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.
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.
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…
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.
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?
On July 1, Sina Toossi published an important piece in Foreign Policy mag in which he argued that the “12-day war” that the US-Israeli alliance launched against Iran on June 13 had backfired, primarily in terms of its nuclear-nonproliferation goals. He wrote:
There is no question that Israel achieved notable tactical successes, inflicting serious damage on Iran’s military command and scientific infrastructure. But … based on available evidence, Netanyahu’s core goals—undermining Iran’s deterrence and meaningfully rolling back the elements of its nuclear program that pose the greatest proliferation risk—remain unmet.
One of the most significant failures lies in the nuclear file…While Trump administration officials have insisted that the strikes set Iran’s program back by years, early U.S. and European intelligence assessments suggest otherwise.
On July 8, Israeli military/intel analyst Moty Kanias followed up with this analysis, along similar but notably broader lines. Here were his heading and subhead:
Very few people in the ‘West’ have yet paid much attention to the very significant contribution that China has made, behind the scenes, to strengthening Iran’s resilience as well as its defensive and offensive military capabilities.
Several Western reporters have written (e.g., Reuters here) about China’s heavy degree of reliance on oil imports from Iran, and many of them have noted that this has made China very vulnerable to any closure of the Straits of Hormuz that could have been sparked by a continuation of the US-Israel war on Iran. But very few Western commentators have taken note of the fact that on May 24, a lengthy freight train carrying electronics and other goods arrived in Tehran, having inaugurated the first ever direct rail link between China and Iran.
Establishing this direct rail link is not the only way in which China has been bolstering Iran’s resilience and capabilities. Of probably even greater importance has been the ability Chinese tech has given many core parts of Iran’s governance and military command systems to free themselves from reliance on the kinds of Western tech that have left users often fatally vulnerable to US-Israeli hacking. As the well-placed Chinese tech expert William Huonoted earlier today, “Iran’s drones… fly coordinated, autonomous, and lethal. That’s Chinese targeting AI and optical systems… Iranian missiles run on Chinese chips, Chinese servos, Chinese nav units.”
He noted that in return, “China gets a combat-proven proxy and real-time telemetry from a U.S.-backed target. If Iron Dome can’t keep up, what happens in Taiwan? What happens to Aegis? To Japan’s missile net? Everyone watching saw the same thing… “
Small surprise, therefore, that earlier today, per Al-Monitor, “China hosted defence ministers from Iran and Russia for a meeting in its eastern seaside city of Qingdao…”
Huo and others have noted that much of the terminal guidance that made Iran’s most advanced missiles, and some of its drones, so effective in reaching precise targets inside Israel, was provided by systems using China’s Beidou navigation system (intriguingly often shortened to ‘BDS’.) Unlike systems reliant on the Western GPS system, BeiDou is not vulnerable to US/Israeli hacking or spoofing.
Evidently, some leading people in Iran’s security sector were still, as of June 13, using Western-based communications systems like WhatsApp or Telegram. Earlier this week, a Washington Post reporter was passed, by “an Israeli individual who obtained the material” an audio recording of a threat that an Israeli security-services operative had delivered over the phone to a “senior Iranian official” warning that he and his wife and family would be murdered unless he either fled Iran or made and sent back to them within 12 hours a video in which he dissociated himself from the Iranian government.
Almost certainly, going forward, all senior Iranian officials will be restricted to using non-Western means of communication.
China’s ability to have started building valuable, concrete operational relations with many parts of the Iranian military should come as little surprise. Back in March 2023, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stunned the whole of the Western world when he succeeded in brokering a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran that changed the geopolitics of the Gulf region and West Asia very substantially.
Prior to that reconciliation, it was an unquestioned assumption of most Western policymakers that the wealthy (and Sunni Muslim) rulers of the Arabian Peninsula coast of the Gulf more or less shared their desire to see the demise of the (Shi-ite-dominated) Islamic Republic of Iran. During the whole of the current US-Israeli attack against Iran, however, the Arab Gulf rulers of the GCC have largely stood aside from joining the anti-Tehran battles, though Qatar and many of the others do still host significant US military bases. At the June 22 meeting that the UN Security Council convened urgently to discuss the US-Israel-Iran crisis, the ambassador of Kuwait put his name on the speaker’s list and in the name of all members of GCC he decried the Israeli and US attacks on Iran and called urgently for a ceasefire.
On recent developments in China’s policies toward Palestine and West Asia more generally, here are two other intriguing sources:
This piece by Zhang Sheng in Mondoweiss in March. (This tracks how, despite the PRC government’s fairly close economic ties with Israel some years ago, it has more recently distanced itself from it.
English translations of the speech the Chinese rep at the UN made at the June 22 session, and comments by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spox, also on June 22. Interestingly, the Ministry spox noted that Chinese bodies had worked to evacuate 3,125 Chinese nations from Iran during the war, while “China’s Embassy in Israel helped and organized the evacuation of over 500 Chinese nationals from Israel to safety, and helped some nationals from the UK, India and Poland safely evacuate.” So that is ratio of about 6 to 1.
London-based security analyst Mark Sleboda gave one good initial summary of the takeaways from this war, as summarized here by Bernhard of Moon of Alabama.
I agree with most of Mark’s points, especially his bottom-line conclusion that the biggest loser was “the NPT and international law.” We’ll come back to that, later.
Here are just some quick clarifications on Mark’s point that the US and Israel came to realize that a war of attrition “was going to go badly for Israel”:
People who consume mainly western corporate media need to understand that they have NOT gotten anything like the full picture of the damage that Iran’s strikes have caused to Israel’s society and economy. All foreign media reporting from Israel is subject to very strict military censorship, as I know from experience. None of the journos for Western corporate media who report from Israel tells their viewers/readers that. Shame on them!
In a small slip, the Israeli Tax Authority recently released (but then speedily deleted) some docs reporting that as of yesterday they had already received 32,975 claims for damages to buildings. The Twitter account of MENA Unleashed reproduced some parts of this Israeli Tax Authority report. You can read their whole analysis of this and other damage data from Israel here.
The Electronic Intifada’s indispensable Jon Elmer also presented a great assessment on June 20 of how the war was going for Israel, by then. You can see his 31-minute here, or read a transcript here. (The still photo above is from his report.)
Mark Sleboda wrote that the Iranian government had agreed to Trump’s ceasefire proposal “because they too have been badly shaken through Israeli covert warfare and their own air defense all but collapsed.” The first part of that assessment is almost certainly true, given that on the first day (Friday the 13th) of Israel’s massive initial assault, Israeli covert ops succeeded in killing more than a dozen key, top IRGC leaders and commanders, and top nuclear scientists.
However, after many decades of facing different types of attack from Washington, Israel, and their allies, the Iranians have become very accustomed to building redundancy and resilience into their command and control networks. And within just a few hours of Israel’s atrocious and quite illegal sneak attack, Iranian units were able to send 100 missiles against Israel on that first day, and then to maintain the capability to shoot missiles and drones against Israel until the very day of the ceasefire, June 24.
The image here, taken from the Haaretz website, lists just the 532 ballistic missiles that Iran sent against Israel during the war, not those low-level drones that also got through. It indicates that 31 of the missiles managed to evade Israel’s multi-layered (and generously US-funded) interceptor system.
Toward the end of Jon Elmer’s June 20 report, he gave some intriguing figures on just how expensive Israel’s anti-ballistic and anti-drone interceptors are, compared with the often minimal cost of the incoming Iranian weapons. (As with Yemen’s Ansarallah, as he noted.) There have also been several reports that Israelis were just plain running out of interceptors for their high-level Arrow system.
Mark Sleboda was right to say that Iran’s air-defense system had “all but collapsed” as of June 13– when, on the first day of Israel’s attack one of its main target sets was precisely the Iranian air-defense radars and associated systems. And that left many, many parts of Iran woefully unprotected against Israel’s many waves of bomber aircraft, which received considerable, active help from the USAF along the way in the spheres of both intel coordination and in-air refueling as the Israeli planes streaked across the skies of Syria, Iraq, and possibly also Jordan, with huge amounts of help from US Centcom.
Source, IISS via Jon Elmer. Click to enlarge
However, Iran is a very large country and it’s nearly 1,800 km away from Israel. So though Israel has a very large, very capable (and did I mention US-funded and US-supported?) Air Force, it was still, after eleven days, quite incapable of breaking the Iranian military in any meaningful way. And meantime, though the USAF and the IAF were able to act with a high degree of safety for themselves inside that air-bridge from Israel to Iran, the Iranian military/IRGC was able to get to Israel using two different layers of the atmosphere: both by shooting their large and capable missiles very much higher than the USAF-IAF air bridge and by send their Shahed drones very much lower, as Jon Elmer very helpfully explained.
So after eleven days it was a mutually hurting stalemate. But there have been several indications that Israel’s society and economy were much closer to collapse than Iran’s. (Hence, Trump’s rush to the ceasefire.)
In the early hours of June 13, the Israeli Air Force, reportedly aided by special forces/spy units pre-deployed into Iran, launched a barrage of massive strikes against Iranian air-defenses, nuclear facilities, command-and-control nodes, and individual targeted Iranians, military and non-military. Iranian government negotiators were planning to meet in Muscat, Oman, just two days later, in the next phase of the talks that U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had maintained for the previous two months. (Israel’s attack reportedly killed some of the Iranian specialists who were planning to attend those Muscat talks.)
The Israeli attack almost certainly took the Iranians by surprise. Israel killed many senior military leaders, especially in the elite Iranian revolutionary Guard Corps. But within just a few hours, Iran’s command system proved capable of responding in kind; and since June 13, every night has seen an exchange of deadly missiles between the two countries. Israel has delivered much of its ordnance against Iran from air-force planes flying right over Iran, or close to its Western border in the skies of Iraq and Syria protected by U.S. surveillance (and potential interception) capabilities, while Iran has delivered its missiles, including some hypersonic missiles, from its own home turf.
The Israelis claim they have destroyed many significant Iranian military and nuclear-research facilities. Their attacks– along with calls from Pres. Trump for the “evacuation” of the whole of Tehran–have caused deep disruptions in the lives of millions of Iranians.
The human casualties of this war have been very much higher in Iran than in Israel–though not on a per-capita basis. In Israel, families who have never previously experienced “incoming” attacks that caused more than minor damage have now been seeing the much larger level of damage inflicted by those Iranian missiles that manage to evade Israel’s multi-layered (and partly U.S.-supplied) anti-missile shields.
The two sides have seemingly become locked into a deadly war of attrition with no clear end– or even a plausible diplomatic off-ramp– in sight. (There have meantime been some reports that Israel’s stock of “Arrow” anti-ballistic missiles has been depleting at a rate that can’t be sustained for very much longer.)
Within this picture of a possibly lengthy, slugging-it-out war of attrition, there are a number of possible wild cards:
The painting above is of Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque
For Pres. Trump, cruelty is a vital tool as he bulldozes through all constitutional requirements to undertake (and publicize) exemplary deportations of undocumented immigrants and of any legally documented visitors like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil whom he arbitrarily chooses to punish.
For Israel’s PM Netanyahu and his ministers, cruelty is similarly a vital tool as they deploy waves of bombers and incendiary drones against two million Palestinians huddling under tarps on Gaza’s trash-piled shores while totally blocking the entry into Gaza of all the basic necessities of life.
Indian Ocean trading routes before da Gama. Click on image to enlarge.
It’s worth noting that cruelty has been a vital, and deliberately deployed, tool for the architects and commanders of “White” empires ever since the 15th century CE. In 1415, Portuguese navigators started carving their way down the coast of West Africa to establish heavily fortified “trading” (plunder) posts in their quest for gold. Those navigators were also intent on finding a sea-route to the richest trading zone they’d ever heard of, the one that traversed the Indian Ocean and wove the riches of East Africa, India, and distant Cathay (China) into the most advanced manufacturing and consumption area then known to humankind…
