranians to rise
up against the ayatollahs. But after the mass protests and brutal
crackdown in January, these calls have not been heeded. Iranians have
rallied to the nation.
If, however unlikely it seems, the latest
US-Iran ceasefire somehow transitions to a more permanent agreement to
end hostilities on Iran’s terms, it would be seen as a historic defeat
for the US, on par with Vietnam. And a break with the total war that
killed tens of millions in the 1940s.
As of now, the US is blockading Iran’s ports and seized an Iranian ship, while moving thousands of troops into the region. At home, Trump is on a war footing, putting the auto sector on notice to convert to weapons production,
while asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion “defence” budget, the largest
ever. This does not look like imminent peace, but with Trump, who
knows?
When will it end?
And what about Gaza? The genocide is far from over. For the Palestinians, this question is existential.
History offers some clues. No modern
genocide has lasted more than four years. Rwanda’s lasted 100 days – the
fastest, most brutal, in history. Cambodia’s lasted over three years
until Vietnam invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. The Armenian genocide
lasted just over one year. Stalin’s special operation against the
Poles, Ukrainians and other national minorities lasted 16 months. The
German siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. The Holocaust, the worst of
all, lasted four years.
So far the Palestinians have endured
926 days of extermination and siege. According to a 2025 household
survey and joint mortality study, the Gaza death toll had reached 84,000
by January 2025 and is likely now well over 100,000, on top of 6,500 killed by Israel in Lebanon, and thousands more in Iran.
The biggest defeat of all is not in Lebanon, or Iran, but in Washington. US voters have had enough of wars and Israel
Crucially, in most cases, genocide precedes the collapse or military defeat of the perpetrator.
Israel has always relied on unconditional
US support, which culminated in Washington arming a genocide, then
backing not one, but two unprovoked assaults on Iran, and a prolonged
war against Hezbollah. All of them failed, at appalling human cost. And
now that US weapons pipeline is in jeopardy.
The vote last week in the US Senate on
supplying arms to Israel was historic. Even though it passed, 40 out of
47 Democratic senators voted for Bernie Sander’s resolution blocking a
batch of military aid. By contrast, last April, only 15 of the Democratic caucus’s 47 members supported similar measures. This signals a dramatic shift against Israel in Washington.
Democrats who want to be re-elected in
November know they must now distance themselves, not just rhetorically,
but also financially and politically, from Israel and its powerful US
lobby. Aipac is still spending hundreds of millions to get its
candidates elected, but the taint of lobby money is increasingly electoral poison.
Netanyahu had his golden time with Trump’s
first term, then Joe Biden, and Trump two. That time is coming to an
end. Most likely, he will look for a way to prolong Israel’s campaign
for regional supremacy and remain in office as long as possible, but he
is running out of road.
He now faces his biggest defeat of
all; not in Lebanon, or Iran, but in Washington. US voters have had
enough of forever wars and Israel.
In Israel, as Finkelstein warns, it is not
just Netanyahu, but the whole of Israeli society that “has turned into
homicidal maniacs” supporting war on Iran, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon, and genocide in Gaza.
The final lesson of World War Two was that
fascism was defeated after its leaders’ disastrous military overreach
and defeat at the hands of the Soviet Red Army and partisan resistance.
Today’s fascist war leaders have learned nothing from this history.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Joe Gill has worked as a journalist in
London, Venezuela and Oman, for newspapers including Financial Times,
Morning Star and Middle East Eye. His focus is on geopolitics, economic
history, social movements, and the arts.
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