Israel – Globalities

War on Iran: Global consequences and off-ramps we should support

Helena CobbanMarch 6, 2026March 6, 2026Antiwar, China, Diplomacy, Iran, Israel, U.S. military, United NationsLeave a comment

(The photo shows Trump being prayed over in the White House yesterday by a group of evangelical pastors.)

Today is Day 7 of this mass-murdering, mass-destruction project that Pres. Donald Trump named “Operation Epic Fury” (OEF). Already, the dimensions of many of its (quite foreseeable, and by many people clearly foreseen) consequences are becoming evident.

Most crucially, as of today, these:

The Iranians’ governance and command structure has survived, despite “decapitation” strikes since its first hours that killed Supreme Leader Khamene’i and dozens of top commanders.
Iranian forces continue, in response to OEF, to undertake stand-off attacks that seem well aimed and well coordinated and have in many cases inflicted real damage on their intended (military and economic) targets.
Israel has exploited this situation of war, impunity, and lawlessness to (a) reimpose its super-tight siege on the two million people of Gaza, (b) sharply escalate its bombings of Lebanon and peremptorily order the ethnic cleansing of South Lebanon as well as Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs, and (c) continue to oppress and dispossess Indigenous inhabitants of both the West Bank and Syria.
The Iranians’ response to OEF has included attacks not just on Israeli and U.S. military bases across West Asia but also on key economic facilities in Arab Gulf countries.
Through those latter attacks and by closing the Straits of Hormuz to shipping from OEF-associated countries, Tehran has delivered a huge blow to the global economy and especially to the Gulf Arab states that have been major bankrollers of Trumpian projects worldwide.

There are still, as of now, no signs of any imminent collapse of Iran’s command/governance structure. And meanwhile, all around the world a chorus of questions is growing louder around two key issues, either of which could rapidly increase the pressure on Washington to end the war. The first such pressure-point is the durability of U.S. stockpiles of key missile-defense and air-defense munitions needed to fend off Iran’s continuing volleys of low-cost drones and high-altitude missiles. The second is the degree, speed and temporal extent of the damage that the war inflicts on the global economy– a process that has already started.

No to war on Iran! No to U.S. hegemony!

Helena CobbanFebruary 21, 2026February 21, 2026Antiwar, Iran, Israel, Nuclear weapons, U.S. policy

Most people in the United States and other Western nations seem to consider it “normal”, or anyway unremarkable, that the U.S. should, on its own, have the authority to control and police the nuclear-enrichment projects of another country far away.

It is not.

There are a number of high-level UN bodies, with the Security Council at their apex, that have that authority. In 2015, the United States, the other four veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, and Germany jointly negotiated an arrangement with Iran that sought to address concerns that some countries had had about Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program. The agreement they reached, the “JCPOA”, was immediately endorsed by the Security Council.

In 2018, Pres. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the JCPOA and restored many of the unilateral U.S. economic sanctions on Iran that had earlier been lifted under its terms. The JCPOA’s other (non-Iran) signatories expressed mild concern at Trump’s move, but took no other action. (When Joe Biden became president he took some inconsequential steps to rejoin the agreement, then abandoned the project.)

The U.S.-Israeli plot against Iran: The record of the past 15 months

Helena CobbanFebruary 20, 2026February 20, 2026China, Diplomacy, Global balance, Iran, Israel, U.S. military

The Trump administration has now ordered a second Carrier Strike Group to join the one that is already sailing in the Gulf of Oman, close to Iran, and has deployed large amounts of military equipment (both offensive and defensive) to U.S. bases across West Asia, and to Israel. Trump’s envoys have now had two rounds of “proximity talks” with Iranian counterparts this month, discussing new limitations on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Both sides have said those talks went fairly well. But Washington now expects Tehran to present more detailed plans by March 3 and Trump has warned that if Iran fails to reach a satisfactory agreement, then it will face very serious military consequences.

Some analysts have gauged the probability of an all-out war at “80 to 90 percent.” Such numbers are still wildly speculative (and personally I would peg them far lower than that.) But in assessing the possibility of any major military engagement between the U.S.-Israeli alliance and Iran it is crucial also to assess the range of outcomes and knock-on effects that we can plausibly foresee from any such conflict, at a number of different levels:

within the immediate theater of the conflict (Iran, the Gulf region)
in the Mashreq (Levant) region which has Israel at its geographic core, and specifically, on Israel’s ability to continue imposing its diktat on its neighbors in the region, and
on the stability and integrity of the global system as a whole.

In this essay, I shall review the record of the project to weaken or topple Iran’s current, 47-year-long system of governance that the Trumpists and the government of Israel have jointly pursued in the period since Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, and identify six key takeaways we can take from that review.

In a later essay, I plan to build on this analysis to provide a few preliminary guidelines for what the effects of any new Trump-Israel assault on Iran might be, at the three levels identified above.

Tracking the Trump-Israel plot against Iran

Trump’s Iran backdown

Helena CobbanJanuary 16, 2026January 17, 2026Iran, Israel, Persian Gulf, U.S. policy2 Comments

There was Trump, on Tuesday, shouting all over the internet, “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! … HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.” And there was Trump just a day later saying, “We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping — it’s stopped — it’s stopping… And there’s no plan for executions, or an execution, or execution — so I’ve been told that on good authority.”

He was racing backward from the incendiary regime-change rhetoric of the previous day.

This was– for now, anyway– a clear case of “TACO, Iran-style”, to borrow the FT’s great acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Read on to see where I think this leaves us all now. But first, a bit of essential background.

Back in late June, in the aftermath of the “12-day War” that the U.S.-Israeli axis launched jointly against Iran June 13, I made a number of judgments, and shared some of them here and here. In the first of those essays, I judged that the reason that war ended so (relatively) swiftly and cleanly was that by June 24-25 both Israel and Iran found themselves locked in a “mutually hurting stalemate.” It was most certainly not any kind of “cakewalk” for the U.S.-Israel axis, and it certainly did not result in the unassailable U.S. win that Pres. Trump hurried to present it as.

Zionism (& other settler colonialisms) in world-historical perspective

Helena CobbanOctober 24, 2025December 5, 2025Israel, Palestine, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy3 Comments

It’s been a long time since I read either Fayez Sayegh’s seminal Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965) or Maxime Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973.) In the intervening decades, a lot has happened…

Sayegh was one of the intellectual fathers of the famous “Zionism is Racism” resolution that UN General Assembly adopted in 1975, and rescinded, under super-heavy American pressure, 16 years later. He died in 1980…

Rodinson was a brilliant French Marxist and an early and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights. (His use of the question-mark in his book’s title I emulated in my 2004 book Amnesty After Atrocity?; in both cases, it was a way of indicating that we had heard and engaged with the arguments of the critics of our main thesis.) Rodinson died in 2004…

Other things that have happened since I read those two books were:

The status and meaning of Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal

Helena CobbanOctober 14, 2025December 20, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, U.S. policy

On October 10, the devastating bombings and other attacks that the Israeli military has undertaken against Gaza nearly continuously for the past two years finally came a halt. (Or nearly so, see below.) The Israeli military’s massive tanks and bulldozers began to lumber their way out of some– but far from all– of the parts of Gaza they had devastated over those 24 months. Some aid trucks started to roll in. Hundreds of thousands of the Palestinians who’d been forced, under withering Israeli fire, to evacuate south from Gaza City started to trudge back north to their former– very often completely pulverized– homes.

Phases of withdrawal in Trump’s plan. Source. Click to enlarge.

U.S. Pres. Trump was the one who successfully forced the Israeli government to sign onto that ceasefire agreement. (He could, at any moment since his inauguration back in January, have used Washington’s near-complete sway over Israel’s military decisionmaking to force that same outcome… And so, at any point in the preceding 15 months, could his predecessor in the White House. How many thousands of lives and destinies would have been saved?)

On October 13, as the reciprocal captive-exchange portions of the October 10 agreement were completed, Trump organized two large, splashy public events– one in Israel, one in Egypt– at which with his now horribly familiar braggadocio he took his victory laps for the ceasefire.

Hamas in negotiations– and on the ground

Helena CobbanOctober 10, 2025October 10, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Qatar, U.S. policy1 Comment

Text of Oct. 9 agreement. Click to enlarge.

The clock started ticking at Noon Palestine Time today on implementation of the 6-step ceasefire + captive-release agreement negotiated in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, by Pres. Trump and his three Muslim-state mediation partners. Those talks were held on a “proximity” basis with, presumably, the Israeli negotiators in one room, the Palestinian resistance alliance led by veteran Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya in another, and various groups of mediators shuttling between them.

(That’s Khalil Al-Hayya, above.)

The negotiators in Sharm had reached agreement on their 6-step plan on Thursday, but per Step 2 therein, implementation awaited the approval of the Israeli government. That was achieved this morning.

The prescribed ceasefire and many signs of an Israeli military pullback started at Noon today (local.) By that time, thousands of Palestinians whom the Israelis had previously expelled south from Northern Gaza under fire were already streaming back toward their homes in the north.

On ‘Condemning Hamas’

Helena CobbanOctober 1, 2025October 2, 2025Diplomacy, Discourse suppression, Gaza, Israel, U.S. policy

I was at an in-person event here in Washington yesterday, and I raised the matter of Hamas, noting that the title of Rami Khouri’s and my recent book Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters is still very relevant. One of the speakers was the Egyptian-American Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid. He responded by making a few fairly smart observations– but then he loudly repeated the injunction that has been his watchword throughout the past two years: “We must condemn Hamas!”

I guess that is the price Hamid feels he must pay to have access to the pages of Jeff Bezos’s failing, but still influential, rag here in the U.S. capital. Maybe he even believes it. But why? What does it actually mean to “condemn” an entire movement– and one, moreover, with which our national government has been negotiating, with varying degrees of intensity, for more than 18 months now?

A movement, therefore, whose inner workings and worldview it would presumably be very useful for both government officials and informed citizens to understand as well as possible…

A Jewish State in Palestine: The UN’s Original Sin?

Helena CobbanSeptember 26, 2025September 27, 2025Diplomacy, Global balance, Global governance, Israel, Palestine, United Nations2 Comments

On a day when an indicted war criminal and the author and Kommandant of an ongoing genocide gets to speak from the rostrum of the world’s most august and authoritative governance body… We should ask whether this tradition of coddling and endlessly appeasing the leaders of a brutal settler-colonial project in Palestine dates back, indeed, to the founding years of the United Nations and the decision an earlier UN General Assembly took in November 1947 to partition historic Palestine and assign to that small proportion of its residents who were participants in the Zionist settler project, their own independent ethno-state state and to allocate to it, moreover, a wildly disproportionate amount of Palestine’s fertile land and other resources.

Today, at a time when Israel’s government and military continue their genocide in Gaza– and their ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank… and their continuing aggressions against Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and even a small unarmed flotilla of humanitarian activists– we should ask whether this two-year-long orgy of Israeli violence is now bringing down not just the global power of its main backer in world affairs (whose own foundation as a “nation” lay also, lest we forget, in a settler-extremist rebellion against the metropole), but also the United Nations itself.

Palestinian statehood and international legitimacy

Helena CobbanAugust 3, 2025August 3, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, Palestine, Settler colonialism, United Nations

The recent announcements by the governments of France and the U.K. that they have some (limited) readiness to “recognize” a Palestinian state change nothing– either regarding the genocide in Gaza or in the diplomacy over the Palestine Question more broadly. What they do do, however, is highlight once again the debate that has long simmered within the Palestinian-rights movement over whether the goal of the Palestinian movement should be a fully democratic one-state situation (‘solution’) or a two-state situation in which Palestinian and majority-Jewish Israeli states co-exist side-by-side in the land of historic (Mandate-era) Palestine.

But maybe now is a good time to re-examine another formula that’s been on the table for nearly 80 years now: that of, effectively, the three-state situation prescribed by the Partition Plan for Palestine as defined in the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 181 of November 1947?

That 1947 Partition Plan is, after all, the only authoritative and geographically delineated plan for governance in historic Palestine that carries the imprimatur of the UN and thereby its certificate of international legitimacy. And we should all care about international legitimacy, right?