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.
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.
President Trump has threatened to “blow up” the “whole country” of
Iran if Tehran doesn’t agree to a deal that he is demanding it sign, as
the very fragile ceasefire appears to be on the verge of collapsing.
Trump made the comments in an interview with Fox News reporter Trey Yingst.
“I just spoke with President Trump for about 20 minutes, and he told
me: ‘If Iran does not sign this deal, the whole country is getting blown
up.’ He went on to say that bridges and power plants will be targeted
if Iran does not sign this agreement,” Yingst said.
The threat from Trump came after Iran said it re-closed the Strait of
Hormuz after briefly declaring it was open to all commercial vessels.
The Iranian government said that the waterway was again closed due to
the fact that the US was maintaining its blockade on Iranian ports, a
violation of the ceasefire agreement.
President Trump at the White House on April 13, 2026 (White House photo)
After Iran said the strait was again closed, Iranian military vessels
reportedly fired on two ships, something President Trump referenced in a
post on Truth Social on Sunday, where he also threatened Iran with major attacks on its power plants and bridges.
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take
it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out
every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR.
NICE GUY! They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they
don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done,
which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last
47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!” the president
wrote.
In the same post, Trump said that his “representatives” were going to
Pakistan for negotiations with Iran, referring to US envoy Steve
Witkoff and Jared Kushner. In another interview on Sunday, Trump said Vice President JD Vance would not attend the negotiations due to “security concerns.”
Iranian media reported on Sunday that there’s been no decision in
Tehran to send negotiators to Islamabad and that there wouldn’t be “as
long as there is a blockade.” Iranian officials have also denied claims
from President Trump that Tehran agreed to allow the US to take Iran’s
uranium that’s enriched at the 60% level.
As workers around the world are hit with
the ever-worsening consequences of the US war on Iran—crippling rises in
petrol and gas prices, food price hikes and the growing threat of food
shortages in poorer countries—major corporations and banks are raking in
increased profits to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
First in line to benefit from the profit
bonanza, as could be expected, are the oil companies. But the flow of
increased money extends across the board.
The price of diesel is advertised at a gas station Thursday, March 19, 2026, in Hyattsville, Md. [AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough]
According to an investigation by the Guardian,
the results of which were published on Wednesday, with oil at around
$100 per barrel the major oil conglomerates in Saudi Arabia, Russia, the
United States, Britain and Europe will collect an additional $234
billion in profit for 2026, an extra inflow of $30 million an hour for
the rest of the year.
The biggest winner is Saudi Arabia’s
Aramco, which is expected to make a war profit of $25.5 billion, with
the Russian petro-giants set to make an additional $23.9 billion.
The US firm ExxonMobil will take in an
additional $11 billion. Shell’s revenue will rise by $6.8 billion, and
Chevron stands to make an additional $9.2 billion.
The additional profits are on top of the
$1 trillion the oil industry takes in every year while receiving
explicit subsidies which totalled $1.3 trillion in 2022, according to
calculations by the International Monetary Fund.
There are other benefits as well flowing
from the rise in share prices. The market value of ExxonMobil has
increased by $118 billion, while that of Shell is up $34 billion.
Apart from the oil producers, trading
firms which deal in oil, food, metals and other necessary commodities,
largely dominating global markets, are already cashing in. The Wall Street Journal
reported that the Swiss commodities trader Gunvor said it had already
made as much money in the first quarter of this year as it did in all of
2025 when it made a profit of $1.6 billion. Others will be experiencing
a similar boost.
Also not surprisingly, US arms
manufacturers have been cashing in. On the first day of the US attack on
Iran major firms recorded a rise in their total market value of up to
$30 billion.
The profit and price gouging extends across the US economy under conditions where, according to a recent article in the New York Times, corporate profits “have reached a record share of the US economy.” Corporate America intends to keep it that way.
Sonu Varghese, the global macro strategist at the Carson group, a financial firm, told the Times
that many companies viewed inflation from “outside shocks,” such as
war, “as an opportunity to raise prices and boost margins” and that
there was going to be some “margin expansion.”
This points to a repeat of the experience of the inflation surge of 2022 when, as the Times
reported, data from the US Producer Price Index “showed that
wholesalers and retailers generally expanded the margin between their
sales prices and their cost of acquiring goods.”
Major US banks have also been cashing in
on the opportunities generated by the war. The six major US banks
reported collective profits of $47.6 billion for the first quarter, much
of it generated because market volatility provided conditions for
significantly profitable trading.
Reporting on the profit hike, the Financial Times
noted that the first quarter was marked by geopolitical shocks—the
military operation in Venezuela and the Iran war—triggering volatility,
which is “good for investment banks which make money from financing and
facilitating client trades.”
JPMorgan led the way in absolute terms
with a 13 percent increase in profits, over the same period last year,
to $16.5 billion, with market jitters being characterised as a “gift to
trading desks.” Goldman Sachs reported a 19 percent increase in profits
to $5.6 billion. Citigroup reported a 42 percent profit surge and Morgan
Stanley’s profits rose 29 percent.
The combined increase in the profits from the trading desks of the major banks is estimated to be the highest in 12 years.
Much of this money is being used to
finance share buybacks to boost the portfolios of the banks’ senior
executives and big investors. The largest US banks spent a record $33
billion on buybacks in the first quarter, with JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs
and Citigroup making their largest ever repurchases.
The banks have benefited from the
relaxation of regulations under Trump. Bank of America chief financial
officer Alastair Borthwick said the bank was “encouraged by the work the
administration is doing,” as it bought back $7.2 billion of its own
stock in the quarter, the highest level in four years. The Trump regime
is moving to reduce the amount of capital the banks must hold as a
reserve, freeing up money for trading and buybacks.
The overall sentiment on Wall Street is
that the profit bonanza will continue, at least for now, with the
S&P 500 passing the 7,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday.
Inflation profiteering fuelled by the war is one factor. Another is the
wave of mass layoffs, hitting tens of thousands of workers in many
cases, especially in the high-tech industries.
Commenting on what it called a new era of mega-layoffs, the Wall Street Journal noted that “employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once.”
In the past, mass layoffs by a company may
have signalled troubles or mismanagement. “Now, such a company is more
likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting
boldly.”
Giant corporations and banks are feeding
on death, destruction and the impoverishment of the working class the
world over. This makes it urgently necessary for workers and youth to
draw the sharpest political conclusions.
The war on Iran itself is not the product
of the individual Donald Trump, but is driven by the historic crisis of
imperialism, of which he is the most grotesque personification.
Likewise, the obscenity expressed in the
present day economic and financial system is not the product of the
individual greed of the ruling oligarchs, though that exists in
abundance. It is a product of the capitalist system itself, the
objective logic of which, as Marx explained 150 years ago, is the
creation of fabulous wealth at one pole of society and poverty, misery
and degradation at the other.
Today the necessity for its overthrow and the establishment of socialism is not confined to the pages of Das Kapital but is being written large in the language of daily life.
Direct talks in Washington for the
first time in 30 years continue a long history of overtures that
predate resistance and persist despite repeated Israeli attacks on
civilians
Lebanese protesters gather in Martyrs’
Square in Beirut to reject direct negotiations with Israel, expressing
opposition to normalisation and diplomatic engagement, on 13 April 2026
(Abdul Kader Al Bay/ZUMA Press Wire)
Since Lebanese
President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam assumed office in
early 2025, mere weeks after the November 2024 ceasefire between the
Lebanese resistance and the genocidal state of Israel, the new leadership, under strong US and Saudi advice, moved urgently to offer friendship and full cooperation to Israel.
Not only did they fail to protest the more than 10,000 ceasefire violations that Israel committed over the 15 months leading up to the US-Israeli aggression on Iran
in late February 2026 – including thousands of air strikes, drone
attacks and ground incursions that killed more than 500 people, most of
them civilians – but they went as far as offering, even pleading, for
direct negotiations to achieve permanent peace with the Jewish
settler-colony.
Rather than blaming Israel for its ongoing crimes against the Lebanese people, the two leaders blamed Hezbollah,
as if Israeli attacks were a response to the resistance, when in fact
the resistance has been retaliating against unceasing Israeli aggression
and occupation of Lebanese land.
Such magnanimous offers were last made by
the Phalangist president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, who collaborated
with Israeli invaders of his country in 1982, and his brother Amin, but
they were scrapped afterwards due to much opposition.
The Israeli government initially rebuffed
these recent overtures, which Salam repeatedly extended until it finally
agreed last week. Facing pressure from the Trump administration, Israel met with Lebanese officials in Washington
this week for their first direct talks in more than 30 years, even as
it continues to bomb Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut, killing
upwards of 2,000 people in the past six weeks alone.
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Israel has justified its multiple
invasions and incursions into Lebanon since the late 1960s, which have
killed tens of thousands of civilians, as efforts to defeat Palestinian
resistance fighters who moved there after 1969, and who were forced to
withdraw in 1982. It has since invoked the same justification to
confront post-1982 Lebanese resistance to its illegal occupation of
Lebanese territory, especially Hezbollah.
Yet present claims that resistance
movements provoke Israeli aggression, and that Lebanese leaders must
therefore normalise relations with Israel to achieve stability, obscure
the historical record: Israeli relations with Lebanese political and
religious figures eager to offer it friendship and cooperation date back
to the 1920s, long before the settler-colony was even established, let
alone the arrival of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon or the
emergence of Hezbollah.
Indeed, Aoun and Salam are part of a long chain of Lebanese politicians eager to please Israel.
Sectarian myths
In Lebanon, a common claim is that
right-wing sectarian Maronite leaders only sought to befriend Israel
after 1948, in response to the arrival of more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees expelled during the 1948 Zionist conquest of Palestine by Jewish colonists – the majority of them Muslim – and the resulting demographic shift.
This, however, proves to be a fabrication.
Sectarian Maronite hostility towards Lebanese Muslims precedes the
arrival of the Palestinians by nearly three decades.
In March 1920, Jewish Agency representative Yehoshua Hankin and Lebanese Maronite representatives signed a treaty of cooperation
that also included “prominent Muslim families”, many of whom were
absentee landlords who sold land in Palestine to Zionist settlers.
In March 1920, Jewish Agency
representative Yehoshua Hankin and Lebanese Maronite representatives
signed a treaty of cooperation that also included ‘prominent Muslim
families’
Contacts between Lebanese Maronite leader Emile Edde
and Zionist representatives began in the early 1930s. During this
period, Edde expressed his support for establishing friendly relations
with Jewish colonists and “even of a Zionist-Maronite alliance”.
Edde was elected president of Lebanon in 1936 and remained in contact with the Jewish Agency for the next two years.
Edde’s prime minister, Khayr al-Din al-Ahdab,
the first Sunni Muslim to hold the position in Lebanon’s history,
offered his country’s guarantees of order and security to the Jewish
colonial-settlements along the Lebanese border. After leaving office and
seeking to regain power, Edde resumed his contacts with the Israelis in
1948 while vacationing in France.
This was followed by the signing of the infamous political treaty between the Jewish Agency and the Maronite Patriarch Antoine Arida, on behalf of the Maronite Church, on 30 May 1946.
The treaty established guidelines for
close ties between the Maronites and the Jewish colonists, based on
mutual recognition of rights and nationalist aspirations, including the
Jewish Agency’s recognition of Lebanon’s “Christian character” and its
assurance that the Jewish colonists had no territorial ambitions in
Lebanon.
In return, the Maronite Church supported Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Deepening collaboration
Edde, al-Ahdab, and the Maronite Church
were not the only parties in Lebanon offering love and friendship to
Israel. The Phalangists were next. Israel established relations with
them at the end of 1948 in the United States, through the mediation of
the Maronite priest Yusuf ‘Awad, who had contacts with representatives
of the US Zionist Federation.
The main Phalangist contact was Elias Rababi, who, along with other Phalangists, held several meetings with the Zionist representatives in Europe.
Rababi informed the Israelis that if the
Phalangists took over the government, they would establish diplomatic
relations with Israel. In exchange, he requested funding to support
Phalangist political activity and procure weapons.
While the Israelis were unconvinced of the movement’s strength, the foreign ministry nevertheless paid him $2,000.
In February 1949, three envoys of the Maronite Archbishop of Beirut, Ignatius Mubarak,
arrived in Israel and met with a foreign ministry official. The three
claimed that Mubarak “wished to know the position of the Israeli
Government on plans for a coup in Lebanon” against President Bechara
Khoury due to the latter’s support of integrating Lebanon in the Arab
world.
Emile Edde and Pierre Gemayel were said to
be parties to the plan. The Israelis responded by welcoming any attempt
on the part of Lebanon’s Christians to “liberate themselves from the
yoke of pan-Arab leaders”, but requested a detailed plan of how the coup
would be staged, what forces they had backing them and the level of
assistance required from Israel. The plan ultimately came to naught.
But the plan to install a pro-Israel government in Lebanon through a coup was an idea Zionists had entertained since the 1920s.
In response to former prime minister David
Ben-Gurion’s 1954 proposal that Israel encourage a military coup in
Lebanon to establish a Christian regime allied with Israel, then prime
minister Moshe Sharett dismissed it as “nonsense“, writing in his diaries that no movement was strong enough to establish an exclusively Maronite state.
Given the proposal’s unfeasibility, Moshe Dayan, who was the army chief of staff at the time, proposed in 1955 that Israel annex Lebanon south of the Litani River.
Before resistance
Just as there is a long history of
Lebanese politicians offering a loving friendship to Israel, Israeli
atrocities against the Lebanese people between 1948 and 1969 were also
the order of the day, long before the existence of the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) or Hezbollah.
During the 1948 war, even though the
Lebanese army did not engage in battle with the Israelis, Zionist forces
conquered southern Lebanon in what they dubbed “Operation Hiram”,
occupying 15 Lebanese villages as far as the Litani River.
Zionist commander General Mordechai Makleff
asked Ben-Gurion for permission to occupy Beirut, which he said could
be done in 12 hours, but the latter refused, fearing international
condemnation given Lebanon’s neutrality.
During their occupation of southern
Lebanon, Zionist forces committed one of the worst massacres of the 1948
war in the Lebanese village of al-Hula, where they slaughtered 85 civilians on 31 October. When the Israelis invaded it again in 2024, soldiers defaced the monument to the massacre, listing the names of those killed.
Ceasefire not included: Lebanon begins ‘exploratory’ talks with Israel
In early 1949, Lebanese and Israeli officials began formal armistice negotiations at Ras al-Naqura, which proceeded “more smoothly”
than with all other Arab states. Rather than express horror at Israeli
atrocities committed against Lebanese civilians a few weeks earlier,
Lebanese delegates privately informed the Israelis that they “were not
really Arabs”. They also discussed the possibility of establishing
diplomatic relations with Israel.
The Israelis withdrew from Lebanese territory in March 1949.
This week’s meeting in Washington DC was a repeat performance by the Lebanese ambassador to the US, who did not condemn Israel’s recent massacres of Lebanese civilians but reportedly shook hands with the Israelis in a two-hour private meeting away from the cameras.
None of this will halt continued Israeli
attacks on Lebanese civilians, any more than the extra-friendly 1949
talks halted subsequent aggression.
In the 1950s and 1960s, long before the PLO guerrillas arrived in Lebanon, Israel attacked the country close to 200 times
– including raids and shootings, stealing Lebanese cattle, burning
crops in border villages and towns, destroying homes and property and
kidnapping Lebanese civilians – resulting in at least 23 killed, 39
injured and 81 abducted.
In 1965, Israel bombed a dam under construction intended to divert the Banyas, Hasbani and Litani rivers in Lebanon and Syria, in response to Israeli theft of water belonging to Arab states, which it sought to divert to the Naqab desert in violation of international law. It destroyed the project.
Atrocities continue
Perhaps Israel’s most daring crime during
this period was the machine-gunning of a Lebanese civilian plane in July
1950 by one of its air force fighters inside Lebanese airspace.
The attack on the plane, en route from
East Jerusalem’s Qalandya airport to Beirut, killed two people and
injured seven Jordanian passengers, including a five-year-old girl whose
leg had to be amputated. Among those killed were Lebanese radio operator Antoine Wazir and Arab Jewish student Musa Fuad Dweik, whose head was blown off by one of the bullets.
In 1967, Israel occupied the Shib’a Farms, even though Lebanon was not a party to the war. It continues to occupy them today.
The following year, in December 1968, two
days after two Palestinian refugees from Lebanon machine-gunned an
Israeli passenger plane parked at Athens airport, killing a marine
engineer, Israel bombed Beirut International Airport, destroying 13 civilian passenger planes worth almost $44m at the time, as well as hangars and other airport installations.
The Lebanese government is offering Israel
extensive support to neutralise Hezbollah, including criminalising the
only Lebanese resistance movement that ever liberated Lebanese territory
from occupation
All these atrocities were committed before
Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon began to launch resistance operations
against the settler-colony. Likewise, Lebanese politicians who offered
cooperation with Israel did so long before these developments were later
invoked to justify Israeli aggression.
Neither Aoun nor Salam is proposing anything new to the Israelis that previous Lebanese allies had not offered.
The Lebanese government is offering Israel
extensive support to neutralise Hezbollah, including criminalising the
only Lebanese resistance movement that ever liberated Lebanese territory
from occupation and disseminating anti-Iranian propaganda.
Lebanese Justice Minister Adel Nassar
posted on X this week the complete fabrication that Iran abandoned its
condition for a comprehensive ceasefire that includes Lebanon in return
for the Americans releasing its funds in western banks.
Yet despite all this help, nothing will
sway Israel from committing more atrocities in Lebanon, and no one – not
the Americans, the Saudis or the Israel-friendly Lebanese government –
will be able to stop the Lebanese resistance from fighting back against
this genocidal, predatory state.
Ultimately, Israel did not need to
orchestrate a coup in Lebanon to secure a regime allied with it. The
United States and Saudi Arabia did the job on its behalf and then some –
as Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, who participated in
Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, affirmed when he emerged from this
week’s talks declaring: “We are on the same side.”
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab
politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He
is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His
books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in
Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question:
Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in
Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen
languages.
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