After losing the most expensive primary race in American history last month, largely thanks to pro-Israel figures and groups spending millions to defeat him (according to the Federal Election Commission, Massie received donations from 1,119 individuals actually living in Kentucky, compared to only 98 for his opponent Ed Gallrein), Massie announced just days later, “I filed with FEC for the 2028 House race.”
He explained, “This allows me to raise funds to continue my political operations supporting my position as a current office holder and as a potential candidate for federal office.”
A run for the White House isn’t out of the question. “I haven’t made a final decision about which office to seek, if I run,” Massie teased.
As one of the most antiwar congressional Republicans in history this side of Ron Paul, Massie has offered consistent and vocal opposition to foreign aid including to Israel. His opposition to U.S. backing and participation in Israel’s wars in Gaza and Iran was seen as a significant factor in why he lost his primary, angering President Donald Trump and, of course, one of the country’s most powerful foreign lobbying groups.
Rather than backing down, Massie is calling these people out more than ever.
On Sunday, after the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition boasted of the $5 million his group had spent to unseat Massie, the Kentucky congressman replied, “Matt Brooks bragging that the Republican Jewish Coalition spent millions to buy a congressional seat in Kentucky… but if you observe the same thing, you’re antisemitic.”
Massie was noting that any opposition to—or mere acknowledgement of—Israel’s outsized influence in American politics is almost always labeled as antisemitism by pro-Israel advocates. Yet here was Brooks openly touting it. Neoconservative veteran John Podhoretz even celebrated the role of “Jewish money” in defeating Massie.
When Axiosreported this week that Trump had reportedly unloaded on Netanyahu in an expletive-laden call, Massie weighed in with his own reality check, writing,
It’s all talk. Just withhold foreign aid to Israel for a month and they’ll stop bombing their neighbors—instant peace, the Strait of Hormuz can be opened, and gas drops $2 a gallon. Israel has been, and continues to be, the biggest welfare recipient from American tax payers.
The libertarian-leaning Kentuckian added on Tuesday, “The more Netanyahu prevents the war with Iran from ending, the more obvious it becomes that he convinced Trump to start it.”
Massie isn’t the only prominent conservative who has stuck his neck out by vocally opposing the Iran War. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh launched a tirade against it this week, writing on Monday, “This whole sh—show has been an enormous waste of time and resources and our country has not benefited from it at all.”
Of course, the Daily Wire is home to Ben Shapiro, one of the most pro-Israel voices on the American right. Replying to Walsh, Massie chimed in, “I hope you get to keep your job after this post.”
When talk host and rabid Zionist Mark Levin insisted on Sunday, “I make NO apologies for my support of Israel, the Persian people, Ukraine, and Taiwan! Period!”, America First Massie had this response: “Great! Write a personal check. Americans are tired of sending them tax dollars while our own infrastructure crumbles and prices soar.”
This kind of banter with neocons is nothing new for Massie, but there does seem to be something extra in his standard fearlessness now, including with regard to his efforts to declassify the controversial files of the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, files which the administration would strongly prefer to bury. The president, under intense pressure, signed off on their release in November.
After the podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked podcaster Shawn Ryan what “core MAGA” was now, Ryan replied, “I have no idea. Pedophiles Supporting Israeli Lobby?”
Massie shared that clip, asking “What’s MAGA now?”
He’s not just striking a new pose online. After Responsible Statecraft last Friday revealed a shocking plan to integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries, Massie and his frequent Democratic ally Rep. Ro Khanna of California pounced. Massie posted, “If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor.”
“We are a sovereign country,” Massie insisted.
Khanna shared Massie’s post, writing, “And I will be offering an amendment in the committee itself to strip section 224 out.” The California congressman added, “Trump can’t kill the Massie/Khanna partnership no matter how much he posts on Truth Social.”
Two weeks since a Trump-endorsed and AIPAC-backed candidate defeated Massie, the president still seems obsessed with him—and with former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Tucker Carlson, and other America Firsters—something that could get even more interesting given that Massie still has seven more months in office. Greene was pressured out of her Georgia House seat by the president, but in retirement has remained a force in politics, arguably even a greater one than she was in office.
Massie, for his part, is using his remaining time in Congress to advance an America First agenda. He even introduced legislation to block U.S. bombs from being sent to Israel. “Israel has used American-supplied munitions to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians,” Massie observed. “America is morally obligated to end support of Israel’s devastation of Gaza and its people. I’m cosponsoring the Block the Bombs Act to limit the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel.”
As if that wasn’t enough, on Wednesday Massie again broke party ranks, along with three other Republicans, by joining Democrats to pass the Iran War Powers Resolution, which he cosponsored. “The People’s House is sending a message: end this war,” he wrote.
The hits keep coming. On Thursday, Massie announced that he will address a controversial attack by Israeli forces on an American ship on the event’s 59th anniversary. Massie wrote, “On June 8, 2026, I’ll speak on the floor of the House to honor and memorialize the brave crew of the USS Liberty who died and were wounded in an unprovoked attack by Israel on June 8, 1967.”
He’s obviously not cowering or giving an inch to the figures and groups that worked so hard and spent so much to beat him.
Megyn Kelly has reported that an estimated $30 million was spent by pro-Israel forces to defeat Massie. What dollar amount would that lobby be willing to cough up should Massie decide to run for president?
Again, Thomas Massie doesn’t look or talk like someone who just lost. He acts more like someone who’s just getting started.
Sen. Ron Johnson convened physicians and researchers for a hearing on possible links between COVID mRNA injections, cancer, and scientific censorship. The testimony raised explosive questions about immune suppression, oncogenes, and why some of the most urgent safety concerns are still being pushed to the margins.
SpaceX will soon go public, in an offering that will value the company at over a trillion dollars. Anthropic and OpenAI are Artificial Intelligence companies, who also plan megacap IPO’s for later in the year. Recent changes to indexing rules will compel massive share buys into these companies by retirement and pension plans, and by passive ETF’s and mutual funds. In the past, new companies were required to wait until insiders sold most of the shares after the lockup periods before being added to investment indices. Companies also needed to show a strong history of growth and sound financial practices.
The Israel government has done a lot to earn dislike through bringing death and destruction on a vast scale. People are seeing Israel’s attacks in the last few years on Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and beyond as using destructive force that is not just defensive and focused on military targets. General annihilation is seen as a clear objective.
Americans have had special reason to become aware of reasons to dislike Israel given that the United States government has been working as a coconspirator, funding and otherwise assisting Israel’s mayhem. Indeed, a new Pew Research Center poll of the views of people across 36 countries found that in America 60 percent of queried individuals have a very or somewhat unfavorable opinion of Israel, while only 37 percent have a somewhat or very favorable opinion of Israel.
Still, Americans, compared with other people questioned across the world, come in as less critical of Israel than most. The figures for median views of people in the 36 surveyed countries came in at a 67 percent unfavorable view of Israel and a 25 percent favorable view.
In each of the 36 surveyed countries where people were questioned, the opinion regarding Israel tilted negative except for in India and three African nations — Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria — where the positive opinion regarding Israel came in on top.
How will the Trump years in office play out in the history books? Recently, a number of unthinkable scenarios have taken place which will mark Trump and 2026 out as a seismic watershed moment in America’s history which will change the country’s identity and standing in the world forever. The decision by Trump to strike Iran on February 28th was remarkable in that it was a decision that Trump more or less took while disregarding his chief of staff and most of the cabal of decision makers around him, in preference for what Israel was insisting was a quick, winnable weekend war.
If we are to believe the explosive expletives though which were delivered by Trump to Netanyahu in a telephone call, it would appear that the greatest nightmare the world has about America – that it is run entirely these days by Israel – has come true. The anger and frustration by Trump might be real, even though what was reported might have been exaggerated for political purposes but the reality is that Israel is blocking any deal that Trump might believe he can pull off with Iran. And worse than just blocking it, based on Netanyahu’s statement about Lebanon, Bibi has not “turned back” IDF troops from making the south of Lebanon a new Gaza. The killing goes on, the systematic destruction of property and the war with Hezbollah has not been halted which puts Trump in an even tighter corner than he might have imagined he was in just a couple of weeks ago. He himself is unable to strike Iran as GCC partners have critically denied his military the support it would need, but in reality those governments and their elites – in particular MbS of Saudi Arabia – have played the safety lever role on Trump’s madness that Washington couldn’t pull off itself. Trump’s firing of all chiefs of staff from Biden’s days and surrounding himself with under qualified yes men has resulted in Trump himself being able to cultivate the maddest ideas and it is only leaders of the middle east who can tell him no. Enough is enough.
Presently, what we are witnessing in the region is the division of GCC countries – those who are allied to Israel via the Abraham Accords – and those who have formed a new anti Israel alliance with its own nuclear deterrent, a group made up of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan which doesn’t have a name but is now an informal pact.
And in the middle of all this madness, comes more. Now we are hearing plans for Israel to move ahead with plans which would guarantee its annual 3.8 bn USD military gift from the U.S. for the next 20 years, shrouded in even more secrecy through a bill in congress which would essentially merge the Israeli government with the Washington apparatus making the IDF one with the U.S. military.
This fusion of the IDF and U.S. forces comes when Israel is sensing that future governments and congress will demand more accountability of how the annual defence gratuity is spent and Israel’s intentions in future wars. It also comes when public opinion seems to be against America’s support for Israel and its regional goals.
For example, according to Al Jazeera, a survey this month from The New York Times and Siena College found that 57 percent of U.S. voters opposed providing Israel with additional economic and military support.
Moreover, 62 percent said they disapproved of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza, which started in 2023, has killed more than 75,000 people, prompting widespread condemnation, Al Jazeera claims.
There is some kickback from both houses against the so called Section 244 although those who have opposed it have predictably been called ‘anti semitic’.
But the very fact that Israel is using its leverage with congressmen which it has on its payroll to push through a bill which would ‘co-ordinate’ all military action that both the U.S. and Israel are involved in shows just how advanced Israel is with its absolute control of Washington. We’ve reached a new high-water mark of servility and it’s the Trump second term which has been a catalyst to this new world order which is going to make any deal with Iran even harder – first of all to get signed, but more importantly to implement, which of course the Iranians know, which explains their lethargic pace in the negotiations compared to Trump’s panicky buffoonery.
To Trump’s credit, he at least presented some resistance to U.S. forces being sent to their deaths when Israel turned up the heat and insisted on getting dug into a longer, drawn out deeper conflict with Iran. Sceptics rush to point out that Israel will only use a closer union to sell on the open market all of America’s military secrets, the bigger point is being over looked. If this article 244 gets through, it will only be a matter of time before an Israeli PM can simply order U.S. troops to fight any battle it wants. The days of heated arguments, threats or even blackmail will be looked back upon almost nostalgically as a golden era where a U.S. president still had the final call on whether to send in American troops. Netanyahu’s identity for three decades has been built on him bragging that he and Israel have been running America but the claim has been largely uncontested until now. Are we now about to enter a new phase?
“He’ll do whatever I want him to do,” Donald Trump declared recently about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The statement may be one of the most revealing statements Trump has ever made—not for what it says about Netanyahu, but for what it reveals about Trump’s psychology. It was intended as a display of strength. Instead, it exposed the opposite.
Trump has built a political persona around hyperbole, self-aggrandizement, and declarations of superiority to cover up for an oversized inferiority complex, he only knows its extent. When he insists that Netanyahu is acting at his command, he is projecting an authority he does not possess. The louder the boast, the more apparent the insecurity beneath it.
If there is one lesson since the election of Trump, it is that Netanyahu, not Trump, has consistently dictated the pace of America’s wars in the Middle East. Trump may occupy the White House, issue ultimatums, and proclaim himself the master negotiator, but the facts on the ground tell a different story. Again and again, Netanyahu acts, and Trump adjusts.
For years, Netanyahu worked relentlessly to pull the U. S. into another made-for-Israel war, this time against Iran. Successive administrations, despite their deference to Israel, stopped short of falling for the scheme. Trump, however, proved far more susceptible to the influence of his Israel-first donors and to Netanyahu’s chicanery. Yet he continues to portray himself as the one calling the shots.
This week, Trump proudly recounted a phone call in which he supposedly instructed Netanyahu to halt a planned Israeli attack on Beirut. It took little time after Trump’s statement for Israel’s defense minister to announce that military operations “will continue under all circumstances.” True to that pledge, Israel launched fresh attacks on hospitals and villages in southern Lebanon, killing and wounding civilians despite the so-called Trump’s war cessation.
Two days later, on Wednesday June 3rd, Lebanese and Israeli delegations meeting in Washington announced another ceasefire. The third such extension since last April. One day after reaching the agreement, Israel resumed strikes on South Lebanon and said it would neither withdraw nor allow Lebanese civilians back to their homes in the south.
It is almost certain, when the Lebanese resistance eventually counters the repeated Israeli violations, Trump—as he has done before—will condemn the retaliation rather than the provocation. To save face and avoid appearing weak before Netanyahu, he will once again blame the Lebanese side while ignoring the Israeli occupation and military actions that triggered the response.
The same pattern is evident in the negotiations with Iran. For months, Trump’s stated objective was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon—a framework which aligns with Tehran’s declared position. But nuclear-armed Israel, which never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty that Iran did, has different goals entirely. Netanyahu’s government will not be satisfied with anything short of the destruction of knowledge and the reduction of Iran to a failed state, precisely the fate that befell Iraq and Libya after both countries agreed to surrender their nuclear ambitions.
For Israel, a negotiated agreement between the U.S. and Iran, may be far less desirable than the continuation of regional turmoil. For its objective is the preservation of a strategic environment that sustains military and geopolitical dominance. Zionism has long viewed the emergence of democratic, technologically advanced, and self-reliant neighboring states as a threat. Fragmentation and disorder in surrounding countries serve that objective by limiting the rise of independent regional powers that could one day, potentially challenge Israeli primacy. In this case, Israel may be unique among nations: it derives strategic advantage not from a stable and prosperous region, but from entropy, and has built a regional doctrine whose success depends on propagating chaos.
The cost to ordinary Americans is tangible, and personal. They feel it every time they fuel their cars, pay inflated prices for goods, or watch Congress cut healthcare or financial student aid for Americans in order to finance another military aid package for Israel.
Americans are not only financing Israel’s wars through tax dollars and weapons transfers. They are also paying what amounts to an Israeli surcharge tax at the pump.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been trying for weeks to assure consumers that gas will hover around $3 a gallon between June and September, as if it is acceptable for Americans to pay elevated prices until Netanyahu deigns to approve a ceasefire, especially when Trump boasts that America is a net oil exporter.
Gaza is another front in Israel’s endless wars. Trump personally signed the ceasefire agreement in Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2025, chirping “we have peace in the Middle East.” He had since watched in silence as Israel systematically dismantled every commitment it had made. During the “ceasefire,” it maintained a starvation diet blockade, murdered more than 800 and wounded thousands.
Under Phase One of the agreement, Israeli forces were required to withdraw to approximately 53 percent of Gaza. Phase two stipulated further withdrawal. Instead, Netanyahu ordered the seizure of an additional 32 percent, increasing total Israeli military occupation to 70 percent of the besieged territory, confining 2.3 million Palestinians to 30 percent, or roughly 50,000 human beings per each square mile of rubble.
On all fronts, Trump did not merely follow Netanyahu’s lead. He enabled it, funded it, armed it, and defended it diplomatically. Then, standing before television cameras, he attempted to compensate for this reality by insisting that he was the one in control.
To that end, and following recent Republican primary elections, lame-duck Republican members of Congress have already begun treating the Trump administration as a lame-duck presidency, long before the midterm elections. The recent congressional vote to limit presidential war powers is a telling sign that Trump’s political capital is eroding far sooner than expected.
Nevertheless, Americans may be witnessing a historic inflection point in the decades-long power of Israel-first Zionist influence over American political life. It is clear the political landscape is shifting, and the assumptions that long governed Washington’s relationship with Israel no longer appear as immutable as they once did. From growing dissent within the Democratic Party—and among Republican influencers—to deepening unease across the Washington Beltway, genuine cracks are appearing in a system that for generations treated Israel as a sacred cow. Eight decades of unquestioned manipulation and political leverage over American leaders is now facing resistance from constituencies that were once among its most reliable friends.
Hence, no amount of presidential bravado or social-media posturing can obscure what has become undeniable: under Donald Trump, American foreign policy has served Netanyahu’s Israel-first agenda, not America’s. And when the history of this era is written, this odd couple may be remembered for ushering in the sunset of Israel-first Zionist dominance over the U.S. government.
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
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.”
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:
"Sexual violence against young boys and girls. Things that are done in the name of a religious ritual… These rituals, most of which are ancient rituals from the days of Ba'al worship, have not vanished from the world".
Slamming US-Israeli acts of nuclear terrorism, Iran says the international community must adopt a “zero-tolerance policy” towards any armed attack on peaceful nuclear installations and promote binding international norms on the inviolability of such facilities.
Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations Office and other International Organizations in Vienna made the call in a statement during the Special Meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors in Vienna on Friday.
It said military strikes against civilian nuclear energy sites constitute a fundamental violation of the very objects and purposes of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the IAEA Statute.
Such attacks also weaken the legitimacy and credibility of the international non-proliferation framework, particularly the IAEA’s safeguards system, and deteriorate the very basis of global peace and security, it added.
It emphasized that the most relevant resolutions of the IAEA General Conference banning strikes on nuclear installations are resolutions 444 and 533, both put forward by Iran. Conversely, the United States rejected both.
The statement urged the international community to stop these attacks on nuclear facilities from becoming a normal occurrence, warning, “Otherwise, in addition to our security, the main victim would be the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.”
The mission insisted that efforts to prevent such normalization must be carried out in a systematic manner, free from political manipulation, biased approach, or double standard.
“We must adopt a ‘zero-tolerance policy’ towards such attacks. We must promote the adherence to, and effectiveness of, the existing norms on the inviolability of peaceful nuclear activities,” it pointed out.
It further stressed the need to establish international norms where necessary aim to “absolutely prohibit attacks or threats against safeguarded nuclear installations under any and all circumstances.”
According to the statement, Iran believes that it is entirely reasonable to expect the IAEA Director General — especially given his candidacy for UN Secretary-General — to follow officially recognized UN terminology and to use the official names of geographical features as reflected in relevant UN documents and also historical documents.
“Such consistency is important for preserving the impartiality, professionalism, and credibility expected of senior international officials,” it emphasized as IAEA head has refused to explicitly condemn US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities during two rounds of US-Israeli aggression on Iran in June 2025 and January to April 2026.
The mission further noted that the “gravest, most extensive and unprecedented” armed attacks against IAEA-monitored nuclear sites in the Agency’s history have been carried out against Iranian facilities.
“In their illegal acts of aggression in 2025 and 2026, the US-a nuclear-weapon State-and the Israeli regime – an outlaw nuclear-weapon-possessor – carried out 17 waves of multiple attacks against Iranian safeguarded nuclear facilities,” it said.
According to the statement, one of the “gravest” attacks targeted a structure located just 350 meters away from the reactor of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, resulting in human casualties.
It added, “After all, US high-ranking officials had publicly threatened to attack Iranian nuclear power plants! This Plant hosts thousands of kilograms of nuclear materials, and as the IAEA DG stated, a direct hit thereto could result in a ‘very high release of radioactivity to the environment’.”
The mission declared that any such attack constitutes a “material breach of a peremptory norm of international law, namely, the prohibition of aggression” and warned that both the crime of aggression and war crimes carry international liability as well as individual criminal accountability for the perpetrators.
It further reminded the meeting that the first time the IAEA considered such acts was after the Israeli regime’s attack on an Iraqi nuclear installation in 1981 and said that in its resolution adopted on 12 June 1981, the UN nuclear agency’s Board of Governors strongly condemned the attack and recommended suspending any assistance to the Israeli regime as well as its membership.
The General Conference later described the attack as “an attack against the Agency and its safeguards” and suspended the provision of assistance to Israel, though it fell short of suspending the regime’s membership, it added.
However, the mission noted, declassified US documents have since revealed that American pressure and threats to cut the IAEA budget had been the main cause behind the failure to fully suspend Israel’s membership.
“Moreover, in a number of resolutions and decisions adopted from 1981 to 2009, the General Conference reaffirmed that any attack or threat against safeguarded nuclear facilities constitute a violation of UN Charter, international law and IAEA Statute,” it said.
America’s position on the Ukraine conflict has become almost indistinguishable from that of the EU, making US President Donald Trump’s stated ambition to mediate an end to the fighting hollow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told RT.
Trump repeatedly blamed the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on his predecessor, Joe Biden, and claimed that he could bring it to a swift conclusion while campaigning in 2024.
However, recent statements by members of his administration suggest a different course, Lavrov said on Thursday in an interview on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
“Biden’s war has become Trump’s war,” the Russian foreign minister said.
Speaking to Congress this week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said efforts to facilitate Russia-Ukraine talks were complicated “because, frankly, we’re not an impartial mediator.” He cited the continuation of the sanctions on Russia and sales of US weapons to Ukraine.
“After we agreed to the United States proposal in Anchorage [in August 2025], Washington began to shift its position. Instead of advancing those same proposals in its dealings with Ukrainians, it is now pretending that the parties should sort things out themselves. This is not a very consistent position,” Lavrov said.
“It is the West that cannot be trusted to keep its agreements. Its approach is: ‘I’ll promise something now, then stall for time.’ If the US had truly advanced its own initiative, I think… the fighting would already have stopped.”
According to Lavrov, the only major difference between Trump’s policy and that of Biden and the EU is that his administration resumed direct talks with Russia. Dialogue is important, he said, but it must be matched by action on commitments already made. … Full video interview
Two National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers are charged with conspiring to smuggle biological materials, including deactivated monkeypox virus samples, into the U.S. from Africa. The researchers also allegedly lied to federal authorities about what they were carrying, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Detroit.
Vincent Munster, Ph.D., a Dutch citizen and chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe Yinda, Ph.D., a Cameroonian research fellow, are charged with conspiracy to smuggle goods into the U.S. and making false statements to federal investigators.
Both men work at a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, the highest level of containment used for research involving dangerous pathogens.
According to federal prosecutors, the researchers arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Jan. 25 after traveling from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a monkeypox outbreak was ongoing.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers questioned the pair about a large black case they were carrying. Prosecutors allege the men told officers the case contained diagnostic and testing equipment, but investigators later determined it held 113 vials stored in Styrofoam coolers.
Testing of a portion of the samples found deactivated monkeypox virus in 17 vials, chickenpox virus in one vial and human DNA in two others.
“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo,” U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. said in announcing the charges. “Let that sink in.”
Federal authorities stressed that the case centers on alleged violations of importation and disclosure requirements. Prosecutors did not accuse the defendants of intentionally releasing pathogens or harming the public.
FBI Detroit Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Runyan said the allegations demonstrate that scientific credentials do not exempt researchers from federal statutes.
“No researchers should believe their positions, credentials, or professional status place them above the law,” Runyan said.
The complaint alleges Munster “adamantly denied” carrying biological samples and at one point told investigators that any necessary documentation was on his laptop. “I do this all the time,” he said, according to an FBI affidavit. Authorities said Munster did not produce the documentation he claimed to have.
Neither defendant responded to emails requesting comment.
Congressional inquiry into past research ties
Munster has previously been mentioned in congressional oversight inquiries involving COVID-19 research.
A 2024 letter from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), then ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, to then-NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli said committee investigators had reviewed documents they believed showed collaboration among researchers affiliated with NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology on SARS-related coronavirus studies.
The letter cited Munster as a participant in the work alongside EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, Ph.D., University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., and Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Zhengli Shi, Ph.D.
The correspondence did not make a finding of wrongdoing but said the materials “indicate” involvement in coronavirus research projects under congressional review.
Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, said the letter raises additional questions about Munster’s past medical ties.
“If the letter is correct, Munster’s record likely includes the unlawful importation and false claims incidents for which he was arrested, but also a share in culpability for causing COVID,” Ebright said.
‘Experimental laboratory approaches’
In a LinkedIn post earlier this year, Munster referenced an article about transmission of the monkeypox (also referred to as mpox) virus “translating our work in the Republic of the Congo towards experimental laboratory approaches.”
Munster and Yinda also co-authored a paper published earlier this year in The Lancet warning that the spread of monkeypox was becoming a “global threat.”
They said cases detected in multiple regions suggested ongoing international spread and called for expanded surveillance, stronger contact tracing and further research into how efficiently the virus transmits and whether sustained community spread is possible outside Africa.
NIH ‘cooperating fully with law enforcement’
The NIH has not commented on the charges, but the agency said it would assist legal authorities in the case.
“This matter is currently under investigation, and NIH is cooperating fully with law enforcement and appropriate authorities,” the agency said in a statement.
The charges emerge amid reports of an employee at Rocky Mountain Laboratories potentially being exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) in late 2025.
Federal officials said the leak was contained and posed no risk to public health, while some legal experts told The Defender these instances were “surprisingly common.”
Munster and Yinda are scheduled to appear in federal court in Montana. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison.
Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW, is an investigative reporter for The Defender.
America’s longest current criminal prosecution is in its 15th year, on its fifth judge, and still has no trial date.
The defendants are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged mass murder co-conspirators. Mohammed is the second person that the government has characterized as the ringleader of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Originally, the feds had labeled Osama bin Laden as the ringleader. Yet, rather than charging and arresting bin Laden, in order to keep him quiet it sent a team of Navy Seals to his home in Pakistan to murder him and his wife and their children.
After that, the feds labeled Mohammed as the orchestrator of 9/11 even though that, by the time of bin Laden’s death, Mohammed had been in US custody for eight years. During that time, he was brutally tortured by CIA officers and other US civilian agents.
His torture was truly repellant. He was waterboarded 183 times. He was hanged by his wrists while naked and in well-lit walk-in refrigerators such that he was freezing and denied sleep for days. His head was smashed repeatedly against wooden walls. His rectum, through which he was fed, was so brutalized that he bled for months, often ingesting into his intestines his own blood and fecal material.
At the end of three years of these criminal attacks at foreign sites operated by cooperating intelligence agencies with the torture administered by Americans, he told his torturers what he thought they wanted to hear. Then he was transferred to the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has remained since 2007.
Upon his arrival at Gitmo, a different set of interrogators took over. The video tapes of his hundreds of torture sessions were destroyed but not the transcripts of his confession. The purpose of the second round of interrogations was to elicit another confession by agents who could testify to a judge that they did not torture him, and that his confession to them was not coerced.
Though some of these interrogators at Gitmo were FBI agents, no one read him his Miranda warnings, advising him of his right to silence, to counsel and to the legal implications of anything he told his new interrogators. Mohammed made admissions to this second group of interrogators substantially similar to those he made to his torturers.
The government, which once denied but now admits to the torture, nevertheless was prepared to argue that his second confession was voluntary. Then, the feds had a change of heart. And, two years ago, his lawyers entered into plea negotiations, at the request of the government because the military lawyers and their Department of Justice legal colleagues concluded that they could not ethically defend torture in an American courtroom.
Federal law, the federal rules of criminal procedure, the canons of legal ethics and state bar licensing authorities all prohibit lawyers from using coerced testimony in a courtroom.
The government and all defense lawyers entered into a plea agreement that provided for full public confessions, a public confrontation by family members of 9/11 victims during which the defendants agreed to reply truthfully to their questions, and, of course, life in prison at Gitmo.
The Army general in the Pentagon in charge of all Gitmo prosecutions — herself a former military judge — approved the plea agreement, as did the military trial judge, and all five defendants.
Then, the Biden administration Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin fired the general who approved the plea agreement and revoked the Pentagon’s approval. A federal appeals court upheld his revocation. At that point, Mohammed was on his fourth military judge and his fifth team of prosecutors.
After the court affirmed the Pentagon’s change of heart, the military judge who had approved the plea agreement retired. The current and fifth judge has presumably read the 44,000 pages of documents and transcripts that 15 years of litigation has generated as he announced last week that he will rule on the admissibility of the second round of confessions this summer.
The present judge, who did not preside over any of the hundreds of hours of proceedings in the case, including those during which the horrific tortures described above were related in an American courtroom, must now decide if the second confession was voluntary. Though the government now admits that the first confession was not voluntary, its relevance here is not the words Mohammed told his torturers but the degradation of his mental faculties due to the egregious tortures such that the second confession was also not voluntary.
Was Mohammed so conditioned to the power of his interrogators that his will was attenuated?
The standard of proof that the government must meet to get the second confession admitted is voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. That’s the same high standard for proving guilt in all American courts. If the feds fail to meet this standard to the satisfaction of the judge, the case will proceed to trial without the jury hearing the confession.
This is a two-edged sword for the government. If the confession is read to the jury, then the defendants and their experts can relate to the jury all the horrific things the government did in order to produce the confessions. But if the confession does not come into evidence, then the jury will not hear of the tortures unless there is a conviction and the torture testimony is presented in mitigation of punishment.
What we have here is a lawless system of brutality. Torture and all it produces is a profound violation of natural rights, the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, as well as federal law. Even practitioners of this medieval behavior have acknowledged it produces unreliable statements. It is the tool of monsters.
On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, we are asked to accept government at its worst; one that the Framers thought they had prohibited and one to which the governed never consented.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alamoffers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy: … continue
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