Lynch has seen a memo entitled “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths,” which was produced by food security experts in US AID and the State Department, and which they sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. These US officials gave the memo a subheading that is damning for the Israeli government of PM Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel-imposed administrative challenges are preventing the delivery” of food.

So two things are being asserted:

1. Famine in Gaza is now unavoidable and will kill many civilian noncombatants even if more food aid starts getting in now.

2. The responsibility for this starvation of children, women and noncombatant males lies squarely with Israel, which is obstructing food aid deliveries.

That is all you need to know. These experts have never seen a situation so bad.

Lynch quotes the memo, sent earlier this month:

“Adequate health, nutrition, and water, sanitation, and hygiene … interventions, an immediate cessation of hostilities, and sustained humanitarian access will be required. Absent these conditions, all available evidence indicates rising acute food insecurity, malnutrition, and disease will lead to a rapid increase in non-trauma deaths, particularly among women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities.”

It continues that the

“deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history, exponentially outpacing in six months the long-term declines that led to the only other two famine declarations in the 21st century: Somalia (2011) and South Sudan (2017).”

The National Institutes of Health concluded that “During 2010–2012, extreme food insecurity and famine in Somalia were estimated to account for 256,000 deaths.” The population of the country was then about 12 million, so that is 2.1% dead of starvation. If Gaza’s coming famine were only as bad as Somalia’s we’d expect 46,200 dead from starvation alone, more than have been killed by Israeli bombing during the past six months. But the USAID and State Department experts are saying that the Gaza famine is outpacing Somalia’s. Hence we can expect even more deaths from this cause.

The USAID/ State memo is consistent with what the World Food Program is assessing as of last Wednesday. According to UN News, Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP Director, Geneva office, said at a news conference on Wednesday of Gaza, “people are clearly dying of hunger.” So this catastrophe is not in the future. It is now.

Cirri said, “People cannot meet even the most basic food needs, they have exhausted all coping strategies, like eating animal fodder, begging, selling off their belongings to buy food. They are most of the time destitute and clearly some of them are dying of hunger.”

He called for massive food deliveries “in a very short time.” He said,

“We’ve mentioned the necessity to rebuild livelihoods, to address root causes and so on. But, in the immediate time, like tomorrow, we really need to significantly increase our food supplies. This means rolling out massive and consistent food assistance in conditions that allow humanitarian staff and supplies to move freely and (for) affected people to access safely the assistance.”

Food security experts, Cirri remarked, say that “We are getting closer by the day to a famine situation. Malnutrition among children is spreading. We estimate 30 per cent of children below the age of two is now acutely malnourished or wasted and 70 per cent of the population in the north is facing catastrophic hunger,”

Cirr added “There is reasonable evidence that all three famine thresholds – food insecurity, malnutrition, mortality – will be passed in the next six weeks.”

Reuters Video: “Gaza Strip could reach famine in six weeks, WFP says | REUTERS”

Lynch at Devex also has seen a study produced by USAID concluding that Israel is in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and is impeding the delivery of US-funded humanitarian aid. It is therefore ineligible for US provision of offensive weaponry.

On February 8, President Joe Biden had issued a national security memo instructing Secretary of State Antony Blinken to seek written assurances from all recipients of such US military weaponry that they are abiding by IHL and not interfering with humanitarian aid shipments. Either the Israeli government has declined to proffer such assurances, or USAID has concluded that they aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.

The paper concluded that the killing of (at that time) over 32,000 persons by Israel, of which the US government assesses two-thirds or 21,120, were noncombatant women and children, could constitute a violation of International Humanitarian Law. The official death toll reported by the UN, based on Gaza Ministry of Health Statistics, has risen to over 34,000, but this number is widely considered to be a gross under-count, given that thousands of people were killed when Israeli fighter jets targeted their apartment buildings, and their bodies are under rubble, unrecovered. Many likely died a slow, agonizing death, trapped by fallen concrete blocks, thirsting to death. After 3 days without water, renal failure typically sets in. Some observers estimate that the real death toll may be 100,000, or 4.5% of the pre-war population. That is about the percentage of the non-Russian European population killed by Nazi Germany 1933-1945 (17 million out of about 400 million).

Although Israel claims to have killed 10,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, the Qassam Brigades, and other militant groups, these assertions cannot be verified and seem unlikely to be true. It is likely that many of the 10,000 were elderly or boys or were civilian men with no connection to Hamas, or were civilian Hamas party members rather than Qassam Brigade fighters. International Humanitarian Law does not permit militaries to blow unarmed civilians who do not pose an immediate threat to smithereens from the sky, regardless of their party membership.

The Anne Frank House Center says that, “Zionism is about the pursuit of an independent Jewish state.” That was accomplished in 1948, and affirmed in bloody wars in 1956, 1967, 1973 and in various attacks and battles since then. On October 7 the Zionist military apparatus, for all its impressiveness, failed because of hubris. Modern Jewish history didn’t start then. The post-World War I San Remo Conference of 1920 was the genesis for current dynamics, when the artificial boundaries of the Levant were created by the victorious Western empires.  

Zionism is abused as a social and religious cudgel by the Evangelical movement, and has become another tool of divisiveness for the American far-right. Evangelicals, not Jews, comprise a greater plurality of Israeli tourism now, as more American and European Jews reject this narrative of a “false idol,” in the words of author and activist Naomi Klein. She wrote in a recent ‘Street Seder Address’ published in The Guardian, that Zionism “is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide . . . . . a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.”

Netanyahu’s virulent Likud form of Zionism, which he has now allied with the openly racist and even genocidal Religious Zionism and Jewish Power blocs, has created an image of the movement that is anathema to many progressive and leftist activists, and it fuels anti-Semitism as less informed people on the right and left conflate this ruthless ultra-nationalism with Judaism. Just as marriages can run their course, leading to a necessary divorce, the time has come for Jews to divorce Zionism. Bibi has become a literal Pharaoh to Palestinians.  Klein adds, “From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.”

Democracy Now! Video: “Naomi Klein: Jews Must Raise Voices for Palestine, Oppose “False Idol of Zionism”

It’s important to remember that “Judaism and Zionism are two distinct terms often intertwined, in reality, they represent rather distinct concepts with different historical, cultural, and most importantly, political implications,” as noted in The Business Standard.  They add, “Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that continues to support the development and protection of the State of Israel. Zionism, at its core, can be understood as a manifestation of Jewish nationalism.”  Judaism is a religion, while Zionism is a political ideology.

 The original anti-Zionists were, “from fringe Orthodox sects and maintain that Israel can only be regained miraculously. They view the present state as a blasphemous human attempt to usurp God’s role, and many seek to dismantle the secular State of Israel. However, unlike many gentile anti­-Zionists, Jewish anti-Zionists usually firmly believe in the Jewish right to the Land of Israel, but only at the future time of redemption.”  Though the Neturei Karta were the most visible of observant anti-Zionists, most Haredim in Israel continue that tradition with their refusal to participate in the military or support the embattled state.

Klein asserts that the Zionist ideology, “. . .  is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children. Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child. . . . Including the love we have as a people for text and for education. . . .Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets.” She calls this “scholasticide,” which is parallel to the burning of libraries and synagogues by Nazis.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is one of many Western Jewish organizations that continues to promote the false idol narrative.  They argue that anti-Zionism means that Jews “do not have a right to self-determination — or that the Jewish people’s religious and historical connection to Israel is invalid.” The AJC also says that, “Calling for a Palestinian nation-state, while simultaneously advocating for an end to the Jewish nation-state is hypocritical at best, and potentially anti-Semitic.” The polemical problem is that the Jewish nation is a powerful “fact on the ground,” though threatened by hostile outside forces. Israel is a political reality. But Judaism and Zionism are also threatened internally by Bibi’s leadership record of self-destruction, as his primary aim is political self-preservation. Israel’s economy and security are also undermined by the refusal of the Haredim to support the state and serve in the military.

Not only can Israel remain secure without Zionism; it may become more secure, as the provocations towards Palestinians would cease. The Temple Sunday School narrative minimizes, euphemizes and marginalizes what Palestinians suffered in the Nabka, concurrent with Israeli independence. It’s time to correct that false narrative, and recognize that Zionism has run its course.

The outpouring of objection to American funding of the Israeli war machine is unprecedented in size and scope. In turn the size and scope of government efforts to quash these protests is also unprecedented, now becoming evocative of Kent State in 1970. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when anyone proposes placing National Guard troops on a US college campus. Doing so would be a provocation and incitement for escalation, and that game plan appears to be unfolding.

Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, have all been plagued by departures from their spiritual ethics into orgies of violence. We see this phenomenon in Bibi’s brand of imperial Zionism, Hamas’ and other extremist groups’ violent perversion of Islam, preferring an ideology of hate and misogyny, and the White Christian Nationalist movement in the US, fueled by Trump. The religions of Christianity and Islam have struggled to come to terms with secular modernity, and have seen powerful and violent movements during that struggle. Judaism has the spiritual Reform movement, but no corresponding social-political movement. Judaism came first and has an obligation to take the lead in creating a new paradigm, of a monotheistic, biblically-rooted tradition that nevertheless stands for tolerance and human rights for all. Jews must recognize that the shelf-life of Zionism has expired. Also important is that Judaism is a religion, not a form of ethno-nationalism, despite former President Trump’s attempts to dragoon all Jews into the effort to censor free speech over Palestinian human rights.

Outside the court, at most twenty people could be counted as being there to support Höcke at some point during the morning. In their conversations, they complained that the procedure against Höcke was politically motivated. This had been Höcke’s message from the very beginning. Meanwhile, around 600 demonstrators had protested against the radical right politician earlier on the morning, before the start of the judicial process. There will be hearings until mid-May, but it is already clear that the most severe punishment for Höcke would be the payment of a fine. 

Höcke, who rivals Donald Trump in his mastery of self-victimization, failed to explain in his initial “X” post why he had to appear before a court in Halle. The AfD politician, who can be openly described as a fascist according to a German court, had to answer for his use, on at least two occasions, of the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany). The phrase was employed by the paramilitary National Socialist group SA (“Sturmabteilung”, or Storm Division). Using National Socialist slogans and symbols is a punishable crime in Germany. 

Höcke, a former history teacher, promised he did not know the origins of the slogan. His repeated use of expressions with strong National Socialist connotations, such as “entartet” (degenerate) or “Volkstod” (death of the nation) in public speeches and his 2018 book, belie this claim. Furthermore, the German sociologist Andreas Kemper has long established that there are striking parallels between Höcke’s public statements and different articles that appeared under the pseudonym Landolf Ladig in neo-Nazi publications more than a decade ago. One of these articles argued that Germany had been forced into a “preventive war” in 1939. 

The lack of open support for Höcke in front of the court in Halle was all the more embarrassing because the radical right politician had been given an incredibly powerful loudspeaker by Elon Musk, the billionaire and owner of Twitter/ “X”  since October 2022. Musk reacted to Höcke’s “X” post denouncing what in his eyes was a restriction on freedom of speech and asked him, “What did you say?”. After Höcke explained he had said “Everything for Germany”, Musk asked why the phrase was illegal. “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi, as Germany has legal texts in its criminal code not found in any other democracy,” replied Höcke. He forgot to add that no other democracy is the successor state of a regime that killed 6 million Jewish people and set the European continent on fire, with up to 20 million deaths in six years in Europe alone. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “German far-right politician on trial for alleged use of banned Nazi slogan”

Höcke has made abundantly clear in public statements how he understands Germany’s National Socialist past. He has referred to the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and said that history is not black-and-white when asked to comment about Nazism. Elon Musk’s apparent support for Höcke should not come as a surprise given their shared antisemitic and Islamophobic views. The South African businessman has launched antisemitic tropes against Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. According to Musk, Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” The AfD, like so many other far-right movements around the world, has also targeted Soros. Furthermore, Musk recently espoused the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.” Musk’s Islamophobia does certainly not lag behind. The “X” owner agreed with a far-right blogger who said France has been conquered by Islam. Again, Musk’s Islamophobia is a perfect fit for the AfD. The party was accurately described as having “a manifestly anti-Muslim program” by an independent commission established after a right-wing terrorist killed nine people, who had originally come as migrants, in Hanau in February 2020. 

Musk and the AfD have supported each other in the past. In September 2023, the billionaire criticized the German government’s funding of NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean and called people to vote for the AfD. Three months later, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said Musk’s takeover of Twitter was good for “freedom of opinion in Germany.” One of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, has supported Musk in his ongoing confrontation with the Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The judge is demanding that “X” close accounts spreading fake news in Brazil. Since then, Musk has become a hero for the Brazilian far-right backing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

The mutual sympathies between Musk and German-speaking far-right radicals also extend to the Austrian political scene. According to Harald Vilimsky, a member of the European Parliament for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Musk’s overtake of Twitter represented an end to censorship. The FPÖ, founded in 1955, has a far longer history than the AfD, established in 2013. Their political programs, however, defend similar far-right positions and both parties are members of the Identity and Democracy Party group in the European Parliament, one of the two far-right groups at the European level.

Meanwhile, in March 2024, Martin Sellner, the leader of the radical right group Identitarian Movement in Austria, was interrupted by the local police while delivering one of his racist speeches in the small Swiss municipality of Tegerfelden, close to Germany. When Sellner posted about the police action against him, Musk replied by asking whether this was legal. Sellner, taking a page from Höcke’s self-victimization, said that “challenging illegal immigration is becoming increasingly riskier than immigrating illegally.” The local police were simply enforcing a legal provision that allows them to force people out of the region if they “behave in a prohibited manner.” Sadly enough, Sellner is used to spreading his racist propaganda with impunity.

Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement’s hatred against migrants knows no limits. This transnational group of radicals hired a ship in 2017 to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from assisting boats in distress. Once they ran into technical problems, the Identitarians were helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO that normally rescues migrants instead of radical racists. The Identitarians have directly benefited from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. After Musk bought the company, Sellner’s account on the social platform, and also that of his Identitarian Movement, were reinstated. Twitter had blocked the accounts in 2020 as they violated the rules to prevent the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism that the social platform had in place back then. In his first post after his Twitter account was reinstated, Sellner explicitly thanked Musk for “making the platform more open again.” Sellner was denied entry to the United States in 2019 because he had a $1,700 donation from the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019. 

In January 2024, the independent German investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his proposals for the deportation of millions of migrants with foreign citizenship and Germans with a migration background in a secret meeting in November 2023. The encounter in Potsdam, organized by two German businessmen, counted with the participation of Roland Hartwig (who at the time was the personal aide of the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel) and Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt. Some members of the “Werteunion” (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the center-right CDU, were also in attendance. The findings by Correctiv finally led the CDU to cut its ties to the “Werteunion”. 

The lack of open displays of support for Höcke in Halle last week was comforting. Even more positive were the mass protests against the far-right politician and the AfD in front of the court. However, recent polls in both Germany and Austria are reason for great concern. The AfD would currently receive around 18% of the votes and finish second in an election to the German parliament. Meanwhile, its Austrian counterpart, the FPÖ, would be close to 30% of the national vote and emerge as the strongest party. Austria will vote this autumn, whereas elections in Germany should take place at the end of 2025. 

In both Germany and Austria, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Brazil, the far-right is benefiting from Musk’s support and open-door policy to radicals on “X.” Needless to say, though, Musk is just offering a new platform to very old ideas. The far-right’s threat would hardly be less serious if the billionaire had a sudden political conversion. What to do, then? One of the banners at the demonstration against Höcke in Halle pointed to the holistic approach that will be needed to counter the far-right. The banner read “AfD Stoppen! Juristisch, Politisch, Gesellschaftlich.” In English: “Stopping AfD! Judicially, Politically, Socially.” 

Charges that these peaceful on-campus rallies are antisemitic in character are bad faith propaganda by hard line ethno-nationalists who have long striven to equate criticism of Israeli government policy with bigotry toward Jews — a ridiculous proposition. If accepted, this strategy would imply that criticism of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico is a form of bigotry toward Chicanos. If so, no one has more racialist prejudice toward Chicanos than Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The only documented antisemitic slurs have been shouted in the street in New York beyond the Columbia University campus, by outsiders rather than students and faculty. Any bigotry toward Jews is completely unacceptable and wholly contemnible.

The campus demonstrations are instead being driven by outrage at six months of war crimes committed by the fascist government now in power in Israel, which includes ministers who are the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.

It is bad enough that presidents of major American universities are having their students and faculty arrested for “trespassing” on their own campus, with many of them suspended and forced out of their dorms (for which they paid and the rental terms of which they had not violated).

Those same presidents of leading institutions of higher education in the U.S. have stood completely silent as the extremist government in Israel has destroyed every last university in Gaza, leaving 88,000 students stranded and their education interrupted, for who knows how long. Many of them may forever be deprived of their degree.

The Israeli military has also murdered from the sky 5,479 students and 261 teachers .

Reliefweb notes,

“As of 30 March, the Education Cluster estimates that 87.7% of all school buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 212 school buildings have had a direct hit and could be severely damaged and a further 282 have sustained moderate, minor or likely damage. Previously 503,500 children attended, and 18,900 teachers taught at the school buildings which have now had a direct hit or sustained major or moderate damage. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed.”

The dead include hundreds of undergraduates and over a hundred professors, as well as three presidents of universities.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth is the only one I know of to have publicly denounced this situation (thanks to Laila Lalami for tipping me to this piece).

Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.

About 19 institutions of higher education, including 12 universities, in Gaza served 88,000 students and employed 5200 staff and faculty before October 7, since which time they have all been closed and several have been demolished.

As I wrote last winter, the buildings of the al-Azhar University in south Gaza have been largely destroyed by Israeli shelling.

The following footage from TikTok shows the bombing of al-Azhar University in Gaza in November.

@pandapunk303 The sad part is they wont face any punishment. #freepalestine🇵🇸❤️ #alazhar #alazharuniversity #freepalestine #palestine #gaza #istandwithpalestine #foryou #fyp #crime #university #school #speakup #tiktoknew #wow #sad #messedup ♬ سبحان الله – Ali Dawud

The footage below says it shows the state last winter of al-Azhar University in Gaza:

“Destruction of Al-Azhar University in Gaza”

Al-Azhar University in Gaza was established in 1991 by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular rival of Hamas. It is not related to the al-Azhar in Cairo. It had 14,391 students and 387 faculty members, though some of these are now dead and none of them have any buildings in which to learn or teach. It had been ranked around 171 out of 200 among Arab regional universities, and it is amazing that it wasn’t at the bottom given that it functioned in an occupied territory under economic siege since 2007.

This was AUG’s medical school.

AU Gaza Kulliyat al-Tibb

That medical school is now not graduating doctors, to say the least.

This scholasticide is not an accident and it has nothing to do with a “war on Hamas” or “self-defense.” It is the typical gutting of a colonized people’s consciousness by a settler colonial state. These actions are intended to cripple Palestinian education and Palestinian culture in Gaza. Israeli leaders have made no secret of their hope to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the Strip entirely.

Hordes of settlers continue to wreck havoc in Palestinian occupied territory .. another attack on Al-Mughair village near Ramallah that left a 35 year old man dead and so many houses and cars burnt. #ApartheidIsrael pic.twitter.com/pBcXuOMzqi

— Amal Jadou (@AmalJadou7) April 12, 2024

Palestinian civilians, especially in villages in area C have been abandoned by the world, and so, for that matter, have all the Palestinian populations facing the violence of armed Israeli settlers. The expansion of the Israeli settlements, considered illegal under International Law, and built on stolen Palestinian land, goes on at its fastest rate ever. Meanwhile, Israel exploits the diversion of the world’s attention by its barbaric assault on the Gaza strip to strengthen its grip on the West Bank.

According to a recent UN report which covers the period from November 1 2022 to October 31 2023, illegal Israeli settlements expanded at unprecedented rate since records began in 2017. Approximately, 24,300 units were advanced in existing Israeli settlements including 9670 in East Jerusalem. The same report also highlighted that about 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank including 465,000 mainly live in area C in the West bank and 230,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Displacement or small scale ethnic cleansing were also carried out against Palestinian herding communities. This uprooted about 1105 Palestinians from 28 herding communities from their land between January 2022 and September 2023. Further 878 people including 435 children from 15 herding communities were displaced between 7th and 23rd of October 2023.

The figure of 700,000 settlers is particularly alarming. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, in 2002, the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank was 380,000 settlers. This massive increase reflects how different Israeli governments worked tirelessly to almost double the number of settlers in the West Bank in 21 years. Such a doubling was also pursued by Israel after it signed the Oslo Accord with the PLO in1993, promising to withdraw from the Palestinian territories by 1997.

It is ironic that the Oslo Accords which were supposed to lead to peace and the creation of a Palestinian state, were followed by the creation of ever more Israeli settlements after dividing the West Bank into areas A, B and C, killing any hope for just peace. To illustrate, area A is about 18 percent of the West Bank and encompasses the main urban areas. Most matters there are under the authority of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Area B is about 21 percent of the West Bank. It is under joint control between Israel and the PA , which affects health, education and the economy. 60 percent of the West Bank is area C. It is mainly rural, and is where the Palestinians have their main agricultural land, so that it is crucial for their food security. Israel is in full control in this area.

The Israeli refusal to withdraw as agreed enabled Israel to deny the Palestinians permits to build new homes in most of the West Bank while construction in the illegal Israeli settlements was accelerated. These discriminatory policies forced desperate Palestinians to build without Israeli permission. Many of those who dared to do so had their homes demolished by Israel. Between 2009 and 2022, 9,128 Palestinian homes were demolished, causing the displacement of 13,171 Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli government offers the Israeli settlers a wide range of financial incentives and subsidies, including but not exclusive of grants and preferential loans to buy property, reduced land prices, reduced taxes for individual and businesses and crucially, indemnity to compensate for any loss of income resulting from EU custom duties. This institutional racism is another manifestation of an apartheid state and settler colonialism.

CBC News Video: “West Bank engulfed by wave of settler violence”

For economic reasons, these racist policies are designed to encourage more Israelis to live on stolen Palestinian land in breach of the international law. This strategy is aimed at easing the demand on housing inside Israel and speeding up its colonization of the West Bank ahead of its declared plan to annex area C to Israel. These policies, combined with the settlers violence will force more Palestinians out of area C towards the already crowded and smaller areas of A and B. This is already causing property price inflation and decreasing affordability. Additionally, these areas are already subjected to frequent Israeli raids, sieges and extrajudicial executions. This is besides other socioeconomic problems such as unemployment and poverty caused mainly by the Israeli occupation.

While the world’s influential governments are allowing Israel to carry on with its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, the same governments are turning a blind eye to Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Alas the Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and all the Palestinian factions in the West Bank are spectators, watching as if they are neutral without even attempting to organize an effective non-violent campaign to boycott Israeli products. If things continue as they are now, it is only a matter of time before the West Bank will face an ethnic cleansing similar to what happened in the 1948 Nakbah.

Defending itself from Iran’s drones and missiles cost the Israelis alone an estimated 4-5 billion shekels ($1.08-1.35billion). This does not include the cost to US citizens of $1 billion in countering Houthi and Iranian missiles and drones targeted at Israel. Israel’s initial limited response on April 19 through a drone attack on a military base in Isfahan leaves room for de-escalation of tension over a full-scale war.

Iran’s first direct attack on Israel hit the Nevatim airbase, a mere 40 miles south of Jerusalem, practically implying an Iranian credible deterrence capability if the potency of the deterrence is questioned. Prospects for a wider conflict in the region involving Russia and China remain, risking an ultimate nuclear exchange that should remain ‘unthinkable.’ Strategic partners Russia and China have Tehran’s back, and their role in West Asia’s conflict will only grow if the US doesn’t keep Israel in check. Whilst the war in Gaza and the Lebanon-Israel border continues. Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza, killing over 34000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, with the vast majority women and children, has turned public opinion against Israel. And, Israel’s attempts to destroy UNRWA — the backbone of relief efforts in Gaza — with its slow, meticulous, and often arbitrary inspection of trucks have further complicated aid delivery.

What indelibly marks these events, aside from the military and political calculations and implications for the region, is that they have occurred in violation of provisions of international law, including, but not exclusively, the breach of sovereignty, international humanitarian laws, laws of war,  crimes against humanity, wars of aggression, and according to a preliminary ICJ ruling, possibly the articles of 1948 genocide convention. Israel’s ‘ironclad’ supporter, the United States, is construed, therefore, as an accomplice in the crime of genocide through its arms transfers to Israel, and vetoes in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to end Israel’s almost seven-month-old military operation in Gaza. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “Nearly 200 bodies found in mass grave at hospital in Gaza’s Khan Younis”

A closer look at the post-Cold war period since 1990 reveals persistent US violations of international law, generally related to the 75-year-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The United States has paid a heavy financial and political, and now explicit moral, price for its protection of the state of Israel. But the biggest victim of this ‘special relation’ has been the very foundation of the liberal international order. The United States’ (along with its Western allies in NATO) double-standard views and application of provisions of international law have been detrimental to an orderly global governance, A major culprit for such liberal/illiberal dichotomy in rhetoric and practice is the US blind commitment to the state of Israel.  

The end of the Cold War promised the End of History and the beginning of a ‘New World Order.’ It promised that globalization of trade and finance and the technological revolution in information technology, transportation, and communication means the falsity of a looming ‘Clash of Civilizations.’ 

The United States experienced almost unprecedented economic prosperity in the 1990s and the European allies celebrated the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. The Eastern European countries abandoned communism and joined the ranks of capitalist countries and the European Union. China continued with its miraculous economic performance welcomed Western investments and traded and cooperated in the Security Council curtailing the Iranian nuclear program. Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation similarly welcomed privatization. But,   structural adjustment policies resulted in a defunct privatization of state-owned properties, and with inadequate legal and institutional mechanisms to prevent the rise of the new oligarchs and ‘parasitic capitalism.’ 

Ironically, the new world order was to emerge on the ruins of Iraq after the 1990-91 first Persian Gulf war. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 on 29 November 1990 authorized the first UNSC collective security action against an aggressor since the 1950-53 Korean War. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 triggered the first Persian Gulf war, but we also witnessed 30 scud missiles hitting Israel as Saddam Hussein attempted to expand the war and turn it into another Arab-Palestinian-Israeli war. The Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) was a bloody confrontation between two Muslim countries with opposing views on Islam, power politics, and what constitutes national interest. Yet, the revolutionary state in Iran saw the liberation of al-Quds (Jerusalem) to follow the liberation of Shia holy sites in Kerbala and Najaf in Iraq. Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric and actions have remained steadfast since the advent of the revolution. 

The US Mideast policy immediately after WWII focused primarily on countering communism and securing the flow of cheap oil from the region which demanded dealing with authoritarian Arab regimes fearful of both the threat of communism and radical ideas that may threaten the status quo on the resource power parameters in the state-society relations. Still, the thorny Palestinian issue was two-pronged, and the Arab states fought against and cooperated with Israel to contain Palestinian nationalism. The Arab Israeli wars have always involved competing Arab, Israeli, and Palestinian nationalisms, compounded with inter-Arab states’ political rivalries, sectarianism, and US (and Israeli) interventions during and after the Cold War. Recall, the Arab-Israel-Palestinian wars with such hallmarks, including 1948, 1956, 1967-70, 1973, and 1982-85 (Lebanon) wars.

Regional wars bearing similar traits and related to the wider Palestinian nationalism include the first Persian Gulf War (1990-91), Intifada I (1987-1990), Intifada II (2000-2005), Lebanon (2006), and 15 wars involving Gaza alone since 1948, including the Gazan wars of 2008-09, 2014, 2018-19, and now the ongoing 2023-24 war. No wonder, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the mother of all wars in the region. The conflict over the years has fed the radicalization of politics in the region. The Islamic movements have rallied around the issue of the liberation of Palestine and al-Quds (Jerusalem) to mobilize popular support in advancing political and religious legitimacy in the absence of a viable democratic rule. The 22 authoritarian Arab states, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Türkiye have also been intimately involved with the Palestinian issue.   

The United States has relied on its hard and soft power to lead a liberal global order since World War II. The Cold War preoccupation with polarity and deterrence based on a doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) complicated the plans for a liberal international system, beginning with the creation of the Bretton-Woods gold-based, fixed-rate exchange system and its institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). The principle behind the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) eventually developed into the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, as the Europeans’ attempts at integration since 1951 progressed into the creation of the European Union in 1993. Other rule-based regional economic integration also appeared in Asia, Africa, South and North America. Contrary to the unstable interwar period that saw the rise of Nazism and Fascism, the post-WWII ‘peaceful’ international system witnessed 51 founding members of the UN in 1945 increase to 193 countries today. 

The United States’ commitment to the security of the state of Israel has been a dominant theme in its Middle Eastern policy since its creation in 1948 but also at the expense of its advocacy for a liberal-based international law and order. The US has over decades dispensed billions of dollars in economic and military aid premising it on Israel as a strategic ally in countering communism, helping the flow of oil, and keeping Arab radicalism at bay. Israel has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, collecting about $300 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance. The US diplomatic coverage of Israel also is unconstructive; the UN data shows it has vetoed dozens of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions critical of Israel, including at least 53 since 1972.

A review of debates in Congress and data analysis also shows, “Members of Congress have consistently debated and passed resolutions in support of Israel and in repudiation of its foes, showing strong bipartisan support for Israel.” The US’s unequivocal support of Israel has seen it prevent resolutions condemning, among others, violence against protesters, illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank built since 1967. The US meanwhile has obliged its NATO allies, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and Jordan in its quest to protect Israel and in support of authoritarian Arab states!

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the ‘mother of all conflicts’ in the MENA region that has intimately influenced or been influenced by Arab nationalism, the Islamic movements, the radicalization of politics, and overall governance in the region. To the neglect of elsewhere in Africa, the Sahel region has experienced five military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, and Gabon. Whilst, Tunisia, Chad, and Sudan have experienced constitutional coups and widespread violence in the case of Sudan. The US Africa Command since 2008  has been involved in military training of African states to counter the Russian and Chinese military and economic inroads in the Continent.  

The restoration of a global liberal order necessitates a uniform and unbiased application of the expectations, norms, and laws of international law. Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel from Gaza, the world has witnessed the continuing degradation of the norms and laws and the expectations of behavior in the so-called international liberal order. The Israeli overreaction to the Hamas attack resembles the United States’ initial response to the terrorist attack on its soil on September 11, 2001. In that instance, the United States, for the sake of revenge, self-defense, or the restoration of international order, took measures that violated the very norms, laws, and expectations of the international system which Washington had championed for decades. The United States in less than a month began bombing Afghanistan and quickly overthrew the ruling Taliban regime and chased al Qaeda fighters across the border into Pakistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond. This story, however, did not end there. The US declared a ‘War on Terror’ resulting in a policy of regime change beginning with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, Moammar Qaddafi in Libya, and unsuccessful attempts in Syria and Yemen.  

Estimates of direct civilians killed due to American military intervention totals stand at least 400,000 since 9/11. The number of people killed indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, including in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, is estimated at 3.6-3.8 million, though the precise figure remains unknown. This brings the estimated total of direct and indirect deaths to 4.5-4.7 million. Similarly, the Israeli overreaction after the tragic events of October 7, 2023, resulting in 1200 Israelis killed, has already led to 34,000 Palestinian dead, with women and children accounting for the majority, not accounting for thousands injured, maimed, traumatized, and remain unaccounted for. The deadly Israeli assault on Gaza has also led to the death of many journalists, members of the NGOs, and the destruction of hospitals and mosques. 

International law today remains incomplete and in need of drastic structural changes, e.g., a reform of the UNSC membership and power structure, a revisiting of the adjudication power of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) and its ‘compulsory’ jurisdiction, the World Trade’s provisions for labor and environmental protection, and a serious re-commitment to empower UN and its functional agencies with necessary resources. The United States unconditional support for Israel and its lack of attention to the welfare of peoples in the MENA region, as well as elsewhere in the developing world, in pursuit of peace, human security, and good governance, is detrimental to the universal compliance and voluntary adherence to the norms and rules of international law.    

The US national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the US economy to crash. That is, the US Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.

The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes (see below).

Israel’s bombing raids, including against designated safe areas in Gaza, continued daily this week. On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force bombed a house in the center of Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have been pushed from the north, killing six persons and wounding others. Rafah had been designated a safe zone by the Israelis when they were trying to force people down there.

Emma Graham-Harrison writes at The Guardian, “Ahmed Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter Alaa. ‘They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children,’ he told Associated Press on Saturday, crying as he cradled Alaa’s body, wrapped in a white shroud, and gently rocked her. ‘This is a world devoid of all human values and morals.'”

Saturday’s strikes brought the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 8 to over 34,000, Graham-Harrison reports. These numbers exclude more thousands buried under rubble when Israeli fighter-jets destroyed civilian apartment buildings. Some 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded, 12,000 of them children (see below).

On Wednesday through Friday of this week, Israeli bombing raids killed 113 Palestinians and injured 169 Palestinians.

UNICEF said this week that 12,000 children, at the very least, have been wounded by Israeli bombardment or other fire since last October.

That comes to 70 children injured every day, or nearly 3 every hour, one every 20 minutes or so. Since some 13,000 children have been killed, that means that a child has been either killed or wounded every 10 minutes.

Spokesperson Tess Ingram Ingram said,

“”I left Gaza yesterday after spending two weeks there. It was my second mission into Gaza this year. By far, what struck me most about this mission was the number of wounded children. Not just in the hospitals, but on the streets. In their makeshift shelters . . . their lives forever changed by the horrors of war.”

Half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Of 36, only 11 are still partially functioning, mainly as warehouses for the sick and wounded since they lack “needles, stitches, anaesthetic.” Children lie on mattresses or floors “languishing in pain.”

Despite the desperate need for medavac transportation of these children, many amputees, from Gaza, only 3,500 such requests have been granted in over six months.

Guardian News Video: “‘I can’t find food’: despair in Gaza as children face malnutrition”

WHO says that in northern Gaza, between 12% and 16.5% of children (6-59 months) have been stricken with with acute malnutrition, and 3% of children have severe acute malnutrition. In southern Gaza, 2-6% of children have acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition presents with substantial muscle wasting in the arms, unnatural thinness, and build-up of fluid and swelling in the feet. Acute malnutrition has the same symptoms but they are less exaggerated. Even a short bout of malnutrition leaves children with permanent cognitive deficits and learning disabilities.

In April, 15% of the aid missions to northern Gaza and to parts of southern Gaza that require coordination with Israel have been denied by Israeli authorities, often on arbitrary grounds.

Because Israel cut off potable water or destroyed its delivery systems with bombing, and because 270,000 tons of solid waste has accumulated in the absence of hygiene services, WHO recorded 345,768 cases of diarrhea, with 105,635 cases in children under 5. In toddlers and infants such gastrointestinal diseases can eaily lead to fatal dehydration. Without an immediate ceasefire, a team at Johns Hopkins has predicted that 11% of the deaths in Gaza over the next four months will be from epidemic diseases.

Israel is using facial recognition programs and drones to locate and kill the 37,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, but at least 10% of their identifications are wrong, and they often strike at these individuals when they are surrounded by their wives, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary. Most of these members had no knowledge of the October 7 attack, which was planned and carried out by a small clique. The Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure and the imposition of starvation on the population are forms of illegal collective punishment.

Viewers accustomed to American media will likely blame Iran for any intensification of hostilities. In fact, however, virtually every act of aggression that has taken place in the region since October 8^th is rooted in Israel’s ‘war’ on Gaza, which has deep roots not only in the European colonial past but in religious mythology and a Zionist ideology that is rigid, chauvinistic and exclusive. All three factors underscore the belief that Jews alone have a right to historic Palestine.

Across America, as the carefully choreographed Iranian “attack” played out like a fireworks display on our television screens, Hudia –a friend of mine in Rafah, Gaza—recorded her thoughts:

“Was Iran allowed to attack Israel so that the world’s attention would be drawn away from Gaza? If so, it was successful. Here in Gaza, however, Israel’s destruction did not stop for one second. Iranian missiles broke apart in the skies to our east, but the drones and bombs over our heads remained intact until they exploded on the ground, scattering debris and human bodies.”

On Saturday morning, 13 April 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported 33,634 Palestinians killed and 76, 214 injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7^th. By Monday morning, 15 April 2024, the death toll had increased to over 33,800 – an addition of nearly two hundred bodies—but global attention was now focused on Iran.

For the US and Israel this was a win. Herzl Halevi, Chief of Staff of Israel’s military, promised a response –a sinister pledge since Iran’s “attack” was supposed to have been the conclusion to Israel’s April 1^st bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus in which Israel targeted what is considered sovereign Iranian territory, according to the 1961 Vienna Convention.

The Young Turks Video: “Israel Attacks Iran After Vowing Retaliation”

With this strike, Israel killed 16 people, including seven IRCG soldiers, two of whom were high-ranking officers, Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Mohammad Hadi Haj Rahimi.

Halevi and his associates in Israel understood the attack in Syria would have consequences beyond fulminations against the ‘Zionist entity.’ For the first time in its history, the Islamic Republic of Iran struck back at Israel. But this was little more than a face-saving measure.

Iran gave the US fair warning –allowing it to caution its embassy staff in Israel not to travel – and appears to have aimed most of its weapons at the Nevatim Air Base in southern Israel, where the F-35 that struck Damascus began its flight. This was a largely symbolic strike, one that aimed “to minimize casualties while maximizing spectacle.”

Iran is uninterested in regional war, least of all one that involves the United States. Why then are the Israelis so keen to hit back at Iran?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the opportunity to justify a retaliatory attack. He has openly sought such a war for nearly 30 years. Although US President Joe Biden told Israel the US would not participate in any Israeli action against Iran, he has repeatedly told Israel US support is “ironclad”. If Iran attacks Israel again US participation is therefore guaranteed.

The American Israeli tango taking place has other curious features. When the US bombed several Middle East targets after three American service personnel were killed at Tower 22 in Jordan, Iran called on allied militia groups to cease all attacks against US bases in the region. After the Israeli strike in Damascus the Iranians held the United States responsible, placing US troops in danger yet again.

Rather than express anger at Israel, the US, UK, and France blocked a UN resolution condemning Israel’s actions.  Iran’s offer not to hit back militarily if the UN condemned Israel’s actions was ignored. The United States was therefore instrumental in fueling Iran’s counterattack.

In Egypt and Qatar, Hamas negotiators have repeatedly demanded a permanent ceasefire in exchange for all the hostages taken on October 7^th, yet Israeli negotiators have consistently refused insisting they must defeat Hamas in Gaza before the fighting stops. One result has been a surge in Hamas’ popularity across the Middle East; another is that the hostages remain in captivity. The US vetoed three UNSC resolutions demanding a ceasefire, abstained once, falsely claiming the resolution was “non-binding;” and continues to entertain Israel’s plan to invade Rafah.

With global attention focused on Israeli-Iranian tensions, Netanyahu can claim at least a partial victory. What better way to salvage Israel’s image, battered by its genocidal actions in Gaza, than to spearhead an assault against the “Axis of Resistance”?

Israel can again claim it is a tiny, beleaguered nation fighting valiantly against “terrorism” and Islamic ‘treachery’ with Hamas (and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) portrayed as the agents of Tehran. As such, Hamas is but one arm of the sinister ‘octopus’ whose head is the Islamic Republic and whose other arms include Hizbullah of Lebanon, Ansar Allah of Yemen, Syria, and various Iraqi paramilitaries.

For some in the West, Palestine is just a fig leaf covering the Axis’ greater goal of destroying Israel, instrumentalized by antisemites and shadowy anti-enlightenment villains determined to overthrow Western civilization. The protection of the Jewish State then becomes a moral duty.

Instead of being seen as a rogue nation pulverizing the Gaza Strip into oblivion, Israel will try to convince the world that its destruction of Gaza is to protect the world we know. If Palestinians have already been dehumanized to the extent that genocidal murder and displacement raise few eyebrows, they can be partly de-nationalized as well. Palestine will no longer be the central issue; our core Western values, of which Israel is a key representative, are under threat.

Is this the framework Netanyahu and his cohorts here and in Israel wish to reinforce? If so, they can ‘rightly’ conclude that demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and ignoring Iran’s attack are suicidal. Hudia writes,

“Iran’s attack did nothing but divert attention from what’s happening here. Hundreds of Iranian drones and rockets evaporated into the atmosphere achieving nothing but heightened tensions with Israel, giving them greater license than ever to carry on with genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

On Friday morning, Israel launched missile strikes on military bases near the Iranian city of Isfahan.

A desperate Netanyahu, seeing Western support for his total war on Gaza collapsing, began this tit-for-tat cycle by launching an assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria on April 1^st 2024.   The Israeli government knew what they were doing.  Netanyahu was baiting Tehran into a reaction, which he got.

Iran responded with a missile and drone barrage on April 13. Almost all these projectiles, however, were shot down by the United States, since Iran had openly telegraphed its intentions.

The context for this exchange of strikes is the Israeli assault on Gaza. Netanyahu’s government has killed more than 34,000 people.  The numbers are not clear, since the ones under the rubbles of Gaza cannot even be calculated.

14,000 children.

Today, Gaza is worse than Dresden after the war.  

Hamas, of course also committed atrocities against the Israeli population on October 7. Over 600 innocent, noncombatant Israelis were killed, alongside more than 400 Israeli military personnel.  Many of the civilians were peace-loving people, who disagreed with their own government’s punitive policies toward the Palestinians. The response of the far-right wing Netanyahu government, however, has been vastly disproportionate.

Another issue between the two countries has been Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program to create fuel for its reactor. Netanyahu fears that it can easily be militarized, and had created a spectacle at the UN showing off Iran’s alleged nuclear capabilities.   

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) refuted him, insisting that Iran has no military nuclear program.

Netanyahu’s charges obscured the imbalance of power between the two countries. Considering that Israel has 300 nukes, Iran, which has none, can be wiped off the map in a matter of minutes.

The IAEA’s assurances notwithstanding, the Israeli government under various Israeli administrations has assassinated nuclear scientists inside Iran. 

Israel, with the help of the expatriate Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) organization, which was until recently on the US State Department terrorism list, also stole nuclear data from Iran.

Then, Trump came along, and he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, to which Iran had scrupulously adhered, mothballing 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program for promised sanctions relief that was never granted.

The decision to rip up the deal was made in Tel Aviv, not in Washington. 

Now, Mr. Netanyahu  has a last chance to get his allies to rally behind him when both his support at home and internationally has dissipated. Since the war in Gaza has not gone well and has isolated his regime, his government, a very right-wing government, is looking for alternatives.

CNN Video: “Israel has attacked Iran, US official tells CNN”

The Islamic Republic has been been building deterrence by supporting the various groups in the Middle East, whether Houthis, Hezbollah or Hamas.

Several IRGC commanders were assassinated, including Ghassem Soleimani. 

The shadow war has continued.  Hezbollah launched missiles at the territory of Israel.   Houthis fired on cargo ships in support of Gaza. 

In his most recent speech at the UN, the Israeli ambassador compared the regime in Tehran to the Nazi regime.   How can an educated person even compare the two?  The Nazi regime eliminated millions of Jews and others. 

Iran has the largest Jewish community after Israel.  Khamenei is no Eichmann, despite what Netanyahu keeps alleging.

We, as Iranians and Iranian Americans wish for a better Iran without the rule of the clerics.   But not at the expense of the disintegration of Iran.  There is no question that has been Netanyahu’s wish. 

Many years ago, at a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, I remember the notorious Michael Ledeen had invited non-various actors from different ethnic minorities of Iran. Those speaking on their behalf did not even represent the Iranian minorities.  At the end of the conference, where Paul Wolfowitz was also there, (the one who advised Bush to go to Iraq) all the speakers said we want a united Iran.

It was a total failure. 

To this day, Iran has been a united nation and Iran is a nation state. 

Iranians want a regime change but not by the help of any foreign entities, but rather with their own volition.

No war is going to solve anything.   We are all united against a war on Israel or the Israeli nation and on Iran and the Iranian nation.

We need clearer, sounder voices to come to the fore.

 In the words of the great Sufi poet of Iran, Rumi,

“Out beyond the idea
of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field, I’ll meet you there.”

We are for peace.   But those in power in Israel and in Iran do not want peace. 

They are itching for war.