Why am I convinced that Jeffrey Epstein was part of the deep state — that is, with Mossad, the CIA, or both? Simply because of the plea bargain he received in 2008. In my opinion, there is simply no way that wealthy, prominent, influential men could have pressured a U.S. Attorney to give Epstein that plea bargain. The plea bargain was so super-sweet that there is only one entity that would have had the power to secure it — the same entity that I have long contended is actually running the federal government — the national-security establishment, which consists of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
Keep in mind that U.S. Attorneys are not like state District Attorneys. U.S. Attorneys don’t have to answer to the voters. Although they don’t have lifetime appointments, like federal judges do, their term in office is essentially the same as the president. They are very powerful people within their particular jurisdictional realm.
The U.S. Attorney in Miami had Epstein dead to rights. Any federal prosecutor could have easily secured multiple convictions against him for sexually trafficking many underage girls. A federal judge would undoubtedly have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.
Instead, he managed a super-sweet plea bargain in which he was permitted to plead guilty to a relatively minor prostitution charge in state court, not federal court. He served out a 13-month jail sentence and in the county jail, not the state penitentiary. He was also permitted to leave the jail every morning and return at night. And his co-conspirators were shielded from prosecution in Florida.
Again, in my opinion, only the national-security branch of the federal government wields that much power. Ever since the Kennedy assassination, nobody in the federal government — including the executive, legislative, and judicial branches — has dared to buck the deep state.
It is my opinion that that the deep state is looking for a way to secure Ghislaine Maxwell’s early release from prison. If Epstein was, in fact, part of the deep state, it is a virtual certainty that she knows it. But my hunch is that the deep-state officials have assured her that they will manage to get her an early release from prison, so long as she keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t reveal Epstein’s deep-state connection.
Why would they let her serve any time? After all, she’s now been in prison for 5 years. Because sometimes the deep state loses control over events. For example, it was obviously able to control Epstein’s prosecution in 2008 but lost control when federal prosecutors in New York indicted him again in 2019. Epstein, of course, is now dead, but Maxwell is still very much alive. She got convicted in federal court in New York for her role in facilitating and participating in the sexual abuse of underage girls by Epstein. She received a sentence of 20 years. Compare that to the 18-month sentence that Epstein himself received with his super-sweet plea bargain.
At 63 years old, Ghislaine Maxwell has no interest in serving out her entire 20-year prison sentence. After five years in prison, she undoubtedly wants out. My hunch is that she is pressuring the deep state to get her a pardon or a commutation. The implicit threat, of course, is that she’ll disclose what she knows if she isn’t released. Killing her would be an option but would obviously be very problematic, especially given Epstein’s “suicide.” Thus, it is my conviction that the deep state, right now, is putting big-time pressure on President Trump for a pardon or commutation for Maxwell.
A similar thing happened with a deep-state operative and murderer named Michael Townley. Townley is the guy who personally installed the bomb that killed former Chilean official Orlando Letelier and his American assistant Ronni Moffitt in 1976. Townley inserted the bomb in Letelier’s car, which exploded when Letelier and Moffitt were on their way to work in Washington, D.C.
Let me emphasize something important: Townley was a cold-blooded murderer. And this was not the only murder in which he was involved. He was also involved in the murder of the former head of the Chilean armed forces, Gen. Carlos Prats. He was also a key figure in Operation Condor, which arguably was the biggest state-sponsored assassination ring in history.
The mainstream consensus is that Townley was not a U.S. deep-state operative. The consensus is based on the fact that the CIA and Townley denied that he was one of its operatives. Moreover, there have never been any CIA records revealing that Townley was a CIA operative.
But there is one big problem with reaching a conclusion on that basis: The CIA lies. Everyone knows that the CIA lies. Recall, for example, CIA Director Richard Helms committing perjury in sworn testimony before Congress. Recall the sweetheart plea bargain he received that permitted him to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, for which he received a fine. Recall how he was honored by CIA personnel when he returned to CIA headquarters.
Or consider the lies regarding CIA official George Joannides — lies that continued until just recently when they were uncovered. Consider that the CIA gave Joannides a medal for his lies.
Don’t forget also the CIA’s destruction of its MKULTRA files and, more recently, its torture videotapes. If the CIA destroys records, it can also alter, modify, and create records that deliver a false narrative.
We do know that Townley made contact with the CIA and sought employment. The official story is that the CIA rejected him. Thus, Townley ended up going to work for the Chilean deep state after the Pinochet coup in 1973 that the CIA had helped bring about. Specifically, he went to work for a secret Gestapo-like agency called DINA, which was responsible for arresting thousands of people for the “crime” of being socialists, torturing them brutally, raping them, executing them, or permanently disappearing them.
The head of DINA was a Chilean deep-state operative named Col. Manuel Contreras. There is something important to note about Contreras: He was also a paid asset of the CIA.
So, the CIA helped to bring about the coup. The coup leaders established DINA, which rounded up innocent people, tortured or raped them, and executed or disappeared them. DINA’s head was a paid asset of the CIA. Michael Townley went to work for DINA. Perhaps it’s worth noting what CIA asset Contreras stated about Townley: “He was never a DINA agent … instead, a CIA agent since February 1971.”
While most everyone has concluded that Townley wasn’t also working for the CIA, I myself have absolutely no doubts that Townley was a CIA operative. On what do I base my conclusion? Primarily on his plea bargain. Like Jeffrey Epstein, Townley received a super-sweet plea bargain that, in my opinion, only the deep state could have gotten for him.
Remember: This guy had murdered two innocent people on the streets of Washington, D.C. He should have received a sentence of life without parole. Instead, he was permitted to plead guilty to conspiracy to murder and then was sentenced to serve only 10 years. But get this: He was released after having served only 5 years. And get this: He was released into the Federal Witness Protection Program, whereby the feds secured new identities for him and his family so that they could restart their lives anew. To this day, no one except a few feds knows where Townley is living because the federal government continues to protect this cold-blooded murderer. How weird is that? Not weird at all if Townley was, in fact, a U.S. deep-state operative?
To my knowledge, there is no public record of the federal prison in which Townley served those five years, but I have no doubts it was a “Club Fed” — that is, one of the nice, comfortable federal prisons rather than a high-security penitentiary for convicted murderers. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Townley was given the same type of arrangement that Epstein was given with respect to being able to leave the prison every morning and return at night.
So, why did Townley even have to serve 5 years? Because sometimes things get out of the control even for the deep state, and someone has to pay the price. Epstein had to serve 13 months in jail. Townley had to serve 5 years in prison. Ghislaine Maxwell has had to serve 5 years in prison.
But I have no doubts whatsoever that Ghislaine Maxwell will not be serving out her 20-year sentence. The deep state is too powerful, and the deep state can’t afford to let her talk. My opinion is that Ghislaine Maxwell will be receiving a pardon or a commutation before President Trump leaves office.
A few weeks ago I published an article noting that the State of Israel and the Zionist movement that gave rise to it have probably employed assassination as a tool of statecraft more heavily than any other political entity in recorded history. Indeed, their deadly activities had easily eclipsed those of the notorious Muslim sect that had terrorized the Middle East a thousand years ago and gave rise to that term.
The piece had been prompted by Israel’s sudden strike against Iran, capping its reputation as the greatest band of assassins known to history. Even as the Iranian government was intensely focused on the negotiations with America over its nuclear program, a sudden Israeli surprise attack successfully assassinated most of Iran’s highest military commanders, some of its political leaders, and nearly all of its most prominent nuclear scientists. I cannot recall any previous case in which a major country had ever had so large a fraction of its top military, political, and scientific leadership eliminated in that sort of illegal sneak attack.
Less than one year earlier, a series of missile exchanges between Israel and Iran had soon been followed by the death of hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister in a highly-suspicious and never explained helicopter crash. Given subsequent events, I think we can safely assume that he, too, had died at the hands of the Israelis.
Earlier this year, the declassification of a large batch of JFK Assassination files had prompted me to recapitulate and summarize many of my articles of the last half-dozen years on that landmark twentieth century event. I gathered together some of the very considerable evidence that the Israeli Mossad played the central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 as well as the death of his younger brother Robert a few years later, probably the highest-profile political assassinations of the last one hundred years or more.
The most weighty and authoritative work on the long history of Israeli assassinations is surely Ronen Bergman’s 2018 volume Rise and Kill First, running 750 pages and including a thousand-odd source references, with many of the latter citing official documents never previously made available to journalists. By some estimates, this book documented nearly 3,000 such foreign political killings, a remarkable total for a small country then less than three generations old.
Although the Bergman book was certainly very comprehensive, it was produced under strict Israeli censorship, so the text quite understandably omitted almost any coverage of some of the highest-profile Zionist attacks on Western targets. For example, there was no mention of the unsuccessful but well-documented attempts to kill President Harry Truman, nor the assassination efforts aimed at British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the top members of his Cabinet.
Some of this latter coverage may be found in Thomas Suarez’s 2016 book State of Terror which I would recommend as a very useful supplementary work, though its focus is almost entirely limited to the activities of Zionist groups just prior to the establishment of Israel.
For a broader discussion of the history of Israeli assassinations and closely-related terrorist attacks, especially those targeting Westerners, one of the most useful compilations might be my own very long January 2020 article, providing extensive references to the underlying primary and secondary sources.
That 2020 article had actually been prompted by America’s own sudden assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a shocking development that drew a great deal of media coverage at the time.
I had opened my long discussion by noting that over the last several centuries Western governments had almost totally abandoned the use of political assassinations against the leadership of major rival nations, regarding such actions as immoral and illegal.
For example, historian David Irving revealed that when one of Adolf Hitler’s aides suggested to him that an attempt be made to assassinate the Soviet military leadership during the bitter combat on the Eastern Front of World War II, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade any such practices as obvious violations of the laws of civilized warfare.
For most of American history, a similar attitude had prevailed, but I explained that this began to change over the last couple of decades, mostly in the wake of the 9/11 Attacks.
The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.
A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don’t recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means. I am hardly a specialist in modern European history, but after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and regularized the rules of warfare, no assassination as high-profile as that of Gen. Soleimani comes to mind…
During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged as rebels by the British. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin’s blade, nor that King George III ever considered using such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation’s history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln’s death being one of the very few that comes to mind.
At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents—Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—all issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.
Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:
One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.
Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but
Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.
We don’t call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are “targeted killings,” most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America’s go-to weapon in the war on terror.
The Bush Administration had conducted 47 of these assassinations-by-another-name, while his successor Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar and Nobel Peace Prize winner, had raised his own total to 542. Not without justification, Pollack wonders whether assassination has become “a very effective drug, but [one that] treats only the symptom and so offers no cure.”
Thus over the last couple of decades the American government has followed a disturbing trajectory in its use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy, first restricting its application only to the most extreme circumstances, next targeting small numbers of high-profile “terrorists” hiding in rough terrain, then escalating those same killings to the many hundreds. And now under President Trump, the fateful step has been taken of America claiming the right to assassinate any world leader not to our liking whom we unilaterally declare worthy of death.
Pollack had made his career as a Clinton Democrat, and is best known for his 2002 book The Threatening Storm that strongly endorsed President Bush’s proposed invasion of Iraq and was enormously influential in producing bipartisan support for that ill-fated policy. I have no doubt that he is a committed supporter of Israel, and he probably falls into a category that I would loosely describe as “Left Neocon.”
But while reviewing a history of Israel’s own long use of assassination as a mainstay of its national security policy, he seems deeply disturbed that America might now be following along that same terrible path.
Pollock’s discussion of these facts came in his lengthy 2018 New York Times review of the Bergman book entitled “Learning From Israel’s Political Assassination Program,” and he greatly decried what many have called the “Israelization” of the American government and its military doctrine. President Donald Trump’s sudden public assassination of so high-profile a foreign leader as Gen. Soleimani came less than two years later and demonstrated that Pollock’s concerns were fully warranted and indeed even understated.
As my January 2020 article explained, nothing like this had ever previously happened in peacetime American history, and only very rarely even during wars.
The January 2nd American assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was an event of enormous moment.
Gen. Soleimani had been the highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80 million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one of the most universally popular and highly regarded. Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s elderly Supreme Leader, and there were widespread reports that he was being urged to run for the presidency in the 2021 elections.
The circumstances of his peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an American Reaper drone near Iraq’s Baghdad international airport just after he had arrived there on a regular commercial flight for peace negotiations originally suggested by the American government.
Our major media hardly ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected killing of so high-ranking a political and military figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so later, the front page of my morning New York Times was almost entirely filled with coverage of the event and its implications, along with several inside pages devoted to the same topic. Later that same week, America’s national newspaper of record allocated more than one-third of all the pages of its front section to the same shocking story.
But even such copious coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to provide the incident with its proper context and implications. Last year, the Trump Administration had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “a terrorist organization,” drawing widespread criticism and even ridicule from national security experts appalled at the notion of classifying a major branch of Iran’s armed forces as “terrorists.” Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and this apparently provided the legal fig-leaf for his assassination in broad daylight while on a diplomatic peace mission.
Although Pollock provided some explanations for this shocking transformation in American doctrine, he failed to note what was arguably the most obvious factor. Over the last generation or two, the American government and American political life have been almost entirely captured by what scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt called “The Israel Lobby” in their best-selling 2008 book of that title, and this political and ideological transformation has only further accelerated in the last couple of years, most recently reaching ridiculous, almost cartoonishly extreme levels.
For example, nearly every other country on earth regards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as one of the worst war criminals in modern history, now under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his ongoing genocidal massacre of Gaza’s helpless two million civilians, with an international warrant issued for his arrest. But the American political system is almost entirely under the control of pro-Israel partisans so he was invited in 2024 to give an unprecedented fourth public address to a joint session of Congress, receiving an endless series of standing ovations by the trained barking seals of our national legislative body.
Over the last couple of generations, successful American politicians have increasingly been selected for their unswerving loyalty to the State of Israel and their admiration for all things Israeli, often describing themselves as committed Zionists, followers of a foreign nationalist movement.
As a notable example of this strange pattern, a Republican Gentile such as Rep. Brian Mast had not only volunteered for service in the Israeli military, but then proudly wore his foreign uniform while serving as an elected member of Congress. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this demonstration of his overriding loyalty to a foreign nation, in January he was named chairman of our powerful House Foreign Relations Committee.
In another bizarre twist, foreign students attending American universities have never been punished for denouncing or condemning America or the behavior of the American government, but under the Trump Administration they have been rounded up and deported if they criticized the foreign government of Israel.
So if Israel and the Zionist movement have spent the last one hundred years heavily relying upon political assassinations as a primary geopolitical tool, it is hardly surprising if American political leaders have now increasingly adopted the practice of their Israeli mentors and exemplars and done the same.
This trend was further accelerated by the complete capture of the foreign policy establishment of both of our major political parties by the militantly pro-Israel Neocons. Indeed, as I have noted, the term “Neocon” has largely dropped from usage during the last decade or so because the views and beliefs of almost everyone in DC establishment circles would now fall into that category, a tendency that extends across our entire political ecosphere of elected officials, staffers, think-tanks, and media outlets.
I believe that this new American emphasis on political assassinations has extremely dangerous consequences for the world, consequences that perhaps most analysts have failed to properly appreciate. Israel’s tendency to assassinate the political leaders of those countries it views as rivals or threats has naturally focused upon its own region. But when American leaders have adopted that same mind-set, their targets have obviously been different ones.
Israel’s sudden and largely successful decapitation strike against Iran had heavily relied upon the innovative use of drones. But just a couple of weeks earlier, a somewhat different but equally bold use of drones had been used to hit all of Russia’s interior airbases housing its strategic bomber fleet, successfully destroying quite a number of those nuclear-capable aircraft, one of the important legs of the country’s nuclear deterrent triad. Just before that, there was an attempt to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin with a swarm of drones when he visited the Kursk area on a helicopter tour of that region.
Although the Ukrainian government took full credit for these latter two attacks against Russia, it seems extremely unlikely that they would have undertaken such action without the full support and approval of their American and NATO paymasters, and indeed the Russians claimed to have hard evidence of such involvement. As I noted in an article, the Ukrainian government explained that the planning for the project had begun roughly eighteen months earlier, and that had been exactly the time when New Jersey and parts of the East Coast had reported a mysterious wave of very heavy drone activity, which our government later admitted was testing for a highly classified military project. I think that the very close match of timing was hardly likely to have been coincidental.
The size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal surpasses our own and its large suite of unstoppable hypersonic delivery systems has given it a measure of strategic superiority over America and our NATO allies on both the nuclear and conventional escalation ladders. So the very strong likelihood that America was intimately involved in an attack on Russia’s nuclear triad and an attempt to assassinate Russia’s president seems exceptionally reckless and dangerous behavior. In a recent article, I suggested that Russia should take prompt and forceful action to deter any such future attacks, but this has not yet happened:
A couple of years earlier, I published an article focusing on indications of earlier American attempts to kill President Putin. This came after our bipartisan political and media elites had begun vilifying the Russian leader as “another Hitler,” with leading media figures and top U.S. Senators loudly calling for his assassination. I noted that the Russians seemed concerned that such assassination efforts might even employ novel, biological means:
We should also recognize the reality that during the last seventy years America has maintained the world’s largest and best-funded biological warfare program, with our government spending many tens of billions of dollars on biowarfare/biodefense across those decades. And as I’ve discussed in a long article, there is even considerable evidence that we actually used those illegal weapons during the very difficult first year of the Korean War…
Soon after their invasion, the Russians publicly claimed that the U.S. had established a series of biolabs in Ukraine, which were preparing biological warfare attacks against their country. Last year one of their top generals declared that the global Covid epidemic was probably the result of a deliberate American biowarfare attack against China and Iran, echoing the accusations previously made by those countries.
Russian security concerns over our advanced biowarfare capabilities and the extreme recklessness with which we might employ them may explain the rather strange behavior of President Putin when he met in Moscow for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz shortly before the outbreak of the Ukraine war.
At the time many observers were puzzled why in each case the two national leaders were seated at opposite ends of a very long table, with Putin blandly suggesting that the placement was meant to symbolize the vast distance separating Russia and NATO’s Western leaders. Perhaps that innocuous explanation was correct. But I think it far more likely that the Russians were actually concerned that the Western leaders meeting him might be the immunized carriers of a dangerous biological agent intended to infect their president.
On the face of it, American attempts to assassinate Russia’s president would make little logical sense and these would obviously be extremely reckless and dangerous. But much the same could be said of American-orchestrated efforts to destroy Russia’s strategic nuclear bomber fleet, yet there seems very strong evidence that both these actions occurred. So we should seek to understand the logical framework, however irrational and unrealistic, under which such American decisions would be made.
I think an important insight may have been recently provided by Alistair Crooke, a former senior MI6 officer and Middle East peace negotiator, with a great deal of expertise and excellent sources in that latter region.
In an interview a couple of weeks ago, he claimed that America had been directly involved in the wave of Israeli assassinations against Iran’s leaders, taking such action despite the fact that we were currently in the midst of crucial nuclear negotiations with that country. Launching a massive assassination attack against the entire leadership of a country with whom you are currently negotiating is obviously an extremely destabilizing action, one that will hardly inspire confidence among other prospective negotiating partners and will surely long be remembered.
But according to Crooke, the logic behind such American action was the widespread belief that the hold of the Islamic Republic upon the 90 million people of that country was quite fragile, and that the successful assassination of most of the Iranian leaders would cause the collapse of the regime, much like the government of Syria had collapsed earlier this year after attacks by armed Islamicist forces based in Idlib. The American government was greatly disappointed when that wave of assassinations failed to trigger such a political collapse and instead redoubled popular support for the ruling regime.
Crooke suggested that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been targeted for death as well, but unlike so many other senior Iranian officials they had been fortunate enough to survive. Indeed, not long afterward, President Trump repeatedly threatened to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei unless he completely acceded to America’s demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Offhand, I can’t remember the last time a world leader has publicly threatened to assassinate one of his foreign counterparts in such fashion.
If Crooke’s analysis is correct, similarly mistaken reasoning might help to explain the likely American involvement in the attempt to assassinate Putin a few weeks earlier. Most of America’s political decisionmakers may have convinced themselves that the Russian regime was discredited, unpopular, and fragile, and that the sudden elimination of Russia’s president perhaps combined with a heavy blow to Russia’s nuclear retaliatory arsenal would cause its collapse.
Such an analysis might seem extremely implausible to most observers, but much of America’s leadership seems to exist in an unrealistic propaganda-bubble in which these notions have become widespread.
Consider, for example, estimates of Russian casualties in Ukraine. The Western-funded anti-Putin media outlet Mediazonahas used its considerable resources to continually sweep the Russian Internet in order to compile a running total of verified Russian losses in the Ukraine war, and as of July 2025 had confirmed a total of over 120,000 Russian soldiers killed. This is likely somewhat of an underestimate given that at least some such deaths have escaped public notice, and such totals certainly represent heavy losses in a Russian population of around 140 million.
But our Neocon-dominated American government and its intelligence services have instead accepted without question totally outrageous figures apparently based upon the dishonest claims of Ukrainian propagandists. Back in February, Trump told reporters that Russia had already suffered 1.5 million casualties, an astonishing figure, and just a few days ago, he claimed that almost 20,000 additional Russians had been killed in the month of July alone.
As former CIA officer Larry Johnson noted, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that an intelligence official described for him a destroyed Russian military that had already suffered two million casualties:
“The total now is two million. Most importantly,” the official stressed, “was how this number was described. All the best trained regular Army troops, to be replaced by ignorant peasants. All the best mid-grade officers and NCOs dead. All modern armor and fighting vehicles. Junk. This is unsustainable.”
Two million Russian casualties would probably amount to more than 5% of that country’s entire population of military-age males, and such enormous losses could not possibly be kept concealed. Those figures are obviously delusional.
But if America’s political leaders and many of their military advisors accept such fantasies, they could easily convince themselves that a defeated Russia is now ripe for regime-change triggered by Putin’s assassination. They would obviously hope that the replacement might be a new government closely aligned with the West and subservient to its demands, much as had been the case during the 1990s.
Other Neocon analysts have proposed Russia’s dismemberment into several different much smaller states, none of which would be able to resist American pressure and domination, with various such proposed maps floating around.
Thus, America’s likely involvement in assassination efforts against the top leadership of both Iran and Russia was based upon our unrealistic assumptions regarding the weakness of the two regimes, and the belief that elimination of their top leaders would lead to a collapse. Moreover, in each case these attacks rather treacherously occurred in the midst of ongoing negotiations, over Iran’s nuclear program in one case and over Russian willingness to end the Ukraine war in the other. We should also remember that Trump’s earlier assassination of Gen. Soleimani occurred when that latter leader had been treacherously lured to Iraq for peace negotiations.
Unfortunately, countries that are totally delusional on some national security matters are much more likely to be equally delusional on others as well. I have recently discovered that important elements of the American foreign policy establishment have convinced themselves that the government of China is also fragile and weak, and possibly ripe for collapse if it were hit by one or more sharp shocks. A blogpost brought these strange and surprising notions to my attention a couple of weeks ago.
The blogger highlighted a major article in the New Yorker focusing on aspects of a likely future war between America and China, and suggesting that in some respects it might be analogous to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza. Indeed, the subtitle even described Israel’s invasion of Gaza as “a dress rehearsal” for a future American war with China.
China has an enormous military, equipped with some of the world’s most highly-advanced weapons, and these include a full suite of the unstoppable hypersonic missiles that America has so far failed to successfully produce. So the belief that Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Gaza’s helpless, unarmed civilians holds any serious lessons for the course of a future American war with China seems rather strange reasoning indeed.
What’s Legally Allowed in War How U.S. military lawyers see Israel’s invasion of Gaza—and the public’s reaction to it—as a dress rehearsal for a potential conflict with a foreign power like China.
Colin Jones • The New Yorker • April 25, 2025 • 3,300 Words
The rather peculiar tone of that article may have been influenced by a very lengthy report published several months earlier by the Rand Corporation, whose title appeared to raise strong doubts about the military effectiveness of China’s armed forces.
The Chinese Military’s Doubtful Combat Readiness The People’s Liberation Army Remains Focused on Upholding Chinese Communist Party Rule, Not Preparing for War
Timothy R. Heath • The Rand Corporation • January 27, 2025 • 15,000 Words
However, after carefully reading that Rand study, I concluded that the title was somewhat misleading. The researcher correctly noted that China gave no indications of preparing to wage war against Taiwan, America, or any other country, and much unlike the U.S. had avoided involvement any military conflicts for the last half-century. But lack of interest in starting wars is quite different than lack of military effectiveness if attacked or sufficiently provoked, and conflating the two probably reflected the ideological climate found at most American think-tanks based upon the influence of their funders.
Finally, the lengthiest and most astonishing think-tank report of all was published just a couple of weeks ago by the Hudson Institute, one of our most unswervingly Neocon research organizations. This book-length study argued that China’s Communist government might be ripe for collapse and casually suggested that American military forces should be prepared for deployment inside China in order to seize crucial military and technological facilities and then reconstruct the government of that enormous country after the downfall of its current regime.
China After Communism Preparing for a Post-CCP China
Miles Yu et al. • The Hudson Institute • July 16, 2025 • 65,000 Words
The blogger quoted a couple of the paragraphs from the executive summary of this remarkable document:
While the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has weathered crises before, a sudden regime collapse in China is not entirely unthinkable. Policymakers need to consider what might happen and what steps they would have to take if the world’s longest-ruling Communist dictatorship and second-largest economy collapses due to its domestic and international troubles.
With chapters written by experts in military affairs, intelligence, economics, human rights, transitional justice, and constitutional governance, this report examines the initial steps that should be taken in the immediate aftermath of the CCP regime’s collapse and the long-term trajectory China might take after a stabilization period. Drawing on historical analysis, strategic foresight, and domain-specific expertise, this anthology describes these challenges as an exercise in possibilities. The different chapters explore how a single-party system collapses in key sectors of the country and how political institutions transform, as well as China’s unique political, economic, and social situation. Taken together, they assess the daunting tasks of stabilizing a long-repressed country after it has collapsed, in addition to the forces shaping China’s future. In so doing, the authors hope to offer policy recommendations for managing the risks and opportunities of a transition.
Having carefully read the entire report, I found it just as astonishing as was suggested by those paragraphs.
Over the last half-century, China has certainly been the world’s most successful major country, experiencing perhaps the highest sustained rate of economic growth in all of human history and now possessing a real economy far larger than that of the U.S.
Indeed, if we exclude the service sector, whose statistics are easily subject to manipulation, China’s real productive economy is now actually larger than the combined total for America, the EU, and Japan, while certainly growing much more rapidly. Meanwhile, America has experienced decades of stagnation, with heavy financialization replacing our once enormous real industrial strength. Moreover, in many technological sectors, China has now become the world leader, and it is near the very top in most of the others.
Earlier this year I published a lengthy comparative analysis of China and America, whose conclusions were hardly favorable to the latter:
American Pravda: China vs. America A Comprehensive Review of the Economic, Technological, and Military Factors
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 13, 2025 • 14,100 Words
The following month I summarized much of this same material in a lengthy interview with Mike Whitney:
One of the main authors of that Hudson Institute report was lawyer and conservative columnist Gordon G. Chang, probably best known as the author of the 2001 book The Coming Collapse of China, and a quarter-century of absolutely contrary real-life trends seems to have hardly changed any of his views.
The Hudson Institute is a leading DC think-tank, quite influential in mainstream political circles, and a report with five co-authors that runs 128 pages must surely carry considerable weight in establishment circles. So when it suggests that the Chinese government is fragile and might soon collapse, those policy makers hostile to China are likely to take such views quite seriously.
Suppose that a leading Chinese think-tank with close ties to the PRC government published a weighty report predicting that America might soon collapse, then went on to argue that Chinese military forces would need to be deployed in our own country to seize our key military and technological assets and also establish a new government organized along Chinese lines. I doubt that most American political leaders or ordinary citizens would view such Chinese proposals with total equanimity, and indeed the blogger quoted a shocked Western pro-China business executive who succinctly summarized some of the striking elements in that Hudson Institute research study:
… which provides detailed operational plans for inducing Chinese regime collapse through systematic information operations, financial warfare, and covert influence campaigns, followed by detailed protocols for U.S. post-collapse management including military occupation, territorial reorganization, and the installation of a political and cultural system vassalized to the U.S.
Rand and Hudson are two of our leading mainstream think-tanks and the New Yorker is one of our most prestigious media outlets. Taken together those major articles and reports could easily convince the ignorant and suggestible ideologues in our government that the Chinese military was weak and the Chinese government fragile and ripe for collapse.
If delusional beliefs regarding the fragility of the Iranian and Russian governments had already led to American assassination attempts against their top leadership, similar reasoning might easily result in targeting those of China as well, especially President Xi Jinping, widely regarded as the strongest Chinese leader in decades. And given all of the recent American assassination projects, the Chinese government might certainly have itself reached such conclusions.
Xi’s surprising absence caused some discussion in the media. I initially paid little attention to this issue, but then some commenter suggested an obvious explanation: Both Xi and Putin were concerned about the possible risk of American assassination.
Brazil is located within the Western Hemisphere, a region under full American military domination. Given the extremely reckless and unpredictable behavior of the American government, with President Trump having publicly threatened to assassinate Iran’s top leader just a couple of weeks earlier, both China and Russia may have believed that some risks should best be avoided.
Suppose an errant missile struck down an incoming presidential plane, with no conclusive means of proving the source, or an aircraft were destroyed by some more sophisticated methods. Over the years, Xi and Putin had both met on numerous occasions with Iranian President Raisi, with whom they had developed an excellent working relationship, and surely his 2024 death in a mysterious helicopter crash while returning from a foreign trip would have concentrated their minds.
Any such “conspiratorial” explanation has naturally been entirely avoided by the media. For example, a lengthy article late last month in the Wall Street Journal described how Xi had drastically reduced his foreign travel over the last year or so, noting that a China-EU summit originally set for Brussels was moved to Beijing after the Chinese explained that Xi had no plans to visit Europe. Since the end of 2024, Xi’s only foreign travels have been to Russia and to several countries in South-East Asia. Unlike Europe or Latin America, none of these countries nor the travel routes to reach them would be likely venues for serious American attempts at assassination.
When major countries develop a well-deserved reputation for assassinating the leaders of other major countries, often even doing so in the midst of international negotiations, such behavior may obviously have serious consequences. Back in 2017, President Xi was quite willing to visit Mar-a-Lago for face-to-face negotiations with President Trump, but I very much doubt the Chinese leader will be taking any trips to our own country in the foreseeable future.
In 1943, the U.S. Army Air Force began flying bomber missions deep into Germany. Bomber Generals thought they didn’t need fighter escorts because their bombers could defend themselves. The Army Air Force had substantial numbers of long-range P-38 fighters but sent them to the Pacific and Africa so they could prove fighter escorts were unneeded. This was a disaster as bombers were slaughtered. The US Army Air Force lost 5,548 heavy bombers during the war and over 50,000 airmen over Europe. The United States 8th Air Force in England lost more men than the U.S. Marine Corps in the Pacific theater.
“’Black Week’: The Darkest Days for the US Army Air Forces”; John Curatola; The National WWII Museum; October 5, 2023; https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war…
“Command Decision”; 1948; https://ok.ru/video/278508866211 ; great movie, but the plot was spun into a lie that bloody bomber missions were needed to prevent the production of far superior German jet fighters. These raids were failed attempts to cripple regular fighter production.
Despite Israel’s formidable military capabilities in the Middle East, it undoubtedly cannot establish regional dominance—a status implying absolute superiority over all adversaries and the voluntary submission of neighboring states.
Netanyahu’s bold claims of transforming Israel into an unshakable regional ruler sound like a fantasy detached from reality. His ambitions are not strategic calculations but dangerous illusions, ridiculed by history and debunked by the very logic of Middle Eastern conflict.
The Bloody March of the “Invincible” Hegemon
After Hamas’s successful October 2023 attack, Israel responded with relentless slaughter, attempting to erase Palestinians from the political map. Human rights advocates and experts unanimously labeled it genocide. Then, it methodically decimated Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon—through airstrikes, exploding phones, and other covert warfare tactics. It bombed Yemen to suppress the Houthis and struck Syria under the pretext of destroying weapons, though in reality, it sought to crush any resistance to its influence.
Then came Iran’s turn. Israel’s unprovoked attacks were not just strikes on nuclear facilities, but an attempt to:
– Sabotage U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, leaving Tehran with no diplomatic options.
– Decapitate Iran’s elite—killing generals, scientists, and diplomats to cripple its ability to respond.
– Drag the U.S. into a major war, shifting the burden of its adventurism onto Washington.
At best, Israel hoped to push the Iranian regime to collapse. But all of Netanyahu’s “bold strategist” efforts ended in obvious failure. The Iranian people rallied even more firmly around their government, and hatred for Israel’s bandit-like actions only grew. This reaction among ordinary Iranians is widely reported by diplomats and global media, including in the U.S. The exception is the Israeli press, which Netanyahu has heavily censored under an endless-seeming wartime regime.
Hegemon? Or Hostage to His Own Delusions?
If each of these actions brought temporary success, does that mean Israel has become the region’s unshakable master? If a hegemon is a force no one can resist, does Israel fit that definition? And crucially: Should neighbors bow their heads, acknowledging its “natural” superiority, as small nations do before great powers?
Reality only laughs in response. Israel’s might is not a sign of dominance, but a desperate attempt to suppress growing resistance. Each new attack breeds new enemies; each bombing creates new avengers. Netanyahu’s hollow “victories” are Pyrrhic—they don’t consolidate power but only rock the boat he himself sits in.
The idea of Israeli hegemony is a doomed utopia. Because true strength lies not in aerial terror but in the ability to negotiate—something neither Israel nor its prime ministers, including the latest failure Netanyahu, have ever learned.
Israel and the Illusion of Regional Dominance
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has demonstrated an impressive ability to survive and strengthen amid hostile surroundings. Relying on cutting-edge military technology and unwavering Western (especially U.S.) support, the country has gained significant influence in the Middle East. Yet, the dream of regional leadership remains unattainable—not due to a lack of strength but because of a lack of legitimacy, recognition from neighbors, and a coherent strategic vision.
With a $27.5 billion budget, Israel boasts one of the world’s most powerful militaries: a nuclear arsenal, advanced missile defense, elite special forces, and cyber warfare units. Its per capita military spending is among the highest globally, and overseas operations—like assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists or striking Syrian facilities—showcase its formidable capabilities.
But military might does not translate into political dominance. Operation Rising Lion in 2025—a joint U.S.-Israel strike on Iran’s nuclear sites—exemplified this paradox. Despite tactical success (temporarily destroying centrifuges in Natanz and the underground Fordow facility), the operation was a strategic failure. Iran not only quickly repaired the damage but, as Tehran announced, accelerated its nuclear program, enriching uranium to 90%. Meanwhile, Iran retaliated with effective missile strikes on Israeli bases and the U.S. Al Udeid base in Qatar.
Why Can’t Israel Become a Hegemon?
Several glaring reasons stand out:
The Demographic Time Bomb – The Arab population within Israel and in occupied territories (Gaza, West Bank) continues to grow, threatening the Jewish character of the state.
The Palestinian Wound – The unresolved Palestinian issue undermines Israel’s international reputation and unites the Arab world in solidarity with Palestinians. Even Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has repeatedly emphasized this.
Geopolitical Isolation – Even normalization with the UAE and Bahrain hasn’t changed the fundamental reality: the Arab world is unwilling to accept Israel as a legitimate regional leader. Powers like Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia see it as a rival, not a partner.
No Unifying Ideology – Unlike Iran’s “Shiite resistance” or Turkey’s Ottoman nostalgia, Israel lacks a regional vision. Its policy revolves around security and deterrence, not constructive engagement.
True hegemony requires not just military superiority but voluntary recognition. Yet, Israel remains an “outsider” in the region—due to its occupation of Palestinian lands, blockade of Gaza, and reliance on U.S. support, which is seen as dependence on an external power. Even technological marvels like the Iron Dome don’t negate its vulnerability to mass rocket attacks. And with 30% of its military budget coming from U.S. aid, its strategy is predictable.
Israel’s “security through superiority” approach has reached its limit. Operations like *Rising Lion* only accelerate arms races and consolidate enemies. Without a political settlement with Palestinians and normalized relations with neighbors, Israel is doomed to remain a fortress—not a leader.
The Alternative?
Shifting from intimidation to diplomacy. Creating regional security structures where Israel is an equal partner, not an occupier. For now, Netanyahu’s dream of hegemony remains a utopia—because force can be bought, but respect cannot.
Israel will not become a hegemon because it lacks not just military power but legitimacy. Its security depends not on strength but on political reconciliation with neighbors, including Palestinians. The world must realize: instead of blind support for Israel, diplomacy and dialogue are needed. Only this can break the cycle of violence and achieve lasting peace.
Viktor Mikhin, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Middle East Expert
Some well-meaning people (as below) are keen to point to ‘anti-Zionism’ in Haredi communities in occupied Palestine. The hope is that they might help to dismantle the Jewish state from within. But we should beware the false hope that this brings.
The anti-Zionism which was almost universally shared by Hasidic groups in 1947 has been subject to considerable dilution and indeed reversals. Some groups like the Bobov maintain a refusal to serve in the IDF and appear to have been more militant in this than the other large Hasidic sects.
On the other hand, the three largest Hasidic courts: Ger, Belz, and Viznitz, have, in July 2024 “instructed their members to continue” to “report at the enlistment centers after receiving pre-draft evaluation orders.” All four of these sects have adherents who live in illegal settlements. There is even a Bobov cluster in the illegal settlement of Beitar Illit, and the Bobov Rebbe has recently made a “triumphant visit to Israel”.
In addition Ger, Belz and Viznitz are closely associated with two ultra-orthodox parties the Agudat Yisrael, which is half of a coalition known as United Torah Judaism, which is, in turn, part of the current Netanyahu regime. We can safely conclude that all of these notionally anti-Zionist sects are Jewish supremacists.
Meanwhile one of the largest groups known as Chabad, has shifted from an anti-Zionist position in the 1920s to become an ultra-Zionist sect which has enthusiastically taken part in the genocide in Gaza. This sect, has over 5,000 branches worldwide, and more than 150 outposts in the UK.
But surely there are ‘genuine’ Anti-Zionist Hasidim?
Well, the main candidate for that accolade is the Satmar.
Satmar is the largest Hasidic sect that still professes to be anti-Zionist. However, after the launch of Al Aqsa Flood one of the leaders (there are two rival factions) of Satmar condemned the participation of the anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta in demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians. Neturei Karta appears to take some inspiration from the previous Satmar Rebbe, but there are apparently some contradictions within the Satmar camp. Among the rebukes from Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar Rebbes, based in Williamsburg, New York, was: “Unfortunately, we see how far they have strayed from the path… They are walking around the world together with the Arabs, with those who shout without any shame and support the murders, they walk with them in broad daylight with the Shtreimel and the gown and shout together with the haters of Israel and murderers of souls. This is a terrible desecration of the name of heaven, to strengthen murderers in the name of the Holy Torah and in the name of heaven.” Obviously, the anti-Zionism of this strand of Satmar, at least, does not extend to supporting the liberation of Palestine or support for Palestinian resistance.
Bibi thinks he’s accelerating towards some kind of victory. But he’s actually zooming off a cliff. As the reality of the Gaza genocide sinks in, the people of the region, and the world, will find a way to excise the Zionist cancer from West Asia and the planet. It could come through the ongoing Resistance strategy of imposing death from a thousand cuts, as the world collectively withdraws support from Israel and throws its weight behind Palestine. But we might also see nukes going off in Occupied Palestine, or the release of biological weapons targeting Ashkenazi Jews. By now, people are angry enough to try just about anything.
Israel’s genocide strategy is accelerationist in the sense of “let’s make things worse in hopes that it will somehow magically make things better.” The original accelerationists were left-wingers who wanted to intensify the ravages of techno-capitalism in hopes of provoking revolution. In recent decades the alt right has appropriated the concept to mean “let’s burn down society so our ethnonationalist utopia can emerge from its ashes.” Israel, for its part, wants to burn down West Asia, and with it the world, so Biblical prophecy can be fulfilled as a Jewish Messiah arises to rule the world from a rebuilt blood sacrifice temple in Jerusalem.
This kind of millennialist messianic madness isn’t new. Historian Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium gives us the pro-Jewish version, casting Christians as the main villains and Jews as innocent scapegoats. But since Christian and Muslim millenarianists agree that Jesus, the Prince of Peace and avatar of pure spirituality and universalist brotherly love, is the one true Messiah, whereas Jews loathe Jesus and yearn for a bloody Jewish conquerer to subjugate, exterminate, and enslave all non-Jews under a global Jewish dictatorship, it’s easy to understand why the Jewish version of messianic millenarianism is even more toxic than the Christian cults analyzed by Cohn.
About 375 years ago, Zionism was born in the ravings of the lunatic satanist Shabtai Tzvi as polished by his publicist, Nathan of Gaza. Together, the pair convinced the plurality of European, North African, and West Asian Jews to at least provisionally accept Tzvi as the Messiah who would lead them to conquer the Holy Land and following that, the world. While Tzvi’s career culminated ignominiously in the propitious year 1666, when he led his followers into nominal conversions to Islam in a successful attempt to convince the Ottoman sultan to spare his life, Tzvi’s brand of satanic antinomian Zionism sparked the movement that unleashed genocide on Palestine in 1948 and is accelerating it today.
Tzvi’s movement crashed and burned. Unsurprisingly, it elicited “persecution” of Jewish communities. (Naturally enough, Christian and Muslim rulers were wary of maniacal outbreaks of Jewish fanaticism, especially since the fanatics’ goal was to conquer and exterminate Christians and Muslims and enslave the survivors.)
There have been countless similar cases of Jewish excesses leading to “persecutions.” When Jewish predation (or parasitism if you will) reaches a certain point, the victims have nothing to lose and rise up in pogroms. If usurers who are also tax collectors and blackmailers and sellers of alcohol, drugs, and whores reduce whole communities to penury, those communities have been known to respond, naturally enough, with torches and pitchforks. Throw in the minoritarian but very real practice of black magic using the blood of Christian children, among other abominations, and you have a perfect blueprint for becoming the world’s most unpopular minority.
When Bibi’s genocidal plan to conquer West Asia river-to-river fails, and Jews return to the status they have always enjoyed (barring a brief post-World War II interlude) as the most hated people on the planet, there will doubtless be wailing and gnashing of teeth. But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe tribalist Jews are actually masochists who love being hated, and who torment the goyim precisely so they can find themselves “persecuted.” That’s what one of my favorite ex-Israelis, Alon Mizrahi, suggests in his latest Substack note:
In case you were wondering what the Israeli plan was, let me share with you that plan in great detail: it doesn’t exist.
There is no Israeli plan. There is no future arrangement they seek to achieve, or a finite situation.
Their plan is to keep escalating until they are forced to stop either by a devastating war, crippling sanctions, internal collapse, or a civil war (preferably: all at once).
That is the plan. Believe me: this, and only this, is the plan.
–
Zionists are notoriously braindead, souldead, and deluded, but they know that they cannot take over the Middle East and subjugate all of humanity to their rule, which is the only way they could censor ‘criticism of Israel’ and contain resistance forever. They know it’s impossible (unless god steps in and intervenes on their psychopathic behalf).
Their plan is not to achieve this; the plan is to die or get arrested trying. It is not a plan, but a yearning that cannot be controlled to fail in something big and then mourn the destruction and failure, like Ashkenazi Jews love to do so much.
They made mourning and complaints against humanity the center of their culture and identity, and that’s precisely the mental space they want to return to. This is the only space where they will feel safe and at home: when they are hated and everything they built has been destroyed. For them, a scenario like this is the ultimate proof that they are really god’s chosen.
I know it sounds psychotic, and it is. Nevertheless, that’s the collective yearning: to try big, to fail big, and to fall back to the comforting sense of persecution and hate.
–
This is why they’re doing all these counterintuitive things (from a self-preservation point of view). They want to be stopped. They long to be vilified and hated. They relish that hatred. It comforts and soothes them. When they are hated, in their mind, they become eternal Jews, fulfilling the decrees of an ancient Jewish existence.
They don’t hate being hated. They love it. Once you realize this, things will start making sense to you.
–
God bless Alon Mizrohi for escaping from the Israeli prison, and the Jewish-tribalist mind-prison. Like Gilad Atzmon and Miko Peled, he’s living proof that being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t necessarily prevent a person from uttering prophetic truths.
On 19 July, the Mail on Sunday revealed that Inter-Mediate, a shadowy firm founded by Jonathan Powell, now National Security advisor to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, brokered the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Damascus and London.
This included a heavily publicized meeting between UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Syria’s self-appointed President Ahmad al-Sharaa, two weeks earlier. The outlet also exposed how the British state-funded Inter-Mediate operates a dedicated office in Syria’s Presidential Palace.
Britain’s opposition Conservative party has demanded a formal inquiry into Powell’s use of Inter-Mediate “to run back channels to terrorist groups” and the conflict of interest created by his unelected role.
As Starmer’s national security advisor – described as wielding “more influence over foreign policy than anyone in government after the prime minister himself” – Powell operates entirely outside parliamentary accountability. A Whitehall source told the Mail on Sunday:
“These are essentially outsourced spies and spooks undertaking ‘back channel’ discussions with political leaders and armed groups to reach negotiated settlements.”
Terrorists to technocrats
Inter-Mediate’s central role in assisting former Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Sharaa’s rise to power in Damascus was first revealed in May by Independent Arabia. This followed disclosures from former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford (2011 – 2014), that in 2023 a British “non-governmental organization” sought his personal assistance in transforming HTS – in particular Sharaa, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad Julani when he was an ISIS chief – from “terrorists” into politicians. While Ford did not name Inter-Mediate, Independent Arabia did – and mainstream media ignored it entirely.
Now that Inter-Mediate’s embedment with Damascus’s post-Bashar al-Assad government has been confirmed, western media has belatedly begun describing Syria’s new rulers as comprised of barbarous extremists linked to Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Yet few are willing to interrogate the far graver implications of a British intelligence-linked firm enjoying intimate access to Syria’s seat of power – and the extraordinary leverage that affords London over the HTS-led administration and its leadership.
Compounding this is the deeply suspicious timing: Powell assumed his advisory role just days before HTS violently seized Damascus. Starmer immediately declared that Assad’s ouster heralded “a more active role” for Britain in West Asia and dispatched top diplomats to meet with HTS officials. The media acknowledged these summits were completely illegal, as HTS was a proscribed terror group under British law.
Despite the occupation state routinely executing highly destructive airstrikes against government and military infrastructure since former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s fall, HTS appears undeterred. We are thus left to ponder whether the Al-Qaeda-rooted government’s brutal internal repression, and concerted inaction over Tel Aviv’s military bombardments and incursions into its territory, are ultimately directed by MI6.
‘Deny responsibility’
Inter-Mediate’s website offers few clues to its real agenda. It lists a cadre of former western diplomats and military officials as staff and board members, and vaguely claims to facilitate “backchannels with hard-to-reach conflict actors” where “direct negotiations are impossible or inadvisable.” It boasts of creating space for political solutions “in some of the world’s most intractable conflicts.”
Syria was quite some “intractable conflict” – not least because Assad’s “popular” and sovereign government steadfastly refused to relinquish power to mass-murdering CIA and MI6-backed foreign elements that invaded the country in 2011.
Leaked emails of former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton indicate Inter-Mediate was active in Damascus from the first stages of the foreign-fomented “crisis.” In March 2012, Clinton’s senior aide Jake Sullivan contacted her, announcing Powell had “launched a new NGO that has already initiated some very interesting work below the radar.”
An attached email from Powell noted Inter-Mediate had “[set] up secret channels between insurgents and governments” in several countries, was preparing to start work in Burma, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, and sought to pitch its services to senior US State Department officials.
He added his firm “work[ed] closely” with the British Foreign Office, National Security Council, and MI6. At this time, it was well-understood in Washington that Syrian “insurgents” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda, among other ultra-extremist entities.
The evidence suggests Inter-Mediate’s relationship with the forces that became HTS dates back over a decade, and that London’s project to replace Assad with a compliant Al-Qaeda-linked regime has been in motion ever since. Its operational office inside Syria’s palace is not a recent development, but the culmination of years of quiet penetration. Nor is Inter-Mediate the only British intelligence cutout embedded in West Asia’s corridors of power.
As The Cradle has previously documented, Lebanon’s security and intelligence apparatus is heavily penetrated by the British, to the extent that Foreign Office contractor Torchlight maintains a dedicated office within Beirut’s Military Intelligence Directorate.
Leaked documents related to this infiltration noted London’s presence was a highly effective means of “rapidly developing relationships of trust” with the agency’s high-ranking staff, and ensuring they were “unlikely to say ‘no’” to further involvement of British personnel and technology in the Directorate’s sensitive operations.
Other leaked files related to the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), a British clone of the US CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), reveal the organization maintains offices in Lebanon’s parliament building.
An official review of WFD’s activities explicitly states its “central rationale” is to conduct “controversial” projects overseas that London “could not or would not wish to undertake directly,” therefore limiting “damage to official government-to-government relationships,” while “avoiding the danger” of “British government presence [being] interpreted as foreign interference.”
“[WFD’s] arm’s length relationship … provides the [Foreign Office] with the best safeguard … the less the [Foreign Office] seeks to exercise control the more it can deny responsibility … The Foundation provides a necessary and valuable instrument over and above those which the [Foreign Office] can provide for itself.”
Powell’s warpath
The Mail on Sunday’seditorial accompanying the Inter-Mediate exposé highlights another key concern: the outsized power wielded by former UK prime minister Tony Blair-era figures in Starmer’s government. Powell is not alone – Peter Mandelson, now the UK’s ambassador to Washington, is another. The editorial bluntly states that these Blairites “are the real forces in British diplomacy,” while Lammy plays “an effectively ceremonial role,” executing policies scripted by Powell and others behind the scenes.
While the pair were said to maintain “formidable private networks they are able to mobilize” to influence British government action and policy, “some within Downing Street” were reportedly “growing increasingly wary about the influence of these smooth Blairites.” As one official put it, “at what point does ‘experience’ and ‘guidance’ become ‘control’?”
That question also applies to Inter-Mediate’s relationship with the new Syrian government. Is Powell, via his company and government position, finally realizing Blair’s long-standing dream of reshaping West Asia in Britain’s image? The former prime minister’s Institute for Global Change has openly called for regime change in Iran and boasts of nurturing anti-government networks across the region.
Powell’s history is instructive. In September 2002, he pressed the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee to exaggerate Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to justify the illegal Anglo-American invasion six months later.
He believed it a “bit of a problem” that the assessment did not conclude Iraq posed an urgent, imminent military threat, insisting its wording be changed to ensure maximum impact on media reporting, and public perceptions. A recent profile of Powell suggests he remains committed to Blair’s mission:
“The historical record shows [Powell] had doubts about Iraq’s WMDs, but thought Saddam Hussein had to go ‘because he was a ruthless dictator suppressing his people’. This was, as Blair named it, ‘liberal interventionism’, which called for the west to ‘get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’ … [Powell] has the same instincts today. After Iraq, and Afghanistan, he still wants to save the world.”
If Starmer’s unelected security chief is indeed scripting foreign policy through Inter-Mediate, then Britain is no longer merely meddling in West Asia but is also governing it by proxy. And if Powell’s loyal Al-Qaeda client in Damascus is the new face of “liberal interventionism,” it is clear the colonial playbook has not just returned – it never left.
Note: This blog series is derived from“Did Six Million Really Die?” book by Richard E. Harwood (1974) with many additional sources, originally presented in DJ Noble Protagonist’s E-book (The Battle to preserve Western Civilization): https://archive.org/details/@nobleprotagonist
It is true that in 1945, Allied propaganda did claim that all the concentration camps, particularly those in Germany itself, were “Death Camps,” but not for long. On this question the American historian Professor Harry Elmer Barnes wrote, “These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dora, but it was soon demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention was then moved to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow, Ravensbruck, Mauthausen, Brezeznia and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been extended as needed.”
What had happened was that certain honest observers among the British & American occupation forces in Germany, while admitting that many camp inmates had died of disease & starvation in the final months of the war, had found no evidence after all of “gas chambers.”
As a result, eastern camps in the Russian zone of occupation, such as Auschwitz & Treblinka, gradually came to the fore as horrific centers of “extermination”, though no one was permitted to see them. This tendency has lasted almost to the present day.
Here in these camps it was all supposed to have happened, but with the Iron Curtain brought down firmly over them it was difficult to verify such charges. The Communists claimed that four million people died at Auschwitz in gigantic gas chambers accommodating 2,000 people, and no one could argue to the contrary.
THE LEUCHTER REPORT
In 1984 in Toronto, Canada, German-born publisher, Ernst Zundel, distributed his own edition of the pamphlet, “Did Six Million Really Die?”, and sent copies out to Canadian Members of Parliament; members of the clergy; journalists and broadcasters. A year later he was subsequently put on trial and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment followed by automatic deportation, after a Jewish complaint under an obscure law prohibiting the publication of “false news”.
This sentence was passed even though both the defense and the prosecution agreed that the bulk of “Did Six Million Really Die?” was correct and only small points were in dispute.
“The Leuchter Report” was actually commissioned by Ernst Zundel, to act in his defense, after his 1985 conviction was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1987, and a retrial was ordered to commence in January, 1988.
In February 1988, the first forensic examination of the alleged execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, was conducted by Fred Leuchter and subsequently published as “The Leuchter Report”.
Fred Leuchter, was an engineer who specializes in the design & fabrication of execution hardware used in prisons throughout the United States. One of his projects was the design of a new gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City.
In essence Fred Leuchter took samples from the walls of the alleged gas chambers and also from the walls of the de-lousing chambers so he could compare the claim that rather than Zyklon B being used to gas inmates of the various camps, it was actually used to de-louse the inmates clothing of lice in order to prevent outbreaks of typhus.
Leuchter’s results were overwhelming. He could find no trace of Zyklon B in the walls of the alleged gas chambers, yet it was overwhelmingly prevalent in the walls of the de-lousing chambers where the inmates’ clothing was cleaned of lice.
The Leuchter Report concludes, “After reviewing all the material and inspecting all of the sites at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, your author finds the evidence overwhelming; there were no execution gas chambers at any of these locations. It is the best engineering opinion of this author that the alleged gas chambers at the inspected sites could not have been, or now, be utilized or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.”
Despite Fred Leuchter’s neutral position in questioning the official version of the “Holocaust” and his evidence based upon the exact science of forensic chemistry, Ernst Zundel was once again found guilty, albeit this time he was given a nine month sentence as opposed to the 15 month one he was given previously. He was granted bail after signing a “gag order”, promising not to write or speak about the “Holocaust”.
In 2003, Ernst Zundel was arrested at his quiet home in the mountain region of eastern Tennessee. U.S. authorities seized him on the pretext that he had violated immigration regulations, or had missed an interview date with US immigration authorities, even though he had entered the US legally, was married to an American citizen, had no criminal record, and was acting diligently, and in full accord with the law, to secure status as a permanent legal resident.
After being held for two weeks, he was deported to Canada. For two years he was held in solitary confinement in the Toronto West Detention Centre as a supposed threat to national security.
In 2005, Zundel was deported to Germany, just as Jewish groups had been demanding. Upon his arrival at Frankfurt airport, he was immediately arrested and taken to Mannheim prison to await trial for the “thought crime” of “denying the Holocaust.”
A few months later, the public prosecutor in Mannheim formally charged Zundel with inciting “hatred” by having written or distributed texts that “approve, deny or play down” genocidal actions carried out by Germany’s wartime regime, and which “denigrate the memory of the (Jewish) dead.” .
Zundel’s three-month trial concluded in 2007, when a court in Mannheim sentenced him to five years imprisonment for the crime of “popular incitement” under Germany’s notorious “Holocaust denial” statute. The court upheld efforts by German authorities to punish individuals for writings that are legal in the country (Canada) where they are published. Jewish groups quickly, and predictably, expressed approval of the verdict.
Zundel was released from prison in 2010. Banned from returning to either Canada or the United States, he went to his family home in Germany’s Black Forest region, where he resided until his death.
Meanwhile, Fred Leuchter was also “persecuted” & blacklisted by promoters of the Holohoax. In 1991, he was arrested & jailed in Germany for giving an anti-Holocaust lecture for Günther Deckert, a well-known political party leader. Leuchter was allowed out on bail. He returned to the U.S. and chose not to go back to Germany to stand trial. Nonetheless, he lost his livelihood as a result.
The Allied Committee of Inquiry has to date proven that no poison gas was ever used to kill prisoners in the following concentration camps… Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, and satellite camps.. Natzweller, Neuengamme, Niederhagen, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Stutthoff, Theresienstadt. In all cases where gassings were alleged, it could be proven that torture was used to extract confessions, and witnesses have lied. Any former inmate who, during their debriefing continues to allege that Poison gas was used to murder people, in particular Jews, are to be reported to this office, and if they insist on lying further, they are to be charged with perjury.” – Major Miller, Commanding Officer Allied Military Police Vienna
Note: In a 1985 court case, Dr. William Lindsey testified under oath that the Auschwitz gassing story is physically impossible. Based on his careful examination of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, and on his years of experience, he declared, “I have come to the conclusion that no one was willfully or purposefully killed with Zyklon B in this manner. I consider it absolutely impossible.”
Note: When American & British forces overran Western & Central Germany in the spring of 1945, they were followed by troops charged with discovering and securing any evidence of German war crimes. Among them was Dr. Charles Larson, one of America’s leading forensic pathologists, who was assigned to the US Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Department. As part of a US War Crimes Investigation Team, Dr. Larson performed autopsies at Dachau and some twenty other German camps, examining on some days more than 100 corpses. After his grim work at Dachau, he was questioned for three days by US Army prosecutors. In a 1980 newspaper interview Dr. Larson confirmed that there “never was a case of poison gas uncovered.”
FINAL FORENSIC NAIL IN THE COFFIN – AUSCHWITZ STORY
Germar Rudolf was born on October 29, 1964, in Limburg, Germany. He studied chemistry at Bonn University, where he graduated in 1989 as a Diplom-Chemist. From 1990-1993, he prepared a PhD thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State research in conjunction with the University of Stuttgart. Parallel to this and in his spare time, Rudolf re-examined Auschwitz, Birkenau and other installations and buildings, testing brick and mortar samples of delousing chambers & alleged “gas chambers” for traces of Zyklon B.
Following the pioneering work of Fred Leuchter, Germar put the final forensic nail into the coffin of the Auschwitz story with his 1993 expert report, The Rudolf Report, which proved the “Holocaust” to be a Holohoax. Even though this book on Auschwitz was scientific in nature and utterly apolitical, Rudolf’s home & office were raided three times; his computers & papers seized.
In 1994 & 1995 he was charged and tried in Germany for his expert report. As a scientist, he found the “gassing” claims to be scientifically untenable. Rudolf was found guilty and convicted to 14 month imprisonment. As a result, the University of Stuttgart denied him to pass his final PhD exam.
Rudolf tried to avoid serving this prison term by going into British exile with his young wife and two babies. There he started a small revisionist outlet for German language material, Castle Hill Publishers, and VHO.org, a multilingual website, which within a few years outgrew other revisionist websites by size & traffic. In early 1999, due to the permanent persecutorial pressure, his wife filed for divorce and returned to Germany with their two babies.
When Germany wanted to have Rudolf extradited from Britain in 1999, he fled to the United States, where he applied for political asylum. While his case wound its way through the U.S. legal system, Rudolf expanded his publishing activities into English language material, for instance by launching the ambitious “Holocaust Handbook Series” [linked at the top of this article].
In 2004 Rudolf married again, this time a U.S. citizen, and soon became the father of a young baby daughter. Immediately after this marriage was recognized as genuine by the U.S. Immigration Services in October 2005, and at a time when a hearing of his asylum case was just being scheduled by a U.S. Federal Court, the U.S. government had Rudolf arrested and deported to Germany.
Hence, his asylum hearing which took place in absentia a few months later was nothing but a farce. In Germany, Rudolf was duly arrested and put on trial again for his revisionist publishing activities abroad. Although Rudolf’s activities had been perfectly legal both in the United Kingdom and the United States, Germany nevertheless applied German censorship laws and sentenced Rudolf to another 30 months imprisonment.
On July 5, 2009, Rudolf was released from prison. After a legal battle against the U.S. government lasting almost two years, Rudolf finally succeeded in obtaining an immigrant visa for the U.S. He has been reunited with his wife & daughter since August, 2011.
Note: In 1995, one of France’s most influential & respected magazines, L’Express, acknowledged that “everything is false” about the Auschwitz “gas chamber” that for decades has been shown to tens of thousands of tourists yearly.
Note: On page 541 of (Jewish historian) Olga Wormser-Migot’s thesis on the system of National Socialists concentration camps, there is a passage on the “gas chambers”. There, the reader will find three additional surprises. According to Olga, the “problem” lies in attempting to determine whether the “gas chambers” at Ravensbrück (Germany) & Mauthausen (Austria) ever existed; she concludes that they didn’t.
GAS CHAMBERS WERE NOT CREMATORIES
Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the United States War Department in the occupation forces in Germany & Austria for six years after the war, made an astonishing statement in the widely read Catholic magazine, Our Sunday Visitor, on June 14, 1959.
Pinter admitted, “I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a U.S. War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors & sightseers there and erroneously described as a ‘gas chamber’ was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but since that was in the Russian zone of occupation, we were not permitted to investigate since the Russians would not allow it. From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany & Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria and consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject.”
Pinter tells a very different story from the customary propaganda. He is very astute on the question of the crematory being represented as a chamber. This is a frequent ploy because no such thing as a “gas chamber” has ever been shown to exist in these camps, hence the deliberately misleading term “gas oven”, aimed at confusing a gas chamber with a crematorium. The latter, usually single furnace and similar to the kind of thing employed today, were used quite simply for the cremation of those persons who had died from various natural causes within the camp, particularly infectious diseases.
This fact was conclusively proved by the German arch bishop Faulhaber of Munich. He informed the Americans that during the Allied air raid on Munich, in September 1944, 30,000 people were killed. The archbishop requested the authorities at the time to cremate the bodies, but was told that, unfortunately, this plan could not be carried out; the crematorium, having only one furnace, was not able to cope with the many bodies of the air raid victims.
Clearly, therefore, the crematorium could not have coped with the 238,000 Jewish bodies which were allegedly cremated there. In order to do so, the crematorium would have to be kept going for 326 years without stopping and 530 tons of ashes would have been recovered.
The figures of Dachau casualties are typical of the kind of exaggerations that have since been drastically revised. In 1946, a memorial plaque was unveiled at Dachau by Philip Auerbach, the Jewish State-Secretary in the Bavarian Government who was convicted for embezzling money, which he claimed as compensation for non-existent Jews. The plaque read, “This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here.”
Since then, the official casualty figures of Dachau have had to be steadily revised downwards, and now stand at only 20,600; the majority, from typhus & starvation only at the end of the war.
Note: Dachau was one the first concentration camp set up soon after the National Socialists came to power. These first camps were in reality large prisons to which inmates had been sentenced by the ordinary criminal courts to fixed terms of imprisonment. Membership in the Communist Party was a frequent criminal offense. Jews were largely involved in communist activities, and were imprisoned accordingly.
Over the past 77 years, we Palestinians have faced an absurd type of multilayered injustice,unspeakable barbarity, chronic brutality,and compounded oppression with a twist.
* We are the only oppressed group who are vilified, condemned and labelled as terrorists, for merely existing.
We are the wronged, named as oppressors, the scorned named as haters, the slaughtered named as criminals, the dispossessed named as villains, we are the murdered named as the killers.
* We are the only oppressed group who are not allowed to identify or name their oppressor.
We cannot call the spade a spade and say “Jews occupy our land” despite the fact that the only criteria that enables any human to come from any corner around the globe to settle in our land is their Jewishness.
We cannot say “Jews are killing us” despite the fact that every single one of the occupiers is Jewish, every fallen bomb is dropped by a Jewish pilot, every bullet is shot by the hand of a Jewish soldier who pulled the trigger,every genocidal policy is drawn by a Jewish commander who gave the orders.
Yet the only word we are allowed to identify as our oppressor is “Zionism”, a conceptual shadowy word with no connection to real people who commit real Crimes Against Humanity around the clock.
Zionism did not drop 100,000 tons of explosives over Gaza killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of innocent souls. People who identify as Jewish did.
* We are the only oppressed group who aremanipulated to grief for and bemoan the alleged suffering of their oppressor before their own, otherwise we are shunned and blacklisted as “holocaust deniers”
Our persistent suffering is secondary,diminished by the“eternal victimhood“ of our occupiers. Our pain is peripheral, dwarfed in comparison to theirs andvalidated only by the magnitude of our reverence to the “unique suffering“ of our oppressors
* We are the only oppressed group who are demanded to:
– Gratefully consent to the theft of their historic homeland, – Gracefully lay down their only means of survival, their resistance
– Respectfully grant legitimacy to those whose aim is to exterminate them, – Obediently protect the security of those from whom they saw nothing but savagery and barbarity – Humbly guarantee a permanent presence and a prosperous future for those whose very ideology views the other with utter contempt as mere “animals, created only to serve them” and calls for their annihilation.
* We are the only oppressed group who are forbidden to discuss or ask questions about the ideology of their oppressorswho claim to be the “chosen” above all others and that “God gave them the land”.
* We are the only oppressed group who are barred from investigating the extended tentacles of their oppressors, namely theextent of power and roleof the global Jewish lobby in supporting and maintaining the regime that caused and maintained our Nakba for eight decades, under the pretext that there are some Jews who are against it.
As if all that is not enough, even as we get slaughtered, maimed, starved and eradicated, with our babies shredded to pieces we are still expectedto watch our words and not to ever offend or hurt the feelings of our oppressors otherwise we aredefamedas “hateful antisemites”.
Is it any wonder that our Nakba is still raging, eight decades and counting!
Israel is aggressively implementing plans to shape Palestine’s future and the broader region, sculpting its vision for the ‘day after’ its genocide in Gaza.
The latest, bizarre iteration of this strategy proposes fragmenting the occupied West Bank into so-called ’emirates,’ starting with the ’emirate of Hebron.’
This unexpected twist in Israel’s protracted search for alternative Palestinian leadership first surfaced in the staunchly pro-Israeli US newspaper, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). It then quickly dominated all Israeli media.
The report details a letter from a person identified by The WSJ as “the leader of Hebron’s most influential clan.” Addressed to Nir Barakat, Jerusalem’s former Israeli mayor, the letter from Sheikh Wadee’ al-Jaabari appeals for “cooperation with Israel” in the name of “co-existence.”
This “co-existence,” according to the “clan leader”, would materialise in the “Emirate of Hebron.” This “emirate” would “recognize the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people,” in exchange for reciprocal recognition of the “Emirate of Hebron as the Representative of the Arab residents in the Hebron District.”
The story may seem perplexing. This is because Palestinian discourse, regardless of geography or political affiliation, has never entertained such an absurd concept as united West Bank “emirates.”
Another element of absurdity is that Palestinian national identity and pride in their people’s unwavering resilience, especially in Gaza, are at an unprecedented apex. To float such clan-based alternatives to legitimate Palestinian leadership seems ill-conceived and is destined to fail.
Israel’s desperation is palpable. In Gaza, it cannot defeat Hamas and other Palestinian factions who have resisted the Israeli takeover of the Strip for 21 months. All attempts to engineer an alternative Palestinian leadership there have utterly collapsed.
This failure has compelled Israel to arm and fund a criminal gang that operated before 7 October 2023, in Gaza. This gang functions under the command of Yasser Abu Shabab.
The gang has been implicated in a litany of violent activities. These include hijacking humanitarian aid to perpetuate famine in Gaza and orchestrating violence associated with aid distribution, among other egregious crimes.
Like the clan leader of Hebron, the Abu Shabab criminal gang possesses no legitimacy and no public support among Palestinians. But why would Israel resort to such disreputable figures when the Palestinian Authority (PA), already engaged in “security coordination” with Israel in the West Bank, is ostensibly willing to comply?
The answer lies in the current Israeli extremist government’s adamant refusal to acknowledge Palestinians as a nation. Thus, even a collaborating Palestinian nationalist entity would be deemed problematic from an Israeli perspective.
While Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is not the first Israeli leadership to explore clan-based alternatives among Palestinians, the Israeli prime minister and his extremist allies are exceptionally determined to dismantle any Palestinian claim to nationhood. This was explicitly stated by extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. He famously declared in Paris, in March 2023, that a Palestinian nation is an “invention.”
Thus, despite the PA’s willingness to cooperate with Israel in controlling Gaza, Israel remains apprehensive. Empowering the PA as a nationalist model fundamentally contravenes Israel’s overarching objectives of denying the Palestinian people their very claim to nationhood and, consequently, statehood and sovereignty.
Though Israel has consistently failed to establish and sustain its own alternative Palestinian leadership, its repeated efforts have invariably proven disruptive and violent.
Prior to the Nakba of 1948, the Zionist movement, alongside British authorities colonizing Palestine, heavily invested in undermining the Arab Higher Committee, a nationalist body comprising several political parties. They achieved this by empowering collaborating clans, hoping to dilute the Palestinian nationalist movement.
When Israel occupied the remainder of historic Palestine in 1967, it reverted to the same divide-and-conquer tactics. For instance, it established a Palestinian police force directly commanded by Israeli military administrations, in addition to creating an underground network of collaborators.
Following the overwhelming victory of nationalist candidates in the 1976 elections in occupied Palestine, Israel responded by cracking down on PLO-affiliated politicians, arresting, deporting and assassinating some.
Two years later, in 1978, it launched its ‘Village Leagues’ project. It hand-picked compliant traditional figures, designating them as the legitimate representatives of Palestinians.
These individuals, armed, protected and financed by the Israeli occupation army, were positioned to represent their respective clans in Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Gaza and elsewhere.
Palestinians immediately denounced them as collaborators. They were widely boycotted and socially ostracised.
Eventually, it became evident that Israel had no alternative but to engage directly with the PLO. This culminated in the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the subsequent formation of the PA.
The fundamental problem, however, persisted: the PA’s insistence on a Palestinian state remains anathema to an Israel that has shifted dramatically to the right.
This explains the Netanyahu regime’s unwavering insistence that the PA has no role in Gaza in any ‘day after’ scenario. While the PA could serve Israel’s interest in containing the rebellious Strip, such a triumph would inevitably recenter the discussion of a Palestinian state—a concept repugnant to most Israelis.
There is no doubt that neither the Abu Shabab gang nor the Hebron emirate will govern Palestinians, either in Gaza or the West Bank. Israel’s insistence on fabricating these alternatives, however, underscores its historic determination to deny Palestinians any sense of nationhood.
Israel’s persistent fantasies of control invariably fail. Despite their profound wounds, Palestinians are more unified than ever, their collective identity and nationhood hardened by relentless resistance and countless sacrifices.
Israel, with its small population, has a socially and politically fragile structure due to its different minority groups. The fact that Arabs are the largest minority group has led Israel to establish more careful relations with other groups and to try to strengthen the ties between these minorities and Jewish elements. In this context, Israel’s relations with the Druze, its efforts to integrate them into society, and how this group is used as a political lever should be examined.
There are approximately 150,000 Druze in Israel; they live mainly in the Carmel, Galilee, and Golan regions. Druze, which emerged in Egypt in the 11th century, is seen as a common interpretation of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The Druze, who do not intermarry with other religious groups, have a very closed social structure. The exact number of Druze is unknown, but today they live as a small minority group in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
The Druze are being integrated into Israeli society
After the Ottoman Empire withdrew from Palestine, Zionist leaders sought to establish close relations with the Druze in order to benefit from their support in the process of establishing a state. These leaders positioned the Druze as a group distinct from the Arabs and attempted to gain the support of this minority by claiming that there was a religious connection between them.
Although a paramilitary alliance between Jews and Druze began in the late 1930s, it cannot be said that this alliance encompassed the entire Druze minority. This is because part of this minority participated in the Arab uprising that began in 1936 and then fought against the Jews in 1948.
Israel, given its demographic structure, sought to strengthen its ties with small minority groups other than Arabs. The state’s policies and privileges toward the Druze were intended to separate this community from the Arab community and bring it closer to the Jewish community. In this context, the Druze were defined as a separate nationality in 1962 and separated from their Arab identity. This situation has created a perception that the Druze are favoured both in state institutions and in Jewish society. In addition, in 1976, a separate Druze education sector was established to protect the Druze culture, and this community was made subject to compulsory military service.
Israel applied this policy against the Palestinian Druze and, after occupying the Golan Heights, also applied it to the Syrian Druze. After occupying the Golan, Israel forced a large part of the 130,000-strong population to migrate, while allowing 6,396 Druze to remain in the region, adopting a moderate approach similar to that toward the Palestinian Druze in order to separate them from the Arabs. However, the Syrian Druze did not respond in kind to Israel’s policy. Although they did not like the Syrian regime, they continued to see themselves as part of Syria and dreamed of becoming part of Syria again.
Role of the army in establishing special relations with the Druze
In Israel, the army is seen as an institution that unites different segments of society. The army serves to strengthen the ties between the state and both Jews who have immigrated to Israel and minority groups who are drafted into military service. In particular, members of minority groups who serve in the military are viewed with a certain degree of respect by the Jewish community. Therefore, the conscription of the Druze minority has been part of Israel’s policy to integrate them into Jewish society. After October 2023, many Druze soldiers served in the Israeli army that entered Gaza, and more than 430 Druze lost their lives as a result of Hamas attacks.
In response to Israel’s policy of separating the Druze from the Arabs and integrating them into Jewish society, Druze leaders have also been receptive to serving in the army in order to gain certain advantages. Through this approach, Druze leaders hoped to overcome structural issues such as insufficient investment in Arab and Druze villages and employment problems resulting from the state’s institutional discrimination.
Israel lifts the veil of institutionalised discrimination against Druze
Despite the Israeli government’s policy toward the Druze, they continue to face discrimination from the Jewish community. Although the Druze sought to escape discrimination by serving in the army, they reported that they were subjected to discrimination by the Jewish community after leaving military service. Indeed, Druze Member of Parliament Said Nafaa said, “We hoped that serving in the army would give us equal rights with other Israelis. However, we soon discovered that this was an illusion.” For this reason, some Druze men today refuse to enter military service. For example, although Druze do not face problems in terms of education, most encounter difficulties in finding employment. Additionally, Druze who wish to live in Jewish areas are required to pay above-average rent. These and similar problems faced by the Druze do not currently pose a security threat in Israel. However, if Israel does not improve its policy toward the Druze, there is a possibility that the Druze could become a security threat by separating themselves from Jewish society. Israel’s latest move to address this issue has been the approval of a five-year plan worth $1.1 billion to solve the housing problem of the Druze minority living in the north of the country.
Israel’s intention to use the Druze as leverage in Syria
Just as it did during its occupation of the Golan Heights, Israel is currently attempting to intervene in areas of Syria with a high Druze population. On the one hand, Israel is inciting the Druze population in the region against the new Syrian government, while on the other hand, it is attempting to gain their support by offering them certain opportunities. In this context, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz recently announced that Syrian Druze would soon be allowed to enter the country for work purposes. In addition, during the recent tensions in the Druze neighbourhood of Cermana in Damascus, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to send military forces to Cermana to protect the Druze. However, the Druze rejected this offer. In the recent events in Suwayda, Israel launched attacks on the Syrian army to support the Druze in their conflict with the Syrian army. Israel wants to use the Druze in Syria for its own strategic purposes, just as it has done with the Druze in Palestine, by offering them various opportunities. Thus, Israel, which sees stability in Syria as a threat to its interests, is stirring up the Druze issue that has arisen in the new Syria and supporting the Druze in order to destabilise the region and prepare it for its own occupation.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu geared up for what was intended as a triumphant visit to Washington, commencing on Monday, 7 July 2025, Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades in Beit Hanoun were meticulously preparing their own stark counter-narrative. On the very inaugural day of the Israeli leader’s high-stakes diplomatic trip, the battalion launched a devastating strike, inflicting significant casualties on Israeli soldiers. The Israeli army, notorious for obfuscating its military losses, begrudgingly acknowledged five soldiers killed and 14 wounded, some critically.
This audacious operation, coupled with numerous others across both northern and southern Gaza, offered an undeniable truth: Israel’s utter inability to secure any segment of the Strip. This failure undermines its proclaimed intent to establish control over the genocide-stricken territory, seemingly as a prelude to forcibly displacing the entire population, first to Rafah in the south, and ultimately, towards Egypt.
Netanyahu may possess a sharp political cunning, yet his acumen primarily serves his personal survival as a politician. It demonstrably fails to harness politics for the genuine good of his nation, let alone for global stability. He might project an image of eloquence, but this perceived mastery of words often flourishes only because he remains largely unchallenged within his customary political circles.
Consider, for instance, this pronouncement he uttered on July 6, 2025, just hours before his flight to Washington:
“Our joint involvement brought a great victory over our mutual enemy – Iran. Iran has dedicated itself, for years, to our destruction, and for years, we had apprehensions: What should we do about Iran? Would we be able to take on Iran? And now, our heroic pilots flew in the skies of Iran, and the IDF did wonders, along with the Mossad and all other security branches…”
Stripped of critical context, this self-congratulatory declaration implies an earth-shattering event poised to fundamentally alter “the face of the Middle East,” a favored refrain of Netanyahu’s. Yet, beyond the relentless and baseless claims of having decisively defeated Iran – a narrative utterly devoid of credibility among sober political analysts – mere hours later, Palestinians in Gaza, enduring over 639 days of a relentless and internationally recognized genocide, delivered an undeniable message: Israel cannot even subjugate Beit Hanoun.
What, then, is Beit Hanoun?
In essence, this small town, encompassing an approximate area of 12.5 square kilometers (4.8 square miles), persists merely as a geographic marker and a name. It has been almost entirely obliterated, its entire pre-war population, estimated at around 60,000 residents, wholly displaced.
Owing to its perilous proximity to the Israeli border, often as close as 1.5 kilometers (approximately 1 mile), Beit Hanoun has been a primary target in nearly all of Israel’s prior aggressions against Gaza. It bore a disproportionately heavier burden of destruction compared to other Palestinian areas, dating back as early as 2004, 2006, and 2014.
However, the latest war and genocide have left virtually no building intact; some structures have been bombed repeatedly, rendering the entire area a haunting tableau of charred devastation. Indeed, numerous charred remains of victims still lie in the streets of Beit Hanoun or entombed beneath its vast rubble to this day.
Adding profound insult to grievous injury, the city was literally branded with the Star of David. In January 2025, chilling satellite imagery starkly revealed a giant Star of David carved into what was once fertile farmland in Beit Hanoun. Historically, alongside Beit Lahia and other eastern regions, the town constituted a vital segment of Gaza’s food basket – a role that became acutely critical during the two decades of suffocating Israeli siege.
Though much of this crucial agricultural land had already been appropriated by the Israeli army as ‘military zones,’ it still managed to somewhat stave off outright famine. Thus, the deliberate destruction of Beit Hanoun fundamentally equates to a deliberate assault on Gaza’s very capacity for survival.
Yet, Beit Hanoun simply refuses to die. On the contrary, it persists as one of the most active and formidable fronts for the Palestinian Resistance, posing one of the most perplexing military quandaries for the Israeli army. This defiance occurs despite Israel’s state-of-the-art killing technology, overwhelming troop numbers, and a seemingly endless supply chain, courtesy of Uncle Sam’s boundless generosity.
When Israel initiated its full-scale ground offensive on Gaza on 27 October 2023, it commenced precisely in Beit Hanoun. Astonishingly, it took the Resistance merely three days – between 27 October and 1 November – to discern the tactics of the invading Israeli army and adapt accordingly.
On 1 November, Al-Qassam declared it had decimated four Israeli Merkava tanks and armored vehicles using Yasin 105 anti-tank rocket-propelled grenades, followed by the precision targeting of an Israeli soldier gathering with a quadcopter drone. On 11 November, the Israeli army itself reluctantly admitted to the killing of four soldiers and the wounding of others in a booby-trapped tunnel in Beit Hanoun. The Resistance further asserted it had detonated an anti-personnel improvised explosive device (IED) targeting Israeli forces occupying a civilian home in the area.
Numerous other operations followed, each as lethal and sophisticated as its predecessors. It became terrifyingly evident that the more destruction the Israeli army wrought upon Beit Hanoun, the more fiercely and resiliently its resistance emerged. Desperate for a conclusive victory, the Israeli army brazenly declared on 18 December 2023, that it had “dismantled” the Al-Qassam battalions in the town. Consequently, its war tactics in the area supposedly shifted from a full-scale invasion to “holding operations,” predicated on the false premise that the Israeli army was now in “full control.”
That, too, proved to be another pipedream. The Israeli army was repeatedly forced to withdraw from Beit Hanoun as Palestinian fighters, expertly utilizing previously excavated tunnels – and possibly newly dug ones – infiltrated back into their ravaged town. They ingeniously leveraged the very mass destruction inflicted by the Israeli army to their strategic advantage, turning the urban wasteland into a complex battlefield.
The deadly 7 July attack on Israeli forces marked the 639th day since the war’s inception on 7 October 2023. This operation unequivocally signaled Israel’s failure, not only to occupy the town definitively, but also to truly conquer any part of Gaza. Beit Hanoun is, in essence, a microcosm of Gaza’s undefeated, and arguably undefeatable, nature.
And like every sacred piece of land in Gaza and throughout Palestine, the history of Beit Hanoun predates the very existence of Israel by millennia. Beit Hanoun, an ancient settlement, is believed to have been founded by a pagan king named Hanoun. Archaeological findings in the area testify to both ancient constructions and uninterrupted habitation across countless epochs.
It was there, just west of Beit Hanoun, that the Ayyubids famously vanquished the Crusaders at the Battle of Umm al-Nasser hill in 1239. To commemorate that pivotal victory, a mosque was consecrated bearing the battle’s name. Tragically, this very mosque, the revered Umm al-Naser Mosque, was obliterated by Israel in November 2023, with news of its destruction confirmed in January the following year.
If the human spirit were merely quantifiable by stones and concrete, Beit Hanoun would have been meticulously erased from both existence and memory long ago. The human spirit, however, can only be truly measured by the unyielding steadfastness of a people’s collective will. As clever as he may perceive himself to be, neither Netanyahu nor his formidable, US-backed army will ever manage to defeat this ancient Palestinian town, nor Gaza, nor the indomitable Palestinian people themselves. If history has bequeathed us any certain lesson, it is precisely this.
Internment of civilian nationals belonging to opposing sides was carried out in varying degrees by all belligerent powers in World War Two. It was also the fate of those servicemen who found themselves in a neutral country.
At the outbreak of war there were around 80,000 potential enemy aliens in Britain who, it was feared, could be spies, or willing to assist Britain’s enemies in the event of an invasion. All Germans and Austrians over the age of 16 were called before special tribunals and were divided into one of three groups… continue
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• AIR FORCE STORY, THE — SCHWEINFURT AND RE… 
* We are the only oppressed group who are demanded to:
As if all that is not enough, even as we get slaughtered, maimed, starved and eradicated, with our babies shredded to pieces we are still expected to watch our words and not to ever offend or hurt the feelings of our oppressors otherwise we are defamed as “hateful antisemites”.
Aletho News
Aletho News 