nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Netanyahu Says It’s Antisemitic For Israeli Soldiers To Describe Their Own Atrocities

Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 28, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/netanyahu-says-its-antisemitic-for?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=167017991&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Sometimes I’ll write a headline that looks odd on its face, but then I’ll lay out facts and arguments which allow the reader to understand the validity of the claim by the end of the essay. This is not one of those times.

This headline is just me saying the thing that happened. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz are publicly denouncing a report from an Israeli newspaper quoting Israeli soldiers who describe atrocities they were ordered to commit in the Israeli military, accusing the report of “blood libels”.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published an article titled “‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid”, subtitled “IDF officers and soldiers told Haaretz they were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, prompting the military prosecution to call for a review into possible war crimes.”

One Israeli soldier attests that civilians seeking aid are “treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.”

“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier says, adding, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

IDF sources tell Haaretz that Gaza has become “a place with its own set of rules” where they are interacting with civilians with whom “your only means of interaction is opening fire”. Deadly military weapons are used as crowd control to steer the starving populace wherever it’s determined they’re supposed to be, routinely killing desperate aid seekers.

Another soldier describes being instructed to fire artillery shells at a crowd to keep them at a distance, saying, “Every time we fire, there are casualties and deaths, and when someone asks why a shell is necessary, there’s never a good answer. Sometimes, merely asking the question annoys the commanders.”

In quote after quote after quote we read Israeli soldiers describing atrocities they were ordered to commit which they knew were wrong. I guess Israel’s PR machine never counted on some of the soldiers they sent in to perpetrate the Gaza holocaust having an actual conscience.

joint statement from Netanyahu and Katz denounced the report, accusing Haaretz of publishing “blood libels”.

“The State of Israel absolutely rejects the contemptible blood libels that have been published in the Ha’aretz newspaper, according to which ‘IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid.’ These are malicious falsehoods designed to defame the IDF, the most moral military in the world,” the statement reads.

“Blood libel” refers to the way medieval Europeans used to falsely accuse Jews of murdering Christian children in blood sacrifices — an early form of atrocity propaganda used to justify the persecution of Jews.

So again, just to be absolutely clear, the leader of the Israeli government is claiming that an Israeli newspaper quoting Israeli soldiers describing their own atrocities is antisemitic. And that mountains of testimony from inside the IDF is “designed to defame the IDF, the most moral military in the world.”

What can I even say about that here? It speaks for itself. I have nothing to add.

The more exposed Israel’s criminality becomes, the more absurd the arguments made in its defense are getting.

June 29, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

The Chris Hedges Report: Starvation and Profiteering in Gaza (w/ Francesca Albanese)

Francesca Albanese joins Chris Hedges to break down the current starvation campaign in Gaza, and her upcoming report detailing the profiteering corporations capitalizing on the erasure of Palestinians

Chris Hedges, Jun 26, 2025

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

There is not much more that can be said about the unfathomable levels of devastation the genocide in Gaza has reached. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been chronicling the genocide and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to shed light on the current situation in Gaza, including parts from her upcoming report on the profiteers of the genocide.

Israel’s siege on the Palestinians is leaving the population starving, and Albanese lambasts other nations for not stepping up and completing their obligations under international law. “[Countries] have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I’m asking you. This is your obligation,” she explains.

Albanese compares Gaza and Israel’s siege to a concentration camp, stating it is unsustainable but also allows the world to witness how a Western settler colonial entity functions. “There is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism,” Albanese tells Hedges.

In her forthcoming report, Albanese will detail exactly how Palestine has been exploited by the global capitalist system and will highlight the role certain corporations have played in the genocide. “[T]here are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life,” she says.

“The profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”……………………………………………TRANSCRIPT………………………………….. …………..https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/25/the-chris-hedges-report-starvation-and-profiteering-in-gaza-w-francesca-albanese/

June 27, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Iran Shows Us Why The US And Israel Should Not Be Allowed To Have Nukes.

Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 25, 2025

Well it’s been a crazy couple of days.

Trump bombed Iran’s civilian nuclear energy facilities in an attack that CNN reports did no lasting damage, and Iran exercised extraordinary restraint with symbolic retaliatory strikes on US military bases coordinated to avoid American casualties — a move many are comparing to Iran’s non-lethal response to the US assassination of General Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

After pumping out deception and fake diplomacy for weeks in order to assist Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran and launch an unprovoked attack on his own, Trump took to social media to proudly celebrate his administration’s facilitation of a ceasefire to the war he himself needlessly started, like an arsonist giving himself a trophy for extinguishing one of his own house fires.

And, for the moment at least, the ceasefire appears to be holding. Which is good. There are a lot of terrible people who did everything they could to get Iran to kill US troops and spark a horrific war, but Iran didn’t take the bait. Iran doesn’t want war at all. Trump found out that Americans disapproved of the airstrikes and opposed war with Iran. And Israel found out that fighting an actual military force is a lot less easy than fighting hospital patients and children.

So for now we’ve got a ceasefire.

We have never been shown any evidence that Iran was working on obtaining nuclear weapons, which given the US empire’s extensive history of lying about this sort of thing means we should assume it was not. But it has certainly been given every incentive to obtain them now, given that that’s probably the only thing that can stop the US and Israel from casually committing these egregious acts of aggression whenever they feel like it.

And isn’t it interesting how Iran keeps demonstrating a degree of restraint that we all know we’d never see from the United States or Israel if another country bombed their energy infrastructure or assassinated their military leaders, and yet Iran is the country we’re told can never be trusted with nuclear weapons?

The US empire and Israel both exist in a perpetual state of war and attack other countries constantly; Iran never invades other countries and avoids war like Melania Trump avoids missionary position. But we’re meant to accept that it’s fine for the US and Israel to have nukes and do anything necessary to prevent Iran from getting any?

Even if you accept the evidence-free premise that Iran would do crazy and reckless things if it became a nuclear-armed state, there is no rational argument that Trump and his handlers have been going about preventing this outcome intelligently. As Joe Lauria explains in Consortium News, the Iran nuclear deal was a remarkable achievement of international diplomacy that was working fine until Trump shredded it in 2018. Iran was following all the agreed upon rules and its nuclear enrichment was capped at 3.67 percent, but Trump killed it because the Zionists and warmongers who brought him to power want more aggression toward Iran instead of less.

It’s so intensely stupid that we have to keep doing this horrifying dance every few years just because there are too many war-horny freaks with way too much power inside the US empire. And every time they get closer to getting their wish. Iran is being given more and more reasons to view the US and Israel as an existential threat, more and more motive to obtain nuclear weapons, and less and less reason to negotiate anything with Washington.

These bastards keep pushing us toward something very ugly. Let’s hope people keep waking up to the depravity of Israel and the US empire before the warmakers succeed in obtaining their long-sought prize.

101

Share

2

June 27, 2025 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US State Department Spokeswoman Says Israel Is Greater Than America.

Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 23, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/us-state-department-spokeswoman-says?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=166596495&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Journalist Ken Klippenstein has drawn attention to an overlooked remark made by State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce last month saying that the United States is “the greatest country on earth, next to Israel.”

“The pride of being able to be here and do work that facilitates making things better for people and in the greatest country on Earth, next to Israel,” Bruce told Jewish News Syndicate. “It’s an honor to be able to make a difference and to be able to speak in this regard with an administration that I love so much and that I feel genuinely represented by.”

It’s like this administration is doing everything it can to vindicate those who accuse it of being Israel First instead of America First.

I feel like we don’t talk enough about the fact that Donald Trump publicly admitted to being bought and owned by the richest Israeli on earth, Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson.

On the campaign trail last year Trump told the Israeli American Council Summit that the first time he was president, Miriam and her late husband Sheldon “would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody, outside of people that work there.” He said they were always after something, “always for Israel,” and “as soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else.” He named the US recognition of the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel as one of the gifts he showered the Zionist state with to please the Adelsons, who pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into his presidential campaigns.

It’s hard to focus on Israel’s airstrikes in Lebanon due to Israel’s invasion of Syria, which is hard to focus on due to Israel’s atrocities in the West Bank, which are hard to focus on due to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which is hard to focus on due to Israel’s war on Iran, which is hard to focus on because of America’s war on Iran.

Top Ten dumbest things we’re being asked to believe about Iran:

1. That the Iranians want to be bombed.

2. That the guy bombing Iran wants peace.

3. That regime change interventionism is a swell idea this time.

4. That anyone who doesn’t want war with Iran hates Jews.

5. That this time the government and the media are telling us the truth about an American war.


6. That this time the neocons are smart and correct.

7. That bombing Iran makes it LESS likely to try to obtain nukes.

8. That Iran is trying to assassinate the US president when all US presidents have the same foreign policy.

9. That Iran (a country that never starts wars) cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, but Israel (a country that starts wars constantly) can.

10. That attacking Iran benefits Americans.

It blows my mind that there are people trying to argue that Trump does not seek war. What do these idiots think the United States would do if another country started bombing American energy infrastructure?

I’m trying to get an important business deal done, so I firebombed the guy’s house to make him more likely to negotiate with me. I just want peace.

The following things are antisemitic:

– opposing war with Iran

– viewing Palestinians as human

– opposing genocide

– Greta Thunberg

– peace

– journalism

– Ms Rachel

– truth

– critical thinking

– the UN

– Tucker Carlson

– Amnesty International

– Human Rights Watch

– equal rights

It’s hilarious that anyone still takes this “antisemitism” schtick seriously. Oh no there’s a special group of white people who might get hurt feelings if I don’t want to send my kids to invade Iran.

The western world has been on a two-year crash course learning all the reasons why the Muslim world has been correct about Israel this entire time.

It’s kind of nice to be arguing with George W Bush conservatives about US foreign policy again. For the last few years I’ve been getting called a Nazi by western Zionists and a Putin-loving fascist by NATO simps; it’s refreshing to be hated for the hippie moonbat I actually am for once.

June 24, 2025 Posted by | Israel, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s attack on Iran is ‘unconditional surrender’ to Israel

Aaron Maté, Jun 22, 2025, https://www.aaronmate.net/p/trumps-attack-on-iran-is-unconditional?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=100118&post_id=166521469&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Shunning the US intelligence consensus, Trump and top principals rely on Israeli fraud to bomb Iran.

Since his election in 2016, Donald Trump’s political opponents have portrayed him as a dangerous, unstable fabulist doing the bidding of a malign, nuclear-armed foreign power.

Having returned to the White House this year, Trump is proving his detractors correct on all counts but one: the location on the map. The rogue state that he’s colluding with — at great peril to the planet — is not Russia, as his most vocal detractors alleged, but Israel.

Israel’s June 13th attack on Iran sabotaged the then-ongoing talks on a new nuclear deal with the United States, and Trump has gone to unprecedented lengths to support its aggression. Trump undercut his own Secretary of State’s claim that Israel had undertaken “unilateral action” by acknowledging that “we knew everything” in advance of what he called a “very successful attack.” Administration officials then disclosed that Trump had previously authorized giving Israel intelligence support for the bombing. Trump then called on Tehran’s 9.8 million residents to evacuate, mused about killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and declared that “we” – meaning Israel – “have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.”

After Iran rejected his demand for “unconditional surrender”, Trump imposed a new deadline of two weeks, only to break it three days later by ordering a US military attack on three Iranian nuclear energy sites, including the deeply buried mountain complex Fordo, which he quickly hailed as a “great success.” Just as with Trump’s diplomacy with Iran, his two-week deadline turns out to have been a ruse whose “goal was to create a situation when everyone wasn’t expecting it,” a senior administration official said.

To wage war on Iran, Trump and his allies have employed the traditional Iraq WMD playbook of ignoring or manipulating the available evidence to fear-monger about a foreign state marked for regime change. Unlike the Iraq war, where the fraudulent case for invading was mostly concocted in-house, Trump has outsourced the job to Israel, while not even pretending to care about public opinion or Congressional approval.

Back in March, the US intelligence community assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and “has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program… suspended in 2003.” According to US officials who spoke to the New York Times, “[t]hat assessment has not changed.” Moreover, the US has found that “not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one,” CNN reports, citing four sources.

Whereas Dick Cheney and company went through the trouble of nudging subordinates to fabricate intelligence, including via torture, Trump does not care about seeking their imprimatur. “[M]y intelligence community is wrong,” Trump told reporters on Friday. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that “Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon,” and, if authorized by Ayatollah Khamenei, “it would take a couple weeks to complete the production of that weapon.” In White House meetings, CIA chief John Ratcliffe has argued that Iran is close to a nuclear bomb and that claiming otherwise “would be similar to saying football players who have fought their way to the one-yard line don’t want to score a touchdown,” according to one US official who spoke to CBS News. (After the Iraq war, a “Slam dunk” basketball analogy is no longer available).

If Trump’s intelligence community is “wrong,” who does he think is right? As US officials told the New York Times, the claims from Trump and his circle “echoed material provided by Mossad,” Israel’s intelligence agency. And whereas some in the government, undoubtedly those close to Trump, “find the Israeli estimate credible”, others believe that “Israeli assessments have been colored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to gain American support for his military campaign against Iran.” Moreover, according to multiple officials, “[n]one of the new assessments on the timeline to get a bomb are based on newly collected intelligence,” but instead on “new analysis of existing work.” In other words, Trump is sidelining his own intelligence community to trust a “new analysis” that is based on no new information, just the manipulation of a foreign government.

Trump’s disdain for his own agencies is a particular slight to intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said this week, referring to Gabbard’s presentation of the US intelligence consensus on Iran in March. “I think they [Iran] were very close to having it.”

Rather than defend the agencies she oversees – and the record she earned challenging previous US-driven regime change deceptions — Gabbard has bent the knee to Trump, and Israel by extension. In a social media post, Gabbard chided “the dishonest media” for taking her March testimony “out of context.” The US, Gabbard now claimed, “has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.” Gabbard also shared video of that March testimony, without addressing the contradictory fact that it does not include any mention of her newfound claim that Iran has the capability to produce a nuclear bomb “within weeks to months.”

Gabbard is engaging in disingenuous wordplay. If Israel tells America that Iran “can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks”, then yes, American intelligence now “has” that intelligence. That doesn’t mean it is true, or that American intelligence believes it, which it does not. A US official familiar with the available record on Iran tells me that there is no US intelligence assessment concluding that Iran is “weeks” away from building a nuclear weapon. Gabbard is only saying, therefore, that the US intelligence community has received “intelligence” from Israel, without mentioning that the IC does not actually endorse it.

Moreover, pretend for a moment that the Israeli claim is correct. Gabbard’s caveat of “if they decide to finalize” is an acknowledgment that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon. That’s because Iran has said it does not want one, and is willing to commit to that in a binding agreement — the one they were negotiating with the US until Trump and Israel sabotaged it, and not for the first time. In fact, as US intelligence officials have also predicted, Trump’s bombing now increases the likelihood that Iran will pursue the nuclear bomb that it has long foresworn. Iran claims to have moved enriched uranium stockpiles prior to the US bombing, which preserves its capacity to weaponize.

Trump and Israel insisted, in the president’s words, on “unconditional surrender”: capitulation to maximalist US-Israeli demands that Iran end its uranium enrichment program, which it is entitled to have under the Non-Proliferation Treaty; and that it limit its arsenal of missiles. In other words, Trump and Netanyahu demanded that Iran agree to abandon its sovereignty and right to self-defense just as it is under attack from US-backed Israeli aggression; and all while US-backed Israeli mass murder in Gaza and annexation of the West Bank continues unimpeded.

Iranian officials did not surrender. Trump, by contrast, cannot say the same. By enabling its bombing campaign, parroting its deceptions, and now going to war against Iran on its behalf, Trump has already offered an unconditional surrender to Israel — a betrayal that grows more dangerous by the day.

June 23, 2025 Posted by | Iran, Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Rogue States: The illegality of the U.S.-backed Israeli attacks on Iran

Israel has stockpiles of conventional, hi-tech, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, allows no international inspections of them, and refuses to ratify the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). 

they have extended the argument to absurd levels, basing their justification for war not on a claim that Iran has WMDs, but that they might someday acquire them.

international law does not allow for so-called “anticipatory self-defense” or so-called “pre-emptive strikes.” 

The attack on Iran is just the latest crime in the Israeli regime’s path of destruction across the Middle East. Its Western-backed impunity has become a global threat. 

Mondoweiss, By Craig Mokhiber  June 18, 2025 Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official.

The Israeli regime, drunk with western-backed impunity, flush with western-supplied weapons, and driven by a violent, western-born racist ideology, is rampaging across the Middle East, leaving a trail of blood and destruction in its wake. 

The Israeli regime’s blatant act of aggression against Iran is just the latest crime perpetrated by the regime in its current twenty-month orgy of violence in the region. 

But Israel is not a lone rogue. And it could not get away with its crimes without a powerful backer. 

The U.S. provided the Israeli regime with the greenlight for its surprise attack, the distraction of (perhaps disingenuous) diplomatic talks to facilitate the attack, U.S. tax dollars to finance the operation, the intelligence for targeting, the weapons and ammunition for killing, the diplomatic cover to protect it from Security Council action, U.S. forces for the interception of Iran’s defensive response, the promise of direct U.S. military backing if Israel requires it, and the propaganda cover of complicit U.S. media corporations. Now the U.S. appears poised to enter the military assault directly. 

Once again, the U.S. is a co-perpetrator in Israel’s crimes. 

The resulting Israeli impunity, the principal byproduct of U.S. collaboration with the Israeli regime, not only threatens Palestinian self-determination and the sovereignty of countries across the region, but global peace and security itself. 

The global threat of Israeli impunity

In recent months, the Israeli regime has perpetrated genocide and apartheid in Palestine, a transnational terrorism attack with booby trapped pagers in Lebanon, thousands of armed attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, & Iran, the unlawful occupation of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian territory, several extrajudicial executions on foreign territory, the assault on and commandeering of the humanitarian flotilla ship the Madleen, countless attacks on United Nations staff and facilities, and the use of its proxies in Western countries to harass human rights defenders and to corrupt governments.  

Israel has stockpiles of conventional, hi-tech, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, allows no international inspections of them, and refuses to ratify the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). And it is governed by a far-right, deeply racist, and fundamentally violent regime that is unconstrained by any norms of international law, international diplomacy, or common morality. 

Add the ingredient of impunity, and you have a formula for global disaster. The western-guaranteed impunity that the Israeli regime has enjoyed is what has produced the regime’s serial criminality. And that criminality threatens the entire region and, potentially, the world. 

Worse, to further insulate the Israeli regime, the U.S. and its allies have systematically corrupted, captured, or crushed virtually every government in the region, and battered the parts of Lebanon (Hezbollah) and of Yemen (Ansar Allah) still challenging the regime and its violent hegemonic project. Only Iran is left standing. As such, it represents an intolerable element to the Israeli regime and its U.S. sponsor: deterrence.

A war for U.S.-Israel regional hegemony 

Thus, Iran is being targeted because it is the last independent state still standing in the region, following the corruption and capture of most Arab governments by the U.S., and the systematic destruction of those that refused to submit (e.g. Iraq, Libya, Syria).  

The essence of this plan was revealed more than two decades ago by U.S. General and former NATO Commander Wesley Clarke, when he described U.S. plans to “attack seven Muslim countries in five years.” On the list were Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and, of course, Iran. 

Even after decades of sanctions, sabotage, aggression, destabilization efforts, and the meddling of Western intelligence agencies, Iran has defiantly refused to submit to the U.S.. Despite sustained pressure, it has refused to abandon the Palestinian people, to normalize Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid, or to look the other way as Israel perpetrates a genocide. 

Importantly, it has also refused to surrender control of its natural resources (including significant oil and gas reserves) to the U.S. empire. And, famously, it refuses to give up its right, as a sovereign state, to develop peaceful nuclear energy for the benefit of its developing economy.  

Because decades of efforts by the U.S.-Israel axis to strangle and destabilize the country (while causing great civilian suffering in the country) have failed to force Iran to submit, the U.S. and Israel have now moved to large-scale military aggression, dusting off the old, fabricated “WMD” justifications that served them so well in justifying their aggression in neighboring Iraq more than twenty years ago.  

But, in this case, they have extended the argument to absurd levels, basing their justification for war not on a claim that Iran has WMDs, but that they might someday acquire them. A charge made all the more ridiculous by the fact that the attackers themselves- both the U.S. and Israel- in fact possess such weapons, and that both are themselves guilty of serial acts of aggression, while Iran is not. 

Jus ad bellum: The crime of aggression

The U.S.-backed Israeli regime’s unprovoked attack on Iran was a crime under international law. Indeed, it was a treacherous attack, launched in the middle of ongoing U.S. negotiations, and even targeting the Iranian official in charge of the negotiations. (And, by the way, right after Israel cut off the internet in Gaza, drawing a digital curtain around its accelerating genocide there). 

Article 51 of the UN Charter recognizes the right of self-defense only in response to an “armed attack,” or when specifically authorized by the Security Council. Any other armed attack constitutes the crime of aggression in international law. 

That means that the Israeli regime is using force against Iran unlawfully, in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, prohibiting the threat or use of force, and, as such, is committing the crime of aggression. In this case, as a matter of law, the right to self-defense belongs to Iran, and decidedly not to Israel (or the U.S.). 

Furthermore, contrary to the claims of the Israeli regime’s proxies in the West, international law does not allow for so-called “anticipatory self-defense” or so-called “pre-emptive strikes.” 

Some, like the Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq aggression, have tried to argue that anticipatory self-defense is permissible. But that argument was widely rejected, since the intent of the Charter was to prohibit claims of self-defense unless and until an armed attack has occurred, or military force is authorized by the Security Council. 

…………………………………….Of course, Israel, the quintessential rogue regime, wrapped in the armor of U.S.-guaranteed impunity, cares little about legality. But its representatives and proxies will often try to adopt a veneer of legality as part of the regime’s propaganda efforts in Western media. 

As such, Israel proxies have tried to distort the idea of anticipatory self-defense even further by claiming the right to attack anybody who might someday in the future decide to attack Israel. They seek to claim that Iran may one day develop nuclear weapons, that it may use them on Israel if it develops them, and that therefore Israel has no choice but to attack Iran now. 

Clearly, as a matter of international law, that is entirely impermissible. If that were the rule, any state could lawfully attack any other state at any time, just by claiming a potential future threat. And that would effectively annul the UN Charter. 

But, for Israel, this makes perfect sense. Israel is, in essence, an annihilatory state. It was created in violence, has expanded through violence, and is sustained by way of constant violence. Its official ideology is premised on a militarized conception of security that essentially says that anyone who does not submit to us must be destroyed, lest they someday try to fight back.

Thus, the entire history of the Israeli regime has been defined by militarization, conquest, colonization, expansion, and aggression. In practical terms, this has meant genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine and constant attacks against the regime’s neighbors. 

But even under the broadest possible arguments of anticipatory self-defense (which, again, is rejected by almost the entire discipline of international law), Israel’s use of force against Iran would still be illegal. 

…………………………………Jus in Bello: Attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure

Beyond the crime of aggression, the Israeli regime’s attacks on Iran have included a number of other grave breaches of international humanitarian law. As of the drafting of this article, the Israeli regime has already killed hundreds of Iranians, overwhelmingly civilians. It has targeted apartment buildings, media buildings, and at least one hospital. And it has murdered several Iranian scientists. Needless to say, such acts violate the principle of distinction and the prohibition of targeting protected persons and protected civilian infrastructure. 

The killing of scientists is a case in point. Only if a scientist is a member of the military (that is, not a civilian working for the military), then, in some circumstances, s/he may be a legitimate target.  But most scientists, including the Iranian scientists, are civilians, even if they were working on weapons. (And the Iranian scientists are not even working on weapons, just nuclear energy.) As such, targeting them is entirely unlawful. And, needless to say, it is impermissible, as a matter of law, to target people in their homes just because they are scientists who might someday work on weapons. This, in simple terms, is the crime of murder. 

Attacks on nuclear facilities

Particularly egregious, as a matter of both law and humanity, is the Israeli regime’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In international humanitarian law, attacks on dangerous facilities, such as nuclear power plants and other facilities containing what the law calls “dangerous forces”, are generally prohibited. Indeed, the International Atomic Energy Agency has affirmed that such attacks are prohibited in international law and are a violation of the UN Charter. 

These facilities are protected under international law due to the potential for severe harm to the civilian population if attacked. ………………………………………………………………………….

Reining in the rogues

The open lawlessness of the Israeli regime and its sponsors has wreaked havoc both on the countries and peoples of the Middle East, and on the very legitimacy of international law itself. Calling out the crimes of these states and pursuing accountability for them are essential to the cause of justice.

While the West obsesses about the risks of peaceful nuclear programmes, the true threat to global security at this moment in history rests not in reactors and centrifuges, but rather in aggression, genocide, and impunity. Containing these threats is a global imperative. …………………………………………… https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/rogue-states-the-illegality-of-the-u-s-backed-israeli-attacks-on-iran/

June 23, 2025 Posted by | Israel, Legal | Leave a comment

The real threat to Israel is Netanyahu

23 June 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Walt Zlotow, https://theaimn.net/the-real-threat-to-israel-is-netanyahu/

Steven Katz misunderstands the real existential fight occurring in Israel and its performance in its unprovoked attack on Iran.

In his Chicago Tribune op-ed, ‘Israel’s war against Iran is just’ Katz begins with; “Israel is waging an existential fight for its survival as a Jewish state. And it is winning and fighting well.”

While Israel is waging an existential fight for its survival as a Jewish state, it’s not from Iran. Iran never was, is not now and won’t in the future be an existential threat to Israel. It has neither the will nor the means to do that.

Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his even more extreme cabinet are doing that quite well without any help from Iran or any of its other neighbors. Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign of ethnically cleansing all 2,300,000 Palestinians in Gaza has made Israel a pariah state being shunned by much of the world.

Tourism is down 90%, inflicting a $3.4 billion drop in tourist revenue. Almost 470,000 Israelis have emigrated since the genocide began October 8, 2023, a day after the Hamas attack. Israel’s economy has been battered. Bank of Israel estimates war costs since October, 2023 will amount to $55.6 billion costing Israel 10% of its economy. Israeli GDP dropped to 2% since the Gaza genocide from 6.5% before. Consumer spending declined 27%, imports dropped 42% and exports fell 18%.

Instead of ending the bleeding in Gaza and the Israeli economy, Netanyahu launched another murderous misadventure sure to make all these demographic and economic declines worse. The existential threat to Israel lies not in Tehran but in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office

Regarding Katz’s take on Israel’s war performance, it’s neither winning nor fighting well. Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear capability by itself nor topple the Iranian regime. Only massive US military involvement can possibly do that and with no certainty of success.

Israel knows this which is why it has goaded the US to attack Iran for decades, beginning with their cheering on America’s illegal, immoral, criminal war on Iraq 22 years ago. That war was designed then to end up toppling the Iranian regime in Tehran. Instead it backfired and didn’t.

Israel’s sneak attack enabled by duplicitous US diplomacy to lull Iran into complacency, has caused retaliatory strikes never before experienced in Israel’s 77 year existence. And they will get worse as Israel runs out of weapons to shoot down incoming missiles.

Steven Katz certainly knows all of this. But in the service of US and Israeli exceptionalism promoting world/regional dominance, he turns a blind eye. The Tribune’s readership deserves better.

June 23, 2025 Posted by | Israel, media, USA | Leave a comment

Israel’s war with Iran costs $200M a day, raising pressure for swift end

Oh dear! – Killing people is so expensive!

20 June 25, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250620-israels-war-with-iran-costs-200m-a-day-raising-pressure-for-swift-end/

Israel’s war with Iran is costing the country an estimated $200 million per day, according to early assessments reported by The Wall Street Journal—a staggering figure that is quickly becoming a major constraint on the duration of the conflict, Anadolu reports.

The most expensive burden is the interception of Iranian missiles, which alone can run into tens or even hundreds of millions daily, the WSJ reported on Thursday.

Systems like David’s Sling and Arrow 3—each interception costing between $700,000 and $4 million—have been activated repeatedly in response to over 400 missiles launched by Iran in recent days.

Offensive operations are also increasing costs. Deploying Israeli F-35s over 1,000 miles to hit targets in Iran costs approximately $10,000 per hour per jet, in addition to the price of precision bombs like JDAMs and MK84s.

Altogether, the Aaron Institute for Economic Policy estimates that a month-long war could cost Israel $12 billion.

“This war is far more expensive than Gaza or Hezbollah,” said economist Zvi Eckstein. “The ammunition—defensive and offensive—is the big expense.”

The economic pressure is leading to calls for a shorter war, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not indicated any intention to halt operations before achieving strategic objectives such as crippling Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

While Israeli markets remain stable—some even rising—damage on the ground is mounting.

Engineers estimate that reconstruction costs from missile strikes will exceed $400 million, as hundreds of buildings have been damaged, and more than 5,000 civilians have been evacuated.

Israel’s largest oil refinery was temporarily shut down after being hit, and work in several critical infrastructure sectors has been suspended.

Former Bank of Israel Governor Karnit Flug told the WSJ that the duration of the conflict is key to economic sustainability: “If it is a week, it is one thing. If it is two weeks or a month, it is a very different story.”

June 23, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why won’t the BBC report on Israel’s nuclear weapons?

 DOES Israel have nuclear weapons? Yes. Will the BBC report that fact?
Apparently not. The broadcaster has quietly updated a story which wrongly
claims the “real answer is we do not know” if Israel has nuclear
weapons.

However, the BBC claim – which relies on the fact that the
Israeli government has not officially acknowledged its nuclear capabilities
– remains even in the updated version of a story purported to offer
answers to readers’ questions on the Iran-Israel conflict.

 The National 19th June 2025, https://www.thenational.scot/news/25251643.wont-bbc-report-israels-nuclear-weapons/

June 21, 2025 Posted by | Israel, media | Leave a comment

Working Hard to Justify Israel’s Unprovoked Attack on Iran

Belén Fernández, https://fair.org/home/working-hard-to-justify-israels-unprovoked-attack-on-iran/ 18 June 25

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

‘Preemptive strike’

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.

Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:

Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.

That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.

In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.

‘Potential salvation’

Its profile of the young poet Abbasi notwithstanding, the Washington Post has been particularly aggressive in toeing the Israeli line. Following Netanyahu’s English-language appeal to Iranians to “stand up” against the “common enemy: the murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you”—a pretty rich accusation, coming from the man currently presiding over mass murder and all manner of other oppressionPost reporter Yeganeh Torbati (6/14/25) undertook to detail how some Iranians “see potential salvation in Israel’s attack despite risk of a wider war.”

In her dispatch, Torbati explained that in spite of reports of civilian deaths, “ordinary Iranians” had “expressed satisfaction” at Israel’s attacks on Iran’s “oppressive government.” As usual, there was no room for any potentially relevant historical details regarding “oppressive” governance in Iran—like, say, the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the way for the extended rule-by-terror of the torture-happy Iranian shah, whose oppression was aided by manic acquisition of US weaponry.

On Monday, Torbati was back with another report on how, amid Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian population had “lamented the lack of adequate safety instructions and evacuation orders” from its government, “turning to social media for answers.” The article quotes a Tehran resident named Alireza as complaining that “we have nothing, not even a government that would bother giving safety suggestions to people”—although it’s anyone’s guess as to what sort of suggestions the government is supposed to offer given the circumstances. Try not to be sleeping in your apartment when Israel decides to bomb it?

We thus end up with an entire article in a top US newspaper suggesting that the issue at hand is not that Israel is conducting illegal and unprovoked attacks on Iran, but rather that the Iranian government has not publicized proper safety recommendations for dealing with said attacks. At one point, Torbati concedes that “the government did provide some broad safety instructions,” and that “a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, recommended that Iranians take shelter in metros, mosques and schools.”

Refusing to leave it at that, Torbati goes on to object that “it was unclear why mosques and schools would be safer than other buildings, given that Israel had already targeted residential and other civilian structures”—which again magically transforms the issue into a critique of the Iranian government for lack of clarity, as opposed to a critique of Israel for, you know, committing war crimes.

‘It’s all targeted’

Which brings us to the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to cheerlead on behalf of Israeli atrocities—like that time in 2009 that the paper’s resident foreign affairs columnist literally advocated for targeting civilians in Gaza (FAIR.org1/30/25), invoking Israel’s targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as a positive precedent. Now, a Times article (6/15/25) headlined “Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah” wonders if another Lebanese precedent might prove successful: “Israel decimated the group’s leadership last fall and degraded its military capabilities. Can the same strategy work against a far more powerful foe?”

After reminiscing about “repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles” in Lebanon in 2024—which produced “more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total”—the piece speculates that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran and assassinations of top Iranian officers seem “to be following the script from last fall” in Lebanon. Swift confirmation comes from Randa Slim at the Middle East Institute in Washington: “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”

Never mind that Israel’s activity in Lebanon last fall amounted to straight-up terrorism—or that somehow these “targeted assassinations” managed to kill some 4,000 people in Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024 alone. In unceasingly providing a platform to justify Israeli aggression and mass civilian slaughter throughout the region, the US corporate media at least appears to be following its own script to a T.

June 21, 2025 Posted by | Israel, media, USA | Leave a comment

Israel – Iran: The Confrontation

while the Iranian documents seized by the Mossad did not reveal a military nuclear program, [ 18 ] despite the statements of Benyamin Netanyahu, the neutrality of the Argentine Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been questioned based on the first Israeli documents seized by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. They show that he passed on observations of his organization to Israel, even though Israel is not a member. Among the IAEA governors, Russia, China and Burkina Faso opposed this resolution.

Coincidentally, Rafael Grossi has already been grilled about his strange silence during the Russian special operation in Ukraine: during a speech at the Davos Forum in 2022, he revealed that the Ukrainian regime had stored 30,000 kilos of plutonium and 40,000 kilos of enriched uranium at the Zaporijia plant. After that, nothing more, despite Russian objections.

The day after the publication of the documents seized by Iran, Tel Aviv attacked Iran. This is exactly the same behavior as during the 2006 war against Lebanon…………In reality, it attacked to block investigations by the Lebanese police and judiciary into a vast network of Israeli espionage and terrorism in Lebanon


Thierry Meyssan
Voltairenet.org
Tue, 17 Jun 2025
https://www.sott.net/article/500180-Israel-Iran-The-Confrontation

The confrontation between Israel and Iran does not correspond at all to the image presented by the media. Its roots go back to the time before the Islamic Republic and have nothing to do with the production of a nuclear bomb.The current start of the war is intended to cover up the misdeeds of the Argentine Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The time has come: the confrontation between Israel and Persia has begun. Its origins lie not in the Islamic Republic, but in everything that preceded it. This war will continue until one of the opponents is exhausted.

To understand what is happening and avoid falling into one of the two official narratives that obscure the reality of the problem, we need to take a few steps back.

Iran’s Enemies in the 20th Century

All demonstrations in Iran against external enemies end with the inevitable “Death to the United Kingdom, Death to the United States, Death to Israel!” It is a cry that comes from the depths of Persian suffering since World War I.

Although we in the West are not aware of it, Iran was the victim of the largest genocide of the First World War in 1917-1919 [ 1 ] . 6 to 8 million people died of hunger out of a population of 18 to 20 million, i.e. between a quarter and a third of Iranians. Iran, although neutral, was crushed by the British armies, against a background of rivalry with the Bolsheviks and the Ottomans. This horror left a traumatic memory that is still very much present in Iran [ 2 ] For an Iranian there is no doubt that the United Kingdom is the first enemy of his country.

The British, who had colonized Iran with the help of one of his officers, Reza Shah (1925-1941), overthrew him to install his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979), in power. Behind these guises, they plundered the country’s oil. In 1951, the Shah appointed Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. Mossadegh nationalized oil at the expense of London. What followed was a conflict in which the British attacked viciously and organized a color revolution with the help of the Americans. This was “Operation Ajax” [ 3 ] . The new [Persian] regime was no longer led by London, but by Washington. The American embassy, ​​which installed the telephone system, tapped all the ministers’ lines so that they could listen in live, without their knowledge. This system was discovered during the 1978 revolution. So Iranians have no doubt that the United States is their second enemy.

When Mossadegh was ousted, the British appointed General Fazlollah Zahedi in his place. Zahedi was a Nazi they had imprisoned in Cairo, but London was counting on him to restore “order.” So he set up a secret police force modeled on the Gestapo. He recruited former Nazis to train them, and several hundred “revisionist Zionists” were sent by Yitzhak Shamir (then working for the Mossad) to supervise them [ 4 ] . The horrors of the Savak, the most horrific secret police in the world at the time, can still be seen in the museum dedicated to it in Tehran [ 5 ] . So there is no doubt in the Iranian mindset that Israel is their third enemy.

Israel’s Only Enemy in the 20th Century

Contrary to what the Israeli public believes after 25 years of “revisionist Zionist” propaganda, Iran – neither that of the Shah nor that of the Islamic Republic – has never had the goal of destroying the Jewish population of occupied Palestine. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made clear, the goal was to destroy the State of Israel in the same way that Russia had destroyed the USSR [ 6 ] .

No, the only enemy of the State of Israel is the one that has sabotaged every attempt at peace between Jews and Arabs for 80 years: the United Kingdom. As I have often explained, when the Foreign Office drew up its plan, The Future of Palestine, in 1915, it specified that a Jewish state should be established in Mandatory Palestine, but that it should in no way be able to guarantee its own security.

Continue reading

June 21, 2025 Posted by | history, Iran, Israel, Reference | Leave a comment

Israeli missile defense at risk of collapse in coming days: WashPo

A Washington Post report reveals that “Israel’s” missile defense could fail within days under sustained Iranian attacks, as costs skyrocket and interceptor supplies dwindle.

A long war of attrition between “Israel” and Iran may not be sustainable for Tel Aviv, according to a new report by The Washington Post, which highlights mounting costs and dwindling interceptor supplies as critical vulnerabilities in “Israel’s” air defense network.

The report, published Monday, cites assessments from US and Israeli intelligence officials indicating that without urgent resupply or direct US military intervention, “Israel” may only be able to sustain its current level of missile defense for another 10 to 12 days.

“They will need to select what they want to intercept,” one source briefed on the matter said. “The system is already overwhelmed.”

The Post’s analysis aligns with recent warnings by military-focused open-source intelligence (OSINT) account @METT_Project, which projected that Iran’s sustained ballistic missile salvos could begin heavily breaching “Israel’s” multi-layered missile shield around Day 18 of the war. That projection, based on interceptor usage rates and known inventories, suggested that daily missile penetrations would increase significantly as the Israeli grid begins to ration munitions and prioritize critical zones.

Read more: Analysis finds Israeli missile defenses may crumble by day 18 of war

High cost of BMD necessitates quick end to war

The economic strain of defending against Iran’s heavy missile barrages is also becoming untenable. According to The Marker, an Israeli financial outlet, the cost of operating missile defense systems has soared to approximately one billion shekels per night, about $285 million. “Israel’s” reliance on high-end systems like the Arrow-2 and Arrow-3, whose interceptors cost roughly $3 million apiece, has raised alarms over the sustainability of its current escalation.

High cost of BMD necessitates quick end to war

The economic strain of defending against Iran’s heavy missile barrages is also becoming untenable. According to The Marker, an Israeli financial outlet, the cost of operating missile defense systems has soared to approximately one billion shekels per night, about $285 million. “Israel’s” reliance on high-end systems like the Arrow-2 and Arrow-3, whose interceptors cost roughly $3 million apiece, has raised alarms over the sustainability of its current escalation.“It’s like shooting a 9-millimeter pistol at a freight train,” said Israeli strategic analyst Efraim Inbar, describing the mismatch between cheaper, widely deployed Iron Dome interceptors and the supersonic ballistic missiles used by Iran. While Iron Dome is optimized for short-range rocket threats, such as those from Gaza, it is virtually ineffective against long-range Iranian missiles that travel through the upper atmosphere.

The Washington Post report adds that US officials are closely monitoring the pace of Iran’s strikes and the strain on Israeli systems. As Iranian salvos continue, Israeli commanders are increasingly forced to make difficult decisions about which targets to protect, a scenario that could soon expose strategic infrastructure and population centers to successful hits.

Read more: Iran’s heavy barrages impact multiple Israeli targets overnight

June 21, 2025 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel’s Bombing Won’t Stop Iran from Going Nuclear

NPEC – Non Proliferation Policy Education Center, June 17, 2025 

Spotlighting  Greg Jones‘ latest research on the difficulty of targeting Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Jones is one of the nation’s top nuclear analysts and has had close ties to NPEC for more than three decades.

Most of the analyses of Israel’s air campaign against Iran’s nuclear program have focused on two questions: Can Israel destroy Iran’s enrichment plants on its own? Or does Israel need Washington’s help to knock them out? 

The question too infrequently asked, however, is can any bombing campaign, with or without U.S. assistance, keep Iran from getting a bomb? Greg’s short answer is no.

As he points out, bombing Iran’s enrichment plants may temporarily put them out of commission, but the centrifuges and cascades can be repaired. Tehran, he argues, can remove undamaged centrifuges, build new cascades, and be back in business in four to six months. 

Fordow, for now, remains untouched. Conservatively, Fordow could produce a bomb’s worth of nuclear fuel every 2.5 weeks. Again, the centrifuges there can be removed to other locations.

Then, there’s the matter of the 440 kgs. of 60 percent enriched uranium that Iran already has – conservatively, enough to build 12 bombs. This material, Greg points out, is stored in hardy metal cylinders that are extremely difficult to destroy via bombing attacks and can be moved by truck to remote locations.  Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency has determined that Iran has all but developed the nonnuclear components necessary to build a nuclear weapon. 

This is why Greg concludes that any quick military fix to prevent Iran from going nuclear is impractical and that the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon will remain until and unless Iran agrees to relinquish its entire stockpile of enriched uranium and eliminates its centrifuge enrichment program.

You can read Greg’s full, footnoted analysis here

…………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://npolicy.org/israels-bombing-wont-stop-iran-from-going-nuclear/

June 21, 2025 Posted by | Iran, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The World’s Most Dangerous Man and His Enabler

And so we come to the case of Donald J. Trump. I do not consider the American president to be as dangerous as Benjamin Netanyahu. He, Trump, may be stupider than Bibi, but he is not as unhinged. I count Trump Netanyahu’s enabler, and this is the role he just played.

now we have a nuclear-armed nation of many-times-demonstrated dangerous judgments threatening “a State without nuclear weapons,” as the IAEA refers to Iran.

 June 16, 2025 By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

It is some years since I described Benjamin Netanyahu as the most dangerous man in West Asia. That was back when we heard all about the menace of the Assad regime in Damascus, the Beelzebub otherwise known as Iran’s supreme leader, and other such unthinkably malign figures.

The Israeli prime minister just graduated. By any serious reckoning he is the world’s most dangerous man as of the shockingly reckless, altogether nihilist attacks he launched against the Islamic Republic in the early hours of Friday, June 13. I will get to Donald Trump’s place in the ratings in a sec.

In his initial announcement of Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu asserted that Iran presents “an existential threat” to Israel and that he had no choice but to order an attack. This is nonsense, but we had better pay attention to the nonsense. With this loaded phrase, Bibi has effectively licensed the Zionist state to launch a nuclear weapon if these attacks fail to destroy all of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programs, as seems likely. This is my read.

There is indeed an existential threat abroad as of last Friday. But it extends well beyond Iran and, indeed, West Asia. As the self-defined Jewish state’s long, dreadful record makes plain, it appears to recognize no limits to the violence it will inflict on others, its breaches of international law and the norms of the human cause, and the risks it will inflict on the world in the name of what amounts to a biblically authorized project of subjugation and domination.

To finish this point, the obsessed leader of a nuclear-armed nation never subjected to the terms of the Non–Proliferation Treaty has just attacked a non-nuclear nation it calls a mortal danger to Israel’s survival because of the nuclear weapons it does not possess. You do the math, as the expression goes. 

“Operation Rising Lion,” for the record, is a reference to the Prophecy of Balaam, an infidel with a very mixed record but who impressed the ancient Israelites with his exceptional powers of divination. In the Revised Standard Version of Numbers, 23:24, we find him saying, “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.” So does Bibi, who has the Palestinians down as evil Amalekites straight out of the Old Testament’s mythologies, once again state his purpose.

Israel and Iran are now at war, as one Tehrani told The New York Times after she listened to explosions and watched the flicker fires out her window last Friday evening. All is changed now. Netanyahu has craved this war for decades, always justifying his lust — a clinically psychotic lust, it is right to say — by way of endless lies and an apparently bottomless paranoia. These lies and this paranoia just put the world in danger of a global confrontation. We are all Iranians now: I am perfectly willing to say this.

As to President Trump and the American role in this, there is no need any longer for any of us to deceive ourselves. I continue to insist, against many who think otherwise, that the Zionist state is to be understood as a recklessly over-indulged client and not the Übermeister of U.S. policy. It is a complex dynamic, I mean to say, but the Zionist state just got done what the imperium wants in its broader ambition to “reshape the Middle East,” as the neoconservative cliques who direct U.S. policy have long put it. As I have noted previously in this space, borrowing from spookspeak, Israel does Washington’s wet work in West Asia.

As many commentators have remarked in many places, the Israelis have a well-established practice of lying in matters to do with events, policies, the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces, and so on. All governments lie, as I.F. Stone famously contended on many occasions, but the Israelis are in a class of their own among the officially mendacious, it is fair to say.

The thing about the Israelis is that they continue to lie even after a given lie is exposed. Netanyahu, a ready-to-hand case in point, still goes on about how the Hamas militias who attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, raped men and women, beheaded some babies and baked others in ovens, and so on. All of this has been exposed as false, the product of Israel’s hasbara apparatus, the constantly-in-motion machine that produces propaganda for the consumption of international audiences. But Bibi nonetheless continues to retail these smears.

And this is the case with Netanyahu’s claims that, as of last week, Iran was on the very brink of producing nuclear weapons, and it was therefore urgent to stop it.

When he announced Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu asserted, “It could be in a year, it could be within a few months — it could be less than a year.” Read this carefully. It is sheer fear mongering, not a stated fact in it. There is no more substance to these assertions than there has been since Netanyahu first started carrying on in this fashion in the early 1990s. Anyone aware of the record knows this is merely another in the long line of statements Netanyahu has made of this kind. Bibi knows all his “coulds” and predictions are groundless — Israeli intel and the Central Intelligence Agency have told him so — and he cannot but know those paying attention know he knows this. Now this transparent lie proves enough to start a war with two sides and risk a war with many.

On June 11, two days before the Israelis launched their attacks on Iran, a social media account going by The United States of Israel posted on “X” a timeline of Netanyahu’s claims that the Islamic Republic was about to cross the threshold and become a nuclear-capable danger. There are 20 entries, beginning in 1992 and ending earlier this year. In 1996 Iran was some months to one year away from building a bomb. In 2010 it was a year away, in 2021 months to a year, and so on.

I am not familiar with The United States of Israel and cannot vouch for every entry, but of those I know, they are all accurate. I think first of 2013, when Netanyahu addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Oct.1 with that infamously ridiculous graphic that readers may recall — the bomb shaped like a bowling ball with a fuse out of the top. The forecast then, a dozen years ago, was a year to nuclear capability.

………………………………….. commentators and others now place much weight on a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency charging that Iran has been in violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Non–Proliferation Treaty.

Some facts: The agency is an organ of the United Nations and has 35 members. It convened to vote on a resolution that was advanced by the United States, Britain, France and Germany. This resolution was presented Thursday, June 12, a day before Israel began attacking Iran. It passed with a vote of 19 board members in favor, three against (Russia, China, Burkina Faso) and 11 abstentions; two board members did not vote.

These facts merit scrutiny. Why did four Western powers, which unanimously support Israel and oppose Iran, introduce this resolution when, by last Thursday, United States and European officials were already warning of an imminent Israeli attack? Why did 16 other nations — many of them non–Western, some of them (Canada, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan) U.S. allies — decline to back the resolution? On the day of the vote, you may recall, the State Department withdrew its diplomatic staff from its embassy in Baghdad and encouraged the families of military personnel in the region to evacuate on a voluntary basis.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, immediately interpreted the IAEA’s censure as politically motivated, a preface to the Israelis’ operation the next day. Let us take care here: This view of events cannot be verified as so, but it most certainly cannot be dismissed.  

The IAEA censure is contained in the four-page June 12 report. This is a highly technical document having to do with the agency’s access to nuclear-related sites in Iran and the Iranians’ official accounts of their nuclear programs in their regular contacts with the IAEA. The points of contention between the agency and the Iranians go back five years; the most recent of these dates to November 2024. Nothing happened last week or last month or the month before that to prompt the agency’s censure.

Here is a key passage in the document:

Noting with concern the Director General’s conclusion, most recently in GOV/2025/25, that these issues stem from Iran’s obligations under its NPT Safeguards Agreement and unless and until Iran assists the Agency is [sic] resolving the outstanding issues, the Agency will not be in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful …

Does this read to you like a declaration that Iran is on the brink of nuclear-capability and must urgently be stopped? Or does this read as another in a long line of interim reports, the basis for further interaction of the kind that has gone on routinely for decades? Does this, or any other passage if you care to read the technical prose, support Bibi Netanyahu’s latest predictions as earlier quoted? Does it support the commentaries of David French and Bret Stephens? Put this report next to the assertions of these people and you have an across-the-board case of gross distortion.

Iran, in response to the IAEA censure, now threatens to withdraw altogether from the Non–Proliferation Treaty and pursue its nuclear capabilities in earnest. You can read this as a potential horror show or you can think about the principle of deterrence. I have been of the latter persuasion for many years in the Iranian case. Deterrence was held very high as a strategic concept during the Cold War decades. I regretted the circumstances that made deterrence necessary but saw the necessity of it. And now we have a nuclear-armed nation of many-times-demonstrated dangerous judgments threatening “a State without nuclear weapons,” as the IAEA refers to Iran. I come to the same conclusion.

Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s now-perturbed foreign minister, was due to travel to Oman Sunday, June 15, for further talks with the United States on a nuclear accord that would replace the agreement Netanyahu railed against even before it was signed and Trump abandoned. This is now off, for obvious reasons.

And so we come to the case of Donald J. Trump. I do not consider the American president to be as dangerous as Benjamin Netanyahu. He, Trump, may be stupider than Bibi, but he is not as unhinged. I count Trump Netanyahu’s enabler, and this is the role he just played.

Trump is as deep in the pockets of the Israel lobbies and various wealthy American supporters of the Zionist state as any other American pol, allowing for very few exceptions. But in his support of so dangerous an operation as Rising Lion, Trump may have outdone them all, it seems to me. It is one thing, condemnable enough, to back a genocide by way of limitless supplies of weapons, political support and diplomatic cover. Isn’t another to approve of aggression that carries the risk of global conflagration? The degree of cynicism strikes me as yet greater than Joe Biden’s, and I admit that is going some.  

There was a day or so just before Netanyahu’s lion began to rise when Trump put Marco Rubio, his hapless secretary of state, out in front of the microphones and cameras to tell the world no, the U.S. had no prior knowledge of Israel’s plans and there were no “American airplanes” involved. It transpires that Rubio meant no jets with the “USAF” insignia painted on their fuselages. Newsweek reported the day the Israelis attacked that Israel has deployed a variety of American-made fighter jets in the Israeli inventory — F–35s, F–16s and F–15s — against the Iranians. You might ask whether this amounts to tacit consent, but don’t bother. The Israelis, ever eager to boast of America’s approval of all their malevolence, have clarified the matter.

Antiwar.com, the libertarian news site, reported June 13 that a senior Israeli official disclosed to The Jerusalem Post that the Netanyahu and Trump regimes colluded “to convince Tehran that diplomacy was still possible after Israel was ready to attack Iran.” As the Jerusalem Post reported, “The round of U.S.–Iranian nuclear negotiations scheduled for Sunday was part of a coordinated U.S.–Israeli deception aimed at lowering Iran’s guard ahead of Friday’s attack.”

Here is the able Dave DeCamp’s report in Antiwar.com and here is the Jerusalem Post’s. And here, for good measure, is how The New York Times played this story under the headline, “A Miscalculation by Iran Led to Israeli Strikes’ Extensive Toll, Officials Say.” Those foolish Iranians: They took the Americans at their word.

All this while, to complete the picture, Trump was on his Truth Social messaging platform with this kind of thing:

We remain committed to a Diplomatic Resolution to the Iran Nuclear Issue! My entire Administration has been directed to negotiate with Iran. They could be a Great Country, but they first must completely give up hopes of obtaining a Nuclear Weapon. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

I like the flipped-off flattery, the upper-case nouns, and the exclamation points. Very Donald. So is what we read about in the above-cited publications.   

I do not want to go on about how cravenly the U.S. so often conducts itself in matters of state. This has been noted often enough. But what the United States just did to Iran with the assist of its client seems to me the ne plus ultra of diplomatic betrayals. I can think of only one other case that offers a useful comparison.

That was when Vladimir Putin personally negotiated a settlement of the Ukraine crisis in its early stages. The Russian president invested heavily in the two Minsk Protocols, signed in September 2014 and February 2015, as a promising solution to the divisions evident in Ukraine after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev in February 2014. He subsequently discovered neither Ukraine nor the Western powers that served as guarantors of these accords, France and Germany, ever had any intention of implementing them.

Essentially at issue in these two cases is trust and breaches thereof.  A measure of trust is foundational in international relations. Without it there can be no constructive diplomacy, either between adversaries or, for that matter, among allies. Nations are that much closer to a default of hostility and potential chaos. The Europeans broke trust with the Russians when they abandoned the Minsk accords as soon as they signed them. Trump just broke trust with the Iranians. This is devastation of a kind — scorched-earth statecraft, we may as well call it.  

To finish this point, do you think others do not notice this? The Chinese, to name the most critical case?

Trump and Netanyahu just executed the cheapest sort of good-cop, bad-cop routine with Tehran. It is a variant of Biden’s duplicity as he armed Israel with all it needed to proceed with its genocide in Gaza while claiming to fight “night and day” for a ceasefire. Biden betrayed the Palestinians, Trump the Iranians. They have both betrayed all of us. These are acts of desperation, in my final read. Let us not forget why this is, and in which direction history’s wheel turns. https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/16/patrick-lawrence-the-worlds-most-dangerous-man-and-his-enabler/

June 20, 2025 Posted by | Israel, PERSONAL STORIES, USA | Leave a comment

Jeffrey D. Sachs: Stop Netanyahu Before He Gets Us All Killed

We could soon see several nuclear powers pitted against each other and dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Sybil Fares, Jun 16, 2025, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/netanyahu-war-on-iran

For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has driven the Middle East into war and destruction. The man is a powder keg of violence. Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian Government. His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon, unless Netanyahu is stopped.

Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence–wars, assassinations, terror–is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.

The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine. At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted roughly 87% of the population and owned ten times more land than the Jewish population. As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The now infamous chant, “from the River to the Sea,” which is characterized as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud.

Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy. We are witnessing the culmination of decades of extremist Zionist manipulation of US foreign policy.

The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.

In 1996, Netanyahu and his American advisors devised a “Clean Break” strategy. They advocated that Israel would not withdraw from the Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war in exchange for regional peace. Instead, Israel would reshape the Middle East to its liking. Crucially, the strategy envisioned the US as the main force to achieve these aims—waging wars in the region to dismantle governments opposed to Israel’s dominance over Palestine. The US was called upon to fight wars on Israel’s behalf.

The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11. As NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark revealed, soon after 9/11, the US planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”

The first of the wars, in early 2003, was to topple the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the US became mired in Iraq. Still, the US supported Sudan’s split in 2005, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched CIA operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, with the UK and France, overthrew Libya’s government through a 2011 bombing campaign. Today, these countries lie in ruins, and many are now embroiled in civil wars.

For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has driven the Middle East into war and destruction. The man is a powder keg of violence. Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian Government. His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon, unless Netanyahu is stopped.

Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence–wars, assassinations, terror–is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.

The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine. At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted roughly 87% of the population and owned ten times more land than the Jewish population. As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The now infamous chant, “from the River to the Sea,” which is characterized as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud.

Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy. We are witnessing the culmination of decades of extremist Zionist manipulation of US foreign policy.

The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.

In 1996, Netanyahu and his American advisors devised a “Clean Break” strategy. They advocated that Israel would not withdraw from the Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war in exchange for regional peace. Instead, Israel would reshape the Middle East to its liking. Crucially, the strategy envisioned the US as the main force to achieve these aims—waging wars in the region to dismantle governments opposed to Israel’s dominance over Palestine. The US was called upon to fight wars on Israel’s behalf.

The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11. As NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark revealed, soon after 9/11, the US planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”

The first of the wars, in early 2003, was to topple the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the US became mired in Iraq. Still, the US supported Sudan’s split in 2005, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched CIA operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, with the UK and France, overthrew Libya’s government through a 2011 bombing campaign. Today, these countries lie in ruins, and many are now embroiled in civil wars.

Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the U.S. Government including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and others.

Testifying in the U.S. Congress in 2002, Netanyahu pitched for the disastrous war in Iraq, declaring “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” He continued, “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.” He also falsely told Congress, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons.”

The slogan to remake a “New Middle East” provides the slogan for these wars. Initially stated in 1996 through “Clean Break,” it was popularized by Secretary Condoleezza Rice in 2006. As Israel was brutally bombarding Lebanon, Rice stated:

“What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing — the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.”

In September 2023, Netanyahu presented at UN General Assembly a map of the “New Middle East” completely erasing a Palestinian state. In September 2024, he elaborated on this plan by showing two maps: one part of the Middle East a “blessing,” and the other–including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran–a curse, as he advocated regime change in the latter countries.

The premise of Israel’s attack on Iran is the claim that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Such a claim is fatuous since Iran has repeatedly called for negotiations precisely to remove the nuclear option in return for an end to the decades of US sanctions.

Since 1992, Netanyahu and his supporters have claimed that Iran will become a nuclear power “in a few years.” In 1995, Israeli officials and their US backers declared a 5-year timeline. In 2003, Israel’s Director of Military Intelligence said that Iran will be a nuclear power “by the summer of 2004.” In 2005, the head of Mossad said that Iran could build the bomb in less than 3 years. In 2012, Netanyahu claimed at the United Nations that “it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.” And on and on.

This 30-year-plus pattern of shifting deadlines has marked a deliberate strategy, not a failure in prophecy. The claims are propaganda; there is always an “existential threat.” More importantly, there is Netanyahu’s phony claim that negotiations with Iran are useless.

Iran has repeatedly said that it does not want a nuclear weapon and that it has long been prepared to negotiate. In October 2003, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production and use of nuclear arms—a ruling later officially cited by Iran at an IAEA meeting in Vienna in August 2005 and referenced since as a religious and legal barrier to pursuing nuclear weapons.

Even for those skeptical of Iran’s intentions, Iran has consistently advocated for a negotiated agreement supported by independent international verification. In contrast, the Zionist lobby has opposed any such settlements, urging the US to maintain sanctions and reject deals that would allow strict IAEA monitoring in exchange for lifting sanctions.

In 2016, the Obama Administration, together with the UK, France, Germany, China, and Russia, reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran—a landmark agreement to strictly monitor Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Yet, under relentless pressure from Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby, President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Predictably, when Iran responded by expanding its uranium enrichment, it was blamed for violating an agreement that the US itself had abandoned. The double-standard and propaganda is hard to miss.

On April 11, 2021, Israel’s Mossad attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. Following the attack, on April 16, Iran announced that it would increase its uranium enrichment further, as bargaining leverage, while repeatedly appealing for renewed negotiations on a deal like the JCPOA. The Biden Administration rejected all such negotiations.

At the start of his second term, Trump agreed to open a new negotiation with Iran. Iran pledged to renounce nuclear arms and to be subject to IAEA inspections but reserved the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. The Trump Administration appeared to agree to this point but then reversed itself. Since then, there have been five rounds of negotiations, with both sides reporting progress on each occasion.

The sixth round was ostensibly to take place on Sunday, June 15. Instead, Israel launched a preemptive war on Iran on June 12. Trump confirmed that the US knew of the attack in advance, even as the administration was speaking publicly of the upcoming negotiations.

Israel’s attack was made not only in the midst of negotiations that were making progress, but days before a scheduled UN Conference on Palestine that would have advanced the cause of the two-state solution. That conference has now been postponed.

Israel’s attack on Iran now threatens to escalate to a full-fledged war that draws in the US and Europe on the side of Israel and Russia and perhaps Pakistan on the side of Iran. We could soon see several nuclear powers pitted against each other and dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation. The Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to nuclear Armageddon since the clock was launched in 1947.

Over the past 30 years, Netanyahu and his US backers have destroyed or destabilized a 4,000-km swath of countries stretching across North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Western Asia. Their aim has been to block a Palestinian State by overthrowing governments supporting the Palestinian cause. The world deserves better than this extremism. More than 170 countries in the UN have called for the two-state solution and regional stability. That makes more sense than Israel bringing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon in pursuit of its illegal and extremist aims.

June 19, 2025 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment