SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
middle east
Israel Is Out of Control—And No, It's Not Just Netanyahu
Netanyahu's defeat or exit won’t mean “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It’s an entire Israeli political culture that has gone off the rails.
Jun 22, 2026
When looking at today’s Middle East, it is important to recognize that Israel is completely out of control, and no one has the will to rein them in.
This should have been understood back in July of 2024, in the waning days of the Biden administration, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington to address a joint session of Congress. His government had already committed atrocious war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon. They had killed Iran’s Ayatollah and many of its political and scientific leadership. They had also occupied parts of Syria, destroyed much of that country’s military capacity, and were working to deepen Syria’s sectarian strife. At the same time, Israeli violent settlers, backed by the military, were running roughshod over the West Bank terrorizing Palestinians and systematically demolishing the homes of thousands.
In his address to the Congress, Netanyahu boasted that this murderous behavior demonstrated that Israel had become the dominant force in the Middle East fighting and winning on seven fronts. You are not defending us, he claimed, we are defending you—terming his bloody rampage across the region as Israel leading the effort to protect Western civilization against the barbarism of the East.
As inflammatory and disgraceful as his words (and the actions they described) were, he was applauded by Republicans and some Democrats, with only a handful of Democratic members of Congress vigorously protesting. For its part, the Biden administration left it to Vice President Harris to deliver a mild rebuke to Netanyahu.
During the past five US administrations, it has been precisely this pattern of behavior—whether outright support for Israeli crimes or silence and timidity in the face of them—that has fostered Israel’s impunity, coupled with a megalomaniacal sense of mission. President Clinton termed Netanyahu impossible or ridiculous; Obama considered him “incorrigible”; and even Trump has described his frustration with the Israeli leader in harsh, obscene language. But none have taken firm steps to rein him in.
In the wake of President Trump’s half-baked “deal” attempting to end his ill-considered, costly war with Iran, Netanyahu has been quiet. He has left criticism to ministers in his cabinet and opposition party leaders. Vice-President JD Vance’s rebuke of Israeli critics was noteworthy but absent threats of serious changes in policy Vance’s words will be dismissed as nothing more than words.
At this point it must be noted that Israel’s dangerous impunity and expansive sense of mission is not just a Netanyahu problem. It is a deeper Israeli problem that historically has manifested itself in two ways.
During the Clinton and Obama years, when the US wanted the Israelis to stop settlement expansion or honor terms of agreements that were being broken, their administrations hesitated to take tough measures against Israel, or even use tougher language, for fear that it would embolden Israel’s hardline right and end up being counterproductive. As a result, there were no crackdowns on Israeli governments led by Yitzak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Naftali Bennet.
This deference toward Israeli leaders, out of concern for the problems they would face from hardliners should we force them to make hard decisions, is never shown toward Palestinian or other Arab leaders. The result of this coddling has been the emboldening and empowerment of Israeli hardliners to the point where they and their espoused views are the dominant political current in today’s Israeli politics. This is not to say that there aren’t “liberals” contesting Netanyahu’s coalition government. But their liberalism is defined by their opposition to Netanyahu’s corruption, his authoritarian instinct, and his courting of the ultraorthodox and the religious policies they impose on the rest of Israeli society.
The opposition parties that will be contesting Netanyahu in the next election are not only not challenging his war policies, but also now posing as more hawkish than he is with regard to Israel’s wars and its treatment of Palestinians. In fact, all of the main contenders to head a post-Netanyahu Israeli government have roundly condemned his agreement to ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon. They have uniformly denounced what they’ve called his displays of subservience to US President Trump thereby making Israel appear to be a humiliated “vassal state.” All have criticized the recently announced US-Iran peace agreement, with the self-described “liberal” Democrat party blasting the deal by suggesting that it threatens to “erase all of the gains Israel had achieved” in their war on Iran.
All of this should make it clear to liberals in the US that the problem in today’s Middle East isn’t just Netanyahu. His defeat won’t mean “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It’s an entire political culture that has gone off the rails. The only way it will change is if we make Israel pay a price by ending aid and political and military cooperation, thereby creating a shock that will force a political reckoning in the country. On the other hand, if we don’t act, Israel’s out-of-control rogue behaviors will continue to set the Middle East on fire and we will be complicit in all that they do.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Art of the Recycled Deal: Trump and the Outcome Israel Cannot Tolerate
110 days of a war that went nowhere to get here. And for what?
Jun 18, 2026
There are many lessons to be learned from the lates made-for-Israel war on Iran. The first and most damning is that the war resolved the very crisis it created. Donald Trump celebrated the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the blockade against Iran. Two conditions that were fully in place before Benjamin Netanyahu dog walked Trump into this war. The agreement that concluded the war took us back to exactly where we stood before America spent $200 billion, and where Americans continue to pay Israeli surcharge tax at the pump and grocery stores.
As for Iran's nuclear program, the arithmetic does not lie. The 400 kilograms of 60-percent enriched uranium that Iran possessed were zero before Trump — pressured by his largest Israel-first donors — tore up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran had fully complied not only with the IAEA non-proliferation agreement, which Israel has never signed nor accepted, but with the additional protocols governing verification and monitoring of its civilian nuclear program. Trump canceled the deal anyway, not because it failed America, but because it did not satisfy Israel’s veto.
The deepest irony is that Iran's nuclear knowledge and capabilities are more advanced today than when Trump discarded the JCPOA. Any new agreement—even one stricter in structure than the original—is therefore being negotiated from a fundamentally weaker position than the one that existed in 2018. No treaty can unlearn what Iran already knows.
On Monday, June 15, Trump heralded the end of war bragging that Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. Item 8 of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed Wednesday, states: “The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.” The word reaffirms is not incidental. It is a direct reference to Article III of the 2015 JCPOA, which Trump most likely never read, where Iran had already affirmed: “… that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” Same commitment. Same language. Different signatures. Twelve weeks of a war that went nowhere to get here.
From “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” to celebrate an MoU to reopen a Strait that was open before $200 billion and countless American and Iranian lives were squandered. Trump's triumph is much ado about nothing. He canceled an existing deal that took years to negotiate, inflicted economic hardship on ordinary Iranians, and allowed Iran's nuclear advancement to leap forward. It is, in the most literal sense, like redefining water as H2O. The molecule did not change. Only the dressing did. Israel’s war took Trump back to the starting point, at twice the cost to American taxpayers.
The same special-interest group that pushed Trump to cancel the JCPOA, lobbied him long before the 2024 election. Israel-first donors poured hundreds of million into his campaign as a down payment for this war. Netanyahu visited Trump seven times in 13 months, manipulating, and scheming for another made-for-Israel war.
This war should also carry a lesson for the Arab Gulf states that long believed American military bases were a guarantee of their security. Instead, they found themselves sidelined and never consulted on a war waged, directly or indirectly, from their own soil, ultimately in service of an Israeli agenda. Foreign military presence does not deliver security. It delivers dependency. Lasting regional stability is built through regional cooperation, on terms beneficial to the region.
Foreign military presence does not deliver security. It delivers dependency.
More importantly, the region must now reckon with a pattern it can no longer afford to ignore: wherever Israel goes, instability follows. The so-called Abraham Accords brought Israel into the Gulf. What followed was bombs, drones and economic ruin not seen since the Second World War. I have lived in the Gulf. The only pop people could hear was the backfire of an aging car exhaust. In the last three months, friends shared recordings of ballistic missiles splitting the sky and drones buzzing overhead. Israel did not bring a defense shield; it brought a target. Its presence is a magnet for unrest. It is a carcass attracting wasps.
In fact, Israel is an agent of disorder and a parasite nurtured by chaos. It wraps itself in the language of partnership, mutual benefit, and shared values, deceiving others into believing the arrangement is reciprocal when it is entirely one-directional.
Israel record speaks for itself: a genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing across the West Bank, 1.3 million internal refugees in Lebanon, the occupation of Syrian land following Assad's fall, destabilization operations in northern Iraq and Sudan.
In Iraq, the American invasion and regime change did not satisfy Israel’s insatiable lust for total chaos. It targeted Iraqi scientists and waged war against knowledge itself. The blueprint, in this view, has not changed for Iran. Israel’s dissatisfaction over the MoU with Tehran is not that it fails to produce a non-nuclear Iran, but that it fails to wipe out knowledge. Its broader objective is the suppression of scientific and technological development across the region. Israel seeks neighbors unable to think independently. it wants consumers, not producers. It wants importers rather than innovators. It wants to maintain a monopoly over nuclear capabilities and control over regional scientific advancement.
Israel brought ruins to the US, too. The made-for-Israel Iraq war helped detonate the financial crisis of 2008, saddling future American generations with trillions in accumulated debt that has never been fully reckoned with. A war that Trump condemned, criticizing Democratic leadership for failing to impeach George W. Bush who “got us into the war with lies.”
The cost of Trump's made-for-Israel war on Iran requires no economist to explain. It arrives uninvited in every American home, at the meat counter, in every grocery bill, every gas receipt, every price that keeps rising without explanation. They may not realize its extent—not yet anyway. By the time they do, the damage to the US economy, as in 2008, will be too deep to reverse.
To undermine potential peace with Iran, the ungrateful Israel-first loyalists like Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin are already panicking and challenging Trump’s MoU. Israel will activate the constellation of media outlets controlled by Israel-first billionaires to shape what Americans see, read, and are permitted to question. The once-respected "60 Minutes," under a new Israel-first boss, Bari Weiss, allows Netanyahu to handpick his own interviewer. Who knows, maybe he submits his own questions, too.
Now, Netanyahu and American Zionists have 60 days to sabotage a final deal with Iran. Israel will mobilize its donors, lobby Congress, and if that fails, resort to what it has perfected. A false flag operation against American forces in the region, or another assassination in Lebanon. A conflagration ensues, and once again, it will be fought with American money and American lives. Because a Middle East free of American military entanglement is the one outcome Israel cannot tolerate—a prospect more threatening than any Iranian nuclear centrifuge.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Embrace the US-Iran MOU, But Understand It's Only a First Step
What exactly has been agreed on? Much less than meets the eye.
Jun 15, 2026
Early Monday morning Islamabad time, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced that “Following intensive talks, we are pleased to announce that the Peace Deal between the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED. Both sides have declared the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon. The official signing ceremony will be on Friday, 19 June in Switzerland.” Pakistan and Qatar had been the lead negotiators, though Qatar’s negotiating team appears to have sealed the deal Sunday with a marathon 14-hour session.
The White House concurred. US President Donald Trump posted that the deal with Iran is “complete” and that he would immediately lift the US blockade on the Strait of Hormuz and is announcing its “toll-free” opening. “Let the oil flow,” he said.
Al Jazeera reports that Iran’s National Security Council announced the end of all military actions, including in Lebanon.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted on an International Criminal Court indictment for war crimes, attempted to derail Sunday’s negotiations by bombing Beirut, an Iranian red line, but this petulant display failed in its purpose. Trump called Netanyahu “a very difficult guy” and insisted that he should be “very thankful” for the deal. Israel was not involved in the negotiations although it began the war in partnership with the US Having lost to Tehran, Netanyahu has been marginalized and is clearly increasingly seen as a problem by Trump and MAGA.
Tasnim, the pro-government news agency, reported that Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi confirmed that the text of the MOU had been finalized, that there has been an immediate end to military actions, and that it will be signed in Switzerland on Friday. Over the next sixty days, he said, issues will be negotiated in the lifting of US sanctions on Iran and the disposition of Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program and its existing stockpile of High Enriched Uranium, which the US and others fear could be enriched to weapons grade.
What exactly has been agreed on? Much less than meets the eye. It is a “Memorandum of Understanding,” not a detailed peace treaty of the sort the Obama administration negotiated in 2015. It is simply an agreement to stop fighting while further negotiations continue.
Although the US says that the Strait is open “toll-free,” the Iranians have changed their terminology and are speaking of collecting an “administrative fee.”
Sharif’s breathless announcement was the first sign of a breakthrough, though the leadership of Israel’s extremist far right government continues to insist that it will occupy and attack Lebanon at will, defying President Trump. Lebanon is one of the Iranian government’s “red lines,” and Tehran’s inclusion of it in the ceasefire is an attempt to project Iranian influence so as to counter Israeli expansion into south Lebanon.
Lebanon is a small country of 4 million people, about a third of them Shia Muslims, the same branch of Islam that predominates in Iran. Those Lebanese Shia live in the south of the country abutting Israel and were brutalized by repeated Israel invasions and attempts at occupation. Their chief paramilitary power is Hezbollah, which subjected northern Israel to repeated rocket barrages in response to the Israeli genocide against Gaza. Israeli politicians have expressed a desire to ethnically cleanse the Shia from the south, and have been destroying entire towns and villages and attempting to depopulate Tyre, the ancient major city of the south. The Israelis have also been bombing the disproportionately Shia Beirut district of Dahieh, killing and wounding civilians. Iran insists that this bombing cease as part of the agreement with Trump.
Netanyahu’s land-grab of fully 1/5 of Lebanese territory and his attempt to do to south Lebanon and parts of Beirut what he did to Gaza remains a wild card in US-Iran relations.
The MOU is good news, but it is only a first step.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular