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Stop Netanyahu Before He Gets Us All Killed
We could soon see several nuclear powers pitted against each other and dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation.
Jun 16, 2025
For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has driven the Middle East into war and destruction. The man is a powder keg of violence. Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian Government. His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon, unless Netanyahu is stopped.
Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence–wars, assassinations, terror–is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.
The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine. At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted roughly 87% of the population and owned ten times more land than the Jewish population. As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The now infamous chant, “from the River to the Sea,” which is characterized as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud.
Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy. We are witnessing the culmination of decades of extremist Zionist manipulation of US foreign policy.
The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.
In 1996, Netanyahu and his American advisors devised a “Clean Break” strategy. They advocated that Israel would not withdraw from the Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war in exchange for regional peace. Instead, Israel would reshape the Middle East to its liking. Crucially, the strategy envisioned the US as the main force to achieve these aims—waging wars in the region to dismantle governments opposed to Israel’s dominance over Palestine. The US was called upon to fight wars on Israel’s behalf.
The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11. As NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark revealed, soon after 9/11, the US planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”
The first of the wars, in early 2003, was to topple the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the US became mired in Iraq. Still, the US supported Sudan’s split in 2005, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched CIA operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, with the UK and France, overthrew Libya’s government through a 2011 bombing campaign. Today, these countries lie in ruins, and many are now embroiled in civil wars.
Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the U.S. Government including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and others.
Testifying in the U.S. Congress in 2002, Netanyahu pitched for the disastrous war in Iraq, declaring “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” He continued, “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.” He also falsely told Congress, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons.”
The slogan to remake a “New Middle East” provides the slogan for these wars. Initially stated in 1996 through “Clean Break,” it was popularized by Secretary Condoleezza Rice in 2006. As Israel was brutally bombarding Lebanon, Rice stated:
“What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.”
In September 2023, Netanyahu presented at UN General Assembly a map of the “New Middle East” completely erasing a Palestinian state. In September 2024, he elaborated on this plan by showing two maps: one part of the Middle East a “blessing,” and the other–including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran–a curse, as he advocated regime change in the latter countries.
Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy. We are witnessing the culmination of decades of extremist Zionist manipulation of US foreign policy.
The premise of Israel’s attack on Iran is the claim that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Such a claim is fatuous since Iran has repeatedly called for negotiations precisely to remove the nuclear option in return for an end to the decades of US sanctions.
Since 1992, Netanyahu and his supporters have claimed that Iran will become a nuclear power “in a few years." In 1995, Israeli officials and their US backers declared a 5-year timeline. In 2003, Israel’s Director of Military Intelligence said that Iran will be a nuclear power “by the summer of 2004.” In 2005, the head of Mossad said that Iran could build the bomb in less than 3 years. In 2012, Netanyahu claimed at the United Nations that “it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.” And on and on.
This 30-year-plus pattern of shifting deadlines has marked a deliberate strategy, not a failure in prophecy. The claims are propaganda; there is always an “existential threat.” More importantly, there is Netanyahu’s phony claim that negotiations with Iran are useless.
Iran has repeatedly said that it does not want a nuclear weapon and that it has long been prepared to negotiate. In October 2003, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production and use of nuclear arms—a ruling later officially cited by Iran at an IAEA meeting in Vienna in August 2005 and referenced since as a religious and legal barrier to pursuing nuclear weapons.
Even for those skeptical of Iran’s intentions, Iran has consistently advocated for a negotiated agreement supported by independent international verification. In contrast, the Zionist lobby has opposed any such settlements, urging the US to maintain sanctions and reject deals that would allow strict IAEA monitoring in exchange for lifting sanctions.
In 2016, the Obama Administration, together with the UK, France, Germany, China, and Russia, reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran—a landmark agreement to strictly monitor Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Yet, under relentless pressure from Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby, President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Predictably, when Iran responded by expanding its uranium enrichment, it was blamed for violating an agreement that the US itself had abandoned. The double-standard and propaganda is hard to miss.
On April 11, 2021, Israel’s Mossad attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. Following the attack, on April 16, Iran announced that it would increase its uranium enrichment further, as bargaining leverage, while repeatedly appealing for renewed negotiations on a deal like the JCPOA. The Biden Administration rejected all such negotiations.
At the start of his second term, Trump agreed to open a new negotiation with Iran. Iran pledged to renounce nuclear arms and to be subject to IAEA inspections but reserved the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. The Trump Administration appeared to agree to this point but then reversed itself. Since then, there have been five rounds of negotiations, with both sides reporting progress on each occasion.
The sixth round was ostensibly to take place on Sunday, June 15. Instead, Israel launched a preemptive war on Iran on June 12. Trump confirmed that the US knew of the attack in advance, even as the administration was speaking publicly of the upcoming negotiations.
Israel’s attack was made not only in the midst of negotiations that were making progress, but days before a scheduled UN Conference on Palestine that would have advanced the cause of the two-state solution. That conference has now been postponed.
Israel’s attack on Iran now threatens to escalate to a full-fledged war that draws in the US and Europe on the side of Israel and Russia and perhaps Pakistan on the side of Iran. We could soon see several nuclear powers pitted against each other and dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation. The Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to nuclear Armageddon since the clock was launched in 1947.
Over the past 30 years, Netanyahu and his US backers have destroyed or destabilized a 4,000-km swath of countries stretching across North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Western Asia. Their aim has been to block a Palestinian State by overthrowing governments supporting the Palestinian cause. The world deserves better than this extremism. More than 170 countries in the UN have called for the two-state solution and regional stability. That makes more sense than Israel bringing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon in pursuit of its illegal and extremist aims.
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Israel's Pager Bombings Are Blatant Effort to Stoke Regional War
The only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the end of the occupation and apartheid and the establishment of a truly democratic state for both the Palestinians and Jews.
Sep 20, 2024
Israel’s massive cyber-attack on Lebanon on 17 and 18 September, with the near-simultaneous explosion of 3,000-4,000 pagers and walkie-talkies, has killed a few dozen Hezbollah members and many civilians, including some children and health workers, has blinded and maimed hundreds of people and wounded many thousands. Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in a long speech on 19 September, frankly admitted that the attacks had delivered a severe and unprecedented blow to the radical movement, but he said that the movement would recover from it.
From an intelligence and technical point of view, the booby-trapping of the pagers was a sophisticated espionage operation carried out by the Israeli Mossad. There is an international trail in this complex operation and, so far, even the company that produced those pagers and those who manipulated them have not been identified. In view of the impact of this extensive form of cyber terrorism on the current Israeli war and its repercussions in the region and beyond and what it means for cyber security in the future, this incident must be properly investigated to see which firms and which countries were involved in this heinous act.
Many international legal experts and academics have stressed the illegal nature of such indiscriminate action and have described it as another Israeli war crime. Luigi Daniele, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and an expert in international humanitarian law, says that these acts constitute at least two war crimes. “The first is intentionally directing attacks against individual civilians not taking a direct part in the hostilities, for all the unlawful targets, so basically, diplomats or merely political affiliates of Hezbollah with no combat function.” The second is “intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated.”
Yet, some pro-Israeli commentators have bizarrely praised it as an example of Israel’s technical expertise and its intelligence dominance of the region. Writing in Haaretz, Yossi Melman called it a “genius move” and praised it as “a brilliant and innovative operation, showing that for imaginative spy craft planners the sky is really the limit.” However, he criticises its “early implementation”, rather than waiting for the start of a war on Hezbollah. Axios cited a former Israeli official who said Israeli intelligence services had originally planned to use the modified pagers as a “surprise opening blow in an all-out war to try to cripple Hezbollah”, but three U.S. officials told Axios that they used them prematurely because they believed that their secret might have been discovered by the group.
Although so far, the United States has supported Israel at great cost to its reputation and its relations with Middle Eastern and Muslim countries as a whole, there are indications that most Americans, including young Jewish Americans have turned against Israel’s far-right government.
Clearly, the massive pager attack on Lebanon was meant to coincide with the start of a major Israeli invasion of Lebanon and it might still lead to a regional war. Israeli aircraft have already started bombing parts of Lebanon. Even from before the 7th October attack, Netanyahu spoke about a new Middle East. In a speech at the UN General Assembly in New York, Netanyahu showed a map of Israel which had incorporated both Gaza and the West Bank.
Speaking two days after the Hamas attack on Israel, Netanyahu vowed to change the Middle East: “What Hamas will experience will be difficult and terrible … we are going to change the Middle East.” The day after the Hamas attack, Israeli forces shelled Lebanon, killing three Hezbollah members, to which Hezbollah responded by firing a salvo of rockets into northern Israel, marking a significant expansion of the conflict. These border attacks have continued ever since, displacing some 60,000 Israelis from their homes in Northern Israel and a larger number of Lebanese from southern Lebanon.
Israel’s technical prowess and the expansion of the war to Lebanon may be a sign of Israel’s military superiority, but in the long-run they may prove to be counter-productive and even foolish. Praising them is similar to praising Hitler’s aggressive wars as signs of German military strength. The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the beginning of World War II with dire consequences for Europe, for the world, and especially for Germany. Yet, from a military point of view, it was a great achievement. It started with the Gleiwitz incident, which was a false flag attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz (then Germany and now Gliwice, Poland) staged by Nazi Germany as a casus belli for the invasion of Poland.
One of the aims of the invasion was to divide Polish territory at the end of the operation and seize large parts of it, something that the Israelis have done before in the case of Lebanon. The 1978 South Lebanon conflict (codenamed Operation Litani) began when Israeli forces invaded southern Lebanon up to the Litani River in March 1978. The conflict resulted in the deaths of as many as 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, and 20 Israelis, and the internal displacement of nearly 250,000 people in Lebanon. In response to the Israeli invasion, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolutions 425 and 426, calling on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, which eventually she was forced to do.
Again, on 6 June 1982, Israeli forces under the command of Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon on the false excuse of the attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat in London by the PLO, despite the fact that the perpetrators belonged to Abu Nidal Organisation, which was an enemy of the PLO. Israel’s objectives were to expel the PLO members who had fled to Lebanon following the Nakba, and install a pro-Israeli Christian government led by President Bachir Gemayel.
Israeli forces carried out massive bombardment of Beirut and Sidon, killing between 20,000 and 30,000 people and displacing hundreds of thousands of the Lebanese. Those savage attacks ended with the Sabra and Shatila Massacre when between 16–18 September 1982 several thousand unarmed Palestinians were massacred by Israeli-backed right-wing Lebanese militias, while Israeli forces provided lighting for the massacre. In February 1983, an independent commission chaired by Irish diplomat Sean MacBride, assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, concluded that the IDF, as the then occupying power over Sabra and Shatila, bore the main responsibility for the militia’s massacre.
The Shi’is who formed the majority in the south bore the brunt of Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. This is how Hezbollah was born to force the Israeli forces to leave Lebanon, which they eventually achieved in the year 2000. The Israelis have a habit of describing all those who rise against their occupation as terrorists, whether the PLO and later the Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas which came to power in Gaza as the result of a democratic election, encouraged by President Bush mainly in order to weaken the PLO.
If Israeli forces are foolish enough to invade Lebanon again and try to occupy a part of it near their border they will face the same outcome. Despite massive and unquestioning US support, the Israelis constitute a tiny minority in the Middle East. The genocide in Gaza has alienated and infuriated many people, even many of Israel’s former friends. Far from achieving an Israeli-Arab front against Iran, many Arab countries that Netanyahu counted on, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have established relations with Iran. Egyptian and Iranian leaders have spoken of the possibility of renewing diplomatic relations. Turkey which has friendly relations with Iran has turned against Israel and has called Netanyahu’s government a terrorist regime.
Although so far, the United States has supported Israel at great cost to its reputation and its relations with Middle Eastern and Muslim countries as a whole, there are indications that most Americans, including young Jewish Americans have turned against Israel’s far-right government.
Netanyahu has not concealed his ultimate desire to expand the scope of the war and get the United States involved in a war against Iran. Such a war will not be in the interest of the region and the United States. Even if Israel manages to crush Hezbollah and weaken Iran, he will not be able to get rid of some seven million Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel. In this day and age, the world will not allow another massive genocide and ethnic cleansing similar to the one Israel carried out in 1948. The only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the end of the occupation and apartheid and the establishment of a truly democratic state for both the Palestinians and Jews.
The world’s highest judicial authority, the International Court of Justice, has described Israel’s massacres in Gaza as “plausible genocide”, and had ordered Israel to stop the war. It has also clearly declared the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as illegal and had ordered Israel to end the occupation as soon as possible. On 18th September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding that Israel “brings to an end without delay its unlawful presence” in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The voting result was as follows: In favour: 124, Against: 14, Abstain: 43. This shows that the international community as a whole regards Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories as illegal and views its system as an apartheid regime. Israel should stop digging and should abide by international law.
As was done in the case of the apartheid South Africa, the international community must form a truth and reconciliation commission, to punish those who have been directly involved in the genocide and to form a unity government under United Nations supervision, until the two communities learn to live in peace together. Any other alternative will be a mirage and will lead to greater tragedies in the future.
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'Jaw-Dropping': Mossad Chief Threatened ICC Prosecutor Over Israeli War Crimes Probe
"Bullying won't hide genocide and war crimes," said one anti-war group.
May 28, 2024
Just over a week after the International Criminal Court announced it had officially applied for an arrest warrant for two top Israeli officials over the Israel Defense Forces' assault on Gaza, an investigative report revealed Tuesday that the Israeli intelligence chief spent close to a decade attempting to intimidate the ICC's prosecutor into halting a war crimes probe.
Former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary investigation into Israel's actions in Palestine in 2015, a year after Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that killed 2,251 Palestinians in less than two months. Bensouda aimed to make an initial assessment of allegations of possible war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
According to Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call and U.K. newspaper The Guardian, Bensouda and her prosecution team soon began to receive warnings that Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency, "was taking a close interest in their work."
After briefly meeting Bensouda at the Munich Security Conference in 2017, Mossad Director Yossi Cohen "ambushed" the prosecutor at a hotel in New York in 2018, when Bensouda was meeting Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila.
"The pair had met several times before in relation to the ICC's ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in his country," reported The Guardian. "The meeting, however, appears to have been a setup. At a certain point, after Bensouda's staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials traveling with her. Why Kabila helped Cohen is unclear, but ties between the two men were revealed in 2022 by the Israeli publication TheMarker."
The investigation found that Cohen—who retired in 2021—repeatedly called Bensouda and sought meetings with her after the "ambush," eventually prompting Bensouda to alert senior ICC officials about the Mossad chief's conduct after his tactics shifted to "threats and manipulation." One ICC official compared Cohen's behavior to "stalking."
Cohen initiated at least three meetings with Bensouda between 2019-21, including one where he allegedly told the prosecutor: "You should help us and let us take care of you. You don't want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family."
He also allegedly suggested to Bensouda that a full investigation into war crimes by Israel would harm her career, and showed her copies photos that had covertly been taken of her husband.
The Guardian reported that Cohen did not respond to a request for comment, and Bensouda declined to comment on the reporting. A spokesperson for the Israeli government told the newspaper that the report was "replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel."
Threats against an ICC prosecutor could amount to offenses against the administration of justice, a violation of Article 70 under the Rome Statute, which established the court in 1998. Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the authority of the ICC, but Israeli officials including Cohen can still be prosecuted for an offense against the administration of justice.
After Cohen's alleged threats against Bensouda's family and career, the ICC in 2021 opened its formal war crimes investigation into alleged war crimes going back to 2014. Last week, current ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced he was seeking warrants to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for actions since October 7, 2023.
Jacobin journalist Branko Marcetic said the revelations about Cohen's targeting of Bensouda in the midst of her preliminary investigation proves the Israeli government "is completely out of control"—partially because continued political and material support from the United States, its largest international military funder, allows it to act with impunity.
Threats against an ICC prosecutor, said Canadian New Democratic Party lawmaker Charlie Angus, "are the actions of a criminal state."
Another of what one journalist called "truly jaw-dropping allegations" was that Mossad obtained transcripts and other materials that were part of a "smear campaign" against Bensouda.
"The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and [then-President] Donald Trump in the U.S. to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff," reported The Guardian.
The Trump administration imposed sanctions including visa restrictions against Bensouda between 2019-20, allegedly in retaliation for a separate war crimes probe regarding Afghanistan. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested the sanctions were imposed because the ICC was "putting Israel in [its] crosshairs."
Tuesday's reporting indicated that Israel "is fast becoming a pariah," said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
"Not only is it committing war crimes and likely genocide," said Parsi, "now we find out that they use their spy chief to threaten to hurt family members of ICC prosecutors."
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