Such a lot happening in today’s troubled world. I hope you’re keeping well?

I’ll try to keep today’s newsletter as brief as possible. Here’s what I’ll write (briefly!) about. Scroll down to what interests you:

1. Iran, diplomacy, and the risk of a new Israeli-US aggression

2. The mounting intifada inside the Democratic Party

3. Two new eps from PalCast

4. A great sale on the e-book of our Understanding Hamas book!

5. News from JWE board members

6. Some thoughts on post-election policy priorities.

Subscribe now

1. Iran, diplomacy, and the risk of a new Israeli-US aggression

We’ve had the Israeli election, and seen its still indeterminate result. Forming a coalition that’s able to govern there may take weeks. Meantime, Netanyahu— whop was notably not repudiated by the electorate— retains the levers of Israel’s power… And an increasingly deranged Pres. Trump has said he’s considering unleashing another large attack on Iran, soon after Tuesday’s election.

What could possibly go wrong?

From the point of view of humankind worldwide, obviously, a lot. A new escalation from Washington and Tel Aviv could speedily cause global economic and governance chaos even more dire than that sparked by their illegal initial assault against Iran, last February.

There are some small signs of ongoing diplomacy between Washington and Tehran. High-level Qatari envoys took a Trump-approved message from VP Vance to Tehran early in the week, returning with Tehran’s response, yesterday. Tehran has stood firm on its demand for full and speedy implementation of the fully agreed June MOU. And here’s the latest, sternly deterrent message from the Supreme Leader, today.

Worth underlining: On Monday, Tehran pulled off a significant diplomatic/strategic coup when the powerful head of the country’s National Security Council, Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, hosted the defense ministers of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Türkiye’s influential intel chief in Tehran for a crucial, somewhat Yalta-like confab.

Attendees said little about what they’d agreed on. But they all committed to continuing their discussions, and there was talk of building an ”endogenous” defense structure for the region. Western war-hawks who’d hoped that the earlier defense pact among Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan could become a bludgeon against Iran were badly disappointed.

The stench of war-lust still hangs over much of Washington and Israel. The US military has been moving significant new munitions to Israel and Jordan.

And the Iranians are enforcing their regulations for passage through Hormuz more tightly than ever, hitting and disabling roughly three tankers making “unauthorized” transits every day. So the price of Brent crude— and everything worldwide that that still depends on transits through the Strait— continue to rise…

2. The mounting intifada inside the Democratic Party

Trump, as noted above, has been acting increasingly strangely. In the lead-up to Tuesday’s election he’s been tossing hateful Islamophobic accusations and suggestions far and wide. And the fortunes of the Democratic Party have continued to rise, with a strong probability that they will win a majority in the House and a good chance they might also win the Senate.

It’s important to note the degree to which this rise in Democratic fortunes has been powered by these factors:

• Soaring disgust with the corruption in Trump’s Washington, especially when set alongside the price rises that we all see clearly, every time we go to the grocery store or the gas pump.

• A clear understanding that nearly all of this inflation has been fueled by the aggression against Iran that Trump and Netanyahu voluntarily and quite illegally launched last February. That war was never popular, from the beginning; and it has become less so, pretty speedily, every month since February.

• A growing readiness to challenge the hold that Israel has long held over the policy positions of Democratic Party leaders. This, driven both by grassroots anger of Israel’s cruel, now three-year-long genocide in Gaza and by its role pushing for the War on Iran.

• The emergence within the Democratic Party of a new and energetically insurgent trend that wants the party speedily to end both the war on Iran and the blank check that Trump— and before him, Joe Biden— have continuously given to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.

I have started to call this new trend in the Dem Party, in a preliminary way, the “Mamdani Intifada”— though of course its motivating power is far broader than just that one super-talented and super-principled young man.

The Mamdani Intifada has proven capable of energizing and mobilizing vast new numbers of potential Democratic voters (including some former Trump voters) to an extent that the tired old, AIPAC dominated, Biden-Harris version of the Party was quite unable to.

Some quick indicators to watch in this regard:

• AIPAC’s recent announcement that it would not longer be openly endorsing candidates, so toxic had its brand become!!

• The very welcome success of Crossing the Red Line, Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s super-timely book that details how deeply many high-level officials in the Biden admin were involved in furthering Washington’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. (If you haven’t read it yet, you should, depressing though its story is.)

• The emergence of two new, well-organized initiatives that work to definitively end U.S. complicity in the Gaza genocide and to ensure that no administration engages in similar complicity ever again. These are “Drop The Genocide 20”, which has info on the Top Twenty genocide enablers from the Biden era and a petition you can sign, and the “Gaza Resignees Call for 2028 Presidential Candidates to Pledge Not to Hire Officials Responsible for Genocide in Gaza.”

Do check out all those resources— along with all the very useful, legislation-related info you’ll find on the website of the “IMEU Policy Project.”

3. Two new eps from PalCast (from Gaza)

The first of these is brand new, audio-only, and is of deep relevance for academics and researchers everywhere. The second is new-in-video and is charming, and achingly poignant…

** “Educating for the Future in Gaza,” with Dr. Mahmoud Altarabin

Dr. Mahmoud is a distinguished scholar, an Associate Professor of Translation and Linguistics, and Deputy Head of the Department of English at the Islamic University of Gaza. In this episode, now available on Apple Podcasts on Spotify, he spoke for 36 minutes with co-hosts Yousef and Tony from the displacement tent he’s been living in, in Khan Younis.

He described both the many, extreme challenges he’s been facing as he has worked to continue his calling as a teacher and scholar— and also the paths he sees as necessary in order to resuscitate Gaza’s once-vibrant higher-ed sector as soon as the genocide can be ended.

Listen to the episode and share it with others to help bring attention to the challenges facing education in Gaza.

** “The Trick is to not take the Serious Stuff Seriously” with Zain Abu Tawela

So here, finally, is the video version of the great 41-minute convo that Yousef and Tony had with 10-year-old Zain Abu Tawela, back in August.

Zain shares her experiences of displacement, the loss of everyday comforts, and the challenges of continuing her education, while explaining how art, creativity, humor, and films help her cope. Through her story, viewers gain a child’s perspective on life in Gaza and the realities that no child should have to face. This could be a good one to watch with your family…

4. A great sale on the e-book of our Understanding Hamas book!

If you missed buying the Just World Ed/OR Books book Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters when it first came out, you should know that through midnight (US-Eastern Time) today, Saturday, you can buy the e-book version for just $2.00 or £2.00.

What a great opportunity to soak up the wisdom of those five featured experts, as framed and presented by Rami G. Khouri and me!

5. News from JWE board members

Talking about Rami Khouri, here were two new pieces on his Substack this week:

• His October 28 take on the Israeli elections, with the money quote “Who drives the genocidal train is not the issue…”

• His speedy review of 3,000 years of history— in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Wow!

** Meantime, over on Richard Falk’s blog, I see there were three substantial pieces there this month that I hadn’t mentioned before. All of them were, I believe, transcripts from interviews he gave to Turkish media:

• This October 7 assessment of the Gaza Genocide, three years on

• A Solidarity Initiative for Gaza: The International Gaza Tribunal–Winning the Legitimacy War. (Richard was of course the main organizer of this important citizen initiative.)

• His October 19 take on whether Zionism is racism.

** As for Nora Barrows-Friedman, she was back doing her amazing work on the Electroinic Intifada livestream on Thursday… And today (Saturday), at 3:30 pm ET,she’s doing a special livestreamed gig with the Psychic Militancy Podcast, “Everybody (still) loves Nora… and Mikey” that I’m definitely going to try to tune in to.

6. Some thoughts on post-election policy priorities

Maybe by Wednesday or Thursday the broad picture of the election results will be clear. Let’s hope there is not too much post-election lawyering to sit through.

But the existing Congress will continue to be seated until the end of the year. It— and the guy in the White House— can do a lot of harm in that period. Not just launching the massive new physical assault on Iran that Trump’s buddy B. Netanyahu seems to be itching for. But also, God forbid, finally passing the long-discussed “NDAA” legislation that would (a) boost the U.S. military budget for FY2027 to the unprecedented height of $1.5 trillion, and (b) embed special set-asides for Israel and its “battle-tested”— on Palestinians— military industries very deep inside Washington’s own military budget.

There are many other disturbing prospects for what Trump and the GOP-led Congress might do in the two months ahead. But in the foreign policy realm, launching a new escalation against Iran and passing the NDAA as proposed are clearly the gravest. Two good, nationwide organizations that are are organizing to resist these moves are, of course, Codepink and the Friends Committee on National Legislation. If you’re a US citizen, I hope you’re familiar with both those orgs, and participate in their nationwide campaigning.

Beyond the end of the year, all those of us who want to see a more just and peaceful world will have a long list of goals to aim for; and we’ll need to be able to prioritize and strategize among them. Here’s a first quick list of the items I see as most pressing:

1. Ending the war on Iran, most likely on the basis of something like the previously agreed June MOU (which also, by the way, stipulated a permanent ceasefire for Lebanon and the restoration of Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.)

2. Ending the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s other gross atrocities in the West Bank. These goals would most plausibly be achieved by ending all forms of U.S. participation in, and support for, all Israeli actions that violate U.S. domestic law and international law, and by insisting on strict compliance with relevant legislation including the Leahy Law going forward.

3. Ending the cruel U.S. blockade on Cuba, and moving speedily with allies in the region to restore that country’s full sovereignty.

4. Restoring Washington’s full participation in the UN and its affiliated bodies, and credibly restating Washington’s commitment to all the principles of international law.

You may have your own list. If so, we’d love to hear what is on it!

Also… I realize that the list I provide above is incomplete. There will be many continuing issues to deal with relating to the military budget. And one foreign policy matter of sizeable impact and commensurate contention that will have to be tackled is Ukraine. Looking “tough” on Ukraine and harshly demonizing Russia and its president continue to be stances that many Democrats seem eager to hold onto. That, despite the facts that the war there has been going on for nearly five years, it has imposed a massive costs in (mainly Ukrainian) lives and treasure— and no plausible “victory” for the Ukrainian side looks anywhere near.

Back in April 2022, JWE built on the contributions of more than a dozen experts to produce a report that urged a speedy ceasefire while all the outstanding matters of contention be addressed through negotiation. Implementing those recommendations would have been great to do back then, and would still be an excellent approach in 2027.

… Anyway, the four issues I listed above seem to be ones that a mounting current within the Democratic Party— and also some Republicans?— will be able to agree on. So I’m hoping that Just World Ed can contribute well to all the deliberations over prioritizing among them and pushing them forward as effectively and as speedily as possible.

If you can help us do this through a super-timely donation, that would be great!

Support Just World Ed's work!

Till Tuesday, then, friends. Let’s see how it goes. (And please, feel free to put your own reactions and suggestions into the comment box below.)

Stay well—

~ Helena

This is a tumultuous weekend. There are fears of a big new U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran (Which I don’t wholly subscribe to— at least, not right now. But it might yet happen?)

For their part, Iranian leaders have made some very serious deterrent threats against the U.S. and its allies, along the lines of "If a country attacks us, we will both respond and go on the offensive.” This is, of course, in the context of the U.S. and Israel having quite illegally initiated their still ongoing and quite illegal war of aggression against Iran.

The Iranians have recently escalated enforcement efforts against ships evading the regulatory regime that they and Oman have long been preparing for the Strait of Hormuz. Two recent attacks against regs-evading oil tankers sent oil spreading far down the UAE’s coastline. They also sent world oil prices spiking to highs not seen since the early weeks of the Russia-Ukraine war, Here’s the FT’s 5-year graph for Brent, starting in late 2021:

There’s no sign— absent a serious U.S. return to diplomacy— that this line will do anything but continue climbing. Consumers worldwide, including here in the U.S., will be squeezed ever harder. I have to note that this is quite in line with what I surmised about the plans of Iran’s leaders back on September 2:

It is very likely they have a keen eye on the electoral calendar here in the United States and hope that their actions will cause the deepest pain for Trump and his party in mid-October or so…

War is, as Clausewitz so wisely remarked, an extension of politics by other means.

Meantime, as we know, tumultuous things are happening in many regions of the world today. These include: the sizeable protests in France and other European countries… confusion and more violence between Ukraine and Russia… the deep strategic crisis that Yemen’s super-smart Ansarullah have delivered to Western linchpin Saudi Arabia… instability in Brazil’s crucial elections… continued U.S. aggressivity against Cuba… etc, etc, etc…

Also key: what’s been happening in Israel. In the lead-up to the elections there Tuesday, the candidates have nearly all been competing primarily over who can inflict the most cruelty on the country’s neighbors, whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon.

Here’s what I’ll cover in today’s newsletter:

1. World Food Program reduces its vital aid to Gaza

2. Israeli forces enact harsh collective punishment across the West Bank

3. New from PalCast: Pediatrician Dr. Belal’s agonizing testimony from Gaza

4. Rami Khouri assesses today’s Resistance forces, at key Doha forum,

5. My own early thoughts on the geohistorical resonance of Israel’s ongoing orgy of violence.

Read on!

Subscribe now

1. World Food Program reduces its vital aid to Gaza

On October 19, the UN_affiliated WFP announced it would be cutting the amount of food aid it sends to Gaza by one-third, citing mainly serious shortfalls in funding.

In this press release, the WFP provided more details. All worth reading. Key points:

• An estimated 1.4 million people, or 67 percent of Gaza’s population, are experiencing acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse, classified as Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Phase 3 or above.

• This is down from 1.6 million people, or 77 percent of the population, at the end of 2025. However, the improvement remains modest and fragile.

• Around 200,000 people remain in Emergency conditions (IPC Phase 4) where immediate food assistance is needed to prevent deaths from hunger.

• Only one in five children consumes a sufficiently diverse diet. Access to health, water, sanitation and hygiene services also remains limited.

The Palestinian rights organization Al-Haq responded with a detailed analysis of this step. It noted the role of Israel in blocking and impeding aid deliveries (which by the way considerably drives up the costs for international orgs like the WFP.) It also noted that under international law,

The prohibition of starvation of civilians is absolute. Starvation with the intention to destroy a protected group amounts to genocide.

It concluded with a list of five steps it urges third states to take in response to Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. These ranged from, “Ensur[ing] the immediate, unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid” to,

Address[ing] the root causes of the genocide, by implementing the recommendations of the ICJ Palestine Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 to end Israel’s illegal presence in the OPT…

2. Israeli forces enact harsh collective punishment across the West Bank

On Thursday, two Palestinian Resistance fighters in occupied Al-Khalil (Hebron) in the West Bank attacked a squad of active-duty occupation forces near the city, killing two of them. The response of the Israeli government and military was speedy, and brutal, and it continues until now.

Al-Jazeera has been carrying a good livestream of the developments that have been breaking very fast across the Hebron District and many other parts of the occupied West Bank. Here’s what they posted at 13:15 GMT:

In several places, the Israeli military’s well-practised demolition squads have also gone into action against Palestinian homes and businesses:

3. New from PalCast: Pediatrician Dr. Belal’s agonizing testimony from Gaza

The latest episode of PalCast, “I Hate To See Anyone Suffer – A Paediatrician in Gaza,” featured Dr. Belal Adnan Abuiyada, a pediatrician working amid the devastating consequences of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In hisconversation with hosts Yousef and Tony, Dr. Belal shared his experiences treating children, witnessing the suffering of families and navigating a healthcare system pushed to the brink of collapse.

Alongside his medical work, he writes on Instagram about displacement, grief, memory and the moments of tenderness that persist despite the devastation. be sure to follow him there!

Dr. Belal described the lasting psychological effects of war on children, including nightmares, bedwetting, speech difficulties and social withdrawal. The conversation also explored how, beyond the immediate trauma of violence and injury, the terrible living conditions— frail and overcrowded shelters, inhumane sanitary conditions, etc—also cause skin diseases, gastrointestinal illnesses, respiratory problems, and more.

He also highlighted the collapse of essential healthcare services, explaining that many conditions could be treated if hospitals, medicines and diagnostic equipment were available. While vaccines continued to arrive through the WHO, he said, insulin remained hard to obtain. For Dr. Belal, these outcomes were not inevitable: a ceasefire and access to humanitarian aid could help prevent further suffering.

This latest episode is available now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to it and share it widely with others to help bring these experiences to a wider audience!

4. Rami Khouri assesses today’s Resistance forces, at key Doha forum

Our great JWE board member Rami G. Khouri has been busy recently. On Tuesday he was on a panel at the Global Security Forum in Doha, along with— as it happens— our good friend and colleague Elijah Magnier. You can see the whole video of that panel here. (We’ll be working on a transcript soon, I hope.)

As he usually does, Rami had prepared his remarks well. He sadly didn’t get time to deliver them all, but he posted a fuller version of what he wanted to say on his Substack, here.

In the course of that, he gave a good shoutout to the important book Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters that he and I co-authored a couple of years ago (and which is still a good, essential primer on the subject, if you haven’t yet read it.)

He also made these important points:

• Deep down, resistance groups in our region are motivated essentially by the same forces that drive civil rights activists, student protests, and other public action groups across the West — dignity, equal rights, opportunity to live a decent life, liberty, ending colonial and domestic oppression, respecting identity and morality in public life, and justice for all.

• West Asian resistance groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Insarullah (Houthis) in Yemen, and the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, among others, battle in three arenas simultaneously: decent domestic governance; regional issues of common concern, especially Israeli crimes against Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians; and, repelling foreign imperial-colonial predators that have tormented, occupied, or ravaged them for over a century…

• The important historical moment we navigate now has seen a combination of Iranian and Arab resistance groups battle Israel-US aims and force them to halt their assaults — for the moment, at least — especially since the US armed forces were forced to retreat from many of their bases in Arab lands. It is not clear how this war will end, but it does appear now that the regional order that the UK+Zionists created in the 1920s is being reconfigured by the force of sustained indigenous resistance against the US-Israeli combine.

Hallelujah to that, Rami! (Or probably, something less Crusader-ish…)

5. My own early thoughts on the geohistorical resonance of Israel’s present orgy of violence

These past few weeks, while traveling and doing a few other things, I’ve also been starting to prepare the Table of Contents for my next big book project, which is to be a broad-brush account of How a handful of White Western powers managed to build and sustain the system of hegemony over world affairs that we now— far too belatedly!— see fracturing and coming toward its end.

It is very important, especially for those of us who are of “White”, West-European heritage, to understand both the terrible impact that that 500-year-plus system of Western colonialism has had on all the peoples of what today we call the “Global South", who have been the ground-down victims of that system.

People of “White” heritage today make up less than 12% of the world’s people— roughly the same as the proportion of “White” people in South Africa, during Apartheid. Them monopolizing power in South Africa then was (rightly) seen as wrong by almost everyone around the world. “Us”— White Westerners— monopolizing power at the global level, as we have done for several centuries now, is equally inequitable; and it is a system that has only ever been sustained, today as throughout those earlier centuries, by the massive application of violence.

Whether we’re talking about the brutal violence that the (White-birthed) settler-colonial state of Israel has been continuing to inflict on a daily basis on the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Or about the crushing physical and economic violence that— at Israel’s urging— Pres. Trump’s America has been visiting on the people of Iran. Or the violence that Western-supported Saudi Arabia has been visiting on the people of Yemen since 2014…

So I turn from reading accounts of what Israel is currently doing in Gaza or what the U.S. is currently doing in Cuba or Venezuela or Iran to the brilliant summary of the worst of Britain’s depredations in pre-Independence India that the veteran Indian diplomat and lawmaker Shashi Tharoor put into Chapter 5 of his book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India…

Some highlights from that very meticulously researched chapter:

From 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines… The famines of the [pre-Independence] twentieth century probably took the total well over 35 million. William Digby pointed out that in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5 million people had died in all the wars around the world combined, whereas in just ten years 1891-1900 19 million had died in India in famines alone… (pp.150-51)

Tharoor also underlines that there have been no famines in India since India won its independence, and cites the brilliant economics thinker Amartya Sen as noting famines are nearly always avoidable and that they result not from lack of food but lack of access to food.

In that chapter, Sen also dissects a number of the orgies of physical violence with which the British “Raj” sustained its survival, including crucially the massacre at Jallianwallah Bagh, Amritsar in April 1919 in which British forces used machine guns to kill an estimated 379 of the Indians gathered for religious ceremonies in that enclosed garden, wounding many hundreds more.

(Or, I turn from reading about the corruption in Pres. Trump’s entourage to the priapic shenanigans of the court of Henry VIII… But that will be a different chapter in my book.)

A number of things seem significant in my re-reading of Tharoor’s brilliant work. But mainly these:

• As with the parallel excesses the British committed in Sudan in the late 1890s, which I had written about here in late August, the British forces carries out very many of these atrocities long after Britain along with a handful of other “White” governments had agreed— in 1864— to the basic principles of what we now call "The “Laws of War.” But for the British and other signatories of those early “Geneva Conventions” like the French, Italians, Portuguese, or Americans, those “humanitarian” principles were very evidently not intended to apply to non-White peoples.

• In the late 19th and early 20th centuries all those imperial/colonial powers continued practicing gross atrocities against the peoples subject to their empires. Intermittently there might be dogged journalists, or parliamentarians, who shone a spotlight on the suffering. But those spotlights always came with a considerable time-lapse because of the poor communications; they were fragmentary; and were very speedily covered up by the authorities. Today in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and Cuba, we can see and know what the colonial powers are doing, in almost-real time. Yet still, most people in “White”, Western societies remain complacent about these atrocities that are being carried out with our tax dollars and supposedly in defense of something called “Western civilization.” Where is the outrage??

• Here is another very sad footnote, too. Tharoor is not just a smart and careful scholar. For decades he had a brilliant career at the United Nations, culminating with appointment as under-secretary-general for communications and public information (UNDPI) with effect from 1 June 2002. (I met him briefly at a conference, not long after, and enjoyed our short conversations.) In 2006, the Government of India nominated the still-youthful Tharoor for the post of Secretary General. In the final round of “straw-polling” in the Security Council tfor that appointment, the South Korean politician Ban Ki-Moon was the only candidate not to be vetoed by one of the permanent members, while Tharoor was vetoed by the U.S., under the express instructions of Condoleezza Rice.

Since then, Tharoor has served with distinction. in the Indian Parliament, where he now chairs the Standing Committee on External Affairs. (Fwiw, his son Ishaan Tharoor worked for some years as a foreign affairs columnist at the Wapo, and is now at The New Yorker.)

But my bottom line here is that if we want to understand the relevance of all the cruelty the “White” empire and its various offsprings are practicing today— and also, the globe-shaking impact of the resilience and smarts with which its targets are currently not just resisting but also fighting back— then it is good to dive back pretty deep into the historical record… Back, indeed, to when the first Portuguese colonizers started making their pillaging way down the coast of West Africa in 1415 CE. (They were then the first Westerners to arrive at— and conquer— the Persians at the Strait of Hormuz— in 1507… What went around then, has now started to come back around today… )

Onward to a much more just and peaceable world— for all of humankind!

And I hope you want to help support all of Just World Ed’s programs, going forward. You can do so here:

Give to Just World Ed!

You stay well—

~ Helena

A busy week for me— and in world affairs. I hope you’re well?

In today’s newsletter I’ll start by making a quick stab at answering the big question I posed above. (Spoiler alert: one of these elections matters a lot more than the other.) Then I will run quickly through these items:

1. Two new PalCast releases

2. The round-up provided by our board member Nora Barrows-Friedman to the EI livestream on Thursday

3. Update on Heidi Levine and Zionist terror gangs in the West Bank

4. Zionist terror in Lebanon, too

5. A thoughtful take from a doc in Gaza on the Israeli film NAZA

6. Two new analyses from me on Iranian and Ansarullah capabilities and how they’re changing the global balance

7. My discussion with Iran’s Foad Mahdavi on Iran’s options and the NPT.

I’ll try to make this quick. There’s a lot to cover…

How much will the Israeli & U.S. elections matter?

Yesterday, I penned this analysis of the prospects for these two upcoming elections.

(Along the way there I took a detour to look at the conclusions that Tel Aviv University’s fairly well-respected “Institute for National Security Studies” reached in a recent study of trends in Israeli security over the past three years. You might be interested in the graphic I shared there, from that study’s conclusions…)

But if you want the answer to the “How much these elections matter” question, here’s the short version of what I wrote yesterday:

I judge that the election in Israel is very unlikely to lead to any meaningful change in country’s policies towards its neighbors or the world. It will likely take some weeks of intra-party consultations before the make-up of the ruling coalition is even clear; and even then, the policies that result are likely to be “more of the same”— or worse.

The elections here in the U.S. will be much more momentous for the fate of the peoples of this country, of West Asia, and the world. Pres. Trump is extremely likely to emerge from these elections— and particularly after the seating of the new Congress next January 3— with his wings considerably clipped. The Democrats are very likely to win the House, and now even have a good shot at winning a majority in the Senate.

But what kind of a Democratic Party will this be?

(I then explored that latter question some…)

Also of relevance to the matter of the integrity of our election process here in the U.S. is, of course, the continuing— and recently escalated— campaign that Pres. Trump has been waging against sitting member of the U.S. Congress Ilhan Omar. If you want to back Rep. Omar’s urgent campaign to fight back against Trump’s outrageous lawfare, you can do so here.

Two new PalCast releases

We are thrilled that we’ve just released a brand-new audio episode of the PalCast podcast: It’s a convo that hosts Yousef and Tony had with Malak Abu Krayem, a Palestinian computer scientist, app developer, and children’s book writer who ws speaking with them from (still-being-genocided) Gaza.

This episode was titled “Finding a New Path Through the Genocide.” In it, Malak described how she continued developing apps and creating art, working both within Gaza and remotely with people abroad, highlighting the determination of Gaza’s Palestinians to keep learning, creating, and finding opportunities despite the conditions they faced.

She described the daily challenges of working in Gaza, where unreliable internet and electricity made even basic tasks difficult. Batteries cost more than $3,000, while electricity prices had risen to at least ten times their normal rate. A week-long internet outage caused considerable stress, but her Taiwanese employer responded with understanding, demonstrating the importance of empathy and flexibility when working with people in crisis.

Malak also discussed Snaptek, an app she co-founded with a partner in Taiwan to organise notes, links, and expenses.

Oh wow. I am bowled over with admiration!

Listen to everything Malak has to say, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! And share the episode with others to bring attention to the life and work of Palestinians in Gaza.

** And, a video version of our convo with Muhammad Shehada…

We’ve also been pleased to release a video version of the hour-long convo that Yousef and I recently conducted with Palestinian political analyst and commentator Muhammad Shehada.

In that convo we explored the so-called “Yellow Line” that was supposed to restrict the presence of Israel’s military inside Gaza; Israel’s creation of armed militias in Gaza; and the political interests surrounding the Trump-dominated Board of Peace. We explored the worsening situation in the West Bank… And also, regional developments involving Iran, the United States, Israel, Ansarullah, and Arab governments.

What an informative, wide-ranging discussion that was!

Subscribe now

The round-up provided by our board member Nora Barrows-Friedman to the Electronic Intifada livestream on Thursday

I always love listening to the round-ups Nora provides at the head of each EI livestream. She is such a strong, well-centered leader, to be able to pull these achingly tragic reports together week after week after week. I ache for the emotional toll it must take on her; but she just keeps going, and leads us all to a better understanding of the effects of Israel’s brutality on all the Indigenous people who are its targets.

Now, I see that EI is providing a text version of Nora’s reports, as well. This latest one is titled “3-year-old girl watches mom burn alive in Gaza.”

This was her lede:

It has been more than one year since the fraudulent ceasefire was announced in Gaza. The Palestinian health ministry says that since 10 October 2025, Israel has killed more than 1,500 Palestinians and wounded more than 5,300.

This week, 120 international humanitarian, human rights, and civil society organizations jointly stated that “the ceasefire exists in name only, with Israeli forces continuing to kill and injure Palestinians daily, and restrictions on aid, equipment and rebuilding materials preventing families from recovering.”

Update on Heidi Levine and Zionist terror gangs in the West Bank

You have probably all heard about the attacks that gangs of Zionist settler terrorists have been launching recently against Palestinian farmers trying to harvest olives from trees in West Bank lands that their families have owned for many generations… And yesterday, as WaPo photojournalist Heidi Levine was trying to document that violence, they attacked her too, stomping her to the ground and kicking and hitting her hard as she lay there.

Local Palestinians risked their lives to rescue her. According to the WaPo’s account, she was was later “treated at hospitals in Ramallah and Israel for lacerations across her body, a broken rib and four broken vertebrae. She will need surgery on one hand after a finger was ripped open, exposing bone.”

I know there’s been a huge amount of turmoil at the WaPo recently. And under Jeff Bezos’s ownership the “Opinion” section has been almost completely hollowed out. But it still does some good investigative reporting— including in this report, which also states:

Levine described being overtaken by a group of attackers, hit and knocked to the ground. A video taken by another journalist shows her being struck repeatedly while she is on the ground.

“They just kept kicking me and kicking me, like probably 50 times,” Levine told reporters.

Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, a blogger who filmed the assault, said the settlers beat Levine with sticks while the journalists and villagers were forced to retreat.

… Israeli troops arrived shortly before the attack, which seemed to embolden the settlers, Khrzhanovskiy said.

Soldiers fired tear gas at Palestinians and “did absolutely nothing about the settlers,” Khrzhanovskiy said.

If the settler-terrorists feel bold enough to treat a clearly-marked and fairly evidently “Western” journalist like this, that tells us a lot about how ready they too often are to inflict even greater violence on the always vulnerable Palestinian Indigenes…

Zionist terror in Lebanon, too

Lebanon, like Gaza, is another place where there is supposed to be a (U.S.-brokered) “ceasefire” but where that term has since the beginning been devoid of all actual meaning. …And Courtney Bonneau, like Heidi Levine, is another experienced photojournalist who takes non-trivial risks to share the world the visual reality of what they see around them…

Bonneau has been doing a lot of powerful work in Jebel Amel (South Lebanon) for the past couple of years, and she has a well-maintained, almost daily feed on X. Here is what she posted there yesterday:

A thoughtful take from a doc in Gaza on the Israeli film NAZA

I haven’t yet had the chance to see the award-winning film NAZA, in which two Jewish-Israeli film-makers document the series of conversations they held on a rooftop in Tel Aviv with operators from the Israeli military who had knowingly killed large numbers of civilians during the still-ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.

I know that the film has been deeply controversial. In late September it won a 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice International Film Festival. It has won huge support from leading genocide scholars such as Omer Bartov— along with excoriation and threats from the Israeli authorities. It has also been criticized by some leaders in the Palestinian-rights movement on the grounds that it centers accounts of Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza provided by Israelis themselves rather than the many accounts of these actions provided by their victims, and also that the film-makers allowed the interviewees to give their accounts anonymously, thus allowing them to escape any real accountability for their actions.

Personally, I don’t have a view— yet— on the film and its value. Maybe once I’ve seen it I can offer an opinion. Meantime, I found this deeply thoughtful reaction to it (PDF) that was recently shared by a medic and gifted writer in Gaza called Dr. Ezzideen Shehab.

(I had to love this guy when I saw that the profile he has on X features excerpts from Dr. Refaat Alareer’s haunting poem, “If I Must Die.”)

He writes:

Yesterday, I watched Naza.

I did not go to learn what had happened in Gaza. I am from there. I am one of the victims of this war, one of its witnesses, and one of those who have paid a price that will not end when the war does.

…

I went with another question in mind.

How can people who have inherited the memory of the Holocaust find so many ways to justify committing atrocities against another people? How can someone who has inherited the memory of being a victim come to defend the actions of those who inflict suffering?

Do they ever truly feel remorse? Do they understand what they have done? Are they ashamed when they speak of it?

And if I were to meet one of them someday, would he dare to look me in the eyes?

How do they sleep at night?

Anyway, his whole thread there is worth reading…

Two new analyses from me on Iranian and Ansarullah capabilities and how they’re changing the global balance

As some of you know, currently my greatest intellectual concern (or “leading”, as Quakers would say) is with the impact that events in West Asia have been having in recent years— let’s say, since October 7, 2023— on a global balance of power that for more than 500 years now has been dominated by the rapacious shenanigans of a handful of small groups of violent adventurers and pillagers who originated from polities perched at the extreme-Western coast of Europe…

Over the past three years, the settler-colonial entity of Israel, with the full support and backing of its much more powerful North American counterpart the United States, has undertaken the latest in the centuries-long stream of genocides that “White” settler-colonial entities have undertake against the Indigenous people of the lands they sought to settle and dominate. Israel’s genocide in Gaza shocked almost the entire world, for a number of reasons.

It was the first genocide ever to have many of its key events recorded and shared “live” or nearly “live”— often by both the perpetrators and their victims, each for their separate audiences of supporters.

It has also been— along with the earlier atrocities in Myanmar— one of the few genocides being actively undertaken in the era after the global community provided (in 1948) a formal definition for this practice of killing off entire communities and all their culture, which as I’d noted had already been followed by waves of settler colonizers throughout the centuries before 1948… and after the nations of the world agreed that this should “Never Again” happen…

Anyway, the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the “ironclad” support it has continued until now to enjoy from the most powerful state in the whole world has over the past three years brought this most powerful state, the U.S., and the entire world system that it has dominated since 1945, to a turning point that now promises to usher in a new, much more equitable, just, and— I hope!— peaceable world order.

(It is key to underline the degree to which the until-now-existing “world order” has been upheld only through the massive and systematic application of violence.)

The current, transformational cracking of the U.S.-led world order has been achieved by the remarkable resilience and organizational smarts demonstrated not only by the resisting people of Palestine but also by their fellow resisters in Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and elsewhere throughout West Asia.

Over the past week I have published two sets of notes on some of the key aspects of the current military/strategic contests in West Asia; and I warmly invite you to read them, share them with your networks, and record your comments/reactions as youy see fit.

Here they are:

• This one, “Ansarullah and Iranian victories pave the way for the end of ‘White’ empire”, from October 12.

• This one, “More good resources on the Ansarullah-Saudi and Iran-GCC conflicts”, from yesterday.

My discussion with Iran’s Foad Mahdavi on Iran’s options and the NPT

Oh, and here is something else I did this past week. It was a 30-minute discussion with Foad Mahdavi on, basically, the topic of whether Iran should follow the North Korean example and leave the NPT.

I do not presume, from my comfortable position here in Washington DC, to provide advice to thinkers and people in a country against which my government has unleashed— and continues to unleash— a violent, destructive, and quite unjustifiable war. I did note, however, that the actions the Iranian government has already been taking while it has still been in the NPT have been very successful in resisting the U.S.-Israeli assaults and also in. starting to roll back U.S.-Israeli power in the region.

The whole matter of the NPT and its current status/standing is anyway a crucial one. How much longer will the discourse of the “West” and of so much of the rest of the world continue to be distorted by the longstanding double standards under which Israel’s non-membership of the NPT and its actual possession of an extremely robust nuclear arsenal are almost never mentioned in public, at all?

So that’s it for now. The 16 days ahead of us should be fascinating for everyone concerned about the global balance and the fate of “White”, Western hegemony. It certainly looks to me as if Iran’s leaders have been planning to have maximum effects on Western oil and financial markets in this lead-up to the U.S. election…

In the meantime, a HUGE thank-you to everyone who’s been giving recently to support our work at JWE. If you haven’t given recently, or haven’t given yet at all, just click on this link to see how to do so!

Give to Just World Ed!

You stay well—

Helena

Some wonderful news! The Norwegian committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize has announced that this year’s prize goes to the deeply experienced (and fearless) South African jurist Navi Pillay. Read their citation of the great value of her work, here. Back in 2003, I had the honor of interviewing Judge Pillay in Arusha, Tanzania, where as Presiding Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) she established two key new norms in the jurisprudence around genocide and war crimes, concerning rape and media incitement as tools of genocide. She was a thoughtful, incisive, and deeply well-informed presence.

Judge Pillay’s life work draws a clear line from her support for the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa, where she served on Nelson Mandela’s legal team, to the pioneering role she played last year when, as chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” she oversaw all the meticulous work needed to produce a legal analysis of Israel’s conduct in Gaza (PDF here.)

That analysis of the facts and the relevant law concluded unequivocally that,

The State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award this year’s prize to Judge Pillay sends some powerful messages worldwide. It centers the urgent issue of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the need to end it. It is a (discreet) slap in the face to Pres. Trump, who has made no secret of his longstanding desire to win the prize himself. And it indicates that the Norwegian political elite that is responsible for the composition and work of the Nobel Committee is eager to distance itself from the ties to Israel (and to Jeffrey Epstein) that so many of the elite’s members have long hewed to, the extent of which were shockingly revealed in the recent releases of Epstein’s emails.

For his part, Trump reacted to the news from Norway by announcing punishing new sanctions against judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC,) a group that had included Judge Pillay, 2003-2008. It’s good to note that (like Russia, China, and numerous other states) the U.S. has never actually been a member of the ICC. But by issuing unilateral “sanctions” against the court Trump can cripple the ability of the targeted judges and of the court itself to maintain websites, to conduct routine financial transactions, and so on.

As we know, this is just the latest in a long series of decisions Pres. Trump has taken that seek to undermine international law and long-established international institutions. Nearly all these decisions, like this one, have been taken on the clear grounds of defending Israel from being held to any effective form of international accountability.

Here’s what else I’ll be covering (as succinctly as possible) in today’s Just World Ed newsletter:

1. New PalCast ep brings voices of Palestinian medics on Gaza’s front-lines

2. Useful resources on the “meaning” of October 7, from Rami Khouri, myself, and “Mujamma Haraket”

3. The campaign to shun top foreign policy officials from the Biden era heats up, informed by A.S. Ahmed’s powerful new book

4. Key news items from the UK, and

5. A fight for free speech in the U.S.

Subscribe now

New PalCast ep brings voices of Palestinian med ics on Gaza’s front-lines

The latest episode of our amazing PalCast project is titled “We Will Not Abandon Our Patients: Two Doctors in Gaza.” It brings to listeners the voices of Palestinian physicians Dr. Ahmed Alqady and Dr. Abdullah Almobayed. Speaking from Gaza with hosts Yousef and Tony, the two docs (who have not been paid since October 7, 2023) describe their work providing medical care to patients at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis and also in a small medical tent in Mawasi.

In the ep, the doctors described the scale of the medical needs they faced each day. Their little tent received at least 70 patients daily, while many more sought treatment at the hospital. They have been treating severe malnutrition, gastroenteritis, scabies and other contagious diseases, conditions gravely worsened by displacement, poor living conditions and limited access to clean water. The shortage of medicines and medical supplies had made their work even more difficult, with their patients sometimes dying while waiting for essential medication that could not enter Gaza.

Both docs talked about the stress of witnessing the deaths and suffering of patients, colleagues, and neighbors. They spoke about the targeting of medical workers, including a colleague who was killed while taking part in a rescue mission. Despite these risks, they remained committed to their patients and described helping their people as both a priority and an honor. With winter approaching, they were also preparing their makeshift tent for heavy rain and seeking support for medicines and other supplies.

Drs. Alqady andAlmobayed called on people around the world to keep Gaza in their thoughts and to continue pressuring governments to stop the genocide. Listen to this full episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and share it with others to help keep attention on the realities faced by patients and medical workers in Gaza.

Useful resources on the “meaning” of October 7, from Rami Khouri, myself, and “Mujamma Haraket”

With this past week seeing the third anniversary of the Hamas-led breakout from Gaza that Hamas leaders had named “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, several commentators— myself included— shared analyses of the impact of that operation and its gruesome, long-drawn-out aftermath. I’ll take a quick look at these three:

• Our board member Rami Khoury on “Seven things that have been exposed since October 7, 2023”

• My essay on “Gaza genocide at 3”

• Mujamma Haraket on how Hamas had hidden its preps for the operation in plain sight.

Here they are:

Rami Khoury on “Seven things that have been exposed since October 7, 2023”

On October 7, our esteemed colleague Rami Khoury appeared in this informative 26-minute discussion on TRT World. He also, as usual, helpfully shared his talking points for that appearance, here.

Here’s his lede there:

The three years since October 2023 have exposed seven significant things in Palestine, Israel, the American and other Western governments, the Arab region, and American and global public opinion

The first of these seven things was this:

1. The racist, genocidal nature of zionism and the majority of the Israeli government and people, who have enthusiastically advocated, conducted, and boasted about their ongoing genocide against Palestine and parts of Lebanon, is now clear and official for all to see. It’s a mistake to only condemn Netanyahu and his rightwing fascist partners, because most Israelis in and out of government have been revealed as commited genociders.

I also found his #5 notable:

5. The majority of Arab governments seem to have revealed themselves as being politically and militarily impotent or incompetent, or both. Their reliance on the USA, Israel, or other foreign powers to protect them has not worked as they expected, and some states are in danger of massive suffering or even collapse if the war with Iran persists. The USA in the last two generations has now been militarily checked, beaten by, or evicted from four Asian countries — Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.

My essay on “Gaza genocide at 3”

I published this on my personal Stack on October 6. The full title was “Gaza genocide at 3: Israeli-U.S. cruelty and the smart, deep resistance to it are changing the world.” And my lede was this:

The small Mediterranean-coast enclave of Gaza has long acted as a crucible for the Palestinian-rights movement. Since October 7, 2023, the events that have devastated human life and society in Gaza have also acted as a crucible for a worldwide movement that today is— slowly but unmistakably— bringing to a close the stiflingly hegemonic order that a handful of “White”, Western states have exercised over world affairs for more than three centuries now.

Obviously, I hope you go read the whole thing! Post your comments, and share it with your friends and networks!

I just want to add a quick additional note about the image I used there:

I have seen several different photos of that mass-funeral event and also of (I think) a separate one. Back in the late 1970s, I worked as a foreign correspondent in Beirut, covering some of the worst atrocities committed during the civil war in Lebanon. Here’s what these images from Gaza say to me:

• Organizing such mass funerals is a complex project that is challenging at many different levels. The fact that the heads of these two large Gaza families were able to organize this mass funeral is a testament to the depth and resilience of the social ties that still exist among the residents of the tightly besieged and constantly attacked portion of the Gaza Strip into which the Israeli military has concentrated the remaining population of Gaza.

• What is carried on most of those stretchers is very evidently not an entire human body. Most of them seem to carry only a few disparate body parts. But the members and heads of these families had concluded that carrying these stretchers and their burdens in this way served a valuable purpose—for the many still-living individuals bereaved by the slaughter of those loved ones, and for the community as a whole. What important decisions.

• I just ache to think about the emotions of the the young men carrying these far-too-light stretchers. But they all evidently felt that this procession and the prayer services that accompanied the mass funeral were worth participating in, or in many cases perhaps very deeply meaningful. Helping to bring about a degree of what Western analysts blithely call “closure”, perhaps?

Mujamma Haraket on how Hamas had hidden its preps for the operation in plain sight

I know there’s been a lot of commentary in Western media in recent weeks about the degree to which Israeli PM Netanyahu “knew in advance about” or “must have known in advance about” Hamas’s plans to launch their big breakout from Gaza. (Much of that commentary seems to have had the clear purpose of discrediting Netanyahu in the lead-up to the Israeli general election due on October 27.)

On October 7, Electronic Intifada published an excellently sourced, wide-ranging piece in which the Palestinian analyst known as “Mujamma Haraket” systematically took down much of that speculation.

“Such discussions,” he wrote,

have prompted some commentators to speculate that Israel intentionally allowed the operation to take place so as to justify a genocidal response.

These judgments, however, belie several critical facets informing the pre-7 October 2023 state of affairs. Foremost among these is Israel’s colonial hubris, which led it to believe that it had effectively contained and neutralized Hamas within Gaza.

More importantly, such assessments also sideline the Palestinian resistance’s years-long gambit of “strategic camouflage.”

The campaign to shun top foreign policy officials from the Biden era heats up, informed by A.S. Ahmed’s powerful new book

Smart U.S. journo Akbar Shahid Ahmed recently released his first book, Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza. It is a searing, in-depth account, based on “interviews with more than 150 officials and other involved,” of how the top foreign-policy officials of the Biden era dealt with the grotesque, almost immediately genocidal actions that Washington’s most-favored aid recipient Israel took in post-October 7 era.

As we know, a handful of very ethical officials from that era started to resign from their positions. But the vast majority chose not to. Ahmed has clearly talked at length with individuals from all along that spectrum, and this book, published by W.W. Norton, is the result.

As of now, I have had time only to dip into the book, to check on the high quality of its documentation and indexing, and so on. Here is his conclusion:

Concurrently with the release of Ahmed’a important , detailed record, a coalition of U.S. activist organizations has recently launched an important campaign titled DropTheGenocide20. Here are the members of the coalition:

The campaign’s web-site contains a lot of well-researched info about the 20 former Biden administration officials whom they seek to have the democratic Party shun, going forward. Check it out!

The key action the campaign urges people to take, at this point, is to sign this pledge:

Two members of the U.S. House of Representatives have signed thus far. I have. I very warmly invite you to, too!

Key news items from the UK

The diplomatic spat between London and Tel Aviv continues. After the new-ish UK government announced a plan to ban goods and services sourced from Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, the Israeli government demanded that the U.K. close its long-usedconsulate in occupied East Jerusalem. This week, the two sides speedily agreed to re-name the consulate a “Mission” while reducing the number of diplomats posted there by around 50%.

Meanwhile, there have been conflicting accounts of whether, and to what extent, London may have been cutting back on the very extensive cooperation with Israel in the military and intel fields it has engaged in throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza thus far.

Middle East Eye recently carried this account of the somewhat confused state of play on this. It included these points:

Last month, after sanctioning Israeli settlements, [UK Foreign Secretary Ed] Miliband insisted intelligence cooperation with Israel would continue.

…

A great deal remains unknown about Britain's military agreement with Israel, which was signed in 2020 but not announced by the British government.

…

Israel and Britain have historically been close intelligence partners, and the UK shared intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza with Israel throughout its genocide.

Also in the past week, the powerful Palestinian-rights leader susan abulhawa finally won her long battle to have the prestigious Oxford Union Debating Society restore the full version of the contribution she made to a November 2024 debate on the motion, “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.”

Read more on her battle to have the edited portions of her speech restored, here. And of course, do go and watch the whole of her 20-minute address that day, which you can now see on the OUDS’s Youtube channel, here.

A fight for free speech in the U.S.

… And we have many, continuing struggles here in the U.S. too, to protect people’s rights to voice open criticisms of Israeli and U.S. policies. One of these struggles is that of the outlet BreakThrough News to resist subpoenas issued against its journalists Zoe Alexandra, Rania Khalek, and Amanda Yee.

Read more about this attempt to harass BTN and these journalists, here.

They also have a petition that they (and I) urge people to sign. It’s here.

So that’s it for now. October is, obviously, shaping up to be another busy month in world affairs, what with the election in Israel— which actually I don’t think is going to change much at all, in terms of the suffering that any potential election victor is likely to inflict on Israel’s neighbors— and the run-up to the November 3 mid-terms here in the U.S. Oil-industry and other analysts say that despite all Trump’s claims, there is unlikely to be any change in the all-important rate of inflation here for oil, diesel, or other basic goods. For that and many other reasons, Republican candidates seem to be trailing in the polls in many states.

At the global level, Israel, Washington (and also Jeffrey Epstein’s friends in Saudi Arabia’s palaces) are evidently capable of visiting terrible, continuing harm on the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen. And yet, those long-threatened peoples have retained their capacity to resist those colonial punishments, and to some extent at least, to start to fight back.

We are no longer in the 19th century. Thank God. As Indi Samarajiva has recently noted, the current era is, intriguingly, one of the “democratization” of military capabilities…

Before I sign off, though, here is my customary request for your support:

Please, please, give what you can! For more than ten years now, Just World Ed has been a constant voice for Palestinian rights, for an end to the era of the West’s bullying global hegemony, and for the construction of a just and peaceful world order. Your continuing support will let us keep our groundbreaking programs going!

Give to Just World Ed!

You stay well—

~ Helena

I hope you’re well? As we approach the third anniversary of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, my heart is heavy… Though I do allow myself to feel some hope that the shifting balance of forces across West Asia and the world can bring an end to Israel’s ongoing butchery in Gaza— and all its other “West”-backed rampages elsewhere in West Asia— within the not-too-distant future.

I realize I haven’t sent out a newsletter for some time. I’ve been traveling in the UK and I’ve reconnected ”In Real Life” with so many great people here that I never got time until now to sit down and pen a newsletter.

But first up here, a confession: Back in early September, I had described that month as likely to mark a “turning point in world history.” And I concluded there by asking,

In the 81st [UN] General Assembly session that will open in New York next week… what will this body do to start restoring the gravitas and the integrity of the UN as a whole?

Of course, as is now abundantly clear, that framing was wildly off the mark. As I should have recognized all along, it is not the UNGA as such that makes the important decisions regarding world affairs, but rather the leaders of the states that compose it. And most crucially, the leaders of the world’s biggest, most powerful governments.

At this year’s UNGA session, two of the world’s three most powerful leaders (Presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia) were absent. And many other significant figures from around the world were also no-shows— see one list of them, here.

U.S. president Donald Trump did appear at the session. But he used his time there to lambast the UN itself, to crow about having used military force to overthrow the Venezuelan government, and to issue additional, openly genocidal threats against Iran.

(That performance was followed by a similarly grotesque series of anti-UN diatribes from Israel’s PM Netanyahu.)

Indeed, the high point of this year’s UNGA session came when 77 delegations solemnly left the chamber as Netanyahu took to the podium.

So what I’ve started working on is an exploration of how it is that this previously crucial, 81-year-old body, the UN, has now so seriously lost not just its credibility and its internal coherence but also any semblance of relevance to the existential challenges that humankind faces today.

I’ll hope to share the results of those explorations when they’re ready. Meantime, what I can share with you today are these items:

1. Two new audio episodes from our PalCast project

2. Two new video releases from PalCast

3. Hamas’s rep in Lebanon gives a key assessment of the October 2023 breakout from Gaza

4. Kudos to Britain’s Green Party for confirming that Zionism is Racism, and

5. Some quick thoughts from me on “Memoricide”.

Subscribe now

1. From PalCast: Two new audio episodes

We’ve been privileged in the past two weeks to release these two new audio episodes of our PalCast project:

“Rafah is a 15min drive, but my home is a lifetime away“ with Hassan Herzallah (Sept.25)

In this episode, the PalCast hosts Yousef Aljamal and Tony Groves spoke with Hassan Herzallah, an English Literature graduate, writer and translator. Hassan had grown up in Rafah, but he was speaking to Yousef and Tony from the tent he has been living in for two years in Al-Mawasi, near Palestine’s coast on the Mediterranean.

In this convo, Hassan described his experience of displacement, famine and Israeli attacks. He discussed his determination to document life under genocide, to complete his university degree, and to speak out about the reality facing Palestinians in Gaza. He also talked about the recently-announced steps toward imposing international sanctions on Israeli settlements, describing them as symbolic— and far too late. He argued that much stronger measures are needed.

This episode was recorded under difficult circumstances, reflecting the wider challenges of maintaining communication with Gaza. Listen to the full ep on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and share it with others to help bring Hassan’s account of the realities of life in Gaza to an ever-wider audience.

“Telling these Stories is a Privilege” with Hala Hanina (Oct. 1)

In this episode, Yousef and Tony spoke with Palestinian researcher, writer and podcaster Hala Hanina about her experience of leaving Gaza shortly before October 7, the loss of her home and community, and her decision to keep telling Palestinian stories from London.

Hala, who co-hosts the Palestine Deep Dive podcast and hosts Falasteeniya, reflected on the Gaza she left behind, including her wedding day and the people who were there, many of whom have since been killed or displaced.

Hala described the personal losses she had experienced during the still-continuing genocide, including the destruction of her family home and the deaths of friends, including the journalists who had documented her wedding.

She spoke about hope as a means of survival, despite the scale of the devastation facing Palestinians in Gaza. She also discussed what she saw as the failure of international institutions to act on ICC arrest warrants and ICJ rulings, while acknowledging limited measures such as UK sanctions on Israeli settlers and the EU’s refusal of Israeli war bonds. For Hala, these actions remained far from what was needed in response to the scale of the violence.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and share it with others so that Hala’s stories can reach a wider audience.

2. Also from PalCast: Two new video episodes!

We’re delighted to be able to share full video versions of two recent PalCast episodes that were previously released only in audio:

“If You Cannot Say Genocide” with Yahia Lababidi (video Sept. 23)

This is the video version of the convo with Arab-American writer Yahia Lababidi that Yousef and Tony had earlier released in audio format, back in July. Now you can watch it, too!

Yahia’s book If You Cannot Say Genocide: Essays on Conscience and Witness is due to be released very soon by New Village Press in New York. Exciting! Watch this 31-minute video to get a great preview of some of Yahia’s thoughts on topics like:

• Poetry as a form of “spiritual journalism” that connects distant suffering to the reader’s conscience.

• The influence of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Refaat Alareer.

• Changing attitudes toward Palestine and Palestinian rights in the United States.

• Censorship in American publishing and cultural spaces, including the dropping of Lababidi’s Palestine Wail by its original publisher.

“International Law didn’t fail, World Leaders failed International Law” with Dana Besaiso (Oct. 2)

This is the video version of the convo that Yousef and Tony had with Gaza-born law student Dana Besaiso, also in July.

In this episode of PalCast, Dana Besaiso shared her experience of surviving the genocide in Gaza and discussed these and other topics:

• Her experience of displacement, hunger, loss, and survival during the genocide in Gaza.

• The use of starvation as a weapon and its impact on Palestinians.

• Her journey from Gaza to Egypt and eventually to London, and how her lived experience has shaped her studies in public international law.

• Armed conflict, human rights, war crimes, and the pursuit of accountability.

• The emotional burden of living outside Gaza while the destruction continued…

3. Hamas’s rep in Lebanon gives a key assessment of the October 2023 breakout from Gaza

Kudos to the pseudonymous Palestinian analyst Mujamma Haraket who has now provided an English translation of the interview that Ahmad Abd al-Hadi, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon, gave recently to An-Nahar.

I’m strongly hoping that MH will soon be posting his whole translation of this 22-minute interview on his (always excellent) Substack platform. For now, there is just a short excerpt there. I was able to find a longer version— though still apparently not the complete thing— on MH’s X/Twitter feed.

Here are two key excerpts from that:

"Even if Al-Aqsa Flood hadn't happened, there would have been a war on Lebanon. The pagers that were prepared years in advance show that. And there would have been a strike on Iran [...] As I said, the difference is that the Flood exposed this project and set it off quickly, whereas it would have come as a surprise. That's why it struck Iran, struck Lebanon, and even Syria. A plan had been prepared for Syria too. So we can't say this happened because of Hamas.

…

By the way, we did not agree to hand over the weapons. We agreed to store them and keep them within Gaza, overseen by the committee that was formed and still hasn't entered, because the Zionist enemy hasn't let it in. So Hamas is in Gaza, and it's still the one governing Gaza, waiting for the committee to come in and take over governance with our consent, because we don't want to keep carrying the burden of governing Gaza. So we're there. We're the ones running security, the humanitarian side, and the civil side, and so on. And we're present outside, with all our leadership bodies abroad too [...]

Dr. Abd al-Hadi’s remarks provide a helpful and informative response not just to the (sometimes hostile) questions of the Nahar interviewer but also to Western analysts such as Norman Finkelstein whom I have heard excoriating Hamas in public for its decision to launch the October 7 operation.

Thank you for drawing attention to these remarks, and translating them into English, Mujamma Haraket!

4. Kudos to Britain’s Green Party for confirming that Zionism is Racism!

The UK’s Green Party has now become the first major political party in the UK to adopt a resolution that defines Zionism as racism. At the party’s largest-ever national conference this weekend, delegates adopted this resolution by 1,022 to 813. It is probably fair to say that this move will bring vast swathes of new supporters for the party, which is operating in a context of continued fragmentation of the political-party system here in the UK.

Green Party head Zack Polkanski will be representing the party in the key by-election being held this coming Thursday, for the “Holborn & St. Pancras” seat that former PM Keit Starmer abruptly resigned from a few weeks ago.

… It is worth remembering that the proposition that Zionism is Racism is not a new one. Indeed, it was adopted by the UN General Assembly back in November 1975. Then, as now, Zionist lobbyists and supporters around the world threw a massive hissy fit. They even managed to get the UNGA to reverse course. (The government of Israel meanwhile undertook a big project to import into the Zionist state many plane-loads of Ethiopian Jews whose importation had not until then been a priority for them.)

After I ended up in the U.S., after having grown up in the UK and spent seven years in West ASia, I was amazed that many Americans were so strongly opposed to the proposition… That is, until I figured out that because of the “peculiar” history of the U.S., for most Americans “race/racism” is defined almost wholly in terms of skin color, whereas in British-English, it would more commonly connotes any difference of nationality, such as between English and French people… No skin tones involved.

5. Some quick thoughts from me on “Memoricide”

I truly don’t have time to write everything I want to, right now. But I do want to note that this past ten days of traveling around England has brought me so many chances to reconnect not just with my family members and much-valued friends here, but also with some of the places that meant the most to me when I was a child and young person.

I have found these visits to old haunts unexpectedly affecting. (Sometime maybe I’ll share some photos?) But revisiting these places has also been very, very poignant, because I am always deeply aware that the Israelis’ continuing campaigns of ecocide, domicide, and the deliberate leveling of homes and cultural institutions throughout Gaza and South Lebanon also constitute an extremely powerful attempt at memoricide.

What are humans and our society, after all, if we are not entities constituted in good part by the memories that we harbor? And the physicality of place is often— as I have found out these past few days— a potent anchor for memory.

… Anyway, the global balance is shifting fast, and shifting against all the powers that uphold the old system of Western hegemony and “White” settler colonialism.

I feel very deeply honored that by the work I’ve done with my colleagues at Just World Educational we’ve been able to create, share, and preserve some very valuable records of the insights, voices, and views of Palestinians in Gaza and worldwide. And I know that all my colleagues on the JWE board are determined to continue doing what we can to support the Palestinians’ crucial struggle for liberation… a struggle that certainly helps to liberate all of humanity from the ills of colonialism, “White” hegemony, and outright greed.

Please help us if you can! Learn how to do so here:

Support Just World Ed!

… I’ll hope to get back onto a more regular writing schedule next week. Until then, you stay well—

~ Helena

I hope this finds you well? A couple weeks back I noted in my newsletter that the present month is one that’s witnessing deep-seated global change. Indeed it is! Much, though not all, of this change will be visible during the High-Level Meetings the UN General Assembly will be holding in New York over the days ahead. The main drivers of the change, however, have been over in West Asia where the resilience and smarts of anti-colonial actors in Palestine, Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon have forced the White Empire into probably the most serious showdown it has ever faced— one that has impact not just in that region, but also globally.

In today’s newsletter, I shall sketch out the main dimensions— and possibilities!— of the present global flux, and to get them as succinctly as possible onto the record. I’ll run through them in this order, so feel free to scroll down to what interests you most:

1. Recent “No Cold War” webinar with thinkers from China, the U.S., and worldwide

2. New PalCast ep with a trainee lawyer from Gaza

3. My latest exploration of Iran’s and Ansarullah’s capabilities

4. Chinese, Russian UN SC vetoes on the Iran-nuclear issue underline Washington’s weakening

5. Other UN news, including the Sec-Gen race, U.S. dues payment, Abu Mazen vs. Pres. Pezeshkian…

6. Artificial Intelligence: Contests over its danger and its governance

7. Finally, a vibe shift in U.S. attitudes on Palestine!

8. Two key Sept. 18 anniversaries: Imperial Japan’s 1931 false flag attack in Manchuria, and Israel’s cruel “pager” attack in Lebanon .

Let’s go!

Subscribe now

1. Recent “No Cold War” webinar with thinkers from China, the U.S., and worldwide

I was very honored, recently, to be included in a globe-girdling group of scholars and thinkers that gathered to assess U.S.-China relations in the run-up to the summit meeting that Presidents Xi and Trump are planning to hold in Washington, DC, on September 24.

This webinar was convened by the No Cold War campaign and supported by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. Chaired by John Ross, a Senior Fellow at Chongyang and a member of the No Cold War International Collective, the event brought together speakers from China and from countries in both the “West” and the Global South.

You can see the whole, 105-minute long webinar here. You can read an excellent summary of everyone’s contributions— with all our names, and titles— here. You can see just my contribution (11 mins), which was the last one, here.

What a pleasure it was to be with so many thoughtful, concerned people from all around the world!

2. New PalCast ep with a trainee lawyer from Gaza

In the latest episode of our PalCast podcast , “A Trainee Lawyer in Gaza: I Want To Fight For Justice,” co-hosts Yousef and Tony were talking with Nour Alali, a Palestinian law graduate and trainee lawyer in Gaza with Cypriot heritage. Nour completed her law degree in 2025 during the war but has been unable to complete her legal training or begin her career. Speaking from her home, which she had returned to after more than two years of displacement, she shared her experiences of living through bombardments, hunger, displacement and brutally harsh weather.

Their convo also examined the wider conditions facing families in Gaza, including the high cost of basic necessities and the scarcity of food, gas and water. Nour explained that aid was being sold on the black market while families without income struggled to meet their basic needs… Despite these conditions and her frustration with the failure of international law to protect civilians, she continued to believe in the purpose of law. Arguing that the unjust way people and governments applied the law did not make the law itself unjust, she said she still believed in fighting for justice and helping people secure their rights.

Listen to Nour’s important testimony on Spotify, and share this episode with your friends and networks!

3. My latest exploration of Iran’s and Ansarullah’s capabilities

I’ve been doing a lot of research recently into the high level of strategic thinking and planning that went into the campaigns that both the Iranian authorities and their allies in Yemen’s Ansarullah movement have waged thus far this year. It is fair to say that the success of these campaigns came as a complete surprise to many of the most highly regarded “experts in both the U.S. and Israel. I’ve certainly written about that before, regarding the Iranians’ successes, a number of times. But now we have the most recent gains by Ansarullah to add to the list of, “Gee, we never saw that coming!” events.

So a few hours ago I published these results of the fruits of my researches thus far. They draw heavily— but far from exclusively— on the work of two much-esteemed colleagues: Elijah Magnier and Indi Samarajiva, whose work I hope y’all follow, too. They’re both paywalled, but for my part I find their fees well worth it.

The key conclusion I reached about Ansarullah (which is often wrongly referred to as the “Houthis”), was this:

The accounts by Elijah, Indi, and others also make clear that the campaign Ansarullah launched earlier this month was broad, sophisticated, and very well prepared, most likely over the course of many months, or even years. These were not just a bunch of randos wandering around in flip-flops.

I also made this argument, about Yemen:

the diplomacy I’d most love to see would be a concerted effort to find a sustainable end to the civil strife in which the country’s 43 million people have been trapped so very damagingly and for so long.

This would almost certainly have to involve the great powers of the world (including of the Arab world) giving formal recognition to Ansarullah’s political arm as constituting the official government of Yemen, since it already exercises control over— and clearly enjoys considerable support from— a majority of the country’s people, and it has also long been in control of the capital city, Sana’a.

Added bonus: Yet another HC piece on Gaza and the history of “White” Western genocide

This week, I was also continuing my research into the whole history of “International Humanitarian Law” as developed by (mainly) “White” Western nations since 1864 and the sheer hypocrisy of those governments proclaiming thos allegedly universal values at the same time that they continued to undertake extremely gross atrocities against Indigenes of the non-Western world.

You can read this essay here. It also contains a short and fairly IHL-nerdy, but intellectually very valuable, exchange I had with a very experienced scholar of IHL who had commented on the earlier, much longer essay I’d written about Gaza, genocide, and the brutal record of Western empires throughout the centuries…

4. Chinese, Russian UN SC vetoes on the Iran-nuclear issue underline Washington’s weakening

You doubtless recall that a prominent casus belli that Pres. Trump and PM Netanyahu cited for the major wars they illegally unleashed against Iran last year and again this year was the alleged “threat” that Iran might be very close to acquiring a nuclear weapon… So this week, the U.S. reps at the UN Security Council introduced a resolution to extend by a year the mandate of a body that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) established to monitor Iran’s implementation of commitments under the 2015 nuclear pact, the JCPOA. (That “experts’ panel” could also order UN sanctions against Iran and its suppliers.)

But yesterday, when the resolution was put up for a vote, China and Russia both vetoed it. UNSC members Somalia and Pakistan abstained.

These vetoes come after Russia, China, and Iran all participated in the high-level/summit gatherings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS+. They follow the vetoes that China and Russia both wielded on April 7 to block a blatantly one-sided, anti-Iran resolution that a U.S.-led bloc had introduced at the UNSC.

However, earlier, on March 11, China and Russia had abstained from vetoing an earlier, anti-Iran resolution. Clearly, the winds of global change were blowing very hard between March 11 and April 7.

(It’s worth recalling, too, that neither Russia nor China used its veto against the truly terrible Resolution 2803 that the UNSC adopted last November, which handed effective control over all peacemaking and peace monitoring and enforcement in Gaza over to the trump-led “Board of Peace” for a period of two years…)

Speaking at the IAEA’s General Conference in Vienna yesterday, Iranian ambassador Reza Najafi called for a decisive and consistent international response to attacks on nuclear facilities, such as Iran has suffered last year and again this year:

“The international community must adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward any attack or threat against peaceful nuclear facilities,” Najafi said. “No political or military justification should be accepted for attacking nuclear installations. No attack on nuclear facilities must be tolerated.”

5. Other UN news: The Sec-Gen stakes, Abu Mazen vs. Pezeshkian, US dues payment

So yesterday, the Security Council held the third in the series of closed-door deliberations it has held in recent weeks, to determine the attitudes of members to the now eight candidates for the job of Secretary-General, which will need t be filled as of January 1.

It is a strange and secretive procedure the SC members go through. It’s designed, I think, to make sure that the candidate who eventually goes to the General Assembly for the definitive final vote is one who will not be opposed there by any of the five veto-wielding “Permanent Members” of the SC. Of course, they don’t have vetoes in the UNGA itself. But I guess that as long as the UN retains this system of having veto-wielding Permanent Members of the SC, then it’s a good idea to ensure the Sec-Gen has at least something of a functioning relationship with all of them.

Hence, this lengthy period of the closed-door straw polls. At each of these events each of the SC’s 15 members, including the five PMs, get to submit a secret ballot to the sitting president of the SC on which he he/she indicates that they “encourage”, “discourage”, or “have no views on” each of the candidates being considered. The president then reveals the gross numbers.

Here’s how the three rounds have come out so far:

The three I find most interesting are these:

1. Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica, the secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development and a former Costa Rican vice president. She’s now 9-encourage to 5-discourage.

2. Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, Guyana’s ambassador to the UN and a former foreign minister of her country. She’s now 8-encourage to 6-discourage.

3. Rafael Grossi of Argentina, who has very frequently done Washington’s bidding in his (still continuing) role as the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He’s now 5-encourage to 8-discourage.

I am very, very strongly hoping Grossi doesn’t make it. It seems that eight members of the SC share that view.

Read more about this process, here.

U.S. pays a tiny portion of its outstanding UN dues

Also from Passblue, I learned this:

The United States has paid $827 million toward its outstanding assessed contribution to the United Nations regular and peacekeeping budgets, providing a major cash infusion as the organization prepares to host world leaders for its 81st high-level General Assembly debate, starting Sept. 22.

…

Washington owed the UN a total of about $5 billion, more than $2 billion for the regular operating budget and about $3 billion for peacekeeping; much of the dues were in arrears. Subtracting the latest payments, the US still owes approximately $4.2 billion.

About Abu Mazen…

But as the country that hosts the UN headquarters, the U.S. still has the ability (if not necessarily the right) to give or deny visas to national leaders attending the UNGA’s annual assembly… And this year once again, shockingly, the trump administration denied visas to PA President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and to any member lof his administration.

That, though Abu Mazen and his “PA” structure exist solely because of the role he plays as a U.S.-Israeli cat’s paw in the Palestinian body politic, and has nearly always been willing and eager to do Washington’s bidding.

Meantime, the visas for Iran’s president, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, and his accompanying delegation have gone through just fine. Go figure…

6. Artificial Intelligence: Contests over its danger and its governance

I realize this is a massive, possibly even existential, issue; and I don’t have the time or energy to write everything I’d like to about it, here. I just want, first, to bookmark a couple of analyses that the NYT has published about it recently that I found notable, and then to note my strong hope that when Presidents Xi and Trump meet in a few days’ time they can make serious progress toward building a bilateral— or better yet, multilateral— process for regulating (“pacing”) the more scary frontiers of AI development.

First, the NYT pieces:

Why Tech Oligarchs Are Willing to Risk Apocalypse, by Michelle Goldberg on Sept. 12.

She starts off thus:

In a series of private speeches last year, Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and Silicon Valley thought leader, said that the young activist Greta Thunberg represented the spirit of the Antichrist. It was more than just a hyperbolic slur. Thiel was expressing a Promethean theology, one that sanctifies technology and expansion. In Thiel’s worldview, the forces of dynamism must struggle against the evils of stagnation, represented by Thunberg’s leftist environmentalism. “In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science,” said Thiel.

Thiel’s philosophical assumptions might sound bizarre to outsiders, but they appear to be widely shared among the tech elite.

Her whole piece is worth reading. And then, on Sept. 16 there was this, from someone called Seth Center, described as someone who “led A.I. diplomacy at the State Department from 2023 to 2025. His title: “I Led A.I. Diplomacy for the U.S. The Coming Safety Talks Will Not Save Us.”

Mr. Center’s piece focuses tightly on the “risks” that, he argues are attendant on any U.S.-China dialogue on this issue. “As the former State Department envoy who co-led the first U.S.-China A.I. dialogue,” he writes,

I fear the coming talks will not save us. If the past is prologue, China will have little interest in anything beyond gaining a competitive advantage…

China chided us for our concerns about A.I. risks. They portrayed our safety approach as a barrier to unlocking the technology’s opportunity and a way to stop poorer countries from accessing A.I. tools. They unfurled proposals for subdialogues that would have most likely resulted in endless procedural diplomacy.

… In this month’s meetings, I expect China to again downplay safety risks… Meanwhile, it will be likely to keep doing everything it can to get ahead — like generating propaganda in the hopes of inflaming opposition to data centers and encouraging Chinese companies to continue exploiting U.S. models to improve their systems.

This kind of distrust-amplification is eerily reminiscent of the fear-mongering that nuclear-weapons hawks engaged in during the early decades of the last century’s U.S.-Soviet Cold War. Thank goodness that back then, wiser heads finally prevailed and the risks of a rapidly-escalating exchange of nuclear weapons were radically reduced through painstaking joint processes in which the risks were carefully evaluated, confidence-building measures undertaken, and mechanisms and limits put in place to tamp down those risks considerably…

We certainly need the same kind of thoughtful, deeply humanistic today. And we need it very urgently!

I’m hoping that AI is seriously on the agenda during the upcoming Trump-Xi summit, so I think it would be useful for Americans and everyone else around the world to have a clear record of the policy guidelines that Pres. Xi laid out at a key, mid-July “World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance” held in Shanghai.

At its core were these four principles:

First, we should adhere to the principle of openness and win-win and boost innovation-driven development…

Second, we should strengthen risk-awareness and ensure that AI is secure and controllable…

Third, we should encourage inclusiveness and promote mutual learning between civilizations…

Fourth, we should advocate solidarity and improve global governance…

7. Finally, a significant vibe shift in U.S. attitudes on Palestine!

This week we’ve been witnessing a massive shift in the way that even mainstream U.S. media have been talking about Palestine.

Here we are, nearly three years into the genocide that Israel has been relentlessly pursuing against Palestinians in Gaza. A Seattle-based rapper, Macklemore, was on stage at a massive stadium in New Jersey and he said two magic words, “Free Palestine!” that brought him thunderous applause from just about all the tens of thousands of mainly young people in that venue.

Then he explained his thinking a little, saying that he didn’t judge it controversial to believe that all human beings are deserving of equal respect… And he said it again: “Free Palestine!”

What happened next, was very revealing. An uber-wealthy and extremely pro-Israel guy called Robert Kraft who owns a number of the stadiums (stadia?) in which Macklemore and his main-act colleague Ed Sheeran were due to play, called Sheeran and told him that his big national tour could not proceed if Macklemore was still on the roster.

Sheeran caved. And then it got even more interesting…

Long story short:

• Just about all the other back-up acts for the Sheeran tour said they would not appear either, in solidarity with the Mack.

• A lot of information came out about the many sleazy ways Kraft has used his billions over the years: to fund strongly pro-Israel projects; to consort with Jeffrey Epstein; and to visit very exploitative “massage parlors” in Florida…

• Mack said he would donate $1 million to a group of (excellent) organizations providing much-needed relief to people in Gaza. Read the list here. The widely loved children’s online educator “Ms. Rachel” said she would match that, too.

• Ticket sales plummeted for the remaining stops on the Sheeran tour.

• Sheeran and Kraft desperately tried to play catch-up by claiming they would make donations to organizations working “in the region” too. (Not specified if some of those would go to Israel.)

Also intriguing: that even the mainstream media here could not avoid giving this whole controversy something almost like fair coverage.

Are the long-sturdy walls of Zionist speech-suppression finally starting to crumble?

… And in the halls of power here in Washington meanwhile, Pres. Trump was finalizing plans to send to Israel 40,000 bombs that weigh 2,000 pounds each, along with 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads.

These are exactly the same class of bombs that Israel has used to demolish massive high-rise buildings across Gaza and Southern Beirut, as well as entire towns and villages in portions of Lebanon further to the south.

Though these transfers are described as “sales”, in fact they would be paid for not by the Israeli government but by the U.S. taxpayer. So not “sales”, at all.

The top-ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Gregory Meeks, speedily and publicly put a “hold” on that transfer. But as The Hill explained,

The State Department typically respects [such a] hold and works with the member to resolve their concerns. But the Trump administration has previously ignored an objection from Meeks, moving forward on an arms sale package in February 2025 despite the Democrats “hold” on parts of the sale.

Over in the Senate, Meeks’s counterpart there, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, has been trying to put a hold on this arms transfer since July.

Several analysts in Israel have written that PM Netanyahu is eager to get this transfer agreed before he comes up for national elections (October 27), as well as before U.S. legislators face their mid-term elections (Nov. 3.)

It remains to be seen whether the huge shift toward pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide sentiment that is now sweeping vast parts of the broader culture here can also have some effect on our lawmakers. (I believe that for an arms transfer like this to be finally blocked, its opponents in the Senate need to be able to mount a veto-proof majority to do that. Please let me know if I’m wrong on that.)

8. Two somber Sept. 18 anniversaries: Imperial Japan’s 1931 false flag attack in Manchuria, and Israel’s cruel “pager” attack in Lebanon

And lest we forget, here were two anniversaries the world marked yesterday:

On Sept. 18, 1931, a Japanese officer detonated a small explosive charge near a Japanese-owned railway in Manchuria, China; and that fals-flag attack was then used by the Japanese high command to justify a full-scale invasion and later occupation of broad swathes of China. Both Nationalist Chinese and Communist Chinese movements resisted that military occupation. The Japanese occupiers used many brutal methods in China, including biological weapons. During the 14 years of the occupation, the occupiers killed somewhere between 10 million and 20 million Chinese people, both civilian and military.

On Sept. 17-18, 2024, Israel’s Mossad special-ops corps brought to fruition a plot they had long prepared in which they blew up hand-held beepers and walkie-talkies that had previously been sold (by Mossad cutouts) to Hizbullah fighters and organizers as “especially secure.” English Wikipedia tells us that “According to an unnamed Hezbollah official, the attack took 1,500 Hezbollah fighters out of action due to injuries. According to the Lebanese government, the attack killed 42 people, including 12 civilians, and injured 4,000 civilians.”

Those attacks were a precursor to the wide-ranging military assault the Israelis launched against Hizbullah and its national-resistance allies the following month. In November 2024, Pres. Biden negotiated a “ceasefire” which has since turned out to be anything but.

The Lebanese news organization Public Source has released an extremely poignant set of testimonies from some of the survivors of those attacks. Read it here.

What can we do to bring a decisive end to all this brutal, late-colonial violence? At the very least, let’s use the current vibe shift to push as fast and as hard as possible to end U.S. connivance in, and support for war crimes, genocide— and also for war itself.

You stay well—

~ Helena

P.S. And oh, please give as much as you are able to support Just World Ed’s work. Here’s the button:

Give to Just World Ed!

This week, human history has been unfolding at warp speed, as the position of Saudi Arabia— long a bastion of Western influence in West Asia— has been collapsing rapidly along its crucial Red Sea coast. (Saudi Arabia’s standing in U.S. public opinion, never high to begin with, also took another significant blow at yesterday’s 9/11 commemorations in NYC.)

Yesterday I put a quick essay onto my personal Substack that explored the impact of those developments. I’ll add a few further thoughts and resources on the subject further down in this newsletter. Here’s what else you can read here today:

1. Early news from the BRICS+ summit in India

2. New PalCast ep on the plight of Palestinian child prisoners in Israel’s West Bank prisons

3. Further gross Israeli war crimes in Lebanon

4. Quick thoughts on the upcoming elections in Israel and here in the U.S.

5. The UK government’s baby steps toward upholding international law…

6. Additional thoughts on Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc (and a couple of good maps.)

Subscribe now

Here goes:

Early news from the BRICS+ summit in India

So here, hard on the heels of the recent SCO-plus summit in Kyrgyzstan, comes the now-underway BRICS+ summit in New Delhi. Presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia— along with Pres. Pezeshkian of Iran— are among the nine heads of government of member countries taking part. Here is the roster of participants:

The BRICS membership is far broader, geographically, than the SCO membership, which is located mainly in Asia. The two organizations have different remits/goals. BRICS is far more tightly focused on economic/financial cooperation than the SCO, and has run its own “New Development Bank” since 2015.

The summit meetings of both bodies have allowed considerably more discreet coordination among the attendees at all levels than is shown in the photos. However, this photo of Pres. Pezeshkian holding talks with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi (UAE) looks significant, primarily because the UAE is the most staunchly anti-Tehran state in the Persian Gulf and has hosted Israeli military and and intel units for some years now…

Two FT journos reporting from New Delhi wrote this:

Chinese President Xi Jinping, making his first visit to India in seven years, called on the groups’ 10 member nations to act as peacemakers to stop a war that has “caused serious losses to people across the region”.

Two weeks before scheduled talks with US President Donald Trump, Xi also made a veiled dig at Washington, saying the Middle East conflict “does not serve the common interests of the international community”.

Stay tuned. All this intense diplomatic activity comes, obviously, in the run-up to the High-level Meetings due to open at the UN General Assembly on Sept. 22, as well as to the summit between Presidents Xi and Trump, expected Sept. 24.

New PalCast ep on the plight of child prisoners in Israel’s West Bank prisons

In the latest ep of our PalCast podcast hosts Yousef and Tony sent the mic to the occupied West Bank to record a deeply personal conversation with Abdulkhaliq Burnat, a 26-year-old Palestinian law student from Bil’in who— starting when he was still a minor— spent five years in Israeli jails, including four years under administrative detention without charge or trial.

The episode explored the treatment Burnat experienced and witnessed inside Israeli prisons. He described interrogations that lasted between 22 and 25 hours, during which he was handcuffed, held in painful positions, physically assaulted, subjected to forced nudity and cold water, and threatened without access to a lawyer. He also recounted witnessing severe abuse against other prisoners, including an elderly man forced to lick water from the ground and a prisoner who was beaten to death after requesting medication.

At the notorious Moscobiyya prison in occupied East Jersualem Burnat was forced to spend 60 days in an underground cell without a mattress or blanket, exposed to freezing air conditioning and unable to see the sun or sky. He said his message from the prisoners was a call for continued campaigns for their release, stressing that the prisoner cause concerns everyone in Palestine.

He also described how his experiences shaped his decision to study law and work for the rights of Palestinian prisoners. Listen to (and share!) this whole convo now, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Further gross Israeli war crimes in Lebanon

Israel’s ecocidal (and fully U.S.-supported) military has been continuing its truly grotesque destruction of the built environment across broad stretches of South Lebanon. This, despite the existence of a completely chimerical “ceasefire” that was supposedly brokered by the Americans many months ago.

On Thursday night, Israeli demolition squads used more than 1,100 tonnes of explosives to blow deep into Jebel Ali Taher. That explosion triggered an earthquake measuring 4.1 on the Richter scale.

To gain an idea of how extensive, how relentless and destructive Israel’s ongoing campaign of demolition across South Lebanon continues to be, if you are on Twitter (X) I urge you to follow Courtney Bonneau or Roqaya Chamseddine. Here is Courtney’s roundup just from September 10:

… In addition, Human Rights watch has just released a 45-page report, “Uncontrolled Burn: The Inhumane Effects of White Phosphorus Munitions and the Need for Stronger Law,” that documents 23 verified incidents of Israeli use of WP in southern Lebanon between March and May 2026. (The report also details the horrific harm the munitions have caused in armed conflicts in recent years.)

HRW adds this:

White phosphorus munitions burst in the air over populated areas are indiscriminate—that is, they cannot distinguish between combatants and civilians—and thus violate general international humanitarian law. But despite their incendiary effects, white phosphorus munitions are not covered by the 1980 Protocol III to the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), which is dedicated to regulating incendiary weapons.

… Additional reported uses of white phosphorus munitions since 2000 include by Israel in Gaza in 2008-2009 and 2023; by US-led coalition forces against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria in 2017; by Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces in Yemen in 2016; by Ethiopian forces in Somalia in 2007; by NATO forces, primarily from the United States, and anti-government forces in Afghanistan between 2005-2011; and by the United States in Iraq in 2004.

Quick thoughts on the upcoming elections in Israel and here in the U.S.

I realize these topics are far too big for me to give them adequate coverage here. However, I note the following:

** Here in the U.S.: Pres. Trump’s standing in the polls is at a fairly historic low of 32%. The main criticisms of voters are (as usual) primarily economic; and very many voters quite correctly attribute the everywhere evident rise in prices to the disastrous effects of the war Trump and Netanyahu launched against Iran back on February 28. Voters also see the effects of the very crazy tariff wars Trump has waged since April of 2025.

So then this week, Trump organized an unprecedented “mid-term” party convention, at which he stated with assurance that the war on Iran “would end the day after the election in November” and that thereafter oil and gas prices would start tumbling down. That prediction obviously made no sense, and was inherently non-credible. (As are all of his public promises these days.)

So then he also promised all adult voters a so-called “dividend” of $5,000 if the Republican Party can retain control of both the House and the Senate.

That promise is also quite non-credible. But in addition, for him to voice it in public seems deeply unconstitutional and anti-democratic. Let’s see if the courts or the non-Republican political parties do anything to constrain him from repeating it?

** There in Israel: The general election scheduled for October 27 looks mainly like a contest between parties, movements, and leaders over who will do the most to continue to inflict grave harm on the Palestinians of Gaza. There is possibly some more divergence of views regarding policies toward the West Bank, regarding which a whole slew of— now seriously ageing— former political figures claim they want to keep “the hope of a two-state solution” alive. Also, really, a non-credible promise since those same former leaders did nothing effective to allow the emergence of an independent Palestinian state back when they had the chance.

There was, however, a big fuss in Israeli and pro-Israeli circles on Tuesday, when Haaretz published an account by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval of a phone call they said UAE president Mohammed Bin Zayed (MBZ) of the UAE had initiated with PM Netanyahu in late September 2023, in which he “warned that Hamas' leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords… “

The timing of this leak, which almost certainly came from the camp of MBZ and his aides, clearly looks as if it was intended to undermine Netanyahu’s chances in the upcoming election. (Not that any other conceivable victor would be any better for the Palestinians than Netanyahu, I note… )

The leaker/s also shared some information about peace/de-escalation offers that Sinwar and other Hamas leaders had delivered to Netanyahu both in the lead-up to the breakout of October 7— and also in the days and weeks afterwards…

Those overtures were all, they wrote, completely stonewalled by the Israeli PM.

Much of this information has been publicly available for quite some time now. But the direct involvement of MBZ in the contacts seems new to me. By all accounts, including this one, he has maintained a very close relationship with numerous Israeli leaders for several years now…

The UK government’s baby steps toward upholding international law…

On Tuesday, Britain’s new Foreign secretary Ed Miliband announced a new set of sanctions against those involved in economic ties (including purchasing, or investing) with Israel’s extensive networks of— as we know, quite illegal— civilian settlements all across the West Bank.

In the speech in parliament in which he announced the sanctions, and since, Miliband made clear that he was speaking “as a proud British Jew,” and that the government was committed to these new sanctions “as a way to save the two-state solution.” He also denounced the actions of those settler extremists in the West Bank whom he described as “settler terrorists” who were carrying out “ethnic cleansing” against the Indigenous Palestinians.

Hi boss, PM Andy Burnham, and all the other Labour grandees seated around them in the House of Commons all looked notably unenthusiastic as he delivered the speech.

Miliband was quite unwilling to utter “the G-word” regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza over the past three years, or to announce any new UK initiatives regarding that now-devastated enclave. What he said about Gaza was this:

What the Netanyahu government is doing in Gaza is a stain on the conscience of the world and there is increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed…

Talk about mealy-mouthed.

“Increasing evidence”? How much further does it have to increase?

“War crimes appear to have been committed?” By whom?

… Also left unclear:

• Whether the sanctions planned against the settlements in the West Bank will also be applied to occupied East Jerusalem, which has long been considered an integral part of the West Bank

• Whether they will also be applied to the Israeli settlements in occupied Golan

• Whether the U.K. military will be halting in any way the copious support it is giving to Israel’s horrendous actions in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.

Additional thoughts on Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc (and a couple of good maps.)

In the essay I published yesterday evening on the speedy gains that Ansarullah have been making against formerly Saudi-supported positions along the Red Sea coast I focused in particular on two aspects of these developments:

1. The fact that the effective crippling of Saudi Arabia’s ability to control Yemen’s Red Sea coast and simultaneously of its ability to export oil via its Red Sea terminals represent a serious setback for the US-led war effort against Iran, and

2. The intriguing role that Pakistan has been playing in the still-unfolding U.S.-Iran conflict, since it has been working actively since March as the lead node of mediation between Tehran and Washington. And this week, both Islamabad and Washington reportedly turned down Saudi Arabia’s appeals for urgent military help as the Saudi-supported forces in Southwestern Yemen speedily crumbled…

There are many other dimensions to the way this conflict will continue to unfold over the weeks ahead.

Saudi Arabia is very clearly the major actor among the six Gulf-Arab states that are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, GCC. Just as a reminder, here are some quick population figures for three key GCC states:

The other three are Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait. Non of them are any bigger than the UAE. I need to get their numbers into an updated version of this little table…

Iran’s population is 93 million. That of Iraq, which sits at the northern head of the Gulf, is ~46 million.

Saudi Arabia is also a significant player in world financial markets. Even before these most recent setbacks, there was a lot of speculation about kits ability to weather the storms caused by the Israeli-U.S. War on Iran. (E.g., here and here.)

… Anyway, there are lots of indicators I’ll be watching over the coming days. I’ll try to share them in a timely way on my personal Stack. Meantime, here are a coupe of good maps I dug up for you:

And this shows, within the light-green lines, the extent of the Ansarullah advances in the Southwest portion of Yemen in the past few days:

The historic port of Mokha was the origin of some coffee of worldwide renown. Centuries ago, Yemeni merchants from there also took their produce to the far end of the Indian Ocean, to Java. Just so you know…

… That’s it for today then. I just want to send a HUGE thanks to all the folks who have made donations to Just World Ed over the past couple of weeks. Your support means so much to us!! And it’s what keeps our programs going… We are totally reliant on donations from the public

If you haven’t given recently, here’s your chance:

Give to JWE!

Meantime, have a good week, and stay healthy and sane—

~ Helena

I hope you’re well? I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and writing this past week. (The two usually go together. I’ve been a writer so long that choosing the words, the exact tense-framing, the purview, and organization of what I write: all that intellectual work always, certainly, requires me to think more deeply!)

In today’s newsletter, I’ll quickly share information on (and links to) the following resources:

1. The two essays I wrote this week on my personal Substack that explore vital dimensions of the currently underway global shifts

2. Yet more outrageous, clearly genocidal declarations from Israeli ministers

3. Three new releases from PalCast showcase voices from Gaza!

4. Archivists in Gaza win much-deserved recognition

5. A great Lebanese news platform also wins important recognition

6. A terrifying new assault by U.S. legislators on universities nationwide.

Subscribe now

The two essays I wrote this week on my personal Substack that explore vital dimensions of the currently underway global shifts

In this essay, “September 2026: A turning point in world history?”, from September 2, I first assessed the shifting balance in Iran’s favor in the (relatively) slow-mo war that the U.S. and Israel forced upon Iran’s rulers back on February 28. Then I contrasted the notable decline in many markers of Washington’s power in world politics— as was very evident during the G20 finance-ministers’ confab held in North Carolina early in the week— with the robustness of the notably non-U.S. alliance of global leaders who make up the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization” (SCO,) which held a 25th anniversary summit-level gathering ion Kyrgyzstan on thpose exact same days.

As I noted there, the SCO is not a military alliance. (I likened it more to the venerable Organization for Security and Cooperation in. Europe, OSCE, though I admit that that analogy is not exact.)

Here’s the lineup of leaders who were at that summit:

If you look carefully at the front row there, you’ll see— standing alongside the heads of government of China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and other Asian powers— Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian.

In my article I also note the extreme importance of the session of the UN General Assembly that’s due to open in New York very soon. (I should also have noted the importance of the summit that China’s Pres. Xi is scheduled to have with Pres. Trump, on September 24, while Xi is here in the U.S. for the UNGA session.)

Then this morning I penned a follow-up essay, “From September 11, 2001 to February 28, 2026, to September 2026...” in which I reflected more tightly on this 25-year period of history that has unfolded since 9/11/2001.

In that piece I placed the outrages that the U.S. and Israel have committed against the Indigenous peoples of West and Central Asia since 9/1//2001 in the broader context of the (often genocidal) actions that leaders of “White” empires have committed against the Indigenes of the Global South throughout the past 500-plus years. But I also noted that, especially since February 28 of this year, it has started to become clear that in illegally attacking Iran on that day the leaders of the U.S.-Israel Axis have finally met a force capable of resisting them.

As you may realize, I run my personal Substack in a different way than I run these newsletters. On the personal SS, I publish my essays whenever I’m ready to do so. With this JWE newsletter I usually try to send it out just once a week; and I include news about a lot of other resources in addition to my own writing.

If you want to read the pieces on my personal SS in a super-timely way, you can subscribe there separately. (Everything there— as here— is still free to read. But of course, both there and here, we strongly appreciate it if you can take out a Paid subscription! All the proceeds, from both accounts, go to Just World Ed.)

Yet more outrageous, clearly genocidal declarations from Israeli ministers

This is not even news any more… But we do need to know and to keep on the record the things that powerful ministers in the Israeli government declare in public.

On Wednesday, Defense Minister Israel Katz told a conference organized by a major Israeli newspaper that,

plans to facilitate the mass emigration of Palestinians from Gaza remain under discussion and were merely “frozen” by US President Donald Trump, not taken off the table entirely.

He discussed the plans… at the same time as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid a visit to an IDF outpost inside the Gaza Strip and reaffirmed that Israel had no plans to withdraw.

There was no reporting that anyone at that conference expressed an objection.

One day later, according to the Times of Israel, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir,

unveiled a plan he said he hoped to advance if the coalition maintains control of power in the coming October 27 election. It is aimed at removing the vast majority of Gaza’s Palestinian population from the territory through what he termed “voluntary emigration,” including by establishing a dedicated government ministry.

That account noted quite accurately that Ben-Gvir had openly advocated such a plan for a long time. It added this:

“At first, I was treated as a delusional extremist,” he said. “Then, one day, everything changed: President Trump publicly declared that encouraging emigration was a solution to the Gaza issue. Suddenly, Ben Gvir’s plan became legitimate. Suddenly, everyone became Ben Gvir.”

By the way, the TOI itself is widely thought of as a pretty rightwing news outlet. But I’ve seen some pretty good reporting there in the past couple of years, on precisely the immense growth and influence of all these openly ethno-supremacist, eliminationist trends within Israel’s political elite. The more left-presenting Ha’aretz, by contrast, seems to work harder not to feature such groteque accounts in their English-language reporting…

THREE new releases from PalCast showcase voices from Gaza!

Our great team have been working overtime! Here’s what they’ve released:

** Audio podcast, late August: “Gaza and the Israeli Elections: It’s Not Just Netanyahu.”

In this ep, co-hosts Yousef and Tony examined the worsening reality in Gaza amid a fragile ceasefire, as well as what Israel’s upcoming elections could mean for Palestinians. The conversation questioned the idea that the current situation could be explained by the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alone, and explored the wider political and social attitudes that continue to shape Israel’s approach to Palestinians.

Catch it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

** Audio podcast, September 1: ”Sharing Art, Culture and Languages during the Genocide.”

In this ep, Yousef and Tony had as their guest with Roa’a Abuaser, a 19-year-old dentistry student from Gaza, who talked about her efforts to keep language, culture, and creativity alive. Roa’a, who is also a poet, creative writer, and musician, spoke about her disrupted education, her experience of displacement and famine, and the community she built through PolyVera, a language and culture community in Gaza.

Roa’a’s studies at Al-Azhar University were disrupted by the war, but she continued learning languages through self-study and online courses. She now speaks four languages: Arabic, English, Turkish, and some Spanish! Her interest in language and cultural exchange led her to establish PolyVera, which began with five participants and grew to around 100 members. The community provides young people with a space to practice languages and engage with poetry and music.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with others to help bring Roa’a’s experience and work to a wider audience.

** Video podcast, September 3: “We Just Ran”

In this video version of an earlier audio release, Mohammad AlTurk, a young English translator from Gaza City, spoke with Yousef and Tony about his personal experience of repeated displacement, ongoing attacks, severe shortages, and the destruction of his home, university, and community.

We feel so privileges to be able to watch and share all these powerful testimonies from young Palestinians in Gaza. This one is just 20 minutes long. Do share it with your friends!

Archivists in Gaza win much-deserved recognition

We are not professional archivists. But we have huge respect for people who are! So we were totally delighted to learn that UNESCO recently awarded the distinctive, once-every-two-years Unesco/Jikji Memory of the World Prize, to two archivists in Gaza who have been working really hard to preserve as much as possible of the Strip’s very rich, and now direly threatened, documentary heritage.

These heroes are Abdul Latif Abu Hashim (manuscript scholar) and Haneen Al-Amassi (conservator.)

In this time of the deliberate, intentional memoricide the Israelis are waging against their neighbors in Palestine and Lebanon, this international recognition of the work of these conservators is so wonderful.

I almost wept on reading that account. It includes these details about the work Abu Hashim and Al-Amassi have been doing:

Their work included salvaging rare manuscripts, handwritten documents, copies of the Quran and historical works from the bomb-damaged Omari Mosque library. They moved the materials to a safe location, and some were digitized using a contactless scanner.

“The two recipients have continued to rescue and restore endangered manuscripts even under the most difficult circumstances,” a Cheongju city official said. “Their efforts have kept documentary heritage threatened by war and disaster from disappearing and preserved it for generations to come.”

The duo has preserved and digitized more than 258 manuscripts in Gaza, amounting to roughly 25,000 pages.

By the way, the South Korean city of Cheongju is involved in awarding this prize because the world’s oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, the “Jikji”, was produced in a Buddhist temple in Cheongju in 1377.

(Take that, Gutenberg!)

A great Lebanese news platform also wins important recognition

This week, too, the innovative, Beirut-based news platform The Public Source won an important award. This was the Arthur E. Rowse Award for Excellence in Examining the News Media, which is awarded annually (I think) by the National Press Club here in Washington DC. The investigative story for which TPS was honored was this one from August 2025: Israel’s Willing Propagandists: What the Media Won’t Tell you When It Embeds With the Military.

Big congratulations!

Here was the less-than-enthusiastic face of the NPC’s president when he read the title of the winning story:

If you’re on X, you can find a short video of the presentation, here. My two main recommendations are: (1) That you go read the whole of TPS’s excellent investigation, which is a broad summary of the enthusiasm with which major Western news outlets conspire with the Israeli military’s media machine to suppress information vital to understanding the scenes they show you, or write about, and (2) That you support TPS in every way you can…

A terrifying new assault by U.S. legislators on universities nationwide

As if we didn’t have enough grotesquerie happening in today’s world, on Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives passed this outrageous bill, “H.R.4795 - Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act of 2026”.*

This bill:

prohibits institutions of higher education (IHEs) that participate in federal student aid programs [that is, virtually all of them] from engaging in boycotts against Israel. Specifically, IHEs may not engage in a commercial action intended to limit commercial relations with Israel, or with an entity licensed by, regulated by, or organized under the laws of Israel, that is not based on a valid business reason.

(* As with so much in U.S. public life, the name of this bill is intentionally mendacious.)

You can read the final roll-call of how all the members voted, here. 33 Democrats joined the Republican majority in voting YES and 2 Republicans voted NO.

Thanks to Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace for her careful tracking of this, as of so many other developments in the life of the U.S. legislature. Her comment on the passing of this latest bill was:

The road to erasing US right to free speech/protest of ANYTHING in the US is quite literally being paved with laws to protect/promote Greater Israel/Israeli impunity.

Okay, that’s it. I’ve written enough! I hope you have a wonderful week—and that we all have a transformative month— ahead.

Oh, and don’t forget to support the work of Just World Ed if you are able. We work hard to bring you a broad range of informational/educational that can help you understand this crazy world we all live in!

Support Just World Ed

And stay well—

~ Helena

Like everyone else worldwide I’ve been transfixed by the videos of the glacier/glacial lake collapse in Northern Nepal. I’ve been stunned to see the sheer power of the mass of ice- and stone-encrusted water as it pummels down the valleys breaking and erasing buildings, bridges— and how many hundreds or thousands of our fellow humans and all their laughter, culture, compassion and dreams?

Gone. And the stunned survivors left to pick up what they can, care for each other, and find a way to carry on.

Earlier, we had the two big earthquakes in Venezuela and Colombia. And earlier yet— and still ongoing— Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide.

One of these four mass disasters of 2026 is not like the others. One of them is entirely human-caused and human-enacted and could be halted by the stroke of a pen.

Donald Trump’s pen, to be precise. Should he choose, Trump could at any moment use it to sign an executive order holding Israel accountable to international law, and blocking any further provision of military aid, intel sharing, or economic aid until Israel’s government complies.

Much better than using it for this:

Today, nearly three years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, if Pres. Trump should decide to use his power to start holding Israel accountable, he could now count on the support of an unprecedented proportion of U.S. citizens and legislators…

Just saying.

On my part, I’m planning to use my electronic “pen” over the next few days to write a few more reflections on the Nepal disaster— including, of course, its clear relationship to the broader (and Trump-fueled) phenomenon of global warming/ climate change. But for here, today, I have these items for you:

1. A great round-up of 150 episodes of Just World Ed’s PalCast project!

2. Indi Samarajiva on the extent/impact of U.S. military losses in the Persian Gulf

3. Rami Khouri on the Trump/Bessent “Economic D-Day” against Iran

4. Remembering Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour (1947-2026)

5. Other items worth reading (Shehada and Abulhawa)…

Subscribe now

A great round-up of 150 episodes of our PalCast podcast!

Our talented colleague Mustapha Muhammed recently published this excellent retrospective on the first 150 episodes (and counting) of the PalCast podcast, which Just World Ed has been proud to support since the very beginning.

This is the top of his story:

… But go read Mustapha’s whole article there. It really conveys a lot of what makes JWE’s PalCast podcast so distinctive.

Indi Samarajiva on the extent/impact of U.S. military losses in the Persian Gulf

As you may know, I’ve been a big fan of the Sri Lankan thinker Indi Samarajiva for some time. Recently, he’s been producing some really excellent pieces on his writing platform Indi.ca— which is well worth subscribing to, if you don’t already.

These were two of his recent notable pieces:

How America Is Blowing Up Its Military (In Iran) and Can’t Replace It (Without China)

In this one, he takes deep dives into recent reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Research Service (CRS) and pulls out some intriguing and extremely important data. Such as this table from a 2024 GAO report:

He writes,

Each Tomahawk [missile] requires specific rare earth elements, like neodymium, samarium, dysprosium, and terbium… Other smart missiles like HIMARS, JASSM, and Patriot Interceptors need the same stuff. Anything that maneuvers needs magnets (and other magic) and those magnets need this special dust. But where does 90% of this dust come from? China, which America is also pissing off. Oops.

Then, this great paragraph:

Strategically, America has long known that they have a deep dependence on China for raw materials. However, they could not muster the strategic thought to maybe not piss everybody off in Asia all at once. In its headless rush through its world domination bucket-list, America has A) fought Russia and Iran at the same time, massively depleting stocks and B) started a trade war with China, making replenishment impossible. Even Hitler got his sequencing better in World War II. Instead of Molotov-Ribbentrop, America has thrown a Molotov cocktail into its own supply chain. It's World War III repeating as farce…

Logistics War 2: The Reserve Fleet

This August 25 piece from Indi is #2 in a series of three, with #1 dealing with oil and #3 dealing with the missile shortages the U.S. military is currently confronting. Several good analysts have also written on #1 and #3 (though not with Indi’s verve.) But what he wrote in #2 about the state of the U.S.’s National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF), the long-ago turn by Pentagon planners to building up stocks of “Pre-positioned War Reserve Materiel” (PWRM) in places close to presumed future battlefields— and what happened to many of those stocks in the early days of the current war on Iran… I found what he wrote there genuinely eye-opening.

Indi starts by noting the steep declines in both the U.S.-flagged merchant fleet and the NDRF, which is a subset of the merchant fleet that is also tagged for potential use by the U.S. military in times of emergency.

He has a number of great graphics. This one, grabbed in 2024 from the YouTube show of naval analyst Sal Mercagliano, shows the age in years of vessels in the NDRF:

Indi traces how, as far back as the 1990-91 Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, the Pentagon started to deal with the limited capacity of the NDRF by building up PRWM supplies closer to where they might be needed in the future— including in Qatar and (post-Desert Storm) Kuwait. Both those logistics hubs were used a lot during the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But then Pres. Trump decided to launch a gratuitous and aggressive war of choice against nearby Iran. As Indi writes about the whole PRWM plan:

In 2026 this plan got punched in the face. The PWRM for the Iran War got blown up by Iran’s long range weapons almost immediately, caches in Bahrain and Oman chief among them. This meant that warships like the USS Lincoln couldn’t resupply properly and began running out of supplies. Pirates started walking the plank on their own, morale was so low.

The Empire tried to resupply from Diego Garcia, but that is just the tip of an extinct volcano, and that too had to get resupplied from somewhere. Look at the map, where? And again, how? There are very few US flagged ships in general, and even fewer in the reserve fleet that were available. People like Mercogliano have been warning for a long time that the merchant marine was the backbone of the war machine and that it was geriatric and creaking, but no one gave a ship. Now they’re in deep ship and there’s nothing they can do about it. Iran had a strategy to take down American logistics, which sinks their Navy without sinking a ship.

… Anyway, if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of this war, Indi’s writings are a great resource. Go check them out!

Rami Khouri on the Trump/Bessent “Economic D-Day” against Iran

Our super JWE board colleague Rami Khouri was on Turkey’s TRT t.v. show again yesterday, giving his take on the state of the U.S. war on Iran. And as he often does, he shared the notes he’d prepared before the interview on his Substack page. (I loved the part there where he talks about “the U.S. shift from bombs to bombast.”)

He also made these important points:

Iran teaches global masterclasses in how to evade economic sanctions, so the latest US approach will have little impact… Iran has done this for almost half a century, and most of the world wants to maintain relations with Iran and prevent the US from becoming the global hegemon that Trump aspires to become.

…

All of the Arab Gulf states and most of the world have recognized that hollow US foreign policy-making is a problem for those who primarily relied on the US for their security. More balanced strategic links are being developed as we speak, as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye step in to adjust things, while the Chinese, Russians and Indians are watching closely to see how they can participate in a constructive way. The US will remain a major economic and commercial partner, but not the sole guarantor of security in West Asia where it embarrassingly failed its Arab partners who relied on it.

Remembering Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour (1947-2026)

Some visual artists have made outsized contributions to the still-vibrant national culture of Palestine. One of these, undoubtedly, was Sliman Mansour, who was born in the West Bank town of Bir Zeit in 1947. When he was 15, he won award for his painting from a UN exhibition of young people’s art, and from soon after then the broad range and deep nationalist imagination of the images he portrayed became an increasingly central part of Palestinian iconography.

Mansour’s 1973 painting “The Camel of Burdens” (shown above) has struck a deep chord for every generation of Palestinians since then. Many of his paintings, like this one, evoke the multiple hardships Palestinians have labored under for the past century, while others wae gorgeously colorful and intricately composed celebrations of Palestinian history, culture, and resilience. Find a great collection of the many Mansour paintings that were reproduced as posters throughout the decades, here.

There have been many great tributes to Mansour published online in recent days. I found this one, written by his longtime friend and colleague Vera Tamari, to be particularly thoughtful and informative.

Sliman Mansour was buried a few days ago in the graveyard of the Anglican Church in Bir Zeit.

Also worth reading…

Here are some other great recent contributions to the discourse:

** Muhammad Shehada’s tangle with the “Board of Peace” over the BOP’s part in pulverizing evidence of genocide in Gaza

On Wednesday, the super-smart and increasingly well-connected Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada wrote on X that, “EU diplomats told me last week Israel has been quietly moving hundreds of thousands of tons of runnel mixed with dead bodies out of Gaza to bury evidence of its genocide. When the EU asked Israel why or whether they filter human remains out of the rubble, no answer ever came!” The next day, he added to this that some of this rubble-removal work had been funded by the so-called “Board of Peace”.

The BOP responded on X in a fast and furious fashion.

Here was Shehada’s response to that:

No response to that yet from the BOP…

** Susan Abulhawa on Israel’s role as arms exporter

Palestinian thinker Susan Abulhawa recently put onto her Substack a powerfully argued analytical piece in which she tracked the growing role that arms exports have come to play in Israel’s over-all economy (GDP), and also the fact that Israel’s arms exports per capita of the population considerably outweigh those of any of the world’s many other arms-exporting nations.

Here’s her graph on that latter aspect:

If you’re interested in this topic, I urge you to go read her whole piece. Just some quick notes here:

1. Abulhawa bases all her main findings on the data provided by the Swedish think-tank SIPRI, which as she notes, has real limits since, “SIPRI only tracks major conventional weapons…and explicitly excludes small arms, ammunition, services, training, and most drone, cyber, and surveillance exports, which are leading Israeli exports. Every figure in this piece is therefore a floor, not a ceiling.

2. She notes that at major arms expos worldwide, Israeli arms companies make a point of noting that their products have been amply “field tested”— which means, generally, tested during assaults on Palestinians or Lebanese.

3. She also notes the role that the provision of Israeli weapons has played in fueling/enabling the commission of numerous atrocities worldwide, going back to Serbian atrocities in Bosnia from 1992 on, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and more recent atrocities in Myanmar, South Sudan, and Congo…

Just before I sign off, two other things:

First: I hope you got the chance to read the essay I posted a few days ago on “Genocide and Western hegemony: What Sven Lindqvist understood”? I’ve gotten enthusiastic reactions from several people I deeply respect, which was nice.

… But I also wanted to let folks know that I planned this essay to be one of the possible chapters in the book that I’m just thinking about writing. The book will be an overview of the history of Western colonialism and the hegemony that a handful of small (but ocean-skirting) “White” Western powers came— along with their colonial offshoots— to exercise over the affairs of the whole of the world for several centuries. I’ll delve into the role these colonial empires played early on, in fostering a sense of distinctive “national” identity in each of the five main colonial powers and, even more evidently, in funding the big developments in manufacturing that underlay the emergence in the metropoles of a form of capitalism that became ever more predatory and ever more reliant on high-order financial shenanigans…

And of course I’ll write about the catastrophically horrendous, genocidal, eliminationist effects those empires had on so very many peoples and cultures all across the non-”White” world.

I am pretty excited to be writing this at a time when that whole “White” Western hegemonic edifice is fracturing almost before our eyes. Also, a little bit scared, since I haven’t written a whole book of my own since 2007-08. (In the interim, it’s true, I founded and ran what I think was a pretty worthwhile book-publishing company. But for all those years, I was supporting and promoting the writing of others, not doing my own.)

Second: Here is my traditional request for you to support the work of Just World Ed. Our non-profit has been going for just over a decade now, and I think we’ve made a quite distinctive contribution to the discourse… on Palestine, on Ukraine, on Iran, on Venezuela, on US-China relations, and on a host of other global issues.

This newsletter is just one of the many things that Just World Ed produces or supports! The PalCast podcast is another! Check out the other materials on our far-ranging blog, and the Resources page on our website which is a portal to the materials from all our larger projects.

So please, if you find our work valuable and thought-provoking, show us some love by supporting our work to the extent that you are able. Use this button to do so:

Give to Just World Ed!

Our big thanks for any donations you can make!

And you stay well—

~ Helena

I know I told you in my newsletter Saturday that I was working on this essay. Now, it’s done. You can read it here.

It took me a week to write. For me, writing is an essential tool through which I develop my analytical powers, and this essay was a hard taskmaster. With the help of the (now sadly deceased) Sven Lindqvist I came out with conclusions that I think are valuable. Tell me what you think! I opened it up so anyone can place their comments there.

And now back to thinking and doing more for Just World Ed…

You stay well,

~ Helena

Subscribe now

This will be a quick newsletter today. (I’m in the midst of writing a fairly lengthy essay on the long relationship between genocide and Western hegemony. My first title for it was “Re-reading Sven Lindqvist After Gaza.” Then I realized we are not in any sense yet “after” the genocide in Gaza, so I renamed it. Watch for it in the days ahead on my personal Substack.)

Here’s what I have for you today:

1. A report on the recent webinar on the Iran War I took part in, organized by the Tehran-based Organization for Defending Victims of Violence

2. News of our latest PalCast episode

3. Rami Khouri’s latest on Trump’s policy on Iran

4. The chaotic and counter-productive nature of the Trump admin’s decisionmaking

5. Links to essential reports on the humanitarian crises in Palestine and Lebanon.

Let’s go!

Subscribe now

A report on the recent webinar on the Iran War I took par in, organized by the Tehran-based Organization for Defending Victims of Violence

You can find a good summary of the rich discussions we had in this webinar, here. The participants were:

• Independent legal scholar Alexander Azadgan

• Iran-based professor of international law Dr. Jabbar Aslani

• Switzerland-based Claudio Celani, speaking on behalf of the Schiller Institute

• Former British diplomat, ambassador, and UN oficial Peter Ford,

• and me.

With ODVV’s agreement we’ve posted the video of the whole event onto our YouTube channel, here. In the description on that page you can find the guide to who spoke at which point:

The webinar was recorded at a ridiculously inconvenient time for me. But I was happy to be able to exchange views with such a distinguished roster of people from Tehran, the EU, the UK, as well as here in the U.S.

News of our latest PalCast episode

In a special episode of PalCast, hosts Yousef and Tony were joined from Gaza by Zain Abu Tawela, a 10-year-old girl who shared her experiences of life during the ongoing war. Zain spoke about her love of crafting, designing clothes, and creating art with Play-Doh, as well as her dreams of becoming a pottery artist and opening a bookshop. Her creativity had, she said, become an important way for her to escape, even briefly, from the bombing and chaos around her.

Zain also had some much more painful memories to share. But as she said— and this was the title of the episode— “The Trick is to not take the Serious Stuff Seriously.”

Hear Zain tell her story in her own words on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and share this episode so more people can hear what she has experienced.

Rami Khouri’s latest assessment of Trump’s policy on Iran

On Wednesday, Pres. Trump tried to divert attention from his (and Israel’s) inability to impose a military defeat on Iran, by announcing a tough new round of sanctions on the country that he described as “an economic D-Day.”

Yesterday, our JWE board colleague Rami G. Khouri was on TRT deriding Trump’s ambition to “win” against Iran in such a way.

Read the main points of what Rami said on his Substack, here. One of the key ones was this:

If anyone in the world could write a book on how to survive sanctions and evade them, it’s Iran, which has survived half a century of sanctions!

Or, you can watch his whole intervention at this post on TRT’s YouTube channel. (He comes in at about 1:15.)

The chaotic and counter-productive nature of the Trump admin’s decisionmaking

The decisionmaking in Pres. Trump’s Washington, which was never any model of coherence, has recently been becoming even more chaotic, disorganized, and counter-productive.

Quite likely, a significant driver of this has been Trump’s frustration, and that of his aides, at the total failure of all the attempts he’s made to impose his will on Iran, even through his use of extremely deadly (and expensive) military force. I’ve written a lot over the past weeks and months about the serious degree to which his waging of the War On Iran has depleted the stocks of key munitions. Over recent days we have had two additional, very sobering revelations about the costs of this war:

1. We’ve had all the accounts about the degrading and worsening conditions of life aboard the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier which has now been at sea for over 260 days.

2. We had the announcement Wednesday that the U.S. national debt has now topped $40 trillion, taking it back up to the proportion of 120% of annual GDP that previously it only topped during the Covid pandemic.

The administration’s response to both these revelations has been defensive and chaotic. Yesterday, the Pentagon bosses fired the publisher of the venerable Stars and Stripes military newspaper, and two of his two editors, for the “crime” of having done some serious, in-depth reporting on the Abraham Lincoln scandal.

And on Wednesday, the same day that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed the size of the national debt, he also announced that the Treasury Department would double the pace at which it buys back its own long-term bonds. The FT’s Katie Martin noted (sorry, a paywall there), that:

Buybacks in themselves are a pretty standard bit of financial housekeeping, but to bond market wonks, a few things stuck out.

One is the unscheduled nature of this move. Bond investors do not like surprises, often reading support measures as an admission that something somewhere has broken…

The other is the context, because this is just the latest in a series of surprises Bessent has delivered in the most important financial market on earth.

Martin’s judgment on the move was apt:

Scott Bessent’s running battle with the bond market is starting to look like his boss’s war in Iran — started by his own hand with a tangled set of objectives, an underestimated opponent and an implausible path to victory. And like the conflict in the Middle East, we are all going to suffer its effects.

Wednesday was also the day, as noted above, on which Trump announced his “economic D-Day” approach toward Iran.

Good luck with that…

(Worth recalling, too, that Scott Bessent has all along been a vital partner of the Netanyahu-Trump plot to squeeze Iran so hard economically that the “regime” would collapse. It was Bessent who back in March 2025 had already tightened the financial sanctions on Iran to the maximum. It’s not clear what further punishment he and Trump can impose at this point.)

… And talking of counter-productive decisionmaking, I found these recent observations from the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi pretty intriguing:

I have been stunned by the number of officials from a wide variety of countries who, while hardly favoring Iran or feeling much empathy for the Islamic Republic, have privately expressed to me a huge sigh of relief over Tehran’s success in thwarting US-Israeli aggression…

As one official from a traditional American ally told me: “Had it not been for the resilience of the Iranians, Trump would likely have attacked Cuba by now and perhaps even annexed Greenland.”

Links to essential reports on the humanitarian crises in Palestine and Lebanon

I’m sorry I only have time to share the headlines here. Click on the green links for more info.

Gaza, from OHCHR:

Gaza, from the Norwegian Refugee Council (and others):

West Bank, from HRW:

Lebanon, from UNHCR:

That’s it for now. More soon. And please do continue to support our work as best you can. All support very deeply appreciated!

Give to JWE!

Stay well—

~ Helena

Another busy week to report on. I hope you’ve been keeping well?

First, quickly, I want to tell you about the Online Film Salon that ‘Voices from the Holy Land’ will be presenting tomorrow (Aug. 16), starting at 3pm ET. Just World Ed is co-sponsoring this event, which will deal with the important topic of “Marketing the Genocide: Israeli Hasbara and the Brainwashing of America.”

Attendees are urged to watch as many as possible of the five short documentaries that will be discussed, before the salon takes place.

A full list of, and links to, these documentaries will be sent to everyone who registers for the salon. You can register at this link: Tinyurl.com/VFHL-August2026.

This Salon will be moderated by our friend Dr. Omar Zahzah, an assistant professor at SF State University and the author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.

The panelists will be:

• Lama Nazeeh: Advocacy Manager at 7amleh, a Palestinian lawyer and human rights advocate

• Nick Cleveland-Stout: Research Associate, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

• Bryce Greene: an organizer, student, and writer based in Bloomington, Indiana.

I hope to see you there?

By the way, the webinar that JWE co-sponsored a few days ago, that was presented by the Tehran-based Organization for Defending Victims of Violence (ODVV), produced some really interesting presentations. We’re still working to access the multimedia records of that one and will share them on the JWE blog as soon as we have them.

Here’s what we have in today’s newsletter:

1. Report on the latest episode of our Palcast podcast

2. Info from a fascinating new report on Hamas’s leaders pushing for internal democracy within the PLO and its national legislating body the PNC

3. My latest essay on Iran’s leaders explicitly adding an end to Israel’s war & violations in Palestine as their condition for ending the war with the U.S.

4. Another essay from me looking at the 500-year history of the “North East Passage” between Europe and China.

(Each of those two latter segments also includes links to some supplementary material.)

Read on and enjoy!

Subscribe now

The latest episode of our Palcast podcast

The latest ep of the PalCast was titled “I Don’t Want to Leave Gaza – Winning The Reverse Lottery.”

Yousef and Tony’s guest was Abdulrahman Al-Sheikh Khalil, a Palestinian student from Gaza who had traveled to to pursue his studies in information technology, and then returned to Gaza in July 2023 to reconnect with his family and community. Less than two months later, October 7 changed everything. He has spent the years since navigating displacement, destruction, and survival in Gaza.

Abdulrahman described the experiences he and his family have endured during the genocide, including evacuating to the south, living in tents, and witnessing the devastation of their homes and community. He also discussed the harsh realities of daily life in Gaza, including severe shortages of water and electricity. His family lives in a house without proper walls, while the cost of privately supplied electricity had reached around $10 per kilowatt.

Despite these conditions, Abdulrahman has continued his education and his work. He spoke about the large community of IT professionals in Gaza who continue working remotely for international clients despite the lack of reliable electricity and internet access. Among his own projects is Bayan, an AI-based application designed to help people learn Quranic pronunciation. He also described his work with organizations seeking to improve aid delivery.

Catch this informative episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to it and share it widely to amplify Abdulrahman’s voice and story.

Hamas’s leaders pushing for internal democracy within the PLO and its legislating body, the PNC

A coalition of eight Palestinian resistance organizations called the “Alliance of Popular Forces” recently issued an important manifesto calling on the PLO’s leadership to preserve the elements of democratic process that for decades have (even if only imperfectly) marked the constitution of its legislative body, the Palestine National Council, PNC.

The resistance-affairs specialist “Mujamma Haraket” posted an English translation of this manifesto here. The eight orgs that are part of this coalition are: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP–General Command, Fatah al-Intifada, al-Saʿiqa, the Khalid ʿAbd al-Majid wing of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, the Abu Nidal al-Ashqar wing of the Palestinian Liberation Front, and the Revolutionary Palestinian Communist Party.

It is good to recall a few key dimensions of this development:

• The PLO acts as the supreme decision-making body of all the Palestinian people, whether within the occupied homeland or in the Diaspora. Its legislative body, the PNC, is supposed to have representation from both those wings of the Palestinian people.

• The “Palestinian Authority” (PA), which has some limited sway over some specks of land in the occupied West Bank, exists only as a child of the “Oslo Agreement,”— which was concluded between the PLO and Israel in 1993.

• For many years, Hamas was so opposed to the Oslo Agreement that it refused to participate in any of its bodies, including the “Palestinian Legislative Council” (PLC) that was also created at Oslo. Voting rights for the PLC were given only to residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

• In 2005, however, Hamas agreed to participate in elections for a new PLC. This notable step marked its first indication of a Hamas willingness to enter the post-Oslo “peace process” with Israel.

• Hamas did participate in the PLC elections held in January 2006— and it won a robust majority in them. That victory led Israel, the U.S., and their local allies (Quislings) to launch harsh attacks against Hamas, including by throwing a tight siege around its strongholds in Gaza.

• The fact that Hamas and other allies in the resistance movement today still seek close involvement in the affairs of the broader PLO is very notable. A decision by the forces that currently control the PLO to allow Hamas and its allies to “enter” the PNC on a basis of democratic inclusion and decisionmaking would be transformative for the whole Palestinian body politic.

Thanks, Mujamma, for your great continuing analysis of Palestinian politics.

… And yes, everyone else here: I know that the (anti-)humanitarian situation of our brothers and sisters in Palestine today is quite beyond belief. This situation will only be ended once robust political forces around the world can finally impel Israel to respect international law, and to end its clearly illegal continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. So let’s redouble our efforts to bold that capability!

My latest essay on Iran’s leaders adding an end to Israel’s war & violations in Palestine as their condition for ending the war with the U.S.

In recent weeks, I’ve written quite a lot about how Iran’s leaders have been able over the past six months to shift from demonstrating their capability to survive the onslaught the U.S. and Israel have jointly waged against it… to being able to exercise deterrence of further U.S.-Israeli escalation… to starting to project (and test) their power to compel Washington to abide by, in the first instance, the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding that Pres. Trump himself had signed with Iran, back on June 18.

This past week saw a collection of developments that underlined that this is, indeed, what’s been happening. These developments included the appointment by Iran’s Supreme Leader M. Khamenei of Maj.-Gen. Mohsen Rezaei as the new head of the country’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC.)

Rezaei has a long reputation as an activist in the pre-1979 anti-Shah movement, an early leader and organizer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a smart and methodical strategic thinker.

Soon after his appointment, Rezaei reportedly defined Iran’s conditions for ending the conflict— which the U.S. and Israel had started, remember— as now including that Washington must, “end the conflict in the entire region, including Lebanon and Gaza.”

Spelling out that ending the conflict in Gaza is now one of Tehran’s conditions for ending the war is new. Previously, in the MOU that Trump and his Iranian counterpart both signed back in June it was stated only vaguely that the conflicts “in Lebanon and other front” should be ended.

So in an essay on my personal Substack that I published a few hours ago I explored some of the implications of, and backstory to, this shift… along with some of the prospects for the possibly lengthy war of attrition that I now see looming ahead. Check it out!

Two other very relevant resources on related issues are these:

• Sina Toossi’s recent piece in Foreign Policy in which he spells out how and why Tehran is now preparing for a long war, and

• Elijah Magnier’s excellent explanation of why, even if Saudi Arabia and the UAE can over time funnel some of their crude oil exports through pipelines that circumvent Hormuz, this will still leave Hormuz as a crucial chokepoint in global trade.

My essay on the 500-year history of the “North East Passage” between Europe and China

This essay is a result of me combining my focus on current global changes with the work that I did a few years ago on the origins of the hegemonic power that a handful of nations in far-West Europe came to exercise over the affairs of all of humankind.

One of the factors pushing the emergence of that hegemony was ta search by merchants and adventurers in England, Netherlands, and Scandinavia for a “North East Passage,” a waterway that could connect them directly with the long-vaunted riches of Cathay (China) without having to be reliant on the goodwill of Muslim (or Catholic) intermediaries.

Well, those West Europeans never did find their North East Passage. But along the way, as they searched for it, they created such phenomena as the East India Company, which in 1843 was able to force China import large supplies of opium (leading to China’s “Century of Humiliation”) along with the intense financialization of the joint-stock company which underlay the explosive growth capitalism which then fueled Global Warming, which resulted in… the accelerated melting of the Arctic ice-cap, which has now allowed… some shipping companies to start running regular voyages of container ships between China and ports in Europe.

So guess which country’s shipping companies are running these new routes?

Yup, China.

Cathay’s revenge, I guess.

And Russia is well-placed to take advantage of this melting, too.

Read all about this history and check out some other resources on this and related topics at this page on my personal Substack.

… And here is another great related resource, from Indi Samarajiva. He summarizes his argument thus:

It took about 500 years, but the natives have finally done it. There are rebellions all across Asia, and they're winning. These are not anti-colonial wars, which have been won, but anti-imperial wars, to put them on the run. Yemen has defeated the US Navy in the Red Sea. Iran has destroyed US air supremacy and taken the main source of energy. All the wealth that accrued to the corrupt will accrue to the clean. Meanwhile, Russia has defanged NATO conventionally and China is in another league entirely. It's not that these countries could invade the other side of the world. It's that the very idea of invading the other side of the world is becoming stupid, as it should be. It's a few centuries late and a carrying climate short, but nature is healing.

Indi has some other great maps there, too. Great work, Indi!

So that’s it for another week in our rapidly shifting world.

If you want to support all the projects we’re pursuing here at Just World Ed, I hope you know how to do so? Just click here:

Support Just World Ed!

Our big thanks to all of you have been supporting our work— for the past ten years! If we all work together with discernment, curiosity, and compassion I am convinced that within far less than the next ten years we can end all these late-imperial wars and oppressions and build the just, peaceable, and sustainable world that all the world’s children (and their parents and grandparents) so richly deserve…

You stay well— Helena

If you’re located east of the Atlantic you might want to register for this webinar, early Tuesday morning, that Just World Ed is co-sponsoring:

The bottom line: It starts at 8:30 am London time, and the link to join is meet.google.com/ktw-zbjo-drj

I am very honored to be a part of this distinguished panel, of which the principal convenor is our colleagues from the Tehran-based Organization for Defending Victims of Violence (ODVV).

We’ll be discussing some very important topics! If you’re unable to “attend” it live, there will be a recording speedily available.

Subscribe now

Rami Khouri on Gaza, Lebanon

On August 2, my great JWE board colleague Rami G. Khuri was (as so frequently) featured on Al-Jazeera, talking about Gaza. One thing I love about Rami’s smart use of SubStack is that he often uses it to post not just the video of his media appearances but also the talking-points he has prepared beforehand (I’m guessing) for that appearance.

Go read the whole of what he wrote on his SubStack about that August 2 appearance. He prefaced it with this:

The 19 Palestinians Israel killed in Gaza Sunday are its message to Trump that it does not plan to adhere to the new agreement…

Remember, that was Rami’s judgment eight days ago… Since then, PM Netanyahu has been quite explicit in his rejection of Trump’s current plan for the “Board of Peace.”

(And any “consequences” from the U.S. government for the Israeli leader’s brutality and defiance? I am not holding my breath…)

Then on August 6, Rami was on TRT, talking about the latest round of (completely for-show) Israeli-Lebanese talks in Rome.

In his SubStack take on the matter, he noted the completely empty, “theatrical” nature of all these Israeli-Lebanese meetings the Trump administration has been organizing. And he made this observation:

if major western states, world and ME powers, Arabs, and the US combine to force Israel to negotiate honestly, seeking peace agreements like the Jordan and Egypt agreements with Israel that satisfied both sides’ rights and needs simultaneously, perhaps Israel would wake up one day and negotiate honestly and equitably.

Again, though,I’m not holding my breath…

My upcoming trip to the U.K.

I want to add— for friends in the U.K.— that I’m planning a trip to your shores for the end of September and the beginning of October, with stops in London, the West Country, Oxford, and possibly elsewhere. I’ve already told many of my U.K. friends that I’m coming, and I’m really looking forward to reconnecting with many old friends in person.

But if you didn’t get that email and would like to schedule a meetup, let me know!

Also, I realize this is pretty short notice, but if any of you would like to help organize a public event or discussion of the still super-helpful book that Rami and I co-authored in 2024, Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters, that could also be an interesting way to spend some of my time there. Let me know if you’d be interested in doing that, too.

Stirring times we live in.

If you want to help support Just World Ed and all the work we do— as so richly archived on our website, then you know the drill:

Give to Just World Ed!

That’s it for now. You stay well—

~ Helena

This newsletter comes a day earlier than usual. I hope it finds you well?

This past week has seen two very significant developments in West Asian and world affairs:

1. Pres. Trump was forced (by Iran’s increasingly evident depth of resilience) to back down from the “massive attack” he had threatened against the country as recently as the morning of August 2; and

2. The progressive, anti-Zionist contender to be the Democratic Party candidate in Michigan’s next Senate election, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, managed to win his primary despite pro-Israel orgs pouring more than $30 million into the campaign of his pro-Israel opponent.

Of course these two developments are linked. The combination of the resilience of the indigenous peoples of West Asia and the growing revulsion among publics in the “West” for the barbarism and cruelty of the Zionist settler-colonial project are, between them, starting to change the world…

I’ve been fortunate over the past ten days to take part in two excellent conversations that explored aspects of these changes. In this episode of JWE’s “PalCast”, recorded last week, I joined long-time host Dr. Yousef Aljamal in a great 71-minute convo with the always insightful Muhammad Shehada of the European Council on Foreign Relations. And this week, I had a really good convo with Prof. Nazari Ismail, the head of the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at Universiti Malaya, in which we surveyed all the key developments in West Asian and world politics.

Then yesterday, I was able to pull together my own thoughts on the balance-shift that is now— very slowly— transforming West Asian realities into this essay on my personal Substack.

In this newsletter, I’ll start by giving you more details on all these resources from Just World Ed and our partners. Then I’ll finish off with links to some other timely learning resources.

Subscribe now

Our PalCast with Muhammad Shehada

Muhammad, who was with us from Copenhagen, is a real expert on the situations both on the ground in Gaza and in the halls of decisionmaking in the Arab countries and Europe.

He started out by describing the very dire situation in Gaza, including Israel’s repeated, lethal attacks on the Strip’s remaining population, its constant pushing westward of the “Yellow Line” that squeezes Gazans into an ever-reduced portion of the Strip, and its cruel restrictions on the entry of vital necessities… with all that happening during the period of the so-called “ceasefire” that was agreed last October.

He was coruscating in his criticism of the “Board of Peace.” He said,

If I want to be accurate… I would say all of it was just a scam. All of it was just supposed to give the facade of progress, to give a free hand to Netanyahu to do whatever he wants in Gaza…

For example take the new “international stabilization force” that Israel will allow now to operate in Gaza… If you read the small print it says Morocco sent one soldier, Kosovo sent one soldier, Kyrgyzstan sent one soldier, Kazakhstan will send one soldier. So it’s gonna be… four soldiers against 30,000 Israeli soldiers, against 25,000 Hamas militants, and those four soldiers are supposed to oversee the entire governance, reconstruction…

He then discussed the worsening crisis in the West Bank, the difficult position of the Palestinian Authority, and the challenges facing Palestinian leaders as they confront an increasingly difficult political and security environment.

We examined the wider regional dynamics involving Iran, the U.S., Israel, and other actors. We looked at Iran’s ability to influence the regional balance and surveyed what all these developments might mean for Palestine. Muhammad argued that Palestinians needed a proactive and unified strategy that can sustain their struggle while remaining responsive to changes in the regional and international landscape.

Listen to this whole PalCast episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! Share it with others who wanted to better understand the current situation in Palestine and the wider region.

My convo with Prof. Nazari Ismail

We recorded this great, 54-minute online conversation on Tuesday, the very day on which Michiganders were going to the polls in their important primary. Our discussion covered shifting political currents in the United States, the state of the US-Iran war, Israel’s escalating pressure on Lebanon, and the deteriorating situation in Gaza under the so-called ceasefire.

Much of the conversation focused on the unprecedented shift toward pro-Palestinian rights policies inside the Democratic Party. I noted that this shift is something I have never seen in my 44 years in this country, while I also observed that a parallel, if smaller, fracture has been occurring inside the Republican Party.

We also looked in some detail at the situations in Gaza, Lebanon— and of course in the “big” confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, over the issue of control of Hormuz.

You can read a good digest of this conversation here. (Or watch the whole thing!) We’re planning to release a full transcript of this convo, and of the PalCast talk with Muhammad Shehada, within the days ahead.

My essay, “How far will Iran’s leaders take their emerging capability of compellence?”

In this essay, which I published yesterday, I dove deeper than I previously have into the mechanisms through which Iran’s leaders have been able, over the past five months, not just to defend their homeland and its governance structure but also to exert a degree of deterrence and then even compellence over the actions of the country’s massive armed U.S. (and Israeli) attackers.

The degree of Iran’s deterrent capability was displayed most evidently on August 2, when Pres. Trump, having deployed large numbers of troops and weapons to (the Westernmost side of) West Asia and having surveyed the possibilities that another large attack on Iran could be successful, abruptly— yet again— called off that attack.

In the essay, I explore the reasoning behind trump taking that “TACO” decision. The two main bundles of reasoning were clearly: (a) the information from his military that U.S. supplies of vital missiles and interceptors has now run very low, and (b) entreaties from leaders of the “front-line” Arab states on the south coast of the Persian Gulf that he not take steps that would invite very clearly threatened retaliatory attacks— on them— by Iran.

In the essay I also look at how Iran has been methodically moving beyond deterrence toward testing its ability to compel the U.S. act in ways that Tehran wants: classic compellence.

The first test of this is over control of the Strait of Hormuz. And if, as seems likely, Tehran wins this battle of wills by showing the ability to deny Washington the role it seeks in the governance of the strait, then— as I write in my essay— Tehran may well test its ability to compel U.S. actions on other issues, too… Including, possibly Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.

In this regard, I note that the terms that Iran announced for the early April ceasefire and the terms that the presidents of both countries signed onto for the MOU of June 18 can provide a guide for what Iran’s war goals might be.

In the essay I also briefly survey the “Israel factor” in all this.

If you’re interested in this (slightly nerdy, but still I think informative) analysis, I urge you to go read the whole essay. Do post your thoughts and comments there, too! I am sure I can learn a lot from many of you.

Some timely resources from elsewhere

1. I am very much looking forward to next Tuesday’s release of the super-timely book Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick. These are two deeply informed and trustworthy analysts! I haven’t had the chance to read the book yet. But this teaser that the two authors published in The Guardian on August 2 and this review that Dr. Josh Ruebner published on Mondoweiss have certainly whetted my appetite to do so.

2. Murtaza Hussein had a chilling piece of investigative journalism on Drop Site News recently, in which he revealed the (essentially treasonous— to the UN) role that a long-time Israeli mole called Yahav Lichner has been played in the past, in his jobs at high levels in a number of UN organizations. Lichner is currently the director of the Washington DC office of UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund. Hussein’s article draws on a trove of emails from 2013-14 that were hacked from the account of veteran Israeli diplomat Ron Prosor, who acted as a key sponsor for Lichner when he got his first UN staff job, with UNPFA, in 2013. (Obama administration official Samantha Power was also an ally in that.)

So that’s it for today. Before I sign off here is my customary plea for you to continue to support Just World Ed in our timely and groundbreaking work. Here is just a quick hint of the issues we’ve been covering over the past couple of years:

Click here to access and use that whole portal on our website. And click here to donate to support our work:

Support Just World Ed!

You stay well and stay steadfast! The times they are— at last— a-changin’!

~ Helena

Another really busy week to review. And though I’m on family business far from home I’ll try to make the best sense of it— for you and also for myself, since I think it’s an immense privilege to be witnessing a time of such deep (and overwhelmingly positive) global change.

As I remarked in a short convo on Twitter a couple of days ago, the hegemony that “White”, Western nations have exercised over global affairs for the past few centuries was already noticeably crumbling before October 7, 2023 and February 28, 2026… But the decisions that “Western” (primarily American) leaders made on those two days have vastly accelerated that process.

Now, in the war against Iran, the U.S.-Israeli axis finds itself outsmarted and facing an uncomfortable set of challenges from which there is zero easy exit. (I have written quite a lot in recent weeks about the roots of Iran’s resilience to the— still continuing— U.S.-Israeli assault, and the ways in which Iran’s leaders have been able to transform that resilience into a smart and carefully calibrated exercise of escalation dominance over their assailants. Check out this mid-July analysis I wrote of that phenomenon, or the gloss I added to it in last week’s newsletter.)

Subscribe now

I will write more about this and related matters lower down in today’s newsletter. So here are the topics that I’ll be writing about today:

1. Just World Ed’s latest PalCast ep: Conversation with a Gaza-Palestinian law student

2. What Hamas leaders say about their commitments to the “Board of Peace.” (Hint: It’s not what Trump claims.)

3. Israel’s continued viciousness in Lebanon pushing even Pres. Aoun to protest!

4. The U.S.-Iran conflict metastasizing further across West Asia— and the Mediterranean

5. Serious questions about the UN’s role, relevance as the contest over the next SG heats up.

1. Just World Ed’s latest PalCast ep: Conversation with a Gaza-Palestinian law student

The latest episode of our Palcast project is titled “International Law Didn’t Fail, World Leaders Failed International Law.” It features Dana Besaiso, a Gaza Palestinian writer and scholar who is now studying for her LLM degree in the UK, with a specialty in public international law.

Speaking with hosts Yousef and Tony, Dana reflected on her experience of surviving the genocide in Gaza, sharing her story of displacement, hunger, loss— and also, the determination that has driven her to continue her legal studies in the United Kingdom. The convo examined the human cost of Israel’s assault on Gaza while exploring Dana’s commitment to pursuing justice for her people.

Throughout the episode, Dana argued that international law itself had not failed. Instead, she maintained that world leaders and institutions had failed to enforce it. Drawing on her own experiences, she described the first days of the genocide, the repeated displacement of her family, the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon… and then, the emotional burden of living outside Gaza while the destruction continued within it.

She also spoke about the solidarity that sustained Palestinians through unimaginable hardship and the deep sense of responsibility she felt to document these experiences through her writing.

This episode offers a unique and deeply personal perspective on justice, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for accountability. It is now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

2. What Hamas leaders themselves say about their commitments to the “Board of Peace.” (Hint: It’s not what Trump claims.)

One interesting development this week has been that Pres. Trump, unable to claim anything like a strategic, Iran-related achievement from his lengthy, damaging, and expensive war on Iran, tried instead to claim that that war has now led to a non-trivial achievement on the Gaza issue: He “trumpeted” far and wide that the Iran war had led Hamas finally to agree to the diktats of his infamous “Board of Peace” that it disarm completely…

But not so fast. The Hamas leaders themselves contest that claim.

You will recall that back in early October, they had agreed only to the first phase of the Trump-mediated ceasefire agreement for Gaza— the one that involved them securing the release of all the remaining Israeli captives, and that promised them a total cessation of Israel’s attacks and the delivery of 600 trucks per day of vitally needed humanitarian goods… They never agreed to the subsequent “20-point Plan” that established the Board of Peace and spoke of the complete disarmament of the resistance forces in Gaza.

However, in recent weeks, they have signaled their readiness to work with the “National Council for the Administration of Gaza” that was established by the BOP. And now, under their newly elected leader Dr. Khalil Al-Hayya they have started actively exploring modalities for how various different classes of the arms they hold can be handed over to the NCAG’s custody in parallel with Israeli forces undertaking the necessary withdrawals from the areas of Gaza that they now hold.

One excellent source on this issue is the Copenhagen-based Gaza-Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada. (Follow him on X if you don’t, already… Also, stay tuned for the release, very soon, of the great Palcast episode that Yousef, Tony, and I recorded with Muhammad just a few days ago… )

Muhammad has been all over Western media outlets in recent days sharing his understanding of Hamas’s position. Here he was, quoted on CNN yesterday:

This is “a major compromise” for Hamas, said Muhammad Shehada, an expert on Gaza and a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, adding that the militant group would not have publicly agreed to it if it didn’t have sufficient guarantees from mediators that its own conditions will also be met.

Shehada said that the biggest obstruction to the deal will likely be the Netanyahu government, which is likely to oppose any withdrawal of troops or reconstruction of the enclave before the elections. “It would be political suicide for them to try to poke a hole in the mirage they’ve tried to sell to the Israeli public.”

Hamas insists the deal is contingent upon Israel upholding its obligations under the US-led plan signed in October, which include Israel withdrawing its troops to the so-called Yellow Line.

Why now? Firstly, Israel is heading toward a new election cycle, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to keep, if not ramp up, the Gaza front to garner support, Shehada said.

Secondly, Hamas may have been disappointed to see Iran fail to include Gaza by name in its ceasefire negotiations with the US, but instead included Lebanon. This left the group feeling “like they were left to fend for themselves,” the expert said.

Finally, Hamas has been losing support in Gaza among Palestinians who have now endured nearly three years of war, and has been unable to pay the majority of government employee salaries there. But while Hamas felt it was time to agree to this concession, several obstacles remain…

The biggest of those obstacles is, undoubtedly, the extreme reluctance of PM Netanyahu to comply with Israel’s obligations under the Trump/BOP plan.

Indeed, with Trump now increasingly eager to have some achievement to point to from his disastrous (Netanyahu-urged) attack against Iran, the matter of pushing forward the BOP plan for Gaza seems to be driving an increasingly large wedge between Trump and Netanyahu.

Both men face key elections in the next three months, and the “achievements” regarding Gaza that they hope to present to their voters in this election period are almost diametrically opposed.

3. Israel’s continued viciousness in Lebanon pushes even Pres. Aoun to protest!

As we know, Lebanon’s Pres. Joseph Aoun and PM Nawaf Salam have been slavishly happy to dance to Pres. Trump’s tune regarding conducting direct talks with Israeli officials even as Israel has continued many very damaging military campaigns across the south of their country in direct violation of successive ceasefires concluded with U.S. mediation, the most recent of which was signed on June 26…

Then on Thursday night, Israel detonated its most massive explosion yet— right under the historic, nearly 900-year-old Beaufort Castle, perched high on a ridge near Nabatieh, South Lebanon…

Plucky journalist Courtney Bonneau posted this quick report on X yesterday:

(If you click on Courtney’s video there, you’ll see the dusty debris from that blast sweeping across a street in Marjayoun, a few kilometres away…)

Yesterday, even Pres. Aoun publicly denounced Israel’s detonation at the site:

He said the powerful explosions recorded Friday at Beaufort Castle generated seismic waves equivalent to a 3.8-magnitude earthquake, according to Lebanon’s National Center for Geophysics.

Aoun described the blasts as “a highly dangerous escalation” and “a blatant violation of existing commitments,” warning that they represented “a direct threat to the process launched under the framework agreement,” whose obligations Lebanon has committed to implementing.

He said the timing of the attacks, on the eve of a meeting in Rome to continue discussions on implementing the trilateral framework, “sends negative messages and undermines international efforts aimed at consolidating stability.”

4. The U.S.-Iran conflict metastasizes further across West Asia— and the Mediterranean

When Israel and the U.S. launched an attack of unprecedented scale against Iran on February 28, Pres. Trump assured Americans that this would be a speedy and successful operation. 38 days later it became clear that this was not so. On April 7-8, Washington and Tehran entered the first stage of a still-shaky ceasefire that was seemingly strengthened somewhat in the “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) that they signed on June 18.

That MOU had been painstakingly negotiated, with the mediating help of, primarily, Pakistan, whose negotiators were also helped by colleagues from Oman, Qatar, and some other (even more pro-American) Muslim-majority nations. But Trump remained deeply skeptical of the MOU and was opposed to complying with two of its key clauses:

• Para. 1, which specified a complete ceasefire in Lebanon, and Israeli’s withdrawal therefrom; and

• Para. 5, which specified a 60-day period in which Iran would regulate traffic through the Strait of Hormuz for no fee and would meantime coordinate with the Strait’s other “co-owner”, Oman, to draw up a joint, lasting regime for Strait governance after the 60 days period…

Please note: Several commentators in the Western media have described the MOU as “ambiguous” regarding the Hormuz arrangements. It was not! The language had been negotiated in detail over the preceding two months; and the presidents of the two countries signed the agreed text in both national languages, to eliminate any possibility of ambiguity.

But from the beginning, Trump worked to slide around and violate the provisions of Para. 5,; and he speedily persuaded (or strong-armed) Oman to let him do that by organizing the transit of some ships along a Southern route through the Strait, more distant from Iran’s shores and islands.

The Iranians protested those violations. Then, on July 9, they took action. When some of the vessels using the Southern route refused to comply with Iranian warnings that they were violating the terms of the internationally agreed MOU, the Iranian naval forces used (generally non-lethal) warning shots to persuade them to turn back. Many or most of those ships’ captains complied; and anyway the rates at which the big maritime insurance companies would insure vessels using the Southern route meanwhile shot sky-high.

Those Iranian actions in defense of Para. 5 of the MOU then spurred another round of exchanges of fire that slowly escalated in range and impact over weeks that followed. The Americans aimed their attacks on Iran at elements of the country’s vital national infrastructure as well as at apparent military targets. The Iranians undertook numerous precision attacks using drones and short-range ballistic missiles, most of which targeted key intel, command, and sustainability systems on the U.S. bases along the South coast of the Persian Gulf— radomes, fuel bladders, interceptor arrays, etc.

Along the way, they expanded their target list to include U.S. bases in Jordan, where on July 18 they killed three serving U.S. service-members in the Muwaffaq Salti barracks. And in Bahrain they targeted a big Amazon data center that they claimed had been used to support U.S. military operations in the Gulf.

On July 27, the Americans eased the scale of what had been nightly attacks against Iranian targets. But three nights later they unleashed a large-scale attack against the Iranian island of Qeshm where, as an investigation by the New York Times revealed, they had apparently dropped a 2,000-lb bomb on a residential neighborhood, demolishing a family home and killing a husband, wife and their 2-year-old son, while the family’s two other children were pulled from the rubble alive.

That report notes that, “The Times found no indication of a military site near the family’s home or any reports of military casualties from the strike, which the Iranian authorities typically announce.”

Yesterday, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned bluntly that the United States “will pay the price” for killing those civilians on Qeshm Island.

… This was the latest in a string of utterances in which Iran’s leaders clearly spell out their intention to respond to any U.S. actions in a forceful (but still measured) way. See e.g. this or this warning.

Meantime, these leaders are also pursuing active diplomatic efforts aimed at building an international alliance capable of forcing U.S. compliance with either the June MOU— or, presumably, an agreement that is even stronger than that one proved to be.

This campaign has included continued outreach to all the parties that had helped Tehran achieve the April and June agreements (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, China.) It has also included an intriguing phone call between Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi and his new British counterpart, Ed Milliband.

However, the conflict between Iran and the U.S.-Israel axis has also spread to other areas. As we know, this conflict has long been closely tied to the assaults the Israelis have been undertaking in Lebanon. And there are also longstanding links between Iran’s rulers and their allies in both Yemen’s Ansarallah (“Houthi”) movement, and the various “Popular Mobilization Forces” in Iraq. The past few weeks have seen the U.S.-Iran conflict spreading to these other arenas, too. Of particular note has been the sharpening conflict between Ansarallah, in Yemen, and the Saudis, a development that has obstructed Tehran’s campaign to reach a workable accord with Riyadh.

… Then, on July 29, there was a mysterious drone attack against an LNG carrier anchored at Egypt’s key Mediterranean gas-hub of Damietta, that set off fierce blazes aboard that ship and another one anchored nearby. Pres. Trump speedily attributed that attack— like earlier attacks on key Saudi oil facilities in Abqaiq— to Iran or its allies. But from Tehran, FM Araghchi stressed that “Egypt is an important friend and partner in the region, and its security is of utmost important to us,” adding that “We must all be vigilant against Israeli plots and false-flag operations designed to undermine regional peace.”

On July 30, the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran spread even further West, too. This linkage was the best explanation I’ve seen for the very surprising incursion of some 60,000, mainly Moroccan, young men into Ceuta, a small, historically Spanish enclave at the northern tip of their country, just across the water from the UK-controlled enclave of Gibraltar.

Many Europeans were worried that this incursion might presage a much broader o incursion of African migrants into the EU’s long-protected “Schengen Area.” Most local observers noted however that:

• The incursion seemed to have been well coordinated from the Moroccan side of the borer by the Moroccan authorities.

• Most of the young intruders bore little resemblance to other, actual trans-continental migrants into Europe: they didn’t have full, frayed backs; they didn’t seem exhausted or desperate. And by the end of the day, many of them had already returned to the Moroccan side of the border.

Based on these observations, it seemed fairly easy to conclude that this “incursion” was a way for Morocco— which has disagreements with Spain over a number of matters, including the strong opposition Spain’s government has expressed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the U.S.-Israel assault on Iran— to “poke” Spain… perhaps also in alliance with Morocco’s longstanding allies in Tel Aviv and Washington.

This week’s events in Ceuta and Damietta indicated that the still unresolved conflict between the U.S. and Iran could metastasize even further in the future… This, at a time when its effects on the global oil markets and the global economy more broadly are already very evident.

Here, for example, is the picture from the market-intel firm Kepler on how many vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz July 28-30:

(That, compared with roughly 140 ships per day prior to the current war.)

5. Serious questions about the UN’s role, relevance as the contest over the next SG heats up

Before I sign off today I want to note that there will be another notable event in.the weeks ahead that— along with the upcoming elections in. both the U.S. and Israel— will have a large impact on the course of Iran’s thus far notably successful campaign to push back against the hegemony the U.S. and Israel have long exercised across nearly all of the (globally significant )region of West Asia. This is the upcoming session of the UN’s General Assembly, due to open, as always, in mid-September in New York.

This session will (yet again) face the challenge of trying to establish why this international body, the UN, should continue to have any relevance at all, given the notable dereliction of its Charter-defined duties in re Israel’s genocide in Gaza that its “leading body”, the Security Council has displayed for the past three years. (And especially with the SC’s adoption last November of its Resolution 2803, by which it ceded nearly all responsibility for the ongoing shitshow in Gaza to Donald “King Leopold” Trump’s grotesquely misnamed Board of Peace.)

This year’s UNGA will have another big responsibility, too. It will be voting on who should lead the whole UN as Secretary-General for the next five years (renewable, once.) SG Antonio Guterrez will end his term on December 31. Who will replace him? Thus far, seven candidates have tossed their hats into the ring.

The process by which a ”winner” gets presented to the UNGA session is complex and fairly opaque. Before the UNGA gets its chance to vote, the candidates all get pre-vetted by the Security Council members, who engage in a number of rounds of fairly informal “straw votes” to winnow the field. The goal there is to identify one (or maybe more than one?) candidate who can be presented to the UNGA as having a strong level of support while not provoking a veto from any of the SC’s “P-5” members.

The first straw poll for this round was conducted on Thursday. This good article from PassBlue explains both the process and what happened in that poll.

Apparently each of the 15 delegations in the Security Council gets to pronounce— anonymously— its opinion on each of the candidates presented, with that being expressed as they “encourage”, or “don’t encourage”, or “have no opinion on” this person’s candidacy.

The candidates at this point, nearly all of them from South America, are as follows:

And here, according to PassBlue’s X account, was how Thursday’s straw poll came out:

Very interesting. I’ve found out that the top two there, Rebeca Grynspan and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, have both earlier paid visit to China and had apparently consrtuctive meetings with china’s FM, Wang Yi. Here’s an account of Rebeca Grynspan’s June meeting with FM Wang, and here’s an account of his more recent meeting with Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett.

Well, that is definitely it from me, for now. Next week I’ll be back in my home office and y work will be better organized. Meantime, here‘s my obligatory fundraising button:

Support Just World Ed!

This world we live in is so darned interesting— though very painfully so, for far too many people, I know. But at least we can now have more hope that things are finally moving in a good, anti-colonial, and pro-justice, pro-peace direction!

You have a good week, and stay well—

~ Helena

This has been yet another big week in the affairs of West Asia (and the world.) I have, however, been busy with some personal affairs. So the longer analytical piece I’ve been planning to write on the determinants and implications of the escalation dominance that Iran has— slowly, judiciously— been exercising against the U.S (and U.S.-Israeli) military presence that is sprawled widely across West Asia… is still in the edit stage.

I’ll give you a quick summary of the main points of my analysis on that, lower down in this newsletter, along with some other news from Just World Educational and some quick links to resources on the recent Hamas leadership election.

But first, this:

America as Israel‘s proxy force

Here’s the place to note that in recent days we have seen unprecedented revelations about the extent to which Israel has successfully subordinated U.S. policy to its own ends:

• On Wednesday, the House of representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027. It includes a section (#219) that expressly instructs the Pentagon to work closely with the Israeli military in all stages of the development and testing of several absolutely critical technologies.

• Also on Wednesday, the administration announced that Energy Secretary Chris Wright had signed an agreement to sell nuclear-energy technology to Saudi Arabia under unprecedentedly lax safeguards. Israel, which has long commanded a sizeable nuclear-weapons arsenal, had long sought to condition any nuclear-tech transfer to Saudi Arabia on the kingdom joining the Abraham Accords with Israel. Sec. Wright’s agreement did not include that provision… So less than 24 hours later the White House intervened to stress that the deal the Saudis had signed just a day earlier is indeed still conditioned on Riyadh joining the Accords…

Of course, we have long known about the control that Israel exercises over many key areas of U.S. policy. We know, for example, that Pres. Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching the illegal (and still ongoing) attack on Iran on February 28 was taken at PM Netanyahu’s urging.

Indeed, the legal “justification” for this war that is posted on the State Department’s website states clearly that:

the United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense.

So today, U.S. taxpayers are shelling out billions of dollars to sustain this war effort, and increasing numbers of U.S. service-members are returning home in coffins or on hospital gurneys… Yet since April 7, the Israeli military has not been actively engaged in this war effort, but has instead focused its mega-lethal attentions on its immediate neighbors in Lebanon and Gaza.

That is why I think, despite all the allegations in the Western corporate media about Iran operating through “proxies” across West Asia, it is much more accurate to describe the United States as Israel’s proxy in the region.

(As for those Iranian allies that have been working alongside Tehran to resist the illegal Israeli-U.S. war in West Asia, at least they know that Tehran is also actively in that campaign with them… Rather than sitting it out on the sidelines as Israel does, just hoping that the blood and treasure of Americans can do their job for them.)

Subscribe now

PalCast with guests from the occupied West Bank

Our great colleague Tony Groves tried something new this week for the PalCast podcast series that we’ve been co-presenting for nearly three years along with his Dublin-based “Tortoise Shack” media center: He brought two young Palestinian journalists from occupied East Jerusalem onto the show.

These guests were the talented young journalists Zena Tahhan and Leila Warah, who explored how Israel’s settler colonialism continues to have a heavy impact on the lives of Palestinians right across the occupied Palestinian homeland.

Tahhan and Warah discussed the expansion of settlements in occupied Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank, attacks by armed settlers, land confiscation, forced displacement, and the continued detention of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners…

Listen to this full episode to gain a deeper understanding of the realities facing Palestinians today! You can find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

About those Hamas leadership elections…

On Monday, Hamas announced that as the result of an extensive consultation, Dr. Khalil Al-Hayya has now been chosen as the new head of the movement’s Political Bureau. (Remember that the last three men to hold this post were all killed by Israel— one of them, Ismail Haniyeh, while on a formal visit to Iran in July 2024, and the next two— Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Deif— by Israel, in Gaza.) Dr. Al-Hayya has very deep roots in Gaza but currently lives and works outside Palestine

Our great JWE board colleague Rami Khouri, who was my co-author of the groundbreaking book that JWE published in 2024, Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters, made several important points about the significance of Al-Hayya’s election in this mid-week interview that he gave to TRT World. Al-Hayya, he noted,

was [previously] elected to the Palestine Legislative Council, the National Council of the Palestinian People. And he has been recently the head of the negotiating team, or the lead negotiator. I think the more important thing for people to realize about what just happened is not just who was elected—it was no surprise, it was either he or the other leading candidate—but the way it was done.

Hamas is going through a very difficult period, the most difficult of its existence, with the onslaught in Gaza, the genocide, the destruction, the killing. But they went through a very methodical process of consulting all their different groups, the West Bank, Gaza, the Palestinians and the diaspora. They even had consultations among Palestinian prisoners to get their views.

And they went through an elaborate consultation process, and they had several votes, and then, finally, he won the votes on the General Shura Council.

Now, what’s significant, is that he and his policies represent what the Palestinian people really feel and want in terms of their rights. That’s what makes it significant.

And this is why Hamas has remained a player, whether you like what they do or you don't like what they do. For the majority of Palestinians, they are today the most representative of the general consensus that the Palestinian people want, which is ending occupation, self-determination, statehood, and to live a normal life. And they've said many times that they're willing to coexist with a Jewish-majority Israeli state, but one that goes back to its 1967 lines and borders, as the U.N. requires.

So, this is what’s, I think, important to keep in mind. The political position of Hamas and all the Palestinian people has not really evolved, even with the terrible beatings that they have suffered. And they continue to resist, along with their colleagues in Lebanon and Iran and other places.

Two more resources on this:

First, obviously would be the book that Rami and I co-authored in 2024, which explains all this and much more about Hamas, its history, its staying power, and its political positions— for the general, non-specialist reader. Learn more about the book and how to buy it here.

Second would be this very rich biography of Dr. Al-Hayya, that was published on July 20 by the writer who uses the pen-name Mujamma Haraket. It contains some very harrowing details about the numerous losses Al-Hayya’s family has suffered. One of his sons was killed in the dastardly attack the Israelis launched against Dr. Al-Hayya and the other Palestinian negotiators in Doha, when they were in the midst of their peace negotiations with Israel last September. The Israelis killed another son just in May. And two of his other sons and many, many other family members had been killed in earlier Israeli attacks. Such has been the fate of many or most Gaza-Palestinian families caught under the jackboot of Israel’s genocide machine…

MH has many other deeply informed articles and notes on his Substack there. Check it out!

More on Iran’s methodical exploitation of its current escalation dominance

In this essay that I published a week ago I argued— contra those who argued that Iran’s use of (retaliatory) military power against U.S. assets looked ill-considered and extremely risky— that it seems at present that Iran enjoys escalation dominance in this large-scale game of chicken.

The events of the past week have borne out that judgment. Both sides have shown themselves willing to escalate the level of their skirmishes to a certain extent. But the Iranians have shown themselves able and willing to undertake—though still in carefully calibrated amounts— even greater degrees than the Americans of both horizontal (geographic) and vertical escalation.

In recent days the Iranians have successfully attacked several very significant comms/ISR facilities on U.S. military bases in Kuwait and in parts of Jordan very close to the border with Israel. Read some details here. Meantime their Ansarullah allies in Yemen have had apparent success in blocking the Bab el-Mandeb to crude carriers carrying oil from Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea pipeline-head, forcing the Saudis to send that oil out via the the circuitous (and far more load-limited) Suez Canal route instead.

Notes on the roots of Iran’s resilience

I have written a lot over the past few months, including last week, about the sources of Iran’s resilience. This resilience inheres in a number of different arenas of Iran’s society today:

• Resilience of the political command system

• Resilience of the military command system

• Resilience of Iran’s physical infrastructure

• Resilience (and intelligence) of its management of relationships with other governments.

In this latter regard, here was FM Abbas Araghchi meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Kyrgyzstan, yesterday:

All these forms of resilience have been systematically built up by the Islamic Republic since its first decade in power, a period in which it successfully— though at massive cost— confronted and fought off a brutal, 8-year-long military assault from Iraq that received considerable support from Washington.

…In earlier posts on my personal Substack I had presented snapshots of several dimensions of the IRI’s physical resilience. (Go check ‘em out!) Then, I found info on another key dimension in this recent essay by the smart, Canada-based analyst who writes under the pen-name “Policy Tensor”.

These numbers indicate the results of the IRI system’s long-sustained investment in secular education, and in particular in STEM/engineering education. Westerners who consume only the stereotypes about Iranian society peddled by the big corporate media may find these numbers surprising. But Iran is not Afghanistan under the Taliban! The results of the IRI’s longterm investment in STEM education have been evident in every one of the Iranian-designed, Iranian-built, and Iranian-commanded drone and missile systems that we’ve seen in operation over the past five months— and also, during earlier rounds of long-distance skirmishes between Iran and Israel, in 2024 and 2025.

Rather than looking at the depth of indigenous Iranian expertise, Western commentators prefer to speculate about possible “Russian” or “Chinese” specialists having engineered those technical achievements. But recall too that for several years now, Iran’s “Shahed” drones have been widely recognized as the first-in-class of modern drone warfare and have been widely copied by Ukrainians, Russians, and others. So people should not be too surprised to learn that the indigenous Iranian development of those technologies built upon a pretty robust STEM-expertise base…

As have, of course, Iran’s projects in the nuclear-tech field. (All of which also indicates that even if the Israelis succeeded in assassinating several dozen top Iranian nuclear scientists in recent years, most notably on February 28, that would still leave an extremely deep bench of other scientists very well prepared to step into their shoes.)

… It is probably fair to say today that no Western empire has ever before tangled with a liberation movement in the Global South that has commanded anything like the IRI’s current level of technical/industrial expertise.

It is also worth putting in here, I think, a link to the WaPo’s July 20 report on a new assessment from U.S. spy agencies which concluded that,

Iran’s government is unlikely to feel significant impact or soften its negotiating position as a result of new rounds of U.S. military strikes like those now underway.

That WaPo report also quotes Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy U.S. national intelligence officer for the Near East, as noting that,

the Trump administration appears to believe that if it keeps hitting Iran harder militarily, Tehran eventually will become more flexible. “That assessment is almost certainly incorrect,” said Panikoff.

Tehran’s smart restraint in its use of power

The leaders in Tehran have evidently, until now, taken clear decisions to limit the degree and extent of the escalations they have engaged in. As I have noted earlier, in the current, post-MOU period of skirmishes they have not yet decided to attack either any targets inside Israel or any of the many (vulnerable) U.S. Navy ships lurking around in the Gulf of Oman.

They have also not yet undertaken any attacks on vital civilian infrastructure in GCC countries such as desalinization plants, except for one attack they recently undertook on a desal plant in Kuwait that they stated clearly was “in retaliation” for an earlier U.S. attack on one of their own desal plants. (Given Tehran’s evident desire to try to win the GCC countries over to their side in the battle against the U.S., or at least to persuade them to oust the U.S. bases from their countries, its general reluctance to target the civilian infrastructure in those countries makes a lot of sense.)

But back to Tehran’s restraint regarding attacks on Israel or on U.S. Navy vessels. Given that the current war was initiated by the U.S. and Israel on February 28 in clear contravention of international law, then any attack on U.S. or Israel military targets would quite clearly be justified, and legal. But the IRI leaders are not at all reckless. They very likely judge that an attack on a U.S. Navy ship that could result in dozens or hundreds of casualties might arouse an anti-Iran ire within the United States that could undercut the “slow and careful” way in which they’ve been pushing their escalation-dominance advantage forward throughout the past four months by, for example, spurring a series of U.S. or U.S.-Israeli attacks of a scale and lethality that we have not yet seen.

(And yes, there has definitely been some talk here in DC about “Why don’t we just detonate one of our nuclear bombs over a deserted part of Iran and threaten that the next one goes over Tehran?” Or, see this Newsweek interpretation of a bombastic early-April threat from Trump. Or, indeed, listen to some of the most recent rhetoric coming from Pres. Trump…)

The restraint the IRI leaders have thus far displayed against Israel is much more intriguing. Here is one recent interpretation of this phenomenon that I found fairly persuasive— and also topical, no?

The theory illustrated there is obviously that the Israeli “goal” is the inner keep of the castle: it is being defended by the outer earthworks made up of the U.S. bases located inside the Arab countries whose flags are displayed… And the Iranian armed forces are working to degrade or destroy those outer earthworks before proceeding to attack the main goal.

A crucial part of this theory is also that the stockpiles of vital AD interceptors that are in the joint U.S.-Israeli armories will over time become increasingly depleted by these rounds of (gradually escalating) preliminary skirmishes— even beyond, obviously, the degree to which they were depleted during the first 38 days of the current war. Which as we know was already not trivial:

During the first 38 days of the current war, the U.S. had used 190-290 (between 52.8% and 80.6%) of the previous inventory of 360 THAAD missiles, unit cost, $15.5M…

Similarly, during those first 38 days, the U.S. used 1,060-1,430 (between 45.5% and 61.4%) of the available 2,330 Patriot missiles, with the replacement timeline being 42 months.

Hence, timing and the optimal stewarding of its own firepower are both clearly key factors in Tehran’s decisionmaking…

… Well, that’s it from me for now. As I wrote earlier here I’ve been busy with some personal matters this week, and will be for some further days to come. I apologize if the thoughts above seem a little scattershot and unfinished, but I still think it is important to share them with you today.

Plus, of course, I need to put in my usual request for your financial support for everything we’re doing at Just World Ed. All contributions are very deeply appreciated! Click on the link to learn how to give, either on a monthly basis or with one— or a number of!— more substantial donations.

Also, if you’re sending a check, be sure to confirm that you’re the right address, which is clearly posted at this link. (We no longer have the P.O. Box that we used to have before.)

Give to JWE!

You stay well. And stay strong so that together we can all help to build the much more hopeful, rights-affirming, non-colonial, and non-militarized world that all the world’s peoples certainly deserve!

~ Helena

I write from a Washington DC that is shrouded for the second day in the toxic fumes of distant wildfires. There is an “end of an era” feel to this city, this country— and indeed to the whole of the White-dominated order the world has known for for the past few centuries.

Here in Washington, an unhinged older White (orange-tinged) guy who denies all the science about climate change and has been dismantling regulations intended to curb it… who started (and recently re-ignited) a vicious war halfway around the world from which there is now no clear exit, even if he wanted to seek one… and who has corruptly enriched himself and his friends beyond all bounds of human comprehension…

On Wednesday, this guy launched a whole new political campaign aimed at undermining the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. This, just 15 weeks before voters will be heading to the polls in our extremely significant mid-term elections.

Such a lot to think, write— and act— about these days. I realize I can’t cover everything of importance in these newsletters. But here’s what I’ve got today:

1. My own assessments (and those of others) of the deadly battle of wills Trump and the Iranians are fighting in and around the Persian Gulf

2. The rapid, though far too long delayed, growth of Israel-curbing actions in the U.S. Congress

3. Two great new productions from Just World Ed’s PalCast

4. Rami G. Khouri’s timely commentary on the Lebanon strife

5. Ilan Pappe’s latest, powerful critique of Zionism

6. Mahmoud Khalil and Max Blumenthal resisting Zionist-spurred oppression

7. The passing of two great, Catholic-inspired rights activists: Gabe Huck and John Esposito.

Scroll on down to whatinterests you!

Subscribe now

My own assessments (and those of others) of the deadly battle of wills Trump and the Iranians are fighting in and around the Persian Gulf

I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing over recent weeks, trying to assess the probable/possible future course of the U.S.-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, and the impact of this contest on the balance of power both across West Asia, and globally. I finished my latest essay in that project a couple hours ago and published it on my personal Substack, here.

My conclusion there was that in this battle of wills, Iran can be fairly confident of prevailing. This assessment is neither new nor original. (Indeed, it was very clearly expressed and explained by no less a figure than the vaunted neocon strategic analyst Robert Kagan, back in May.)

Anyway, I hope you find the arguments I pulled together in my latest essay helpful and informative.

I just added in this graphic, a version of which I had first posted back in March. Still informative, since it illustrates some very basic facts about the resilience of Iran’s power grid:

By the way, if you do like what I’ve been writing on my personal Substack, do subscribe there. It is all still free of charge.

(It’s been taking a bit of time for me how to learn how to use Substack well. I’m still learning! One thing I figured out recently is you can make a PDF of any post there that you might want then to print. I am such a words-on-paper person that I really benefit from that! You’ll find that PDF option at the “three dots” button at the top of the post. Too bad they don’t pre-number the pages for you,though…)

The rapid, though far too long delayed, growth of Israel-curbing actions in the U.S. Congress

In a vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, an unprecedented 103 Democratic Party legislators cast their votes in support of an amendment to a National Security and State Department bill that sought to axe the whole of the $3.3 billion that the bill’s Republican authors want to send to Israel.

The amendment failed by 314 votes to 104. Nearly all the 221 Republican members voted against it, as did 98 members of the Democratic caucus. (Ten Dems voted “Present” and 4 didn’t bother to vote at all.) But this revolt against endless pandering to the pro-Israel lobby is unprecedented within the Democratic Party. Along with the recent victories by Israel-critical candidates several recent primary elections, it seems to clearly presage a new wave of support for Palestinian rights within the party that seems well positioned— provided Pres. Trump doesn’t sabotage the elections— to wion at least one house of Congress this November.

Read more in this good Responsible Statecraft analysis about the fierce battles over this issue now being fought out within the Democratic Party.

It’s worth remembering that Israel-critical sentiment is evident at several powerful spots within the Republican Party, too, including in influential portions of the MAGA movement. Rep. Thomas Massie, who authored last Wednesday’s amendment, was one such figure. The White House’s still-powerful pro-Israel machine proved itself able to defeat Massie— along with two or three Israel-critical Senators— in their recent primaries. But one effect of those tussles was to “free” Massie, Sen. Bill Cassidy, and perhaps others, to come out with positions that are openly critical of the White House. And the White House machine’s campaign to oust Israel-critical legislators has certainly not succeeded in silencing other prominent GOP critics of Israel active in other spheres, like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene…

Two great new productions from Just World Ed’s PalCast

Our great PalCast hosts Yousef and Tony recently released PalCast released a new audio episode with Palestinian writer, poet, artist, and dentist Asmaa Dwimah. as their guest.

Asmaa recounted her journey out of Gaza after receiving a scholarship to pursue a Master’s in Public Health in the UK. She described the emotional challenges of adapting to a new country while remaining deeply connected to her family and community. She reflected on the destruction of her university during the genocide and paid tribute to colleagues whose lives and ambitions were cut short. And she recalled how last year she had completed her scholarship applications while displaced, walking long distances to find internet access and eventually receiving offers from several leading British universities.

She spoke about turning to writing and poetry to document loss and preserve memory. Drawing on her published poems and her writing about her sister, who was killed during the genocide, she explained why bearing witness had become both a personal responsibility and a lasting mission.

Listen to Asmaa Dwimah’s remarkable journey and share the episode to help amplify her voice and testimony! The episode is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

… And a new video PalCast

We are continuing our project to release recordings of some of PalCast’s most impactful conversations as videos, as well as in audio-only form. The latest video in this series is this convo that Yousef and Tony had recently with Hussam Tannera, an English language teacher, translator, and father speaking from Gaza City.

Oh my. I just find all these conversations that Yousef and Tony manage to have with colleagues from inside Gaza so very, very moving!

In this 27-minute episode, Hussam reflected on the transformation of his city, the struggle to provide for his family, and the resilience that has helped them endure. Watch it!

Rami G. Khouri’s timely commentary on the Lebanon strife

On July 14 (Bastille Day), our distinguished JWE board colleague Rami Khouri was interviewed by Al-Jazeera about the latest round of— in my view, outrageous— talked being held by Lebanon’s Vichy-esque government with Israel, in Rome.

Rami’s commentary started thus:

The talks between Lebanon and Israel seem to repeat the Oslo Process of the early 90s when Israeli pledges went unfulfilled and Israeli settlements, attacks, and expulsions of Palestinians in the West Bank continued for decades — and the US kept on funding Israel’s militarism and colonial expansions. Israel similarly ignored all the provisions of the recent Hamas-Israel ceasefires in Gaza, and continued expanding, killing and genociding at will.

Lebanon should beware ceasefire and peace agreement negotiated under US auspices, for they mainly aim to implement Zionism’s and Israel’s sense that Jewish lives matter more than any others in West Asia, and Israeli security triumphs over all other possible goals. This legacy is proven and consistent, which is why Hezbollah refuses to play this game today…

Ilan Pappe’s latest, powerful critique of Zionism

If you have not read it yet, then the whole of this latest essay by Israeli historian Dr. Ilan Pappé should certainly be on your reading list.

It is titled “The Crisis of Zionism and the Future of Palestine”, and it starts with these really super-timely insights:

Zionism is in crisis, and that crisis has given rise to a more violent, racist, and brutal form of it. This follows a familiar dialectic of history: a regime’s final chapter is often its most vicious.

As activists, we must first recognize that the inhumanity unfolding in Palestine today is also a symptom of the looming collapse of those who perpetrate it. This may offer us some hope, but it brings no comfort to those who suffer its consequences.

We must therefore pursue two goals: to shorten this period as much as possible, and to curb its brutality through civic and legal action, as well as solidarity with Palestinians on the ground who are defending themselves against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.

Absolutely every sentence of what he wrote is worth reading carefully and reflecting upon. He carefully locates the whole Zionist project within the same settler-colonial matrix that contains the White settler-colonial project here in Turtle Island (North America.)

Toward the end, he writes this:

Zionism is rotting at its foundations, and in its current form the project is unlikely to survive as a state. We should therefore begin discussing this possibility now, along with the consequences of such a collapse; not only in terms of a one-state or two-state solution, but also regarding when this conversation should take place and who should lead it…

As I said, certainly worth reading.

Big thanks, too, to Dr. Ramzy Baroud and his team over at Palestine Chronicle who not only published this powerful piece from Ilan Pappé but also day after day after day publish an invaluable account of what the Zionists are doing in and against Palestine, and also much further afield.

Mahmoud Khalil and Max Blumenthal resisting Zionist-spurred oppression

On both sides of the Atlantic, there have been severe, Zionist-directed campaigns to curb the essential rights of activists for Palestinian rights. Here in the U.S., one of the most blatant of these campaigns in recent times was the one that last year saw masked federal agents kidnapping Palestinian rights activist, and former Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Khalil from near his home and holding him for 104 days in some of the most notorious of the ICE detention centers around the country.

Now, Khalil is fighting back. This week, with help from the Center for Constitutional Rights, he filed a lawsuit protesting his detention against a string of Zionist and far-right organizations that, the suit alleged had conspired “to single out Mr. Khalil and other non-citizen Palestinians and their supporters for arrest, detention, and deportation, as punishment for their support of Palestinian rights.”

You can learn a lot more about this lawsuit here, or here.

And Max Blumenthal…

The grievance of journalist, filmmaker, and author Max Blumenthal is much more recent. On July 10, Max was returning to this country after completing a six-day reporting trip to and around Iran. Upon return to Dulles airport, he was pulled aside for “secondary screening”, during which the detaining officers took from him the two cellphones he was carrying on his person. He has not been able to retrieve those items.

On July 16, with the help of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee he filed a lawsuit requesting that the Government “immediately return Plaintiff’s electronic devices, together with any information, data, or copies obtained therefrom.”

Stay tuned!

The passing of two great, Catholic-inspired rights activists: Gabe Huck and John Esposito

I was deeply saddened to hear of the recent passing of the writer and Catholic activist Gabe Huck. Back in 2016, I was very proud that my company Just World Books was able to publish the lovely joint memoir that Gabe and his wife Theresa Kubasak published about the time they had spent in Damascus, 2005-12. They had gone there with the mission of giving what support they could to some of the million-plus citizens of Iraq who’d found refuge in Syria from the mega-lethal chaos that engulfed Iraq in the aftermath of the United States’ 2003 invasion of their country.

What Gabe and Theresa did, specifically, was to establish an “Iraqi Student Project”, through which they held regular tutoring sessions for young Iraqis seeking to further their education at universities in the United States. Gabe and Theresa also worked hard to build a broad network of supporters in university communities across America who lobbied for local universities to take in these students, and then provided a continuing “home away from home” support to the students who came.

Their book, Never Can I Write of Damascus, tells the story of that project— and much, much more. (Sadly, I think it is out of print right now.)

It was my deep pleasure and honor to work with Gabe and Theresa to fulfill their vision for the book. Gabe was a sweet, erudite, and deeply committed person. Fittingly, the last time I saw him in person was when he, Theresa, and I were all jostling together in one of the massive, slightly chaotic anti-genocide marches that were held in Washington DC in early 2024.

…And John Esposito

Prof. John Esposito was also someone from a U.S. Catholic background who made a profound impression throughout West Asia. He was a prominent scholar of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University, who was the founding director of its Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He passed away aged 86, on July 15, due to complications from heart surgery.

In this appreciation of his life Middle East Eye’s Yasmine el-Sabawy described him as “a world-renowned American author, professor, and scholar of Islam who consistently challenged western stereotypes.”

She added,

A Catholic from an Italian family in Brooklyn, New York, Esposito spent a lifetime studying Islamic life, its laws, and its application to the political sphere around the world.

He wrote, edited, and contributed to some 55 books on the subject, most of them confronting what he said were misunderstood and even manufactured narratives on Muslims, in particular in the post-9/11 era.

… For his work, he received a staggering seven honorary doctorates from around the world.

RIP both those great people.

… Well, so much death, so many losses, so much destruction. But there are also several amazing signs of great hope in our world today!

We at Just World Ed want to do whatever we can to support the building of a much more peaceful and equitable world. I hope you might want to assist our efforts? One way to do so is to Subscribe to, “Like”, engage with, and help spread the news about some of our great materials. Including:

• This (roughly weekly) newsletter,

• the products of our PalCast project,

• all the other great learning resources that we have produced and that you can access on our Resources portal

• the materials on our Blog, our Youtube channel, and our other social-media feeds, and

• the essays that I write fairly frequently on my “personal” Substack, which is also a project of Just World Ed. (As noted above, this is still free. But it needs a separate “Subscription” to the one that you have here.)

Additionally, of course, we’d love it if you could support our work financially! You can learn how to do that here:

Give to Just World Ed!

I hope the week ahead is a good one for you. Let’s keep the momentum for building the better world that we know is possible!

~ Helena

Yet another jam-packed week to report on here. The highlights, at the geo-historical level, were Pres. Trump (yet again) throwing caution to the winds and re-igniting the hostilities against Iran that Washington and Tel Aviv so violently initiated back on February 28. Plus, the Israelis continuing their lengthy campaign to shred lives, societies, and communities throughout Palestine and southern Lebanon—along with all the constraints of international law. Plus, Trump continuing his cruel strangulation of Cuba… Plus, plus, plus…

(I gather there are also things going on in the worlds of international soccer and international tennis? Great for those with the leisure and the ability to follow them.)

In today’s newsletter, I’ll quickly address the following items:

1. Discussing the US war on Iran with Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman on the Electronic Intifada Livestream on Thursday

2. Updates on the prospect for Iran-U.S. and related diplomacy

3. More dire news from Palestine— and the long-overdue campaign to free Dr. Abu Safiya and his colleagues

4. Update from Lebanon

5. Our latest PalCast episode: “If You Cannot Say Genocide”

6. Rami Khouri’s updates.

Here goes:

Discussing the US war on Iran with Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman on the Electronic Intifada Livestream on Thursday

I was deeply honored to be Ali and Nora’s guest on the EI livestream this past Thursday. My segment covered key aspects of the U.S.-Iran standoff in the Persian Gulf and the fallout from that standoff throughout West Asia and more broadly.

During that convo I noted the particular hostility with which Pres. Trump and his people— along with, perhaps, the Israelis?— had planned to launch a significant new violation of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran that he himself had signed back on June 18… And to time this violation to coincide with the final funeral rites for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who as you will recall was murdered by the Israelis (along with many family members and dozens of top Iranian officials) in the opening salvo of the long-planned, joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that then ensued.

We also discussed the relevance of the truly massive, millions-strong crowds that had attended the late Supreme Leader’s funeral gatherings in Tehran, in other locations in Iran, and also— crucially— in the two Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala, over the preceding days. Bottom line: The (quite illegal) killings of Khamenei and all those other non-combatants on February 28 did not lead, as the war’s planners had hoped, to the splintering or collapse of Iran’s 47-year-old system of governance. Quite the opposite! Drawing on my own family’s history of living in London under the Nazi Blitz, I noted that an exactly parallel process had happened in Iran under the U.S.-Israeli Blitz, with large numbers of citizens who might earlier have had doubts or questions about their government now rallying hard in defense of their nation’s sovereignty.

In the livestream convo, we also discussed (among other topics):

• the two parallel negotiating frameworks that Trump seems to have authorized for Lebanon— though only one of them, the one authorized under the June 18 MOU, has his full, formal presidential imprimatur,

• the move that Hamas had announced to dissolve its existing (interim) governance structure for Gaza, in a gesture toward the “Board of Peace”-sponsored process for the Strip…

We’ve uploaded a full (PDF) transcript of this convo to the JWE website: here. But I urge you to watch the whole of the livestream, which has its usual very informative segments from Nora B-F, Roqaya Chemseddine, Jon Elmer, and Ali, as well.

Update on the prospect for Iran-U.S. and related diplomacy

I want to note that though much of the corporate media seems to be headlining an assessment that “the U.S.-Iran MOU is dead”, and in some cases that the Iranians themselves have declared this to be so, this does not (yet) seem to be the case.

What is true is that from very soon after the moment that he signed the MOU printed out in two languages, English and Farsi, at the Palace of Versailles on June 18, Pres. Trump was very significantly in violation of several of its clauses, including the crucial Paragraph 1, in which— apparently, also on behalf of his “allies”— he undertook, inter alia, to “ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.”

He was violating some of the MOU’s other clauses over the two weeks that followed June 18, as well. But then on Tuesday, July 7, he undertook the most blatant violation yet: the organizing of a small convoy of tankers from Arab Gulf countries that would transit the Strait of Hormuz in a way that directly violated the MOU’s Paragraph 5. In that para, the administration of passage through the Strait for the 60 days following June 18 was clearly assigned to Iran, with no role at all defined for any arm of the U.S. government.

After that clear violation Iranian actors, with a very thin veneer of “deniability”, opened fire on those unlucky ships, with no casualties reported. And immediately the U.S. military’s Centcom command (in which Israel’s military has for some years now been deeply embedded) launched multiple, clearly pre-planned attacks against Iran describing these as “retaliations” for the attacks on the ships…

Exchanges of fire continued throughout the three nights that followed. Meantime, during his appearances at the NATO summit in Türkiye, Trump escalated a vile war of words against Iran and declared the MOU “dead”.

There is a serious question under international law, as to whether one party to a duly agreed and signed “Memorandum of Understanding” can simply exit it and declare it dead. There is an even broader question, in the realm of global politics, as to which powers in this thing called the “international community” can take effective action to end Washington’s outrageous and blatant scofflawry, the costs of which are already being felt by all participants in today’s highly interlinked global economy.

The front-line responsibility for preserving (and also, hopefully, strengthening) the MOU surely rests with the government that was the MOU’s lead mediator/enabler: Pakistan. A key supporting role should also be played by Qatar, which hosted the key follow-up meeting held June 22 in (or near) Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, at which under joint Pakistani-Qatari auspices the Iranian and U.S. delegations agreed on some key modalities for implementing the earlier MOU:

I’ve been happy to see from media in Iran and elsewhere that the Qatari Prime Minister & Foreign Minster Mohammed bin Abdulrahman (“MBA”) has been in Iran, holding meetings with Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi, and also that today Araghchi has been holding talks in Oman, which is another key actor.

Then on Friday afternoon (Islamabad time), Pakistani Chief/Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was posting this on X about some of his latest international contacts:

Its seems quite notable that, at a time when the whole world economy (including, of course, the U.S. economy) is once again poised on a knife-edge that could, thanks to Trump’s belligerency, see numerous peoples of the world plunged into misery— we now, once again, see the chances of averting this hanging on the actions taken by a handful of mid-sized, but deeply involved powers.

May they succeed!

(Notable, too, that the UN, which should be playing the lead role in resolving this crisis is now deeply missing-in-action.)

Subscribe now

More dire news from Palestine— and the long-overdue campaign to free Dr. Abu Safiya and his colleagues

Longtime readers of this newsletter will recall that for roughly the first 18 months of the genocide in Gaza, I would regularly post the very helpful bar graphs that UN-OCHA produced, showing the number of “trucks per day” that the Israeli military would allow humanitarian aid groups to take into Gaza. Then at some point in early 2025, UN-OCHA stopped releasing those graphs. In the “Ceasefire Agreement” that Israel and Hamas signed under U.S. auspices last October, Israel agreed to allow 600 trucks per day of very sorely needed aid to go into Gaza.

Here was what the Logistics Cluster/WFP reported for June 2026:

That is an average passage of fewer than 73 trucks per day.

It is my understanding, including from this information page, that these numbers cover the passage of all humanitarian goods into Gaza, not just those organized by the WFP or even just those related to food items.

The situation of the two million-plus of our fellow humans whom the Israeli military is crushing into ever smaller and smaller portions of Gaza, remains dire indeed. (Listening to dear Nora’s report at the head of last Thursday’s EI livestream was, as always, quite heartrending.) But the situation of the 9,000-plus Palestinian political prisoners— hostages— whom the Israeli authorities continue to hold in dungeons of unspeakable cruelty is also now, belatedly, starting to garner international attention.

The long-imprisoned head of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, has long been a potent emblem for all these prisoners.

Here in the U.S., several lawmakers have started to raise demands that he be freed. I was delighted to learn that on Thursday, the government of France officially joined the international campaign for his release.

This is a website with good information about the ongoing campaign. And this is a poignant account of Dr. Abu Safiya’s work before his December 2024 abduction, and of what has befallen him since.

Update from Lebanon

I’m sorry that I haven’t had time to write much about Lebanon recently. But the headlines from this recent UN-OCHA report on Lebanon caught my attention:

(Worth noting: the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, seems fairly well able to continue operating in Lebanon— which Israel has for the past year or so completely prevented it from doing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.)

Over this past week, there have been several reports of the Israeli military attacking and killing residents of various locations across South Lebanon. But as I learned from the always excellent “Resistance Report” that Jon Elmer contributed to last Thursday’s EI Livestream, PM Netanyahu has recently released a map (at 2:13:00 or so on the livestream) showing where the two U.S.-supervised “pilot zones” are that were agreed in the framework agreement that the Lebanese and Israeli governments signed on June 26:

In those two red-lined zones, the Lebanese government is supposed— with U.S. help-- to ensure that all Hizbullah presence is completely cleared out. (But apparently according to Netanyahu’s understanding, it is quite okay for Israel’s occupation forces to remain in the whole of the rest of the area south of the Yellow Line…)

I just add three thoughts:

• As I’d noted in my own convo on the EI livestream, back in May 1983 an earlier Lebanese government, also acting under intense U.S. pressure, concluded with Israel not just a “framework agreement” but a whole entire peace agreement with Israel. That one last ten months until Lebanon’s then-President rescinded it completely…

• Back in 1982-84, the decision of an earlier U.S. president to cooperate closely with the Israelis to help them manage the aftermath of a completely illegal invasion they’d launched of Lebanon did not end well for the Americans. People much younger than I might want to look up “Marine barracks bombings” on Wikipedia…

• Of course, the whole, more recent June 26 framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel ran completely counter to the solemn undertaking that Pres. Trump had agreed to regarding Lebanon, in the June 18 MOU with Iran…

Our latest PalCast episode: “If You Cannot Say Genocide”

In yet another great episode of Palcast, co-hosts Yousef and Tony had as their guest Arab American poet and essayist Yahia Lababidi, a writer of Palestinian descent whose work has explored questions of conscience, justice, and witness.

In this convo, Lababidi reflected on his forthcoming book, If You Cannot Say Genocide, and discussed why naming Israel’s genocide in Gaza matters.

Lababidi explained that the title of his book came from a poem he wrote more than two years ago, challenging readers to confront the reality of genocide instead of avoiding the word. He described poetry as a form of “spiritual journalism” that reaches beyond facts to remind people of their shared humanity. Drawing on the work of writers such as Mahmoud Darwish and Refaat Alareer, he argued that poetry helped make distant suffering immediate and personal while appealing to the conscience of the reader.

The conversation also explored changing attitudes toward Palestine in the United States. Along the way, Lababidi reflected on censorship within the American publishing and cultural sectors, recounting how his earlier book Palestine Wail was dropped by its original publisher out of fear of backlash.

Now that I’m no longer a book publisher (sigh), I’m delighted that other publishers are taking up the work of foregrounding voices such as Lababidi’s! If You Cannot Say Genocide is now available for pre-order, but won’t be shipping until October.

In the meantime, hurry to your favorite podcast-listenting app and listen to this full conversation! Here, at Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Rami Khouri’s updates

Our valued JWE board member Rami Khouri has been doing some great work in the international media, as always. These two recent offerings were of particular note:

• This July 7 interview with Al-Jazeera, in which he assessed French res. Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Damascus in light of more than a century of French interference in the affairs of Syria… He concluded thus: “Macron’s visit should be… welcomed only if he explicitly rejects his countrymen’s old colonial ways, apologizes for the mess his country helped create in the region, and commits firmly to equal justice and self-determination for all across the entire region, starting in Palestine.”

• This July 9 interview with TRT (Istanbul). In this one, he surveyed the fast-moving confrontatrions between the U.S. and Iran over Hormuz, and concluded: “This combination of forces for and against the war suggests we will see a few more strikes by both sides, then the Omani, Pakistani, and Qatari mediators working overtime behind the scenes will step on the gas and find a ceasefire formula that is more precise and enforceable than the one now in tatters. Severe American pressure on Israel to stop attacking Lebanon must be part of this formula, so we must watch that front also.”

I am so honored to serve with smart committed people like Rami Khouri, Nora Barrows-Friedman, and all the other members of Just World Ed’s board! I think that over the ten-plus years of JWE’s existence we’ve produced some truly distinctive and valuable information resources for the inquiring public. You can gain access to all of our amazing multimedia resources via our website, especially at the Resources tab at the top there:

… But we can only do this thanks to the help and commitment of our donors. Perhaps you are one? If so, our big thanks!

But whether you’ve given recently or not, we definitely always much need— and appreciate— your continuing support. Learn how to send a one-time or a continuing donation by clicking on this button:

Give to JWE!

You stay well! Thanks for everything you’re doing to help build the more just and peaceful world that all the world’s peoples deserve—

~ Helena

Today and the days ahead will see the following commemorations:

• Palestinians everywhere today mark the first 1,000 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza... For their part, most Jewish Israelis are much more tightly focused on the extreme shock and losses their (colonial) community suffered on October 7, 2023, while nearly all of them still strongly support the Israeli military’s abusive actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

• Iran will soon launch a (necessarily delayed) multi-day commemoration of the lives of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i and the scores of officials and family members whom the Israelis killed along with him in that fateful, fully U.S.-supported strike at the overture of the destructive, illegal war that followed.

• Here in the blistering heat of Washington DC, Pres. Trump will preside over ostentatious displays of power on the 250th anniversary of the “Declaration of Independence” with which the settler extremists here on this landmass broke their ties with their British progenitor. back in 1776.

These three nearly concurrent commemorations delineate the key poles of the historical hinge-point the whole of humankind is today traversing. Crucially, right now, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Pres. Trump’s America are engaged in complex and potentially catastrophic arm-wrestling over how the results of their hard-fought— and still simmering— war are get translated into more stable facts on the ground.

(And as we know, in many ways the contest between Tehran and Washington DC is mirrored in, and closely tied to, the contest between Israel and all the Indigenous peoples who are its neighbors.)

The “big” Iran-U.S. diplomatic contest has been pursued, most recently, through the proximity talks that the two sides held yesterday in Doha, Qatar, mediated by Qatar and Pakistan. Here’s how Qatar’s Al-Jazeera summarized the outcome of those talks yesterday:

… In the newsletter I sent out last Saturday, I started to outline the impact of having these two mid-size powers, Pakistan and Qatar, now being the mediators in this crucial diplomatic effort. Their efforts, which are backed by China and numerous other powers around the world, are very different from the endless stream of U.S.-dominated “negotiations” that West Asia has witnessed over the past half-century. But as we have seen in the diplomacy over Lebanon, there is still a significant body of people here in Washington who want to see the “U.S. hegemonic” model of mediation to continue to be the norm, undented by the emerging, MOU-derived “Midsize Powers” model…

I’m sending this week’s newsletter today, before I take a short break over what is, here, in the United States, a long “holiday” weekend.

Here’s what you can read about in today’s edition:

1. The essay I wrote yesterday on That Settler-Extremist Rebellion of 1776

2. TWO new releases from PalCast on the Gaza situation

3. Quick observations on the situation in Hormuz and the Gulf

4. Updates on U.S. national politics, and

5. Two takes from Haaretz on October 7, Netanyahu’s priorities and the long war

Subscribe now

The essay I wrote yesterday on “That Settler-Extremist Rebellion of 1776”

I published this essay yesterday, on my personal Substack. I wastrying to exploret the similarities and differences between the settler-extremist rebellion that George Washington and his co-conspirators unleashed against London in 1776 and the ones the followers of Zionism have periodically undertaken against their project’s sponsoring bodies— mainly London, and the UN— ever since the 1930s.

Along the way I also looked at two rebellions that settler-colonial extremists launched against their respective metropoles in modern times that notably failed. Those were: Ian Smith’s “UDI” project in Zimbabwe in the 1960s, and the actions that the settler-extremist “OAS” conspirators took against the Algerian independence movement and also against Pres. Charles De Gaulle, a little earlier in that decade.

If you’re interested, do look at, comment on, and share that essay!

…As an added bonus, you can now also download the text of another essay I wrote back in 2022. That one tracked the heavy involvement of, in particular, Quakers based around the Chesapeake Bay watershed— members of what Quakers call the “Baltimore Yearly Meeting”— in pursuing, and often spearheading, the Anglo settler-colonial project on this landmass.

TWO new releases on the Gaza situation, from PalCast

I’m delighted to report that our great PalCast co-hosts Yousef and Tony have now released another audio episode and another video episode in our ongoing PalCast podcast series, which for 32 months has foregrounded the voices of Gaza Palestinians.

Their guest in the audio episode was Palestinian writer Sondos Sabra, one of the co-authors of the recently released book Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide.

(That link above goes to the version of the book released in the UK last year. If you want to buy it in the US, you can do so here.)

During the PalCast discussion, Sondos recounted the loss of several members of her family, including five young nieces and nephews, and described the lasting trauma these events left behind. She spoke about the repeated periods of starvation she survived in northern Gaza and how that hunger changed the way she viewed the world and the international community…

The conversation then followed Sondos’s evacuation from Gaza and her journey to Lancaster University, where she continues to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. She explained that, despite living in the UK, her thoughts remain with Gaza, where her family and countless others continue to face displacement, violence, disease, and the consequences of Israel’s stifling restrictions on vitally needed aid supplies.

Listen to her powerful episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

… And a new video episode…

The new video episode was one that Yousef and Tony recorded recently with Dr. Belal Alakhras, a Gaza-Palestinian political scientist now resident in Malaysia. This episode was titled “Gaza Has Shown The World The Truth – Iran and Lebanon is Just a Continuation” and featured Dr. Belal and the co-hosts holding a wide-ranging discussion on Gaza, regional geopolitics, and the continuing impact of the genocide.

The three men explored the resilience of Gaza’s people in the face of devastation. Dr. Belal spoke about how the faith and perseverance shown by Palestinians, including children living through the genocide, continue to inspire those watching from outside and reflected on some struggles of the large number of Gaza Palestinians (like Yousef and himself) who’ve been forced to live abroad and to watch the agony of their family members from afar.

Turning to the wider regional picture, Dr. Alakhras also explored how the genocide in Gaza has fundamentally shifted the political balance all across the Middle East (West Asia) by exposing Israel’s vulnerabilities and reshaping global perceptions of the conflict.

Tune in and watch (and share) this powerful 48-minute conversation!

Quick observations on the situation in Hormuz and the Gulf

The Persian Gulf has been a hive of diplomatic activity in the past ten days. Just over a week ago, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with counterparts from the 6-member Gulf Cooperation Council in Bahrain (which has acted for several decades as headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.) Then yesterday, as noted above, VP J.D. Vance traveled— along with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner— to Qatar for the proximity talks with Iran.

One big concern, obviously, is the matter of control over shipping in the Hormuz Strait. Another has been the release of the Iranian-owned funds targeted many years ago under the U.S.’s unilateral sanctions regime, many of which have been held in Qatar. Under Paragraph 11 of the June 17 MOU, these funds are to be released in step with implementation of the MOU.

On the Hormuz transit issue, around ten days ago the UN-affiliated International Maritime Organization (IMO) tried, with U.S. backing, to develop a shipping route that would run only through the southern (Omani) side of the Strait. But the Iranians said that arrangement undercut their abilityto ensure the safety of shipping in the very narrow navigable portions of the Strait. Apparently their forces had fired on a Singapore-flagged vessel trying to use the southern route, whereupon the IMO shut it down…

… Anyway, in recent days two things happened:

• On Monday, Iran’s deputy foreign minister traveled to Muscat, Oman, where he held talks on the Hormuz issue. It is not clear yet whether Oman will agree to Iran’s plan to impose “service fees” on ships transiting the Strait— as Turkey does on its straits and as Singapore does on the Molucca Strait. These fees would pay for vital safety measures to be taken by the littoral states. Oman has given mixed signals but seems to be coming down in favor of fees.

• On Wednesday, a container ship trying to use a route not authorized by Iran reportedly ran aground.

Here is one of the most widely posted photos of this incident:

Updates on U.S. national politics

It has often seemed, regarding both the Lebanon issue and the Gulf/Hormuz issue, that Secretary of State Rubio and VP Vance have been pursuing contesting agendas. That has fed into a widespread narrative of the two men being locked in a tough fight to become the Trump’s preferred successor… As captured in this recent New Yorker cover (which has Trump dozing off there in the bottom right…)

Well, I find the art amusing. But I don’t think it really captures what is going on in the extremely important negotiations that should be well underway by now over implementation of all aspects of the June 17 MOU. I don’t think Trump is “asleep” at all as his two underlings duke it out on issues from Lebanon to the Gulf. I think, rather, that he is quite happily/deliberately setting them off against each other, with a number of goals in mind:

• As we know, he loves spectacle.

• He loves the “chaos” aspect of this, which wins him valuable time and keeps the spotlight of speculation firmly on him: Will he end up backing Rubio’s imperialistic bellophilia… or backing Vance’s fairly well-established war-wariness?

• He is probably also eager to keep his Iranian counterparts guessing regarding his real intentions.

But Trump doesn’t have all the time in the world. Hizbullah’s tightly targeted anti-occupation resistance actions continue in Lebanon— as do Israel’s extremely abusive actions. And the global economy desperately needs to see a stable shipping regime become established in Hormuz and the interior of the Persian Gulf.

Once the Iranians complete their large-scale commemorations of the lives of Khamene’i and his fellow victims from February 28, I’m guessing they’ll have a lot more ability to focus on insisting that the U.S. side comply fully and in a timely way with all of its obligations under the MOU…

And here within the U.S. national political scene meanwhile…

In the still-continuing primary-election season here, clearheaded opponents of Israel’s genocide, its military occupations, and its militarism in general have continued to rack up some great additional wins against the staunchly Israel-defending older senior figures in the Democratic Party.

To a large extent, these have been generational struggles— and as we know, members of the younger generations within both parties (but especially the Democrats) have been becoming strongly anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian-rights.

One of the latest pro-Palestinian victories was that registered on Tuesday in a congressional primary in Denver, Colorado, by 29-year-old Ethiopian immigrant Melat Keros.

But the victories keep coming in! They have now acquired considerable momentum— and in some states the primary campaigns will be continuing for several more weeks…

One of the aspects of these victories that I love is that suddenly, even within the Democratic Party, questions about Israel’s role in U.S. politics that people could never discuss in public without being accused of “anti-Semitism” are now not just being openly discussed but are also, in many of these races, front and center in determining how people vote.

A big thank-you to the Democratic Socialists of America and all the other orgs that worked to make these victories possible!

Two quick takes from Haaretz on October 7, Netanyahu’s priorities and the long war

Just before I sign off I want to note two articles that the (left-Zionist) Israeli daily Haaretz published today to mark the 1,000th day of Israel’s still ongoing genocide in Gaza.

In this lead editorial, the paper’s editorial board noted that:

A thousand days have elapsed since the worst disaster in the history of the State of Israel and the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust – a day when all the intelligence and operational systems collapsed and Benjamin Netanyahu's diplomatic doctrine was shattered…

And they added this:

On Wednesday, Nitzan Alon, the former head of the IDF's Hostages and Missing Persons Command, burst [Netanyahu’s] bubble of deceit and openly stated that some of the hostages who were killed in captivity could have been returned alive if different decisions had been made during the war…

Alon said that the war in the Gaza Strip "could have been ended at least a year earlier." He added, "The security cabinet and the political leadership refused entire earlier deals in the name of that same total victory, which is actually a lie."

It is true there was much that the Haaretz editorial did not say about the events of October 7, 2023 and its excruciatingly long aftermath. For one thing, for the people of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, the “war” that Israel launched against them on and soon after that day, has not yet ended, as Alon seemed to claim it had.

The editorial never notes that, and pays no heed to the devastatingly genocidal actions Israel has undertaken and continues to undertake in both Palestine and Lebanon in the past 1,000 days.

But still, it is good they paid due heed to Nitzan Alon’s accusations against Netanyahu.

On another page, Haaretz today published an intriguing piece by Beth Oppenheim of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

She writes,

The events of the past four months involving Israel, the U.S. and Iran recall the Greek myth of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun. When the wax of Icarus' wings melted in the heat, he plunged to his death. In 2026, the U.S.-Israel special relationship is melting, and with it, the entire strategy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

… For Israel, the MoU with Iran is a nightmare. It ends the war without resolving the nuclear issue, which will be negotiated over the course of weeks or possibly months, during which Iran will already receive frozen funds worth billions of dollars, and waivers for its energy exports. The text makes no mention of Iran's missiles or its proxies, two longstanding Israeli demands.

And this:

Meanwhile, the regional balance of power is looking altogether less friendly than Netanyahu envisaged. Ever since October 7, he has pushed his ‘peace through strength’ narrative, hoping that showcasing Israel’s military prowess would make it an attractive partner for neighbours near and far.

Instead, his constant reliance on force, and force alone, has strengthened calls for regional diplomacy and a joint security architecture that excludes Israel.

So that’s another piece of good news there…

But not nearly enough, I think, to counter-balance the tidal waves of really terrible news that’s still coming out of Gaza, Lebanon, and many other places that have been the target of Israeli-U.S. militarism.

… Oh, I guess I need to put my fundraising button in here, as well. If you appreciate and want to support our work, please click on the button to learn how to do that!

Give to Just World Ed!

We deeply appreciate all the great support that people send! And if course, feel free to share this newsletter with your friends

You stay well—

Helena

I hope you’re well?

Before I dive into the main content of this newsletter— regarding both the U.S.-Iran MOU and its impact in Lebanon and elsewhere in West Asia, and the reverberations from last Tuesday’s primary elections in New York City— I want to send solidarity and support to all our friends and colleagues from Venezuela whose communities may have been badly affected by Thursday’s earthquakes.

And I also want to recognize the meticulous work done by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, under its chair Srinavasan Muralidhar. He concluded that, “The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces.” The Commission’s report noted that since October 7, 2023 Israeli forces have killed at least 20,179 children in Gaza, and injured at least 44,143.

Muralidhar noted that, “Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law.”

So now, the Iran-U.S. MOU and its impact…

It is just ten days since Pres. Trump signed the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding with Iran. In Paragraph 1 of the MOU the parties agreed to:

the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and [undertook] from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain [from] the threat or use of force against each other and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.

The U.S. has already violated two key parts of that paragraph. Yesterday, it initiated a series of apparently limited, but still severe, attacks against coastal-defense emplacements along some of Iran’s southern coast. Iran then responded, apparently proportionately. As of the time of my writing this, those skirmishes seem to have been contained.

Regarding Lebanon, Secretary of State Rubio yesterday presided over the signing by the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors of a “framework agreement” under which Israel agreed to withdraw its occupation forces from one small part of the Lebanese land it has been occupying, and not to enter another small portion of land it had been threatening, while the Lebanese government would send Lebanese Army troops to occupy those positions and “clear” them of any presence by the Hizbullah resistance forces.

Haaretz reporters noted that Israeli PM Netanyahu said the agreement allowed the Israeli military to “continue to remain in the vast majority of the ‘buffer zone’ it holds in southern Lebanon, and it would retain ‘operational freedom’ in the area until Hezbollah is disarmed.”

So much for Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty…

Lebanon is a litmus test for whether the Iran-U.S. MOU of June 17/18 can usher in an era of peaceful, rights-respecting cooperation across all of West Asia. It is also a key battleground between two models of diplomacy in the region:

1. The model in use since December of 1973 in which the key mediating/adjudication role was always played by the U.S. Even though all the parties involved in those many negotiations were quite aware that, because of its close entanglement with Israel, Washington would not be in any way a “fair” arbiter they would downplay or ignore that fact because of their own strong desire to win Washington’s favor. That whole series of negotiations— from the Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements of 1974-75, and through to the even more disastrous “Gaza ceasefire” of last October— would increasingly sideline the role of the UN and international law. Finally, the whole Gaza-related “Board of Peace” ploy of last October even succeeded in subordinating the UN Security Council to the whims of Pres. Trump. And—

2. The newer model of regional diplomacy, as embodied in the MOU, in which the key mediating/adjudicating role is played by a coalition of mid-size powers who express clear recognition of the UN’s guiding role. This shift away from a U.S.-dominated diplomacy was clearly needed, since in the ferocious attack on Iran of last February the U.S. was not just a party to the aggression but actually the main party to it. Hence, no credible mediating structure could involve Washington as a “mediator”! The key mediating/adjudicating role for the MOU was initially played by Pakistan, which last week was joined by Qatar. Read the whole statement those two powers issued after the high-level meeting they hosted in Switzerland last weekend, involving American VP J.D. Vance and Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi, here. In pursuing this diplomacy Pakistan’s leaders have also intensively involved their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, and have enjoyed quiet support from China. (See my earlier analyses of those diplomatic steps here, here, and here.)

In Lebanon, proponents of each of those two different models of diplomacy are currently trying to dominate the course of events. Secretary Rubio seems to have chosen (or to have been assigned by Trump?) the job of testing to see whether the “old”, Washington-dominated approach can still work there, with his attainment yesterday of an agreement that works to sideline (or destroy) Hizbullah and its allies.

But in parallel, participants in last week’s Lake Lucerne summit, who included VP Vance, created a new body called a “Deconfliction Cell” that would establish some form of a hotline-style arrangement through which Washington and Tehran could communicate— under the auspices of the Pakistani and Qatari mediators— any concerns they had about possible MOU violations in either the Persian Gulf arena or the Lebanese arena.

(I have seen no reports that this “Deconfliction” arrangement has yet been used in either place.)

Regarding Lebanon, the “old-style, U.S.-dominated” diplomacy clearly seeks to appease/reward Israel and exclude/destroy Hizbullah. For its part, the newer, “Lake Lucerne” approach does not include either of the directly fighting parties— Israel or Hizbullah— within the diplomacy. But it seems clear from the structure of the Deconfliction Cell that under this approach the Iranians would rely on the Americans to ensure compliance by Israel, while the U.S. would rely on Iran to ensure that of Hizbullah.

The Iranians, for their part, have made clear throughout the past ten-plus weeks of diplomacy that they see the survival of Hizbullah and the complete withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon as core Iranian interests, in defense of which they are prepared to forego the comfort of an early ceasefire in their “main” fight against the U.S. aggressors. They also see the successful pursuit of the Lake Lucerne/Deconfliction procedure in Lebanon as a key indicator that can demonstrate Washington’s continuing, broader compliance with the whole MOU process, going forward…

Subscribe now

I know Lebanon’s internal politics is a complex matter that many people find hard to understand. Back in 1985, I wrote this book, which summarized what I’d learnt from the seven years I spent living in and reporting from Beirut, and also from numerous follow-up interviews etc.

I was just re-reading the portion near the end, pp. 193-208, where I tracked what happened to the earlier, U.S.-mediated agreement that, in the aftermath of Israel’s large-scale 1982 invasion of Lebanon, U.S. mediator Phil Habib pressed Lebanese Pres. Amin Gemayyel to conclude with Israel.

Habib nailed that deal, which was a full-scale “peace agreement,” in May 1983. It lasted just ten months before fierce popular pressure inside Lebanon forced Gemayyel to rescind it…

How long might Marco Rubio’s latest “framework agreement” for Lebanon last? Who knows?

And in New York City, meanwhile…

Last weekend I was in New York City, where there was a lot of excitement and activity around the Democratic Party primary elections that were held Tuesday.

It was so exciting to see that three of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s allies won their Congressional primaries— and many of his other allies won primaries in state-level races. Given the strength of the Democratic Party in these districts, it is now almost certain that Mamdani allies Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier will win their seats in Congress this November.

All three of these nominees are unafraid to name Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide.” Two of them challenged— and beat— fairly well-established Democratic Party incumbents who’d been overtly and covertly supported by the heinous pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC. For his part, Brad Lander, who is Jewish, has been outspoken in arguing that the fight against Israel’s warmongering in West Asia and the fight against anti-Semitism at home are two parts of the same struggle.

Over the months ahead, these three, along with the existing anti-genocide figures in Congress and others set also to join them after this year’s elections, will be planning to transform the whole of the Democratic Party, which for so long has been a bastion of pro-Israel activity…

We have many other battles to fight here in the United States, too. The Trump administration is continuing its attacks against whole new classes of immigrants, and is cutting back even further on support for health-care insurance and affordable housing. The Supreme Court has been issuing ever more hostile, anti-immigrant rulings. And it’s just eight days until July 4, when Trump plans to preside over a loud and very (small-p) prideful celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of this big colonial-settler state here in America.

The USA at 250, and Just World Ed’s plans…

Personally, if I have one wish or intention regarding this anniversary it is that going forward we can build an America here that is strongly supportive of the most disadvantaged among us; that is generous to the country’s many Indigenous nations; that is fair and welcoming to refugees fleeing violence elsewhere; that supports the environment of this great landmass and the world; that eschews ostentation and seeks to spread the nation’s wealth fairly— and above all, one that enthusiastically participates in the building of a world based on peaceful , rights-based cooperation among all the world’s nations, rather than on militarism, coercion, and violence.

The unprovoked assaults that our government launched against Iran in June last year and then again, much more damagingly, last February were both completely illegal. They should put a decisive end to any notion that the United States should be viewed as a “leader” of the modern world, far less entrusted with the leadership of any diplomatic effort within it.

All of us who want to build a more just and rights-based world owe a debt of thanks to the leaders in Iran whose foresight, planning, and dedication allowed them not just to withstand the U.S.-Israeli assault of last February but also to emerge from the initial months of that battle with a significant (though not complete) victory over the aggressing nations.

As president of Just World Educational, I felt deeply privileged to conduct the whole series of conversations— from February 25 through June 5— that have made up our “Iran Crisis” project thus far. You can access the multimedia records of all those great conversations here.

Right now, my board colleagues and I are trying to decide whether to compile the records of that project into a small publication— as we did earlier with our 2022 project on Ukraine, and our 2024 project on “Understanding Hamas”— or whether to place more focus to returning to the ever-crucial issue of Gaza.

Whatever we decide to do, it will of course take resources! Our big thanks to all those of you who have given recently— and even more so, to those of you who make regular monthly donations! If you haven’t given recently, or if you’d like to increase your level of monthly giving, you can learn how to do all this, easily, by clicking the button below:

Give to JWE!

The MOU and Gaza…

Finally, talking of Gaza, I want to add one last thought to what I wrote above about the prospect that the new “MOU-style” model of middle-power-led diplomacy can now, after the defeat of Washington’s regime-toppling project in Iran, finally win out over model of “U.S-dominated” diplomacy that has been pursued in West Asia for the past 53 years.

One clear lesson in this is that “soft power”, including the power that accrues to the convenor of a negotiation, is also real power. The fact that Washington has been able to dominate diplomatic processes across West Asia for so many decades has itself been a component of American power all across this vital region, and has therefore added to its power in world politics.

Iran’s (relative) victory in the war thus far has challenged this hegemony.

The Iranians have stated that their intention is to challenge the whole, corrupt “Board of Peace” institution in Gaza. For their part, the leaders of Hamas and other resistance groups in Gaza have expressed their support for the Iran-U.S. MOU of June 17/18, and their hope that the new regional balance of power that it represents can soon be felt in Gaza and the rest of Palestine, as well. So there’s a lot more that JWE can hope to explore and discuss in that regard, as well…

That’s it for this week, then. I hope you stay well!

~ Helena