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war on terror
12 Years of Lies, Torture, Drones.... and Hope?
I began writing for TomDispatch during Barack Obama’s somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump’s first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than “horror” to describe Trump 2.0.
Jan 13, 2026
“Tom, I got nothin’.” That’s all I wanted to say to Tom Engelhardt, the kindly and incisive editor of TomDispatch.com. He’d called to check in and see what I was planning for my next piece. I wanted to tell him, “I’m staring at starvation and genocide, the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law, along with the ongoing incineration of our planet. I’m a damp ball of grief, and I’ve got nothing useful to say about any of it.” Furthermore, I wanted to add, “Anything I could say about the present disaster has already been said comprehensively and better by someone else.” That “someone else” includes myriad excellent journalists who have departed (voluntarily or otherwise) from a mainstream media that has repeatedly acquiesced to Trump, succumbing to a malaise of self-censorship at flagship newspapers like the Washington Post and even the New York Times.
People with nothing to say would generally be wise to shut up. Unfortunately, the wisdom to choose to remain silent has never been my most salient characteristic, something even strangers seem to notice about me. Years ago, I was introduced to a woman at a party. Before I’d even opened my mouth, she said, “Oh, good, another short, pushy Jewish dyke from New York!” Must be something in the way I move.
In any case, having nothing for Tom this time around led me to think about all the times I have had something to say and how grateful I am to have had TomDispatch as a place to say it.
So, feeling stuck, I decided to examine my output over all these years. As it happens, there’s a lot of it, 98 pieces in all. I began during Barack Obama’s somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump’s first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than “horror” to describe my reaction to the first year (and counting) of Trump 2.0.
It was far too much to read through in one sitting, but not surprisingly, a few general themes did emerge. Most of them had to do with the importance of working to discern—and tell—the truth about the world we live in.
Thinking about Epistemological Anarchy…
My first TomDispatch piece appeared in 2014. It marked the beginning of an oddly personal chronicle of a time that the poet W.H. Auden might once have called “a low dishonest decade.”
That’s the phrase Auden used to describe the period leading up to September 1, 1939, the day Adolf Hitler’s German army invaded Poland, marking the official beginning of World War II. I think we can fairly say that the Trump years, and even those preceding his first election, constitute a low, dishonest decade.
Of course, Trump himself is an avatar—a human embodiment—of the principle of dishonesty. Indeed, the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 “false or misleading claims” he made during his first four years as president. This time around, most media outlets have given up counting, although several marked his first 100 days with reports on his 10 (or more) most egregious lies. The purpose of “flooding the zone with shit,” as right-wing podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once put it, is not really to convince anyone that any particular lie is true but, as I wrote during Trump’s first term, to convince everyone that it’s impossible to know whether anything is true. As I argued then:
We are used to thinking of propaganda (a word whose Latin roots mean “towards action”) as intended to move people to think or act in a particular way. And indeed that kind of propaganda has long existed, as with, for example, wartime books, posters, and movies designed to inflame patriotism and hatred of the enemy. But there was a different quality to totalitarian propaganda. Its purpose was not just to create certainty (the enemy is evil incarnate), but a curious kind of doubt. ‘In fact,’ as Russian émigrée and New Yorker writer Masha Gessen has put it, "the purpose of totalitarian propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality.”
Back in 2019, I was writing about “totalitarian propaganda” in the past tense, speaking of 20th-century authoritarian regimes. But I was already worried about what Trump’s wild epistemological anarchy portended. “Eroding the very ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy has been,” I wrote, “however instinctively, the mode of the Trumpian moment as well, both the presidential one and that of so many right-wing conspiracy theorists now populating the online world.” For many Americans, it was no longer worth the effort to discern the truth. “When everybody lies, anything can indeed be true. And when everybody—or even a significant chunk of everybody—believes this, the effect can be profoundly anti-democratic.”
In fact, I suggested, “this popular belief that nobody really does or can know anything is the perfect soil for an authoritarian leader to take root.” Trump 2.0 has confirmed that intuition.
“September 1, 1939” was the title of W. H. Auden’s most famous poem, the one that began with a reflection on the previous “low, dishonest decade.” It also contained these lines about what he then imagined was to come:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
…And Memory Holes
That first article of mine was about the evil done by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This was not a surprising topic for me, since I had recently published a book on the subject, specifically about institutionalized state torture as practiced by the United States during what came to be known as the “War on Terror.” It was pretty much all I was thinking about in those days.
In that piece, I pointed out that we had never gotten a full accounting of the torture committed in our names in Afghanistan, Iraq, and globally at CIA “black sites” (their secret torture arenas). I blamed that reality in significant part on President Barack Obama’s “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and pointed out that not “one of the senior government officials responsible for activities that amounted to war crimes has been held accountable, nor were any of the actual torturers ever brought to court.” When, through a 2009 executive order, Obama finally closed those black sites, he argued that, “at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”
Of course, that “need to look forward” (not over one’s shoulder) effectively tossed the history of torture under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into an Orwellian memory hole. And to this day, there has never been a full accounting of the Bush torture program. As a result, I pointed out then, “the structure for a torture system remains in place and unpunished,” which meant that the next time an administration chose to invoke and weaponize a public fear of dark, foreign others, we could well see torture’s resurgence.
Of course, that is indeed what happened under Donald Trump. Beginning with his first campaign speech in 2015, in which he inveighed against Mexican migrants as rapists bringing drugs and crime into this country, he has continually escalated his attacks on the foreign-born, particularly those from places he infamously called “shithole countries.” By his third campaign for the presidency in 2024, he (along with his running mate JD Vance) was routinely telling his followers that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were dining on other residents’ cats and dogs. In his second term, eschewing earlier euphemistic dog whistles, President Trump has been making it very clear that what distinguishes the migrants he characterizes as “garbage” (Somalis) from good migrants (“nice Scandinavians”) is their color.
As a result, this year I found myself reflecting again on the scourge of Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, writing that:
“t’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.
Honestly, though, I don’t think any of us could then have imagined a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) run by Kristi Noem. She’s the Trump appointee who posed in her DHS baseball cap and $50,000 Rolex watch in front of hundreds of half-naked prisoners like the ones she’d illegally dispatched to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran “Terrorist Confinement Center.” In ordering the deportation of immigrants to a penal institution well-known for torturing its inmates, Noem was reprising the Bush-era crime of “extraordinary rendition,” a practice that is, of course, illegal under US and international law.
Because of excellent reporting by outlets like the Guardian, we know that those men, now thankfully freed and repatriated to Venezuela, “suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault.” We also know that the Trump administration tried to tip the whole episode into its capacious memory hole by successfully preventing CBS’"60 Minutes" from airing a segment on the abuse of US deportees at CECOT. (That segment ran briefly in Canada; however, and a full transcript of it is now available, courtesy of The Nation magazine.)
Extrajudicial Killings (Also Known as “Murder”)
Another theme I’ve returned to over the years is the US penchant for murder-at-a-distance. Indeed, our country pioneered what now appears to be a significant part of the future of warfare: remotely directed attacks on individual human beings. In 2016, I wrote about the increasing use of military drones and the implications for military ethics:
The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved—whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone—the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.
I was still writing about the subject six years later. In 2022, TomDispatch published my piece about the push to develop LAWS (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems). This US goal had first emerged in the previous century during the US war in Vietnam with the (expensive and largely unsuccessful) automated battlefield. Half a century later, such automation, including the use of so-called artificial intelligence to make kill decisions, is now available in cheap, easily replaceable drones. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the United States has over the years resisted any attempt to outlaw autonomous weapons. “The European Union, the UN, at least 50 signatory nations, and (according to polls), most of the world population believe that autonomous weapons systems should be outlawed,” I wrote in 2022. “The US, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Russia disagree, along with a few other outliers.” I hardly expect the second Trump administration to take a different position.
In fact, despite what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth might think, contemporary American soldiers probably don’t need to do pull-ups. They only need to sit down—in front of a screen—to cause mayhem globally.
Today, we take our ability to kill at a great distance for granted, as the Trump administration’s actions have demonstrated. We accept with disturbingly little question the now routine murders by drone of more than 100 people in small boats off the Venezuelan coast and in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Only when it emerged that one of those unpiloted aerial attacks on defenseless human beings included a “double-tap”—a second strike to kill two survivors floating in the water by their devastated boat—was there widespread objection, including from members of Congress.
Hope in Strange Times
Before the 2016 election, I wrote a piece about how the rest of us needed to learn to claim our victories. “In these dismal days,” I said, “of climate change, imperial decline, endless war, and in my city, a hapless football team, I seem to be experiencing a strange and unaccustomed emotion: hope.” How could that be, I asked. “Maybe it’s because, like my poor San Francisco 49ers, who have been ‘rebuilding’ for the last two decades, I’m fortunate enough to be able to play the long game.”
At that moment, however, I did find one thing especially encouraging: “We seem to have finally reached Peak Trump, and the reason why is important.” Or so I thought.
Calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers didn’t do it. Promising to bring back waterboarding and commit assorted other war crimes didn’t do it. Flirting with the white supremacist crowd and their little friend Pepe the Frog didn’t do it. But an 11-year-old audio tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women "by the pussy" seems to have been the drop of water that finally cracked the dam and sent even stalwart Republican leaders fleeing a flood of public revulsion.
Well, even Cassandra can get things wrong once in a while and I was certainly wrong about that one. Today, Trump no longer simply “flirts” with white supremacism. He’s all in. And I’d be surprised now if even a demonstrated association with Jeffrey Epstein’s many predatory crimes will be enough to bring him down. In any case, there’s a solid backbench of genuine fascists—Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and of course Vice President JD Vance—to take over, should Trump take one nap too many and fall off his gilt-edged chair.
A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”
I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me—or any of us—back in that bottle.”
I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle.
Auden concluded his poem with the following lines. Almost a century later, they still remain an apt response to our contemporary confrontation with fascism and our latest night terrors:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Maybe I still have something to say after all.
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Trump's Buffoonery Reveals That the Empire Has No Clothes
Under his leadership, our political structure is naked and exposed, stripped of its political correctness.
Jan 01, 2026
In the Donald Trump era—praise be!—so much is possible that previously no one had ever even imagined. For instance, not only has “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” come back to life, he might even join Trump’s cabinet.
Well, that’s just a guess, but why not? I think he’d fit right in. All of which is to say: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear...” It’s not simply that Trump is unique (i.e., uniquely crazy). He definitely is, but he’s also American to the core. Under his leadership, our political structure is naked and exposed, stripped of its political correctness. The emperor has no clothes! Suddenly we can’t avoid seeing this.
Indeed, we can’t avoid seeing ourselves. As psychologist John Gartner has pointed out, Trump is not only a malignant narcissist, but—as has been clear in his second term—he’s slithering ever more deeply into dementia. Yet people still support him—enough people to let him win elections. Why?
Because, Gartner notes: “He’s beating up on their shared enemies. There’s a psychological appeal that a Hitler-like character has. Someone who feels disempowered feels re-empowered by someone who, in a punitive way, is attacking their shadow enemies and making them feel powerful and entitled to dominate.”
The “war” on terror, the transcendence of terror—the transformation of humanity, of Planet Earth—begins by looking deeply at ourselves and choosing to evolve.
I would add that these “enemies” may simply be pulled out of the blue... a group his supporters weren’t even aware of. But the strongman has declared them to be the enemy: in effect, creating the enemy. What matters is not that a long-despised group of people are getting what they “deserve,” but that the disempowered supporters now have someone they can feel like they’re dominating.
And, yeah, Trump is going crazy, so to speak, attacking various enemies. As Bret Wilkins writes at Common Dreams:
President Donald Trump—the self-described "most anti-war president in history"—has now ordered the bombing of more countries than any president in history as US forces carried out Christmas day strikes on what the White House claimed were Islamic State militants killing Christians in Nigeria...
In addition to Nigeria, Trump—who says he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize—since 2017 has also ordered the bombing of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as boats allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Trump has also deployed warships and thousands of US troops near Venezuela, which could become the next country attacked by a president who campaigned on a platform of "peace through strength.”
But this “leadership” is anything but unprecedented. As Palestinian-American comedian Sammy Obeid asks, in a comedy routine with more factual clarity than is often present in the official media: What actually is terrorism, this thing we’ve been trying so hard to eliminate for the last couple decades? To find out, he looked up the definition: Terrorism is “using violence to achieve a political goal.”
Uh... America itself is the biggest terrorist of all time, apparently! Or at least it’s well up there on the list. Beyond the Vietnam War—millions dead—there’s the alleged War on Terror, launched by George W. Bush, continued by Barack Obama, eventually ended by Joe Biden.
According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project: “An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 412,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died ‘indirectly,’ as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure, and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.”
You might say Trump brings the darkness of all this to light. Isn’t that where war belongs—in raw public scrutiny? Perhaps the greatest enemy of peace is the collective justification and abstraction of war by the political and media complex, along with the financial flow making it possible. This is our national infrastructure. Trump is exposing it, not intentionally, but with snarky, 12-year-old honesty, mixed with dementia.
“Terrorism is using violence to achiever a political goal.” The “war” on terror, the transcendence of terror—the transformation of humanity, of Planet Earth—begins by looking deeply at ourselves and choosing to evolve. If we refuse to do so, we have Donald Trump.
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Trump Is Just the Gilded Nail in the Coffin of the American Century
If the first 25 years of the 21st century have proved anything, it is that America was emotionally, morally, and intellectually incapable of acting as a global leader.
Dec 27, 2025
It is tempting to distill all the chaos, hatred, and blood spilled in 2025 into the small frame of one man: Donald Trump.
It is true that Trump richly deserves the accolade of being the worst, but also the most consequential president in modern US history.
This president has bombed Iran, allowed Israel to invade Southern Syria, finished the decimation of Gaza, and embarked on the annexation of the occupied West Bank. The Emirati-funded and armed ethnic cleansing of Sudan means little to him. A death toll of up to half a million Sudanese is of no consequence.
Three months after unveiling his "big beautiful peace plan," a reality is established on the ground in Gaza that is its parametrical opposite—an ugly, petty recipe for war without end.
Never has so much been expected of a mind that is truly so small.
Israel is not even content to leave over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza shivering and starving in tents. When storms flooded them out, Israelis cheered.
Killing Palestinians has become an Israeli national obsession.
Israel Katz, the defense minister, has just announced plans to settle northern Gaza permanently: “We are deep inside Gaza and we will never leave all of Gaza; there will be no such thing. We are here to protect and prevent what happened," Katz said.
So much for any hope of a full withdrawal envisaged by the Trump plan.
A 'Moral Collapse'
Bounced like a pinball between Moscow and Kyiv, Trump has been unable to secure in Ukraine in a year what he promised as a candidate to achieve within days.
When Bob Reiner, a Hollywood director and long-time critic, was killed along with his wife by his son, in a family tragedy so deep it should elicit sympathy from any parent, Trump’s bile could not contain itself.
Reiner’s death was his own fault because he had driven others "crazy" with his obsession with Donald Trump, the president declared on Truth Social.
This is the mentality of the man to whom every rich Arab state in the Middle East has paid good money and now looks to for salvation.
Never has so much been expected of a mind that is truly so small.
This is the man whom Syria expects to force Israel to stop arming the Druze in Sweida, as a Washington Post investigation disclosed.
This is the man whom Turkey hopes will force the Kurds to join the as-yet nonexistent national armed forces of Syria; the man whom Qatar hopes will install an international stabilization force on the borders of Gaza, the man from whom Saudi Arabia wants a nuclear reactor, the man on whom the leader of Egypt—most likely the next Arab leader to fall—depends on for his very survival.
The only power that profits from this chaos is the power that is not involved: The meta story of 2025 is the confirmation of China as crown prince, as a world leader in waiting—a rise that has been handed to it on a silver plate.
More valuable to China than all its own strategic patience, planning, and thinking added together has been the moral collapse of America. All China has had to do is weather Trump’s tariff tantrums and watch the US collapse unprompted under its own weight.
Turning Victory Into Defeat
How did the US pluck defeat from the jaws of victory? Arrogance, hubris, the belief that as the last man standing, we were the only man standing, are all part of the story.
So the outgoing liberal elites of America and Europe, who have been in power for so long, are surely deluding themselves if they ascribe the chaos of 2025 to the rise of the extreme right at home and abroad.
We are not only seeing out one terrible year, but the first quarter of the century. It has been a terrible start.
The wars fought in defense of democracy destroyed all belief in the system at home.
If you compare how powerful America and the West were in Christmas 1991, when I watched the Soviet flag descend on the building of the Russian Supreme Soviet and chart a course to where they are now, you can only come to one conclusion: that when America had the chance to become the world’s uncontested leader, it blew it.
In 1991, America held the monopoly over the use of force abroad. Today, there are as many drone attacks as there are state actors or non-state actors who own them.
In 1991, Russia was on its knees. Today, its forces menace not just Ukraine but the whole of Western Europe.
In 1991, the streets of Russia were so pro-Western that there was a debate in the media as to whether they should continue using the word West, as Russia was now part of it.
Today, they are prepared to sacrifice a whole generation of Russian youth in a war that is framed in Moscow as a war with America.
Losing wars is another part of the jigsaw.
The Pentagon and NATO headquarters in Brussels should really have asked themselves a long time ago, why Western alliances "of the willing" have not won a war since Kosovo in 1998.
Interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria have all been defeats. Whether those interventions were declared or undeclared, whether they were led from the front or from behind closed doors, the result was the same.
The quick thrill of toppling regimes was followed in each country by the sober reality of insurgency, civil war, and ultimately military withdrawal.
Imagined Foes
Ideology also played its part. I do not mean the ideology of "radical Islam," but the ideology that made the US and its allies such an aggressive world force.
It goes far beyond 19th-century imperialism, which, by comparison, was fairly limited in its ambitions.
It is the belief that at any one time in history, Western liberal democracy is faced by an implacable, transnational, and existential foe.
During the Cold War, it was communism. After it, al-Qaeda became a world threat. Then came Daesh, or the so-called Islamic State.
Today, it is the Muslim Brotherhood; and soon, it will be Islam itself.
Even though these imagined foes have nothing in common with each other, they are given the same characteristics.
During the Vietnam War, it was the Domino theory, a theory that warned if the dominoes of Southeast Asia were allowed to fall to communism, Australia would be next.
In the days of al-Qaeda, this was replaced by "the crescent of crisis," which stretched from Iraq to Somalia.
This ideology preexisted major events like the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, and helped transform what should have been a limited anti-terrorist operation into an all-out "war on terror."
It was critical to this project that the West did not define the enemy.
Hence, Vladimir Putin’s first bloody war as prime minister and later president of Russia, the war he launched on Chechnya, was merrily folded into George W Bush’s "war on terror."
The then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair was duly sent by Washington to invite Putin to meet Queen Elizabeth II, as the horrors of Russian counterinsurgency were tried out on the Chechens 22 years before the same techniques were applied to the Ukrainians.
But what did it matter, Western intelligence calculated. They were only Muslims.
Now, 25 years on, America seems congenitally incapable of learning from its mistakes.
Terminal Decline
When Dick Cheney, the former vice president and the architect of the war on terror, died recently, the tributes came in thick and fast.
Former President Bill Clinton extolled Cheney's "unwavering sense of duty," while former Vice President Kamala Harris called him a "devoted public servant" who gave "so much of his life to the country he loved.” CNN's front-page story lauded him for helping "his daughter stand up to Trump."
They praised a man who constructed an elaborate double lie as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq: that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he had links with al-Qaeda.
We only need a real financial collapse to recreate the conditions of the 1930s.
In 2004, Cheney said: "I continue to believe, I think there's overwhelming evidence [of a]… connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government."
There have been many attempts to assess the human cost of the Iraq war. The latest in 2023 by Brown University researchers, using United Nations data, concluded that the invasion of Iraq and related "war on terror" campaigns killed more than 4.5 million people.
This figure includes about 1 million direct deaths and 3.5 million indirect deaths. The wars also killed 7,000 US troops and 8,000 contractors, according to the study.
There is something in the psyche of an imperial power in terminal decline that blocks out the obvious truth: The wars fought in defense of democracy destroyed all belief in the system at home.
Even before a new generation of ideologues assumed power in Washington, the old regime of liberal Zionists, like Joe Biden, had armed and allowed Israel to do most of the killing in Gaza, the West Bank, south Lebanon, and Syria.
So, the collapse of moral governance is truly a bipartisan achievement. The year 2025 capped 25 years of failure.
A New Leadership
What happens next? It is alas very far from being goodbye to all that, because all of the unfinished business in the Middle East and Ukraine will keep on coming back to haunt the retreating West.
You can only keep on supporting Israel by blinding yourself to the daily reality of what Israel is doing in the West Bank.
Even if Israel changes its prime minister and slows down its settlement scheme, it will become evident that the Palestinian state recognised as a sovereign nation by 157 of the 193 UN member states is impossible to create.
It is to the West Bank, not Gaza, that all eyes should be turning in 2026.
Israel’s mission to annex the West Bank can be as clearly seen through Christian eyes as it is through Muslim ones, as Middle East Eye's Lubna Masarwa and Peter Oborne report on how Christians in Bethlehem face an existential threat.
The pressure on governments by their people will grow. They will do their best to outlaw demands for Palestinian justice. But the more they seek to oppress, the more of a domestic civil rights issue Palestine will become.
The real sin of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has not so much been to keep as close to Washington as possible on Israel, but to establish the infrastructure of an authoritarian government that will be fully used by his potential successor, Nigel Farage.
The late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to grant "special category status" to the 1981 Irish hunger strikers is being replicated today, even though her response led to the death of 10 men, including the MP Bobby Sands, and a government capitulation on the core demand.
No matter.
Lord Timpson, the UK's prisons minister, is intrepidly following in Thatcher's footsteps in the way he is dealing with the hunger strike by youths on remand for taking part in direct action on behalf of Palestine Action.
Timpson said: "We are very experienced at dealing with hunger strikes. Unfortunately, over the last five years, we have averaged over 200 hunger strike incidents every year, and the processes that we have are well-established and they work very well—with prisons working alongside our NHS [National Health Service] partners every day, making sure our systems are robust and working—and they are."
We will see in 2026 how long that confidence in the system lasts if one of those hunger strikers dies. We will also see the divide that has opened up between Israel and the Jewish diaspora getting wider.
If 2025 was the year when the fig leaf around Israel’s true genocidal character dropped away, the first years of the next quarter of this century will be dominated by more Jews in America demanding and creating an entirely different political leadership.
The ideologues of "Israel First" are fighting an ugly and vicious losing battle, and they know it.
This is supposed to be America’s century. If the first 25 years have proved anything, it is that America was emotionally, morally, and intellectually incapable of acting as a global leader.
At the moment that failure is leading to the rise of the extreme right all over the West and potentially the rise of fascists. We only need a real financial collapse to recreate the conditions of the 1930s.
If that, in turn, spurns a new generation of leaders capable once again of governing with authority, morality, and modesty, then it will have been a lesson worth waiting for. But at what price?
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