‘This Arrogant Enemy’: Israel’s Colonial Reversion to the Noose
April 1, 2026 SCHEERPOST, Zarefah Baroud for Thinking Palestine
“Israel is also confronted by something older than Israel itself: namely, the willingness and ability of the Palestinian people to mobilize and resist in the face of state-sanctioned death.”
The authorities cuffed the nationalist detainees, leading them to their death at the gallows, scaffolding and rope that had borne witness to the final moments of dozens of nationalists like them. As they approached the noose with grace and a sacred conviction, they declared their final tribute to the beloved homeland: “Filasteen ‘Arabiyya!” (“Palestine is Arab”), and issued a final, unflinching indictment of her oppressors.
The families and communities of the martyrs gather outside Sijn Akka, dressed in white and adorned with henna as if they were attending a wedding, receiving the martyr’s body among eruptions of ululations and celebratory songs.
This is not a romantic tale, but rather the tradition adopted by Palestinians throughout the British Mandate for Palestine, a colonial regime that saw to the systematic annihilation of an entire generation of Palestinian nationalists.
The Spectacle of the Noose
While this scene played out on many occasions throughout the British Mandate for Palestine, it could conceivably happen tomorrow, if proposals put forward by Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, are approved by the Israeli Knesset. If this comes to pass, the “death penalty bill” — an amendment to the current Israeli penal code – will result in the execution of those who have allegedly killed Israelis for nationalist purposes (or, more reductively and disingenuously, for “anti-Semitic” reasons).
Further, recent reports have confirmed that the Knesset’s proposed legislation draft will no longer perform the death penalty via lethal injection but rather transform the execution of Palestinian detainees into a colonial spectacle. In other words, the original mode of colonial execution would be restored as the chosen method of capital punishment par excellence.
If approved, hanging will once more become a colonial spectacle, which is enacted, in the sterile and removed wording of the National Security Committee, with the aim of “cut[ting] off terrorism at its root and creat[ing] a heavy deterrent.”
It is critical that, as we discuss this pending policy, which Abdel Nasser Farawna characterizes as improbable (though not impossible), we recognize that the extrajudicial execution of prisoners has always been Israel Prison Service (IPS) policy.
Ben-Gvir has put forward his proposal at a time (the period since October 7, 2023) when the Israeli authorities have murdered detainees at an unprecedented rate. In April 2023, the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees estimated 236 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli custody after 1967, a period of 56 years. In the post-October 7 period, in contrast, almost one hundred Palestinians have died in custody, a killing rate around 10 times the historical average.
A November 2025 report produced by Physicians for Human Rights Israel suggests that this may actually be a substantial under-estimate, by virtue of the (at least) 14,000 Gazans who are still missing, presumed to be dead or abducted at the time of writing…………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/01/this-arrogant-enemy-israels-colonial-reversion-to-the-noose/
Ukraine actively involved in US-Israeli aggression against Iran: Envoy to UN
Monday, 30 March 2026, https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2026/03/30/766089/Ukraine-actively-involved-in-US-Israeli-aggression-against-Iran–Envoy-to-UN-
A senior Iranian diplomat condemns Ukraine’s admission to the dispatch of “hundreds of experts” to the region to confront Iran, saying Kiev is actively participating in the military aggression launched by the United State and the Israeli regime against the Islamic Republic.
Iranian Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani made the remark in a letter to Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres and president of the UN Security Council on Monday.
“Ukraine’s admission that it has dispatched ‘hundreds of experts’ to the region apparently to help some Persian Gulf governments to confront Iran is in its essence considered to be providing financial and operative support for an unlawful military aggression, led by the United States of America and the Israeli regime, against Iran, which began on February 28, 2026.”
He said Iran rejects all unfounded accusations leveled by the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN which are devoid of any credible evidence and have been made with the clear aim of diverting attention from the ongoing US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Such allegations also intended to whitewash the horrific crimes committed by the US and Israel against civilians and non-military infrastructure, he said.
“Such interference is not accidental. It exposes active participation in and facilitation of the illegal use of force against a sovereign state and raises serious concerns within the framework of international law, including the principles governing state responsibility and the prohibition of aiding or abetting in the commission of internationally wrongful acts.”
“Ukraine’s illegal acts constitute participation in an act of aggression and violate the fundamental prohibition on the use of force enshrined in Article 2, paragraph 4, of the United Nations Charter,” he added.
Furthermore, the envoy reiterated, Ukraine’s attempt to justify or normalize the targeting of critical infrastructure is deeply concerning and inconsistent with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.
Earlier on Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters that linking the conflict in Ukraine to the current developments in West Asia, particularly after the US-Israel military aggression against Iran, is a “very catastrophic miscalculation.”
In response to a question about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s offer to provide military assistance to the US allies in the region, Baghaei expressed hope that the countries in the region will be wise enough not to allow such a person, who exposed his country to a very destructive war over the past four years, to pursue his objectives.
Projectile hits near Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, killing one: IAEA
Tehran says it is the fourth attack near the nuclear plant amid the US-Israel war on Iran.
By Al Jazeera Staff and Reuters 4 Apr 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/4/iaea-says-projectile-hits-near-irans-bushehr-nuclear-plant-killing-one
One person has been killed by projectile fragments after United States-Israeli strikes targeted a location close to Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The agency, citing confirmation from Iranian authorities, said in a statement on X that there was “no increase in radiation levels” after Saturday’s attack.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed the Bushehr facility had been “bombed” four times since the war erupted on February 28, criticising what he described as a lack of concern for its safety.
The strike comes as the US and Israel escalate their targeting of Iranian industrial sites, even as experts warn of the high risks of striking nuclear or petrochemical facilities.
IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi expressed “deep concern about the reported incident and says [nuclear] sites or nearby areas must never be attacked, noting that auxiliary site buildings may contain vital safety equipment”, the statement read.
Grossi also reiterated a “call for maximum military restraint to avoid risk of a nuclear accident,” the IAEA added.
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) confirmed the incident in a post on X.
An “auxiliary” building on the site was damaged, but the main sections of the power plant were not affected by the strike, the government agency said, adding that the person killed was a member of security personnel.
The head of Russia’s state nuclear company, Rosatom, said 198 Russian staff had evacuated the plant following the attack, state news agency Interfax reported.
“As planned, we began the main wave of evacuations today, about 20 minutes after the ill-fated strike. Buses departed from the Bushehr station toward the Iranian-Armenian border. 198 people, to be exact – the largest wave of evacuation – are on the buses,” Alexei Likhachev said.
Rosatom has been evacuating staff from the plant since the US-Israeli war on Iran began. Saturday’s evacuations had been planned before the attack.
The Bushehr plant is Iran’s only operational nuclear power plant. It is located in Bushehr city, home to 250,000 people, and is one of Iran’s most important industrial and military nodes.
Meanwhile, US and Israeli strikes on Saturday hit several petrochemical plants in the southern Khuzestan region, an important energy hub, according to Iranian media.
At least five people were injured, Iranian media reported, citing a provincial official.
Explosions were heard, and smoke was also seen rising after missiles hit several locations across the Mahshahr Petrochemical Special Economic Zone.
The state-run Bandar Imam petrochemical complex, which produces chemicals, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), polymers and a range of other products, was struck and sustained damage, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.
A provincial governor in Khuzestan added that the Fajr 1 and 2 petrochemical companies, as well as other nearby facilities, were also hit, according to the Fars news agency. The extent of damage is unclear.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed it shot down an MQ-1 drone over central Isfahan province on Saturday, hours after authorities said they forced down two US warplanes.
Isfahan, which houses an underground uranium conversion and a research site, was one of three facilities bombed during US and Israeli strikes on Iran last June.
Ambassador Chas Freeman: Trump PUSHES ESCALATION — Israel’s Strategy COLLAPSES Overnight
3 April 26,
COMMENT by Robert Anderson
The US, and its administration are on the losing end of this war, there’s a coverup going on. The military hospitals in Germany are full, we have many more casualties from the war in the Gulf/Iran/Israel. Iran is essentially winning this war. We will quit the war while we are behind (losing in this case. Epstein will come back to the forefront at some point. If nothing else this will bring Trump down, he’s being blackmailed by Israel which forced him into this war,
From ISIS to Iran: Joe Kent Says Washington Keeps Repeating the Same Catastrophic Playbook
April 3, 2026, ScheerPost Staff, https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/03/from-isis-to-iran-joe-kent-says-washington-keeps-repeating-the-same-catastrophic-playbook/
In a wide‑ranging and unusually candid conversation, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent explains why he resigned over the Trump administration’s war on Iran—and why he believes the United States has once again walked into a strategic disaster of its own making.
Kent’s account, drawn from decades inside U.S. covert and military operations, offers a rare insider narrative of how Washington’s pro‑war reflexes, Israeli pressure, and America’s own history of regime‑change hubris converged into the current crisis.
A War Built on a False Premise
Kent opens with the core claim that drove his resignation: Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States.
As he puts it, “Iran was not on the cusp of attacking us… They observed a very calculated escalation ladder.”
According to Kent, Iran halted proxy attacks once Trump returned to office, sat at the negotiating table, and even refrained from striking U.S. forces during the 12‑day war—until Israel launched its own attack on Iranian nuclear sites.
The only “imminent threat,” Kent argues, came not from Tehran but from Israel’s unilateral actions, which forced Washington into a conflict it did not need and could not win.
How Israeli Influence Shapes U.S. War Decisions
One of the most explosive threads in the interview is Kent’s description of how Israeli intelligence, lobbying networks, and media allies shape U.S. policy far beyond what most Americans understand.
Kent describes a “multi‑layered influence ecosystem” that bypasses normal intelligence vetting and pressures senior U.S. officials directly.
“They will come in and say, ‘They’re within two weeks of getting a bomb,’ and that night it’s repeated on TV,” he explains.
This echo chamber, he argues, successfully moved the U.S. red line from “no nuclear weapon” to “no enrichment at all”—a shift that made diplomacy impossible and war inevitable.
The Forever-War Reflex in Washington
Kent echoes what former officials like Lawrence Wilkerson have long warned: Washington has a structural bias toward war.
Defense contractors, political incentives, and a bipartisan foreign‑policy class create what Kent calls the “factory settings” of U.S. power—settings that default to escalation, not restraint.
Even Trump, who campaigned on ending endless wars, was eventually pulled into the Iran conflict. Kent argues Israeli officials and neoconservative advisers played to Trump’s ego, promising an easy, historic victory.
The U.S. Role in Creating ISIS—And Repeating the Pattern
Kent’s most damning historical analysis concerns the U.S. role in the rise of ISIS and al‑Qaeda affiliates in Syria.
He recounts how the Iraq War destabilized the region, empowered Iranian‑aligned militias, and pushed Gulf states and Israel to back radical Sunni factions in Syria.
“We were supporting al‑Qaeda, which eventually morphed into ISIS,” Kent says bluntly.
He describes how U.S. and Turkish support helped elevate Abu Mohammad al‑Julani, an al‑Qaeda figure who now effectively governs northwest Syria with tacit Western acceptance.
The lesson, Kent argues, is clear: regime‑change wars always produce monsters—and America never seems to learn.
Iran’s Strategy: Win by Not Losing
Kent believes Iran has adopted a long‑term strategy shaped by watching U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan:
• survive • absorb blows • raise global energy costs • outlast Washington’s political will
Iran doesn’t need to defeat the U.S. militarily, he argues—only to avoid collapse.
And with control over the Strait of Hormuz, ballistic missile capacity, and regional alliances, Iran can keep the war costly indefinitely.
The Nuclear Danger: A Self‑Fulfilling Prophecy
Kent warns that U.S. and Israeli pressure may push Iran toward the very outcome Washington claims to fear.
“We basically destroyed the school of thought that opposed nuclear weapons,” he says, referring to the killing of Iran’s former Supreme Leader and the rise of hardliners.
He predicts Iran may now pursue a “North Korea solution”—a nuclear deterrent to prevent future attacks.
The Only Exit: Restrain Israel, Reopen Diplomacy
Kent’s prescription is stark:
- Publicly restrain Israel’s offensive operations
- Cut military aid if necessary
- Offer sanctions relief
- Reopen the Strait of Hormuz
- Return to negotiations
Without restraining Israel, Kent argues, the U.S. will remain trapped in an endless cycle of escalation.
“Unless we restrain Israel, I just don’t see us having a way out of this,” he warns.
This conversation is not just another critique of U.S. foreign policy. It is a rare moment when a senior insider—someone who helped run America’s counterterrorism apparatus—publicly breaks with the system he once served.
For ScheerPost readers, Kent’s testimony reinforces what independent journalists have long documented:
• U.S. wars are rarely about security • Israeli influence shapes U.S. decisions in ways the public never sees • regime‑change operations consistently backfire • Washington’s war machine is structurally incapable of learning from its failures
Kent’s resignation and his warnings should be a national scandal. Instead, they are being heard mainly on independent platforms—another sign of how tightly controlled mainstream narratives around war have become.
You can read more about Joe Kent MAGA Goons Smear The Grayzone to Get Back at Joe Kent
or Joe Kent’s Resignation, in His Own Words, Reveals MAGA’s Fracture Over War—Not a Break From Empire
Remember this too: as Nate Baer reported, “Then you’ve got the frauds like Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center who just resigned over the war. A MAGA devotee and former special forces operative who pulled the trigger for U.S. imperialism in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, his resignation wasn’t about ethics or principle. In his resignation letter, he even praised Donald Trump’s 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Trump was doing imperialism right then—now, in Kent’s view, he’s simply doing it wrong.”
Escalating To Catastrophe
when Trump and Hegseth use this phrase, they are using it knowingly and deliberately. They are channelling all of LeMay’s savagery, racism and fascism.
They are simply reflecting the dominant belief held for decades by US military planners that the US can, and should, commit war crimes and mass murder to get what it wants.
Nate Bear, Apr 02, 2026, https://www.donotpanic.news/p/escalating-to-catastrophe
In his televised address last night Trump said the US was going to continue attacking Iran for another two or three weeks and would bomb the country “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
More on that phrase later.
But first a bit on the economics.
Promising to keep doing the thing that has brought the world to the brink of a global economic catastrophe, and threatening maximum escalation, didn’t go down well with the people who make numbers go up or down. The oil price rocketed, and markets sank. It seems the people behind the screens might finally be waking up to the looming disaster. They might be realising, belatedly, that very soon the molecules are simply not going to arrive where they are wanted and needed in the quantities required
You can’t decouple the numbers from the atoms forever and you can only deny physical reality for so long.
And the physical reality is stark and stunning. The drop in oil production since the US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran is bigger than the drop during covid, which was the biggest drop in modern history.
Read that again if you need to.
But there’s a crucial difference that makes this situation worse.
The covid drop was demand destruction.
This is supply destruction.
In 2020 no one needed the oil because of a mandated and somewhat managed power down. In 2026 everyone still needs the oil, and gas. There’s been no managed power down. The fuel just isn’t there. For the global economy the difference is like willingly checking into rehab versus being forced to go cold turkey.
Two once-in-a-generation events in six years.
The outcome can only, logically, in the short-term at least, be disastrous.
In the medium-to-long-term perhaps, on the energy front at least, this will accelerate the shift to solar, wind and wave, as a friend suggested yesterday.
Perhaps.
But covid didn’t.
Despite that energy shock, despite all the talk of building back better and the demonstration of how active state interventions could end homelessness or drive child poverty to record lows, nothing changed. The US even re-installed Donald Trump, the man who during the first once-in-a-generation event suggested drinking bleach to cure yourself of the virus.
Nothing changed because to make pro-social changes you need pro-social leaders willing to create pro-social systems. Maniacs, war criminals and imperialists aren’t going to do it.
And that’s what we’ve got.
Additionally, for all the uses I detailed in my last article, it’s impossible to get rid of oil and gas entirely, or even mostly. You can’t even make turbines or solar panels without fossil fuels. Petrochemicals are deeply woven into the fabric of our societies, and the interests of capital have a huge incentive in keeping it that way. And when those chemicals aren’t flowing through the system in the quantities we rely on, our societies are forced to react.
And that’s what’s about to happen.
This power down will be messier than covid because it’s even less planned.
Now to the imperialism.
Trump threatened to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. Hegseth tweeted the same.
Yes this is sadism. Yes this is an openly announced war crime. Yes it shows that this was never about helping the Iranian people.
But Trump and Hegseth’s sadism is far from anomalous.
The use of this exact phrase by US military leaders has a long history.
Curtis LeMay
General Curtis LeMay was known as The Demon. An air force general who commanded US forces in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, he advocated total war against civilian infrastructure to break the political leadership of a country. LeMay was the architect of the firebombing of Japan in March 1945, in which an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 civilians were murdered in a single night. He also commanded the total war bombing campaign against civilians and civilian infrastructure in North Korea and casually boasted that “we killed off, what, 20% of their population.”
It was during the Vietnam war, and later recounted in his autobiography, that LeMay advocated for bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.” He also said the same about the Soviet Union, arguing that the US shouldn’t just bomb but nuke them into the Stone Age.
LeMay is revered among the US military. US Strategic Command in Nebraska is named after him. LeMay was also a racist. In 1968 he joined George Wallace’s campaign for president and became his running mate. Wallace’s main policy was maintaining racial segregation.
So when Trump and Hegseth use this phrase, they are using it knowingly and deliberately. They are channelling all of LeMay’s savagery, racism and fascism.
They are channelling the savagery, racism and fascism of empire.
A savagery, racism and fascism that American empire was built on and which still today knits the United States together.
So no, Trump and Hegseth’s language, for all its barbarity, was not a surprise.
They are simply reflecting the dominant belief held for decades by US military planners that the US can, and should, commit war crimes and mass murder to get what it wants.
Naked empire
If there is a difference right now, it’s how naked empire has become. How the savagery is uttered in real time, by the president of empire, to a global audience.
The imperialists no longer pretend to have humanitarian motives for their crimes. Now they openly announce they’re going to kill large numbers of humans and overthrow governments to steal oil and resources.
Which is why anyone coming out on the other side of this still clinging to liberal beliefs about the international order, about the US as a force for good, about Trump as an anomaly, is a coward. Anyone who tells you Trump is merely an aberration is afraid to internalise the truth about empire, or is motivated by privilege not to do so.
Which goes for the vast majority of legacy media, liberal or otherwise, all of whom have utterly failed to keep citizens informed about the catastrophe this war has provoked. A major reason is because, as appendages of empire, as stenographers for imperialism, they didn’t want to say too much about the targets Iran has hit for fear of hyping the enemy.
Completely captured, but, in the end, it doesn’t matter. Because, I repeat, physical reality has a habit of being real.
It doesn’t matter whether you like that reality or not.
Molecules and atoms don’t care about your political bias or your ideology.
So now, as US-Israel escalate to catastrophe against Iran, the shock is really going to shock, especially for those who’ve been kept in the dark.
‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook
For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.
The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine.
The passing of the recent Israeli death penalty law legalizes an already existing policy of executions within a set schedule. The same colonial logic governs how Israel launches its wars: first Gaza, then Lebanon, now Iran. Resistance in this region is refusing Israel’s timetable of death.
By Abdaljawad Omar, Mondoweiss, April 2, 2026
The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the passing of a death penalty law for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption.
It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices.
Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his study of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly Qassamite revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the 1936 uprising, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.
What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it.
Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Palestinian nationalist and resistance fighter who lived through the British Mandate and left some of the most detailed firsthand accounts of that period, documented this disparity plainly: in his account, the capital sentence fell on Arabs, while Jews charged with the same or graver offenses walked away with prison sentences. The rope, in practice, was for Arabs only.
The new Israeli law carries this same racism forward, entering a prison system where Palestinians make up the vast majority of political prisoners, and where the definition of who is dangerous has been stretched until it fits almost anyone who refuses to disappear quietly. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only.
There is something else that legalizing execution does, something beneath the law’s stated purpose that may be its more consequential effect. Hughes shows that in Mandate Palestine, official policy and unofficial violence never operated separately. As British courts hanged men with increasing speed and confidence, the threshold for what soldiers felt permitted to do in the field quietly fell. At Miska, a Palestinian village in the coastal area, British police tortured four captured Palestinian rebels in May 1938, killing them once interrogation was complete — not in a courtroom, but in the open.
Law and lawlessness were not opposites in that system: they fed each other. The widened application of capital punishment in the courts gave license to soldiers in the field. What we are watching in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank today follows the same pattern, pushing the boundaries of permissible conduct.
For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.
A codification of existing practice
In this sense, Israel is not doing something new with this law. It is catching up with itself. The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, of the 1,260 complaints filed against soldiers for harming Palestinians between 2017 and 2021, soldiers were prosecuted in less than 1% of cases — 0.87%, to be precise. The law does not create impunity, but guarantees it. Once enshrined, it pushes the violence further, each legal expansion making extrajudicial killing easier to justify, and each unjustified killing creating pressure for new legal cover. They drive each other.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/the-rope-is-for-arabs-only-israels-new-death-penalty-law-for-palestinians-recycles-a-colonial-playbook/
Trump Willing to End War on Iran without opening Hormuz Strait?
Iran never had a nuclear weapons program and the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump destroyed, had guaranteed that Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program could not be turned to military purposes. None of the rationales for the war ever made sense, and now the goal seems to be to return to the status quo ante, to get back to February 27, 2026. But you can’t.
Juan Cole, 03/31/2026
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump has reportedly told aides that he wants to end the Iran War within four to six weeks and that he has realized that attempting forcibly to reopen it would take far longer.
Having degraded Iran’s military capabilities, Trump hopes that future diplomacy will help reopen the Strait and that other countries will take the lead on those negotiations (!)
If wishes were fishes we’d all have barrels full.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he said,
It isn’t clear that Rubio is in the loop on Trump’s war aims, and Trump himself appears to say things so as to move the stock market and enable insider trading for himself and his cronies, so it is hard to know what emphasis to place on these bipolar pronouncements. On Sunday Trump was blustering about invading Iran with ground troops or destroying all its power and desalinization plants. Now on Monday evening he want to cease bombing in a few weeks and walk away.
Rubio’s three goals are silly. Iran has never had much of an air force or navy. And while its ballistic missile launchers have been reduced in number, the country still seems to have large numbers of Shahed drones that can be launched from the back of a Toyota truck or from underground emplacements, and Iran still seems to have lots of these drones. It even still has lots of missiles, and hit an Israeli oil refinery at Haifa with one on Monday. The likelihood is that with Chinese and Russian help Iran will be able swiftly to replace those launchers, and it probably is manufacturing hundreds of new drones a week even as the war drags on.
Iran never had a nuclear weapons program and the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump destroyed, had guaranteed that Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program could not be turned to military purposes. None of the rationales for the war ever made sense, and now the goal seems to be to return to the status quo ante, to get back to February 27, 2026. But you can’t.
The political problem for Trump is that Iran’s strategy of taking the world’s oil and gas hostage has worked. Those fuels are characterized by inelastic demand — people who drive gasoline cars to work need gasoline, whether it costs $2.70 a gallon or $4 a gallon or $7 a gallon. They cannot easily switch to another fuel. I mean, over time they could buy an electric car or move closer to their work, but we’re talking this month and next month. Not only is demand inelastic but supply is, as well.
You’ll hear commentators talking about how America has its own petroleum. This is not true. The US consumes a little over 20 million barrels a day of petroleum and other liquid fuels. It produces 13.6 million barrels a day.
We make up the nearly 7 million barrel a day difference with imports, above all from Canada but also from Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Iraq and Colombia.
So although the US may produce more petroleum than any other country, it uses it all itself, and then some. It is not a swing producer. Saudi Arabia is a swing producer because it can produce a lot of oil that it does not use and so can export a lot or a little, having an outsized impact on prices. The US cannot do that. And Saudi Arabia’s exports have been much reduced by Iran’s blockade. What elasticity exists in the oil supply comes from swing producers and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait cannot play that role right now. Supply is therefore inelastic over the short to medium term.
So American’s gasoline and diesel goes up when everybody else’s does, since the producers have a choice of markets to sell into and they will sell to the highest bidder. Americans, contrary to the lies Big Oil tells, are not self-sufficient in gasoline, and their pocketbooks are going to take a big hit on energy prices if this war goes on.
The war has not only taken oil off the market (we won’t be getting any from Iraq since its fields are closed now) but Israeli and US strikes on Iran, and Iranian strikes on the Gulf Arab states, have damaged oil and gas facilities. The French estimate that a third of Gulf refining capacity has been taken off the board because of damage to facilities. Let me fill you in on something: crude petroleum is worthless. It only acquires a value when it is refined into products like gasoline or diesel that can power vehicles or fuel power plants.
That refining capacity is not going to miraculously recover when Trump finally ends this pointless war. Rebuilding will take time. Depending on how long the hot war continues, you could see petroleum stay above $100 a barrel for the foreseeable future, which will take between 0.3% and 0.4% off GDP growth. The US was already anemic at a projected 0.7% GDP growth rate this year, which high petroleum and gas prices could whittle down to nothing. Or we could even go into a recession.
Moreover, the potential is there for more damage to oil rigs, refineries and terminals, and the risk increases with every day the war continues.
Americans haven’t felt the full pain yet because the markets have imperfect information or are paying too much attention to Trump’s jawboning. But industry insiders are worried about $200 a barrel petroleum (it was about $70 before the war), and are worried that elevated prices can be foreseen into the future.
So all of a sudden, as Trump begins to get heat from his MAGA base about gasoline prices and about a costly foreign war and now the prospect of boots on the ground — all of a sudden Trump wants to walk away within a month and let Iran have the Strait of Hormuz until such time as some other countries can talk Tehran out of it!!
Filed Under: Donald Trump, Featured, Iran, Natural Gas, Petroleum, War
About the Author
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook
Israel is making sure Trump can’t find an off-ramp in Iran
The main problem for Trump, the US narcissist-in-chief, is that he is no longer in charge of events – beyond a series of soundbites, alternating between aggression and accommodation, that appear only to have enriched his family and friends as oil markets rise and fall on his every utterance.
Trump’s words are worthless. He could agree to terms tomorrow, but how could Tehran ever be sure that it would not face another round of strikes six months later?
Netanyahu pitched the war as a repeat of Israel’s apparent ‘audacious feat’ of smashing Hezbollah. The US president should have noted instead Israel’s moral and strategic defeat in Gaza
Jonathan Cook, Mar 30, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must have persuaded Donald Trump that a war on Iran would unfold much like the pager attack in Lebanon 18 months ago.
The two militaries would jointly decapitate the leadership in Tehran, and it would crumble just as Hezbollah had collapsed – or so it then seemed – after Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese group’s spiritual leader and military strategist.
If so, Trump bought deeply into this ruse. He assumed that he would be the US president to “remake the Middle East” – a mission his predecessors had baulked at since George W Bush’s dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.
Netanyahu directed Trump’s gaze to Israel’s supposed “audacious feat” in Lebanon. The US president should have been looking elsewhere: to Israel’s colossal moral and strategic failure in Gaza.
There, Israel spent two years pummelling the tiny coastal enclave into dust, starving the population, and destroying all civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.
Netanyahu publicly declared that Israel was “eradicating Hamas”, Gaza’s civilian government and its armed resistance movement that had refused for two decades to submit to Israel’s illegal occupation and blockade of the territory.
In truth, as pretty much every legal and human rights expert long ago concluded, what Israel was actually doing was committing genocide – and, in the process, tearing up the rules of war that had governed the period following the Second World War.
But two and a half years into Israel’s destruction of Gaza, Hamas is not only still standing, it is in charge of the ruins.
Israel may have shrunk by some 60 per cent the size of the concentration camp the people of Gaza are locked into, but Hamas is far from vanquished.
Rather, Israel is the one that has retreated to a safe zone, from which it is resuming a war of attrition on Gaza’s survivors.
Surprises in store
When considering whether to launch an illegal war on Iran, Trump should have noted Israel’s complete failure to destroy Hamas after pounding this small territory – the size of the US city of Detroit – from the air for two years.
That failure was all the starker given that Washington had provided Israel with an endless supply of munitions.
Even sending in Israeli ground forces failed to quell Hamas’ resistance. These were the strategic lessons the Trump administration should have learnt.
If Israel could not overwhelm Gaza militarily, why would Washington imagine the task of doing so in Iran would prove any easier?
After all, Iran is 4,500 times larger than Gaza. It has a population, and military, 40 times bigger. And it has a fearsome arsenal of missiles, not Hamas’ homemade rockets.
But more important still, as Trump is now apparently learning to his cost, Iran – unlike Hamas in isolated Gaza – has strategic levers to pull with globe-shattering consequences.
Tehran is matching Washington’s climb up the escalation ladder rung by rung: from hitting US military infrastructure in neighbouring Gulf states, and critical civilian infrastructure such as energy grids and desalination plants, to closing the Strait of Hormuz, the passage through which much of the world’s oil and energy supplies are transported.
Tehran is now sanctioning the world, depriving it of the fuel needed to turn the wheels of the global economy, in much the same way that the West sanctioned Iran for decades, depriving it of the essentials needed to sustain its domestic economy.
Unlike Hamas, which had to fight from a network of tunnels under the flat, sandy lands of Gaza, Iran has a terrain massively to its military advantage.
Granite cliffs and narrow coves along the Strait of Hormuz provide endless protected sites from which to launch surprise attacks. Vast mountain ranges in the interior offer innumerable hiding places – for the enriched uranium the US and Israel demand Iran hand over, for soldiers, for drone and missile launch sites, and for weapons production plants.
The US and Israel are smashing Iran’s visible military-related infrastructure, but – just as Israel discovered when it invaded Gaza – they have almost no idea what lies out of sight.
They can be sure of one thing, however: Iran, which has been readying for this fight for decades, has plenty of surprises in store should they dare to invade.
No trust in Trump
The main problem for Trump, the US narcissist-in-chief, is that he is no longer in charge of events – beyond a series of soundbites, alternating between aggression and accommodation, that appear only to have enriched his family and friends as oil markets rise and fall on his every utterance.
Trump lost control of the military fight the moment he fell for Netanyahu’s pitch.
He may be commander-in-chief of the strongest military in the world, but he has now found himself unexpectedly in the role of piggy in the middle.
He is largely powerless to bring to an end an illegal war he started. Others now dictate events. Israel, his chief ally in the war, and Iran, his official enemy, hold all the important cards. Trump, despite his bravado, is being dragged along in their tailwind.
He can declare victory, as he has repeatedly sounded close to doing. But, having released the genie from the bottle, there is little he can actually do to bring the fighting to a close.
Unlike the US, Israel and Iran have an investment in keeping the war going for as long as either can endure the pain. Each regime believes – for different reasons – that the struggle between them is existential.
Israel, with its zero-sum worldview, is afraid that, were the military playing field in the Middle East to be levelled by Iran matching Israel’s nuclear-power status, Tel Aviv would no longer exclusively have Washington’s ear.
It would no longer be able, at will, to spread terror across the region. And it would have to reach a settlement with the Palestinians, rather than its preferred plan to commit genocide and ethnically cleanse them.
Similarly, Iran has concluded – based on recent experience – that the US, and especially Trump, can no more be trusted than Israel.
In 2018, in his first term, the US president tore up the nuclear deal signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Last summer Trump launched strikes on Iran in the midst of talks. And then late last month he unleashed this war, just as renewed talks were on the brink of success, according to mediators.
Trump’s words are worthless. He could agree to terms tomorrow, but how could Tehran ever be sure that it would not face another round of strikes six months later?
…………………………………………………………………………. Stoking the flames
As becomes clearer by the day, US and Israeli interests over Iran are now in opposition.
Trump needs to bring calm back to the markets as soon as possible to avoid a global depression and, with it, the collapse of his domestic support. He must find a way to reimpose stability.
With air strikes failing to dislodge either the ayatollahs or the Revolutionary Guard, he has one of two courses of action open to him: either climb down and engage in humiliating negotiations with Iran, or try to topple the regime through a ground invasion and impose a leader of his choosing.
But given the fact that Iran is not done wreaking damage on the US, and has zero reason to trust Trump’s good faith, Washington is being driven inexorably towards the second path.
Israel, on the other hand, bitterly opposes the first option, negotiations, which would take it back to square one. And it suspects the second option is unachievable.
The primary lesson from Gaza is that Iran’s vast terrain is likely to make invading troops sitting ducks for attack from an unseen enemy.
And there is far too much support for the leadership among Iranians – even if westerners never hear of it – for Israel and the US to foist on the populace the pretender to the throne, Reza Pahlavi, who has been cheering on the bombing of his own people safely from the sidelines.
Israel initiated this war with an entirely different agenda. It seeks chaos in Iran, not stability. That is what it has been trying to engineer in Gaza and Lebanon – and there is every sign it is seeking the same outcome in Iran.
This should have long been understood in Washington.
This week, Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, cited recent comments by Danny Citrinowicz, a former veteran Israeli military intelligence lead on Iran, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”. Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”
………………………………………………………………………………………….. Confusing messages
In typical fashion, Trump is sending confusing messages. He is seeking to negotiate – though with whom is unclear – while amassing troops for a ground invasion.
It is hard to analyse the US president’s intentions because his utterances make precisely no strategic sense.
This is not the logic of a superpower looking to shore up its own authority, and restore order to the region. It is the logic of a cornered crime boss, hoping that a last desperate roll of the dice may disrupt his rivals’ plans sufficiently to turn the tables on them.
That roll of the dice looks likely to be a plan to send US special forces to occupy Kharg Island, the main hub for Iran’s oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump appears to think that he can hold the island as ransom, demanding Tehran reopen the Strait or lose its access to its own oil.
According to diplomats, Iran is not only refusing to concede control over the Strait but threatening to carpet-bomb the island – and US forces on it – rather than give Trump leverage. Tehran is also warning that it will start targeting shipping in the Red Sea, a second waterway vital to the transport of oil supplies from the region.
It still has cards to play.
This is a game of chicken Trump will struggle to win. All of which leaves the Israeli leadership sitting pretty.
If Trump ups the stakes, Iran will do so too. If Trump declares victory, Iran will keep firing to underscore that it decides when things come to a halt. And in the unlikely event that the US makes major concessions to Tehran, Israel has manifold ways to stoke the flames again.
In fact, though barely reported by the western media, it is actively fuelling those fires already.
It is destroying south Lebanon, using the levelling of Gaza as the template, and preparing to annex lands south of the Litani River in accordance with its imperial Greater Israel agenda.
It is still killing Palestinians in Gaza, still shrinking the size of their concentration camp, and still blockading aid, food and fuel.
And Israel is stepping up its settler-militia pogroms against Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank, in preparation for the ethnic cleansing of what was once assumed to be the backbone of a Palestinian state.
Sullivan, Biden’s senior adviser, noted that Israel’s vision of a “broken Iran” was not in America’s interests. It risked prolonged insecurity in the Strait of Hormuz, the collapse of the global economy, and a mass exodus of refugees from the region towards Europe.
That would further deepen a European economic crisis already blamed on immigrants. It would strengthen nativist sentiment that far-right parties are already riding in the polls. It would intensify the legitimacy crisis already faced by European liberal elites, and justify growing authoritarianism.
In other words, it would foment across Europe a political climate even more conducive to Israel’s supremacist, might-is-right agenda.
Trump’s off-ramp is elusive. And Israel will do its level best to make sure it stays that way. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/israel-is-making-sure-trump-cant?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=476450&post_id=192603646&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=17yeb&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Implications of a Possible US Ground Invasion of Iran
Abbas Hashemite, March 30, 2026, https://journal-neo.su/2026/03/30/implications-of-a-possible-us-ground-invasion-of-iran/
Following Iran’s strong retaliation, the United States is mulling a ground invasion of the country. However, it would have significant implications for the US.
Escalation Amidst Diplomacy
Despite ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and Israel attacked Iran, violating international rules and norms. Most of Iran’s top-level military and civilian leadership was assassinated in the US and Israeli attack on February 28, 2026. In retaliation, Iran targeted Israeli cities and its nuclear and energy infrastructure, along with key US military facilities in the region. Iran also closed the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global maritime oil trade, which increased global inflation as energy and oil prices surged worldwide.
Since February 28, Iran has been continuously targeting Israeli and US interests in the Middle East. Iran’s strong retaliation against the United States and Israel and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz have exasperated US President Trump. Surging global inflation due to his unnecessary “war of choice,” as Americans call it, has made him desperate to secure a deal over the issue of closure of the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump’s frustration is evident from his simultaneous statement about continuing the war and ending it through diplomatic negotiations.
Contradictions in Strategy and Leadership
Due to increasing contradictions between Trump’s rhetoric and actions, people around the world are curious about the future of this war. Following President Trump’s statement regarding talks with Iran, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Israeli attacks on Iran would continue. On March 25, the Zionist Prime Minister even ordered the Israeli military to speed up its air campaign for the next 48 hours against Iran to destroy as much of its arms industry as possible. Similarly, the US Central Command, on the night when Trump talked about negotiations, reported that air strikes against Iran were carried out extensively.
The cost of the US-Israel and Iran war has already spiraled out of control. The Gulf countries are still unable to recover from the shock of this unexpected war. Amongst all this, a ground invasion of Iran would prove catastrophic for the world, and it would push the war into an ‘irreversible’ phase. Once the United States starts the ground invasion of Iran, it would become nearly impossible to stop the war, and the detrimental impacts of this war would increase manifold. For such an invasion, a clear objective and aim of the war need to be defined first. However, the US and Israeli leadership have failed to define a clear objective of this war.
Shifting Goals and the Risks of Ground War
Initially, the US and Israel stated that their goal was to remove the Islamic regime and end the country’s nuclear and missile program. However, after their failure to spark a native uprising against the Ayatollah regime and Iran’s strong retaliation, President Trump’s objective has apparently shifted towards opening the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan’s Minister of Defense, Khawaja Asif, also mocked the US by stating, “The goal of the war seems to have shifted to opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war.” This shifting objective of the war indicates that the US policymakers are unable to define a clear aim of the war they started at the behest of Israel.
The absence of a clear objective has resulted in a military posture that no longer aligns with the initially stated goals of the war, disrupting US military planning. The ground invasion of Iran would not be possible with a few divisions, but it would require a complete military ecosystem. Iran has already mobilized one million soldiers to counter a possible US ground invasion of the country. Therefore, deploying insufficient military forces in Iran would create an imbalance, resulting only in casualties of the US soldiers. With the increasing number of military casualties, Trump’s political stature will also diminish, as the argument that “the US troops are sacrificing their lives for Israel” will strengthen.
If the United States seeks to control the Strait of Hormuz and nearby islands, it would compel Iran to respond with full military might, as it is ready to sacrifice its own energy infrastructure, which has already been significantly damaged by Israeli and US attacks. Similarly, a ground invasion of Iran through the Kurdish region is also impossible for the US, as it would result in a protracted war between the two sides. A prolonged war between the two sides would further increase the economic cost of this war.
Therefore, a ground invasion of Iran, especially under the current circumstances, is impossible. President Trump’s popularity in the US has already declined to a record low after his involvement in this Israeli war. A ground invasion of Iran would further increase political hardships for Donald Trump. However, if he continues to pursue a conflicting policy stance regarding the Iran war, it would be impossible to halt the war diplomatically and further increase mistrust between the two sides.
Trump’s “New” Mideast: False Promises of Peace Through War
Daniel Martin Varisco, Informed Comment March 30, 2026 , https://www.juancole.com/2026/03/mideast-promises-through.html
On March 27 President Trump spoke in Miami to a Saudi investment conference and touted the “rise of the Middle East,” echoing what he said last October to the Israeli Knesset about the “historic dawn of a new Middle East.”
Imperial wars falsely advertised as a means to peace and stability are not, however, “new” in this region of the globe, nor in any other. Since the early uncivilized behavior of rulers in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt it has been the same old story: war for the glory of whoever was the local god or goddess. Sargon of Akkad, served by the wind god Enlil, went with his army from southern Iraq all the way to the Mediterranean over four millennia ago, destroying cities, slaughtering enemies and enslaving those who survived. Three and a half millennia ago the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III took control of Canaan at the Battle of Megiddo, the same location in what is now Israel that apocalyptic-minded Evangelical Christians think will take place between a returned Christ and the Devil’s last gasp at Armageddon.
The advent of the three major monotheisms did not prevent war in this region from being a constant. The Israelites, after wandering for forty years without a map in Sinai, were told by their Abrahamic God to drive out the Canaanites, in some cases slaughtering every man, woman and child (Joshua 8:24-25). The Babylonians and the Assyrians made life miserable for the descendants of Kings David and Solomon. It was Solomon who reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
In the year 70 CE the Romans destroyed the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem. Almost six centuries later Arab armies under the banner of the new religion of Islam conquered Jerusalem from Christian Byzantine control and guaranteed religious protection for the Jews and Christians there.
At the end of the 11th century Medieval Christian crusaders conquered Jerusalem, slaughtering the Jews and Muslims there in the name of their Abrahamic God. Less than a century later the Ayyubid leader Saladin reconquered Jerusalem, allowing the Christian Crusaders there to leave in peace.
The Buddhist Mongols came close to capturing Jerusalem in the 13th century, but were defeated by the Egyptian Mamluks, who were in turn overcome by the Ottoman Turks in the early 16th century.
At the end of 18th century Napoleon led a massive French force that took over Egypt but failed to conquer Ottoman Palestine, thanks to the British. A century later the British assumed control of Egypt and its important Suez Canal.
The 20th century in the region was regularly punctuated by warfare. The first World War ended the Ottoman Empire and created a new map of what was transitioning from the Near East to the Middle East. The lines drawn by Europeans may have been new, but the problems created by the imposed borders brought up all kinds of old problems. The French denied Syria to the Hashemite Prince Faisal who helped Lawrence of Arabia defeat the Ottomans.
The British created space for two Hashemites hailing from Mecca to become kings in Jordan and Iraq. The French carved Lebanon out of Syria to create a Christian-majority country that Paris hoped would support their colonialism (in the 1940s the Christian Lebanese demanded independence along with everyone else in the country). The pre-oil Gulf States remained British Trucial States for the most part, and mostly desert Arabia was given to King Saud with his fanatical Wahhabi backers.
And, to top it all off, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 set policy for the British Mandate in Palestine, once it was conquered by British troops and awarded by the San Remo conference to London. The British commitment to flooding the Mandate with European Jews led to mounting violence within and outside Palestine. Then in 1948 the modern state of Israel was created, followed by major local wars the rest of that year and again in 1956, 1967 and 1973, along with almost constant tension and violence through the present. Today there is what many call genocide being committed by Israel’s right-wing government in Gaza, daily Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the recent invasion of southern Lebanon and the now four-week old Iran war that is or is not being called a war.
There may indeed be a “newer” Middle East, certainly considering the state of the region a mere century ago, but both the present and future are clouded by non-stop war, revenge and imperial interference that are as old as recorded time itself. Poor patriarch Abraham, who spiritually fathered the three religious rivals in the land where he shepherded his sheep, must be rolling over in his grave. One of the most quoted parables of Jesus in the Gospels, those New Testament books that talk a lot about peace and not about war, is about putting new wine into old bottles. It is worth quoting from the old English King James Version so beloved by those who insist Jesus is yet again about to come down to earth:
The rhetoric clothing war-talk as a prelude to peace can never cover the naked truth of the ongoing suffering of victims on all sides in the ongoing conflicts.
Yet another new wine justifying the horrors of war in a region that has known too much conflict only leads to more spilled blood.
Daniel Martin Varisco is an anthropologist and historian who specializes on Yemen’s agricultural heritage. He blogs at Tabsir.net.
Closing Air Spaces and Cracking Alliances: Trump’s Growing Problem with Allies
2 April 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/closing-air-spaces-and-cracking-alliances-trumps-growing-problem-with-allies/
With the Iran War groaning along, the Trump administration is getting increasingly indignant. Plumes of childish anger can be seen coming out of the White House and Pentagon. Having joined an illegal, joint enterprise with Israel in attacking Iran, allies are proving increasingly unwilling to play along.
That unwillingness gurgled to the top with Spain’s announcement on March 30 that it had closed its airspace to US aircraft participating in strikes on Iran. This added to Madrid’s decision earlier in the month to deny the US military access to its bases for military operations against Tehran. “We don’t authorise either the use of military bases or the use of airspace for actions related to the war in Iran,” Defence Minister Margarita Robles told reporters. Spain’s Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo, in an interview with radio Cadena SER, called the move consistent and “part of the decision already made by the Spanish government not to participate in or contribute to a war which was initiated unilaterally and against international law.”
The government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been singularly pertinacious in its characterisation of the Iran War, and more broadly illustrative of the current bad blood in transatlantic relations. In a piece for The Economist, Sánchez wrote of his country’s misplaced support for Washington in February 2003 when the then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council most gravely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and needed to be attacked. The foolishly credulous Spanish Prime Minister at the time, José María Aznar, was convinced that the regime of Saddam Hussein had such weapons. “Today we face a similar situation, and my government’s position is the same as that voiced by Spanish society two decades ago: NO TO WAR. No to the unilateral violation of international law. No to repeating the mistakes of the past. No to the idea that the world’s problems can be solved with bombs.”
Italian authorities have also expressed displeasure at the presumptuousness of their US allies in taking liberties with their military facilities. In a March 31 report by Corriere della Sera, “several US bombers” that had intended to land at Sigonella air base on route to the Middle East were refused as they had not properly requested authorisation or consulted with the Italian military. A statement from Palazzo Chigi, the office of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, reiterated that Italy “acts in full compliance with existing international agreements and with the policy guidelines expressed by the Government to Parliament.”
Other allies are openly rebuffing requests by US officials to secure additional military equipment to the Gulf. Critical here are air-defence systems such as the Patriot batteries that have been dramatically depleted since the outbreak of hostilities. In the first 16 days of the war, some 1,285 PAC-3 Patriot missiles were used by the US military and Gulf states.
The Polish Defence Minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz could not have been clearer in his statement on whether Poland’s complement of Patriot air defence systems would make their way to the Middle East. “Our Patriot batteries and their armaments are used to protect Polish airspace and NATO’s eastern flank. Nothing is changing in this regard, and we have no plans to move them anywhere!” Fellow allies understood “the importance of our tasks here. Poland’s security is an absolute priority.”
As has become customary, US President Donald Trump has led the growls of grievance, billowing with anger on Truth Social about the reluctance of European partners to throw in their lot in what is, at best, a criminal enterprise. On the issue of depleted jet fuel supplies restricted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, he brusquely suggested to his allies that they could purchase supplies from the US (“we have plenty”) and “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.” With a demented paternalism, he went on to declare that “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.” With typically strained logic, he went on to suggest that any assistance would be minor, in any case, as Iran had been “decimated.” “The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”
Special mention was made of mulishness on the part of the UK (“which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran”) and France. France, for instance, had refused to permit planes carrying military supplies destined for Israel to fly over French territory. “France has been VERY UNHELPFUL with respect to the ‘Butcher of Iran’, who has been successfully eliminated. The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!!”.
Soon afterwards, a comically crazed and increasingly God loving Pete Hegseth struck a similar note in the Pentagon. “A lot has been laid bare, a lot has been shown to the world about what our allies would be willing to do for the United States of America,” grumbled the Secretary of Defense (he prefers War) to reporters. “When we undertake an effort of this scope on behalf of the free world, these are missiles that don’t even range the United States of America, they range allies and others and yet, when we ask for additional assistance or simple access… we get questions or roadblocks or hesitation.”
In his March 30 interview with Al Jazeera, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also brimming with complaints. “If NATO is just about us defending Europe if they’re attacked but then denying us basic rights when we need them, that’s not a very good arrangement. That’s a hard one to stay engaged in and say this is good for the United States.” All this called for a reassessment. “All of it’s going to have to be re-examined.” The re-examination, notably judging from the temper of European states, is proving increasingly reciprocal and, in some circles, even welcome.
Israeli nuclear city emerges as focal point in escalating Iran–Israel confrontation
March 30, 2026, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260330-israeli-nuclear-city-emerges-as-focal-point-in-escalating-iran-israel-confrontation/
The city of Dimona has moved to the center of the escalating confrontation between Iran and Israel, following reports of an Iranian strike targeting its vicinity on 21st March.
Located deep in the Negev desert, Dimona is widely regarded as one of the most sensitive nodes in Israeli strategic infrastructure, largely due to its association with the country’s nuclear programme. Established in 1955, the city has since evolved into a key military and strategic site.
Researchers note that the area surrounding Dimona was historically inhabited by tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouin Arabs prior to the 1948 Nakba. According to political analyst Muhammad Mustafa Shahin, the Negev region was home to between 90,000 and 95,000 Palestinians from tribes including the Tayyah, Azazmeh, and Jabarat, who relied on agriculture and herding.
Shahin highlights the geological significance of the region, noting that the Negev contains phosphate deposits rich in uranium in areas such as Aron, Zein, and Arad, alongside industrial facilities like the Rotem Amfert plants. These resources, he argues, contributed to the foundations of Israel’s nuclear development.
At the heart of Dimona’s strategic importance is the Negev Nuclear Research Center, commonly referred to as the Dimona reactor. Constructed with French assistance in the late 1950s and becoming operational in the early 1960s, the facility is widely believed to have played a central role in producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Shahin describes the reactor as part of what is known as Israel’s “Samson Option” — a doctrine of ultimate deterrence — which continues to fuel regional tensions, particularly in light of Israel’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The reported strike near Dimona marks a significant moment in the current escalation, drawing renewed attention to the risks surrounding nuclear-related infrastructure in an increasingly volatile regional conflict.
Netanyahu woke up on Iran war day 31 with a 3-front war he cannot win
By Walt Zlotow, Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 31 March 2026, https://theaimn.net/netanyahu-woke-up-on-iran-war-day-31-with-a-3-front-war-he-cannot-win/
Tho scrubbed from mainstream news, Trump attacked Iran February 28 because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded, begged, demanded he do so. Trump’s top diplomat, Marco Rubio, revealed this when he stupidly admitted Trump knew Israel would attack Iran and had to preemptively attack as well to avoid Iran retaliation. What Rubio didn’t admit is that the Israeli attack was fully supported by the US since Israel could not attack without total US support.
Trump’s and Netanyahu’s unprovoked war of choice had one strategy. Kill Iranian leader the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and watch the Iranian people depose their government and capitulate within 3 days.
That failed spectacularly as the Iranian people responded like Americans after Pearl Harbor. Iran’s government did likewise, with relentless bombing of Israel, 13 US bases in the Gulf States and closing the Strait of Hormuz.
If this was all that unfolded it would still represent a catastrophic loss for the Trump/Netanyahu war criminal tag team
But for Netanyahu it gets worse. He sent his army north into Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah. That war is now going south as Hezbollah just destroyed 20 Israeli tanks in one day. Hezbollah missiles are raining down on northern Israel driving tens of thousands of Israelis from home.
It gets worse. The Houthis who control Yemen just entered the war on Iran’s side by launching 2 strikes into Israel Saturday. Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree declared Yemen bombed Israel “in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the resistance fronts in Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine, and in view of the continued military escalation, the targeting of infrastructure, and the perpetration of crimes and massacres against our brothers in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and Palestine.”
In addition, the Houthis may reimpose the blockade on Israeli-linked shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. If so, the Bab el-Mandeh Strait will join the Strait of Hormuz in expanding economic disaster worldwide.
Worse yet. Shi’ite militias in Iraq have joined the war and will be targeting US military assets in Iraq that the US has kept there for 23 years.
When Benjamin Netanyahu goes to sleep tonight, he won’t need to count sheep to fall asleep. He just needs to count neighboring countries joining Iran’s defense against the most self-destructive criminal war this century.
Why is Iran being singled out while others escape scrutiny? : Erase nuclear apartheid
Israel maintains a long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity. It neither confirms nor denies its arsenal, avoids international inspections, and remains outside the NPT altogether. Despite this, it faces no comparable sanctions regime, no sustained diplomatic isolation, and no credible threat of enforced disarmament.
March 30, 2026, by Ranjan Solomon, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260330-why-is-iran-being-singled-out-while-others-escape-scrutiny-erase-nuclear-apartheid/
“The world cannot preach non-proliferation while practising selective permission. That is not law – it is hierarchy.”
The global discourse on nuclear weapons has drifted far from its stated goal of disarmament. What remains today is not a principled framework for peace, but a deeply unequal system of control – one that determines who may possess the most destructive weapons ever created, and who must remain permanently under suspicion.
At the centre of this unequal order stands Iran: scrutinized, sanctioned, and threatened, not for what it has done, but for what it might one day choose to do. This is not non-proliferation. This is nuclear apartheid.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970, was premised on a fundamental bargain. Non-nuclear states ag
At the same time, states outside the NPT framework – such as India and Pakistan—have developed and maintained nuclear weapons with limited global penalty. Most strikingly, Israel, widely believed to possess a sophisticated and undeclared nuclear arsenal, has never signed the NPT and remains entirely outside its inspection regime.
The result is unmistakable: a two-tier system – one for the powerful, and one for the rest.reed to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for access to peaceful nuclear technology and a binding commitment by nuclear-armed states to pursue disarmament under Article VI. More than fifty years later, that promise stands betrayed.
The five recognized nuclear powers – United States, Russia, China, France, and United Kingdom – have not only failed to disarm, but have actively modernised their arsenals. Vast resources continue to be poured into enhancing nuclear capabilities, refining delivery systems, and ensuring the long-term viability of weapons that can destroy humanity many times over.
To understand why Iran is singled out, one must step beyond present-day accusations and examine history, law, and geopolitical power.
Iran’s nuclear programme did not begin in defiance. It began with encouragement from the United States under the “Atoms for Peace” initiative in the 1950s. At that time, Iran was a strategic ally, and its nuclear ambitions were supported rather than feared.
What changed was not technology – but politics.
The 1979 Revolution transformed Iran from a Western-aligned monarchy into an independent republic asserting sovereignty over its political and economic choices. From that moment onward, its nuclear programme was reframed—from legitimate development to potential threat.
Yet Iran remains a signatory to the NPT. It has accepted inspections and consistently maintained that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, even invoking religious prohibitions against nuclear weapons.
Contrast this with Israel.
Israel maintains a long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity. It neither confirms nor denies its arsenal, avoids international inspections, and remains outside the NPT altogether. Despite this, it faces no comparable sanctions regime, no sustained diplomatic isolation, and no credible threat of enforced disarmament.
This disparity is not incidental. It reflects geopolitical alignment.
Similarly, nuclear-armed states—both within and outside the NPT—continue to expand and refine their arsenals without facing existential scrutiny. The international system tolerates nuclear weapons in the hands of allies while criminalizing their pursuit by adversaries.
Dimona’s Shadow: How Israel’s Nuclear Monopoly Warps Middle East Security
Iran is not singled out because it is uniquely dangerous. It is singled out because it is politically inconvenient.
The dominant justification for nuclear weapons remains deterrence—the idea that possession prevents aggression. Yet deterrence is not a neutral doctrine. It is a privilege reserved for those already in possession of nuclear weapons.
For states like Iran, surrounded by nuclear-armed powers and subject to repeated threats of military action, the logic of deterrence becomes difficult to ignore. The existence of nuclear arsenals elsewhere creates the very conditions under which others feel compelled to pursue them.
This is the central contradiction of the non-proliferation regime: it seeks to prevent proliferation without addressing the incentives that drive it.
So long as nuclear weapons are seen as guarantors of security for some, they will remain objects of aspiration for others.
Under Article X of the NPT, any state has the sovereign right to withdraw if it determines that extraordinary events jeopardize its supreme national interests. This provision is not exceptional – it is foundational.
If Iran were to exercise this right, it would not be acting outside international law. It would be exercising a legal option embedded within the treaty itself.
The real question, then, is not legality – it is legitimacy.
Why should a state remain bound by a treaty that is applied selectively? Why should obligations be enforced unevenly while privileges remain protected? A legal framework that lacks reciprocity cannot command enduring compliance.
The moral argument against nuclear weapons is not abstract – it is rooted in history. The Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carried out by the United States, demonstrated the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear warfare. Entire cities were obliterated. Generations suffered from radiation, illness, and trauma.
These events should have marked the beginning of the end for nuclear weapons.
Instead, they marked the beginning of their normalization.
In response to this enduring threat, the international community has moved – however unevenly – toward prohibition. The Treaty on the Prohibition of nuclear weapons, adopted in 2017, represents a clear legal and moral rejection of nuclear weapons, declaring them incompatible with international humanitarian law. Yet none of the nuclear-armed states have joined it.
Once again, the pattern is unmistakable: law for some, exemption for others.
The path forward cannot be built on coercion or selective enforcement. It must be grounded in universality. A credible non-proliferation regime requires that all states—without exception – commit to disarmament. This includes the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, as well as India, Pakistan, and Israel.
The principle must be simple and uncompromising: no nuclear weapons anywhere, no exceptions, no hierarchies. Anything less is not non-proliferation – it is discrimination.
Talks without balance: Why Tehran and Trump remain locked in escalation
But disarmament cannot remain a rhetorical aspiration. It demands verifiable timelines, binding commitments, and enforcement mechanisms that apply equally to all states. Without such measures, treaties risk becoming instruments of pressure rather than pathways to peace. The authority of international law depends not only on what it proclaims, but on how consistently it is applied.
The current nuclear order is unsustainable because it is fundamentally unjust. It divides the world into those permitted to wield ultimate violence and those permanently denied that power under threat of punishment.
Iran’s case lays bare this contradiction with clarity. Whether one agrees with Iran’s policies or not, the principle remains clear: international law cannot survive selective application. A system that enforces restraint on some while excusing excess in others undermines its own legitimacy.
If the world is serious about peace, it must move beyond power and toward principle—beyond dominance and toward equality. Not a peace imposed by deterrence, but a peace secured by justice. Not a stability rooted in fear, but one grounded in mutual restraint and shared accountability.
Until then, the truth will remain stark and unavoidable:
There can be no peace with nuclear weapons. And there can be no justice with nuclear apartheid
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