Based on my reading of the latest upscaling of US rhetoric, one of the military options being considered by the Israeli-American axis is the nuclear option. Refer Trump says a ‘whole civilization will die tonight’ if deal isn’t reached, One News, 8 April 2026.

The possibility of Netanyahu and Trump thinking this way would reflect a widely-held understanding that World War Two ended not only with the atomic bomb, but because of those nuclear strikes on Japan. In particular, the prevailing American narrative is that Little Boy and Fat Man saved the United States from having to make a ground invasion of Japan.

My sense is that if Israel and/or the United States go for a nuclear strike, soon or sooner, it will be on a city or some other quasi-military site in the northeast of Iran, closer to Afghanistan than to the present Persian Gulf warzone; away from the energy infrastructure of the Gulf.

Not only is the northeast the birthplace of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, it is also the part of Iran which gave least support to President Masoud Pezeshkian in the 2024 presidential election. Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon, was elected as a moderniser. In 2024 and 2025 he was committed to evolving Iran away from being a Shia theocracy and towards being a typical BRICS’ middle-range geopolitical power. (See my The Enigma of the Iranian President, Scoop, 27 March 2026.)

If we look at the map here – the second round of the 2024 Iranian presidential election – we see that Pezeshkian’s support was most in the more secular northwest and least in the more Islamist northeast. I suspect that the Axis’ military planning will be to inflict as much damage as possible – in one or a few dramatic strikes – on the present Iranian civilisation which draws heavily on Shia Islam; hence focussing on the Shia heartland.

Finally, here, I draw attention to the movie Don’t Look Up. In that movie, the threat was an asteroid, not a nuclear war. The key theme was the widespread dispassion that prevailed, especially in the mainstream media, towards a known and imminent catastrophe. In the case of a nuclear strike on Iran away from Tehran or the Gulf or the Pakistan border, the present lack of mainstream outrage at the aggressions of the last month will probably continue on and beyond the day after.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

• Why did Netanyahu and Trump attack Iran and start this war?
• Why did the US decide to attack without a clear reason to do so and without strategic planning nor a legal argument for it?
• What impact will this war in the Middle East have on US Midterm Elections?
• And what of independent operators in this conflict, such as European states, why do they risk being drawn into this US-Israel Middle East War?

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The human world changed twice during the twentieth century. The first transition lasted from 1914 to 1945. The principal cause of World War Two was World War One. So, to understand the drivers of that long transition, indeed a great levelling event, it is necessary to investigate the causes of World War One. What happened between those wars was not inevitable, of course. But those inter-war events formed part of a comprehensible transitional sequence.

The next transition began, I would argue, in 1967 and lasted until 1980. Though key pre- and post-transition events took place in 1948, 1953 and 1956; and 1989/1990. The 1967 to 1980 transition significantly involved both Israel and Iran. As a result, the post-war world of cold war and decolonisation gave way to a neoliberal world order in which the new financial and political elites increasingly ruled under the titular covers of ‘liberal democracy’, ‘global rules-based-order’, and the ‘unipolar moment‘.

Are we today in a new transition, away from neoliberalism; maybe into a bleak zero-sum order (or negative-sum) of right-wing identity politics? An order in which national or cultural identity groups seek to harm other such groups more than they benefit their own group. An ultra-Hobbesian world in which individuals and groups gain pleasure directly from the pain they cause to others? Or will such gratuitous and predatory behaviour be limited to a transition now under way? While such behaviour happened markedly during the last years of the 1914 to 1945 transition, there were also substantial precursors to it in the lead-up to World War One. Not least the Judeophobic pogroms in Ukraine and some of its neighbouring territories.

These remain open questions. My aim here is to outline the 1967 to 1980 transition, noting some parallels between that transition and present times.

Before that, I’ll just mention that, in 1948, Israel and Palestine were both granted, by the new United Nations, the status of sovereign nation states. The Palestine nation was stillborn, for a number of reasons, one of which was that the eventual borders of Israel split the Palestinian territories. And I’ll mention that, in 1953, the United States instigated a political and military coup in Iran, converting a developing independent democracy into an absolute monarchy whose role was to acquiesce to Washington’s stated and unstated interests.

Suez Canal: the First Crisis

Most wars start with a pretext, an event manufactured or exploited by the true belligerent to justify its aggression.

One country which had been subjugated – indeed occupied – by the United Kingdom for many years was Egypt. That’s why Egypt came to be so important for the New Zealand military in both WW1 and WW2.

The critical strategic asset in Egypt was the Suez Canal, built by French interests, opened in 1869, and effectively wrested by the British from 1882 (though France maintained a strategic interest). For the steamship age, that canal became the critical conduit for the British Empire, connecting London with India (which included modern Pakistan and Bangladesh), East Africa, the ‘Middle East’ (meaning the Persian Gulf), the ‘Far East’, and the Australian colonies which became Australia.

The Egyptian Revolution took place in 1952, and Egyptian president Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in July 1956. The result was a war in the latter part of 1956, in which the British and French persuaded Israel (only created in 1948) to invade Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. (These events were covered in an episode of The Crown.) The Israeli attack took place as Operation Kadesh. Less than two days after this pretext, presented as a threat to Israel’s security, Britain (and France) started bombing Egypt at Port Said, in an operation to ‘secure’ the Canal.

The end result was an ignominious defeat for Britain and France, unsupported by the US, but with no meaningful withdrawal by Israel; the Israel-Egypt border had become permanently militarised, noting that Gaza had been (by agreement) under Egyptian control since 1949.

The Suez Canal was closed for nearly six months, until April 1957.

Suez Canal: the Second Crisis

Ten years later, in June 1967, Israel went for broke. This was the much bigger second crisis for the Suez Canal. In six days, Israel conquered the entire Sinai Peninsula – therefore including Gaza – meaning that Israel had annexed the eastern side of the Canal. In addition Israel conquered East Jerusalem, which in 1948 was supposed to have become the capital of an independent Palestine, the West Bank (which the State of Tennessee, in an act of appeasement towards Israel, now wants to call Judea and Samaria; refer Bill requiring Tennessee to use ‘Judea and Samaria’ instead of ‘West Bank’ advances, Fox17, 6 March 2026), and Syria’s Golan Heights.

The principal consequence was that the Suez Canal, an even more important waterway than the Gulf of Hormuz, was closed from 1967 to 1975.

With hindsight, we can see that the global economic crisis of the 1970s began in 1967. It is understood as a crisis of inflation which morphed after 1973 into a crisis of stagflation; for an overview, biased towards the US and towards the received narrative, refer to The Great Inflation, in Federal Reserve History.

The closure of the Suez Canal had little impact on oil prices. But it did lead to a surge in the cost of international transportation, as Asia to Europe trade had to be diverted to the South African and Panama routes. The other two drivers of that inflation-surge in the late 1960s were the escalations of the Vietnam War, and the prevalence of a corporate structure – outlined by John Kenneth Galbraith in The New Industrial State (1967) and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973) – which made the global marketplace less responsive towards increases in global spending. That last point means that large corporate firms, like today’s energy companies, became predisposed to respond to increased demand by raising prices rather than by raising the quantities of output supplied.

Wartime is almost always associated with inflation, because it both raises costs and constrains the supply of consumer goods. (American wars since the 1970s can be an exception, because they are financed by instant money and readily-available imports; by US government-deficits and US economy trade deficits. Deficits which the rest of the world is eager to facilitate.)

Israel 1967 to 1973

With the partial exception of Syria’s Golan Heights, Israel did not formally incorporate the other conquered territories. This retention of these territories as subjugated territories was partly due to international pressure to not recognise conquests, but was probably more to do with their implications for the demographic balance of Israel. Integration would have led to the possibility of Jews becoming a minority of Israel’s population, and Arabs a majority.

(We should note that, for the secular Jews who run Israel, to be Jewish is understood more as an ethnicity than as a religious faith. Hence, Israelis tend to juxtapose Jews and Arabs, whereas people in the rest of the world juxtapose Israelis (understood to be mostly Jews) and Palestinians. Israelis favour the word ‘Arab’ over ‘Palestinian’, because of a popular Israeli narrative that the indigenous population of Palestine is descended from immigrants from Arabia.)

The 1973 Arab-Israeli War happened in October 1973, beginning with a surprise attack by Egypt, during the Yom Kippur holy day (and noting that the 2026 attacks on Iran occurred during Ramadan, Islam’s holiest period). Basically, Egypt wanted its Sinai Peninsula back, in part so that it could reopen the Canal. Other nearby countries joined-in, especially Syria, but also Jordan and Iraq. Not Iran, which was then under United States hegemony.

Despite Egypt’s initial advantage of surprise, Israel not only fought back defensively, but counterattacked. The counterattack included an Israeli army contingent crossing the Suez Canal and marching on Cairo; ie approaching the Nile River. Potentially this war could have led to the creation of a Greater Israel; from the Euphrates (in Syria and Iraq) to the Nile. But again, the problem of conquest becomes the problem of having to incorporate supposedly ‘inferior’ populations into the expanded nation state.

(We note that surprise attacks often do not bear fruit; noting the American president’s tasteless and quasi-triumphant comparison between 28 February 2026 with the ultimately unsuccessful attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. See Trump jokes about Pearl Harbour in meeting with Japan’s PM, TVNZ, 20 March 2026. For a brief moment, I wondered if the President was going to refer to the surprise attack of 6 August 1945, or that of 10 March 1945.)

Further, the international community had interests other than appeasing Israel. The biggest of these concerns was the price of oil. In the end the international community got its way, but at a cost of making Israel itself into a significantly more belligerent state than it had been hitherto.

Oil Prices

The 1973 Oil Crisis led to a quadrupling of crude oil prices by 1977, most of that taking place in 1974. Given the general inflation, much of it instigated by the oil price increases, real oil prices only increased by 150 percent in United States’ dollars.

The main reasons for the huge price increases of oil were the roles of the likes of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – through the Vienna-based OPEC cartel – being able to push back against the encroachment of the Zionist project in their region, by using their effective near-monopoly power. In turn, these high prices led to the further development of the petroleum industries in the Persian Gulf, and of the Gulf States themselves. Additionally, we should note that oil was underpriced prior to the 1973 war; much as it can be argued that oil was underpriced in January 2026.

This had a much bigger economic impact on countries like New Zealand than anything we’ve either seen or projected in the present March 2026 crisis. (In my case, it brought forward my OE plans. At the end of 1973, for $400 I bought a ticket to sail to England via Acapulco, Panama, Curaçao and Barbados. By time the ship sailed in April 1974, the fare had been subject to two surcharges and I ended up paying more like $480. It could have been worse if the ship had not had access to cheap Venezuelan fuel in Curaçao.)

The result was a series of massive financial imbalances across the world; between oil-importing and oil-exporting countries, and also within larger oil-producing countries such as the United States. (New York’s loss was Texas’s gain.) While those 1970s’ financial challenges were navigated by the world’s finance ministers and central banks with a large measure of pragmatic success, the turmoil of the times let in a new and simplistic narrative around money and inflation; an unnuanced narrative that harked back to the classical stories about money during World War Zero (that’s the Napoleonic Wars of 1798 to 1815).

That new narrative was monetarism/neoliberalism, and placed itself perfectly to exploit the economic crisis – the Great Inflation– to create the neoliberal anti-intellectual hegemony which has ruled over the western world and hence over the whole world since the early 1980s. The guru of monetarism was a Chicago School economist; Milton Friedman. As an academic, Friedman and his acolytes had been plugging away through the 1950s and 1960s; well-placed to take advantage of a good crisis, especially a crisis centred around the word ‘inflation’. Chicago School economists experimented on Chile following its 11 September 1973 military coup.

If Israel had simply returned Sinai to Egypt in say 1970 – in circumstances similar to the eventual return of Sinai – allowing the Suez Canal to reopen, then the 1970s and 1980s could have turned out very differently.

Revolution, and Oil Prices again

One of the consequences of the political crisis in the Middle East was further crisis in the Middle East. Various latent nationalisms in the region intensified markedly; these intensifications turned for inspiration to the common faith in the region, Islam.

Hence, there was a direct – albeit convoluted – pathway from the 1973 war to the 1978/1979 Iranian Revolution. In February 1979 the Imperial State of Iran gave way to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

(I could have gained a personal glimpse of revolutionary Iran. Returning from my OE in September 1978, my partner and I were on a PanAm flight from Rome to Istanbul. The flight originated in New York, and terminated in Tehran, and was running late. Many of the passengers were agitated, because the flight was now projected to arrive in Tehran during the evening curfew. I guess it was always possible that PanAm would take the decision to overfly Istanbul, in order to arrive in Tehran on time. The plane did land in Istanbul, later than scheduled, so I know not about what dramas may have unfolded in Tehran later that evening. I expect that the return flight out of Tehran was fully booked, given the deteriorating situation there for American citizens.)

An important result is that oil from Iran, a founding member of OPEC, came off the world market for a few years. (Although, Aotearoa New Zealand, in its own pragmatic navigation of the crisis, came to do a swap deal with Revolutionary Iran. Despite the fact that, for a few years instances of capital punishment in Iran came to exceed those in the United States, New Zealand negotiated a sheep-meat for oil swap, thereby saving this country’s critical sheep-farming industry.)

The result of the loss of Iranian oil from the word market led, in 1979, to a further doubling of the world price of crude oil. In the second half of the 1970s, many countries – including New Zealand and United States – cut their speed limits to 80kph (or 50 miles per hour). (I still remember, in October 1976, riding in a Greyhound Bus in Pennsylvania, watching big trucks traveling very slowly along the United States’ interstate motorway system.)

In 1979, the crisis became so difficult that the New Zealand government made the sensible though since-derided decision to ration petrol by requiring motorists to observe carless days each week.

Governments in oil-importing countries made the pragmatic decision to both conserve oil and, for balance of payments’ reasons, to develop their own oil, gas and exportable reserves. New Zealand electrified its North Island Main Trunk Railway, doubled its aluminium production capacity (in order to export renewable energy), substantially expanded its oil-refining capacity, developed the Maui gas field; and developed the Glenbrook steel mill as a means to gain export receipts from the sale of west coast iron-sand.

Eventually, in 1986, the world oil price collapsed, ushering in a new (and environmentally discordant) era of cheap oil. Inflation-adjusted oil prices in 1999 were even lower than in 1972.

The Great Deception

World price-inflation was on a substantial downward path once the leading economies’ central banks allowed interest rates to fall (through liberalising monetary policies) in the years 1983 to 1985, and once cheap oil resumed. But in some countries high consumer-price-inflation persevered until the end of the 1980s’ decade, especially as they shifted towards goods and services taxes.

New Zealand pioneered a particular form of illiberal monetary policy in 1989, when inflation was already falling back to normal levels; and claimed that the new simple-minded monetary policy was the sole cure. This policy, which was in fact very much associated with the aforementioned monetarist project, became akin to a biblical truth; and was successfully exported to the consolidating globalised political and financial elites, making this new quasi-biblical truth into a bedrock policy-of-faith in the post-1980 world order.

Today, we can easily observe how false this ‘truth’ of faith is. By looking at the United Kingdom and Australia, two countries which have minimally reduced interest rates since 2022, we can see how their inflation rates have remained stubbornly higher than those with lower interest rates.

The next political and financial world order?

Are we in a new transition? Probably yes. Will it take a decade or so? Probably yes. While there are many calamities that could happen – and remembering that the world faced the possibility of global nuclear war early in both the cold war world order and the neoliberal world order – an optimistic take is that the world will move into a multipolar principles-of-engagement world order in which no single polity (or alliance) can dictate terms to the rest of the world with apparent impunity.

A unipolar world order is an illiberal geopolitical monopoly. Present events may either entrench or destroy the forces pushing for geopolitical illiberalism. Multipolarity is geopolitical liberalism.

The next world order should not be reliant on cheap oil nor indefinite economic growth nor the idolatry of money. Money is a means, not an end; it is a technology, not a commodity. Capitalism can become a peaceful private-public partnership. If enough of us want it to be.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

On Tuesday, I wrote UAE, Israel, And The Hexagon Alliance which illuminated Israel’s duplicity in relation to Hamas, and the understated but very strong alliance between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel. And Israel’s agenda to divide and rule the ‘Middle East’ by creating its own encircling alliance; and setting up two rival Muslim axes (a Shia axis, and a Sunni axis) which Israel would like to see weaken and damage each other.

Here I begin with other candid comments, by recent Israeli leaders, from the Australian 2024 documentary The Forever War. Themes include a mix of empathy and contempt for the indigenous Palestinian population, Benjamin Netanyahu’s trustworthiness, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as “messianic” “terrorists”, Israel’s hold over the United States, and Israel’s self-inflicted diminishing security.

Excerpts from the Australian ABC documentary

TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: They hate us. We saw the results. The idea of eradicating Hamas completely from Gaza is a just cause.

YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: That the IDF is doing everything to avoid civilian casualties is a blunt lie. Straight lie.

YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: Y’know, [in the] the beginning I was also full of rage. I also had the feeling that these are animals, we need to go there and bomb the hell out of them. But then you stop for a second and you think, you say to yourself, what did we think is going to happen after 16 years of siege.

AMIRA HASS, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES CORRESPONDENT, HAARETZ: I was surprised and not surprised because I kept warning that people cannot stand the accumulated cruelty accumulated over so many decades. And somehow there will be an explosion. Somehow there will be an outburst. I couldn’t imagine what it would be, but there it came.

…

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: You’ve spent a lot of time studying this obviously as head of Shin Bet. Could you describe what is the reality for Palestinians here?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: It was a life of people who dream about freedom, and don’t see it. Whether we liked it or not, we control the life of millions.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: If you were a Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza, what would your view be of Israel?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I would fight against Israel in order to achieve my liberty.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: How would you fight? How dirty?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I would do everything in order to achieve my liberty. And that’s it.

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Look, I once was asked some 30 years ago what I have been doing if I were a Palestinian and 30 years ago. I was new enough in politics to tell the truth that if I were born Palestinian probably would’ve joined one of the terror organisations.

…

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Israel’s famous for its targeted assassinations. I mean you yourself dressed as a woman famously and went into Beirut and met up with Mossad and went and killed a Palestinian leader. Israel’s done that over the years. Why couldn’t they have tried to strategically target Hamas leaders rather than kill those thousands of children?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: I never deluded myself to believe that by killing any individual you solve the problem, you give them a blow and they will recover in a way it just delayed the real decision. Real decisions at the end are not about how to kill mosquitoes more effectively. It’s about how to drain the swamp [my emphasis].

…

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Do you trust Benjamin Netanyahu?

TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: Never.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Can there be peace while Benjamin Netanyahu’s the leader here?

TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: No. No.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Can the world trust Benjamin Netanyahu?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: I don’t think that anyone can trust him. So basically, he lies to everyone and no one trust him.

…

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: BenGvir and Smotrich, the two racist messianic guys that seems to be to very strong leverage on Bibi. They want to turn it into a major religious war between Israel and the Islam.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Are they dangerous?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Sure, they’re dangerous.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: How powerful are BenGvir and Smotrich and what do you think of them?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I see them as terrorists and as Jewish messianics, they represent only a small minority within the Israel society, but they get their power because of our coalition system.*

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: But can I just check something? Are you calling the Minister for National Security and the Minister for Finance in Israel? Are you calling them terrorists?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: Of course. They are.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Is the brutal reality that Benjamin Netanyahu wants to continue this war for his own political survival?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Look, I cannot penetrate his soul and tell you for sure, but it’s clear that he acts as if the main objective of this whole event is his survival. He understands that if fighting will have a pause for six weeks or two times six weeks, the Israeli republic will demand accountability in spite of the fact that there is no word in Hebrew for accountability. It was not needed in our culture, but the public will demand it and he might lose his role, the prime minister.

…

excerpt from U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The state of Israel was born to be a safe place for the Jewish people.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: President Biden is a lifelong supporter of Israel.

excerpt from U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: If Israel didn’t exist we’d have to invent it.

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Israel cannot fight this regional war without having close relationship with the Americans. We need their support, not just in munitions that we do not produce in a high enough space to supply the needs of such a regional war, but we need them also to protect us in the UN Security Council. We needed them at the beginning of the crisis to deter Iran from getting involved or from activating the Hezbollah against us. And we will need them even in the Hague, to block the prospect that… Israeli commanders or even politically, they might find themselves as a criminal in the Hague or demanded to be broke. Only America can help us to avoid all this.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Pro-Israeli lobby groups in the US wield immense power.

NATHAN THRALL, FMR DIRECTOR INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP: Every politician in the United States knows that they can pay a major price with their jobs for not toeing the line. And the level of devastation that we are seeing now has so horrified the world and has so horrified the American public that now we have half of the people who voted for Biden saying that Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.

…

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Do you now fear for the future?

TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: I am worried. I am worried about the future of Israel. Yes, more than ever.

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: You cannot deter a person or a group of people if they believe that they have nothing to lose. We Israelis, we shall have security only when they will have hope.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: What’s the future for Palestinians

AVI DICHTER, CURRENT ISRAELI CABINET MINISTER: Supporting death will not bring you anything. If you don’t believe that the Jewish presence here between the Mediterranean and Jordan Valley is forever, you are going to lose more than you’ve lost till now.

*Coalition System

All electoral democracies – ie with parliamentary or congressional elections – face the problem of a very close electoral result in a partisan House. And, as Keir Starmer is finding out, political parties in traditional duopoly systems (generally ‘First Past the Post’) are themselves coalitions. In 1984, under FPP, New Zealand went to the polls early, because a minority faction of two within the governing National caucus – Marilyn Waring and Mike Minogue – had (or seemed, to Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, to have had) gained the effective balance of power. In Israel today, it is BenGivr and Smotrich who have that balance of power within the parliament, the Knesset.) In the US Senate under Joe Biden’s presidency, it was Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

In the Israel case, Netanyahu is the bigger problem. The BenGivr and Smotrich tails are not wagging the Netanyahu dog.

Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein

Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post episode The anatomy of the Epstein network (9 Feb 2026) noted this 15 Jan 2026 article – “Praise Allah, There Are Still People Like You”: Jeffrey Epstein Nurtured Israel-Emirates Ties Before Abraham Accords – from Drop Site News, and then interviewed one of its authors, Murtaza Hussain. As well as emphasising Israel’s links with UAE, it also outlines Jeffrey Epstein’s longstanding links to both UAE (especially Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, former head of DP World) and to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Yes, the very Ehud Barak who intimated that Gaza and the West Bank (and presumably much of Lebanon to the south and west of Beirut) were swamps in need of draining.

Barak, Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001, was the most recent Labor Party leader of Israel. Labor-constituent parties led Israel from 1948 to 1977, and also for some years in the 1990s. Yitzhak Rabin, a Labor Prime Minister, was assassinated by a Zionist terrorist on 4 November 1995.

From Wikipedia: “According to Barak, they first met in 2003, and no evidence of an earlier meeting has been published to date. Barak stayed at Epstein’s apartments in New York several times over the years. … A large portion of the funds invested by Barak was supplied by Jeffrey Epstein. … In 2023, it was revealed that Barak had visited Epstein around 30 times from 2013 to 2017. … Barak said [in 2015 that] he currently earns more than $1 million a year.”

From the Drop Site News article:

“In the last two decades of his life, American financier Jeffrey Epstein acted as an informal diplomatic bridge between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.”

“Epstein’s … claim of having an intimate friendship with Sulayem is now corroborated by a flood of his emails from the House Oversight Committee, a U.S. federal court case, and the hacked inbox of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.”

It appears that much of Epstein’s correspondence with Sulayem was cc.ed to Ehud Barak; keeping Israel – if not Netanyahu – fully in the loop of UAE’s deepening links with Epstein, a man sufficiently notorious as a child sex offender to bring down the likes of the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. (The Epstein Affair has close parallels with the 1963 Profumo Affair, which brought down the British government and also came close to entangling the Royal Family; as viewers of The Crown will appreciate. I’m surprised that the Andrew-obsessed British media seems to downplay this parallel.)

The article adds:

‘In a November 2022 interview about the Abraham Accords, Epstein’s close friend Ehud Barak told journalist Afshin Rattansi, “I’m glad that the Emirates and Bahrain went ‘out of the closet’ and are ready to formalize relationships with us [Israel], and I hope that others will follow. It’s a positive development; of course, it’s not a real peace, it’s not a major breakthrough. We know these people for 25 years, and we have a very intensive relationship with them in many arenas”.

‘The relationship between Israel and the UAE has only deepened in the years since, even as the Israeli genocide in Gaza has provoked global outrage. In December 2025, the UAE signed a $2.3 billion defense deal with Elbit Systems, one of the largest arms sales in Israeli history.’ [What are the odds that the RSF in Sudan are now using some of those weapons?]

‘Although Epstein did not live to see these agreements come to fruition, the private channels he helped cultivate between Emirati and Israeli elites helped make them possible.’

Epstein’s Ponzi Scheme

How did Epstein make his massive fortune and become so influential and entitled? The whole story is of course murky, especially in the years of the 1990s and 2000s. Most of the information we have today relates to the post-2008 period, after Epstein’s conviction for ‘procuring for prostitution’.

I discovered a very interesting story relating to an earlier part of Epstein’s life, when he was working closely with Steven Hoffenberg. From Epstein’s Wikipedia page: “In 1993, [Hoffenberg’s] Towers Financial Corporation imploded when it was exposed as one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in American history, losing over US$450 million of its investors’ money (equivalent to $1 billion in 2025). In court documents, Hoffenberg claimed that Epstein was intimately involved in the scheme.” Epstein worked with Towers Financial Corporation, which perpetrated that Ponzi scheme in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

From CBS (Jeffrey Epstein worked at financial firm that engaged in massive Ponzi scheme in 1980s and 1990s, by Brian Pascus and Mola Lenghi, 13 Aug 2019): ‘Hoffenberg’s financial crimes in the 1990s drew major public attention, as the Towers Financial Ponzi scheme was the largest financial fraud in American history prior to Bernie Madoff’s crimes a decade later, according to The New York Times. … “Jeffrey was my partner in what we did raising the billion dollars. He worked with me every day, seven days a week and he was in the mix with everything that I did,” Hoffenberg told CBS News. “I was the CEO of Towers Financial Corporation, a public company, and Jeffrey was my main assistant, associate, or partner. And the company did do a billion dollars in raising money. And it was criminal”.’

And note How Epstein got so rich, by Timothy Rooks for Deutsche Welle, 16 Feb 2026.

Conclusion

By focussing on Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, we may be letting him and his contacts off lightly.

Epstein was a money man; a miner of money, paying minors while playing majors. An Israel man. A scholar, majoring in influence, with particularly strong links to politicians and businessmen on the right of the political left; people like Peter Mandelson and Ehud Barak. A Hexagon Alliance man, who died ignominiously before his work came to its present fruition. A man trading in big guns and little women. A man serving what has become the world’s most lucrative and secretive industry; the high-tech high-chat world of asymmetric warfare, geopolitics, and draining swamps. Many of Epstein’s many contacts, now distancing themselves from him, will have imbibed the same Kool-Aid.

Epstein was a man who did much towards creating the new circum-Arabia circular economy, whereby Israel facilitates the UAE to supply military tech to the RSF to extract gold and materials from Sudan so that Israel (and its proxies, big and small) can devise, manufacture, and test more military tech to sell to the UAE to supply RSF terrorists …

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

There is a widespread perception in Aotearoa New Zealand that the ‘Gulf States’ are similar, and closely aligned to each other. The States most familiar to New Zealanders are United Arab Emirates (‘Dubai’ to the many New Zealanders who do not appreciate that Dubai is just one of six Emirates) and Qatar.

Further we’ve long-forgotten the dispute which, not-so-long-ago, led to Qatar being isolated by the Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other Sunni Arab countries (noting Egypt in particular). This started with the Qatar–Saudi Arabia diplomatic conflict, which in 2017 escalated into the Qatar diplomatic crisis. This conflict related to allegations of inappropriate financial connections between Qatar and Hamas. While apparent resolution took place in 2021, there is now a new division; a division even more opaque to casual western observers, and noting that western observations of other parts of the world are rarely anything other than casual.

In October 2021, the popular government of Sudan (the result of a popular revolution in 2019) was overthrown by the Sudanese Armed Forces. On the eve of the coup, ‘Protestors held signs stating, “the Emirates will not govern us, nor the implementation of Sisi”.’ For Sisi, read Egypt.

Essentially the anti-Qatar nations were developing their interests in the military and economic exploitation of Sudan. Then, in April 2023, the two parties to the 2021 coup – the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces – split in spectacular fashion, creating the present Sudanese Civil War. The UAE backed the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), while Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed the SAF. This is a hideous civil war (see my War in Sudan), with most of the reported atrocities allegedly being committed by the RSF.

This present division of civil-war-sponsorship is compounded by the diverging relationships of these three Arab states – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE – with Israel. The Trump-sponsored 2020 Abraham Accords brought Saudi Arabia and UAE (and Bahrain) into line with Egypt as an ally-of-sorts with Israel. According to this Wikipedia account:

“On August 14, 2021, the Associated Press reported that a secret oil deal between Israel and the Emirates, struck in 2020 as part of the Abraham Accords, had turned the Israeli resort town of Eilat into a waypoint for Emirati oil headed for Western markets. It was expected to endanger the Red Sea reefs, which host some of the greatest coral diversity on the planet. As Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia also share the gulf’s waters, an ecological disaster was likely to impact their ecosystems.”

Since then, relations between UAE (and Bahrain) and Israel became particularly close. Relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia (and Egypt), on the other hand have soured since the outbreak of the present Sudan war. At the same time, as revealed by Sudan, relations between UAE and these two large Red Sea nations have substantially deteriorated.

That is the backdrop to Iran’s greater hostility, at present, towards the UAE than towards Qatar. Western reports of the present conflict tend to equate Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait as ‘peas in a pod’. The reality is that UAE is a substantial – albeit understated – ally of Israel. (There has been suspicion that UAE has provided substantial secret support for Israel in its recent wars, especially Israel’s genocidal war against Hamas in Gaza. Iran will be well aware of the extent of this UAE-Israel alliance.)

UAE is now in an antagonist relationship with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. (Indeed, it’s now UAE rather than Qatar which is the isolate on the Arabian Peninsula.) In Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia back the SAF. The RSF, on the other hand, is funded and supplied through an opaque deal with UAE; which means that Israel – through its UAE proxy – may in fact be the most important backer of the RSF. And we should note that Israel is, formally, the most important global proxy of the United States; though it may now be that the United States has become Israel’s most important proxy.

(For security reasons, and as a protest against the UAE’s geopolitical cynicism, I decided that I would never again fly to London via the Emirates. Tip for Air New Zealand: put on more flights to Vancouver, and publicise the route to London via Canada.)

Qatar, Hamas, and Israel

The matter of Qatar’s financial connections with Hamas are distinctly murky. I quote here from the ABC (Australian) 60 Minutes documentary Gaza, the Forever War (11 March 2024). The programme features interviews with former senior Israeli political and military personnel.

Excerpt from transcript:

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: It now appears that Netanyahu wanted to sow seeds of division between the hardliners who ruled Gaza and the more conciliatory Palestinian Authority, running the West Bank.

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: We did something very, very simple. We did everything in order to make sure that Hamas will go on controlling Gaza and Palestinian Authority will control the West Bank so they will fight each other.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Netanyahu allowed Qatar to give massive amounts of cash to Hamas in Gaza.

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: So what we did with the permission of our prime Minister is to let Qatar to transfer a huge amount of money in cash, probably more than $1.4 billion, and to make sure that they will be able to send people to work in Israel and to achieve or to get intelligence if they need. By doing it, we increase the power of Hamas.

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: That served Netanyahu who wanted to avoid any discussion of two state solution.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: So, are you saying Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately boosted Hamas to try to prevent a Palestinian state?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Yeah, sure. He deliberately and systematically even told on record, whoever wants to avoid the threat of a two-state solution has to support my policy of paying protection money to the Hamas.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Netanyahu maintains the Qatar money was to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe. Having helped build up Hamas, Netanyahu has vowed to destroy it.

YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: He fed the beast and it exploded in our face.

The Hexagon Alliance

From Netanyahu says Israel will forge regional alliance to rival ‘radical axes’ (Al Jazeera, 22 Feb 2026) we have: ‘Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges, also referred to Greece, Cyprus and other unnamed Arab, African and Asian countries. “In the vision I see before me, we will create an entire system, essentially a hexagon of alliances around or within the Middle East,” Netanyahu said, according to the Times of Israel. “The intention here is to create an axis of nations that see eye to eye on the reality, challenges, and goals against the radical axes, both the radical Shia axis, which we have struck very hard, and the emerging radical Sunni axis”.’

In Will Ethiopia be part of Israel’s ‘hexagon’ alliance rivalling its enemies? (Al Jazeera, 25 Feb 2026): “In December, Israel recognised Somaliland’s statehood, becoming the first country to do so. Months before, there were unconfirmed talks about plans to move displaced Palestinians to Somaliland or to South Sudan, another key Israeli ally in the region. Analysts speculate that countries like South Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, another close friend of Israel, may also recognise Somaliland.”

So the hexagon would appear to be Greece, Cyprus, India, UAE, Somaliland, and Ethiopia. Ethiopia has a Judeo-Christian heritage, in sharp contract to most of its regional neighbours. (See my reference to Judeo-Christian techno-supremacism in The Greater Evil, Scoop, 2 March 2026.)

Re the “emerging radical Sunni axis”, this article from India – The Hexagon Alliance, by Ayaan Ahmad and Arjun Dev Singh, 26 Feb 2026 – suggests “Sunni-majority states such as Türkiye, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, alongside Jordan and Iraq”. You would have to add Egypt to that.

In this context, we should note that Israeli politicians have already been talking up Türkiye as the next “threat”. See Turkish ‘threat’ talked up in Israel as Netanyahu focuses on new alliances, Al Jazeera, 23 Feb 2026. And, noting a joint expression of Islamophobia, Modi in Israel: ‘Hexagon’ alliance and the ideological convergence of Hindutva and Zionism, TRT World, 2 Mar 2026.

And from Is Türkiye Israel’s next target in the Middle East? (Al Jazeera, 21 Sep 2025): “In Washington, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, suggested that Türkiye could be Israel’s next target and warned that it should not rely on its NATO membership for protection.”

This reflects the significance of Greece and Cyprus within the hexagon. It also points to the United Kingdom, indirectly. Part of the island of Cyprus is British sovereign territory; ie not at all a ‘foreign airbase’. And another part of the island of Cyprus has been a Turkish realm state, albeit unrecognised by the international community (as Somaliland – formally British Somaliland – is also unrecognised).

We may note that the tension between UAE and Saudi Arabia is revealed in Google Maps. Despite there being a long border between the two countries, there is only one road crossing, to the far west of Abu Dhabi. Indeed, Doha in Qatar is closer to that border crossing than is either Dubai or the city of Abu Dhabi. 95% of UAE’s population lives in that country’s northeast corner. Along most of the border, there are parallel roads, but no crossing points. In Saudi Arabia that road is Highway 95. In UAE, its road is labelled ‘Boarder [sic] Patrol Road CIVILIAN VEHICLE PROHIBITED’.

The Yemen and Somaliland affairs

As noted by Al Jazeera: ‘Saudi Arabia is embroiled in an ongoing rift with the United Arab Emirates over how to deal with the conflict in Yemen.’

Yemen is one of those many places that are geopolitically important, but completely off New Zealand’s media radar. Historically Yemen was host to an important Jewish population (Yemenite Jews). Southern Yemen – especially Aden – was, for a century, a critical cog in the British Empire. Post-colonially, Southern Yemen became a ‘radical’ country in the world order, whereas Northern Yemen was a religiously conservative society, the Shia Zaydi Imamate until 1962 and then the Yemen Arab Republic.

In more recent years, that conservative north has become a Shia ‘Iranian proxy’, the ‘Houthis’. And the internationally recognised government of Yemen – operative in the south – has become, in that same sense, a Saudi Arabian proxy regime.

On 2 December 2025, the failed 2025–2026 Southern Yemen campaign began, essentially an attempt by the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) to overthrow the Saudi-backed government. It was in the midst of this Israeli-backed campaign that Israel became the first country to recognise Somaliland – close to the geographical Horn of Africa’, and juxtaposed to Aden – as a sovereign state.

This has to be understood in the context of Israel’s Hexagon Alliance; indeed, an attempt to impose UAE/Israeli control over the geopolitically sensitive southern coastline of the Arabian peninsula. From Why Israel’s recognition of Somaliland backfired, (16 Jun 2026) by Abdi Aynte, former minister of planning and international cooperation of Somalia: “By empowering breakaway regions, Israel, with the backing of key regional partners, especially the United Arab Emirates, has sought to reshape the regional order.”

Aynte: “What some experts describe as an ‘Axis of Secession’ is already visible in Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Syria. Led by Israel and supported by a network of regional partners, this axis targets countries whose central governments, hollowed out by conflict, exercise only partial control over their territory. The logic is simple: weaken central authority, bolster breakaway regions, and cultivate dependent entities willing to align with Israel and sign onto the Abraham Accords.” Aynte calls these nations “emerging client polities” of Israel, though resistance remains strong in Somalia, Yemen and Sudan.

Beyond these smaller fractured nation states, there are several large nation states in the region which Israel is trying to fracture. While these attempts in Iran are all too visible, a literal smokescreen, quietly Israel is adding Ethiopia – a country with 100,000 people – to its client list. We note that Ethiopia is hosting RSF training camps, further undermining Sudan’s sovereignty. See Reuters: Ethiopia builds secret camp to train Sudan RSF fighters, sources say, 10 Feb 2026.

This is not regional geopolitics which New Zealand can naively pretend-away. Aynte adds: “Somaliland’s decision to cultivate ties with Taiwan inevitably drew Beijing’s attention”. “The result [of Israel’s meddling through client third parties] is an increasingly crowded and volatile theatre, where global power rivalries intersect with unresolved local aspirations.” “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, once close partners, are now increasingly at odds, while Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt have begun coordinating to counter what they view as a destabilising ‘Axis of Secession’.”

And we note “widespread claims that Israel is exploring resettlement of Palestinian refugees from Gaza in Somaliland”. (An echo of Britain’s former plan to settle European Jews in Uganda!)

If we look at a map of the so-called ‘Middle East’ (nobody refers to Near East or Far East anymore!) and paint the hexagon countries in ‘Star-of-David’ blue – including Israel itself and its occupied territories, and including the RSF-controlled parts of Sudan – the obvious missing links are Egypt, Türkiye, and Iran. Hence the present war in Iran, and the concerns already noted re Türkiye. But what about Egypt?

Egypt, Iran and the Bible

Even today, Israel’s reference point is the Old Testament of The Bible. Note Al Jazeera’s Inside Story episode of 2 March 2026, What dangers does the Iran war pose for Israel?, featuring Mitchell Barak, “former speech writer for Israeli PM Ariel Sharon”, noting that Sharon was nicknamed Butcher of Beirut on account of his responsibility for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Interviewer: “Mitchell, I’m going to start things off with you. Please give us a broad brushstroke of how you see things unfolding.”

Barak: “First of all, I’d like to wish a Ramadan Kareem to all of the people watching who are celebrating and commemorating this holiday. It is also a fast day in Israel, the Fast of Esther, which commemorates ironically and interestingly enough the victory of the Jewish people over an evil Persian empire 2,500 years ago.”

He is referring to the Purim holiday. Note, in these Wikipedia references, the references to Amalek, the word that Benjamin Netanyahu invoked to justify the subsequent genocide of Gaza. Refer The Biblical story of Amalek evoked by Netanyahu, ABC24 Jan 2024.

Barak did not go on to answer the “broad brushstroke” question.

Two polities which feature strongly in that biblical narrative are Egypt and (in the guise of Babylon) Persia aka Iran. To fully understand Israel’s agenda today, we really need to see that regime and its cultural acolytes as playing a long game; a very long game. Israel is trying to reverse the wrongs that it believed it suffered, around 2½ to 3 thousand years ago, at the hands of those two ancient civilisations. (The irony is that Israel denied that there was any historical context – not even a day’s historical context – to the ‘blue-sky’ shock events of 7 October 2023.)

Seen in this context, it is credible that the principal target of the Hexagon Alliance is Egypt, not Türkiye.

And, re the current role of the United Arab Emirates in that fraught region, Australia should not provide military support to Israel’s secret ally and proxy. (See Australia to provide military support to Gulf states attacked by Iran, ABC 10 March 2026.)

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Three more schools and a major hospital have been bombed in Iran and more in Lebanon by the US-Israeli military, all within the first week of launching their latest war.

This is a pattern, not “collateral damage”. Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations Amir-Saeid Iravani said on March 7 that the US and Israel “recognise no red line in committing their crimes” against his country.

Densely populated parts of Tehran are being pounded by wave after wave of US and Israeli bombs.  Shahid Hamedani School in Tehran was struck on March 6, the day of the funerals of schoolgirls (6-12 year-olds) killed in Minab, Iran.

UN officials have confirmed that the Minab attack killed 160 children and five staff.

The Palestinians, despite the genocide inflicted on them by Israel and the West, have never become used to the daily killing of children: “The smallest coffins are always the heaviest,” Palestinians say.

Israel has killed many times more women, children and babies than they have Palestinian resistance fighters. There is even a name for this depravity — the Dahiya Doctrine.

Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine and the law of proportionality
International media are reporting that Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, is suffering another brutal aerial bombardment from the Israelis.

Dahiya — al-Dahiya al-Janubiya — is home to 700,000 civilians living in high-density housing. The suburb lends its name to Israel’s policy of using massive, disproportionate force against civilians and infrastructure to weaken an enemy’s resolve.

It is, of course, a war crime to do so.

In the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel attacked Dahiya, a popular stronghold of the Hezbollah movement. The massive bombing campaign wasn’t to achieve a military objective; the target was civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Hundreds of children were among the dead.

I have a fabric reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica on my office wall. It has been coloured red, green black and white – the colours of the Palestinian flag — to draw the important parallel.

The governments of New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Canada and all the others, with rare noble exceptions like Spain, support this depraved criminality. We share values with the Israelis and the Americans, our leaders tell us.

The Principle of Proportionality is critical to protect children
The Americans and Israelis have a bloodlust and openly brag about their destructive abilities. Operation Epic Fury screams to the world: “war crimes”.

What should constrain US-Israeli violence is international law and the principle that there are limits to what is acceptable in “incidental” harm caused to civilians.

Proportionality is one of the foundational concepts in international law, along with other important injunctions like the prohibition of force against sovereign states. Under the Geneva Convention, before undertaking military action states are obligated to consider: Distinction (separating civilians from combatants), Proportionality, Precaution (taking care to minimise civilian harm), Military Necessity (i.e. don’t launch wars of aggression), and Humanity — prohibiting unnecessary suffering.

This is the exact opposite of the Dahiya Doctrine and the American Way of War — from Korea to Iraq by way of Vietnam. Over six million civilians were killed by the US in just those three conflicts alone.

Article 51 of the Geneva Convention
The principle of proportionality is codified in Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions, and affirmed as binding customary international law applicable to all parties in all conflicts.  This is further affirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Rule 14 which states:

“Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.”

The West has torn up its copies of international law but we need to keep its spirit alive. New Zealand, Australia and most of the “civilised world” are signatories to various treaties that require them to enforce humanitarian law upon belligerents. Instead, our countries work day and night to support Israel and the US in their evil work. Evil is the appropriate word here.

I will give the last word to the Israeli commander who led the 2006 terror bombing of Dahiya, General Gadi Eisenkot, chief of Northern Command:

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it (villages) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

“One can oppose a hateful regime and, at the same time, oppose an unjustified and dangerous military intervention,” says Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

“I once again call for immediate de-escalation, respect for international law, and the urgency of resuming dialogue.”

While some governments around the world have easily managed to express their opposition to the unlawful military attacks by Israel and the US and their opposition to the Iranian regime, shamefully New Zealand has failed to follow their example.

Instead, the government has issued a statement that condemns only Iran; “acknowledges” the military strikes were “designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security”; and calls for “adherence to international law” — apparently blissfully unaware that the attacks comprise multiple breaches of international law.

In an interview on RNZ, the PM repeatedly responded to the question “Does New Zealand support these attacks or not?” by reading out “We think Iran is evil, we think it’s been repressing its own people.

“We think it’s been arming proxies and terrorist organisations. We think it has been developing its ballistic and nuclear programmes and years of diplomacy hasn’t actually paid any fruits.”

He also said more than once that New Zealand’s position was the same as Australia’s — the Australian PM has said they “support the United States acting to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons”.

Bizarre spectre
Which, aside from ignoring the US’s stated desire for forced regime change in Iran, raises the bizarre spectre of two nuclear-armed states attacking another state in case it might develop nuclear weapons — even though Iran is a state party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (#NPT), which Israel is not, and has opened its nuclear facilities to the #IAEA, which Israel has not. Indeed, the only state in the Middle East that does have stockpiles of nuclear weapons (entirely undeclared and unsupervised) is Israel.

New Zealand’s moral failure to condemn these military strikes, but instead to continue describing the Iranian regime as “evil” or “bad actors” as though that somehow makes armed attacks on a sovereign nation to assassinate its leaders to force regime change okay — regardless of civilian casualties — shows how far it has now moved from even the pretence of applying international law to the actions of its military friends and partners.

And what a missed opportunity to point out the urgent necessity for the elimination of ALL #NuclearWeapons — so much for New Zealand’s alleged commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world, and its promotion of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons #TPNW / #NuclearBan and the NPT.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

We, Alternative Jewish Voices, deplore Israel and America’s illegal war of aggression against Iran. We also condemned the repression of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but that does not justify this war.

International war will only bring — is already bringing — more civilian death and destruction. We support the right of the Iranian people to determine their own future.

America and Israel again attacked Iran in mid-negotiation, three days after Iran’s Foreign Minister, Sayed Abbas Araghchi tweeted: “Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”

No one has offered the slightest contrary evidence.

This war of aggression violates international and US domestic law. After the Second World War, the Nuremberg Tribunal called aggression “the supreme international crime”.

We see around us the world they were trying to avert: Israel has waged genocidal war on a trapped community and bombed six countries that were not at war.

This morning, Israel is occupying parts of Lebanon. Russia has invaded and pounded Ukraine for four years. Pakistan is bombing the cities of Afghanistan. US President Donald Trump doesn’t know what to grab next.

Imperial ambitions
We regard the attack on Iran as the latest enactment of longstanding imperial ambitions. How many countries has America tried to bomb into submission? How many times did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bomb the blockaded population of Gaza before America gave him the green light and the weapons to commit outright genocide?

This week, benefiting from the distraction of Iran, Israel has yet again sealed Gaza behind a total blockade. Aid agencies are again counting the days until they again run out of food.

Netanyahu boasts on camera that this war is “what I have yearned to do for 40 years”. Beware of men who prefer the risks of war to those of peace. Chaos and civilian misery are their signatures, but we share responsibility for their impunity.

Even after the horror of livestreamed genocide in Gaza, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon acquiesces to more war and speaks as if Trump and Netanyahu are trustworthy public officials.

Luxon’s appeasement disgraces us. We must not support this unfolding disaster, not materially and not out of the side of the Prime Minister’s mouth. We must say “No” in a bold, principled voice; joining states like Spain and Denmark.

As this fire spreads, we must also peer through the headlines and focus on the people of Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Civilians need protection, intervention and an end to the games of these warmongers.

We urge our morally vacuous government to stand with the civilians, the law and our future.

Alternative Jewish Voices – Sh’ma Koleinu is a collective of anti-Zionist Jews from the Far North to Dunedin. It has a liberatory Aotearoa Jewish identity, whether religious or secular or cultural. It is part of a movement for collective liberation, in Aotearoa and in Palestine.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Western countries, including  Australia and New Zealand, were quick to line up to support Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli blitzkrieg on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

They were effectively throwing international law into a cauldron of blood and mayhem.  These same Western powers — and the Gulf Arab states that stand with them — may soon live to regret it.

In an article on February 21, I wrote, “A precision strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan liquefaction trains (that purify, cool, and compress the gas), for example, would drop a bomb into the world’s gas market.”

Should the Iranian state survive the terrifying onslaught, it has vowed to strike back in ways that could crash the global economy.

Early signs point to a long war
Two early signs of their potential to do so are the closure of all the civilian airports in the Gulf and the effective closure by Iran of the Strait of Hormuz.

The first one stops the daily movement of 500,000 international passengers through Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other airports, the second cuts off the shipment of 21 million barrels of oil and gas a day (20 percent of global daily requirements).

The knock-on effects of a prolonged war are almost incalculable but as I pointed out in a recent article if Iran manages to resist the most powerful military in the world, the shockwaves will soon transfer to our own economies.

I thought that would be a measure of last resort but Iran struck the site with drones on  March 3 and — should they choose — could destroy the facility entirely which would take years to rebuild.

Qatar immediately shut down Ras Laffan, the source of 20 percent of the world’s LNG. UK wholesale gas prices immediately jumped 50 percent.

Countries like Australia and New Zealand may end up on the losing end of a bidding war for oil, LNG and agricultural petrochemicals if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

One should remember that Iran has many thousands of short range missiles and countless mines sprinkled along its coastline which will be all-but-impossible to suppress.

Nuclear propaganda and mischaracterisations
For the moment, the assassination of the Supreme Leader may see champagne corks popping in Western capitals but, as I warned recently, a decapitation strike could lead a furious or desperate Iran to lash out, sinking a US aircraft carrier by using their hypersonic missiles.

There is also a non-trivial risk that the US and Israel could use nuclear weapons if things go sideways.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

We keep hearing that Iran is an “evil” regime run by “clerics”. This conflation of an unscientific and emotive concept (‘evil’) with a cultural occupation (‘cleric’) is made in the context of picking on an ethnic or religious group of people as inferior. In this context, ‘cleric’ applies to Shia Islam, a major denomination of one of the world’s major religions. In the context of white supremacism, that word ‘cleric’ – as applied to Shia Islam – could have been ‘negro’.

Iran has been attacked by forces representing Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy; western super-elites who worship at the altar of military and surveillance technology. And the mainstream media within the imperium parrot the talking points of these supremacists; supremacists, seeking a unipolar world order (aka global hegemony) masquerading as capitalist democracy and riding on the coat-tails of progressive liberalism.

The West is as much a theocracy as is the Iranian regime. Only bigger, and vastly more lethal; and prone to excesses of cowardly asymmetric violence. (In the present event, one of the first groups of fatal victims were over 100 schoolgirls in southern Iran; most western media outlets have not even reported this.) As well as being a zero-out-of-ten on the scale of political ethics, the attack on Iran was illegal in both United States and international law. Once again, Congress was bypassed.

Further, we note that Israel is the world’s most secretive nuclear power; without even the semblance of a nuclear energy program that might act as cover for this. Why do we never hear about Israel’s nuclear hammer-in-waiting?

At the head of the attacking forces is an American President playing the role of the useful fool; himself being simultaneously played by, on the one side, the manifestly-evil regime of Benjamin Netanyau, and the forces of the Dark Enlightenment among which Peter Thiel of Palantir – a New Zealand citizen – is prominent.

Secret City, and President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

Yesterday I watched the final two episodes of Season Two of Secret City, an Australian political thriller. [Secret City finishes on Netflix tomorrow!]

The story, filmed in Canberra and Adelaide in 2018, was about an innocent Australian family killed from the sky by a deliberately misdirected drone attack; an attack like many similar executions of civilians living in northwest Pakistan, as part of a highly secret US/Australian ‘security’ program. A central point of Secret City was to highlight the asymmetry of western sentiment, whereby the deaths of four white Australians elicit 100 times more outrage than 400 similar deaths in or near Pakistan. In the story, the fictitious American company, Trebuchet, served as an equivalent to Palantir. (We note that last month’s mosque bombing in Islamabad was barely reported in the New Zealand media; deeply ironic given the Christchurch attacks on 15 March 2019.)

The end of the last episode of Secret City replayed extracts from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, televised in the United States on 17 January 1961.

Note these excerpts from Eisenhower’s address:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

And: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Much can be said about President Eisenhower’s tenure in office. I will note just this. It was Eisenhower who was able to settle a cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953, after the more-than-two years of extremely bloody stalemate – most of the blood was shed in North Korea – which endured under the previous Truman administration. Technically, that war has not finished. But the cease-fire has held since 1953, for as long as my life, and for longer than the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

Is Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy an imperial theocracy?

We note that the ‘First Reich’ – labelled well after its existence – was notionally an imperial theocracy; the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806). But, once created, it was not expansionist, rather it was a kind of Roman Catholic caliphate. Philosopher Voltaire claimed that it was neither ‘holy’, ‘Roman’, nor an ‘Empire’; it was essentially a German-led ‘commonwealth’ which made titular reference to the Church in Rome. It is arguable that the European Union is a Fourth Reich which references the First Reich.

The expansionist forces out of Europe, which have made the modern world – the world of the last 500 years – came from elsewhere: Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Washington. Until the 1990s, those European-sourced forces of dominance were increasingly secular. Whether or not Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy represents a development of these religious traditions, there can be little doubt that world dominance and appeasement is a process of empire-building.

Especially in Washington circles, there was an air of triumphalism around 1990. This was the unipolar moment. Helping to maintain the new unipolar moment, a man called Jeffrey Epstein – an alleged Israeli asset – became a conduit between the Israeli and American administrations in the 1990s. That’s where and when I see the origins of twenty-first century entitled Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. (On Epstein and Israel, see Starmer, Mandelson & Mossad – it’s worse than you think,Double Down News, Feb 2026; and The anatomy of the Epstein network The Listening Post, Al Jazeera, 9 Feb 2026.)

The greatest ever threat to humanity and the rest of the planetary biosphere

As noted, just about everyone in elite western politics and journalism is now, without analysis or knowledge, asserting that Iran is ‘evil’. Maybe. Though this is little more than believer rhetoric; the rhetoric of religious fundamentalists, the rhetoric of inflammation rather than resolution.

If this ‘evil’ moniker is accurate in some objective sense, then Iran – in the present conflict – is the ‘lesser evil’. The greater evil is clearly the philosophy and aggression of the Judeo-Christian techno-supremacists. Further, the appeasement of this greater evil is itself a most unsavoury thing to behold; almost as bad as the greater evil itself.

(On that appeasement, in a news report on Al Jazeera on Sunday [NZ time], Berlin correspondent Dominic Kane noted – with a straight face – that the governments of Britain, France and Germany all condemned “Iran’s retaliation”; and that Spain, in addition, condemned the American and Israeli aggression. Only Spain had the guts to demur from appeasement. One of the most important forms of  media appeasement is the omission of vital information from reports. According to those chairing the ‘Peace talks’ in Geneva, Iran was just about to present an accommodation which came very close to meeting President Trump’s stated demands, and that the aggressors were aware of this. These ‘negotiations’ were not conducted in good faith.)

The nihilistic logical endpoint of Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy is apocalypse. Indeed many of the ‘Christians’ in the Americanised conflation of Israel and Christianity are fully cognisant of, even excited by, the prophecies of the last book of the Christian Bible – the Book of Revelation.

Nuclear apocalypse – if or when it happens – will not only destroy humanity. Earth stands to become like Mars or Venus, if humanity ends in this way. In today’s circumstances, would it be acceptable to allow Israel or the United States to acquire nuclear weapons; we accept their weapons because they are already there, and because too many of us prefer hypocrisy over moral consistency.

But the Dark Enlightenment is still a developing supremacist project, embedded into Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. Resistance to it and its premises need not be entirely futile. Worse things happen when good people look away.

PS

New Zealand is scheduled to play Iran in the Football World Cup. How will the politics of Iran’s presence in the World Cup play out, especially given that, in last weekend’s events, Iran was the aggresse, not the aggressor?

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed more than 165 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018.

I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.

My wife and I were visiting Iran, both for the second time.

Right at the end of our time there we spent a day in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. It is a massive square that could enclose a dozen football fields.

Built by Shah Abbas I in the 17th Century, during the Safavid period, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site with markets, palaces and other cultural sites framing its four sides.  At one end is the magnificent Imam Mosque where a string of memorable moments happened to me.

I even saw a most astonishing one-woman demonstration.

We were just approaching the Imam Mosque when I noticed a young woman removing her head scarf. A mass of black hair fell down to her waist and then she began dancing.

‘Is this a protest?’
Rhythmically she swirled her upper body in a circular motion that sent her hair out horizontally around her. I was gob-smacked.

After a minute or two she stopped and started talking to her male companion who had been photographing her. I approached.

“Is this a protest?” I asked, somewhat gormlessly.  Yes, against the clothing restrictions.

Today the courage and determination of such people has, to a degree, paid off. Those restrictions, particularly in the cities, have effectively been lightened.  I have seen lots of footage of Iranian women without any head covering.

I salute their courage and determination and know their struggle will continue.

I also salute the courage and determination of the millions of Iranians who have turned out this week to support their government against the violent assault on the sovereignty of Iran by the racist, fascist genocidal Israeli state and its powerful vassal the USA.

Following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I saw remarkable footage of that same vast square in Isfahan filled to the four corners with what must have been hundreds of thousands of people. As with millions around the country, they were defying the missiles to protest the violation of their sovereignty.

The inconvenient truth
The scale of the pro-government demonstrations is virtually never shown in the Western media but to understand the contested political landscape that is Iran you need to understand that inconvenient truth.

Iranian politics in the Western view has been reduced to a cartoon, to a Manichean world of black and white — which partly explains why Westerners, most particularly the leaders, fail to grasp the fierce nationalism that has seen millions of Iranians rally round their government as their state comes under an existential threat.

That day in 2018 in that square I chatted with pro-government and anti-government people; all incredibly nice and open and welcoming. Everyone was keen to discuss Iran and the wider world.

There were lots of school parties and both the teachers and their students were keen to speak with us. It was an unalloyed pleasure for us. Iranians are remarkably hospitable, cultured and kind. For me, they are the finest people in the Middle East.

That is partly why I felt sad and bitter when I watched the footage of the bombed-out Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school (6-12 year-olds) in Minab and heard the screams of mothers calling for children whom they will never walk to school again.

The Western empire has a long history of killing children. I recently referenced Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children being “a price worth paying”.

This is just standard modus operandi for the West.

Protected by Mossad
Israeli football hooligans travel through Europe chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no kids left!” They are protected by Mossad, local police and politicians like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese recently welcomed Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who in October 2023 said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

This is as clear a statement of genocidal intent as you could get and Israel made good on it.

Israel, the killer of tens of thousands of school kids, presents itself as a liberator for Iran? You don’t have to be an A-grade student to spot that lie.

Many people around the Western world want to commit the children of Iran into the hands of the President of the United States.

According to US Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus: “In the Epstein files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

Lieu, one of the architects of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is also one of those legislators who has had access to some of the files still kept out of the public record.

Iranian children have as much right to grow up in safety as our own children.

infamous bro-talk
We should all also recall Trump’s infamous bro-talk with the vile radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked if he could refer to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass,” and Donald Trump salivated back at him: “Yeah.”

While they were joking about this “piece of ass”, Trump said he would try to date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. It is a relevant anecdote because we live in the age of American Geopolitical Epsteinism — a world of predators seeking to violate those weaker than them.

You don’t have to like the Iranian government to support the UN Charter and the insistence on the sovereign equality of nations.

Nothing in the Charter says it is okay for powerful white countries to attack other countries.  The West needs to bring its leaders to justice for the crime of genocide not launch yet another war on innocents.

Hands off Iran, Netanyahu. Hands off the children of Iran, Trump.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 2 March 2026.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

The governments of Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have issued advisories for their nationals in the Middle East to remain calm and take the necessary precautions due to US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran.

Fiji’s Embassy in Abu Dhabi said Fijian nationals who were not residents of the United Arab Emirates should register with the embassy as soon as possible amid airspace closures in the Gulf Cooperation Council region.

The embassy said registration would allow them to offer necessary consular support and maintain situational awareness of Fijian nationals in-country.

The Solomon Islands Foreign Affairs Ministry has advised all its nationals not to travel to the region until further notice.

“Solomon Islanders residing in the Gulf Region and Israel are urged to take necessary precautions, remain calm, follow host country authorities, and monitor reliable updates,” the ministry said in a statement.

While the Vanuatu government is advising its nationals and passport holders that the situation “is extremely volatile and unpredictable” and those caught in affected areas should “make immediate arrangements to depart if possible”.

“Stay informed about local conditions and register with the Vanuatu Ministry of Foreign Affairs if you’re planning to travel to affected areas,” the Vanuatu Foreign Ministry said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

“We warned you,” says Iran’s national security commission head after Israel-US missiles attacks on the capital Tehran and other cities.

Al Jazeera reports comments from Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the national security commission of the Iranian Parliament.

“We warned you!” he wrote on social media.

“Now you have started down a path which end is no longer in your control,” he added.

We warned you!
Now you have started down a path which end is no longer in your control.

— ابراهیم عزیزی (@Ebrahimazizi33) February 28, 2026

Explosions were also reported in the cities of Kermanshah, Lorestan, Tabriz, Isfahan and Karaj, according to local news media.

Al Jazeera’s chief US correspondent Alan Fisher reports that people were expecting that there may well be an attack by the United States.

US President Donald Trump had been talking about it.

‘Some US action expected’
“Most people expected some sort of United States action. So there is surprise that Israel has gone first.

“But there will be speculation here in the United States — inevitably — that this is [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu once again trying to force the United States to take action against Iran.

“And the reason he has done this is to try and force their hand.”

News media report US President Donald Trump as stating that the joint Israel-US attacks were aimed at “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”.

In an eight-minute video message shared on Truth Social, he said: “Short time ago, US military began major combat operation in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating threats from the Iranian regime.”

Mehran Kamrava, director of the Iranian studies unit at the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies and professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, said Israel appeared to have “launched an attack designed to derail the [nuclear] negotiations” between the US and Iran. A new round of talks had been scheduled for next week.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

If Israel and the US attack Iran, the cosy worlds of Europe, Australia and New Zealand could be swept up in an economic catastrophe.

Should the Iranians survive a terrifying onslaught, they have vowed to strike back in a way that could crash the global economy.  How they could quite possibly do this is the topic of this article.

The leaders of the Islamic Republic — love them or hate them — know that they face an existential threat; that the continued existence of a unified state called Iran is imperilled.

They also know that the collective West will not stand up for international law and the proscription on launching wars of aggression. Under these circumstances a state will sacrifice anything to survive, including hitherto unthinkable acts like sinking the USS Abraham Lincoln, the glory of the American war machine.

All the signs are pointing to a new Shock and Awe campaign by the United States.

The goal, as it was in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, is a fast knock-out. Mission Accomplished in a few weeks.

War, however, seldom goes entirely to plan — the Americans never expected they would spend 20 years in Afghanistan and waste trillions of dollars to move from the Taliban regime to . . .  the Taliban regime.

Here is a selection of options open to the Iranians if they survive the initial onslaught.

Shut down all civilian flights for the duration of the conflict
Without firing a single missile, Iran can likely bring all flights into and out of the entire Gulf region to a shuddering halt. That’s 500,000 passengers per day.

More than 180 million passengers pass through Doha, Abu Dhabi and Dubai every year.

Simply issuing a warning that the entire Gulf region is an air combat zone will put the brakes on all major airlines, effectively severing the primary link between Europe, Asia and Australasia for as long as Iran hangs on.

Insurance companies would issue a cancel note on all policies (for airlines, passengers, airports, provisioners) for the entire region.

No airline will defy this interdiction. Would Qantas, for example, fly one of its A380s loaded with mums, dads and kids into a potential kill zone?  The Iranians could underscore the seriousness by firing a couple of missiles onto runways or using EW (electronic warfare tools) to spoof or harass planes.

In an interview with @CBSNews , Iran’s FM Seyed Abbas Araghchi said uranium enrichment is Iran’s legal right under the NPT, reaffirming peaceful nuclear policy and commitment to diplomacy
More: https://t.co/XqHaDqxOfl https://t.co/3tGlg9SJKL

— Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (@Iran_GOV) February 22, 2026

Shut down all oil and LNG shipments
Iran will likely mine the Strait of Hormuz 33 km (21 miles) wide, making it instantly uninsurable for any oil or LNG tanker to move into or out of the Gulf.  Huge numbers of smart mines (that can recognise the acoustic signature of a tanker) will be deployed as well as hundreds of semi-submersible drone boats.

Spread out across the Gulf are thousands of short-range anti-ship missiles that will be virtually impossible to suppress.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

If you struggle to cope with the endless pressure to communicate in an ever-more connected world, spare a thought for the late serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

The flood of three million documents released by the US Department of Justice last weekend confirm that Epstein spent an inordinate amount of time corresponding with the huge network of powerful acquaintances he had developed.

Emailing alone looks to have been almost a full-time job for him — and in a real sense, it was.

The personal attention he devoted to billionaires, royalty, political leaders, statesmen, celebrities, academics and media elites was how he kept himself at the heart of this vast network of power.

His address book was a who’s who of those who shape our sense of how the world ought to be run. But it was also critical to how he drew some of these same powerful figures deeper into his orbit, and into a world of debauched and exploitative private parties in New York and on his Caribbean island.

Apparently there are another three million documents still being withheld. Their contents, we must presume, are even more damning to the global elite cultivated by Epstein.

The more documents that come to light, the more a picture emerges of how Epstein was shielded from the consequences of his own depravity by this network of allies who either indulged his crimes, or actively participated in them.

Epstein’s modus operandi looked suspiciously like that of a gangland boss, who requires initiates to take part in a hit before they become fully fledged members of the mob. Complicity is the safest way to guarantee a conspiracy of silence.

Network of power
It is not just that the late paedophile financier was for decades hiding in plain sight. His network of friends and acquaintances were hiding with him, all assuming they were untouchable.

His abuse of young women and girls was not just a personal crime. After all, for whom were he and his procurer-in-chief, Ghislaine Maxwell, doing all this sex trafficking?

This is precisely why so many of the millions of documents released have been carefully redacted — not chiefly to protect his victims, who are apparently too often identified, but to protect the predatory circles he serviced.

What is notable about the latest tranche of Epstein files is how suggestive they are of a worldview associated with “conspiracy theorists”. Epstein was at the centre of a global network of powerful figures from both sides of a supposed — but in reality, largely performative — political divide between the left and right.

The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes

The glue that appears to have bound many of these figures together was their abusive treatment of vulnerable young women and girls.

Similarly, the photos of rich men with young women suggest that Epstein accumulated, either formally or informally, kompromat — incriminating evidence — that presumably served as potential leverage over them.

In true Masonic style, his circle of peers appear to have protected each other. Epstein himself certainly benefited from a “sweetheart deal” in Florida in 2008. He ended up being jailed on only two charges of soliciting prostitution — the least serious among a raft of sex trafficking charges — and served a short term, much of it on work release.

And the mystery of how Epstein, a glorified accountant, financed his fantastically lavish lifestyle — when his schedule seems to have been dominated by emailing chores and hosting sex parties — grows a little less mysterious with every fresh disclosure.

His cultivation of the super-wealthy and their hangers-on, and the invitations to come to his island to spend time with young women, all smack of the traditional honeytrap famously employed by spy agencies.

Most likely, Epstein wasn’t financing all of this himself.

Israel’s fingerprints
That should be no surprise. Once again, the fingerprints of intelligence services — particularly Israel’s — are to be found in the latest dump of files. But the clues were there long before.

There was, of course, his intimate, preternatural bond with Maxwell, whose media tycoon father was exposed after his death as an Israeli agent. And Epstein’s long-standing best buddy, Ehud Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who later served as prime minister, should have been another red flag.

That partnership featured prominently in a flurry of stories published by Drop Site News last autumn, from an earlier release of the Epstein files. They showed Epstein helping Israel to broker security deals with countries such as Mongolia, Cote d’Ivoire and Russia.

An active Israeli military intelligence officer, Yoni Koren, was a repeated houseguest at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment between 2013 and 2015. An email also shows Barak asking Epstein to wire funds to Koren’s account.

But the latest release offers additional clues. A declassified FBI document quotes a confidential source as saying Epstein was “close” to Barak and “trained as a spy under him”.

In an email exchange between the pair in 2018, ahead of a meeting with a Qatari investment fund, Epstein asks Barak to allay potential concerns about their relationship: “you should make clear that i dont work for mossad (sic).”

And in newly released, undated audio, Epstein advises Barak to find out more about US data analysis firm Palantir and meet its founder, Peter Thiel. In 2024, Israel signed a deal with Palantir for AI services to help the Israeli military select targets in Gaza.

Predictably, these revelations are gaining almost no traction in the establishment media — the very same media whose billionaire owners and career-minded editors once courted Epstein.

Instead, the media seem much more engrossed by weaker leads that suggest Epstein might have also had connections with Russian security services.

Faustian pact
There is a reason why the demand for the Epstein files has been so clamorous that even US President Donald Trump had to give in, despite embarrassing revelations for him too. Much of what we see happening in our ever-more debased, corrupt politics appears to defy rational, let alone moral, explanation.

Western elites have spent two years actively colluding in mass slaughter in Gaza — widely identified by experts as a genocide — and then labelling any opposition to it as antisemitism or terrorism.

Those same elites twiddle their thumbs as the planet burns, refusing to give up their enriching addiction to fossil fuels, even as survey after survey shows global temperatures relentlessly climbing to the point where climate breakdown is inevitable.

A series of reckless, illegal Western wars of aggression in the Middle East, as well as Nato’s long-term goading of Russia into invading Ukraine, have not only destabilised the world, but risk provoking nuclear conflagration.

And despite expert warnings, artificial intelligence is being rushed out with apparently barely a thought given to the unpredictable and likely massive costs to our societies, from eviscerating much of the job market to upending our ability to assess truth.

The Epstein files proffer an answer. What feels like a conspiracy, they suggest, is indeed a conspiracy — one driven by greed.

What was always staring us in the face might actually be correct: there is a steep entry price for being accepted into the West’s tiny power elite, and it involves putting to one side any sense of morality. It requires discarding empathy for anyone outside the in-group.

Maybe a soulless, flesh-eating elite in charge of our societies is less of a caricature than it appears. Maybe the Epstein files have such purchase on our imaginations because they teach us a lesson we already knew, confirming a cautionary tale that predates even the West’s literary canon.

More than 400 years ago, English writer Christopher Marlowe — a contemporary of William Shakespeare — drew on German folk stories to write his play Doctor Faustus, about a scholar who, through the intermediary Mephistopheles, agrees to sell his soul to the devil in return for magical powers.

Thus was born the Faustian pact, mediated by the Epstein-like figure of Mephistopheles. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would revisit this tale 200 years later in his two-part masterwork Faust.

Degenerate logic
Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the media noise over the Epstein files is serving chiefly to drown out a more truthful story struggling to emerge.

The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes, to direct it to a few select individuals — notably in the UK, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson.

The pair hardly count as sacrificial lambs. Nonetheless, they serve the same purpose: to satiate the growing public appetite for retribution.

Meanwhile, the rest of his circle either deny the well-established evidence of their friendships with Epstein or, if cornered, hastily apologise for a brief lapse in judgment — before scurrying for cover.

Seen in this larger frame, what does it matter if children suffer, either in Gaza or in the mansions of a billionaire?

This is a false reckoning. The Epstein files don’t just show us the dark choices of a few powerful individuals. More significantly, they highlight the degenerate logic of the power structures behind these individuals.

The powerful figures who took Epstein’s Lolita Express to his island; who got “massages” from young, trafficked women and girls; and who casually joked about the abuse these youngsters suffered, are the very same people who quietly helped Israel commit mass slaughter in Gaza — and in some cases, noisily defended its right to do so.

Are we surprised that those who raised not a whisper of opposition to the murder and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands more, were also those who connived in rituals of abuse against children — or condoned such rituals — far closer to home?

These are the people who required anyone hoping to raise their voice in defence of Gaza’s children to spend their time instead condemning Hamas. These are the people who sought at every turn to discredit the mounting death toll of children by attributing it to Gaza’s “Hamas-run Health Ministry”.

These are the people who denied Israel’s targeting of hospitals needed to treat Gaza’s wounded and sick children — and ignored Israel’s mass starvation of the entire population. And these are the people now pretending that Israel’s continuing murder and torture of Gaza’s children amounts to a “peace plan”.

Neoliberalism and Zionism
Set aside his paedophilia for a moment. Epstein was the ultimate personification of the twin corrupting ideologies of neoliberalism and Zionism, which dominate Western societies. That is reason enough why he excelled for so long in their upper reaches.

The ultimate destinations of those ideologies were always going to lead to a genocide in Gaza, and in the years or decades ahead — unless stopped — to a planet-wide nuclear holocaust or climate collapse.

Ordinary men, women and children must be left on the sinking ship, while the billionaires requisition the lifeboats

Epstein could serve as a salutary warning of what is so deeply amiss with the West’s political and financial culture. But the wake-up call he represents is now being smothered in his absence as much as it was in his lifetime.

Neoliberalism is the pursuit of money and power for its own sake, divorced from any higher purpose or social good. Over the last half century, Western societies have been encouraged to venerate the billionaire — soon to be trillionaire — class as the ultimate signifier of economic growth and progress, rather than the ultimate marker of a system that has rotted from within.

Predictably, the super-rich and their hangers-on have been drawn to the advocates of “longtermism”, a movement that justifies the world’s current gross inequalities and injustices — and is resigned to a coming climate and environmental apocalypse as the world’s resources are used up.

Longtermism argues that humanity’s salvation lies not with reorganising our societies politically and economically in the here and now, but with intensifying those inequalities to achieve longer-term success via a class of Nietzschean Ubermensch, or superior beings.

A tiny financial elite needs absolute freedom to amass more wealth in search of the solutions — via tech innovations, of course — to overcome the difficulties of surviving on our fragile planet. The rest of us are an impediment to the super-rich’s ability to steer a course to safety.

Ordinary men, women and children must be left on the sinking ship, while the billionaires requisition the lifeboats. In the words of one of longtermism’s gurus, Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, what lies ahead is “a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind”.

To borrow a term from video-gaming, members of the neoliberal elite view the rest of us as non-player characters, or NPCs — the filler characters generated in a game to serve as the background for the actual players. Seen in this larger frame, what does it matter if children suffer, either in Gaza or in the mansions of a billionaire?

No moral outlier
If this sounds a lot like traditional, “white man’s burden” colonialism, updated for a supposedly post-colonial era, that’s because it is. This helps to explain why neoliberalism pairs so comfortably with another depraved colonial ideology, Zionism.

Zionism gained ever-more legitimacy in the aftermath of the Second World War, even as it brashly preserved through the postwar era the depraved logic of the very European ethnic nationalisms that had earlier culminated in Nazism.

Israel, Zionism’s bastard child, not only mirrored Aryan supremacy, but made its own version — Jewish supremacy — respectable. Zionism, like other ugly ethnic nationalisms, demands tribal unity against the Other, values militarism above all else, and constantly seeks territorial expansion, or Lebensraum.

Is it any surprise that it was Israel that, over many decades, reversed the advances of an international legal system set up precisely to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War?

Is it any surprise that it was Israel that carried out a genocide in full view of the world — and that the West not only failed to stop it, but actively colluded in the mass slaughter?

Is it any surprise that, as Israel has found it harder to conceal the criminal nature of its enterprise, the West has grown more repressive, more authoritarian in crushing opposition to its project?

Is it any surprise that the weapons systems, surveillance innovations and population-control mechanisms that Israel developed and refined for use against Palestinians make it such a prized ally for a Western billionaire class looking to use the same technological innovations at home?

That is why the Home Secretary of a UK government that threw its weight behind the genocide in Gaza, and defined opposition to it as terrorism, now wants to revive the 18th-century idea of the Panopticon prison, an all-seeing form of incarceration, but in an AI version.

In Shabana Mahmood’s words, her Panopticon would ensure that “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”.

Nearly two decades ago, it became clear that Jeffrey Epstein was a predator. In recent years, it has become impossible to maintain the idea that he was a moral outlier. He distilled and channelled — through depraved forms of sexual gratification — a wider corrupt culture that believes rules don’t apply to special people, to the chosen, to the Ubermensch.

A handful of his most disposable allies will now be sacrificed to satisfy our hunger for accountability. But don’t be fooled: the Epstein culture is still going strong.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the Middle East Eye with the author’s permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.