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.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted
at a cabinet meeting that Israel has taken more territory in Gaza since
the ceasefire was supposed to go into effect in October 2025, an
acknowledgment of an Israeli violation of the truce deal.
When the deal was signed in October 2025,
Israeli troops pulled back to an agreed-upon line, known as the “yellow
line,” which left about 53% of Gaza under IDF occupation, but that area
of control has expanded. “In Gaza now, we already control not 50%, but
60%,” he said, according to The Times of Israel, confirming reports that said Israel now controls 60% of the Palestinian territory.
Palestinians
live in difficult conditions near the so-called yellow line east of
Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on April 27, 2026 (IMAGO/APAimages via
Reuters Connect)
The ceasefire deal that Israel and Hamas signed in October 2025
said that the “IDF will not return to areas that have been withdrawn
from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement,” and Hamas had
fulfilled its side of the deal by releasing all living Israeli hostages
and bodies that it had and working to recover other Israeli remains.
Israeli officials have claimed Hamas is
violating the deal by not disarming, but the agreement didn’t commit
Hamas to giving up its weapons. The two sides agreed to a US proposal
that called for the “demilitarization” of Gaza as a framework for
negotiations, but the issue of disarmament was meant to be worked out in
follow-up negotiations.
For its part, Hamas has maintained that
disarmament must be linked to a path toward a Palestinian state and has
also stated that it won’t discuss the issue until the first phase of the
ceasefire is actually implemented. Israel has constantly violated the
agreement by launching daily attacks in Gaza, killing more than 870 Palestinians
since it was supposed to go into effect, and it has also not
consistently allowed the agreed-upon number of aid trucks to enter the
besieged territory.
Despite the constant Israeli violations,
the so-called “Board of Peace,” a US-led body meant to oversee the
implementation of the agreement, has put the blame on Hamas’s unwillingness to disarm for the lack of progress in implementing President Trump’s plan for the Palestinian territroy.
This
image provided by U.S. Central Command shows a F/A-18E Super Hornet
launching at left, as an F/A-18E Super at right, prepares to launch from
the flight deck of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln
(CVN 72) in support of Operation Epic Fury, on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026.
[AP Photo/U.S. Navy]
Just two days after US President Donald
Trump’s return from Beijing, the White House is making active
preparations for a renewed onslaught against Iran.
The New York Times reported
Friday that the United States and Israel are “engaged in intense
preparations — the largest since the cease-fire took effect — for the
possible resumption of attacks against Iran as early as next week.”
Trump’s state visit to Beijing, the first
by an American president to China in nearly a decade, was dominated by
the crisis triggered by the war on Iran. Despite a public show of
goodwill between Trump and Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping, no public
agreement was reached on the resolution of the Iran crisis, and no
official communique was issued.
Despite the massacre of more than 3,000
Iranians and the destruction of 81,000 civilian structures, the United
States has achieved none of its goals. It has neither overthrown the
Iranian government, nor broken Iran’s military, nor gained control over
the Strait of Hormuz.
On Sunday, Axios reported that Trump is
expected to convene his top national security team in the Situation Room
on Tuesday to discuss restarting combat operations. The meeting follows
a Saturday session at Trump’s Virginia golf club attended by Vice
President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John
Ratcliffe and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
Sunday evening, after a phone call with
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump posted on Truth Social:
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or
there won’t be anything left of them.”
He followed with an AI-generated image of a
map of the Middle East overlaid with the American flag, with red arrows
pointing at Iran from every direction—hinting at a US ground invasion
of Iran.
Trump had earlier posted an image of
himself pressing a red button on a command console, with mushroom-cloud
explosions shown on an overhead screen—in the latest signal that he is
considering the use of nuclear weapons in Iran.
According to the Times account,
the Pentagon options under consideration include the deployment of US
troops inside Iran, which “would come with big risks of casualties.”
In escalating the Iran war, Trump speaks
not only for himself but for the entire financial oligarchy. Having
launched the war, Trump has staked the prestige of American imperialism
on subjugating Iran. Failure to achieve that aim is seen by the ruling
class as a catastrophe that would accelerate the collapse of the
dollar-denominated financial order on which American capitalism’s
solvency depends.
Dominant sections of the US media are openly agitating for a US ground invasion of Iran. In a Sunday op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal,
titled “How to Finish the Job in Iran,” Seth Cropsey—a former deputy
undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush
administrations—wrote that Trump must “follow through on the threat of
catastrophic force. That means preparing for a multistage operation,
including boots on the ground, that forcibly reopens the Strait of
Hormuz to accelerate the collapse of the Iranian state.”
Cropsey pointed to the desperate crisis
facing US imperialism: “If oil remains around $150 a barrel for the rest
of the year, inflation will accelerate, while key industries see their
supply chains derailed. Mr. Trump has a narrow window in which to end
this crisis favorably, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and ensure an
economic rebound while securing American interests and prestige. But
that requires deploying the full spectrum of American power.”
The push for renewed strikes continued on
the Sunday talk shows. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina, Trump’s most prominent foreign-policy ally, in an appearance
on Meet the Press, called for the United States to resume bombing Iran’s
energy infrastructure. “What President Trump has done has been amazing
militarily,” Graham said. “But there’s still more targets to be had. And
there’s things we can do to hurt. The energy infrastructure is their
soft underbelly. If you go back to the fight, I’d put energy on top of
the list.”
The Democratic Party offered no opposition
to the planned escalation. Instead, the Democrats who appeared on the
Sunday talk shows largely devoted their foreign-policy remarks to
condemning what they considered an insufficiently belligerent posture by
Trump toward China at the Beijing summit.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
declared: “For the sake of democracy and the stability of the global
economy, Trump must not sell out Taiwan.” The Democrats’ complaint is
that the war Trump launched against Iran has distracted the United
States from the conflict with China.
The war against Iran is at the same time a
war against the American working class. The inflationary crisis
triggered by the war has produced a massive surge in the cost of energy
and food. NBC News reported that fresh vegetable prices have risen more
than 44 percent on an annualized basis over the past three months. Gas
is at a national average of $4.51 a gallon, and Brent crude has jumped
roughly 50 percent since the start of the war.
Responding to the disastrous increase in
the cost of living, Trump told reporters at the White House this month:
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
The administration has made the connection
between war abroad and the assault on social programs at home explicit.
At a White House Easter luncheon on April 1, Trump declared: “It’s not
possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these
individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military
protection.” “We’re fighting wars,” he said.
The costs of the war are mounting on the
Treasury as well. Pentagon Comptroller Jay Hurst conceded at
congressional testimony last week that the war has cost $29 billion, a
figure that excludes damage to American bases. Harvard public-policy
economist Linda Bilmes told Fortune in April that she was “certain we
will spend $1 trillion for the Iran war.”
The escalation of the war on Iran comes
amid a major upsurge of the class struggle. Some 3,500 Long Island Rail
Road workers walked off the job at midnight Friday, shutting down the
busiest commuter line in the United States in the first LIRR strike
since 1994.
The 1,300 United Auto Workers members at
Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan, have twice rejected
concessionary contracts in the past six weeks and are pressing the union
for an immediate strike. The 1,000 UAW members at American Axle’s Three
Rivers, Michigan plant voted by 98 percent on May 12 to authorize a
strike when their contract expires on May 31.
The immediate trigger of these struggles
is the cost-of-living crisis created by the war. The defense of workers’
living standards cannot be separated from the fight against the war.
Trump’s threats to annihilate Iranian
society must be treated with the utmost seriousness. The administration
is a criminal, gangster regime that will stop at nothing—including the
use of nuclear weapons—to advance the interests of the American ruling
class.
The struggles in transit and the auto
industry show the way forward in the fight against Trump’s schemes for
war and dictatorship. The murderous Trump regime, and its enablers in
the Democratic Party, must be opposed through the method of the class
struggle and the program of socialism.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has
issued secret arrest warrants for three Israeli politicians and two
military officials, Haaretz reported on 17 May, citing diplomatic sources.
The timing of their issuance is unknown.
The ICC has often issued arrest warrants in secret, publicly announcing
them only later to enable a possible arrest of the suspect.
Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry and State Attorney’s Office do not respond immediately to requests for comment.
The Hague-based court issued arrest
warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former War
Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024.
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan requested that
ICC judges issue the arrest warrants in May 2024, alleging that
Netanyahu and Gallant were responsible for war crimes committed by the
Israeli military in Gaza.
Netanyahu and Gallant bear criminal
responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare
and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other
inhumane acts, according to the ICC prosecutor.
In response to the issuance of the arrest
warrants, the US and Israel carried out a campaign to pressure the ICC
to prevent and cancel the arrest warrants issued against the Israeli
leaders, Le Mondereported in August 2025.
The campaign, which targeted the ICC chief
prosecutor Khan, began in March 2024 after he announced his intention
to seek the indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant.
In response, the Israeli prime minister
launched a campaign to use “all means” to stop the prosecutor with the
help of his allies in London, Washington, and Berlin.
At the end of April 2024, a staff member at the ICC accused Khan of sexual assault.
A source speaking to Le Monde said the allegations were part of an effort to “get rid of the prosecutor” and “hijack the process” of arrest warrants.
In October 2024, while the judges were
still determining whether to issue the arrest warrants, a mysterious
account named “ICC Leaks” appeared on the social network site X.
The account publicized the allegations of sexual assault made against Karim Khan internally at the ICC the previous May.
The ICC finally issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on 21 November 2024.
In February 2025, Chief Prosecutor Khan was placed under sanctions by the US.
Netanyahu applauded the move, calling the court “anti-Semitic and corrupt.”
Khan continued to work on two other
indictments against Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben
Gvir and Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich.
However, Khan has been on temporary leave
since 16 May 2025, pending the outcome of the investigation into the
sexual misconduct allegations, which he strenuously denies.
During its genocide in Gaza, Israel has
killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children,
while destroying most of the strip.
Jewish settlers insist they will colonize Gaza, as they are colonizing the occupied West Bank.
“We are here on the way to new Jewish communities in Gaza,” settler leader Daniella Weiss stated in an interview at the border of the strip in late April.
“The 2 million or whatever number of
Arabs, Gazans, who live here will not live in Gaza,” Weiss added. “It
can take a week, it can take maybe a few months. They will not live
here.”
After destroying 56 small boats in
the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, the Trump administration’s
murderous attacks have become commonplace but remain illegal and evil,
says Andrew P. Napolitano.
President Donald Trump outside the White House on May 8, 2026. (White House /Patrick B. Ruddy)
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
— Voltaire (1694-1778)
Last week, when the
Pentagon resumed its attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern
Pacific Ocean, the media barely noticed.
The U.S. military has now destroyed 56
vessels and killed 190 persons. The killings began in September 2025 and
have continued to this month.
The attacks caused a stir a few months ago
when one of the strikes disabled the boat at which the attack was aimed
but failed to kill all the passengers. When a follow-up strike was
ordered, it succeeded where the initial strike had failed.
The admiral who ordered the murder of the
survivors told members of Congress in secret that he believed he was
following orders. The secretary of defense denied that he ordered the
survivors to be killed.
Killing survivors is expressly prohibited
by federal law as well as by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And,
of course, ordering the killing of innocents is always unlawful.
So, the Pentagon made two changes. It
produced more lethal strikes so as not to be burdened with the problem
of survivors, and it either stopped killing survivors or stopped
revealing that it killed them.
Everyone who professionally monitors the
government expects that it will not be truthful when the truth is
unpleasant or reveals criminal behavior. This expectation is realistic,
considering history and Supreme Court rulings that permit the government
to lie.
The Navy rescued two survivors whom it
failed to kill. Under the law, rescuing is to be done by the Coast
Guard. But that law was written when the Coast Guard was in the
Department of Defense. Today, it is in the Department of Homeland
Security, which is largely mistrusted by the DoD.
So, rather than share information about
its attempted murders with a department of the government over which it
has no control, rather than having a team ready and nearby to rescue
survivors, the Pentagon assigned the Navy to arrive long afterward and
rescue two fishermen.
But the Navy didn’t know what to do with
them, so its legal team asked Department of Justice lawyers for
guidance. They asked the DoD what evidence of crimes it had on these
fishermen, whereupon the DoD was unable to provide an answer that would
rise to the level of probable cause — the legal standard for charging
and detaining anyone.
Probable cause is a level of evidence such
that a neutral person would conclude that it is more likely than not
that the detained persons committed a stated crime. At that point, the
DoJ told the DoD to return these would-be victims to their home
countries.
Survivors Intend to Sue
Unclassified still from video of the first airstrike on Sept. 1, 2025. (U.S. Government, Wikimedia Commons)
In 56 attacks, and one follow-up attack,
only three persons survived. Two of them have hired American lawyers and
have served notice of their intention to sue the federal government for
its attempted murder of them.
The government initially claimed that
these killings were of known drug dealers and this was part of a law
enforcement operation. Yet, under federal law, the military is
prohibited from engaging in law enforcement.
When confronted with that, the White House
claimed that the folks in the boats were enemy combatants, and thus
susceptible to targeting by the military. But that would require some
empirical evidence of their use of force or violence against U.S.
personnel, of which the government revealed none.
Then, the White House likened the effect
of the sale of drugs as a war on the American people and offered that
the job of the military is to defend the country in wartime from what it
called narco-terrorists.
Yet, controlled dangerous substances are
initially ingested voluntarily either by those looking to become
addicted and separated from reality, or by those who believe that they —
not the government — own their own bodies.
It is clear that none of the government’s
changing justifications for these killings amounts to a legally cogent
argument. The Constitution requires due process — notice, fair trial,
right to appeal — and it permits only judges to impose sentences; and it
requires judges to impose only sentences that have been prescribed by
law.
Stated differently, the president cannot
order the killing of a person because he thinks or fears — or even knows
— of their criminal behavior. It is apparently of no moment to him that
drug dealing is not a capital offence.
The Voltaire quotation at the top of this
piece about murders and trumpets has haunted me since I first read it as
a college student. The reference to the trumpets was Voltaire’s way of
calling attention to government wars and executions, many of which in
his day were often accompanied by trumpets.
But trumpets or not, all this raises the
question: How can an act that is intrinsically evil — the intentional
killing of the legally innocent — become moral or lawful just because it
is committed by government officials?
The short answer is: IT CANNOT. Moreover,
intrinsically evil acts can never produce moral outcomes, because the
toleration of pure evil will propagate it.
In America, all persons are innocent until
proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. This
principle has been a bedrock of Anglo-American jurisprudence for
600-plus years.
The president and all in government take an oath of fidelity to the Constitution, whose values embody this principle.
A government is illicit when it violates
the very laws it enforces. When the government breaks its own laws, it
invites others to do so. When it kills innocents, it invites others to
do so. It is always immoral and criminal for anyone intentionally to
extinguish innocent human life.
And now, President Donald Trump’s ordered
killings are so commonplace, there is little coverage and less outrage.
But we will see both when the killings come home.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/UoyDOx5KOWM?feature=oembed&
When representatives of Palestinian resistance factions arrived in
Cairo in mid-March for talks with Egyptian and Qatari mediators, they
were not told in advance that Nickolay Mladenov would be waiting for
them.
Mladenov is no neutral broker. The former
UN official now serves as director-general of US President Donald
Trump’s so-called Board of Peace and its “High Representative for Gaza.”
According to Muhammad Shehada, Mladenov
did not come to mediate. He came to deliver an ultimatum on behalf of
Israel and the United States: Accept full unconditional disarmament or
face a renewed Israeli onslaught.
On The Electronic Intifada
Livestream on 7 May, Shehada said Palestinian factions saw Mladenov as
“an emissary or an envoy of Benjamin Netanyahu,” the Israeli prime
minister.
Citing accounts from participants, Shehada
said Mladenov was “extremely condescending,” issuing a threat “that if
you don’t accept my proposal, immediately, unconditionally, Israel would
get a free hand in Gaza and would resume its military operations.”
A Palestinian writer and researcher from Gaza, Shehada is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
You can watch his full conversation with co-hosts Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman in the video above.
From the UN to the Israel lobby
Mladenov’s bias is hardly hidden. After leaving his post as UN special coordinator for the “peace process” in 2021, he immediately joined the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an offshoot of the Israel lobby group AIPAC.
His conduct in Cairo exposed what this whole process has really been about: forcing and formalizing Palestinian surrender.
In October, Israel agreed on paper to a
ceasefire framework. The Palestinian resistance would ensure the return
from Gaza of all living and dead Israeli prisoners of war and captives.
Israel, in turn, was supposed to stop its
genocidal attack on Gaza, halt “all military operations,” pull back its
forces, allow at least 600 aid trucks a day into the territory, permit
200,000 tents and 60,000 temporary homes, open the Rafah crossing and
allow both an International Stabilization Force and the National
Committee for the Administration of Gaza – a Palestinian-run body meant
to begin civilian governance – to enter the territory.
From there, negotiations on a second phase were supposed to begin.
Nickolay
Mladenov at the launch of the Board of Peace at the World Economic
Forum in January 2026. The former UN official, now acting as Board of
Peace “high representative,” is seen by Palestinians as a messenger for
Israel. (Photo by World Economic Forum/Benedikt von Loebell via Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
All this was set out in Trump’s so-called peace plan for Gaza, endorsed by the UN Security Council in November – in the face of united opposition from Palestinians who viewed the resolution as capitulating to Tel Aviv and Washington and violating fundamental principles of international law.
The Palestinian resistance nevertheless
kept its side of the deal. Israel, to no one’s surprise, violated
virtually all of its commitments, while the supposed mediators,
especially the United States, did nothing.
As Shehada explained on the Livestream, the only item ever fulfilled was the release of Israeli captives.
Since then, Israel has continued killing Palestinians,
choking off aid, blocking temporary shelters and preventing the
Palestinian-run administrative committee from even entering the
territory.
Yet Washington, the other so-called
mediators and much of the media shifted the focus away from Israel’s
violations and ongoing crimes and back onto the old colonial demand that
Palestinians surrender all means to resist and defend themselves.
Palestinian factions rejected the ultimatum, infuriating Mladenov.
“Israel never fulfilled phase one of the
Trump deal. How are you asking us to move to phase two when the first
phase was never fulfilled?” Shehada said, summarizing the position
Palestinian resistance representatives put to Mladenov.
Terms of surrender
In a recent +972 Magazine article, Shehada reports on two Arabic-language documents laying out Mladenov’s demands.
Mladenov set out a 250-day timeline ending
with Palestinians handing over even personal weapons and, “only once an
investigative committee verifies that Gaza is completely free of any
weapons whatsoever – a very elusive process – would Israel make a
limited and ‘gradual’ withdrawal over an undefined period of time to the
‘Red Line’ that would still leave it in control of about 38 percent of
Gaza.”
“Rubble removal and reconstruction under Mladenov’s proposal would only begin on day 251,” Shehada adds.
The documents – reviewed by The Electronic
Intifada – strip Hamas and the other factions of any governing role.
They place Gaza under external control, similar to the colonial Mandate
under which Britain ruled Palestine after World War I.
Israel would remain in control of Gaza
deep into the process, with the final stage still preserving an
indefinite Israeli “security perimeter” inside the territory.
The point is plain enough. Israel and the
US want to keep using hunger, destruction, despair and blackmail to
impose what Israel’s army – despite more than two years of genocide and
devastation – could not impose by force.
Shehada summarized the logic clearly on
Livestream. Mladenov, he said, demanded that Palestinians “become
absolutely defenseless, weaponless,” and trust their lives to an
occupier and its backers who have never stopped killing them.
What then is the endgame? According to
Shehada, Mladenov’s proposals aim “to completely rewrite the Trump plan
to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s satisfaction,” in order
to render it unworkable and “give Israel an absolute free hand to do
whatever it wants.”
While humanitarian relief and recovery
were supposed to begin immediately in phase one, Mladenov is holding the
civilian population’s most basic rights and their very survival hostage
to total surrender by the resistance.
He is, according to Shehada, seeking the
“destruction of everything that they [Palestinians] have that might be
used as either defensive weaponry or as basic leverage in any future
negotiations.”
Decommissioning vs. disarmament
Trump’s plan does not even mention
disarmament. Instead it calls for “placing weapons permanently beyond
use through an agreed process of decommissioning.”
That language comes directly from the
Northern Ireland peace process. In practice, decommissioning meant armed
groups did not immediately give up their weapons, but placed them out
of sight and out of use so long as the political process advanced and
Britain took reciprocal steps to withdraw its forces and dismantle its
repressive apparatus in the north of Ireland.
The weapons remained an insurance card if commitments were violated. Indeed, the Irish Republican Army slowed, and at crisis points suspended, its participation in decommissioning to pressure the British government to fulfill its promises.
“Hamas was saying that we can do this,”
according to Shehada. “Lock all the weapons up in depots for the next
five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and then you need an agreement
to end the Palestinian question, to end Israel’s apartheid.”
Actual disarmament – the final destruction
of resistance weapons – would therefore be the result of a political
settlement and a reciprocal process, not a precondition imposed only on
one side.
As flawed and Israel-biased as it was,
Shehada acknowledged that by adopting the concept of decommissioning,
the Trump framework “was premised on the idea that you don’t have to
surrender, you don’t have to capitulate.”
According to Shehada, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ireland and the United Kingdom support decommissioning as a mechanism for Gaza.
Netanyahu and Mladenov replaced that with
demands for outright disarmament – meaning, as Shehada put it,
“surrender everything you have. You have absolutely no leverage
whatsoever.”
But the comparison has limits.
Northern Ireland involved a political
process that at least formally recognized the rights and aspirations of
all participants and established a path towards a united Ireland, the core objective of the Irish anti-colonial struggle.
With Palestine, even states backing
decommissioning still start from the colonial premise that Palestinian
resistance is the problem, not Zionist colonization, apartheid, siege
and genocide.
Iran changes the power balance
This is why the regional dimension
matters. The demand that the Palestinian – and for that matter Lebanese –
resistance surrender rests on the assumption that the US and Israel
still dominate the region so completely that they can dictate terms and
everybody else must obey.
But the US-Israeli war of aggression
against Iran, and Hizballah’s formidable resistance in Lebanon, have
exposed real limits to that power.
Iran has not only withstood a full-scale
joint assault by the world’s and the region’s strongest and most
genocidal military forces, it has arguably emerged stronger.
Shehada said Trump’s Board of Peace “began to unravel” once the US and Israel attacked Iran.
He noted that Indonesia suspended its participation
and said Gaza’s factions drew a blunt lesson from the regional
confrontation: “If you stand your ground, if you hit back, you strike
back, you maintain steadfastness, you will get your way.”
“That lesson was immediately caught by
people in Gaza,” Shehada said. It made the resistance factions “even
more uncompromising on accepting the Mladenov proposal.”
Despite the catastrophic humanitarian
situation Israel deliberately maintains, Washington and Tel Aviv have
not secured the regional omnipotence they claim.
The existence of Palestinian weapons is
not the root problem, but the consequence of the root problem: Zionist
occupation, land theft, apartheid and genocide, sustained by US imperial
power.
This basic truth cannot be wished away.
Any plan that begins by demanding Palestinian submission while leaving Israeli colonial power intact is a fraud.
Palestine, especially Gaza, does not need
more such scams dressed up as “peace.” Its people need liberation and
the restoration of all their rights.
The durable Western support for Israel
even as it has perpetrated genocide since 7 October 2023 underscores
that liberation will not be a gift from the likes of Mladenov, nor a
reward for what Israel’s arms suppliers and financiers consider
Palestinian good behavior.
As in every anti-colonial struggle,
liberation will be won by Palestinians through their own efforts and
sacrifices – and through the broader regional struggle to end the US
imperial domination without which the Zionist colony in Palestine would
disintegrate.
Tens of thousands of Jewish settlers descended
on occupied Jerusalem on 14 May to celebrate the so-called ‘Flag
March,’ beating Palestinian residents in the Muslim Quarter of the city,
damaging storefronts, and shouting anti-Arab slogans.
The event, also known as the Flag Dance, commemorates the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967.
Even before the parade began, Zionist
youths pushed and cursed Palestinian residents and activists from
“Standing Together,” an Israeli-Palestinian group established to protect
Palestinians during the parade.
“When we put our bodies on the line, it
oftentimes reduces the violence because settlers are less willing to
attack when there are Jews there or when we document what’s going on,” stated Ori Shaham, the group’s international spokesperson.
The parade has long been marked by
violence, extreme racism, and hate songs directed against the
Palestinian residents of the Old City.
On Wednesday, the Knesset’s Aliyah,
Absorption, and Diaspora Committee held a discussion on the violence
directed against Christians during the annual parade.
The committee’s chairman, MK Gilad Kariv,
stated that “there is nothing more ugly and offensive to the status of
Jerusalem than the ugly behavior on the sidelines of the Flag Parade.”
“Every year we know what will happen …
Muslim and Christian residents will close their shops, close their homes
and schools, and lock themselves in their homes so as not to be exposed
to violence? Is this the way of Judaism and the Torah of Israel?”
Last month, Haaretz reported that
the Authority for Jewish National Identity in the Prime Minister’s
Office provided nearly $200,000 in funding to organize the parade.
The remainder of the $400,000 budget was
provided by the Foundation for the Renewal of Communities in Israel, an
umbrella organization for several Torah groups.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir
used the Flag Day march to make a provocative raid on the Temple Mount,
home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.
Professor Graham Allison’s concept has influenced the way scholars and leaders think about competition between global powers.
By Nora Delaney
Fall 2025
HOW SHOULD LEADERS AND POLICYMAKERS THINK
about relative shifts in power between countries? Are there principles
from history that countries can look back to that help understand
geopolitical tensions when countries increase their political and
economic power? These are the questions that help us navigate conflicts
and understand prospects for peace.
Graham Allison,
the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and former Kennedy School
dean, has argued that we can take a lesson from the ancient Greek
historian Thucydides. Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War in the
5th century BCE when the rising city-state of Athens challenged the
dominant existing power of Sparta. Thucydides wrote, “It was the rise of
Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war
inevitable.”
Allison has looked to Thucydides and his
exploration of the tensions between a rising and established world power
to understand the relationship between China and the United States. In
his 2017 book “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape
Thucydides’ Trap?,” Allison argues that history shows many instances
where rising powers challenge established ones, and often these
situations end in war—though not always. Allison’s Thucydides’ Trap has
since become an influential metaphor in international relations as
experts think about the friction between China and the United States—and
ways that they might avoid devastating conflict. The Institute for
National Strategic Studies and the National Defense University Press,
for example, published analyses interpreting the Thucydides Trap in the
context of U.S.–China dynamics. Allison’s analysis has also generated
attention in China. President Xi Jinping frequently uses it to identify
the challenge today’s two great powers face; for example, in his meeting
with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer in October 2023, he said “The
‘Thucydides Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to
accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China
and the United States.” Indeed, during Allison’s quarterly visits to
China, Xi and key members of his team have engaged him directly to
explore opportunities for escaping the Thucydides Trap.
Allison chairs the Harvard China Working
Group that includes faculty from across the university and is pursuing
ongoing work at the Kennedy School that grapples with the nature and
future of U.S.-China competition. The rivalry between the United States
and China, Allison has argued, encompasses four key areas that he and
his colleagues at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
have researched and reported on: rivalry in economics, technology,
military power, and diplomacy. These reports were originally prepared as
part of a package of transition memos for the Trump-Biden transition
after the November 2020 election.
Allison and others at the Belfer Center
and the Kennedy School continue to lead in our understanding of the ways
the United States and China compete and cooperate as world powers.
(Photo credit: Getty Images)
(Photo credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
