The Middle East is ‘conservative’ no more. Rather, a very different ‘Awakening’ is gestating. The long war to reaffirm western and Israeli primacy is undergoing a shape-shift. On one front, the calculus in respect to Russia and the Ukraine war has shifted. And in the Middle East, the locus and shape of the war is... Read More

Of course, a victory narrative was too valuable to be foregone. Yet nonetheless, unexplained events matter. On Saturday, an Israeli force of some 100 aircraft attacked Iran from a stand-off position in Iraq, some 70 kilometres outside the Iranian border. A Wall Street Journal author, Walter Russell Meade, Distinguished Fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote:... Read More

Playing nice’ won’t change its paradigm. Failure does. With the assassination of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah and a number of the Hizbullah senior leadership in Beirut – expressly without prior warning being given to the Pentagon – Netanyahu fired the start gun on an implicit Israeli widening of war to – using Israel’s term – the... Read More

Judging by Israeli statements, the consensus is that Hizbullah will retaliate, but in a way that is different from the way it has responded until now. “After today [the day of the pager simultaneous explosions], there can be no talk about settlement and solutions”, writes Ibrahim Amine, Editor of Al-Akhbar, known for his close contacts... Read More

The war is lost, and the struggle to keep the ‘enforced pretending’ going is breaking through, to be seen by all as a false reality. Israel is entering the next phase of its war on Palestine by completing its takeover of the Gaza Strip – from the northern border to the Netzarim corridor. It is... Read More

America is trapped by its ‘ironclad’, unqualified military support for Israel – which offers Netanyahu ample room for manoeuvre. “The successful thwarting of Hizbullah’s attack on Sunday, symbolized Israel’s intelligence and operational edge”: According to the IDF spokesman, the Hezbollah attack was thwarted for the most part – thanks to 100 Israel aircraft carrying out... Read More

Israelis have been deeply divided these last years, unable to coalesce around a government. After five general elections, they decided to dismiss the Lapid/Gantz team and to put a new coalition – formed around Netanyahu and small Jewish supremacist parties – into power. However, soon after the formation of the new government, there occurred an... Read More

The signposts are there for all to read: The West – in deliberately overlooking such explicit markers – cannot then complain, or escape, the ensuing consequences. No, the ‘tin ear’ is not some new western derangement – a unique mass collapse of sanity – that we are living through. It is something worse: a return... Read More

U.S. foreign policy strategies are not widely discussed publicly, and are viewed by the ruling-strata as vital and being of the essence. Extraordinary Times: Biden renounces his election bid via in the slimmest of Sunday afternoon postings; retreats into a silence which finally is broken by a ‘long farewell’ pronounced from the Oval Office. Biden’s... Read More

Israel’s strategy from past decades will continue with its hope of achieving some Chimeric transformative “de-radicalisation” of Palestinians that will make ‘Israel safe’. (This paper is the basis of a talk to be given at the 25th Yasin (April) International Academic Event on Economic and Social Development, HSE University, Moscow, April 2024) In the summer... Read More

The Resistance seeks to maintain their calibratory control for attriting Israel, whereas Israel wants to move directly to its ‘Armageddon vision’. Israel’s dual strategy for Lebanon is to exert pressure through direct raids to instil fear amongst the wider population, whilst deploying diplomatic pressure to purge Hizbullah – not just from the border, but from... Read More

We have entered a period of breakdown and violence, as the forces pulling apart the old status quo cascade and mutually reinforce one another. In a speech on Tuesday, Hizbullah leader Seyed Nasrallah said that the Party will continue the border offensive until at least the Gaza massacre stops. The war in Gaza however, is... Read More

The U.S. seemingly aims to find a way to hurt Iranian and Resistance forces just enough to show that Biden is ‘very angry’ “The Iranians have a strategy, and we don’t”, a former senior U.S. Defence Department official told Al-Monitor: “We’re getting bogged down in tactical weeds – of whom to target and how –... Read More

The energies of resistance will pierce through the West’s own distinct ‘revolution’ and brewing ‘civil war’ Israel is boxed-in, as is becoming very evident to many Israelis. One Israeli correspondent (formerly a Cabinet Secretary) illustrates its nature: “The meaning of the 7th October default is not only the loss of lives … but mainly the... Read More

China and Russia have been remarkably quiet, watching carefully the global tectonic plates shifting around in response to the ‘two wars’ (Ukraine and Israel’s ‘multiwar’). Really it is not surprising; both states can sit back to simply watch Biden and his team persist with their strategic mistakes in Ukraine and in Israel’s multiple wars. The... Read More

One major theme of Homer’s Iliad – which somehow seems as fresh and as vivid today as when first written – is its description of how even the greatest of states in Western civilization fail to reclaim what they lose. “Attempts to repair one loss lead only to more losses”, Emily Wilson writes in her... Read More

Biden may believe that his ‘long experience’ puts him on the ‘right side’ in judging events, but his experience is drawn from another era. Biden smirked and responded, “I know”, when told by a guest that Netanyahu is drawing the U.S. into a civilisational conflict – and further that Netanyahu blames him (Biden), complaining that... Read More

The Magician steps onto the stage, his black cloak swirling about him. Centre stage, he flourishes his hat: It is empty. He punches it lightly to demonstrate its solidity. The Magician then picks up certain objects and places them into his hat. Into it goes AnsarAllah’s seizure of an Israeli-owned vessel (the situation is being... Read More

Netanyahu is setting the stage for entrapment of the Biden Administration by manoeuvring so that the U.S. has little choice but to join with Israel. The allegory is one in which a scorpion depends on the frog for its passage across a flooded river, by hitching a lift on the frog’s back. The frog distrusts... Read More

Is this punishment on Gaza’s civilian population, prompted by desire for vengeance? Or is it an outpouring of eschatological rage and determination? The point about the Gaza crisis is that should everyone agree to stick their head in the sand and ignore the ‘elephant in the room’, it’s easy enough so to do. The meaning... Read More

Tom Friedman uttered his dire warning in the New York Times on Thursday last: Friedman here is talking, of course, about an American alliance system, pivoted around the idea of Israel’s military prowess being invincible – the ‘Little NATO’ paradigm that acts as the essential substrata for the spread of the American-led Rules Order through... Read More