The Dissident | June 9, 2026
Axios has reported that if David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance deal to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN goes through, Zionist genocide denier Bari Weiss, the current editor of CBS News, may now be installed as editor-in-chief of CNN as well.
The report noted that “Paramount has held preliminary conversations with several candidates for a business-side counterpart to CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, according to two sources familiar with the network’s inner workings”, adding, “The search implies that if Paramount Skydance’s deal with Warner Bros. Discovery goes through, Weiss would oversee all news editorial across both CBS News and CNN. Her potential counterpart would manage business operations across both companies.”
For context, David Ellison’s production company Skydance previously bought Paramount, the parent company of CBS News.
David Ellison, according to the Jerusalem Post, “quietly donates quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF”.
His father, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, is the largest private donor to the Israeli IDF and is close with Benjamin Netanyahu.
David Ellison bought Skydance primarily to turn CBS News into a propaganda organ for the Israeli government.
He installed Bari Weiss- a self-described Zionist fanatic and open Israeli propagandist who has published outright genocide denial articles at her outlet The Free Press, denying well-documented Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Weiss also ran a smear campaign on the Palestinian academic Reefat Alareer to silence his countering of Israeli atrocity propaganda, which led to the IDF labelling him an “Amalekite” and slaughtering him along with multiple family members.
At CBS News, Bari Weiss fired any reporter who has said anything remotely critical of Israel and promoted committed Zionists into high-level positions.
Having Bari Weiss turn CBS News, and now likely CNN, into full-on state media outlets for Israel is just part of Israel’s larger information war on America.
Benjamin Netanyahu himself boasted that Larry Ellison’s Oracle purchasing a large share of TikTok was part of Israel’s information war campaign, boasting, “We’re going to have to use the tools of battle, the weapons change over time, we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we are engaged, and the most important ones are the social media” in reference to the purchase of TikTok.
Benjamin Netanyahu also boasted about using Elon Musk to manipulate the X algorithm in his favour, saying, “the other one that’s most important is X, we have to talk to Elon, he’s not an enemy, he’s a friend, we should talk to him”.
Aside from using Zionist billionaires like David and Larry Ellison to further its agenda, Israel is simultaneously directly funding PR firms to push pro-Israel propaganda on Americans.
As I reported in my last article , Israel has hired Havas Media Germany, a subsidiary of the marketing company Havas, to hire the production company Piro Inc. to produce Zionist propaganda targeting Americans.
Through Havas Media Germany, Israel has similarly:
With Americans across the political spectrum abandoning support for Israel, Israel – which relies entirely on U.S. funding and arms to maintain its occupation of Palestine – will go into overdrive with its information war targeting Americans.
Palestinian Information Center – June 9, 2026
GAZA – Gaza’s health ministry has denounced the arrest of seven Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics by the Israeli occupation forces on Tuesday morning while they were carrying out their humanitarian duties in the Gaza Strip.
The incident occurred as the medical team was passing through a military checkpoint set up by Israeli forces on Salahuddin road, the main artery connecting central and southern Gaza.
The health ministry explained that the arrests took place while the paramedics were carrying out their usual humanitarian duties of rescuing the wounded and transporting patients.
The ministry noted that the seven paramedics were detained and subjected to harsh on-site interrogations before five were later released, adding that two of them remain in custody at an undisclosed location.
The ministry called for immediate international intervention to secure the release of the remaining paramedics and guarantee their safety.
MEMO | June 9, 2026
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said the movement highly valued the Iranian and Yemeni responses to what he described as escalating Israeli aggression against the Lebanese people, saying the stance represented a genuine model of solidarity among the region’s nations in confronting Israeli attacks.
In a press statement on Monday, Qassem said Hamas viewed the position as “the true form of solidarity that should prevail among all components of the nation”. He called on regional forces to regard this level of support and backing as a duty at this stage in support of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.
Qassem said Hamas had received repeated assurances from Iranian and Yemeni officials that they were seeking to end the war on all fronts, including the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
He added that Iran had provided the movement with political, military and financial support and continued to declare its backing for the Palestinian people and their right to resist, while also supporting efforts aimed at securing a ceasefire.
Qassem said Hamas hoped that the current state of solidarity and direct support would extend to Gaza and that the enclave would remain central to regional efforts linked to ending the war and halting the aggression.
Corralling millions of Palestinians into 30% of the former strip is making life there untenable. This is all part of the plan.
By Omar Shaban Ismail | Responsible Statecraft | June 8, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced late last month that he had ordered the Israeli military to seize 70% of the Gaza Strip.
Under President Donald Trump’s 20-point ceasefire plan, Israeli forces were required to withdraw to a zone encompassing roughly 50% of Gaza’s territory, demarcated by the so-called Yellow Line, ahead of further withdrawals in the future. Instead of retreating, however, the Israeli army has steadily expanded its area of control, which now stands at roughly 60% of Gaza, while leveling the areas under its occupation to the ground.
Indeed, despite a so-called ceasefire, Israel continues to carry out near daily attacks on Gaza — at least 932 people have been called since the ceasefire was announced — while heavily restricting the entry of aid.
So what does it mean to squeeze more than two million people into 30% of the already tiny Gaza Strip? It is a direct and deliberate policy of slow death, one that forces the population into an overcrowded and ever-shrinking open-air prison that lacks even the most basic conditions to sustain life. The plan Israel is implementing in Gaza is not the Trump Plan but a plan to make Gaza permanently uninhabitable.
Prior to the war, the Gaza Strip had an area of about 140 square miles and a population of roughly 2.2 million people, making it one of the most densely populated territories in the world. If around 2 million people are squeezed into only 30% of the territory, density rises to more than 46,000 people per square mile; if the full pre-war population is counted, it approaches 52,000. These basic figures are consistent with the World Bank’s latest rapid damage and needs assessment (RDNA) and with the wider demographic reality of Gaza before the war.
For comparison, population density per square mile is about 230 people in Morocco, 320 in Egypt, 100 in the United States, 390 in China, 750 in the United Kingdom, around 1300 in India, and about 1000 in Belgium. Even before the war, Gaza’s population density already exceeded any of these at 16,000 people per square mile. What is being imposed now is the compression of an entire society into a space that can no longer support life, services, dignity, or social order. This is nothing short of demographic suffocation.
The Israeli plan for controlling 70% of the territory — up from 50% in October 2025 — will turn the remaining 30% into a pressure cooker. The occupied and inaccessible areas include much of Gaza’s agricultural land, especially around Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah. These lands are Gaza’s food basket. They also include water wells, desalination projects, wastewater facilities, roads, warehouses and open public land needed for future expansion.
The U.N. summary of the RDNA estimates recovery and reconstruction needs at $71.4 billion, including major needs in agriculture, health, education and sanitation. But without land, even the best-funded reconstruction plan becomes a spreadsheet without geography.
The humanitarian reality is already catastrophic. According to the RDNA, more than 1.9 million Palestinians have been internally displaced, many several times, and more than 1.2 million people have lost their homes. Fewer than half of hospitals and less than 38% of primary healthcare centers are even partially functional. Around 728,000 school-aged children and youth have been out of formal education for more than two years. At least 41,844 people are estimated to be living with life-changing injuries requiring long-term rehabilitation, and over 68 million metric tonnes of debris must be removed.
Under these conditions, the absence of cemeteries is one of the cruelest indicators of social collapse. Families in Gaza have already been forced to bury their dead in informal graveyards, empty lots and makeshift spaces because major cemeteries were damaged, inaccessible or full. A society that cannot find space to bury its dead cannot be expected to build schools, clinics, playgrounds, water tanks, greenhouses, factories or homes. Even death becomes displaced.
This is why the question of land cannot be separated from health, education and social behavior. Gaza’s population grows by roughly 60,000 people each year. Under normal circumstances, the territory would need dozens of new schools annually, additional hospitals and clinics, more cemeteries, more sports facilities, more wastewater treatment capacity, and more public space. Today, Gaza must do all of that while rebuilding hundreds of destroyed or damaged schools and hospitals, tens of thousands of homes, and the economic base that once allowed families to survive without total dependence on aid.
The loss of schools is not only an educational problem. Schools regulate time, protect children, transmit civic norms, and give adolescents a reason to imagine a future. When schools disappear, the street, the shelter, the armed group, the black market and the phone screen become alternative institutions.
This environment is fertile ground for violence, hatred and extremism — not because Gazans are naturally violent, but because engineered deprivation produces social pathologies. Overcrowded shelters and informal camps concentrate exhausted families in spaces where privacy is absent and resources are scarce. PalThink’s research on displacement and survival in Gaza describes how mass displacement has torn family and neighborhood bonds and replaced many patterns of solidarity. When this condition continues for months and years, it becomes very difficult to contain.
The most dangerous outcome is not only humanitarian collapse, but the formation of a generation raised without school, reliable health care, employment, public space, justice institutions, or a credible political horizon. Such a generation will not simply wait patiently for reconstruction conferences. Some will withdraw into despair. Some will search for revenge. Some will be recruited by radical actors. Some will turn against their own society. Others will try to leave. These are the predictable outcomes of compressing life until it becomes unlivable.
It is in this light that one should read Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz’s recent calls for “voluntary migration” from Gaza, to be implemented “at the proper time and in the proper manner.” Indeed, Israeli authorities have created an official government agency to advance such departures. The sequencing of Israeli actions suggests clear intent: first make return impossible, then make life unbearable, then present departure as voluntary.
If two million people are denied land, water, schools, hospitals, jobs, safe homes and even cemeteries, the final destination will be a mass exodus.
The policy conclusion is straightforward. Preventing mass displacement begins with ending the policy of territorial compression inside Gaza. Palestinians must regain access to their land, including agricultural areas, public land and infrastructure sites. Reconstruction must be allowed where people actually lived, not only in overcrowded containment zones. Schools, hospitals, cemeteries, water systems and municipal services must be treated as security infrastructure, because without them no society can remain governable.
In 2012, the United Nations warned that Gaza could become unlivable by 2020. That warning now reads like an understatement. Amid the destruction of war, the loss of homes, the collapse of services and the shrinking of available land and resources, Gaza is not merely facing a humanitarian catastrophe but an imposed and politically engineered geography of non-life.
The occupation of 70% of the already tiny Gaza Strip is not merely the occupation of land. It is a policy aimed at the destruction of all means of life within a confined enclave. If this continues, the question will not be whether people leave but how many will be forced to choose the sea.
Omar Shaban Ismail is a senior analyst at PalThink and a development expert. He holds Master’s of Entrepreneurial studies from University of Stirling, Scotland, and a 2nd Master’s in Development from Geneva Graduate Institute. Omar was born in Gaza in 1962; he exited to Cairo in October 2023. Omar has published tens of article and policy paper in well recognized international magazines.
By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – June 8, 2026
Donald Trump’s attempt to tie an Iran peace settlement to a mandatory expansion of the Abraham Accords reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how dramatically the Middle East has changed since the Gaza war and why old diplomatic formulas no longer work.
Donald Trump has a habit of mistaking the décor of diplomacy for its substance. His latest demand — that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, and others must “mandatorily” join the Abraham Accords as a condition for any Iran peace settlement — is not bold dealmaking. It is a category error dressed up as statecraft, one that conflates a 2020 diplomatic triumph with the profoundly different geopolitical realities of 2026. The silence that reportedly greeted Trump on his conference call with regional leaders was not awkward; it was diagnostic.
The Middle East Trump Remembers Does Not Exist
The original Abraham Accords of 2020 were a very significant development for several reasons. They emerged from a specific regional calculus: Gulf states, quietly terrified of Iranian expansionism, had come to view Israel as a strategic asset rather than an ideological liability. The Palestinian issue, while never abandoned rhetorically, had receded to the background of realpolitik. The formula worked precisely because it did not require Israel to make concessions and because the public cost of signing was, at the time, manageable. That calculus has been demolished by the Gaza war.
A Washington Institute for Near East Policy survey published in August 2025 found that 99% of Saudi respondents viewed normalization with Israel as a negative step. For context, in 2020, 41% had considered the Abraham Accords a positive development for the region. By 2025, that figure had collapsed to 13%. This is not marginal drift; it is a tectonic shift in public sentiment that no Arab leader, not even an absolute monarch, can afford to ignore. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told US lawmakers in 2024 that his efforts to advance normalization had put his life at risk. That is not a man about to sign anything without ironclad political cover.
Saudi Arabia’s position is now unambiguous and unyielding: there will be no normalization without “an irreversible pathway” to Palestinian statehood. That pathway cannot be a vague promise or a roadmap but a concrete and verifiable process. Thus, Saudi Israeli normalization is not merely paused; it is contingent on developments in the Palestinian arena and shifts in how Israel is perceived regionally. Given the vastly changed regional scenario, Saudi efforts are geared less towards normalization with Israel than towards shaping a new regional agenda in which distancing from Israel serves both the Crown’s domestic legitimacy and its aspirations for broader Islamic leadership.
Pakistan’s refusal is even more visceral. Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif flatly stated that joining the Abraham Accords “clashes with our fundamental ideologies,” and pointedly noted that Pakistani passports do not even carry Israel’s name as a valid travel destination. This position stretches back to Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s explicit rejection of the UN partition of Palestine in 1947. The question of recognizing Israel, therefore, is not a negotiating posture; it is a constitutional identity. Qatar, meanwhile, which absorbed an Israeli airstrike as recently as last September, was never a realistic candidate.
Bundling Two Crises into One Catastrophe
There is a second, more immediate danger in Trump’s gambit: it actively threatens the Iran negotiations themselves. As even reports in the mainstream US media noted, the idea of a massive expansion of the Abraham Accords at a moment when the US has not yet secured the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — let alone resolved Iran’s nuclear program — “seems almost absurd.” The Iran talks are already burdened with sticking points: Washington insists Iran must surrender its enriched uranium stockpile, while Tehran has insisted nuclear negotiations be deferred to later discussions and continues to demand sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets. Threading that needle is already the diplomatic equivalent of defusing a bomb blindfolded. Attaching an Israel-normalization condition to it hands Iran a ready-made argument for walking away or highlighting why the US cannot be trusted with any deal.
Not just Tehran, Iran’s neighbors — having watched Tehran survive American and Israeli airstrikes, endure a maritime blockade, and still inflict damage on global energy markets — are unlikely to respond positively to Trump’s appeal. There is a grudging, regionally shared respect for Iran’s resilience, and any demand that frames joining the Abraham Accords as a precondition will be read across the Islamic world not as American leverage but as American tone-deafness.
That said, Trump’s push might placate Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been deeply critical of US attempts to reach a peace agreement with Iran. If true, it means Trump is risking the entire Iran settlement — a genuinely consequential achievement — to manage Netanyahu’s domestic politics. That is a trade-off of staggering irresponsibility. And in a telling sign of how reality eventually wins, by Thursday this week, US sources confirmed that a tentative framework agreement with Iran was pending Trump’s approval, with the Abraham Accords entirely absent from it.
Where This Leads
Trump’s retreat from his “mandatory” demand has already begun. What comes next will reveal the structural fragility of his approach. A ceasefire framework with Iran, if finalized, will be celebrated as historic, and rightly so. But the moment that diplomatic high fades, the region it leaves behind will be considerably more resistant to the kind of top-down normalization that the Abraham Accords represented.
Instead, the explicit rejection of Trump’s demand shows that Israel now risks a form of diplomatic isolation it has not faced since before the Oslo era, as the binary division between a “moderate axis” including Israel and Gulf states gives way to more fluid alignments that no longer treat Iran as the primary regional threat and in which public identification with Israel is seen as illegitimate and potentially regime-threatening.
The harder question is whether the United States can build a durable Middle East architecture on the foundation of a deal that most of the region’s population views as illegitimate. Normalization imposed by American diktat, without justice for Palestinians and for the Iranians, will not hold. Agreements signed under duress — economic, diplomatic, or military — have a long history of unraveling, often at the worst possible moment. What the post-Gaza Middle East demands is not a grander version of the Abraham Accords. It demands a reckoning with why those accords, for all their genuine diplomatic ingenuity, failed to prevent the conditions that produced October 7 in the first place. Until Washington grasps that, its deal-making — however theatrical — will keep colliding with a region that has moved on.
Salman Rafi Sheikh is a research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.
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By Ricardo Martins – New Eastern Outlook – June 5, 2026
Netanyahu and Trump are conditioning the end of the war in Iran on the condition that all countries in the region sign the Abraham Accords, a tacit submission to Israel. Drawing on Daniel Levy, Omer Bartov, and the Pew Survey, I address the reasons, the urgency, and the limits of Netanyahu’s simultaneous battles on several fronts in the quest for a Greater Israel project.
When Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich talks about expanding Israel’s reach “to Damascus,” or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expresses personal attachment to broad territorial ambitions or Israel being not only a “regional superpower” but “in some respects, a global superpower,” these are not just messianic daydreams. They reflect a deliberate, and deeply destabilizing strategic doctrine. For years, the idea of Greater Israel was dismissed by Western analysts as the rhetoric of a few Israeli hardliners. Sustaining this dismissive position is no longer possible.
Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and now head of the U.S./Middle East Project, offers a sharp analytical lens for understanding today’s events. He suggests that Greater Israel isn’t just about land—it’s about Israel aiming to establish itself as the dominant hard-power player across the Middle East. As Levy puts it, this is about seeing how far Israel can extend its reach and consolidate its role as the region’s unrivaled hegemon.
Territorial control—occupying the Golan, reasserting presence in southern Lebanon, pushing forward with West Bank annexation, and the continuation of the genocide in Gaza—is only the most visible layer. The deeper game is about forging new regional alliances, as the one with the UAE, systematically weakening rival states, and building webs of hard-power dependency that lock neighboring governments into Israel’s orbit.
The ideological consolidation of this project was the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, which constitutionally defined Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people.” For many, including the PLO’s Saeb Erekat, this law was the moment when a Zionist aspiration became a formal legal reality, and for critics, a codification of a system of apartheid. What was once an ambition is now written into the legal foundations of the state.
Omer Bartov, a leading scholar on genocide and Israeli history, traces this shift with a heavy sense of loss. In his book Israel: What Went Wrong?, he shows how Zionism, once rooted in the humanitarian ideals of 19th-century Jewish emancipation, has been transformed into a state project of ethno-nationalism, exclusion, and, in the end, violence. As Bartov puts it, what began as a struggle for Jewish liberation has become a machinery for dominating Palestinians, with all the tragedy that implies.
The Logic of Urgency
The pace and simultaneity of Israeli military operations in recent years demand careful analysis. In just two years, Israel has bombed Gaza, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar and Yemen; it has occupied the Golan Heights, Gaza, the West Bank, and parts of southern Lebanon. Israel even succeeded in drawing the United States into a direct conflict with Iran, a move that, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio accidentally admitted, was driven more by Israeli rather than American priorities. As for Netanyahu, this is a posture of someone convinced that the window for reshaping the region is closing fast, and determined to act before it closes.
Levy describes the current moment as the “Pax Greater Israel” era, a time when the old constraints of American power, the so-called Pax Americana, have faded. With a more pliable U.S. administration, Israel’s room to maneuver has expanded. Iran still hasn’t rebuilt the deterrence it once had before Israel and America struck last year. The region’s strategic balance is more fluid—and more precarious—than it’s been in a generation.
While there’s international outrage over Israel’s actions in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon, Israel has not suffered any punishment. The European Union, which heralds itself as the guardian of morals and Western values, has seen these values undermined by Israel, yet no single action has been taken. Netanyahu, who has piloted Israeli politics for nearly two decades, is unlikely to let an opportunity like this slip by.
Netanyahu’s sense of urgency isn’t just strategic. It is also deeply personal and political. He faces criminal charges, widespread public disapproval (polls showed most Israelis wanted him out even before the Gaza war), and an election looming in 2026. His personal survival and his political project are now intertwined. History teaches us that war often delays accountability, and Netanyahu knows that he has survived through wars.
By keeping the nation in a constant state of crisis, Netanyahu postpones his own reckoning while pushing forward his broader regional ambitions. There is always a danger when embattled leaders manipulate the machinery of state.
The Collapse of the Impunity Consensus
For decades, Israel benefited from an unspoken Western consensus that gave it extraordinary complacency on international law. UN resolutions could be swept aside, settlements could expand, human rights abuses against Palestinians could be perpetrated, and the memory of the Holocaust—too often used as a diplomatic shield—offered a kind of moral immunity no other state enjoyed. That consensus is now breaking down, even if its institutional traces remain stubbornly in place.
The visibility of the Gaza war and its horrendous violence has triggered a generational break like never before and a breakdown of this consensus. According to an April 2026 Pew survey, 60% of Americans have unfavorable views of Israel and 37% favorable ones. This becomes more important, as it is the first in history. The same survey also showed Netanyahu’s administration with 27% approval and 59% disapproval. In the last Global Country Perceptions Survey, Israel ranked in the last position, several points behind North Korea and Afghanistan.
The generational divide is even sharper among young people, many of whom reject any complicity in what prominent scholars, including Bartov, now formally call genocide. Netanyahu’s act of tearing up the UN Charter at the General Assembly, followed by a mass walkout, was more than symbolism. It marked the end of an era for both Netanyahu and Israel. Criticism of Israel or Zionism is no longer quickly conflated with antisemitism, especially among the younger generations.
And yet the institutional lag is severe. The European Union, bound by Article 2 of its Association Agreement with Israel, which explicitly conditions the relationship on respect for human rights, has consistently refused to act on its own legal framework. The cost of this cowardice is not merely moral. The EU, having lost industrial competitiveness, seeks its international influence as a regulatory and normative superpower. This claim rests on credibility. A bloc that intends to police the digital practices of technology companies but cannot enforce a human rights clause in its own trade agreement with a small state faces difficulties in imposing itself as a normative power, and the Global South has drawn that conclusion because of the lack of moral authority and double standard.
The pro-Israel lobby in the United States, sensing the tide turning, has responded by intensifying rather than moderating. More money is being spent, more countries are being pressured, more political careers are being threatened or terminated, as was the case with Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and more communication and online platforms are being acquired; censorship is being imposed, especially on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, and algorithms are being “re-educated,” as Mr. Larry Ellison said when he acquired TikTok. The main lobby, AIPAC, has, in great measure, turned into a politically toxic brand, according to The Intercept.
But Levy is right to note the structural limits of this approach. Lobbying is most effective when it moves with the current of public opinion or when it operates in the dark. It is least effective when it operates openly against an overwhelming public majority, against a country’s perceived national interest, and against the values of the rising generation. The lobby is fighting a rearguard action — powerful, well-resourced, and increasingly desperate.
The Next Iran and the Regional Order
It’s no accident that Israeli security officials—from Naftali Bennett to the current establishment—have started designating Türkiye as “the next Iran.” This isn’t just rhetoric; it is also part of “Greater Israel” strategy. Three decades ago, Israel argued that Iran was the existential threat that had to be contained before it led the region. Now, the same logic and language are applied to Türkiye: any regional power capable of building a new security order outside Israeli influence is seen as a threat to be isolated or confronted before it can consolidate.
But Türkiye is a different kind of challenge. As a NATO member with the largest NATO army in Europe, a strong economy, and the anchor of a coalition with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, Türkiye is not easily marginalized. Recent agreements point to a regional bloc that aims to build security frameworks explicitly outside Israeli (and, by extension, Western) dominance. This coalition news has not pleased Israel and soon reached the EU, with Ursula von der Leyen declaring, “We do not want to live under the influence of China, Russia, or Türkiye.”
The regional threat map has changed. For much of the Arab world and for Türkiye’s Erdoğan, Israel—not Iran—is now seen as the chief destabilizer. This shift in perception has real geopolitical consequences, and it’s not something American air power can easily undo.
Are we at the point of no return? In some ways, yes. The two-state solution, no matter how often it’s invoked in diplomatic statements, is functionally dead. It wasn’t killed by a single act, but by decades of illegal settlements, legal discrimination, disproportionate violence, and the systematic fragmentation of Palestinian territory. The ethnostate is already a reality on the ground. Bartov’s assessment is sobering but direct: unless there is sustained, structural pressure and actions from the international community, a real course correction is unlikely, and so far, that pressure hasn’t materialized.
But in another sense, we’re not quite past the point of no return for Netanyahu’s grand project. The conditions that have enabled the Greater Israel strategy are starting to slip away. American public opinion is shifting faster than the country’s political leaders; the support for Palestine is now higher than the support for Israel. A new regional bloc—with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt—offers a real counterweight. Iran, for all its setbacks, still possesses significant strategic resources and has the backing of China and Russia. And inside Israel, recent polling shows that a large majority (71%) support replacing the current Basic Laws with a formal constitution. Beneath the surface noise of hardline politics, there’s evidence that Israeli society hasn’t wholly given in to the ethnonationalist vision Bartov describes.
One thing is clear: this current trajectory of forever war and continued violence and humiliation of Palestinians can’t last forever. As Levy notes, Netanyahu is playing a high-stakes game of “use it or lose it.” The real question isn’t whether this moment will end — sure it will — but what the aftermath will look like. Will the region be forcibly remade in the image of Greater Israel, or will a new order, forged through painful resistance, emerge in its place? The stakes for Israelis, Palestinians, and the broader Middle East couldn’t be higher.
Ricardo Martins – Doctor of Sociology, specialist in European and international politics as well as geopolitics
Your tax dollars at work
By Kevin Barrett | American Free Press | June 5, 2026
On May 18, Israeli commandos attacked 54 civilian boats carrying food and medical supplies to Gaza. The boats were near Cypress, nearly 300 miles from Gaza, in international waters.
The Israelis fired at the boats and kidnapped 428 unarmed humanitarian activists. Those people were never charged with any crime. How could they be? When kidnapped, they were exercising their right to sail in international waters. It was the Israelis who were committing the crime of maritime piracy, which carries a penalty of 20 years’ imprisonment.
But piracy and kidnapping were just the initial crimes. Sexual assault, rape, and torture followed. It began almost as soon as the Israeli pirates boarded the victims’ boats. According to Dropsite News, “The flotilla says at least 12 sexual assaults were documented aboard the vessel alone, including anal rape and forcible penetration with a handgun.”
The kidnapping victims were subjected to sadistic sexual abuse in the form of strip-searches accompanied by sexual taunting and groping. Many were raped. Participants described “rubber bullets fired at close range, tasers used on the face and upper body, stun grenades thrown into groups of detainees (and) prolonged stress positions under permanent bright light.” The activists were brutally beaten, emerging with “broken ribs (and) fractures to the torso, shoulders, and back.”
The kidnappers took their victims to the Israeli port of Ashdod for “further beatings, sexual humiliation, prolonged interrogations, and torture.” Israel responded to the media outcry and formal diplomatic protests from twelve governments, including Spain and Italy, by having extremist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir film himself participating in the abuse of the kidnapped civilians. After Ben-Gvir proudly posted his torture selfies on social media, even the US, UK, and Canada protested. Facing universal condemnation, the Israelis finally released their victims four days after the kidnapping, sending most of them on deportation flights to Turkey.
The kidnapped and tortured activists pointed out that the four days of hell they experienced were nothing compared to what Palestinian prisoners endure every single day. They called attention to the fact that Israel is currently imprisoning more than 400 Palestinian children, and that almost three-quarters of the children kidnapped by Israel report experiencing sexual violence or abuse.
Israel’s crimes against the flotilla activists were shocking but not surprising. Israel, after all, is a nation that trains dogs to rape prisoners, as reported by The New York Times. It is a nation with a “right to rape” movement that makes national heroes of prison guards who sodomize people to death. In his article “Israel Is the Global Rape Capital” Elias Akleh describes how “Sadistic sexual rape seems to be an endemic character of the whole Israeli society, making Israel the rape capital of the world, where sexual abuse and rape are not restricted against Palestinians only, but against Jewish Israeli girls in general.”
In 2011 psychologist Avigail Moor of Tel-Hai College conducted a scientific poll on whether it’s okay to rape your acquaintances. She found that 61% of Israeli men and 41% of women did not consider forced sex with an acquaintance to be rape.
All of this is just the proverbial tip of an iceberg of evidence that Israel is a nation of sadistic sex criminals. Depraved, violent, sadistic sexual abuse is even part of Israeli Orthodox Jewish religious rituals, as reported by the Jerusalem Post (6/3/2025). Social media is full of pictures posted by Israeli soldiers who murder Palestinian women, dress up in their victims’ bras and underwear, and take selfies.
In relatively normal societies, it is estimated that two per cent or less of the population consists of clinical psychopaths, while 98% are non-psychopathic. Among the Israeli Jewish population, it seems, that ratio is reversed. Polls show that the vast majority of Israeli Jews support the genocide of Gaza, which has featured the murders of tens of thousands of innocent women and children, most of whom have been slowly crushed to death beneath the rubble of their own houses.
None of these crimes could happen without the roughly ten trillion dollars of support Israel has received from American taxpayers. That money has been bestowed on the Dog Rape Nation by our politicians, who are bribed or blackmailed by Israeli agents like Jeffrey Epstein, himself a shining example of Jewish-Israeli sexual psychopathy.
Epstein described himself as “Donald (Trump’s) closest friend for ten years.” But it gets worse. In his 20s, Trump was the protegé of Jewish-Zionist gangster Roy Cohn, a sadistic homosexual pedophile who, according to journalist Anthony Summers, ran an Epstein-style blackmail operation that filmed powerful men, including J. Edgar Hoover, abusing little boys.
And it isn’t just Trump. Our whole political class is compromised. Just look at how they vote on Israel-related issues.
The USA desperately needs a serious, French Revolution style housecleaning.
See Also:
MEMO | June 4, 2026
At the University of Vienna, an independently organized student assembly voted by a large majority in favor of an academic boycott of Israeli educational institutions, according to the activist group, University of Vienna for Palestine, which announced the result on Instagram, Anadolu reports.
Previously, over 1,000 students at the university had signed a petition to convene a student assembly “from below,” which organizers described as the first of its kind in Austria.
The students’ resolution is explicitly directed against the strategic partnership between the University of Vienna and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which has been in place since 2015.
The first core motion adopted by the assembly was titled “Academic Boycott Instead of Complicity in Genocide.”
The initiators accuse the partner university in Jerusalem of direct cooperation with the Israeli military.
Other demands made by the participants include the introduction of a university “civil clause” prohibiting military research, as well as the withdrawal of security forces and the Austrian domestic intelligence service from the campus grounds.
READ: ‘We are not part of Trump’s chaotic policy,’ including with US overflights: Austria’s vice chancellor
According to “University of Vienna for Palestine,” approximately 400 eligible students attended the meeting.
One of the university’s largest lecture halls, Lecture Hall I in the New Institute Building, was reportedly filled beyond capacity.
At the start of the gathering, South African author Andrew Feinstein, who worked for the African National Congress (ANC) under Nelson Mandela, gave a speech in which he emphasized the historical significance of the gathering.
In his address, Feinstein also highlighted the historical necessity of the international “Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions” (BDS) campaign.
However, from a legal standpoint, the assembly’s vote is non-binding and symbolic, as it is an independent activist assembly and not an official body of the university administration or the legally established student council.
Press TV – June 4, 2026
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has stated that no peace will be established in the region without the withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories in Lebanon, as it condemns ongoing Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians.
In a statement issued on the recent events in Lebanon on Thursday, the IRGC declared that international condemnations and expressions of disgust from countries and nations around the world have had no effect on the behavior of Tel Aviv’s “bloodthirsty rulers.”
“The arrogant American regime, under the pretext of establishing peace, has only increased crime and genocide through its interventions,” the statement read.
The IRGC described the Israeli army as “cowardly and incapable,” stating that it tries to compensate for its battlefield defeats by killing civilians and destroying homes, hospitals, and schools.
“This racist regime, despite unlimited support from America and European countries, has not even been able to win the hearts of the people of a single occupied village during its shameful existence,” the statement said.
“Its skill is merely ruling over burned lands, and every day we witness the destruction of the homes of the oppressed people of Palestine and Lebanon at the hands of this aggressor regime,” it further said.
The IRGC asserted that the Lebanese nation will not allow the occupying regime to achieve through a forced agreement what it could not achieve through war, even with the support of the “child-killing American regime.”
“Our primary condition for accepting a ceasefire in the regional war has been a ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon,” the statement said.
The IRGC stated that the enemy must urgently halt its attacks on the Lebanese people, immediately withdraw from occupied Lebanese territories back behind international borders, and recognize Lebanon’s territorial integrity.
“The Lebanese nation is the pride of the Ummah and a symbol of the honor of the region’s peoples. We will support them with all our being. No peace will be established in the region without withdrawal from the occupied territories of Lebanon,” it said.
On Monday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered strikes on the Dahiyeh area, a predominantly Shia district in Beirut’s southern suburbs, and issued evacuation orders covering the entire area.
In response, Iran’s central military command warned that if Israel carried out its threat to bomb southern Beirut, Iranian forces would retaliate against the northern occupied territories.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry also said Tehran was ready to help Lebanon resist the “illegal aggression,” adding that a Lebanon ceasefire is “an integral part of any ceasefire and any final agreement” with the United States.
Shortly after Iran’s warning, US President Donald Trump said on social media that he had intervened, claiming he had held a “very productive conversation” with Netanyahu that prevented further escalation.
He also said he had reached an understanding with Hezbollah through senior representatives, stating that the resistance group had agreed to halt attacks in exchange for Israel refraining from strikes.
A Pakistan-brokered ceasefire between Tehran and Washington, which also covers Lebanon, has been in place since early April, though Israel has continued carrying out daily attacks on the Arab country in violation of the truce.
Iran has repeatedly said that any ceasefire must be comprehensive, covering all fronts, including Lebanon, and has warned it will not tolerate continued Israeli attacks on the country.
Palestinian Information Center – June 3, 2026
GAZA – British magazine The Economist published an extensive testimony from a former Israeli soldier who took part in the war on Gaza, describing practices he says he witnessed firsthand during military operations and expressing deep feelings of shame and regret over what occurred in the territory.
The interview was conducted through the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies from soldiers who served in the Palestinian territories. The soldier was identified under the pseudonym “Jonathan.”
He said he joined the fighting following the October 7, 2023 events, believing he was participating in what he considered “the most just war in Israel’s history.” However, his experiences on the ground led him to completely reassess those beliefs after months of combat.
According to the soldier, his unit entered Gaza under what he described as vague combat directives. He said troops were not given clear rules of engagement regarding civilian protection and that the prevailing assumption was that anyone remaining in targeted areas after evacuation orders and bombardment could be treated as a legitimate target.
He added that Palestinian men of fighting age were often viewed as potential threats and noted that many of those killed during operations were unarmed. In many cases, soldiers were unable to verify the identities of those they targeted amid the chaos and destruction of war.
In one of the most significant parts of his testimony, the soldier alleged that the Israeli military used Palestinian detainees in field operations, forcing them to inspect buildings and move ahead of troops to check for explosives or ambushes. He said the practice was commonly referred to among soldiers as the “Mosquito Protocol.”
He further stated that discussions within military units focused less on the legality of using civilians as human shields and more on how to manage those compelled to carry out such tasks.
The soldier also described widespread destruction of homes and infrastructure across Gaza, saying that demolition gradually became the primary mission for many infantry units, even though soldiers often did not understand the broader strategic objectives behind the operations.
He said doubts increasingly emerged among soldiers as the war continued without achieving its stated goals, and that frustration grew within the military over the lack of a clear strategy and the prolonged nature of the conflict.
The former soldier accused Israeli media outlets of ignoring much of the suffering endured by Palestinians in Gaza, saying the gap between what he witnessed firsthand and what was presented to the public ultimately motivated him to speak out.
He concluded by saying that he no longer feels pride in his Israeli identity or his military service, adding that he is ashamed of what took place and can no longer imagine raising his country’s flag above his home as many citizens do elsewhere.
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | June 3, 2026
After Declassified-UK revealed that around 2,000 Britons have served in the Israeli military since the beginning of the Gaza Genocide on October 7, 2023, a campaign has now been launched to demand that London pursue justice. Instead of pursuing potential war criminals, the British authorities appear too busy cracking down on critics of Israel.
A major campaign has been launched by Declassified and the International Center of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), demanding “in the interests of transparency, public safety, and justice”, the British government adhere to the following demands:
Producing a letter addressed to the British leadership, the campaign quickly attracted the signatures of 60 prominent individuals– including lawyers, military veterans, politicians and Genocide Scholars. The campaign was also grounded in the fact of the recent meeting of the Hague Group, where 40 States convened to demand the implementation of international law in order for Israel to be held accountable.
This is but one of various initiatives launched to achieve justice for the victims of the Gaza genocide, aligning alongside activist work, legal projects, political lobbying efforts, and even efforts through the world’s top legal bodies.
Notably, the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have so far failed to achieve their desired results. Similarly, South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is still pending. Having worked to discourage the usefulness of international law, these cases also highlight a clear reality: individual nations’ leaders must be forced to take action, not simply a court.
The Declassified-ICJP campaign seeks to push the UK government to implement the law, which is why so many are getting behind it, hoping that the pressure will finally make London do the right thing.
For its part, the British government has been doing precisely the opposite of what this new campaign demands. In fact, in a recent move, it decided to reject the entry of prominent Leftist commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker. Instead of admitting in a public statement why they had done this, they instead fed the information to The Times newspaper, informing them that comments critical of Israel were the reason for refusing them entry.
A range of personalities, from journalists to activists and former politicians, have also notably been detained at British ports of entry, under the Terrorism Act, all because of their outspoken stances on the issue of Palestine and criticism of the Israeli government. Palestine Action was even designated a terrorist organization for launching a campaign to directly confront weapons manufacturers in the UK that are affiliated with Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, or supply the Israeli military directly.
Journalists like Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada and activists such as Sarah Wilkinson were even subjected to police raids on their personal homes. These are not isolated cases and there have been numerous others since the beginning of the genocide.
All of this begs the question: If the free speech rights of Britons and foreign visitors to the UK are nullified when it comes to criticizing and voicing discontent at Israeli war crimes, does the British government care for domestic legislation, let alone international law? Or, is there simply an exception to Israel that puts its officials and citizens outside of the law altogether?
Take, for example, the infamous case of Shemema Begum, a British national who was brainwashed by Daesh (IS) propaganda and headed to Syria in order to become part of the group as a bride to a fighter. Begum had made this decision at 15 years of age, and as a result, the British State revoked her citizenship, refusing her entry back into the country.
Keep in mind that Begum never committed any provable war crime, much less engaged in committing genocide; she was also a young teenager when she made this decision. The UK government, however, made the determination that she was unfit for her British passport and could no longer return to the nation of her birth.
A few years after this was all decided in court and the British Home Office fought its case – after presenting its arguments as both legally binding and moral principles – there are now some 2,000 Britons who were adults who made the decision to actively fight in a military, committing what the ICJ has ruled a plausible genocide.
Thousands of UK citizens who served in a military commanded by men who now have war crimes arrest warrants issued for them, yet not a single one has been stripped of their citizenship, there is no evidence that a single one of them has even been questioned at a port of entry, let alone investigated. All of this again points back to the question of double standards and whether the UK considers Israelis as above both domestic and international law.
If the answer is that Israel is simply above the law, then this sets a dangerous precedent and poses a major security threat inside the UK and outside its borders also. If London believes that the law doesn’t apply to Israel, then its legal system loses all legitimacy in the eyes of the public and downgrades the status of the nation in the international order.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | July 11, 2024
Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
On July 6th, the New York Times published an astonishing investigation: In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit. The article documents in grim detail how Chosen Company, an international volunteer battalion for Kiev, routinely executes Russian prisoners of war. It is the very first mainstream admission that this practice – a brazen breach of the Geneva Conventions, and a grave war crime – is widespread among Ukraine’s fighters, both foreign and homegrown. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
