The Middle East is in flames. Britain is being dragged into an illegal war, the aims of which are entirely unclear, reports Richard Sanders of Double Down News.

“It’s a war of choice, and the man who chose it is Benjamin Netanyahu. Why, yet again, is the West dancing to Israel’s tune?

“I’ve made a number of videos exposing Israeli crimes. This one is different. It’s directed at conservatives and people generally who support the state of Israel.

“I believe our indulgence of Israel is not just morally wrong. It’s against the interests of the US and the UK and ultimately against the interests of Israel itself.

“It is leading us all to disaster. Palestine is the place you come thundering, crashing into the buffers, the limits of the Western liberal moral imagination.

“The tragedy and complexity of Israel is that it’s both a product of the most unspeakable racism and a cause of it. Zionism was born from the suffering of Jewish people in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, from a desire for a safe haven, a territory where Jews would for once be the hosts and not the eternal guests.

“It was framed as a return to a historic biblical homeland. and for its supporters. These two factors give it an entirely different complexion morally from other enterprises where predominantly European populations have settled far-flung parts of the world.

Dispossession and subjugation
“There’s no doubt that the Zionist dream has enormous emotional power. The problem, of course, is the other side of the equation, the people. It was inflicted upon the Palestinians whose experience of dispossession and subjugation was no different from that of countless other peoples subjected to European colonialism.

“In fact, arguably, it’s been considerably worse than many, precisely because of the licence and indulgence granted to the Israeli state.

“Let’s lay out the bold, indisputable facts. In 1948, more than 80 percent of the Palestinian population of what became Israel fled their homes. Now, if you want to believe this was not an act of deliberate ethnic cleansing, fine.

“What’s undeniable is that they were never allowed to return. In 1947, they were there. In 1949, they were not. The granting of the vote to that small fragment of the Palestinian population that remained provided a democratic fig leaf for the new state, one that was blown away once the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967.

The End of Israel                                     Documentary: Double Down News

“There Palestinians have no right to vote for the political entity, the state of Israel that controls their lives. Jewish settlers, on the other hand, occupying the same territory do.

“Even in East Jerusalem, which as far as the Israeli government is concerned has been formally annexed to Israel, Palestinians cannot vote. Political rights depend upon ethnicity. That is not democracy.

“Israel is and has always been a state whose defining feature is that it’s structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another. What else does the term a Jewish state mean?

‘Elephant in the room’
“This is the elephant in the room. the simple, blindingly obvious, undeniable fact that the Western political media class has decided that we must never mention or acknowledge, despite the fact that all of the world’s leading human rights organisations, including the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, have denounced Israel as an apartheid state.

“Now scour the history of the modern world. No people has ever resigned itself to being second class citizens in their own country. Spend just 10 minutes at a checkpoint in the West Bank and you get it.

“The disfiguring dehumanisation, the humiliation of elderly men and women forced to stand in the sun for hours waiting for 18-year-olds to search them.

“The brutalisation of young men in particular, the daily control of rage that is the lot of every Palestinian. It is simply emotionally, psychologically intolerable.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

In a stunning resignation that has sent shockwaves through Washington, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent has exposed what many have long suspected but few have dared to state publicly — Israel is systematically undermining peace in the Middle East to serve its own expansionist agenda.

Joe Kent, a 20-year Army Special Forces veteran and Gold Star husband who lost his first wife in a Syria suicide bombing, didn’t mince words. His accusation is simple yet devastating: Israel is intentionally sabotaging diplomatic solutions because peace threatens its strategic objectives.

The most compelling evidence supporting Kent’s claim is the targeted assassination of Ali Larijani, Iran’s National Security Adviser and chief nuclear negotiator.

According to Kent, Larijani wasn’t just another Iranian official — he was actively engaged in negotiations that could have de-escalated regional tensions.

“Larijani was eager to get us a deal,” Kent revealed in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

But instead of pursuing diplomacy, US-Israeli strikes eliminated him, along with his son and several staff members. The message could not be clearer — anyone willing to negotiate for peace becomes a target.

This wasn’t just another military operation. Larijani represented the pragmatic wing of the Iranian establishment — someone capable of conducting the sorts of talks needed to end conflicts.

By eliminating him, Israel ensured that the path to negotiation was closed, leaving only the path of escalation.

Energy warfare masquerading as security
Kent’s second explosive claim involves energy infrastructure. He argues that strategic opportunities — particularly Qatar’s gas potential to stabilise global markets — have been deliberately targeted to increase tensions rather than reduce them .

The facts support him. On March 18, 2026, Israel launched a significant aerial assault on Iran’s South Pars gas field, which provides nearly 70 percent of Iran’s domestic gas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted Israel “acted alone” in this attack.

The result? Iran retaliated by striking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City — the world’s premier LNG hub — damaging approximately 17 percent of Qatar’s export capacity .

Global gas prices surged toward US$117 per barrel. The UK benchmark peaked at almost 183p per therm. Markets destabilised. And for what?

Here is the inconvenient truth, a stable energy market benefiting from Qatari and Iranian gas would reduce conflict incentives. By attacking this infrastructure, Israel ensured that economic interdependence — often the foundation of lasting peace — remains impossible.

Even President Trump distanced himself from the attack, stating the US “knew nothing about this particular strike” and describing it as Israel “violently lashing out”. When an American president feels compelled to publicly disavow his closest regional ally’s actions, something is fundamentally broken.

The ‘clean break’ strategy: 30 years of sabotage
Kent’s accusations didn’t emerge from nowhere. They reflect a consistent pattern dating back to 1996, when a group of neoconservatives — including figures who would later serve in the Bush administration — produced a policy paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”.

This document, prepared for Netanyahu, explicitly rejected the “land for peace” formula and proposed reordering the Middle East through military confrontations and regime change. It identified Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Iran as targets.

It called for “removing Saddam Hussein from power” and “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria”.

Three decades later, we’re living the consequences. The Iraq war cost thousands of American lives. Syria descended into a catastrophic civil war. And now Iran faces sustained attacks. All while Israel’s security — not America’s — remained the central objective.

Kent’s resignation letter directly connected these dots: “It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby . . .  This is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war”.

The human cost
Perhaps the most damning aspect of Kent’s accusation is personal. His wife, Navy cryptologist Shannon Kent, was killed in Syria in a suicide bombing. Kent now describes that conflict as “a war manufactured by Israel”.

Think about that. A Gold Star husband — someone who paid the ultimate price for American foreign policy — is telling us that his wife died in a war that served Israeli, not American, interests. If that doesn’t demand scrutiny, what does?

Why this matters now
Critics dismiss Kent as antisemitic or claim he is leaking classified information. But ad hominem attacks don’t address the substance.

Did Israel target a negotiator actively seeking peace? Yes. Did Israel attack energy infrastructure knowing it would destabilise global markets? Yes. Does Israel have a documented 30-year strategy of military confrontation over diplomacy? Yes.

The situation in Gaza further illustrates the pattern. As one analysis noted, Netanyahu’s “ceasefire” effectively granted Israel breathing space to consolidate political control while evading accountability. Within days, Israel’s Parliament passed a bill paving the way for West Bank annexation. This isn’t peace — it’s a pause for rearmament.

The parasite metaphor
A parasite feeds on its host, weakening it while appearing inseparable from it. Israel’s relationship with American foreign policy fits this description uncomfortably well.

American blood and treasure fund Israeli objectives. American credibility suffers when allies act unilaterally. American interests in stable energy markets get sacrificed for Israeli security concerns.

Joe Kent’s accusations deserve more than reflexive dismissal. They deserve investigation. Because if a Gold Star husband and former counterterrorism chief is correct — if Israel is indeed sabotaging peace for its own ends — then Americans have a right to know why their soldiers are dying and their markets are destabilised for another nation’s strategic objectives.

The description of Israel as a parasite may be harsh. But sometimes harsh truths are the only ones that break through comfortable lies.

Israel has positioned itself as America’s indispensable ally. Kent’s resignation suggests it may actually be the parasite draining American power while sabotaging any chance of Middle Eastern peace.

Marcus Alexander is an independent writer in Doha and contributor to Channel Media Network.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Israel’s war on Iran is a direct result of a political culture that depends for survival upon a permanent state of war, says Israeli academic and left-wing activist Idan Landau in the interview that follows.

He observes that Israeli society on the whole has embraced a fascist mindset, “reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety,” and thus intolerance for dissent.

Subsequently, peace is a taboo and there is total indifference to genocidal acts and human casualties. Moreover, there is very little hope for a different trajectory, argues Landau, “as long as the US and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its actions.”

Landau is professor of linguistics and head of the department of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He writes a political blog (in Hebrew) on Israeli affairs and has been imprisoned on several occasions for his refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces reserve.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Since the Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel, the Netanyahu government embarked on a genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, expanded Jewish settlements in occupied West Bank and thus encouraged settlers to escalate West Bank terrorist attacks, exchanged fire with Hezbollah and the Houtis, then attacked Iran in what has been dubbed as the 12-Day War, and finally persuaded US President Donald Trump to go to war with Iran.

What is Israel’s endgame in terrorising the Middle East, and how has permanent war impacted Israeli society and the Israeli psyche?

IDAN LANDAU: I think the whole point of permanent war — I agree this is the most appropriate concept to use here — is that there is no endgame. Permanent war, with ever growing economic, emotional and political costs, is exactly what keeps the Israeli right-wing in power; it feeds on anxiety, paranoia and visions of imminent destruction (interestingly, our own and our enemies’ destruction, equally vivid).

Not being able to concentrate on and fully understand what’s going on is also crucial; the Israeli public is extremely underinformed about key issues, like the fraudulent nuclear talks in Geneva, the far-reaching proposals by the Lebanese government, etc. The media — always complicit, these days criminal — bombards us with caricatures of our surrounding countries.

That said, I think there is one constant, never-changing endgame lurking behind all the upheavals: The expansionist project in the West Bank. Not just Smotrich but a dedicated section within the Likkud, of right-wing religious settlers, are working tirelessly on this project, actually from the first week after October 7.

Plans for resettlement of Gaza combined with increased settlement in the West Bank (specifically, the northern Samaria, surrounding Jenin and Tulkarem) were immediately aired and pushed forward by the settlers’ lobby together with their MK partners.

The surge we now see in ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank is inherent to the overall vision of this government, and it was stated as such even before October 7 — that only gave it a huge impetus.

The impact on Israeli society is perhaps the most depressing aspect of it all. Political discourse has been reduced to hollow slogans. Every single issue in foreign affairs in framed as either “existential threat” or “unavoidable use of military force.” There’s absolutely no room for talk about non-violent paths (“peace” is a taboo even on the left).

The Enemy is an undifferentiated mass of Hamas/Iran/Hezbollah/Houthis, in short, different guises of Amalek. Much of that, as I noted, is fueled by the deliberate absence of facts and evidence for rational conduct on the part of our enemies.

Israelis live in a peculiar state of mind: total disbelief in the possibility of normal life, clinging on to the very ideology that perpetuates this state of mind.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Israel has actual and perceived enemies. But is Benjamin Netanyahu alone the actual problem behind Israel’s permanent state of war? I mean, even most of Israeli opposition supported the genocide in Gaza and it’s doing the same thing now with the war against Iran.

IDAN LANDAU: Netanyahu is the most able consolidator of all the dark impulses of Israeli society, but of course he didn’t make up anything on his own. If you go back to Begin’s speeches in the 1970s-1980s, they also constantly invoked the Holocaust as the ultimate justification for whatever Israel does.

The Messianic drive to settle the greater Israel predates Netanyahu, as well as the overall brutal, racist degradation of Palestinians inside and outside Israel. You can go on and on — nothing is new here. At most, as you note, it is the subservience of the “opposition”; I don’t recall anything like it in the past.

If you look at the governments that went to wars in 1973 and 1982, they faced considerable opposition, within the Knesset and outside of it, on the very issue of whether the war was justified (in 1973, it was clearly preventable; in 1982, it was pure imperial vanity). None of that is left today.

Which is why the temptation of permanent war is so strong: You’re guaranteed to make the willful silence of the opposition also permanent.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: In Lebanon, the Israeli armed forces are using Gaza tactics, attacking hospitals and killing medical staff, while in Iran they have engaged in what has been rightly described as chemical warfare on account of strikes on fuel depots. Isn’t the country concerned at all about its blatant assault on international law and that it has turned into a pariah state in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of the people across the globe? What happened to Israel’s labor party which combined socialism with nation-building?

IDAN LANDAU: As to the Labour Party, I always say that one should not speak ill of the dead. A handful of members of Knesset (MKs) that are obsessed with displays of liberal values and with welfare legislation when genocide is in full force and Apartheid shifts from de facto to de jure.

The other “opposition” parties are either led by generals (Golan, Eizenkot) who offer zero alternatives to military dominance, or by right-wing neoliberals (Bennet, Lapid). The only representatives of left values in the Knesset are the Arab MKs.

As to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), my impression is that Israelis are unconcerned insofar as Uncle Sam is, and it sure looks like he is, thoroughly unconcerned. The Trump administration vindictively sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) judges presiding over the Israeli case, and quite explicitly stated that IHL does not apply to the US and its allies.

There’s a lot of duplicity in Israeli discourse regarding the so-called “Principle of Complementarity”; the official response to the ICC described the “independent and robust judicial system” of Israel, which investigates any suspicions for wrongdoings. Most Israelis simply think that the rules don’t apply to us since they don’t apply to Hamas (they do apply to both parties; I already said that Israelis are shrouded in disinformation).

But even the liberals that appeal to our own “independent and robust judicial system” look ridiculous in face of the massive cover-up we witness from the beginning of the genocide; the dropping of charges against the five torturers/rapists in Sde-Teiman is but the latest instance.

Hundreds of heinous crimes did not even yield any charges.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Courageous voices against war and violence can be heard here and there across Israeli society and peace activists have organised scores of demonstrations in cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem to express their opposition to the war in Iran.

Are anti-war demonstrations really seen as a threat to national security by the Netanyahu government and even segments of the Israeli citizenry?

IDAN LANDAU: These things happen and they do lift our spirit. In honesty, I don’t think anyone views them as “a threat to national security,” that’s fascist talk. The public atmosphere is just incredibly intolerant, with or without the presence of the police, with or without any legal process.

Just try to voice your opposition to the war — any war, pick your favourite — out in the street, and you’re sure to be harassed and probably beaten by random pedestrians within 15-20 minutes. So I think it is a typical fascist all-embracing violent climate, reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety.

The mere verbal expression of “sacrilegious” opinions is seen as a personal threat to our carefully maintained peace of mind; so tenuous and feeble, that it cannot even stand to face dissent.

Point it out to Israelis and urge them to make out what it means for their confidence in what their state is doing that they must violently banish any expression of doubt and criticism (this is now the position of many journalists as well!) — well, see if you get an answer.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Israel censored reporting on the genocide in Gaza. Is the same thing happening now with the war in Iran?

IDAN LANDAU: Luckily, the IDF doesn’t control the entrance and exit to Iran. So we don’t have the brute force censorship, instead it’s the good old “filter and distort and leave out the context” censorship.

They would report civilian casualties only if forced (because it’s getting too much international media), and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the “human shield” trick is now applied reflexively, before any facts are even known.

In this sense, as all human right organisations pointed out, the Gaza genocide has set a shocking new standard of indifference to civilian casualties: All targets are criminalised by association to your favourite Amalek (currently the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC), and we stopped bothering about substantiating this association with actual facts; declaring it so makes it so.

In this context, one can watch civilian suffering in Iran with a level of detachment and blame it all on the IRGC. We should remember, though, that the Iranian regime is no more scrupulous in its choice of targets in Israel — the war crimes are on both sides.

Yet I cannot say that Israeli media covers the wider civilian effects of the war on Iranian citizens in any serious way. Pretty much 95 percent of what we get are silly, heroic odes to our courageous pilots and genius cyber fighters.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: In your view, is there a pathway towards peace in Israel? Is permanent peace even possible for Israel?

IDAN LANDAU: Ultimately there can’t be any other solution; wars eventually end, consuming nations. I just don’t think it will be “Israel” as we now know it that will see the fruits of peace.

It will be a totally different entity, somehow letting Jews and Arabs live together as equals. That’s not possible within the current regime. Sadly, the shift to non-violence only occurs after the level of death and suffering is insurmountable to both sides.

No one knows when that will be. As long as the US and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its policies, it won’t change trajectory.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centres in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).

Idan Landau is an Israeli social justice activist and professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The US-Israeli attack on Iran has unequivocally demonstrated to the world — apart, it seems, from Australia’s government — that being an ally of the US attracts potentially disastrous liabilities but confers few if any benefits.

The US was manipulated into starting this illegal and unjustified war simply because Netanyahu planned it, even though it was and is reputation destroying and obviously detrimental to US interests whether in the Gulf or otherwise.

Apparently, Australia had no notice of the intended attack, and it had not the courage to confirm its obvious illegality.

It then decided, no doubt at the behest of the US, to send a spy plane to participate in the war and as well as some missiles. It is preposterous to assert that Australia is taking defensive action to protect the UAE: data from the spy plane obviously will be integrated into the now degraded US intelligence system and used to support the instigators of the illegal war.

Now look at what is happening to US allies in the region apart from Israel — and in case we need reminding, Australia is not Israel.

The US policy of force projection has completely failed: its massive military might means nothing when it is used reflexively, not strategically, to start a war the real aim of which is dictated by Israel and is the destruction of Iran in pursuit of the Greater Israel project.

Pursuing that aim without any coherent strategy or proper preparation has exposed the US and all its allies, not just those in the Middle East, to probably catastrophic consequences.

Thrown under a bus
Our great protector could not even defend its own military bases and defence systems, let alone the allied Gulf countries that it threw under the bus and did not even try to protect.

Its war has set in train an economic catastrophe just starting to engulf most of the world as we speak, including Australia but with Russia being a notable exception.

Australia’s craven endorsement of the illegal attack and its voluntary entry into the war to support the aggressors is extraordinary. There was no need to do either nor any rational explanation unless we were subject to US coercion.

The consequence of bipartisan decisions since John Howard first came to power is that our politicians have committed our country to the support of a failing flailing superpower that has been co-opted by Israel a small Middle East country has been a perpetrator of violence and aggression against almost every country in the region with the object of regional hegemony.

Its public figures, even in the middle of the current war, are talking about Turkiye being the next target. It is simply hard to believe that the US could be so stupid as to embark upon this enterprise, so detrimental to its reputation and its own interests, when Iran had publicly stated exactly what it would do in response, including closing the Strait of Hormuz.

The American people did not want this war but had it imposed upon them. Australians were not asked: in fact, we still haven’t been told directly that we’ve joined the fray.

We would do well to draw an important lesson from this fiasco. Remember that had Israel not insisted on the US attacking Iran the US would have continued its aggressive behaviour against China with the intention of provoking some sort of direct conflict.

Provocative acts
We have not endeared ourselves to China, by far and away our largest trading partner, by Morrison’s covid origin allegations, by entering into the AUKUS alliance or by participating in such provocative acts as pushing battleships through seas just off the coast of China and thousands of kilometres from Australia.

The Chinese demonstrated their dissatisfaction by trade restrictions and also their capacity to respond in kind by sending their Navy vessels to circumnavigate Australia; at the same time they also demonstrated, perhaps unintentionally, that Australia’s threat detection architecture was hopeless.

Now remember that whatever the outcome of the war against Iran, which at this stage the US seems to be losing, we have seen Iran demonstrate strategic conduct of a war against the odds.

And if as is likely the US still pursues its goal of repressing Chinese influence and power, it will leave us in a position similar to that the Gulf states now enjoy.

That is to say, we are a convenient forward operating base that will be defended only to the extent necessary to protect US interests, any defensive capacity we have will be co-opted to serve the interests of the US in any conflict and we will suffer exactly the same abandonment as the Gulf states when defending us loses priority.

But importantly, we have automatically become a target because of the American bases we host, particularly those providing surveillance and intelligence capacities like Pine Gap.

China is a vastly greater military power than Iran and its missiles undoubtedly could accurately target any location in Australia with little chance of interception. The US has demonstrated by what it is doing now in the Gulf countries that we will be used as a forward operating base until our utility is exhausted or extinguished, at which time the US will pack up and leave .

Defeating a rogue power
Iran has shown that a small country with determination can build a fighting force that with the benefit of strong leadership and capable military strategists can challenge and probably defeat a rogue great power.

It defies comprehension that we are paying huge sums of money and confirming our commitment to what has proven to be a protection racket by an incompetent and immoral international thug.

China has no intention of attacking us and never did: it wants the respect it has earned and mutually beneficial good relations.

We are far better off in the long-term putting more trust in our neighbours with common interests, as just happened with Indonesia, and forming truly defensive alliances with reliable, law abiding allies than tying ourselves to a modern Titanic that will take us down with it when it inevitably flounders.

Kellie Tranter is a lawyer, researcher, and human rights advocate. This commentary was first published on her X account where she tweets from @KellieTranter

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz