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.
When Graham, who served in the Air Force, unexpectedly died last month, critics remembered
the South Carolina Republican as someone who “never met a war he didn’t
want to send your kids to,” as well as “a bloodthirsty bastard who
cheered the killing of Muslims and sold his soul to the fascists.”
On Monday, Hegseth—who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq—fondly recalled meeting with Graham while part of the group Vets for Freedom. Joined
at the base by the senator’s replacement, his sister Darline Graham,
and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is from South Carolina, the Pentagon chief declared that “it falls to us to complete the work that Lindsey Graham began and advocated for for decades.”
“As we gather here today, the War
Department is seeking a historic, generational investment of $1.5
trillion for America’s warriors, and Lindsey himself said to me, in his
office, ‘This is the best military budget
I’ve seen since I’ve been in Congress,’” Hegseth claimed, using
President Donald Trump’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.
“This department pays tribute to Lindsey
Graham in the naming of this base, but there could be no greater tribute
than for Congress to give and invest in our warriors for the full $1.5
trillion,” he added.
The GOP narrowly controls both chambers of Congress, but as Politico reported just hours before the event, “Hegseth hasn’t persuaded Republicans
to steamroll Democrats and advance the record-breaking plan, despite
regularly trekking to the Hill in recent weeks and hobnobbing with
lawmakers. Instead, an increasingly vocal group of GOP lawmakers argue
the administration hasn’t explained why Republicans should burn valuable
political capital in pursuit of Trump’s vision—especially with the
midterms just months away.”
“Several top Republicans are skeptical
about the Trump administration’s two-track approach to clinching $1.5
trillion. This relies on the GOP using the partisan reconciliation
process—which allows the majority to bypass Democrats entirely—to
provide $350 billion, the bulk of the increase,” the outlet detailed.
The Republican majority “has—mostly—had Hegseth’s back” since the battle
to confirm him, despite widely condemned bombings of boats allegedly trafficking drugs on the high seas and the ongoing war on Iran.
Hegseth on Monday shared some supposed details from his last meeting with Graham, who chaired the Senate Budget Committee.
“Mr. Secretary, what do you need for a
reconciliation?” Graham said, according to Hegseth. “I said: ‘Well, in
total, sir, we’re going to need $350 billion for our military. That’s
what we believe gets us to $1.5 trillion—$115 [billion] in the base
budget, $350 [billion] in reconciliation, and we’ll be ready.’”
“He looked at me and said, ‘How’s $355
[billion] sound to you?’ He wanted to give even more than $350
[billion],” Hegseth continued. “I saw firsthand as a young first
lieutenant, as a captain in a combat zone, and as a secretary, the
unwavering commitment of Lindsey Graham.”
Hegseth’s recounting of their meeting
isn’t the first time Graham’s pro-war ideology has been highlighted
since he died. As Common Dreams reported
late last month, footage filmed for a documentary that was in the works
shows the then-senator joyfully reacting to Trump’s Iran War. He said:
“I almost cried. I mean, like, how long have we been pushing this?”
Responding to the release of that footage,
Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International
Crisis Group, said that “the warmonger got his wish and the result has
been a catastrophe.”
In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped.
On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the
president’s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support
the establishment of a Jewish state in as much of Palestine as
possible. On the other were his top foreign policy and national security
officials, led by the secretary of state, George C Marshall. Their
unanimous recommendation was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish
state, which they believed would trigger war in the Middle East and
endanger the future of US relations with the Arab and Muslim world.
With the exception perhaps of George
Washington, no diplomatic or military leader in American history had a
reputation for patriotic virtue and skilled devotion to duty comparable
to that of Marshall. Truman was in awe of the secretary of state, who,
as chief of staff of the US armed forces, had been hailed by Winston
Churchill as “the true organizer of victory” in the second world war.
After the war, it had been Marshall who launched the plan named after
him to rebuild Europe.
In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly
but steadily against the Zionist movement’s proposals to establish a
Jewish state in Palestine. He was concerned that American support would
open opportunities for the Soviet Union to exploit Arab anger, put
Middle Eastern oil supplies at risk in the event of a war between the
Soviet Union and the United States, and require the deployment of
unavailable American troops to prevent bloodshed and instability in
Palestine. These were, indeed, the strongly held views of virtually all
of Truman’s most important military and foreign policy advisers.
Exploiting the fact that most voters were
ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the [Israel] lobby used enormous
resources … to punish or reward politicians
Truman was personally and deeply moved by
the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi “Final Solution”, but also
irritated by and at times furious with the constant hectoring to which
he was subjected by campaigners for recognition of a Jewish state in
Palestine, including the World Zionist Organization and a host of other
Jewish delegations, friends and politicians. Despite his personal
exasperation, he could not ignore them. Coming in an election year that
would pit him against Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, pressures from
the Zionist lobby forced him into an excruciating and embarrassing
position.
With Palestine engulfed by civil war, Arab
states threatening to invade and the last British soldiers about to
leave the country, Truman called a meeting of his top advisers on 12 May
1948. According to Marshall’s own account
of the meeting, he warned Truman against adopting the policy strongly
advanced by Clark Clifford, his main political adviser, to recognize the
state of Israel before it was established.
President
Harry Truman shakes hands with secretary of state George Marshall in
Washington DC on 29 May 1947. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Such a move, according to Marshall, would
be a “transparent dodge to win a few votes”, he said, leaving the “great
dignity of the office of the President … seriously diminished”.
Marshall declared he would not personally be able to vote for Truman
should he bow to political pressure on the issue. A shaken Truman closed
the meeting by saying he agreed with Marshall.
However, within two days, exquisitely
sensitive to the tenuousness of his hold on the presidency and the power
of Zionist sympathizers to throw New York’s electoral votes to the
Republicans, he ordered that the US recognize Israel.
Today, the influence of the groups loosely
known as the Israel lobby has only become more powerful. Truman’s bind –
caught between his sense of the national interest and the domestic
political price of defying a powerful lobby – was something that, in the
decades to come, president after president would experience.
To fast forward: Donald Trump’s decision
to go to war on Iran earlier this year came after a sustained campaign
by Israel to convince the US to join the disastrous operation. It also
came in defiance of several of his top advisers, as well as the 45%
of Republicans who hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That decision
may be most quickly explained as yet another example of the erratic
policymaking that define Trump’s two terms as president. But a closer
examination of the experience of several of his predecessors reveals
that this presidential decision is more the rule than the exception.
The fact is that from Truman to Trump,
most American presidents have caved to the demands of Israel and its
advocates. Driven by the fear of domestic political defeats, presidents
have regularly rejected or abandoned foreign policies that both they and
their most senior advisers believed were in the best interests of the
US and at the expense of making meaningful progress in bringing a
peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Our new book, Israel’s Lobby, tracks the
growth over decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in
American history. Composed of a panoply of organizations, groups and
individuals who advocate American policies that explicitly favor the
interests of Israel, the lobby was nurtured – and has been encouraged
and guided – by Israeli governments. Exploiting the fact that most
voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the lobby used enormous
resources and concentrated attention to punish or reward politicians at
every level depending on their willingness to follow lobby instructions.
Over 20 years after the Truman episode,
for example, President Gerald Ford launched what he referred to as a
“reassessment” of US policy in the Middle East. The initiative had been
advanced by Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as a way
to escape from two years of embarrassing failures to move toward a
comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement. Both Ford and Kissinger had
become intensely dissatisfied with Israeli stonewalling.
President
Gerald Ford talks with secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in
Vladivostok, Soviet Union, on 23 November 1974. Photograph: Consolidated
News Pictures/Getty Images
The reassessment was conducted by the
committee of “Wise Men” convened by Kissinger: former government
officials who had served as pillars of the postwar US foreign policy
establishment. The unanimous recommendation of the committee was
pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in
order to achieve a comprehensive peace, in cooperation with the Soviet
Union.
Clear indications that Ford intended to
accept this recommendation triggered a powerful mobilization by leading
Israel lobby organizations, such as the Conference of Presidents of
Major Jewish Organizations and the American-Israel Public Affairs
Committee (Aipac). The lobby’s decisive achievement was a letter
drafted by Aipac and delivered to Ford demanding that the president
“make it clear … that the United States, acting in its own national
interests, stands firmly with Israel in the search for peace in future
negotiations”, signed by 76 senators.
Ford was “mad as hell” at what he believed
to be an Israeli campaign to use the lobby to obstruct diplomacy. But
he was cowed. To protect his chances for election the following year,
Ford rejected the unanimous recommendation from the “Wise Men”,
returning instead to the step-by-step process that had so infuriated
him, a process of essentially buying slices of the Sinai Peninsula –
seized from Egypt in 1967 – from Israel with increasing amounts of aid
and then returning them to Egypt. Ford and Kissinger also vastly
increased the scale and scope of US support for Israel.
That included a sweeping new collection of US political, economic, military and diplomatic commitments made in a US-Israeli Memorandum of Agreement
that, along with secret annexes, was signed on 1 September 1975. Aides
to Kissinger described the guarantees and concessions made to Israel in
these negotiations as “mind-boggling” and “simply incredible”. In his
memoir, Ford wrote bitterly about the Aipac letter signed by
three-quarters of the Senate that had ruined his diplomatic plans and
cast a pall on his election campaign.
Indeed, Ford lost the election to Jimmy
Carter. The lobby hoped Carter, who won 71% of the Jewish vote, would
abandon aspirations for a comprehensive Middle East peace, but he was
quick to disappoint. The president set his sights on a peace treaty
resolving the core issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With high poll
numbers and an American public that seemed ready for a commonsense,
problem-solving president, Carter voiced his belief in March 1977 in the
need for a “Palestinian homeland” as a key feature of the Middle East
peace he wished to achieve.
The pro-Israel lobby immediately mobilized against Carter’s peace initiative. In a closely held 50-page memorandum
for the president in early June, Carter’s senior adviser on domestic
political affairs warned him that he would suffer serious consequences,
including risks of failing to receive the renomination of his party, as a
result of lobby opposition to his public consideration of a Palestinian
homeland. Undeterred, Carter offered direct criticism of what he
described in an Oval Office meeting
as the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s increasingly inflexible
positions. His differences with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s
prime minister in May 1977, were even sharper. Meanwhile Carter began
intensive communications with Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian leaders.
In October 1977, the US secretary of
state, Cyrus Vance, issued a joint communique with Soviet foreign
minister, Andrei Gromyko, committing the superpowers to achieving “as
soon as possible a just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli
conflict”. Though fully expecting opposition to the president’s Middle
East policy, the administration was stunned by the nearly apoplectic
reaction to the US-Soviet statement by both the Israeli government and
the lobby. Profoundly concerned with the political damage, Carter
requested a meeting with the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, in
New York. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security
adviser, who was present at the meeting, “Dayan in effect blackmailed
the President by saying that unless he had assurances that we would
oppose an independent West Bank and that we would give them economic and
military aid, he would have to indicate our unwillingness in his public
statements here in the United States … ‘I can go,’ said Dayan, ‘to the
American Jews.’” Faced with this threat, Carter surrendered.
The next day, Vance and Dayan issued a
joint statement summarizing a US-Israeli “working paper” prepared in the
early hours of the morning. The statement affirmed negotiations would
be dramatically scaled back and would not frame a Palestinian homeland
as a central issue. The end result was a celebrated “separate peace”
between Israel and Egypt that earned Carter, Begin and Sadat Nobel peace
prizes, but also led to the isolation of Egypt in the Arab world and
the assassination of Sadat. It also set the stage for Israel’s invasion
of Lebanon in 1982 and settlement projects that resulted in Israel’s de
facto annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The
Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, left; US president, Jimmy Carter,
center; and Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin clasp hands on the
north lawn of the White House after signing the peace treaty between
Egypt and Israel, on 26 March 1979. Photograph: Bob Daugherty/AP
It is likely, 13 years later, that
President George HW Bush felt just as Carter must have felt when, faced
with the Israel lobby’s ferocious opposition to his Arab-Israeli peace
initiatives, he made public his frustration with its influence. In a
failed effort to boost the prospects for the upcoming Madrid peace
conference, Bush suspended US loan guarantees amounting to what Israel
was spending on housing in occupied territories and faced ferocious
opposition from the Israel lobby for doing so. In a press conference he
described his exasperation.
“We’re up against very strong and
effective, sometimes, groups that go up to [Capitol Hill]” Bush said. “I
heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the hill
working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy
down here doing it.”
The lobby’s ability to thwart presidential
peace initiatives was on particularly powerful display again during the
Obama administration. No president before him had entered the White
House with such detailed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,
such a record of personal engagement with both Jews and Palestinians,
and such a sustained commitment to closer American relations with Arabs
and Muslims. Fully embracing a “two-state solution” to the problem, he
launched a high-profile peace initiative to be jumpstarted by a
full-scale Israeli freeze on West Bank settlements.
But a storm of outrage in Israel and among
leaders of Israel’s lobby in the United States, and the public feud
that erupted between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, proved more
costly to the former than the latter. Obama quickly reversed course, in
effect replacing his peace process envoy George Mitchell, who was
closely identified as friendly to the Palestinians, with Dennis Ross, a
lobby insider, whose advice to ditch the effort
altogether the president quickly implemented. Instead of pressing
Israel to stop settlements, Obama made a personal call to Mahmoud Abbas,
president of the Palestinian Authority, threatening to pull $450m in
American aid to the Palestinians if Abbas did not withdraw an
anti-settlement resolution put forward at the UN security council. In
Obama’s address to the United Nations, general assembly, in the first
year of his second term, he shifted dramatically from language used in
his previous UN speeches. Instead of criticizing Israeli settlements and
pressing for a two-state solution, he identified himself with Israeli
victims of Palestinian terrorism, opposed any UN action contrary to
Israel’s insistence on direct negotiations between the parties, and
condemned challenges to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.
President
Barack Obama, center, arrives with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, left, and Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, right, to
make a statement on Middle East peace talks in the east room of the
White House on 1 September 2010. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters
The reason for Obama’s dramatic retreat is
easily inferable from his memoir, A Promised Land, in which he
complains about Aipac’s ability to cow American politicians into
obeisance by invoking fears of being labelled antisemitic, and
emphasized his own particular vulnerability to such threats as “a Black
man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis
Farrakhan”.
In the wake of the genocide, the politics
of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with
passion to Israeli onslaughts
More recently, in Joe Biden, the Israel
lobby found a president who genuinely believed the Jewish state deserved
the “special relationship” with the US. The firmness of that commitment
was put to the test by Israel’s response to the 7 October 2023 attacks
by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Socialized into accepting the lobby’s
mantra that any “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem would
encourage Arab intransigence, and remembering the political punishment
Obama received for showing “tough love” to the Israelis, Biden, quashed
all recommendations from his top advisers to do something meaningful to
stop the Israeli onslaught on Gazan Palestinians. When he did make
limited complaints about excessive civilian casualties and implemented
minor delays in American resupply of Israeli armaments, the Republican
Jewish Coalition responded by slamming the administration for inserting
daylight into the US-Israel relationship, while Aipac sent a detailed memorandum to members of Congress defending Israeli actions as limited, necessary and designed to reduce civilian casualties.
The experience of these administrations
demonstrates the wisdom and extraordinary insight of America’s first
president, George Washington. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned
that the American system of government could all too easily be
exploited by a group with a “passionate attachment” to a foreign
country. In a system designed to rely on the mobilization of
countervailing power to limit the effects of factions driven by
self-interest or very particular points of view, Washington argued that
since any faction committed to the interests of another country would
not naturally find its influence checked by effective domestic
opposition, it would therefore drive the United States into exaggerated
and dangerous commitments abroad and implicate it in quarrels and wars
contrary to the country’s interests.
In the wake of the genocide, the politics
of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with
passion to Israeli onslaughts in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. Biden
and Kamala Harris paid heavy costs for knuckling to Israel and its
lobby. Nearly a third
of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Harris in
2024 said that ending Israel’s violence in Gaza was the top issue
influencing their voting decisions. Across both parties, support for
Israel has plummeted; 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of
Israel, and a record number of Israel critics are winning congressional
primaries.
But these losses have not deterred Israel
or its lobby from working to reverse Trump’s 2024 campaign promises to
avoid wars in the Middle East, to pursue even closer relations between the US and Israeli militaries, and to spend millions to thwart the rise of critics of the country.
To be sure, American supporters of Israel
and its governments have every right to express their opinions and work
to shape public policy, and the lobby is by no means the only vehicle
for moneyed interests that warp American democracy. Moreover, American
presidents have free will: the George W Bush administration was run by
many who were in perfect ideological alignment with the Israeli right.
An incompetent and gullible Trump is plainly responsible for yielding to
Israeli pressure and dragging the US into the latest war.
But unless other groups are able to act
freely with other interests in mind – and without the threat of
antisemitism accusations – US policy in the Middle East will remain
dangerously distorted. Both to secure and advance American interests
abroad and to protect American freedoms at home, Americans must unite to
prevent any foreign power from enjoying the influence over policy and
public debate that Israel has exercised, both directly and through the
faction operating on its behalf.
Eli Clifton is a co-founder and senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Ian Lustick is professor emeritus of political science at the
University of Pennsylvania specializing in Arab-Israeli relations and US
foreign policy
Those who challenge and protest
U.S. policies are not foreign-paid terrorists; Rubio and other Trump
appointees are using “McCarthy” tactics to stop dissent, says Ann
Wright.
Downtown Minneapolis ICE-out demonstration
on Jan. 23 following ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ fatal shooting of
civilian Renée Good. (Lorie Shaull /Flickr/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY
4.0)
Thin-skinned and
heavy-handed, the Trump administration apparently feels like it is being
singled out by those who dissent from its policies. As a result, Trump
appointees are taking drastic “McCarthy” tactics to stop dissent.
In less than one month, alleging that dissent and protests are
part of attempts of other governments “to overthrow the government of
the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sponsored two
major initiatives to frighten those who oppose the Trump
administration’s policies.
The first salvo was orchestrating a
conference with 60 countries participating over “Threats From Left-Wing
Terrorists.” The second was the report on Cuba that alleged virtually every group that has ever visited Cuba is paid by the Cuban government.
If You Are Not Outraged, You Aren’t Watching
These allegations of paid protest and
travelling on the dime of another country are unfounded, untrue, and
fly in the face of the history of protests in the U.S. and travel by
U.S. citizens to see the effects of U.S. polices on other countries.
President Donald Trump’s erratic foreign
policy, including the disastrous attacks on Iran as a favor to Benjamin
Netanyahu’s Israeli war machine; attacks domestically cutting health and
education; horrific treatment of migrants;
daily outlandish statements on just about every subject; and disregard
for facts in virtually every issue all provide good reasons for protests
by outraged U.S. citizens.
I have not been paid by any country to protest U.S. policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid.
No one needs to be paid to be outraged!!!
Dissent Is Not Illegal, Nor Paid by Other Countries
Sen. Joe McCarthy, center, confers with Roy Cohn, chief counsel for House Un-American Activities Committee, Aug. 23, 1953. (Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons)
In particular, Secretary of State and
National Security adviser Marco Rubio, who has authored the latest
“McCarthy” report to quell opposition to illegal, immoral policies of
his department and the Trump administration in general, seems to have
lost his grasp on the history of dissent in the U.S.
From his 15 years in the U.S. Senate, he
should remember that many of each administration’s domestic and
international policies have been lawfully and non-violently protested by
U.S. citizens in the U.S. Congress.
Having been a part of many protests since I
resigned from the State Department in March 2003 in opposition to a war
policy, President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, I know that these
protests are NOT a part of attempts of other governments to “overthrow
the government of the United States,” but are legitimate shows of
concern about specific policies.
Rubio’s allegations of other countries’ influence in these protests are unfounded and untrue.
I was not paid by a foreign government to
resign. I resigned because I felt the war on Iraq was illegal, immoral,
and a dangerous action jeopardizing the national security of the United
States.
I have not been paid by any country to
protest U.S. policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid. Protest
is a legitimate, time-consuming act of outrage about a policy that
people use to bring attention to the policy, and hopefully effect change
in the policy.
Rubio: Blame the Left, Ignore Right’s Violent Attack
The first attack against legitimate protest came in the U.S. Department of State sponsored conference on “Far-Left Terrorism”
held in Washington, D,C,. in July, where Rubio and White House pit bull
Stephen Miller harangued the representatives of 66 nations about
terrorists from the left wanting to overthrow the U.S. government.
“This is a distinctive and unique evil. It
has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for
civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a
revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Miller
called left-wing extremism a growing threat aimed at “the overthrow of
our system and form of government” that officials previously failed to
sufficiently address. Miller railed:
“We must stay the course and be completely
unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of
civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of
violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions
cannot and will not succeed.”
“Under the leadership of President Donald
J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness
and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
Of course, neither Rubio nor Miller mentioned President Trump’s pardon of the over 1,500 persons who did try to violently overthrow the United States electoral process on Jan. 6, 2021 as they attacked the Capitol police and broke into and destroyed many offices in the U.S. Capitol.
The attempted overthrow of the 2020
election by seeking to nullify the election results through lawsuits in
62 federal and state courts was attempted by Trump’s loyal personal
lawyers including the current acting U.S. attorney general and head of
the U.S. Department of Justice Todd Blanche, and disgraced and disbarred
lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Prisoners of the C.I.A,-backed Brigade
2506, after they were captured in the Bay of Pigs invasion, 1961.
(Miguel Vinas / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
The most recent and most ludicrous
allegations of left-wing violence and protests being funded by other
countries is in Secretary of Rubio’s 10- page report on “Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism.”
Rubio accuses the National Network on
Cuba, National Lawyers Guild, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, the People’s
Forum, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, and the Democratic Socialists of America
of being paid by the Cuban government whose goal, the report states, has
been for 60 years the overthrow of the U.S. government.
Talk about turning the facts on their
heads. As is well-documented, 13 successive U.S. presidential
administrations since 1959 — Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter,
Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama (first term, when C.I.A.
policies were still in effect, but changing in Obama’s second term with
diplomatic recognition), Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2 — have attempted
to overthrow the Cuban government in the 60-plus years of its existence.
The current attempt of overthrow is
centered on the U.S. brutal and total blockade of fuel going to Cuba,
which has left Cuban citizens without electricity for operations in
hospitals, for food preparation, and for the conduct of normal life.
Making life so miserable for the Cuban
citizenry that they overthrow their government would fulfill the
longstanding hopes of Cuban-American Rubio.
Rubio Dishonest About Cuban American Background
Marco Rubio has been less than forthright
about his heritage as a Cuban American in his quest for the overthrow of
the Cuban government.
Rubio, “Mr. I Know All About Cuba Because I
Am Cuban American,” has been to Cuba only once — where in Cuba did he
go? A few hours at the U.S. prison on the U.S. Naval base at Guantánamo.
No doubt, more will come in the next two
years as Rubio, Miller, and others in the administration seem to think
they can get away with outrageous bullying of individuals and
organizations that do not agree with them and that challenge them in
non-violent ways, in contrast to the Jan. 6 gang.
In particular, there are always protests
against the horrific effects of brutal sanctions that the U.S.
government uses to make life so difficult for citizens of other
countries that they will overthrow their own governments, whether it be
Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, or Nicaragua.
Israel’s Paid Influence Seems OK With Rubio
Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu delivering joint statements in Jerusalem on Feb. 16, 2025.
(State Department/ Freddie Everett)
However, Rubio must be thinking that since
his buddies in the Netanyahu government have paid Trump’s former
campaign manager, Brad Parscale, millions of dollars in a specific
program to influence U.S. public opinion to stop the massive decline in
Israel’s “likability,” that other countries have paid off U.S. persons
to work clandestinely on the same scale.
Parscale and his team sent conservative influencers suggested positive language about Israel for posts on social media sites
such as X, Instagram, and TikTok. The influencers are then compensated
based on how many “likes” each post gets from readers.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
government has dramatically increased spending on influence operations.
Earlier this year, Israel increased by four times its “public diplomacy” influence budget from $150 million in 2025 to $730 million in 2026.
But even The Times of Israel says it’s too late for a “face lift” as a Pew Research Center poll
reported that 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up
seven points in a single year, with only 37 percent viewing it favorably
after Israel has committed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza; pillaged and plundered homes, farms, animals in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian West Bank; destroyed southern Lebanon; and got the Trump administration up to its neck in the war on Iran.
The two recent major attempts of the Trump
administration to quell dissent show how serious challenging illegal,
immoral, and criminal policies has become and how important it is that
we push back hard against these attempts to intimidate citizens to
silence their dissent.
Despite these brutal, heavy-handed
attempts, dissent is spreading to regular citizens. In a recent letter
to the editor of my hometown newspaper Honolulu Star Advertiser, which serves a large U.S. military population, a resident of Hawaii summarized the challenge very well:
“The true domestic enemy includes those
who monopolize political and economic power. The real enemy includes
individuals who misinform, threaten, and disenfranchise the less
powerful. The true enemy are those who are antidemocratic, have little
or no concern regarding the welfare of others, and enrich themselves,
family, and a few friends at the expense of the general population.”
Ann Wright served in the U.S.
Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a colonel. She was also a
U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. embassies in Nicaragua,
Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia,
Afghanistan and Mongolia. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
She has been with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition since 2010, has
been put in Israeli prison twice for attempting to break the illegal
Israeli naval blockade on Gaza and has been on segments of flotillas in
2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2024.
A banner depicting US President Donald
Trump and bearing messages was displayed in front of the Zolfaghar and
Zolghadr ballistic missiles exhibited at Azadi Square in Tehran, Iran’s
capital, on August 2, 2026.
(Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)
As it becomes clear that there is “no
escalatory military path out of this war,” Iran is demanding an even
steeper toll for Trump to pull out.
President Donald Trump
is now quietly conceding that he’s willing to walk away from his Iran
war without meeting all of his demands if they agree to reopen the
Strait of Hormuz. But Iran won’t let him back out of the quagmire
without a steep price.
Iran is in the process of negotiating a
limited reopening of the critical waterway with Oman. But Mohammad
Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security
Council, said on Saturday that “until America corrects its behavior, the
Strait of Hormuz will not open.”
He outlined a list of demands on Saturday,
even harsher than those Trump walked away from when he abandoned the
“memorandum of understanding” negotiated in June.
Zolghadr said the US must permanently end
its war and naval blockade against Iran, and withdraw military forces
from the region. He also said the US must fully compensate Iran for
damages from the war, lift sanctions, and unfreeze assets abroad.
This demand for an end to US “aggression”
applies not just to Iran, but to its allies in the region: Zolghadr also
demanded an end to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, as well as an end to US and Israeli attacks against the Houthis in Yemen.
The Trump administration, which is not known to be in direct talks with Iran, has not yet responded to the demands. Trump told Axios
on Sunday that “We are low-keying it” and “only semi-negotiating with
Iran,” claiming that it was “in very bad shape” economically.
It’s clear, however, that the Iranians
believe they have enough of an upper hand to make Trump grovel,
especially as news emerges that the US has burned through
nearly all its available stocks of long-range precision weapons, making
the war increasingly costly, though the administration has denied this.
Domestic concerns are also weighing on Trump. Over the past month, as the war heated up again, average gas prices in the US have shot back up above $4 a gallon, a major liability for Republicans heading into a midterm election cycle in which many voters say the cost of living is a top concern.
Approval of Trump among Americans has fallen to a new all-time low
of 34% according to a YouGov poll late last month. And just 28% of
Americans say they approve of his handling of the war, according to an
Associated Press/NORC poll.
As the Wall Street Journal reported,
Trump has privately signaled a willingness to declare victory if Iran
opens the strait, even without getting any sort of nuclear agreement,
which was purportedly the reason he launched the war in the first place.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said
Trump was “showing his desperation for a deal before it is completed,
so Iran predictably demand[ed] major new concessions,” adding that it
was a “masterclass in how not to negotiate.”
“As time passes, Tehran appears increasingly confident that the pressure is shifting onto Washington,” said the Israeli national security analyst Danny Citrinowicz. “Iranian leaders seem to believe that the United States
is now more eager than Iran to bring the confrontation in the Strait of
Hormuz to an end, and, crucially, that Washington has few attractive
military options for changing that equation.”
Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told CNN, “At this point, it is absolutely clear that there is no escalatory military path out of this war.”
“It’s been tried in several different
variations, and it has not ended up particularly well,” Parsi said. “In
fact, the US’s position has been weakened, in my view, by additional
military action. And as a result, I think there needs to be a full
dedication to the diplomatic pathway.”
He added that for the Iranians, “the
promise and the credibility of sanctions relief will carry far more
weight than threats of further bombings.”
US President Donald Trump at the White
House in Washington, D.C., United States, on July 14, 2026. [Mehmet Eser
– Anadolu Agency]
Palestinian group Hamas reaffirmed Sunday
its commitment to a roadmap agreed with mediators and the Board of Peace
to complete the second phase of US President Donald Trump’s plan for
Gaza, Anadolu reports.
In a statement, the movement said it
remains serious about “responsibly engaging” on implementing the
15-point plan and establishing a clear timetable for it.
“The priority at this stage must be to ensure the implementation of all phases and obligations of the agreement,” Hamas said.
It added that the process should lead to a
complete ceasefire, an end to Israeli attacks, the completion of
Israel’s withdrawal, the reopening of crossings, the entry of
humanitarian aid and shelter supplies, the start of reconstruction and
enabling the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza to begin
its duties.
Hamas called on the mediators, guarantors
and the Board of Peace to “shoulder their responsibilities,” ensure that
all parties comply with the agreement and prevent violations that could
obstruct its implementation or undermine the ceasefire.
The group said it will continue to engage
“positively and responsibly” with efforts aimed at completing the deal’s
implementation, ending the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and
“protecting their rights and national interests.”
Early Sunday, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Natanyahu rejected the 15-point plan approved by the
Board of Peace for Gaza, insisting that Israeli forces will not withdraw
from the Palestinian territory until Hamas is disarmed.
The strategy is being overseen by
Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, who has long called for the
US to prepare to fight a “limited nuclear war”
The Pentagon is reportedly drafting a new
nuclear strategy that’s expected to emphasize the use of tactical
nuclear weapons to give the president more “options” in a potential
nuclear conflict.
The strategy, first reported by NBC News,
is being drafted by the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, who
has for more than a decade called for the US to develop additional
capabilities to fight a “limited nuclear war.”
The idea would be to shift the US nuclear
strategy away from the focus on using strategic nuclear weapons to wipe
out an adversary’s nuclear capabilities and focus more on the
possibility of using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons in a “regional”
conflict.
Elbridge
Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, during a Senate Armed
Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on March 3, 2026. (Photo
by Craig Hudson/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect)
“If you actually want extended deterrence
to be credible, you have to provide the nation’s political leadership
with nuclear capabilities that common sense indicates you could actually
use,” a source told NBC. “Otherwise you’re reducing our leadership’s options to extreme choices that the adversary won’t find credible.”
While the potential strategy would be
carried out in the name of deterrence and preventing war, arms control
advocates have strongly warned against the idea of developing more
tactical nuclear weapons to prepare for a potential limited nuclear
conflict over concerns that it would make nuclear war much more likely
and that any nuclear exchange would likely lead to a global catastrophe.
“Without a firm rejection of the option to
use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, by building and fielding more
tactical nuclear weapons the administration is signaling its intention
to use them against enemy forces and industrial infrastructure in a
conflict,” the Arms Control Association said in response to the NBC report.
The ACA said that it “strongly opposes the
administration’s decision to build more tactical nuclear weapons to
supplement the options that exist” and pointed to the fact that the US
already has at least two types of tactical nuclear weapons, including
B61-12 gravity bombs, which are deployed in Europe, and the W76-2
low-yield warhead for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic
missile.
The ACA said the US Navy is also
“acquiring a new nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N)
that may be available at the end of the decade for possible use in
conflict with China.”
Breaking Defensereported
that Colby announced on August 5 that the Pentagon was reviewing the US
nuclear posture and repeatedly emphasized the term “options” in a
speech he delivered that has not been made public.
Colby has been one of the leading voices
in Washington’s policy circles advocating for the US to prepare for
limited nuclear war. In a 2015 paper for the Center for a New American
Security (CNAS) titled “A Nuclear Strategy and Posture for 2030,”
Colby said the US “should make a special effort to develop the
platforms and weapons, doctrine, planning capacity, and other
capabilities needed to fight a limited nuclear war more effectively than
plausible adversaries.”
He said that the ideal US nuclear force is
“one that is not only highly survivable and able to issue a devastating
blow against any adversary under any scenario but that is also capable
of conducting effective limited nuclear operations in a controlled
fashion while maintaining the ability to escalate to full-scale war if
necessary.”
Colby made a similar argument in a 2018 piece written in Foreign Affairs titled “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War,”
published just a few months after he left the first Trump
administration, where he led the development of the 2018 National
Defense Strategy.
“Washington’s task is clear. It must
demonstrate to Moscow and Beijing that any attempt to use force against
US friends and allies would likely fail and would certainly result in
costs and risks well out of proportion to whatever they might gain,”
Colby wrote. “This requires conventional military power, but it also
means having the right strategy and weapons to fight a limited nuclear
war and come out on top.”
What happened in the Nablus-area town of Tell lays bare a land war designed to make Palestinian permanence impossible.
Mohammad al-Ayoubi, The Cradle, AUG 4, 2026
Photo Credit: The Cradle
In the Palestinian town of Tell, southwest of Nablus, residents attempted to repel an armed settler assault. Their response was quickly used to justify collective punishment. The army sealed the roads while settlers attacked homes and property, each advancing the same campaign of dispossession. The assault on Tell exposed a campaign already underway across the occupied West Bank.
Abdullah Abu Rahma, director of popular action at the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, tells The Cradle that the violence belongs to a plan unfolding according to a set timetable:
“It is true that attacks have increased markedly in recent days in terms of the number of martyrs, the demolition of property, and restrictions on movement, but they fall within a broader plan drawn up years ago. The events in Tell gave [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s government the political and media pretext to accelerate what had already been planned, exploiting them as justification before its domestic audience to create the impression that its actions against the Palestinians are warranted.”
The figures bear out the scale of that campaign. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission recorded 11,074 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers during the first half of 2026. Of these, 3,488 were carried out by settlers, including assaults on villages, arson, shootings, land seizures, and the establishment of settlement outposts. The commission says settler attacks killed 17 Palestinians during that period.
The occupied West Bank is also being broken into ever smaller enclaves. As of December 2025, OCHA had documented 925 movement obstacles, including 89 permanently staffed checkpoints, 218 partial checkpoints, and 232 road gates.
An Oxfam analysis of UN data found that 1,244 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces or settlers between 2023 and the end of 2025. Nearly 46,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced over the same three years, compared with just over 13,000 during the previous 14 years combined.
For Dr Mohammad Halsa, a specialist in Israeli affairs, the violence cannot be understood as a chain of isolated reactions:
“It is one element of a comprehensive ideological agenda governing the ruling right, which views all Palestinian land as the exclusive property of Jews and considers the present moment the most suitable opportunity to move from ‘managing the conflict’ to ‘resolving it’ once and for all, thereby correcting a ‘historic mistake’ committed by Ben-Gurion in 1948 when several thousand Palestinians were allowed to remain.”
Tell and the anatomy of a land grab
Suleiman Bisharat, director of the Yabous Center, and Abu Rahma both reject the idea that Tell represents a sudden turn. They place it within a pattern of settlement violence that has intensified across the occupied West Bank since 2024.
Community activist Ahmad Ayyash goes further, telling The Cradle:
“What is happening is not ‘settler attacks under army protection,’ as it is portrayed, but attacks carried out in partnership with the army, not under its protection. The partnership between the two operates in a state of extremely close coordination. The settlers and the Israeli army are not separate actors, but two arms of the same project.”
For Ayyash, Tell may nevertheless prove significant as “a turning point in resisting attacks by settlers and the army, or the beginning of the use of new means to confront the occupation,” particularly as Palestinians face forms of violence that many communities had not previously experienced at this intensity.
Regarding one recent incident, Abu Rahma is equally direct, asserting that “what happened was self-defense, the videos show the dead were killed by army fire or by the settlers themselves, and that seizing the weapon was a fleeting moment rather than a planned act.”
Reuters reported that the confrontation began after armed settlers approached the village and that footage appeared to show a Palestinian seizing a rifle before being shot.
Erasing the resistance model
The ferocity of the Israeli response, Ayyash argues, was intended to ensure that Tell would not become a precedent for other Palestinian towns facing settler terror. The occupation could not allow a community’s defense of itself to be seen as a model capable of deterring future attacks.
“Even before 7 October, the occupation was trying to destroy the Palestinian model and the model of the resistance fighter, as previously occurred in the Nour Shams, Tulkarem, and Jenin camps, where the geography was altered, the environment sustaining the resistance was blown apart, and even memorials to the martyrs were destroyed.”
The collective punishment imposed on Tell carried a warning to other Palestinian communities: resisting settler incursions would bring the full weight of the occupation down upon them. Such resistance threatens the conditions under which settlement expansion has been allowed to proceed largely unchallenged.
Making Palestinian life impossible
Ayyash describes this process as demographic engineering, but its methods differ between Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In Gaza, he argues, the occupation has reordered daily life by controlling not only how much enters the strip, but also which goods are admitted or withheld.
Reporting in January 2026 documented shortages of beef, poultry, hygiene products, and other basic supplies caused by Israeli import restrictions. The effect reaches beyond hunger, reshaping how families obtain food and the conditions under which everyday life can continue.
In the occupied West Bank, Ayyash says, the same logic is being applied through systematic displacement. He dates the acceleration of the campaign to 2024, eight months after the war on Gaza began, and recalls advertising and media messages along bypass roads declaring, “There is no future in Palestine.”
Their purpose, he argues, was to convince Palestinians that a dignified life on their land was no longer possible and that they must look elsewhere.
The pressure has fallen especially heavily on Bedouin and herding communities. OCHA reported that settler attacks and related access restrictions displaced 6,200 Palestinians across 119 communities between January 2023 and June 2026, including more than 3,600 people from 46 communities that were completely emptied.
Ayyash says these pressures are now driving internal migration from isolated areas and villages near settlements toward Area A and the main urban centers.
Movement restrictions are compounded by settler raids, the theft of livestock and crops, and the destruction of roads and other infrastructure. This daily attrition cuts communities off from the resources needed to remain on their land. As those conditions deteriorate, targeted areas are emptied and opened to seizure.
Poll What is driving Israel’s accelerated takeover of the West Bank? A long-planned annexation strategy Settler expansion backed by the army The absence of meaningful international pressure All of the above
19 votes, 1 days and 14 hours left
Two arms of the same project
Abu Rahma describes a division of labor between the state and the settler militias. The official apparatus supplies legislation, courts, police, and military force. Settlers receive funding, transport, and weapons, while their crimes are ignored or actively enabled.
A UN inquiry published in June found that Israeli authorities had facilitated settler violence through financial, military, and legal support, with security forces frequently accompanying or protecting settlers during attacks.
The state demolishes homes and chokes Palestinian movement with checkpoints. Settlers torch property and drive residents from their land. Resistance is met with arrest and fines. Step by step, the ground is cleared for annexation.
Halsa identifies two purposes behind this constant friction. The first is to terrorize Palestinians until they leave their land voluntarily. The second is to provoke them into defending themselves, allowing a far more violent response to be justified through an inverted account in which the attackers become the victims.
The commission’s 3,488 recorded settler attacks during the first half of 2026 amount to an average of more than 19 each day, although its methodology counts a wider range of violations than OCHA’s incident-based monitoring.
By 20 July, OCHA had recorded 18 Palestinian deaths linked to settler attacks, a figure that already exceeded the total for all of 2025. What was once treated as fringe violence has become a central method of territorial control.
Outposts without pretexts
Settlement expansion does not depend on Tell or any other single confrontation. Ayyash says the occupation uses every available opportunity to accelerate construction and seize land, but requires no particular pretext. Had the events in Tell not occurred, the outposts would have expanded for another stated reason, or without one.
In the wake of the confrontation, Netanyahu pledged to accelerate settlement construction in the area. Halsa warns that “every inch that is vacated creates room for a Zionist Talmudic foothold, and the hands of the clock do not move backward.”
Extremist Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has announced plans for 763 housing units in Eli, a project expected to triple the settlement’s size. In July, Israel’s security cabinet also approved 1.3 billion shekels for 34 new West Bank settlements, including newly established sites and existing outposts slated for retroactive legalization.
An election fought over Palestinian blood
The escalation is also feeding an Israeli election campaign ahead of the vote scheduled for 27 October 2026. Halsa describes the political field as “wide open,” with ministers competing to adopt the most hardline position and turning Palestinian land and holy sites into campaign material.
Ayyash offers a more severe reading. He argues that extremism is embedded in the Israeli political mainstream and that Israeli society is aggressive and “enamored of killing and destruction,” invoking the racist maxim, “The only good Arab is a dead Arab.”
Political currents compete for votes at the expense of Palestinian lives, each seeking to appear more violent toward Palestinians and more committed to settlement expansion than the next.
That contest leaves little room for the familiar claim that a meaningful Israeli camp remains committed to peace. Bisharat cautions, however, that elections are an accelerant rather than the root cause.
The electoral contest operates within an ideological horizon reaching back to 1948, when Jewish armed groups were deployed to empty Palestinian villages through arson and the killing of civilians.
Today’s settler militias perform a comparable function for the state. Their violence may be presented as spontaneous or unauthorized, but it advances policies that the government later formalizes through military orders, planning decisions, and annexation measures.
Annexation at wartime speed
Abu Rahma says the project was already established before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, but the regional war gave Israel the space to execute it at an unprecedented pace. Plans once expected to take 10 years are now being carried out in three or four, aided by an international community that has normalized crimes against Palestinians through silence and inaction.
That rush has also alarmed parts of Israel’s own security establishment. Nearly 600 former military, intelligence, police, and diplomatic officials warned US President Donald Trump that settler violence could produce consequences “even more catastrophic” than those of 7 October.
Yet electoral and ideological calculations continue to outweigh even the national security concerns raised by figures who spent their careers defending the occupation state.
Across the occupied West Bank, supposedly temporary measures are hardening into facts on the ground. Roads remain closed long after the army arrives, while settler outposts spread across village grazing land under military protection. Cut off from their land and neighboring communities, families are pushed toward urban centers.
Holding the ground
Despite the overwhelming imbalance of force, Palestinians remain the principal obstacle to this project. In Gaza and during the intifadas of 1987 and 2000, they demonstrated an ability to frustrate displacement plans, even at an immense human cost.
Bisharat asks whether Palestinians can continue reshuffling the political deck long enough to benefit from the international shift now troubling Israel. Support for the occupation state has declined, while public backing for the Palestinian cause has risen amid the war of extermination in Gaza. The question is whether that change can be converted into pressure on the governments still arming and protecting Tel Aviv.
Halsa argues that the minimum response must combine organized, peaceful popular action, including guard groups and community gatherings, with a sustained media and diplomatic campaign capable of exposing Israel’s version of events. Tell, he says, should immediately have been followed by press conferences laying out how the confrontation unfolded and documenting the army’s role.
He also calls for Palestinian efforts to build on dissent inside Israel, including the letter signed by nearly 600 former security officials, while exploiting contradictions within the occupation state. That requires converting the shift in western public opinion into influence over international decision-making, an outcome he says Israel deeply fears.
Tell has exposed how military power, settler violence, and state policy are being used to dispossess Palestinians without a formal annexation decree.
International organizations may continue counting the dead, displaced, checkpoints, attacks, and outposts. But documentation without consequence leaves the map to be redrawn while the reports accumulate.
The outcome will be decided on the ground, where Palestinian refusal to leave remains the main barrier to Israel’s West Bank endgame.
![US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., United States, on July 14, 2026. [Mehmet Eser - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/image.png?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
