After US President Donald Trump reiterated that his party lost the midterm elections because of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi asked him to respect the wishes of the American people and end the war now.

“They did not like the war. They did not like the fact that gasoline went up, ‘because I had it down at a low; there’s a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel,’ Trump said during a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, while underlining reasons why Republicans lost the 3 November midterm elections.

Though Trump did not directly blame Israel for the war, Araghchi pointed out that people’s disgust with Israel is rooted in the fact that it has been largely seen as the reason behind the war.

Trump “clearly recognises that the vast majority of Americans are disgusted with Israel,” which has bamboozled successive “US administrations into forever wars,” Araghchi said in a post on X on Monday, 9 November.

Earlier, US Vice President JD Vance had also blamed relations with Israel for the war on Iran, claiming it caused unpopularity for the Republican Party in the elections and called for changes to those relations.

Araghchi affirmed there should be no further delays and the war should end, as both the people in the US and the people of West Asia have seen and suffered enough.

Replying to a related question about the possibility of restarting the war, Trump contradicted his own statements made earlier on Wednesday and Thursday, claiming he is not looking to escalate the war, as there is no reason for it now.

He further said that Iran’s nuclear programme is practically over, as they do not have any nuclear material left, and he “has stopped them from having a nuclear weapon.”

Trump claimed that though there is no need to strike Iran now, if such a need arises in the future, for example, to attack Pickaxe Mountain (an alleged Iranian nuclear site): “We would have that done in one hour.”

Strait of Hormuz

When asked about the cost of the war and the deployment of US assets to protect navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump claimed that the Strait was open.

He also claimed that all its allies in the region, including Israel, would not have survived without the US support, and therefore they are going to pay for all the costs the US has incurred in the war and managing the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has repeatedly denied US claims about the Strait being open. It has targeted dozens of ships trying to cross the Strait with the US help and claimed only ships coordinating with Iran are allowed to cross it.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced additional measures to control what it called the “smuggling” of oil through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, claiming to have destroyed the “enemy’s” navigation aid systems.

In an earlier post on Sunday, Araghchi had reiterated the Iranian proposal to open the Strait. He has said that if the US agrees to its demands, the waterway will open in two days, asking the White House to learn from the American people and make its choice.

Araghchi had proposed last month that if the US agrees to its seven demands, including the end of the war on all fronts in the region, the lifting of all sanctions imposed since the collapse of the 17 June Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), and the release of its frozen assets, Iran will move to open the Strait of Hormuz within days.

The US has rejected the Iranian demands to end the war and open the Strait of Hormuz. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them “outrageous and ridiculous.”

Responding to Rubio’s rejection, Esmail Baghaei, official spokesperson of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, questioned his reasoning on Monday, claiming if anything was really outrageous and ridiculous, it was the US-Israeli war on Iran.

US aggressive posture against Iran continues.

The US has repeatedly quoted data to prove the “normalisation” of the energy trade through the Strait of Hormuz, with Trump making claims that the US is in full control of the waterways.

The US Central Command has continued to make aggressive postures. On Friday, it launched fresh airstrikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island. Though Iran claimed the strike failed to cause any substantial damage.

On Sunday the US also announced the formation of a 20-member so-called “Iron Gate” task force in an effort to prevent the transportation of weapons and other goods through Iranian borders as an extension of its naval blockade.

One of the objectives of the task force is to also prevent trade by land and the Caspian Sea routes as a part of the US attempts to “economically isolate” Iran.

Over the weekend, the US Department of State also launched a so-called Rewards for Justice campaign, announcing a $20 million reward and “possible relocation” for “information about Iran’s nuclear programme, including its facilities, equipment, and associated personnel, such as those in the scientific community.”

Iran reacted sharply to the move, calling it a “bid to recruit accomplices for assassinations, criminal acts and further offensive.”

Adding to the confusion on Sunday, Trump also claimed that he is going to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China next week, where they will be discussing the future of denuclearisation and the “end of the war” on Iran.

Both Russia and China have been demanding the end of the US-Israeli war on Iran, with Russia even offering mediation.

Now that Democrats have swept the House, a key question is: Who should lead it?

Hakeem Jeffries is in line to become the first Black Speaker of the House, which would be a historic milestone. But members of Congress must examine Jeffries’ record, his priorities, and the kind of leadership he would bring to this moment.

Here are ten reasons why Jeffries should not be Speaker.

1. He has abandoned Medicare for All

At a time when millions of Americans struggle with unaffordable health insurance, medical debt, and the threat of financial ruin from illness, Jeffries has distanced himself from one of the most important progressive reforms: Medicare for All.

Jeffries co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation from 2013 through 2021. But in an August 2026 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, he said it is no longer legislation he supports or cosponsors. Ironically, he made that statement on the same day a CBS poll found that 90 percent of Democratic voters back the idea.

This reversal puts him at odds with party voters, but also with a majority of Democratic representatives in the House. As of late October, Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All Act had 118 Democratic cosponsors. A “leader” who won’t back what his own caucus and voters want is not a leader.

2. He refuses to break with Israel

Perhaps nowhere is Jeffries more out of step with the progressive base than on Israel.

For decades, Jeffries has been a staunch defender of the U.S.-Israel alliance. At a pro-Israel rally in 2014, during Israel’s military assault on Gaza, Jeffries proclaimed, “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever!.” In 2020 he told an AIPAC conference that New Yorkers consider Jerusalem their “sixth borough,” totally disregarding the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Even as Israel’s genocide in Gaza sparked worldwide outrage, Jeffries continued to resist calls to end U.S. military support.

In July 2026, 103 House Democrats voted to cut $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel, including the party’s second-ranking House leader, Katherine Clark. But Jeffries joined 97 other Democrats and nearly every Republican in voting to preserve the funding.

In a May 2024 60 Minutes interview, when asked whether Israel’s bombing of Gaza had been indiscriminate, Jeffries said no. By then, nearly 35,000 Palestinians had been killed. When the interviewer pressed him, saying, “You seem reluctant to criticize Israel at all,” Jeffries responded, “I’m dealing with the facts on the ground.”

Jeffries has also refused to cosponsor the Block the Bombs Act, which would restrict transfers of some of the deadliest offensive weapons to Israel, including 2,000-pound bombs, bunker busters, precision-guidance kits, and tank and artillery rounds. As of November 2026, the bill has 82 Democratic cosponsors and the endorsement of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Caucus Chair Greg Casar has pledged to push for a floor vote if Democrats regain the majority. Yet Jeffries has not signed on, and as Speaker, he would have enormous power to determine whether the bill ever receives a vote.

While Jeffries has acknowledged that U.S. policy toward Israel needs to change, he continues to support Israel’s military superiority and joint missile-defense programs. He has also refused to condemn Section 219 of the NDAA, which would further integrate U.S. and Israeli military research, technology, and production.

Ironically, both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have recently suggested that the U.S. should stop giving Israel nearly $4 billion a year because “Israel doesn’t need it.” Whether or not we believe them, it is striking that we have yet to hear a similar call from Hakeem Jeffries.

3. He has failed to champion major cuts to the obscene Pentagon budget

At a time when Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities, Trump is demanding a staggering $1.5 trillion military budget—an increase of nearly $600 billion, or 66 percent, over the previous year’s base funding. Yet Jeffries has not made substantially reducing Pentagon spending a central priority of Democratic leadership.

Yes, he has opposed funding for Trump’s war in Iran but he is a staunch advocate of continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine and has sharply criticized Trump for failing to provide sufficient support. He said “America is stronger when Russia is weaker.” In September 2026, he pledged that Democrats would continue backing Ukraine “until victory is won,” signaling his commitment to greater U.S. involvement and military assistance instead of a commitment to a diplomatic solution that would end that terrible war.

Jeffries is also an enthusiastic defender of the aggressive alliance NATO, which should have dissolved when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. He has called NATO “the most successful military and diplomatic alliance in the history of the world.” NATO, at Trump’s insistence, has called for all members to dramatically increase their military budgets to 5 percent of their GDP (the US is presently at 3.1 percent).

Jeffries’ ties to the military-industrial complex are particularly troubling. During the 2026 election cycle alone, Jeffries’ campaign reportedly received approximately $212,000 from military PACs.

Democrats cannot simply promise better healthcare, affordable housing, quality education and climate action while supporting a massive military budget. Real change requires shifting resources from weapons and war to the needs of ordinary people. The next Democratic Speaker must be prepared to challenge the military-industrial complex.

4. He continues to accept pro-Israel lobby money

Jeffries’s position on Israel cannot be separated from his longstanding political relationship with the AIPAC lobby.

At a time when AIPAC funding has become toxic and so many Democratic candidates rejected AIPAC money, Jeffries has maintained his ties to the organization.

According to Track AIPAC, Hakeem Jeffries has received more than $1.5 million in campaign contributions from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups over his congressional career. During the 2026 election cycle alone, his campaign received nearly $300,000 in contributions from pro-Israel PACs.He has also taken five AIPAC-sponsored trips to Israel since arriving in Congress.

Following the November elections, AIPAC publicly celebrated Jeffries as one of the candidates it supported.

How can congressional Democrats be led by someone so closely tied to AIPAC, a lobby increasingly toxic to their own voters?

5. His Backroom Dealings with Jared Kushner Raise Serious Questions About His Judgment

At a time when Americans are demanding investigations into the Trump family’s financial dealings, Hakeem Jeffries chose to sit down privately with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and influential adviser.

In August 2026, reports revealed that Jeffries had met with Kushner to discuss possible cooperation on housing, immigration and affordability. Yet Kushner, who holds no official government position, continues to wield influence over U.S. foreign policy while maintaining lucrative financial relationships with Gulf governments through his investment firm.

House Judiciary Committee Democrat Jamie Raskin has already launched an investigation into Kushner’s foreign financial entanglements, demanding documents and communications about his dealings with foreign governments. So why was Jeffries meeting with him behind closed doors?

With Democrats taking control of the House in January, they need a speaker committed to untangling the dirty web of corruption committed by Trump and his inner circle.

6. He Has Elevated Warhawks to Key Foreign-Policy Positions

You can tell a political leader’s priorities by whom they put in power. And Jeffries’s choices speak volumes.

In August 2026, Democratic leaders elevated Rep. Jared Moskowitz, one of the House’s most outspoken pro-Israel hawks, to the top Democratic position on the powerful House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa. Moskowitz has been an unwavering defender of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, continued U.S. weapons shipments, and Israel’s brutal military operations in Lebanon. He has also openly supported both Israeli attacks on Iran and Trump’s 2025 bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, and initially opposed congressional efforts to prevent the 2026 war before later backing War Powers restrictions.

With Democrats in control of the House, Moskowitz will be positioned to chair the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, wielding significant influence over congressional oversight and policy toward Israel, Palestine, Iran, and the entire region.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Wesley Bell, two other staunch defenders of Israel, were added to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Bell had defeated progressive Rep. Cori Bush in 2024 after massive spending by AIPAC’s super PAC. Progressives are still steaming over the role of Wasserman Schultz in undermining Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

The backlash to these appointments was immediate. Rep. Ro Khanna warned, “Don’t put Israel hawks out of touch with our voters in charge of our Middle East policy.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the appointments as an insult to voters and an attempt to shield Israel from accountability for its actions in Gaza.

7. Jeffries Represents the Democratic Party’s Dependence on Corporate Money

The Democratic Party claims to fight for working people, but Jeffries remains deeply connected to the wealthy corporate interests that dominate Washington.

His campaign has benefited from millions of dollars in contributions associated with Wall Street, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, real estate interests, Big Tech and military contractors.

These financial relationships raise a fundamental question: How aggressively will Democrats challenge corporate greed, Wall Street speculation, soaring healthcare costs and the military-industrial complex when their leader maintains such close ties to these powerful interests?

Progressive Democrats have demonstrated that grassroots organizing and small-dollar fundraising offer an alternative to corporate PAC money.

The Democratic Party cannot credibly promise to take on corporate power without confronting the influence of big money within its own leadership.

8. He has defended the Democratic establishment against progressive challengers

Jeffries has a long history of protecting entrenched Democratic incumbents against progressive challengers.

In 2020, he backed longtime pro-Israel congressman Eliot Engel against Jamaal Bowman, who defeated Engel in a stunning primary upset. In 2022, Jeffries traveled to Chicago to campaign for veteran Congressman Danny Davis against young progressive organizer Kina Collins, who came within seven percentage points of victory.

And in 2026, Jeffries backed Dan Goldman, Adriano Espaillat and Shri Thanedar against progressive challengers Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Donavan McKinney. All three incumbents lost their primaries, and all three challengers went on to win in November.

This pattern is no coincidence. In 2021, Jeffries joined forces with centrist Democrats Josh Gottheimer and Terri Sewell to establish Team Blue PAC, designed to protect Democratic incumbents against primary challengers.

While voters are demanding a new direction, Jeffries has repeatedly sided with the establishment candidates they rejected.

9. He Wants to Reform ICE, Not Abolish It

As ICE agents terrorize immigrant communities, separate families and carry out violent raids, the question of how to dismantle Trump’s cruel mass-deportation machinery has become increasingly urgent.

Jeffries has condemned ICE’s brutality and demanded greater accountability. But he has stopped short of calling for the abolition of ICE or the dismantling of the Department of Homeland Security, insisting instead that these agencies can be reformed.

Contrast that with Rep. Delia Ramirez’s groundbreaking Reimagining Safety Act, which would abolish ICE, dismantle DHS and establish a new Department of Community Safety, redirecting resources toward housing, healthcare and community well-being. Her legislation challenges the very definition of national security, arguing that real safety comes from meeting people’s needs, not militarizing their communities.

This is the kind of bold, visionary leadership that offers a fundamental alternative to simply “reforming” an out-of-control immigration enforcement system that is terrorizing immigrant communities.

10. He Has Failed to Champion Bold Climate Action

As devastating wildfires consume entire communities, record-breaking heat waves threaten lives, and floods and droughts wreak havoc across the country, the climate crisis demands bold, urgent leadership—not business as usual.

Yet Jeffries has refused to endorse the Green New Deal or champion demands to halt the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and eliminate taxpayer subsidies to the oil and gas industry. In 2022, when more than 70 House Democrats publicly opposed legislation to fast-track fossil fuel projects, Jeffries declined to join them.

More recently, he has distanced himself from calls for a moratorium on new AI data centers, even as a powerful grassroots movement is sweeping the country, with communities organizing against these energy-guzzling facilities that drain water supplies, drive up electricity bills, strain power grids and threaten the environment.

Jeffries supported the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy investments, but he has not embraced the more ambitious climate agenda advocated by progressive lawmakers and community groups.

At a time when climate disasters are destroying homes, livelihoods and entire communities, the Democratic Party needs leadership with the urgency and ambition to confront the climate crisis.

A Democratic Majority Deserves Progressive Leadership

More than any single vote, contribution, or appointment, the problem with Hakeem Jeffries is the establishment politics he represents—politics that protect the powerful, accommodate corporate interests, and offer timid reforms when the country is crying out for transformative change.

Voters did not reject Republican extremism just to see Democratic leaders continue pouring billions into wars and corporate interests while families struggle to afford housing, healthcare, and basic necessities.

And the grassroots are making their voices heard. In just a few days, more than one million people have signed a petition demanding new leadership. Congressional offices are being inundated with calls, and several incoming Democrats—including Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez, Chris Rabb, and Adam Hamawy—are withholding support for Jeffries.

The Speaker of the House holds enormous power. That power can be used to confront the military-industrial complex, challenge corporate money and AIPAC, stand up for immigrants, and put human needs ahead of endless wars. Or it can be used to protect the very system that has brought us to this crisis.

That’s why we need a new generation of leadership willing to fight for real change.

Presumptions of friendship and guarantees in international relations are never secure and rarely lasting. Even when they are given the stamp of firm endurance, a closer look will find greater benefits accruing to one party over the other. When one needs to persuade a weaker power into surrendering real estate and valuable terrain for the more powerful counterpart to use, always employ the terminology of “joint-facility,” “joint-operations” or some such. That will go a long way into validating the mendacity of an arrangement.

The Gulf Arab states are the latest to learn this lesson from the United States, whose guardianship credentials have been looking particularly shabby of late. Having not sought the conflict with Iran that the US, in collusion with Israel, started at the end of February, they now face the prospect of a diminished American presence once hostilities with Tehran end.

For decades, the Gulf Cooperation Council states sought to create a defence order based on gluttonous arms purchases and extensive offerings to US military personnel in terms of bases and facilities, the assumption being that this would guarantee them against attack. While the presumptive attacker in that case was Iran, the GCC states did not spare diplomacy in attempting to mollify Tehran, adopting a conscious policy of distancing from US-Israeli policy. The presence of US forces, in offering that insurance of security, also encouraged those in the Gulf region to advertise grandly as destinations for stable investment, capital and labour (however shoddy the conditions), sheltered by the comforts of the US imperial shield.

The American promissory note guaranteeing Gulf security was spectacularly invalidated in the opening days of March. Shortly after the first US-Israeli strikes hit Iranian soil, retaliation from Tehran came in an expansive spray of attacks on GCC states. These caused fires in the vicinity of luxury accommodation in Dubai. Kuwait’s international airport was disrupted. The Aramco facility in Ras Tanura, responsible for the production of more than half-a-million barrels of oil per day, was targeted and damaged. As the strikes continued, it also became clear that the exorbitantly priced defences long marshalled by the states came to very little. Sophisticated anti-missile technology, for instance, could barely account for swift, stealthy drones of cheaper make yet devastating effect. By mid-July, the US itself had used up over 1,700 Patriot interceptors and over 200 THAAD missiles in the Middle East.

The debate among the policy wonks and wags is that American influence in the region has not only received a bruising, but a bruising with consequence. “For the first time since the great powers dismembered the Ottoman empire a century ago,” declares The Economist with haughty certitude, “the Middle East’s overarching order will no longer be imposed from afar.” American attempts to shape the region had “run their course.” As with previous powers—Britain, France, Russia—the US would still be involved insofar as its interests demanded it. Force and interventions were not to be permanently shelved. “But it will abandon its role as architect.”

The pages of Foreign Affairs are also filled with the symptoms of imminent troop withdrawal. Dana Stroul, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East in the Biden administration, suggests moving US forces (the stock weasel word is always “redeployment”) away from the Persian Gulf. Michael Fuchs, former Special Assistant to President Joe Biden and former Deputy Chief of Staff to Vice President Kamala Harris, is even more blunt in light of the “failed Iran War,” suggesting it to be a “spur for a long-overdue withdrawal.”

The debate favouring withdrawal from the Gulf has gathered such momentum as to worry the coterie of jodhpur imperialists who still insist on the sacrosanct role of US power. F. Gregory Gause III of Texas A&M University is almost panicked by this outbreak of Middle East retreatism, proposing that “a better option would be a prudent reconsideration of the US basing structure in the Gulf, engaged in jointly with the Gulf states that continue to want to host and support the American presence.”

To add formidable insult to smarting injury, President Donald Trump is also of the view that the costs of the catastrophe he was instrumental in unleashing should be covered by regional allies. Making the absurd claim that Washington protected these states in the first place, having demonstrably shown the opposite to be the case, Trump told CBS News that they “are going to pay us back any and all costs that we’ve had for the war.” Without the US, “they would not exist.” Just to add some fiery topping to the commentary, the president also bracketed Israel in their company. “Without us, Israel would not exist.”

The focus on the part of the Gulf states will invariably be one of introspection followed by arrangements for an intra-defence system sharpened by the lessons of the Iran War. Collaborative associations with other states—Turkey and Pakistan, for instance—are bound to become even more attractive (witness Riyadh’s move in that direction with the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement), though any military component will be hampered by a continuing addiction to American weapons systems that require continuous technical support and maintenance from Washington. Then there is the GCC Unified Military Command, formerly known as the Peninsula Shield Force. Its effectiveness, always subsidiary given the heavy reliance on American brawn, may be revisited. To do that, however, the Gulf states will have to set aside their own grumbling differences—indeed, a tall order. US power, in the meantime, will continue to be eclipsed.

Nationwide mobilisations against austerity have continued in France following the massive strike on 5 November, with additional protests announced for 10 November, 14, 17, and 19.

Hundreds of thousands persist in resisting the cuts-based policies envisioned by President Emmanuel Macron and the government of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. They are demanding that authorities finally table concrete proposals to address the concerns that ignited the protests in October.

Until now, the Lecornu administration has only offered measures amounting to “crumbs,” according to student organisations and trade unions involved. The latest in this series was a pledge to increase the minimum wage by 1.6%, announced at a meeting with unions and employers on Monday, 9 November.

“This small increase is not the government’s generosity,” the student union Union Étudiante wrote. “It’s a first step forward made possible by the mobilisation of workers, students, trade unions, and everyone who has taken to the streets.”

A minimum wage increase worth three metro tickets

While government officials claim the increase would help alleviate the cost-of-living crisis plaguing the working class, most trade unions and progressive groups in France have voiced strong disagreement.

After factoring in the inflation adjustment already set to kick in from January, the net amount of the government’s promised increase could amount to as little as €7 to €8 net monthly. Trade unions had demanded at least a €100 increase.

The government’s offer represents “nothing in the face of precarity,” Union Étudiante emphasised, considering it is just enough to purchase three public transport tickets in Paris or a sandwich in a bakery. “It’s an insult to everyone forced to choose between eating, seeking care, paying rent, and financing their studies,” the student group stated.

“Given the level of the measures announced, the social conference held today at Matignon [the prime minister’s residence] obviously does not put an end to the mobilisation,” wrote the General Confederation of Labour (CGT). “On the contrary, it opens a new stage in the balance of power needed to win real progress.”

The trade union organisation Solidaires similarly criticised the government for failing to offer concrete solutions to the mounting anger, including on student demands for more investment in public education. “The number of additional teachers is insufficient, the funding needed to ensure decent study conditions is nowhere to be seen, and promises on the Parcoursup system remain vague,” they wrote.

The left pledges an “emergency social decree” to address the cost-of-living crisis.

Student unions that met prime minister Lecornu on Monday shared similar impressions. In addition to noting no significant breakthroughs, students walked out of a discussion on reforming the higher education recruitment platform Parcoursup over the participation of the far right—which has repeatedly dismissed the protesters’ grievances.

Most recently, Rassemblement National leader Marine Le Pen opposed imposing a minimum wage increase, arguing it would lead to job losses and echo workplace measures from the USSR. She had previously admitted she would not break with the neoliberalism championed by Macron if elected president in 2027.

In contrast, the programme of left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon—who is increasingly shaping up to be the only true electoral alternative to Le Pen—pledges to increase the net minimum wage by approximately €200 to €1,700 immediately upon being elected.

The move would benefit over 2 million workers in France—approximately 60% of whom are women—who were pushed into ultra-precarious working conditions by Macronist policies, wrote media outlet L’Insoumission.

“How can we not raise the minimum wage to €1,700 when the wealth of the country’s 500 richest families has doubled since 2017? Billionaires have never made such enormous profits. Macron has turned France into a tax haven for billionaires.”

The minimum wage increase promised by the left is among a host of other measures included under the umbrella of an “emergency social decree” intended to address the cost-of-living crisis. Other measures include freezing prices and profit margins, as well as other moves to ensure salaries keep pace with prices.

Students and education trade unions are once again taking action on Tuesday, 10 November. On Saturday, 14 November, a new round of general mobilisations was announced, while trade unions are circulating a new call to “generalise strike actions” on 17 November. Two days later, more protests are expected, boosted by the participation of retirees’ organisations.

This year marks the centennial of Ivan Illich’s birth. Many of those who collaborated with him during the most intense period of his intellectual creativity—the first half of the 1970s—are no longer alive or active. It is merely a coincidence that I am one of them.

I believe many people today wonder who Ivan Illich was, whose most famous book was perhaps Deschooling Society, published in 1971. Illich was one of the most radical and creative thinkers of the second half of the last century. He was an Austrian Catholic priest for whom the Roman Curia predicted a brilliant future but who chose instead to serve as a parish priest in the poorest neighbourhoods of New York City. He served as vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico from 1956 to 1960. He resigned due to disagreements with the bishop of Ponce, who sought to prohibit Catholics from voting for a gubernatorial candidate who supported birth control measures. Having endured a harsh and repressive investigation by the Vatican (which questioned his orthodoxy)—an investigation that would certainly have led to a formal order of silencing—Illich refused to answer the interrogation and voluntarily resigned from active priesthood in 1969.

He was a radical critic of industrial society and its institutions, particularly school education, allopathic medicine, energy waste, and the transportation system dominated by the (false) idea of speed. He was a forerunner of movements such as the degrowth movement and the environmental movement. Ivan was so radical that his radicalism could be mistaken for either the far left or the far right. He refused to discuss his proposals in dichotomous terms, whether the left/right dichotomy or the progressive/reactionary dichotomy. He was admired by some and hated by others. Because he was difficult to label, he was often considered an agent of some malevolent foreign power. He received serious threats. During the time I worked with him, his home in Ocotepec was guarded at night by three ferocious dogs—Rottweilers, if I’m not mistaken. He was a man of the left, though ignored by the card-carrying leftists of Latin America. He certainly could not have imagined that, in the decades that followed, some of his ideas—particularly those regarding education—would be appropriated by the right. As a great thinker, he questioned his own theories a few years after formulating them, when he saw the perverse way in which some were being used.

I met him on 16 February 1970, during his visit to Yale University, where I was a doctoral student. I spoke with him at length on that occasion. Immediately, a strong intellectual and emotional bond emerged between us. He invited me to visit his centre, CIDOC (Intercultural Documentation Center), in Cuernavaca, Mexico. My first visit and stay took place in 1971. I returned several times between 1971 and 1974. My theoretical and political formation owes much to my close collaboration with Ivan Illich between 1971 and 1974. And it owes as much to my agreement with him as to my disagreement with him.

One need only follow the seminars he led, the people he invited, and the politicians to whom he gave refuge to understand the political convictions that guided him. It was there that I met Francisco Julião, the leader of the Brazilian Peasants’ Leagues, who was taking refuge there. It was there that I met the political leaders and influential intellectuals from Salvador Allende’s government who had fled Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s coup (11 September 1973), such as Pedro Vuskovic and Eduardo Novoa Monreal. It was there that I met the great Brazilian social scientist Theotónio dos Santos, with whom I became friends and whom I later hosted in Portugal. It was there that I attended the famous debate between Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire on educational reform.

On 4 September 1971—Ivan’s 45th birthday—I remember we spent the night on the CIDOC terrace discussing the contemporary world, particularly the theme of conviviality in today’s societies. Before us stood the imposing silhouette of the Popocatépetl volcano. The discussions were intense, and Ivan regarded me as one of his favourite disciples. It’s possible that he said the same thing to others. His interest in my work was evident in the priority he gave to the full publication of my doctoral dissertation. Perhaps Ivan’s preference stemmed from the fact that I disagreed with him in a very cordial, yet very direct, manner.

According to him, I was too much of a Marxist. For example, in his debate with Paulo Freire, I sided with Paulo Freire. I came from a country under a dictatorship, where one of the democratic struggles was the fight for universal education and for a profound reform of the school system at all levels. I could not agree with the argument that the important thing was to do away with schools simply because universal education was not possible through the school system. His choice was self-learning and informal education.

During the period when I collaborated with CIDOC, Illich was preparing books offering a radical critique of industrial society, covering, among other topics, energy, professions, medicine, transportation, conviviality and social coexistence. Our conversations were long, and I believe they were important for the development of his books on these topics, as Ivan acknowledges in the preface to the book Tools for Conviviality (1973, 1975), in which he thanks everyone who had been associated with CIDOC or engaged in discussions with him. I wrote a lengthy commentary on the book Energy and Equity (1974) that Illich included in some editions of the book, notably the German, Dutch, and Portuguese editions. I had lost track of this text, but my Italian colleagues who study Ivan Illich’s thought encouraged me to look for it. I found it in the Portuguese edition of Energia and Equidade (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, Cadernos Livres No. 7, 1975, pp. 84 to 94). It is included as an appendix, and I reproduce it at the end of this text, with a note titled “Fifty Years Later.”

The centre that Illich had founded in Cuernavaca, CIDOC, was largely funded by the Spanish-language school operating there, where students paid relatively high tuition fees. The overwhelming majority of the students were future American missionaries on their way to Latin America. At the time, I did not know that this avalanche of missionaries was part of a conservative and imperialist political project. It stemmed directly from the 1969 Nelson Rockefeller Report on Latin America. The U.S. obsession with Cuba goes back a long way—in fact, to the beginning of the revolution in 1959. Rockefeller had been sent by President Richard Nixon to Latin America to propose alternatives to the Alliance for Progress, a programme proposed by John F. Kennedy, which Nixon considered a failure because it had failed to contain the revolutionary momentum of the Cuban Revolution.

Rockefeller, after concluding that the communist threat came primarily from Catholic priests associated with liberation theology, proposed a “conservative religious solution” centred on the most conservative theologies of American Protestantism. This involved sending thousands of missionaries to Latin America, many of whom passed through Cuernavaca to learn Spanish. Learning Portuguese, necessary for evangelising Brazil, certainly found other solutions. The “success” of this policy is now quite evident throughout Latin America. Almost all far-right politicians who come to power declare themselves to be neo-Pentecostal evangelicals. The same political exploitation of this religious orientation is now being promoted in Africa and Europe.

For the progressive intellectuals and politicians who gathered around Ivan Illich, what mattered most about CIDOC was the diversity and intensity of the discussions, topics, and positions expressed in the frequent seminars. For example, in 1972, I taught a seminar on “Law and Revolution” together with the French philosopher André Gorz. It was a major event at the centre, and our discussions were lengthy. I was perhaps more dialectical than Gorz regarding the relationship between law and revolution—that is, between bourgeois law and the socialist revolution. André Gorz carried with him the frustrations of the May ’68 student movement, while I came from a transformative experience in the Jacarezinho favela in Rio de Janeiro and from living through a dictatorship in Portugal. I was taking my first steps in my critique of conservative legal reformism—which I would later develop further—and in the theory of legal pluralism, which, unsurprisingly, excited Ivan: the internal law of the favela as a community organisation without formal safeguards guaranteed by the state.

I returned to Cuernavaca several times, and finally (during Illich’s time there) in August 1974. Ivan took me to visit his home in Ocotepec, where he lived with Valentina. It was an “Illichian” house. At one end were Ivan’s rooms, and at the other, Valentina’s. In the middle was the library, a spacious room consisting mainly of reference books. Ivan believed that we had to know everything that had ever been written about whatever we wanted to investigate. We had to know how to find the books in libraries around the world. Bibliographies were an invaluable aid.

At that time, we had long discussions about my future. In the meantime, the 25 April 1974, Revolution (the Carnations Revolution) in Portugal had taken place. I had just returned from Brazil, where I’d had several clandestine meetings with my friends in Rio de Janeiro about the Revolution. On 20 August, at 5:00 p.m., I went to meet with Francisco Julião. It was a long conversation. I had just arrived from Brazil with the worst news about the dictatorship. This confirmed Julião’s pessimism about Brazil’s future. He returned to Brazil after being granted amnesty in 1979. About ten years later, he returned to Cuernavaca to write his memoirs. He died there in 1999.

Ivan wanted me to continue collaborating with him. I promised to return to CIDOC, but the 25 April 1974 Revolution had changed my life. Ten years after my first stay in Cuernavaca, another great friend, Gustavo Esteva, met Ivan Illich and developed a very lasting relationship with him, one that was more aligned with his views. A great friendship blossomed between Gustavo and me, and our point of reference was Ivan—both for our agreements and our disagreements. Gustavo was an almost fanatical Illichian.

On 10 February 2020, Gustavo and I had a long “Conversation of the World” in San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico, during which we discussed at length our differences regarding Ivan’s ideas. Like Ivan, Gustavo rejected allopathic medicine. For this reason, he refused the COVID vaccine and died during the pandemic, shortly after our conversation.

After 1974, I stayed in touch with some colleagues I had met in Cuernavaca, with André Gorz himself, David Weisstub, Harry Athurs and, above all, with my friend Sylvia Marcos. We met again many years later during a New Year’s celebration in San Cristóbal de Las Casas to commemorate the 1994 Zapatista uprising. After August 1974, I never saw Ivan Illich again and lost the letters I exchanged with him and Valentina Borremans. But Illich’s influence is very much present in my work, especially in the development of epistemologies of the South.

Appendix

Comments on Energy and Equity (1975, originally published in 1974)

The main thesis of Illich’s work is this: There is a critical level of energy consumption and industrial activity beyond which the following can be expected to occur: (1) the effect of industry tends to be as destructive in the social environment as in the physical environment; (2) the structure of production relations (be they capitalist-private or socialist-public) ceases to be a decisive variable, and, furthermore, the political problem itself borders on irrelevance, given that the lack of equity and freedom will be inherent in the nature of things; (3) at different cost levels, the resulting social disintegration will be just as fatal for the rich as for the poor; the only way to avoid this is to limit growth and prohibit energy consumption beyond a critical level. This involves a decision in which people should be able to participate.

One of the important aspects of Illich’s work lies in demonstrating, in a new way, the Hegelian law of the transformation of quantity into quality: when the increase in energy consumption and industry reaches a critical level, the concomitant social process becomes something new and qualitatively different. In other words, as long as per capita energy use remains below a certain quantum, the simultaneous pursuit of equity and industry is possible, regardless of the nature of the organisation of production relations and the political process.

According to this framework, the world can be divided into two groups: poor countries—or countries that are still below the critical level—and rich countries, which are dangerously approaching the critical level or, in fact, have already exceeded it. Traditional wisdom regarding social transformation—that is, the wisdom of engineers, economists, planners, and sociologists—has held that while in poor countries the economic factor takes precedence over the political factor (develop first, distribute later), in rich countries the political factor takes precedence over the economic factor. Illich poses a radical challenge to this false wisdom and proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if this dichotomy (economic factors versus political factors) made any sense, poor countries would be in a better position than rich countries. In fact, poor countries are still at the stage of what I might call preventive politics. This policy operates on two different (but related) levels: (1) preventing the critical level from being reached, and thus preventing the ideologues of “develop first, distribute later” from coming to power—that is, so to speak, the Grundnorm of the political process; (2) organizing production in such a way that the simultaneous pursuit of equity and energy can become a reality—that is, rejecting the “politics of exploitation” and organizing production around a socialist model, as the situation demands.

By contrast, rich countries find themselves in a phase of stopgap measures or emergency policy. They are in what jurists would call a state of necessity (Notstand). This state denotes a situation in which two or more conflicting values collide. Any practical decision arising from this situation involves the sacrifice of one of these values. This is what Illich expresses in these terms: “Beyond this critical point, one person cannot save time without forcing another to lose it.” At a macro level, the conflict arises between the value of human survival under humane conditions—that is, under conditions of equity and freedom—and the interests and values created by the infinite growth of industry. According to Illich, the former is the higher value and must therefore be preserved at the expense of the latter.

Moreover, this conflict is to some extent artificial, because the second value is self-contradictory: the fundamental value of industrial production (man as a humaniser of nature) can only be maintained by rejecting industry as it currently exists. Whatever the theoretical nature of the conflict, its practical effect on the social fabric is so profound that it cannot be resolved simply by eliminating exploitative policies (as has been suggested for poor countries). The crisis runs deeper, and the solution must be more radical. The solution is political, even if it breaks with the conceptualisations of political science and “developed” political scientists. It is a solution that has to do with the internal structure of the economic factor and not merely with its external consequences. It consists of destroying the industrial apparatus and reducing its energy consumption to below the critical level. It is a political decision that negates the political process as we understand it today; it is an economic decision that negates the economic process as we understand it today.

The foregoing must be supplemented with two factors of complexity:

(1) Due to the fallacy of “poles of development” invented by the proponents of national planning, any poor country is also, to a certain extent, a rich country. All countries, both rich and poor, have poles of development and poles of underdevelopment. It is the different proportions in which they occur that separate them into two basic groups. For example, São Paulo is the “rich country” of Brazil, while the country’s interior is the “poor country.” São Paulo is already in a state of need, while the interior is still in the preventive state. This factor constitutes the first aporia to the practical realisation of Illich’s political project. This project presupposes that a poor country will make decisions as a poor country—that is, in the style of preventive politics. However, as things stand now, the “rich country” within a given nation generally governs and dominates the “poor country” of that same nation. São Paulo, in fact, governs and dominates the interior of Brazil: will São Paulo decide in such a way that Brazil’s “poor country” prevails? No, because this would be self-destructive, since São Paulo’s “wealth” is based on the modernisation of the interior’s poverty—that is, on the interior’s submission to the ideology of the need for greater development (the Amazon highway is an example of this). On the other hand, if São Paulo decides as a “rich country” (a policy of expediency), the result will be either the perpetuation of the existing structure of internal capitalism or a political rift between São Paulo and the interior, depending on a variety of factors.

(2) The other factor adding to the complexity relates to an assumption underlying Illich’s project: that rich and poor countries are autonomous in deciding their respective survival strategies. Illich states: “Right now they (India, Burma, and—at least for a short time—China) can choose to remain within the energy levels to which the powerful will be forced by catastrophe.” It seems to me that this obscures the fact that, in this world, the relationship between rich and poor countries is characterised by imperialism and dependency. In fact, the very terms “rich” and “poor,” as used by Illich, are sufficient to denote this situation. In other sections of this work, Illich does indeed show that he is aware of the true nature of such relations. It should therefore be clarified that Illich’s project presupposes that the first act of preventive policy to be undertaken by poor countries must consist of severing all economic and political ties with rich countries. This would be the international Grundnorm of preventive policy (as opposed to the internal Grundnorm outlined above). One could further speculate that only through this initial decision by the poor country would the conditions be created under which the rich country could carry out its policy of expedients. And, since the poor country is the “determined negation” of the rich country, one could view this constraining system as a dialectical process in which the regenerative initiative lies with the poor country. (In a rich country, the centre of power is too corrupt due to its excessive energy consumption.)

In fact, Illich’s project—which is a radical policy project for survival—posits a clear vision and conceptualisation of what I would call a dialectical totality as opposed to a mechanical totality, predominant in rich countries, which is based on the ideological conversion of a part of the social process into the whole of it, a manipulation that aims to perpetuate the status quo. Its agents are technocracy and bureaucracy—its two greatest products—which reinforce factionalism in the type of society that, according to Illich, “must prevail when mechanical power exceeds metabolic energy by a certain proportion.” The dialectical totality is the precondition for participatory democracy, and the latter “requires low-energy technology.”

Here, however, a new aporia arises in Illich’s project. According to him, identifying the quantum of energy above which power corrupts is a political decision that must be reached within a system of participatory democracy. But since this type of democracy requires low-energy technology, it is no longer feasible in wealthy countries. Its feasibility depends on the prior identification and implementation of the quantum of energy, with the result that what is presented as the product of participatory democracy is in reality its precondition. This creates a vicious circle in which we might eventually observe a corrupt power structure deciding on the quantum of energy beyond the scope of its own corrupt power. This brings us back to the problem of the dialectical relationship between law and revolution that I addressed in my work “Law against Law” (a doctoral dissertation published in full in Cuadernos de CIDOC and in Law, Growth and Technology, edited by David Weisstub, Cuernavaca, CIDOC.)

Illich’s critique of capitalism, because it is so radical and incisive, can only be compared to that of Marx. The profound differences between these two social critiques correspond to the different social conditions that each analyses (that of “clean” capitalism and that of “dirty” capitalism). Given that capitalism, by its very nature, has set out to manipulate the largest socialist countries (Russia and probably China) through an ideology of infinite industrial growth, it seems to Illich that, once energy consumption exceeds a critical level, whether its production is publicly or privately owned matters little. One cannot help but agree with him. The emergence in China of a class that travels by jet plane above the masses who move about on their own constitutes a warning. However, this should not obscure the fact that in four-fifths of the world, the elimination of the politics of exploitation (that is, of exploitative relations of production) remains a crucial element of preventive policy.

Reflecting a little further, Illich’s critique raises a more fundamental question: is Marxism fundamentally tainted by an ideology of infinite growth?

In opposition to the creation of political utopias, Illich shows us, through the example of transportation, that infinite growth—regardless of the political system—leads to a loss of social justice (greater inequality), personal freedom (over-scheduling), and leisure (increasing scarcity of time). G. Lukács (History and Class Consciousness) demonstrated, in the face of these very same political utopias, that only an economic revolution can lead to a more humane future. Illich goes beyond Lukács by proclaiming the need for an energy revolution as the very foundation of a revolutionary economy.

For Illich, it goes without saying that the poor in a rich country are worse off than the poor in a poor country, because the former are more subject to the modernisation of poverty and the over-scheduling that it entails. The modernised poor thus become “accomplices in the distortion of physical occupations and of the occupation of the inherited space within which humankind has slowly evolved.” This fact raises the problem of “reification” and its consequences: an alienated consciousness, or, in Illich’s terminology, an imagination dulled by speed. “The commuter feels frustrated by growing inequality, by a scarcity of time, and by personal powerlessness, but his only hope lies in more of the same: more traffic through more transportation.” Illich’s passenger has lost the sense of dialectical wholeness, which is why he “cries out for relief through mechanical transformations”—transformations that correspond to mechanical wholeness and ensure the perpetuation of the status quo of energy.

Social inequality is also exacerbated in material terms. Maximum privileges for a few represent a tremendous social cost for the vast majority. These maximum privileges increase as the equalisation of the unequal increases. But this inequality is a form of enslaved equality: equality in the face of the compulsory consumption of high doses of energy. We thus gain a new perspective on an old problem: equality for all before the law becomes little more than a slogan when the consumption of products promoted by dominant interests becomes equally compulsory. The further away from the law people are, the more equal they become. In other words, the greater the distance from the law, the greater the equality before it. To remedy this situation, it becomes necessary—as we outlined in our previous work—to organise a “low-power” justice system. Illich’s critical framework for a theory of social control is at our disposal.

When we take into account the production of commodities for permanent consumption—such as time, space, forms, etc.—we can guard against the exploitative relationships involved in ordinary life. The ethical considerations raised here are “of a more general nature than kidney dialysis or organ transplantation.” Psychologically, we are further removed from the exceptional than from the ordinary, and this is why the former becomes a more natural habitat for values and ideals.

Our conceptualisations and analyses of the sources of social stratification and political power also require radical reform. Professional sociologists are too entrenched in current conditions to be able to carry out such a reform. It must be guided by marginal thinkers or innovative critics, as Illich himself. Speed is a source of political power, as are schooling, the mass media, and, probably, industries that deal with numbers (statistics, computers).

There is one final point in Illich’s critique that requires consideration: the naturalistic aspect—the idea of a “state of nature” from which a safe and sound criterion can be deduced. The optimal limit and the critical level are related to human metabolic energy. Illich speaks of the need to “identify a natural, inescapable, limited quantity” and a “natural measure.” On the other hand, he emphasises that the decision to identify the limit or level is a political decision that must be reached within the political system. The aporia can be expressed as follows: “The question of what is natural will be answered differently by different peoples. Thus, the political decision regarding the natural limit will turn the latter into an artificial limit.” The decision will not answer the question as it is formulated.

Note Fifty Years Later

In this “appendix,” my studies in the philosophy of law in Germany are still very fresh in my mind. One must disregard the Hegelian style of my commentary. My commentary was not intended as a critique of Illich’s book but simply to highlight what was most innovative about his intellectual and political project and to point out the dilemmas (aporias) that its implementation faced. The suggested (perhaps forced) connection between Ivan Illich and Karl Marx pleased Ivan, not only because it might correspond to the truth, but also because Ivan was aware of the danger that his theories—dominated by the aim of rethinking everything—might be exploited for political objectives that he found repugnant. Our discussions always ended on the topic of the available historical agents and the political conditions necessary to carry out his project. It is no coincidence that the book Energy and Equity bears the following epigraph by a mutual friend, José Antonio Viera-Gallo, who served as Secretary of Justice in President Salvador Allende’s Cabinet: “Socialism can only be reached by bicycle.”

My subsequent work—aimed at rethinking Marxism based on Marx’s texts from before and after 1867 (the date of publication of the first volume of Das Kapital) and, later, at decolonising Marxism—has its origins here. I disagreed with a certain romanticization of poverty on Illich’s part and, above all, with his failure to theorize the relationship between impoverishment and enrichment, which, for me, was essential to understanding and critiquing capitalist society. But at the same time, his critique of infinite growth resonated deeply with me. To understand how my thinking on this issue has evolved, I recommend reading Chapter 21, titled “The Rights of Nature,” of my book Law and the Epistemologies of the South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 622 to 676).

It is important to highlight Ivan Illich’s pioneering contribution to the discussions on deep ecology that were already taking place at that time. The disruption of the balanced metabolism between society and nature caused by capitalism was crucial for Illich, and it was there that he saw the origin of inequality. While for me such inequality was rooted in the exploitation of labour and nature, for Illich inequality was the automatic result of the excessive production and use of energy and, therefore, did not depend on the mode of production. For this reason, he spoke of industrial society rather than capitalist society. Interestingly, the idea of a metabolic rupture between society and nature is present in Marx’s Das Kapital but would only be emphasised by Marxists many years later.

We were in complete agreement on the idea of participatory democracy and the creativity of communities in solving problems using their own knowledge and resources. Many years later, I would emphasize this very point—and in a dramatic way—in my analysis of how impoverished communities, abandoned by the state during the COVID-19 pandemic, sought to defend themselves with their own solutions based on their own knowledge and resources (From the Pandemic to Utopia: The Future Begins Now. New York: Routledge 2023).

Our differences centred primarily on the role of the state—which, for me, was a major field of contention—and on the recognition of the importance of cultural and epistemic diversity. The epistemologies of the South emerged from the need to view societies beyond differences in industrialisation and levels of energy consumption. The “poor countries” were rich above all because of their histories of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle and the knowledge that emerged from them. Decolonising history was an integral part of the epistemological and political project. But Illich was a prophet, looking toward the future and seeing a future that others did not see.

Since April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have engaged in a zero-sum war for control of the nation, fuelled by support from powerful business interests. Twenty-two years ago, during a war in Darfur that US Secretary of State Colin Powell and the International Criminal Court characterised as a genocide, I began studying the phenomenon of a nation constantly at war with itself.

The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded in September 2025 that both combatants have committed extensive war crimes. In their wake lies a humanitarian crisis that António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, has repeatedly referred to as the world’s largest humanitarian and displacement crisis. The conflict draws periodic, even lavish media coverage (Vanity Fair, Summer 2026). Still, the alliances that perpetuate the destruction operate efficiently and without substantive interference by the global community. Sudan’s misery rises from war crimes for profit.

Background

The majority of Sudan’s population is Arab. Non-Arab minorities include the Fur, Beja, Nuba, Zaghawa, Masalit and Fallata ethnic groups. Despite intermarriage that blurs tribal affiliations, the political marginalisation of non-Arab groups repeatedly kindles conflict.

The RSF is a paramilitary force of primarily Baggara Arabs. The European Union Agency for Asylum documented their forced recruitment campaigns of young men and boys, particularly in displaced persons camps. The UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons reported in October 2023 that RSF targeted unaccompanied and impoverished children from the outskirts of Khartoum, as well as those from Arab tribes in Darfur and West Kordofan. She received information that children as young as ten have been armed with loaded automatic rifles.

The Sudan Tribune reported in January 2026 that a network of fake female social media accounts is being used to conduct a large-scale propaganda campaign in support of the Rapid Support Forces. This tactic employs emotional discourse to bypass direct resistance, preventing message tracing and evading legal accountability. According to ReliefWeb in April 2017, the RSF also patrols the border with Libya, rounding up Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees to satisfy an initiative between European and African states, including Sudan, to reduce the flow of migrants to Europe. This activity suggests other nations don’t mind RSF’s methods if they help fix migration headaches.

The SAF and their allied militia, including radical Islamist elements, have likewise targeted civilians. SAF warplanes and artillery have carried out wide-area bombardments on densely populated residential neighbourhoods, public markets, hospitals, and medical facilities. Their activities have been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and USAID.

More than three years of chaos has induced powerful patrons to continue exploiting profitable business opportunities for the deployment of advanced weapons.

Business Interests

The economic linchpins of the war: RSF forces took control of gold mines in the Darfur region in November 2017. Their leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, became one of the richest men in Sudan by 2019. Hemedti’s brother Abdul Rahim, deputy head of RSF, controls Al Junaid, the corporation involved in gold mining and trading in Sudan.

A December 2019 investigation by Global Witness found that the RSF controls a large part of the country’s gold industry. Leaked bank data and corporate documents show they run two front companies: GSK, a Sudanese technology company, and Tradive General Trading LLC, a United Arab Emirates-based company, both controlled by Hemedti’s younger brother Algoney Hamdan Dagalo. The RSF’s relations with other neighbouring and allied states are complicated arrangements where political expediency and economic needs are leveraged for movement of weapons and mercenaries.

The RSF’s most powerful patron is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE government has consistently denied supplying weapons, funding, or facilitating foreign fighters for the RSF, insisting their involvement is humanitarian in nature.

The President of the United Arab Emirates is also the Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces. The UAE Minister of Defence is the Crown Prince of Dubai and Deputy Prime Minister of the UAE. Together with H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Chairman of the Board of Directors for EDGE Group, they are overseeing an aggressive transition from a major global arms importer into an industrial competitor.

The UAE-backed EDGE Group, through various international joint ventures, manufactures and exports drones, missiles, armoured vehicles, and small arms to diversify its economy away from oil and to build sovereign military capabilities. According to the Center for International Policy, UN investigators and flight-tracking analysts traced a supply line running through Bosaso in Puntland, al-Kufra in eastern Libya, and Ethiopian military airfields. The UN Panel of Experts found that Ethiopian territory served as a supply conduit for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). A UN fact-finding mission counts at least 350 and as many as 2,000 Colombian military contractors operating alongside RSF units, recruited through private security firms and trained at Emirati bases, according to Human Rights Watch.

However, the types of weapons, notably Chinese manufactured, lead investigators to make qualified statements: “The weapons were almost certainly re-exported to Sudan by the UAE.” Deniability has been fastidiously maintained by the UAE government.

American firms increasingly are meeting the demand for drones by producing or co-producing them in the Gulf rather than exporting finished systems. While the US maintains a formal arms embargo on Sudan, it circumvents regulatory scrutiny and domestic oversight through a “proxy pipeline,” utilising third-party state sponsors—primarily the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This arrangement places the end products closer to their deployment areas for quick resupply and, according to a US House Foreign Affairs Committee statement, circumvents weapons transfer oversight in the US.

The SAF is led by Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, President of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, acting head of state, and commander-in-chief of the military. Supporters are major powerbrokers in the region. Saudi Arabia provides high-level political legitimacy that escalates tensions with the UAE. Iran provides drone technology. According to Reuters, 10 April 2024, the introduction of these drones helped the Sudanese Army prevent advances by the RSF and retake territory in Omdurman and Khartoum early in the war.

The conflict has notably increased gold exports from northern Sudan into Egypt through military-linked arrangements with the informal mining sector. Egypt also provides weapons, ammunition, armoured vehicles, and combat drones according to Middle East Eye as well as intelligence sharing networks in cooperation with Turkey.

Sudan’s war has galvanised alliances of convenience among key military organisations and weapons manufacturers primarily in the Middle East. Wealthy powerful men and companies enjoy freedom from restrictions on activities that help destabilise the “neighbourhood” and allow the Sudanese, theoretically, to fight to the last man standing.

Losses

Agriculture: Al Jazeera (4 May 2026) used satellite imagery to show central farming zones turned into barren ground. World Vision reported in its study, The Hollowed Earth (July 2026), that the conflict has degraded or lost at least 38,918 square kilometres of farmable land and that irrigation systems, storage facilities, and trade routes are ruined. Dry spells and low water levels along the Nile worsened the collapse of staple crops like sorghum and sesame.

The Gezira Scheme, once the largest irrigated farm under single management in the world, collapsed with the destruction of the canal network, leaving fields, farmers and institutions without water. Transport costs inflated by 300%—500% in several states—erasing the profit from produce that reached markets. Al Jazeera (12 October 2026) reported that El Niño-induced drought in Sudan is compounding the effects of war and displacement by inducing famine.

Education: Sources diverge on statistics. In February 2026, the Geneva Global Hub for Education reported that 10,400 schools were closed in October 2023, but approximately 65% were reopened in January 2026. Approximately 7.9 million children remain out of school and have missed over three years of learning. Where schools have gradually reopened after months of closure, ReliefWeb reports (October 2025), they lack basic infrastructure and learning materials.

Health System: The WHO reported that as of 14 April 2026, 37% of health facilities across Sudan were non-functional, with hospitals only partially functioning or closed in conflict-affected areas. There are widespread power outages, looting, and critical shortages of essential medicines and diagnostic tools. The destruction of water, sanitation, and waste collection systems has triggered outbreaks of preventable diseases, including cholera, dengue fever, malaria, and measles. The WHO also documented 217 separate attacks on healthcare infrastructure and personnel, resulting in 2,052 deaths.

Human Cost: The Council on Foreign Relations estimates over 33 million Sudanese, nearly two-thirds of the population, require urgent assistance to continue surviving. A UNDP analysis (28 April 2026) found that Sudan’s war has shrunk the economy by 29.4%, with revenue losses exceeding 50% in high-conflict areas. Some 19 million face acute food insecurity. Over 13 million are displaced.

Statistics of the dead and injured are so alarming as to defy adequate collection efforts. The scale of civilian losses—people, land, food, water, and public services—is catastrophic. All in service to profiteers.

Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War

International bodies, including the UN, humanitarian agencies, and foreign governments, have responded to the epidemic of sexual violence in Sudan with formal investigations, diplomatic pressure, humanitarian aid, and targeted sanctions rather than physical or military intervention.

The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) and a UN Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan have documented hundreds of atrocities and formally declared that the widespread use of rape, gang rape, and sexual slavery in Sudan constitutes war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, the United Nations and other bodies lack a physical civilian protection force on the ground; thus, the epidemic of sexual violence—perpetrated by RSF and SAF forces—continues to escalate, as the UN Security Council reported on 15 October 2026.

The UN Office on Sexual Violence in Conflict has signed a Framework of Cooperation with the Sudanese government to legally prioritise survivor services and build local capacity to investigate and prosecute commanders. This is the same government, in the form of the SAF, that stands accused of these war crimes.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provides urgent gynaecological and psychological treatment. However, aid groups frequently state that their access is heavily restricted in active conflict zones; they are targets for RSF looting and administrative aid blocking by the SAF.

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) operates roughly 90 mobile health teams, 120 facilities, and 51 specialised safe spaces across Sudan, even as humanitarian operations suffer from severe funding shortages and direct attacks on healthcare workers.

UN Women reported in April 2026 the number of people, mostly women and girls, needing support for sexual and gender-based violence has quadrupled since the start of the war. Official estimates are usually just the “tip of the iceberg.” Anna Mutavati, UN Women Regional Director for East and Southern Africa, stated, ”Women and girls are being raped and killed in their homes, and as they flee, seeking food, water and medical care. The use of sexual violence has been embedded in the blueprint of Sudan’s war.”

Gang rape is almost a quarter of verified incidents, according to UN News (23 June 2026). Other violations include sexual slavery, forced marriage, human trafficking, and sexual torture.

Survivors face grievous physical injuries, unwanted pregnancies, HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, and profound psychological trauma, exacerbated by a collapsed national healthcare system.

To its credit, UN Women partners with over 45 local, Sudanese women-led organisations to deliver emergency kits, psychological first aid, and safe extraction for women fleeing targeted ethnic violence. The UN verified just 546 cases of sexual violence in 2025. Underreporting of rape is pervasive worldwide, with estimates suggesting that fewer than 10% of sexual assault victims in many regions ever seek law enforcement intervention.

The unverified violations of possibly thousands of women and girls over the course of this violence in Sudan have resulted in vanishingly few options for continuing treatment of survivors or accountability of the perpetrators.

The women of Sudan, the ones best able to step up for peacemaking and rebuilding, may be sidelined for some time by the underwhelming response to their profound traumas.

Humanitarian Aid: The Resource Gaps

The United Nations 2026 humanitarian response appeal for approximately $2.9 billion remains only 14% funded (as of 23 September), threatening basic pipelines for food, clean water, medical care, and shelter. Moving aid through active combat corridors remains dangerous for UN and other aid personnel. Arbitrary delays, financial extortion, sovereign posturing, and seasonal flooding severely restrict humanitarian corridors into regions like Darfur, Kordofan, and Khartoum. International NGOs must heavily leverage locally based community partners to access volatile areas.

This “leveraging” is a significant and relatively new reality of humanitarian aid. Local Sudanese mutual aid networks, those able to operate well in familiar territory, have increasingly stepped up critical services and supplies. This bodes well for post-war restoration of local governance mechanisms. However, the killing of humanitarian workers in Sudan, reported by the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) to be fewer than 12 in 2006, the peak of the Darfur conflict, escalated to 71 in 2025, with the war total of at least 139 workers. Local staff are especially at risk from aerial bombing, shootings, and detentions and arrests. Humanitarian personnel are considered civilians under International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Wilful killing of protected persons is prohibited under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols I and II (1977). This is another of many examples of the continuing erosion of accountability for war crimes in Sudan.

Peace Efforts

The US and Saudi Arabia mediated the first major initiative, the Jeddah Declaration, in May 2023. It temporarily facilitated limited humanitarian access to affected communities, but both factions repeatedly violated the terms. A 2024 effort to bring the warring parties to peace talks in Geneva was convened by the US and co-hosted by Switzerland and Saudi Arabia, with the UN, African Union, Egypt, and UAE as observers. The RSF attended, but the SAF did not. Regional efforts via the Intergovernmental Authority on Development and the African Union similarly failed when short-term truces broke down.

The fall of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, in October 2025 marked a bloody triumph for the RSF and a critical point in the war. During the Darfur genocide, I made frequent visits to El Fasher and had many contacts there. To read accounts of the RSF’s assault made me weep. “The paramilitary, killing people faster than it can bury them, resorted to mass graves.” The brutality against the living amounted to a catalogue of war crimes.

Fighting continues on multiple fronts: the SAF repelled an attack by the RSF in Blue Nile state. On 18 September, the RSF claimed a major victory over the SAF and its allies in Abu Qaoud, west of El Obeid. Battlefield claims from both the RSF and the SAF in the Kordofan region are difficult to verify independently due to restricted access. Unlike past more localised conflict, this war has engulfed much of the southwest and eastern areas of the country.

In June, US bipartisan Congressional support emerged for the Preventing External Aggression and Conflict Escalation (PEACE) in the Sudan Act of 2026. On 23 September 2026, the African Union (AU) and the United States co-chaired an unprecedented joint meeting of the Quad and Quintet mechanisms on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. This marked the first time the two principal international mediation platforms formally converged to build a systematic, operational roadmap for peace.

The effort brings together nine major regional and global entities: The Quad includes US, Saudi Arabia (aligned with the SAF), Egypt (aligned with the SAF) and the United Arab Emirates (aligned with the RSF), focusing on ceasefires and humanitarian access. That some mediators are militarily aligned with the warring parties can only be a destructive conflict of interest.

The Quintet includes the African Union, IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development), the European Union, the United Nations, and the League of Arab States. Together they are to pursue consultations with stakeholders for a civilian-led government.

During the Darfur genocide in the mid-2000s, protests in the US and the engagement of celebrities like George Clooney informed public opinion and probably helped promote political détente. There is little such public engagement this time.

Possibly the new high-level African Union–US collaboration will deliver an end to the profound suffering of the Sudanese people. Three-and-a-half years into the latest iteration of Sudan’s descent into hell, peace negotiations cannot be simply about stopping the violence. They will have to create political and security mechanisms that render continuing the war less advantageous—less profitable—than rebuilding in peace.

The overarching questions: In the regional and internal chaos spawned by this conflict, how can the international community rein in the cabal of powerful men profiting from an environment rife with war crimes? Who in the international community can help the Sudanese create a new and better normal in the wake of such pervasive destruction and persistent trauma?

The carnage and chaos have been breathtaking, but there’s not much leverage in being a stupefied spectator. Political will to banish the profiteers must find serious new champions in the international community and especially in Sudan.

For multiple days, thousands of workers in Bangladesh, mostly from garment factories, protested for a raise in their minimum monthly wages and against the rising prices of essential commodities, defying the state’s oppressive measures.

On Tuesday, 3 November, news reports indicated fresh clashes between workers and security forces at various places in the capital, Dhaka, with the agitating workers trying to block highways and other roads.

The protests broke out despite the Home Minister of the country, Salahuddin Ahmed, warning the workers to return to work on Monday after claiming their demands had been addressed by the government through the formation of a “wage board.”

Meanwhile, the authorities unleashed violence and repression on workers, with police resorting to baton charges and firing tear gas at various places, injuring several of them. The police have also arrested protesters after accusing them of indulging in arson and violence.

Workers are demanding a revision in their minimum monthly wages to at least 30,000 Bangladeshi taka (around $240) from their present 12,500 (around $100), claiming the present wages are highly inadequate to live a decent life in the context of the rising prices of essential commodities, including food and fuel.

Several unions and progressive organisations, including the Workers Party of Bangladesh (WPB), have demanded an even higher wage of Taka 37,125 (around $300) along with measures to curb the rising prices of essential commodities.

The protests began in Dhaka in the last week of October and continued throughout the weekend. After the government failed to respond to their demands, workers blocked several roads in the city, including some highways, on Saturday and Sunday.

Dozens of factories in Gazipur and other industrial areas of Dhaka declared holidays on Monday and Tuesday in an attempt to avoid gatherings. The government has also increased the deployment of security forces at all major points in the city to prevent agitating workers from blocking roads and taking out other militant actions.

Decent living wages

Workers in Bangladesh argue that the minimum wages in the country have not been revised for years now despite the rise in profits for the companies, higher revenues from garment exports, and rising prices of the essential commodities.

Bangladesh is the world’s second largest exporter of garments, after China, with around 80% of all its export value coming from the sector alone.

According to various studies, the wages of garment sector workers in Bangladesh remain the lowest among all the major exporting countries. Workers in the garment sector are also among the lowest paid workers in the country.

Bangladesh has seen a consistent increase in inflation in the last four years, which, in the absence of a corresponding rise in wages, has actually led to a drop in the real wages. Just for an example, the official inflation rate in September was over 8%. This has created a severe cost of living crisis for most of the workers in the country.

The recent high inflation in the prices of the essential commodities in the country is partially attributed to the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran and continued disruptions in the transportation of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz.

Bangladesh imports nearly half of its oil and gas needs from the Gulf. The US-Israeli aggression and Iranian retaliation have disrupted these imports, leading to severe shortages of cooking gas and oil, also affecting the prices of other commodities, including food.

The WPB issued a press release on Monday in support of agitating workers and condemning the “brutal suppression by law enforcement agencies and hired thugs” on them.

Prothom Alo, a prominent local daily, reported on Tuesday that, along with the security forces, workers of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) were also involved in repressive activities.

The WPB also condemned the attempts by certain sections of the ruling establishment and the media to vilify protests by calling them a “conspiracy.” It expressed hope that the BNP-led right-wing government would understand the gravity of the situation and immediately address the demands raised by the workers.

Indonesia is no longer grappling with separate crises. It is confronting a convergence. Each emergency—the fires, the markets, the corruption, the wiretapping—fuels the next, and the state’s response has become the crisis itself. For strategists and policymakers across the Indo-Pacific, the question is no longer whether Indonesia’s governance model is under strain. It is whether the Republic has the institutional capacity—and the political will—to arrest a descent now visible in every headline, every burning hectare, and every soldier on the streets of Jakarta.

The numbers are not abstractions. Since July, nearly two million hectares of forest and peatland have burnt across Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua. The National Disaster Mitigation Agency’s routine budget has been cut from Rp 2.01 trillion to Rp 491 billion, even as the fires rage. The government has refused to declare a national disaster, thereby denying itself the resources and manpower that such a declaration would unlock.

The haze is not merely an environmental failure. It is a public-health emergency, a diplomatic irritant for Malaysia and Singapore, and a daily indictment of a state that has chosen fiscal populism over ecological stewardship.

That same fiscal populism has collided with the market. On 16 October, Indonesian equities recorded their steepest single-day fall since 1998—an 11.6 per cent collapse—after MSCI warned that Indonesia’s emerging-market classification was “no longer appropriate,” citing opaque shareholding structures and suspected coordinated trading. The rupiah touched 18,040 to the dollar, near its record low. Foreign investors have sold a net $4.88 billion of Indonesian stocks this year, putting the market on course for its largest annual outflow in at least sixteen years. When the president responded that “the Indonesian people are not afraid of anyone and will not tremble,” the markets heard not defiance but denial.

The corruption allegations cut deeper because they affect the poor. Three officials from the disaster agency have been arrested on allegations of misuse of emergency funds, and investigators have seized Rp 1.4 billion in cash, gold bars, and certificates. The flagship free nutritious meals programme has been linked to nearly 53,000 cases of food poisoning, and the red-and-white cooperatives have been allocated Rp 34.6 trillion from village funds, amid expert warnings about the risk of fraud.

Public approval for the meals programme stands at 62 per cent, with opposition at 38 per cent. The President’s own approval rating has collapsed from 81.2 per cent in November 2025 to 44.5 per cent—a descent without precedent in the Reformasi era.

Then came the wiretapping scandal, the clearest signal yet that the crisis has shifted from the material to the constitutional. On 1 November, three senior police generals—including Listyo Sigit Prabowo, the recently appointed presidential chief of staff and former national police chief—were arrested over an alleged surveillance operation that intercepted the communications of the president, cabinet ministers, business figures, journalists and civil-society leaders.

The State Secretariat declared that the compromise of the head of state’s sensitive data constituted conduct “leading toward treason.” Yet the same government acknowledged that investigators had found no indication of treason under the Criminal Code. The rhetoric of existential threat is being deployed to create a political exception that the law does not support.

The response was not a judicial process. It was a deployment of 20,980 troops. The deployment—2,100 personnel in the first phase, 5,740 reinforcements from Java and Lampung, and 13,140 on high-alert standby—has saturated the National Monument, the Presidential Palace, the Hotel Indonesia roundabout and the East Jakarta District Court.

The military calls it “standard procedure.” Independent analysts see three purposes: to deter institutional infighting between the presidency and police factions, to pre-empt the student and labour protests planned for the days after the arrests, and to secure the flashpoints where the state’s authority is most visible. Civilian watchdogs, including Imparsial and Human Rights Watch, see something older: the spectral return of Suharto’s dwi-fungsi, the doctrine that placed the military at the centre of civilian governance.

The comparison with 1998 is not rhetorical. Twenty-eight years ago, Prabowo Subianto was a Kopassus commander who ordered unauthorised troop movements around Jakarta and was discharged by an officers’ honour council for insubordination and the abduction of pro-democracy activists. In November 2026, President Prabowo again responded to an internal institutional threat with a massive military deployment to the capital.

The difference is that he now commands the state apparatus he once tried to bend. The echo is not lost on a public that remembers the disappeared activists, the torture, and the thirteen families who never received a body.

This is what convergence looks like. A currency crisis eroding household purchasing power. A fire season poisons the air children breathe. A corruption scandal stealing from disaster victims. A surveillance scandal turning the state’s own security apparatus inward. And a military deployment treating the symptoms of democratic breakdown as a public-order problem. Each crisis is legible on its own. Together, they describe a governance model that has run out of fiscal space, ecological runway, and political legitimacy at the same time.

Other analysts, on the other hand, have described Indonesia’s foreign policy under Prabowo as “free and active drift”—a widening accumulation of partnerships without a coherent strategic purpose. What is now clear is that the drift is not confined to foreign policy. It is the governing style itself. Jakarta is accumulating crises faster than it is deciding what each one means, and the cost of that indecision is being paid in rupiah, hectares, hospital admissions, and the quiet erosion of the post-1998 democratic consensus.

The Indonesian convergence is not a national story with international implications. It is the first live-fire demonstration of a new planetary condition: the simultaneous failure of the carbon-intensive growth model, the debt-financed populist state, and the surveillance-enabled security apparatus, all within a single sovereign jurisdiction. What Jakarta is experiencing is what Lagos, Karachi, Cairo and Manila will experience within a decade, as climate breakdown, fiscal exhaustion and digital surveillance capacity collide in states whose legitimacy rests on delivering material progress they can no longer afford.

Indonesia is the canary in the coal mine of the twenty-first-century state, and it is not singing. It is choking on haze, watching its currency collapse, and counting troops in the capital. The lesson is not that Indonesia is failing. The lesson is that the institutional toolkit available to any government facing convergent crises—central bank intervention, fiscal transfers, emergency deployments—was designed for a world of discrete shocks. That world no longer exists. Every state now faces convergence, and almost none have the architecture to absorb it.

What the world is watching in Indonesia is the emergence of a new grammar of state legitimacy—what we might call the parser state, in which the sovereign is no longer judged by its capacity to deliver outcomes but by its capacity to parse chaos into legible categories that citizens can navigate. The Prabowo administration has failed at exactly this task. It has parsed a burning archipelago into a budget line. It has parsed a currency collapse into a nationalist slogan. It has parsed a wiretapping scandal into a treason accusation that its own prosecutors cannot sustain.

And it has parsed public anger into a map of military deployments. Citizens across the Global South are watching and learning: the state that cannot parse its crises into actionable governance will eventually parse its citizens into security threats. The choice Indonesia makes now—whether to build parliamentary oversight of intelligence, whether to restore environmental budgets, or whether to accept international assistance without framing it as humiliation—will be studied by every government facing its own convergence. The tools exist. The question is whether the political will exists to use them before the streets become the only parser left.

The global community must now confront a reality the post-1998 architecture of international support was never designed to address. Indonesia is not a failing state. It is a functioning democracy with an elected government, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and an active judiciary. It is still experiencing convergence. This insight should reframe every strategic calculus: the old binary of fragile versus stable state has collapsed. The states most vulnerable to convergent crisis are not the weakest. They are the middle-income democracies whose legitimacy rests on performance and whose performance is now constrained by forces—climate, financialisation, digital surveillance—that no single government can control.

The international community’s choice is not whether to watch or name the fracture in Indonesia. It is whether to build a new architecture of planetary resilience that treats convergence as a shared condition rather than a national failure. That architecture would include: a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism that does not treat climate-driven fiscal stress as a moral failing; a global minimum standard for intelligence oversight that prevents the wiretapping of presidents by their own police; a regional environmental governance framework that replaces the non-interference norm with enforceable obligations to address transboundary harm; and a new development compact that finances resilience rather than extraction.

Indonesia’s convergence is not an aberration. It is an early warning. The question for every strategist in every capital is not whether their own state will face the same convergence. It is whether they will have built the tools to parse it before the troops arrive. The canary is not singing. It is telling us something. The question is whether we are listening.

Britain is firmly back in the grip of a full-blown moral panic about left-wing “anti-Semitism,” once again manufactured by the UK’s political and media classes desperate to shield themselves and Israel from scrutiny.

They are keen to smear large swaths of the British public as Jew haters, just as they did a decade ago when they targeted Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.

But this time the task will be far harder.

Britons are being told they must pretend that the last three years—years in which they watched Israel butcher and maim many tens of thousands of children in Gaza, and then starve them—never happened. They must not believe their lying eyes.

Nor apparently did they see the British political class actively collude in those atrocities year after year: by supplying weapons, passing on intelligence, excusing atrocities, providing diplomatic cover, and crushing protest.

Nor did they witness the billionaire-owned media smear the anti-genocide protests as Jew hatred and soft-soap Israel’s relentless atrocities as a “war on Hamas.”

Now the British establishment is recruiting once again a self-serving definition of anti-Semitism it foisted on public life a decade ago to smear its critics, from the Jewish leader of the Green Party to schoolchildren expressing solidarity with slaughtered Palestinian children.

The Israel-initiated definition of anti-Semitism, formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), focuses on stigmatising criticism of Israel and its apologists rather than protecting Jews.

It cites as examples of Jew hatred the description of Israel as a racist state and any kind of historical comparison between Israel and the actions of the Nazis—long the West’s cultural yardstick for judging crimes against humanity.

Under the IHRA’s misleading definition, the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, must be judged antisemitic for concluding in 2024 that Israel enforces a system of apartheid against Palestinians—that is, a system of institutionalised, racist segregation.

Similarly, the critically acclaimed Israeli documentary NAZA must be called out for Jew hate, because an intelligence officer compares the military actions he took part in in Gaza, using AI to kill Palestinians on an industrial scale, with those of the Nazis.

One-party state

In this latest round of the British establishment’s weaponisation of anti-Semitism, the main target is once again a political leader whose party has broken with the decades-old, failing neoliberal consensus.

Zack Polanski, the only Jewish leader of a major political party, is being painted as an enabler of anti-Semitism—accused of permitting Jew hatred to infect the Green Party just as Corbyn was while heading the Labour Party.

The pretext this time is that the Greens passed a motion at their annual conference—supported by a majority of the wider membership—declaring Zionism to be a racist political ideology.

The motion notes that the self-declared “Jewish” state of Israel, the realisation of the Zionist movement’s ambitions, was created through the mass expulsion of the native Palestinian population. As the ICJ concluded, Israel also upholds a system of apartheid rule for the benefit of Jews only.

This may all be hard to refute, but the British political and media classes aren’t interested in truth. They want blood—and the IHRA anti-Semitism definition supplies the knife.

Both Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey have responded to the motion by refusing to work with Polanski and the Greens should the next general election produce a hung parliament.

In other words, they are prepared to spurn the only Jewish-led party, supposedly on the grounds of fighting anti-Semitism, even if it means killing their own chances of holding power. By default, that may open the door to the right and far-right, forming the next government.

That is where, as both Labour and the Lib Dems know only too well, real racism, not the confected kind, runs rampant.

According to a 2017 Institute for Jewish Policy Research survey, recording antisemitic attitudes by political affiliation, those holding “very rightwing” views were three times more likely than other political factions to have strongly antisemitic views.

Notably, the proportion of “very leftwing” voters holding strongly antisemitic views was entirely in line with the rest of the population—that is, it was a marginal phenomenon.

A similar survey by MORI two years later showed a similar pattern: of the right, being both far more pro-Israel than the left and far more anti-Semitic.

Nonetheless, at the time of these surveys, the political and media classes were claiming, contrary to all the evidence, that a leftwing, Corbyn-led Labour party was plagued by Jew hate.

Now they are doing exactly the same to the Greens.

The Polanski smears alone should serve as proof of the deep, institutionalised corruption of the British political system—a system that continues to excuse and conspire in Israel’s genocide.

Wrecking the Greens

As with the Corbyn era, the all-out assault on Polanski is intended to wreck his party by prising open divisions.

During Corbyn’s time as leader, he found his ability to represent the views of Labour’s huge grassroots membership consistently undermined by the bulk of his MPs and a right-wing party bureaucracy content to rely on big donations from corporations and the super-rich.

They were determined to stop Corbyn from ever reaching a position of power from which he could implement a popular programme of mildly socialist policies, such as ending austerity, redistributing wealth, halting forever wars, and taking failing utilities like the privatised, profit-seeking water companies back into public ownership.

His opponents struggled to attack him directly on policy, so they focused on character assassination instead.

Now Polanski and Green members find themselves in the same boat, facing off against the old guard of the Green party, headed by former leader Caroline Lucas and a handful of MPs.

The media have been helping to bolster this group as a supposed safe pair of hands—the adults in the room—who can take back control of the party.

The goal, one assumes, is that, stripped of Polanksi, the Greens will sink back into electoral irrelevance.

Then there will be no danger of a Polanski-led party ending austerity, redistributing wealth, halting forever wars, and taking failing utilities like the privatised, profit-seeking water companies back into public ownership.

Soap-opera politics

During Corbyn’s tenure, the establishment narrative was that the many hundreds of thousands of disillusioned British voters drawn back into politics by Labour’s new-found commitment to democratic socialism were all dangerous “antisemites.”

In this fanciful telling, Labour became Europe’s largest party only because Jew-hating entryists overran it.

In response, Sir Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, purged Labour of its left wing, once again making the party dependent on donations from Big Business.

The left evicted from Labour found a new political home in the Green party, sending membership numbers rocketing to record highs there.

According to the political and media class, this is not proof that large swaths of the British public want a different kind of politics: an end to permanent austerity and imperial wars—an end to a policy agenda dictated by billionaires.

No, in their view, it simply means that the “antisemitic” left has now infiltrated the Green party and must be rooted out again.

This is the establishment’s whack-a-mole interpretation of rising public anger—anger it would prefer to channel into support for racist scapegoating led by the Reform far-right than risk the left gaining power to tackle the billionaire class’s chokehold on public policy.

Even as the two-party system splinters into an array of factions, Britain continues to look solidly like a one-party state, whose different rosettes represent the same monied interests.

You either back neoliberal austerity at home and corporate-sponsored imperial wars and genocides abroad—or you must be figuratively burnt at the stake as an antisemite.

Hierarchy of racism

The manufacturing of a “left” anti-Semitism scare for a second time is more ambitious and high-risk than before. Parts of the public are waking up to the playbook after three years of British government collusion in Israel’s genocide.

This time, the political and media classes are widening their dragnet to intimidate a far wider section of the population, through a new Big Brother programme to be rolled out in schools.

On this occasion the gaslighting and bullying of the British public is not being restricted to the left, or even to adult voters. It is reaching deep into the UK education system, with the government formally imposing for the first time a hierarchy of racisms to be enforced on children.

Schools will now be required to treat anti-Semitism as a unique and especially pernicuous form of racism—even as all the evidence shows racism towards Muslim and black communities is far more prevalent and troubling.

The large mobs taking to Britain’s streets, trying to stop small boats crossing the Channel and seeking to burn down migrant hostels, are chiefly hostile to brown people and Muslims, not Jews.

Survey after survey shows a swelling tide of Islamophobia.

According to data compiled by the Crime Survey for England and Wales for the three-year period to spring 2025, Muslims were the most likely of any religious and ethnic group to face both religious and race-based hate crime.

Nonetheless, Burnham’s government has announced it is adopting in full all 27 recommendations made by an official review charged with tackling a supposed anti-Semitism crisis in British schools. It was set up earlier this year, shortly before Starmer stepped down as prime minister.

The review was entrusted to Sir David Bell, a former chief inspector of schools and senior civil servant in the education department. Bell is described in the review’s terms of reference as “independent of government” and as having “no conflict of interest.”

And yet, as the media watchdog body Newscord notes, Bell was actually receiving a salary as vice-chair of a government agency called Skills England through much of the period he was conducting the review.

For the past decade he has also been listed as sitting on the national council of the Academic Study Group.

The ASG states that its sole “firm policy” is opposition to the BDS movement, which seeks peaceful means—through boycotts and sanctions—to end Israel’s criminal behaviour towards the Palestinian people, echoing the campaign against apartheid South Africa.

The group’s director, John Levy, wrote in 2021 that the trust was founded to curb “hostility” towards Israel and serve “as a vehicle for introducing British academics to some of the predicaments of contemporary Israel.” Its work includes providing talks supportive of Israel to British schools.

Bell himself has in the past been accused of Islamophobia. In 2005, when he was head of Ofsted, he singled out Muslim faith schools for putting Britain’s “national coherence” at risk.

Anti-Semitism weaponised

Bell’s decision to treat anti-Semitism as a “distinct form of racism”—separate from other racisms and requiring special safeguarding procedures to protect Jewish pupils—is exactly the approach fiercely rejected in an earlier inquiry, one set up by Starmer.

Martin Forde KC was appointed in early 2020 to investigate claims of an anti-Semitism problem under Corbyn, Starmer’s predecessor.

Much to Starmer’s annoyance, Forde’s report, published in 2022, found that Corbyn had been largely correct that anti-Semitism was weaponised during his tenure for factional gain, chiefly by the right of the party that Starmer had come to lead.

Forde also criticised the rightwing Labour bureaucracy, which had opposed Corbyn, for “in effect operating a hierarchy of racism,” privileging anti-Semitism while ignoring or downplaying other forms of racism. Staff were berated for using anti-Semitism for political point-scoring against the left instead of taking a serious approach to tackling anti-Semitism.

With the help of the media, Starmer has succeeded in largely wiping Forde’s report from the record. It is almost never referenced.

With the Bell review, we seem to be back to square one: the weaponisation of anti-Semitism to create a hierarchy of racism is being extended from politics to schools.

Hidden in the report’s later pages, Bell actually notes that there has been no rise in anti-Semitism in recent years: “Anti-Jewish attitudes are typically less prevalent and have remained more stable.”

Perhaps not suprisingly, in parallel Bell points out that opposition to Israel has steadily risen during the period that the world watched Israel murdering, maiming and starving Gaza’s children.

Or as the report observes: “Anti-Israel sentiments are more prevalent and have been increasing.”

Bell himself points to a survey conducted in 2025—at the height of the Gaza genocide—in which a quarter of all Britons and half of those aged between 18 and 24 said they were uncomfortable “spending time with people who openly support Israel.” By contrast, only 3 per cent said they were opposed to having a friendship with someone because they were Jewish.

In other words, Bell implicitly accepts the very premise of his review is flawed: anti-Semitism is not more of a problem than it was. It is opposition to Israel’s atrocities that is on the rise.

And that, it seems, is what the Bell review and the government’s new policy towards schools are really seeking to stifle.

Conjured from thin air

It should hardly need stating that, if the review’s premises are faulty, then any conclusions based on those flawed premises are likely to be wrong too.

But that is beside the point. The purpose of the Bell review is not to eradicate a problem of anti-Semitism in schools that the review largely has to conjure out of thin air.

It has been widely pointed out that Bell’s headline figure of nearly “three in five Jewish children” suffering anti-Semitism—cited by education secretary Lucy Powell and the corporate media—is completely unfounded.

In fact, the figure is based on a minuscule survey sample of 92 six-form Jewish students, aged between 16 and 19. Of them, 29 reported experiencing anti-Semitism—less than a third.

But there is a further problem. Even those 29 Jewish students who claim to have experienced anti-Semitism were likely to have based that experience on the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which focuses on criticism of Israel more than hatred of Jews.

It is quite possible that in many, if not most, of these cases Jewish students perceived as evidence of anti-Semitism not hatred of Jews but opposition to Israel, or anti-genocide protests, or the promotion of Palestinian rights.

That is even more likely given that more than two-thirds of all Jewish pupils study in exclusively Jewish faith schools, many of which characterise themselves as Zionist and teach pupils to identify strongly with an apartheid Israeli state currently carrying out genocide.

That some Jewish children have been educated, like their parents, to regard critics of Israel’s crimes or its apartheid character as Jew haters, does not make Israel’s critics at fault. It is not their behaviour that needs policing.

Rather, it is the racist, anti-Palestinian education being promoted in Britain’s Zionist schools that needs to be rooted out.

Not fit for purpose

Nonetheless, under the Bell recommendations, pupils, teachers and parents will be bullied into accepting that the horrors they watched Israel commit over the past three years—and that the UK colluded in—are not what they seem.

How is this to be achieved? Burnham’s government is to impose on British schools the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism—the one that was used to trash Corbyn’s Labour party and is now being wielded against Polanski and the Greens.

On the basis of the IHRA definition, Polanski is being branded the “wrong sort of Jew”—that is, one whose left-wing policies cannot be tolerated.

Now the same atmosphere of the witch-hunt is to be unleashed in British schools.

Leading legal authorities in the UK long ago criticised the IHRA definition as being unfit for purpose. Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Court of Appeal judge and himself Jewish, warned back in 2017 that the definition was poorly worded, imprecise and was being used to stifle legitimate debate about Israel.

One of the IHRA’s examples of anti-Semitism expressly cites holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions.

And yet, because seven of the IHRA’s 11 examples focus on Israel, the definition risks increasing anti-Semitism through its conflation of Jews with Israel—paradoxically, in violation of its own precepts.

It is precisely because of this continuing and wilful misuse of the IHRA definition that its lead author, Kenneth Stern, has repeatedly stated his opposition to it being codified into law and used to police behaviour in schools and colleges.

In a 2019 Guardian oped, Stern accused “right-wing Jews” of “weaponising” his definition to silence debate about Israel.

But the problem is not just right-wing Jews weaponising anti-Semitism; it is governments like Burnham’s. The British political and media classes have realised that the IHRA definition is far too useful—in crushing leftwing critics—to ever be mothballed.

Zionist re-education

It is not difficult to predict the combined effect of imposing a hierarchy of racisms in which anti-Semitism sits at the top and of enforcing the IHRA definition on schools, effectively outlawing robust criticism of Israel.

It will require school administrations and teaching staff to police classrooms and playgrounds as never before and to crack down on any demonstration of normal, empathetic behaviours among pupils. Henceforth concern for the suffering of Palestinians will be classed as aberrant, as “radicalisation.”

Expressing solidarity with Palestinian children killed or injured in Gaza risks being flagged as a safeguarding threat to Jewish pupils. As will displaying pro-Palestinian or anti-genocide badges. As will holding bake sales to raise money to feed and house Gaza’s children living in Gaza’s ruins. As will wearing traditional Palestinian costume on national identity days celebrated in many of Britain’s more diverse schools.

Already since the Gaza genocide, record numbers of pupils have reportedly been referred to the government’s Prevent “counter-extremism” programme for wearing pro-Palestine badges and stickers.

Acts of fellow feeling for the oppressed, for the victims of what the world’s highest court warns is an apartheid regime, will be banished from schools.

Daniel Kebede, head of the National Education Union, has warned: “Recommending the IHRA definition risks tightening the chilling grip already stifling classroom discussion of the Gaza genocide.”

The logic of the government’s hierarchy of racisms will be fully on display.

Pupils will be denied the right to identify with traumatised Palestinian children in Gaza, so that Jewish children in Britain can be left in peace to identify with a foreign state—Israel—even as it is widely accused of committing genocide.

Presumably, the government’s hope is that, if caught early enough, pupils can be trained out of their normal instincts to care for the less fortunate, for those who suffer. They can be taught that such feelings are shameful and evidence of Jew hatred.

And by extension, they can be made to believe that the British state’s years-long collusion in Israeli atrocities is not a crime but the moral thing to do.

Any pupils who stray from the correct path, who refuse to be cowed, will be subjected to mandatory Zionist re-education, implemented through fiercely pro-Israel lobby groups masquerading as Jewish community organisations.

That is the prospect too for British children who have Palestinian, Arab or Muslim heritage, including those who have had family members killed, maimed, ethnically cleansed or tortured by Israel.

For years they have watched the suffering and humiliation of their communities while knowing that the British government—their government—is complicit in those crimes.

Now they will have to permanently hide and suppress their true feelings to avoid punishment.

Those who fail to do so will be subjected to British state-sponsored instruction programmes—re-education—run by pro-Israel groups to “correct” their wrongthink, to force these children to love the very state that has murdered and abused their compatriots and loved ones.

Racist double standard

To put in proper perspective the government’s crackdown on a largely non-existent anti-Semitism problem in schools, remember that more than 2,000 young British Jews are believed to have headed off to Israel to help its military commit genocide in Gaza.

The government has done nothing to stop them going. Meanwhile, British police have been repeatedly handed details of potential war crimes suspects but so far have failed to investigate, arrest or charge any of them.

Powell, the UK’s education secretary, has told Sky News: “I don’t think that our schools should be a place where it’s about making protests and statements about geopolitical events around the world.”

And yet only a year ago her predecessor, Bridget Phillipson, who set up the Bell review, was filmed in British classrooms with primary schoolchildren waving Ukrainian flags.

Despite Powell’s new prohibition, many Jewish pupils will continue to be encouraged by their schools to identify strongly with the foreign state of Israel—a state almost permanently mired, in the worst possible way, in “geopolitical events.”

If it is important for British children to identify with and support Ukraine’s white children through their suffering, why is it not possible—why is it anti-Semitism—for British children to similarly identify with and support the brown children of Gaza as they go through far greater suffering?

It is hard to imagine an answer that is not racist to its core.

Whatever the government claims, these double standards are not driven by principle. They are not about anti-Semitism. This is about protecting Israel.

Burnham entered office apologising for how his predecessor, Starmer, “got it wrong” at the outset of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.

But his government is now doubling down on what Labour got equally wrong in the years leading up to the genocide—when it dedicated its energies to crushing the section of the party led by Corbyn that was warning of Israel’s deeply racist character and of what it was likely to do to the Palestinians.

The genocide has vindicated Corbyn and the left in the most horrifying manner possible.

No matter. As with the attacks on Polanski, none of this is really about anti-Semitism. It is about Israel.

It is about the British establishment and the billionaire class protecting their interests both in the war industries Israel is so central to and in the oil-rich Middle East, where Israel acts as the West’s attack dog.

This is about crushing dissent to prop up a crumbling western political order, led by a greedy, belligerent narcissist in the White House, as it is afflicted by collapse on every front: economic, environmental, political and social.

Dissatisfaction and unrest are growing. Violence is simmering. Bullying children into saluting the Israeli flag will not halt the decline. It simply underscores how much the “liberal” western order has lost the plot.

It was a remarkably mild early November morning at 6am as I left the Chelsea Cloisters hotel to get the tube to Westminster and the Supreme Court. I had been worried because I had forgotten to pack my thermal underwear.

I had queued overnight for the Assange hearings, the Salmond trial and the ICJ Genocide case—the latter in minus 5 degrees at The Hague—and thermals were an essential part of the kit. On the first night for the Assange hearings, at Woolwich Crown Court, I stood for seven hours in freezing drizzle with Patrick Henningsen and Randy Credico. Immediately after that first day in court finished, I headed to Mountain Warehouse to buy a large, warm, waterproof jacket.

I found the one I wanted, which was on sale, and tried it on. I then took it to the counter and explained to the young lady that it was labelled XXL, but I couldn’t get the zip to do up. She looked at me coolly and replied, “Fat people don’t climb mountains.”

My ego somehow survived, and now as I approached the Supreme Court, I saw the flashing orange lights of three trucks parked outside and heard the ringing metallic sound of crews putting up metal crowd barriers around the building. I was slightly worried I was late for the queue, but there was only one tall young man sitting on the benches outside. He was a journalism student from City University, and neither of us having anything else to do, he interviewed me.

There were three men in sleeping bags along the front of the court building, one right across the door. We speculated as to whether they were part of the queue or simply homeless. As barriers were clamped into place behind us, we worried where the front of the queue was meant to be. I approached the man wearing a Hi-Vis jacket, who looked in charge. He had long hair and a beard and a friendly, open face. He wore a builder’s helmet, presumably in case the Supreme Court somehow fell on top of him.

“Do you know what the system is for installing these barriers?” I asked.

“I’d be pretty bad at my job if I didn’t,” he replied.

I explained we were the queue. He laughed and said we were fine where we were. About five minutes later the crew left with two-and-three-quarter trucks still full of barriers, presumably to cordon off somewhere else. Their work was inexplicably pointless—they had put pit barriers up against an existing wall, with others randomly dotted on the pavement, and left a thirty-yard gap anybody could walk past to the court on the west side.

I pointed out to Tony this seemed strangely pointless and he said its purpose might become clear later. It didn’t.

His name, incidentally, probably wasn’t Tony. I introduced myself, but he didn’t volunteer a name, so I didn’t press him.

At 7:30am a young lady arrived. She was pleasant and joined our conversation but again did not give her name. She worked for a Westminster lobbying company, so I would assume it was in the Israeli interest. It was 8:45am before a real queue began to gather. Public information had been that doors would open at 9am, and they did—but we were kept standing outside until after 10am.

There was then a great disappointment as an official arrived and told us no members of the public would be admitted to the courtroom. Court No. 1, he explained, has no public gallery, and all the rows of benches would be fully occupied by the legal teams. The public would be allowed into an overspill court, No. 3, where screens were set up.

This was very annoying. It was also later plainly observable on the screens that the official explanation of no seats being available was untrue. Exactly the same thing had happened at the High Court hearing. I have no doubt that “security” was the motivation, and having designated Palestine Action supporters as terrorists, they were determined to treat any of the public interested in the case as potential terrorists.

The building is a very late flowering of Victorian mediaeval revivalist architecture and was originally Middlesex County Council. When the Supreme Court was established a quarter century ago, it was converted to the purpose, the county of Middlesex itself having essentially already been abolished.

It is rather a good building, which is important as a close neighbour to Westminster Abbey. Unfortunately, the principle of open justice had not been applied in its conversion to the creation of public galleries.

Today was the last gasp of the UK legal system in challenging the legality of the proscription of Palestine Action in the case brought by its founder, Huda Ammori. This judicial review had proceeded through the High Court, which found the proscription unlawful, and the Appeal Court, which found it lawful.

As the process went through these courts, the grounds for permitted appeal were whittled down until only one was allowed: whether the effect of the proscription on Article X and XI rights (freedom of speech and freedom of assembly) were disproportionate in terms of what was necessary to protect the public from the terrorist organisation.

Articles X and XI are from the European Convention on Human Rights, enshrined into UK law by the Human Rights Act.

In the Supreme Court they do not wear old horsehair wigs and gowns, including the judges. This felt rather strange, as such a costume had not been worn at all the prior stages. The five judges were situated on a curved dais, with the lines of lawyers below them.

One problem with not being in the real courtroom was that, every time a judge spoke, the camera immediately cut to that judge in close-up. The judges all looked extremely similar—white men aged about sixty in suits and ties. It was very difficult to tell in close-up which judge was which. Some of the identifications in this account are therefore almost certainly wrong, but not deliberate.

When you think about it, in our diverse society, the difficulty of telling Supreme Court judges physically apart is a problem.

Raza Hussain KC opened for Huda Ammori. Raza seemed a much more imposing figure without his wig and gown and spoke with a force and fluency that I had not really seen in full flow in the earlier hearings.

His first point may have been excellent, but as the screens in Court No. 3 had no sound for the first five minutes, I did not catch it. We therefore join him at point number 2.

2) Hussain said that Palestine Action was not a terrorist group but a protest group that takes direct action. He said it could only be caught by stretching the outer limits of the definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act, a definition which the Supreme Court had already described in an earlier case as “striking in its breadth.”

3) Hussain said that according to the Home Secretary herself, the vast majority of Palestine Action’s activities did not fall within the definition of terrorism. Only 3 actions out of 385 were so described. Yet these three were used to make all fall under terrorism.

4) Unlike other proscribed organisations, the objectives of Palestine Action were in line with the principles of liberal democracy. They simply wished to impede genocide and war crimes.

5) Contrary to the Appeal Court judgement, Palestine Action did fall within the tradition of other direct action groups, such as the suffragettes and environmentalist and animal rights groups, which were not treated as terrorists.

6) Important civil society groups such as Amnesty, Liberty and PEN, and international organisations including UN Special Rapporteurs had expressed opposition to the proscription.

7) Proscription of Palestine Action had wider effects on public confidence in the proscription regime itself and in the Terrorism Act. There was public revulsion at the arrest of over 4,000 for supporting Palestine Action, many of them elderly and distinguished.

8) Proscription of Palestine Action was prone to upset the court’s judgements in many other compatibility cases over the years. (A compatibility case tests whether a law is compatible with the Human Rights Act.) The decision on the proportionality of the effect on civil liberties must itself depend on whether the anterior exercise of the proscription power was proportionate to the alleged threat.

If an elderly and distinguished person arrested for expressing non-violent support for Palestine Action were to win a case against their arrest at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg—he gave the example of an 81-year-old female Christian ex-magistrate arrested at a vigil at a Truro church—that could strike down all the Supreme Court’s previous decisions on Section 13 of the Terrorism Act (expressing support for a terrorist organisation) where other, real terrorist organisations were concerned.

This last was a very good argument I had never heard before, and one tailored to meet the sensibilities of a court with no interest in civil liberties. Maintaining this absurd proscription could ultimately result, by the law of unintended consequences, in more freedom of speech, not less.

Lord Sales now interrupted from the judicial bench to ask whether Hussain’s description of just three terrorist incidents included that at RAF Brize Norton.

Raza Hussain replied that incident did not meet the bar of terrorism. It should rather be seen in the light of the famous Margaret Jones case, which was not assessed by anybody to be terrorism. The anti-militarist tradition is not terrorist.

Lord Sales then asked whether the proportionality exercise should not be conducted by this court on the facts as of now, as opposed to the facts at the initial hearing. Hussain replied that Lord Justice Lewis had ruled at an earlier stage that material that had happened after the initial Divisional (High) Court ruling was not admissible. Lord Stephens asked why the Court of Appeal had made this ruling.

There was a hiatus as everybody in court went through sheaves of papers looking for the answer to this question, but nobody seemed able to find one.

Lord Sales asked why Hussain said Brize Norton was not a terrorist attack. Raza Hussain replied that it was the Secretary of State’s judgement; it was not a terrorist attack. He suggested the government lawyers might explain that. Lord Sales said he was asking Hussain why he would say it was not terrorism. Hussain replied because of the limited amount of damage done and because of the Jones case.

Lord Stephens then interjected that RAF planes had been damaged. Why was that not terrorism? Raza Hussain said that was a precise comparison to the Jones case, which was judged not to be terrorism. The Jones case involved attempted arson at RAF Fairford. The Brize Norton case was merely spraying paint.

Lord Briggs said that surely the seriousness of damage depended on what the paint was sprayed upon. There was a difference between spraying paint on a railing and spraying paint on a Van Gogh.

Lord Sales then asked why it was not for the Supreme Court, but rather the Secretary of State, to decide whether Brize Norton was terrorism.

James Eadie KC for the government intervened to say that the extent of the damage at Brize Norton was the disputed subject of a current criminal trial. But there were other factors to be considered in determining whether an incident was terrorism.

Lord Sales said Raza Hussain appeared to accept it was for this court to determine whether Brize Norton was terrorism.

Raza Hussain suggested that whether one individual act was characterised as terrorism was not determinative of the proportionality of the interference with Article X and XI rights. The definition of terrorism in UK legislation is very broad. The power to proscribe is very broad. The effects of proscription are very severe. The “guardrails” provided by the Convention rights were therefore very necessary.

He outlined the draconian powers of the act, in empowering the police to arrest people on suspicion of supporting Palestine Action, and criminalising speech which could lead somebody else to support Palestine Action, irrespective of whether that was the intention of the speaker.

Lord Stephens asked whether speaking against the proscription of Palestine Action, rather than in support of Palestine Action as such, would be an offence. Raza Hussain replied that people are being arrested for doing exactly that.

Lord Sales asked whether, if he wrote a judgement opposing the proscription of Palestine Action, that would itself be an offence. Raza Hussain replied that on the ground people were being arrested for just opposing proscription, as well as those being arrested specifically for supporting Palestine Action.

Lord Briggs said that people opposing proscription were not necessarily supporting Palestine Action, and therefore there was no offence. Raza Hussain said that it was an offence under the Act to make a statement that gave rise to a suspicion of supporting Palestine Action. People opposing proscription were being arrested for that. These offences carried up to 14 years in jail.

Lord Reid said that if an academic published “I understand why Hamas (also a proscribed organisation) did what they did,” that would not be actionable.

Raza Hussain said people simply do not know what they may or may not say. There is no clear line. That is precisely the chilling effect on free speech.

Raza Hussain next moved on to say that he would address the findings of the Court of Appeal that Palestine Action was not in the tradition of civil disobedience groups and not non-violent. Hussain said this finding was an error of fact and ignored the evidence, including that contained in the various Home Office documents. The Court of Appeal’s characterisation of other movements was ahistorical. In particular, it was simply untrue to say that the suffragettes only engaged in non-violent and overt campaigning.

His submission was that Palestine Action never advocated violence. He accepted that there had been a few isolated instances of violence, but these were not deliberate.

The context was important, and the context was the enormous suffering of the Palestinian people. The aims of Palestine Action were to prevent jus cogens breaches of international law by Israel, including war crimes, apartheid and genocide.

The Court of Appeal had stated that the complicity of Elbit Systems in Israeli war crimes “must be a matter of contention,” but it was not in fact open to contention. Elbit describes itself as the backbone of the Israeli Defence Force. It is Israel’s main supplier of weapons.

The International Court of Justice had issued interim measures against Israel in the Genocide case. The International Criminal Court had issued warrants for both the Prime Minister of Israel and the former Defence Minister. These were indisputable facts.

An organisation such as Palestine Action with the aim of countering this illegality was clearly in the honourable tradition of British direct action.

There were many precedents, such as the Animal Liberation Front, Extinction Rebellion, and Just Stop Oil, as well as anti-hunting and anti-GM food groups, who used very similar tactics to Palestine Action and were not terrorists.

Lord Sales interrupted to say that this was not an admissible argument. Palestine Action’s ground that the proscription was unfairly discriminatory against Palestinians had been refused, and permission to appeal on this point had been refused.

Raza Hussain continued that the tactics employed by Palestinian Action were commonplace. The Greenham Common women and Trident Ploughshares stood in the same tradition.

Lord Sales interrupted again to ask why this argument was different from a claim of discrimination, which was not allowed?

Lord Sales looks like an uglier version of Toby Young, which rather surprised me, as I had not realised that “Uglier than Toby Young” existed, even as a theoretical concept. He is very much from the Tony Blair stable and was a protégé of Tony Blair’s mate, Lord Gerry Irvine KC.

Sales represented the Blair government in opposing a judicial review into the decision to start the illegal invasion of Iraq, on the grounds that judges should not interfere in ministerial decisions on national security.

They say that true beauty emanates from inside, from the soul. Lord Sales proves that you can get true ugliness that way too.

Raza Hussain tried to plough on despite Sales’s interventions. The suffragettes had engaged in firebombing, arson and serious property damage. They planned such events in secret. But history viewed them as vindicated. This is because, like Palestine Action, they had a legitimate aim. Unlike other proscribed organisations the aims of Palestine Action in stopping genocide were entirely compatible with the ideals of a liberal democracy.

The aim of proscription was to prevent the actions described in Section 1 and Section 3 of the Terrorism Act. The necessity of the proscription must strike a fair balance with its impact on statutory Article X and XI rights. Was there a need for proscription? Elbit’s property rights were protected by the full range of criminal law and not just by Sections 1 and 3.

The aim of proscription must be limited to preventing actions which fell under Sections 1 and 3, not to disrupting the vast majority of Palestine Action’s activities which did not meet the definition of terrorism. Proscription was being used to prevent acts which the government simply considered as irritants. In the proportionality exercise it must be considered that they are preventing Palestine Action’s activities as a whole, not just those which fell under Sections 1 and 3.

Raza Hussain then handed over to Henry Blaxland KC to tackle the Home Office claim of “an escalating pattern of violence.”

Henry Blaxland said that the question to be asked is whether the criminal law is equipped to deal with Palestine Action without proscription. The state should not prematurely exercise a power to prevent crime. Sweeping preventative powers was a fundamental change to the order of a liberal democracy.

There were many charges in the criminal law which could be and had been used against Palestine Action activities. These included criminal damage, burglary, aggravated burglary, assault and violent disorder.

Lord Sales interrupted, saying that criminal law might not prevail. You might not catch the criminal. If you did catch them, then it might be difficult to prosecute and bring witnesses. The fundamental criticism of the Divisional (High) Court by the Court of Appeal was that they did not accord due respect to the constitutional position and democratic mandate of the Secretary of State in making this judgement.

Lord Stephens asked if the criminal law is a sufficient deterrent. It may be like director disqualification when a company goes bankrupt—it was no real deterrent at all.

Blaxland continued that the proscription was an excessive reaction to a particular problem. They should look at the three cases on which the determination of terrorism was made.

Lord Stephens asked whether the three cases included Brize Norton. Blaxfield replied no, but he would come on to it.

In the Thales factory case in Scotland, six defendants had climbed onto the roof of the building and were supported by a crowd gathered outside. There was no attempt to escape, and all six had pleaded guilty to breach of the peace. They received 12-month prison sentences, with one getting an extra 2 months.

This was not assessed as a terrorist action by the police at the time, nor by the Scottish Counter Terrorism Board (CONTEST). It was only later elevated to one of three instances of terrorism. But nobody was hurt.

The second “terrorism” case, the June 2024 action at the Instro Precision factory in Sandwich, Kent, was still being tried at the Old Bailey. In this action the protestors had been divided into black (covert) and red (overt) teams.

The black team had protested outside and provided a diversion before making good their escape, while the red team had entered the factory to cause damage and had intentionally been arrested. This was being tried under criminal law with charges of threatening behaviour, burglary, violent disorder and criminal damage.

The third case was at the Elbit factory at Filton, Bristol in August 2024. Here the black team trial was in progress, and the red team trial had concluded. One security guard and one police officer had been injured.

This had been charged as aggravated burglary, but all were acquitted of that. The charge of GBH with intent had also been acquitted. There was a conviction of GBH with no intent. The judge had found that the action had a “terrorist connection,” which increased sentencing. Jail sentences were very substantial, of six to eight years.

Filton had been a watershed for Palestine Action. The arrests had been made under Section 21 of the Terrorism Act, and all had been remanded in custody for 18 months before trial. This was not dependent upon proscription and was before proscription. It had changed how Palestine Action operated thereafter.

On the Appeal Court’s assessment that these were covert actions:

• At Thales there was no attempt to avoid arrest.
• At Instro Precision the black team evaded arrest, but the red team had volunteered for arrest.
• At Filton all were arrested, and the Red Team had volunteered for arrest.

The actions were not covert. The point of the action was to gather publicity for their cause by volunteering for arrest.

Lord Stevens asked where he could see that they volunteered for arrest.

Blaxland replied this has been plain from the evidence at trial, where they received substantial custodial sentences. That was the meaning of the designations “overt” and “covert.”

Lord Sales said that the Court of Appeal went well beyond the question of avoiding arrest. They spoke of Palestine Action’s hidden funding, its cell structure, and of Ms Ammori’s lack of transparency.

Henry Blaxland replied that Palestine Action was an open organisation. It had a website. It held Training Days and Open Days which anybody could attend.

Lord Sales responded that Palestine Action had a cell structure. Blaxland countered that when it came to the serious incidents on which reliance is placed, they volunteered themselves for arrest.

Lord Lloyd Jones asked about the injury to the police officer. Blaxland stated it was not intentional, and it was subject to a criminal appeal. After the Filton Palestine Action, they confined themselves to action which entailed only low-level criminality.

Lord Stephens asked about Brize Norton. Blaxland replied that Brize Norton was the exception that proved the rule.

The proper comparator was with the Margaret Jones case. That action had involved actual damage to refuelling tankers, with an intention and equipment to damage aircraft by arson. The resulting sentences for the two defendants had been merely a curfew order and conditional discharge.

Lord Sales said that the Jones case was serious criminality. How did comparison to that help Blaxland’s case?

Blaxland replied that there had been no suggestion that the Jones case was terrorism.

Lord Stephens interjected that it plainly was terrorism. It involved serious damage to property.

Blaxland replied that there was no suggestion that the defendants in the Jones case should be described as terrorists or treated as terrorists.

Lord Sales said that the Jones case was prosecuted. This criminality was not tolerated.

Blaxland replied it was prosecuted, but not as terrorism. If he might move on with his argument, at Brize Norton, rather than arson, two aircraft had been sprayed with paint.

Lord Lloyd Jones asked which part of the aircraft. The idea was to disable the plane.

Henry Blaxland KC was plainly struggling. The judges were deliberately preventing him from articulating his argument. He is a criminal defence barrister and used to addressing juries, which are a cross section of the decent British public. Here his audience was much more difficult: four rather stupid, elderly white men hand-picked for their extreme right-wing opinions, plus Lord Briggs.

He explained that the agreed evidence was that these were refuelling aircraft which had been regularly deployed to RAF Akrotiri for operations in support of Israel. When damaged by paint, they had been operationally replaced in 45 minutes. The incident could be dealt with by the ordinary criminal law.

Lord Stephens said that the ordinary criminal law did not deter them from damaging RAF planes.

Lord Lloyd Jones said that Brize Norton was a more serious incident, as it affected national security.

Henry Blaxland said he must now speedily conclude (having lost most of his time with the judges speaking more than he did).

The activities of Palestine Action were within the reach of ordinary criminal law. There were several alternatives to proscription which did not entail wide impacts on freedom of speech and had never been properly considered.

 1) Conspiracy. This covered a wide range of organisational behaviours and could have been used.
 2) Encouragement and Incitement. It should have been very straightforward to detect and arrest people for holding Open Days and Training Days and publishing information online which encouraged people to break the law and taught them how to do it.
 3) The Online Safety Act covered the web activity.
 4) The Public Order Act—this had not been considered.
 5) Civil injunctions. The Court of Appeal had dismissed this point, but these had been effective against Just Stop Oil and the Campaign Against Animal Cruelty.

Lord Sales said that the decision on proscription was for Parliament and the Secretary of State to make.

Henry Blaxland went on: What were the effects of the unnecessary proscription? A wide impact on freedom of speech. On a point raised earlier, Blaxland could attest that people had been charged as supporting Palestine Action on the evidence that they campaigned against its proscription.

Far from depriving Palestine Action of the oxygen of publicity and destroying its brand, the proscription plainly had the opposite effect.

Henry Blaxland KC then handed back to Raza Hussain KC to conclude Palestine Action’s case.

Hussain said that the Margaret Jones case was the locus classicus for this kind of action. It stood in a long and noble history. The suffragettes had been vindicated by history. In a liberal democracy the police and prosecution should behave with restraint when faced with non-violent civil disobedience on a matter of conscience. Lord Hoffman had stated in the judgement:

My Lords, civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country. People who break the law to affirm their belief in the injustice of a law or government action are sometimes vindicated by history. The suffragettes are an example which comes immediately to mind. It is the mark of a civilised community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind. But there are conventions which are generally accepted by the law-breakers on one side and the law-enforcers of the other. The protesters behave with a sense of proportion and do not cause excessive damage or inconvenience. And they vouch the sincerity of their beliefs by accepting the penalties imposed by the law. The police and prosecutors, on the other hand, behave with restraint and the magistrates impose sentences which take the conscientious motives of the protesters into account. The conditional discharges ordered by the magistrates in the case which came before them exemplifies their sensitivity to these conventions.

Lord Sales interjected that it is for parliament and the Secretary of State to make the decision on proscription. (This was the seventh time he had interrupted to make this exact same assertion. I have not noted all his repetitive interruptions.

Raza Hussain continued that there had been a major impact from proscription. Thousands of people had been arrested for expressing their support for Palestine Action.

Lord Reed interrupted, saying that this was the consequence of Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, which the Secretary of State, who had the democratic mandate, had decided to bring into force by proscription and which had been approved by parliament.

Raza Hussain continued, “It was not only freedom of expression which had been constrained.” It was an offence carrying up to 14 years in prison to arrange a meeting which might give rise to a suspicion that it was in support of Palestine Action. 14 years for arranging a meeting.

Palestine Action had produced educational materials about the Israeli arms trade in the UK. This freedom of expression was also being disrupted. Palestine Action had a genuine belief that in the context of the genocide taking place in Gaza, disruptive action was necessary.

If you even say that you support only Palestine Action’s low-level activities, those which did not meet the official definition of terrorism, you are still liable to 14 years in jail. The legislation makes plain your intention is irrelevant.

Thousands of people have now been arrested. Hundreds of thousands more people wished to speak out, but their freedom of speech is curtailed because they could not afford to be arrested.

Freedom of speech and assembly are elevated rights, and political speech and activity are at the top of elevated rights. This was being severely affected, while the legislation gave very extensive intrusive powers to police and other officials.

The deference given to the Home Secretary in matters affecting national security should be attenuated in this case. On the Home Office’s own documents, the threat from Palestine Action was to the property rights of Elbit and other companies. The FCDO assessed that their activities had no foreign policy knock-on effect. Their overall impact on the UK defence industry was assessed as low.

Raza Hussain accepted that some deference needed to be accorded to the Secretary of State in matters affecting national security. But this was not primary. It depended on the reasons invoked in the evidence available to the Secretary of State in making her decision. There was very little good evidence. The open documents revealed no detailed assessment of a threat to national security. Not all national security risks are equal.

Lord Stephens said that it is for the Secretary of State to strike that balance, and she is democratically elected.

Raza Hussain said that there was no evidence to show that the Secretary of State had evaluated the balance between the national security threat and the impact on civil liberties.

The Secretary of State may have available expertise on the national security background. But she does not have available expertise on the impact of proscription on civil liberties, nor had she sought expertise. No deference should be given to her in assessing the weight of the opposing basket in the balance to be struck.

That concluded the case for Huda Ammori (which the government lawyers were to refer to throughout as the case for Palestine Action). Sir James Eadie KC now stood to open the government’s response.

It is very important, given that the Burnham government has attempted to hide behind this court case as an independent arbiter of whether they will continue with the proscription of Palestine Action, to understand that every word spoken here by James Eadie is spoken on behalf of Shabana Mahmood and the government of Andy Burnham.

Sir James Eadie stated that the Court of Appeal had applied longstanding legal principles in a proper way. It had also restricted the extent of this appeal. It had excluded any challenge to the factual basis of the proscription. Palestine Action is an organisation concerned in terrorism. That is the factual basis from which this court must start.

Palestine Action is intended to promote the use of violence. The court would consider whether any fresh proportionality exercise was even required. If the court chose to do such an exercise, it must rest upon the facts established by the lower courts.

The purpose of the Terrorism Act was to allow our society to exist and people to live without fear. Parliament had decided what activities constitute terrorism, and serious damage to property was one.

Parliament had placed no constraints on the powers of the Secretary of State to proscribe terrorist organisations. It is for parliament to decide the consequences that follow on proscription. These were designed by parliament to be effective and to stifle and disrupt the organisation.

Parliament was alive to the fact that these are significant powers with significant effects; that is why the decision is by the Secretary of State but requires approval by parliament.

This is a case of socio-political importance, went on Sir James…

Lord Sales interrupted to agree and said that was why the appeal court had made a fresh proportionality balance (which cancelled the victory of Palestine Action in the High Court).

Sir James agreed with Lord Sales. He said this was in effect a second appeal, and it was important that appeal courts should take a similar view.

Lord Sales said yes, and subsequent appeal courts should look to agree.

Sir James evidently felt that Lord Sales was going a bit far in making the government’s case for him and suggested that the permission to appeal process acted as a filter to decide on which issues the courts may differ, as they excluded many grounds on which the original case had been made.

Lord Sales said yes, but granting permission to appeal does not necessarily mean that a fresh view should be taken.

Sir James Eadie said that he agreed that in principle a second appellate court should seek to reach the same view as the first. However, perhaps the court could follow the same procedure but reach a different conclusion. Important points of fact which had been accepted should, however, not be reopened.

Sales and Eadie continued this pointless cycle of mutual backslapping for another few rounds. I gave up and wrote “Sales Eadie blah blah blah” in my notebook. When I zoned in again, incredibly, they were still doing the same thing.

Lord Sales said that the court should look again but give significant weight to the view of the appellate court. It was important to maintain appeal discipline.

Eadie said that before closing for the day, he had one further point to make, which was to draw the attention of the judges to the (infamous) sentencing remarks of Mr Justice Johnson in the Filton case.

With that, we thankfully reached 4pm and adjourned for the day.

I have not noted every judicial intervention during the presentation of Huda Ammori’s case, as there were well over one hundred.

It became very plain to me that this went beyond judicial testing of the strength of the case into active hostility designed to present the case as if it had been developed, with elements of ridicule. It was extraordinary and very unpleasant. Lord Briggs was the only judge whose behaviour appeared to me professional, whatever his actual opinions.

The interruption was so extreme that the case against proscription was not fully developed, and both KCs were forced by the judges taking up their time to cut major parts of their presentations.

These are top KCs who, in any normal circumstances, can keep a time limit. Even with severe cuts, due to the judges, they overran their allotted time of 3 hours and 45 minutes by 20 minutes. This means their final rebuttal will be cut from 30 minutes to just 10 minutes.

However, should Sir James Eadie take less than his allotted 2 hours and 45 minutes for the government case, then Raza Hussain could recover some of that lost time. The government will therefore seek to stretch out their rather thin arguments to the full time.

So you may think that the prolonged backscratching between Lord Sales and James Eadie was a pointless waste of time. No. It was a pointed waste of time.

While the court was in session, over thirty people had been arrested outside the court for expressing support for Palestine Action. On leaving I gave a few interviews, then left with some friends, including Matt O’Branain, for a bite to eat and a pint in the nearby Westminster Arms. Matt wanted to record me singing his Palestine Action song, which begins, “In the UK it is illegal to say, ‘I support Palestine Action…’”

I told Matt I needed a pint before I sang in public. On arrival at the pub, Matt had vanished. I asked if anyone had seen him. I later discovered that Matt had been arrested just behind me and carted off by the police for singing his song! I am afraid I was so intent on getting to the pub I had not noticed.

That was not the end of the strangeness. When I got back to Chelsea Cloisters, I found that the door of my room had been forced open and the door jamb split apart in the process. Nothing had, however, been taken—there was still £180 in cash I had left on the table. I reported the break-in to the front desk, who said that the CCTV was managed by an external security company.

This could have been an interrupted burglary, but burglaries involving smashing doors in busy hotels are pretty rare. Obviously serious security services can enter a room undetectably. This seems more of a frightener’s exercise.

Oh well, on to Day 2.

The chief of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Mohsen Rezaei, visited Moscow on Thursday, 5 November, and met Russian President Vladimir Putin amidst fresh threats of escalation against his country issued by US President Donald Trump.

On the same day, Reuters reported that Iran presented a fresh proposal to the US related to its nuclear programme through Qatar.

Iran refuted those reports, claiming that no further discussion on its nuclear programme or the Strait of Hormuz would be held until the US agrees to its seven conditions submitted earlier.

Iran’s seven conditions include the end of war on all fronts, reparation for the damages caused by the illegitimate war, lifting of the naval blockade and illegal unilateral sanctions, and access to its frozen foreign assets, among others.

These conditions were formally proposed to the US last month, with the US repeatedly refusing to respond to them and putting the counterproposal to address the nuclear issue upfront.

Though Rezaei’s meeting with Putin was largely confined to bilateral relations between Russia and Iran, the reports in Iranian media also indicated both the leaders discussed the developments related to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Speaking to media after his meeting, Rezaei claimed Putin condemned the illegal war and threats of fresh escalation. Rezaei also claimed that Putin offered his support to end the war. Both the countries also discussed post-war reconstruction and agreed all forms of foreign interventions in regional security must end, Iranian media reported.

In order to minimise the effects of sanctions, the intensification of mutual cooperation through greater energy exchanges in the form of constructing a gas pipeline and a railway route between both the countries was also proposed.

The US is prepared to launch fresh attacks.

A day after his Republican Party lost the majority in both chambers of the US Congress in the midterm elections, Trump admitted that the war on Iran played a crucial role in the loss. However, he also refused to seek the war’s end and has continued to issue fresh threats of escalation.

Trump dismissed the significance of reports about Iran reviewing nuclear proposals in conversations with reporters in the White House on Thursday, claiming “it does not make a difference what they are looking at.”

He reiterated that the US will make sure that Iran is “never going to have nuclear weapons” and may launch fresh attacks to finish the job.

Responding to a question about whether the US will resume the strikes on Iran now that the midterm was over, Trump claimed that he is yet to make a final decision on the issue and people will know about it “soon enough.”

Talking about Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump said that the US has already destroyed most of it, but whether it will attack the remaining ones, such as the Pickaxe mountain (Kuh-e Kolang), is yet to be decided.

Trump also repeated his claims that the US has already destroyed most of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and will decide soon whether “we want to go further and certify it so that it never happens again.”

As far as the preparations for fresh attacks and destruction of the “rest of Iran” are concerned, “we are very much locked and loaded,” he claimed.

An US news channel also reported, citing unnamed sources on Thursday, that the country is all set to resume its strike on Iran next week. It claimed the decision for the same was made during a series of meetings between Trump and other officials in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday.

The sign of desperation

Iran has condemned the repeated threats of a new escalation, including the use of nuclear weapons, issued in various ways by the US and Israel in the last weeks, calling them attempts to “normalise nuclear warfare.”

Reacting to Trump’s threats against its nuclear installations, head of Atomic Energy Association of Iran (AEOI) Mohammad Eslami called it a reflection of desperation.

Noting that any attack or threats of an attack on nuclear facilities amount to a violation of international law and the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) conventions, Eslami questioned the silence of the IAEA on those threats.

He repeated the Iranian accusation that the silence of the head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, on repeated threats is yet another example of him being an “obedient agent” of the US and Israel and claimed that he has passed secret and sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear programme to them.

Condemning what he called the “double standards” of Grossi, Eslami claimed that his actions “amount to an abuse of the authority entrusted to international institutions and called into question their credibility,” IRNA reported.

Several other Iranian officials also warned neighbouring countries to stay away. They said all those countries involved in US aggression against Iran would be a “legitimate target” of its retaliation.

US military bases and other targets in most of the Gulf countries were hit during various rounds of Iranian retaliation against US-Israeli aggressions between February and August this year.

Everything that happens in a dominant country within the world system is important to the world. If the event is dramatic or dramatised, that importance increases. The US midterm elections are one such event. They represent an unprecedented victory for the Democratic Party and a particularly humiliating defeat for President Donald Trump. From his usual residence in parallel realities, Trump asked Americans to imagine that he was the real candidate because, if that were the case, the Republican Party would win just as he himself “had always won.” Americans decided to take his request seriously and voted overwhelmingly against him and his policies. He was the super-candidate who was super-defeated.

What’s Dramatic About the Elections

1. The most dramatic thing of all is realising that money does not have unlimited power to determine election outcomes. The US is the country where financial investment in electoral processes reaches unimaginable proportions. The midterm elections showed that even the most expensive manipulation of public opinion—using the most sophisticated disinformation technology powered by artificial intelligence—cannot guarantee victory, at least not without significant electoral fraud.

The limits of money have allowed for the emergence of an enthusiastic social, cultural, ethno-racial, and religious diversity whose integrity has remained intact despite the propaganda battalions unleashing high-powered attacks against it in recent decades. These battalions are embedded in the media, in political campaign financing, in far-right organisations, in conservative religious congregations, and, more recently, in state institutions themselves (the presidency, government agencies such as the infamous ICE—US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and the Supreme Court itself).

2. The second dramatic factor of the midterm elections lies in the unequivocal way it revealed that democracy’s sole raison d’être and the most important source of its legitimacy is the extent to which it can contribute to the well-being and guarantee of a dignified life for the majority of the population. When people feel in their concrete day-to-day lives that those in power are draining the family budget, those in power lose their legitimacy to govern, and the vote becomes a personalised decree of expulsion.

3. The third dramatic factor is that defending democracy and the dignified life it can provide takes work. It is not enough to vote; one must do organisational work, talk to relatives and friends, go door-to-door in their communities to provide information, answer questions, offer clarifications—doing this over several years and for some time without visible results—and, finally, take to the streets to express the democratic will during the most intense moments of political struggle. This latest exercise in democracy was successfully carried out quite recently by the Brazilian people, earning them the admiration and respect of all democrats around the world.

4. The fourth dramatic factor draws attention to the fact that everything that happens dramatically is always preceded by signs that are usually given little attention, especially because those in power have at their disposal a powerful propaganda machine that does everything it can to conceal or downplay the significance of those signs.

Thus, it should be emphasised that this was not Donald Trump’s first defeat. It was perhaps his fourth. The first was the election of a Muslim socialist, Zoran Mamdani, to the office of Mayor of New York City. The second was his inability to end the war in Ukraine within two years—a war that candidate Trump claimed he could end within 24 hours of being elected. The third occurred in Brazil with the victory of President Lula da Silva. The spree of resounding victories with low political costs gradually faded, especially after Trump realised that there was no Delcy Rodriguez in Iran (forgive the metaphor, which is not intended to target the Venezuelan people) to put in the place of the beheaded ayatollahs.

What Is Dramatised About These Elections?

I lived in the US for part of the year for 35 years, and I was always struck by the mix of democratic enthusiasm during election seasons and the frustration caused in the post-election period by the political actions of both the government and the opposition. In recent times, perhaps the most striking experience of this kind was the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 and everything that followed. I saw many Democrats weeping with joy on Election Day, and I, too, was moved.

The American democratic system has deteriorated profoundly, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010) to allow virtually unlimited funding of political parties by private donors. In practice, it legalised what in other countries is called political corruption. Gradually, yet rapidly, the political system came to be run by the dominant economic interests of the moment. Since capitalism has only one guiding principle—the maximisation of profit—money was channelled toward the candidates who would enable the greatest concentration of wealth. Consequently, funding always flowed where the greatest potential for maximising wealth lay, whether those candidates were from the Democratic or Republican Party. As a precaution, some donors have spread their support for the “democratic cause” across both parties. Let us not forget that the major labour union federation (AFL-CIO) has also been a donor to the Democratic Party, which has historically been closer to the working class.

In sociological terms, American democracy has been an electoral autocracy over the past fifteen years. There is a “deep state” with a single party, existing in two versions—sometimes more convergent, sometimes more divergent. In terms of domestic policy, the Democratic Party tends to provide greater protection for the most vulnerable social classes, but this protection has come under increasingly unfavourable conditions. Wage stagnation and the deterioration of public services (already very limited compared to those in Europe) speak for themselves.

The US remains the richest country in the world, and the gap between its GDP and that of the EU has been widening, given the decline of the European economy since the start of the war in Ukraine. However, when compared to the European average (EU), the US has been deteriorating in many social dimensions: average life expectancy—78 years in the US, 82 in the EU; poverty rate—17%—18% in the US (with child poverty rising particularly sharply), 10%—15% in the EU; concentration of wealth among the top 1%: 40% of national wealth, 25% in the EU; college student debt after graduation: $40,000, virtually nonexistent in the EU; incarceration rate: 531 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, 106 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants in the EU.

In terms of international policy, this is where the reasons for frustration are most concentrated: historically, the Democratic Party has been more interventionist (that is, imperialist) than the Republican Party. The latter has a more isolationist and sovereigntist tradition. In recent times, President Donald Trump was the only president who did not initiate any new wars or large-scale military invasions during his first term (2017 to 2021).

The danger that Donald Trump will become more aggressive on the international stage after the midterm elections is real. This has happened with other presidents when, after the midterms, they have less power to intervene in domestic politics. Many voices within the Republican Party have insinuated (and now say openly) that Trump’s bellicose stance during his second term was due to Zionist pressure from Netanyahu. In recent days, Tucker Carlson, a highly influential far-right broadcaster and long-time Trump supporter, set social media ablaze with a warning that a US nuclear attack on Iran was imminent. According to him, the pressure from Netanyahu was daily and was primarily motivated by Netanyahu’s political survival. Was Trump being blackmailed over the Epstein files? Pure speculation. The attack would reportedly target Pickaxe Mountain, beneath which Iran’s nuclear facilities are located. According to Alistair Crooke, this would be a disastrous and, to a large extent, symbolic attack, since the mountain is made of granite and the facilities are located about 100 metres underground. There has also been talk of an upcoming intervention in Cuba similar to the one carried out in Venezuela, this time involving the arrest and abduction of Raúl Castro. As is well known, total control of Cuba is Marco Rubio’s great dream.

The Trump era is over. Perhaps he won’t be impeached so as not to turn him into a martyr. But justice will not fail to come knocking at his door. The most important thing is that even if Trump is finished, “Trumpism” is not over: the Trumpism of the politics of hate, of xenophobia, of a political climate bordering on civil war, of abusive language, of arrogance and haughtiness toward international norms, of contempt for the ancestral cultures of other peoples, and of the notion that negotiation is surrender without concessions. None of this has ended, nor has the political regime been touched. If there is a country that needs regime change, it is the United States.

After the dramatic and the dramatised

Domestically, the Democratic Party faces more complex problems than the Republican Party. The victory was due to the mobilisation of activists belonging to social groups, many of whom have been ignored by the gerontocracy that dominates the Democratic Party—a gerontocracy just as addicted to private funding as that of the Republican Party: young people, people of Latin American descent, people of African descent, citizens with sexual and religious identities different from the dominant ones, citizens outraged by the genocide in Gaza, and the US’s active complicity with murderous Zionism. In short, citizens are terrified by the possibility that the US might become a rogue state whose only loyal ally is an even greater rogue state, the State of Israel.

What will be the political impact of this new generation of politicians on the Democratic Party? In the past, frustration stemmed from the fact that, in somewhat similar situations, hopes for party renewal were dashed—either because dissident politicians were marginalised or because they were gently co-opted into the fold of orthodoxy.

This time, the drive for renewal is so strong that, if it does not gain the political clout it deserves, it will likely create internal turmoil within the party. If the party emerges weakened from that turmoil, the only beneficiary will be the Republican Party. And in that case, we will be back to politics as usual. Unless, that is, the possibility of a third party—a truly left-wing party with some political clout—finally materialises. It must be borne in mind, however, that the US political system is structured to make it practically impossible for third parties to gain any significant political influence. That does not preclude the possibility that history may yet surprise American Democrats and all Democrats around the world.

In Tehran, Donald Trump has already been put behind bars. Not by a court, but in a public display that turned the American president into a prisoner of his own war. The image was intended as political mockery. Yet after the US midterm elections, it carries a more serious question: who, exactly, is trapped by this conflict?

Trump entered the White House promising to keep America out of new wars. Eight months after launching one against Iran, he has lost both houses of Congress. His vice president, JD Vance, acknowledged the connection more plainly than the president himself. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote after the vote. Trump conceded that the conflict had played a part.

Neither admission means American voters rejected every aspect of Washington’s policy towards Iran. Inflation, tariffs and broader dissatisfaction with the administration also shaped the result. But the war made those grievances harder to separate. A conflict fought thousands of miles from American homes began appearing in petrol prices, household budgets and the cost of running a farm.

The Republicans have paid an electoral price. Whether that changes American policy is another matter.

Trump’s predicament exposes a contradiction within the coalition that brought him back to power. His promise to avoid new wars appealed to Americans exhausted by decades of military intervention. Yet another part of the Republican establishment remains committed to the belief that American military superiority should be used to impose political outcomes abroad.

These positions could coexist while war remained hypothetical. Iran made the contradiction impossible to ignore.

For the interventionists, ending the conflict without forcing Tehran into major concessions risks looking like defeat. For voters who supported Trump precisely because he promised to avoid another Middle Eastern war, continuing it represents a betrayal. The president now faces the prospect of disappointing one constituency by escalating and another by negotiating.

That might appear to give Democrats a straightforward opportunity. They have gained control of Congress while Republicans are struggling to explain the costs of a war they initiated. But opposition to Trump is not necessarily opposition to the assumptions behind his foreign policy.

Democrats have criticised the administration’s conduct of the war, its economic consequences and its handling of Congress. Those criticisms matter. They do not, however, establish that the party is prepared to abandon the sanctions, military commitments and regional security arrangements that have defined Washington’s approach to Iran across successive administrations.

Under Joe Biden, sanctions remained in place, the United States did not return to the nuclear agreement, and American support for Israel continued. Trump has taken confrontation much further, but the underlying relationship did not begin with him.

There are meaningful differences between the parties, particularly over diplomacy, executive authority and the acceptable costs of military action. Pretending otherwise would obscure the choices facing Washington. Yet there is also considerable continuity in the belief that Iran must be compelled to change its behaviour before the United States substantially changes its own.

The question for the incoming Democratic Congress is therefore not simply whether it opposes Trump’s war. It is whether it will use its authority over funding, oversight and war powers to constrain him. Winning an election does not, by itself, amount to a different foreign policy.

For Iran, the distinction is crucial.

Tehran has never needed to believe that Democrats are its friends to recognise the significance of their victory. The more important development is that American military power has failed to insulate the American political system from the consequences of using it.

Iran cannot match the United States aircraft for aircraft, nor can it absorb physical destruction at the same cost. American strikes damage infrastructure that Iran must rebuild under sanctions and severe financial pressure. But Tehran has another means of imposing costs: the Strait of Hormuz.

By disrupting shipping through one of the world’s most important energy corridors, Iran has helped move the consequences of war into economies far beyond the battlefield. Higher energy prices affect transport, manufacturing, agriculture and household spending. The political consequences are not confined to countries within missile range.

This does not mean Iran single-handedly determined the American election. It means Washington has discovered that military superiority does not guarantee control over a war’s economic consequences.

The same problem is confronting Europe. European governments have supported different aspects of Washington’s regional policy while confronting the rising energy costs and commercial uncertainty associated with the conflict. Some have begun questioning whether continued escalation serves their interests.

Iran’s leverage, however, should not be confused with immunity. The country has suffered extensive destruction, economic disruption and civilian losses. The ability to impose costs on an adversary does not erase the suffering at home.

That distinction matters when discussing how ordinary Iranians view the war.

From outside Iran, it is tempting to divide the population into supporters of the government and opponents of it, then assume those categories determine attitudes towards American military action. Iranian society is considerably more complicated.

A person can resent the economic policies of the Iranian government and still reject foreign bombardment. Someone who wants negotiations may also believe that reopening Hormuz without enforceable concessions would leave Iran vulnerable to another attack. Opposition to Washington does not necessarily imply satisfaction with Tehran.

For people trying to earn a living, these questions are not abstract. War affects prices, transport, employment and the ability to plan beyond the next few weeks. A shopkeeper does not need to understand the intricacies of American congressional politics to know that another round of strikes could disrupt business. A university graduate considering a future abroad may fear both continued isolation and a new military escalation.

These are different experiences, and neither can be reduced to a single national mood. Nor should the opinions of a few individuals be presented as a representative survey of Iranian society.

What the war has done is force questions of national security into everyday decisions. The possibility of another attack is no longer something discussed only by military officials or political commentators. It is part of the uncertainty surrounding ordinary life.

That is why the assumption that Iran will interpret Trump’s electoral defeat as an invitation to compromise is questionable.

Tehran’s leadership has repeatedly argued that American assurances are worthless without changes in conduct. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, has tied the reopening of Hormuz to implementation of Iran’s conditions, rather than another round of promises.

Others within Iran favour a more flexible diplomatic approach, warning that insisting on the other side’s complete capitulation could prolong the conflict. The disagreement is real. Both positions, however, start from the recognition that an agreement must address the conditions that produced the present confrontation.

Trump’s political weakness could create an opportunity for negotiations. It could also make the coming weeks more dangerous.

Before the new Congress takes office in January, the president may conclude that a limited military operation offers a way to recover the initiative. A strike presented as decisive, followed by a declaration of victory, might appear attractive to an administration facing domestic criticism.

But wars do not end simply because the side launching an attack declares its objectives achieved. Iran could respond in ways that prolong the confrontation, while Israel has its own calculations about whether another round of fighting should remain limited.

An operation intended to rescue Trump’s political position could leave him with a larger war and fewer ways to end it.

This is the uncomfortable reality behind the midterm results. American voters have demonstrated that a distant war can carry a domestic political price. They have not yet demonstrated that elections can prevent Washington from continuing it.

For Iran, that creates both leverage and danger. For Americans, it raises a question that extends well beyond Trump: if voters can punish a president for starting a war but cannot reliably prevent the next escalation, how much control do they really exercise over the decisions made in their name?

Trump may be behind bars only in a Tehran display. The harder problem is the political system that made his war possible and whether an electoral defeat will be enough to change its course.

“The number one thing we can do to reduce hunger in the world is to reduce the amount of conflict that is happening all around the world,” Luke Lindberg, the new executive director of the World Food Program (WFP), said in his first media address last week.

Conflict is the main driver of hunger today, driving two-thirds of the acute food insecurity affecting 266 million people worldwide. “Conflict is a man-made situation. It is something that we can solve,” added Lindberg, who assumed office on 26 October.

Earlier this year, the WFP said that the “conflict in the Middle East”—a catch-all phrase for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the US-Israeli war on Iran, and the Saudi war on Yemen—“is deepening this food crisis to an alarming degree,” warning of “record numbers of acute hunger if it continues.”

On the heels of this threat, El Niño will likely push another 49 million into acute food insecurity, warned Lindberg.

Identifying Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia—all in Africa—as the worst cases to prioritise, he said that his first visit as the head of WFP will be to Sudan, where the world’s hunger crisis is unfolding as the civil war, fuelled and funded by foreign powers, continues into its fourth year.

“A pat on the back” instead of the much-needed funding

The reason for his travel, he explained, will be to give the frontline humanitarian workers “a pat on the back” and say “thank you for your service.” However, humanitarian workers in Sudan need more than a pat on the back. They need funding, which has been reduced by half.

Following an eight-day visit to Sudan in September, Lindberg’s predecessor, Carl Skau, the then Acting Executive Director of the WFP, complained that the organisation was being forced to cut back on food assistance due to fund cuts. “We now have the capacity; we have the presence, but we are not fully using that space because of the lack of funding.” He warned of the risk that “we will have to scale back even further,” he said.

The WFP’s total budget dropped from nearly $9.76 billion in 2024 to $6.52 billion in 2025 to less than $5.89 billion in 2026, as of 3 November. Most of this decline is driven by the Trump administration’s fund cuts.

The US—whose population of just over 4% of the world owns almost 36% of global personal wealth—has historically been the WFP’s largest donor, funding nearly half of its budget.

The Trump administration slashed over half of its funding to the WFP in 2025, reducing it to $2.06 billion from almost $4.5 billion in 2024. This year, it has contributed just over $1.7 billion.​

Lindberg had served as Trump’s Under Secretary of Agriculture for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs from August 2025 to September 2026, when he resigned to head the WFP. ​

Several reporters asked Lindberg if he would use his close relation to the Trump administration to re-secure the funds the US has slashed.​

MAGA support for humanitarian work?​

“There is a concept out there that the Republican side is not as interested [in humanitarian work].” But, he claimed, a survey by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation earlier this year had shown that “79% of self-identified MAGA Republicans support US engagement overseas.”​

However, the survey had not asked about support for humanitarian work. The “ Reagan National Defence Survey” had found that 79% of MAGA Republicans said that the US “should be more engaged and take the lead in international affairs.”

As subsequent questions in the survey made clear, this greater engagement and taking the lead in international affairs translated into expanding its military power to be able to fight Russia and China and use force in Latin America and the Caribbean.

After misusing this survey to indicate that Trump’s core voters support US humanitarian funding, Lindberg went on to clarify that he indeed has “great relations with many members of the Trump administration.”

“President Trump personally called me and asked me to be the US nominee” for WFP’s executive director, he added. “I know that all the way up the chain to the president there are people within the US government that want to support humanitarian work around the world.”​

No commitment to reverse US fund cuts

Nonetheless, he wouldn’t commit to leveraging any of this to try to re-secure US funding. Instead, he went on to say, “I look forward to them continuing to play a critical role, but the reality is there are more countries around the world as well … We need to be building that deeper donor partnership.”

However, following in the footsteps of the US, other leading donors have also slashed their funding. Germany, which was the second-largest donor in 2024, providing $990.9 million in funds to the WFP, reduced it to just over $570 million in 2025. This year, it has provided under $331.4 million.

The UK, the third-largest donor in 2024 when it funded over $609.9 million, reduced its donation to $435.16 million in 2025 and to just over USD 220 million so far this year. France in the same period slashed its funding from $196.58 million to USD 113.61 million, to just over $32.5 million.

Nevertheless, Lindberg had found “a bright spot.” The WFP, he said, “has done a remarkable job of increasing private sector engagement. The private sector is now the fifth largest donor.”

However, private sector funding of the WFP has not shown any meaningful increase since 2024, when it was the fifth largest donor, funding $335.63 million. In 2025, its funding dropped to just over $310 million. It went up in 2026 to $326.07 million but remains below the 2024 level as of 3 November.

The rise in the share of the WFP budget coming from private sector donations—from 3.44% in 2024 to 4.75% in 2025 to 5.5% in 2026—has not been driven by an increase in their funding to the WFP. It is rather caused by the decline in the WFP’s total budget from almost $9.6 billion in 2024 to under $5.82 billion this year.

Nonetheless, “I think there is a lot more room to grow on that front,” Lindberg said, at a time when WFP’s funding to Sudan has been halved. In South Sudan, over a million people are at risk of losing assistance. Lack of funds is also forcing the WFP to scale down its reach in Somalia to just 5% of the people facing emergency hunger. It has also been forced to reduce its food assistance to Gaza by a third and to the West Bank by half.

Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin recently announced plans to establish a government body to prepare for different scenarios for the country’s constitutional future, including the possibility of a united Ireland. A first round of updates about this plan are expected before the end of the year.

In addition to outlining the scenario of a unitary Irish state, the body would also be tasked to prepare for a possible continuation of the existing situation and “a future united Ireland in which Northern Ireland would remain a devolved entity, maintaining its own separate assembly and government, civil services, public services and police,” Martin said in an interview with The Irish Times in late October.

“Sinn Féin believes that a united Ireland is the best future for all our people,” party leader Mary Lou McDonald stated in response. “Ending partition and bringing our country together offers the biggest opportunity to build a stronger economy, deliver better public services and create a fairer, reconciled society across the whole island.”

Sinn Féin: unification would strengthen Ireland economically and politically.

Martin’s announcement came four months after parliamentarians voted on a Sinn Féin bill on reunification, which proposed deadlines for the government to develop a plan for the organisation of public services and other areas of life in a united Ireland.

Sinn Féin has argued for years that reunification would bring an opportunity to strengthen the island politically and economically, providing space for planning jobs and creating a unified healthcare system.

“Through Unity, we can build the best education and childcare systems for every child and young person,” McDonald said earlier this year. “We can strengthen public services, tackle poverty, and build a fair society in which disabled people and those who care are supported to live lives of equal citizens.”

The proposal, named the Planning for Constitutional Change Bill, also proposed a citizens’ assembly to ensure different perspectives are represented.

In July, Martin’s Fianna Fáil and government partner Fine Gael voted against the Sinn Féin proposal, citing concerns over the bill’s time limitations and participation models. At the time, McDonald defended the timeliness of initiating reunification from the Irish side as the Good Friday Agreement approaches its 30th anniversary.

“There has been nothing rushed, hasty or pre-emptive about this process,” McDonald said. “Over the last three decades, we had big challenges, disagreements, and political confrontations; we have had highs and lows – of that there is no doubt.”

“However, the peace is secure. It is robust, resilient and commands wide support. It is now time to write the next chapter. The chapter of reunification.”

A counter-reaction against unity momentum?

Part of the responsibility for building this process, however, also rests with the British government – which is tasked with organising a referendum if it becomes apparent that a majority of people in the north of Ireland would support leaving the United Kingdom.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham oscillated on this issue in recent appearances. In August, he described a border poll as “off the table.” His reaction was followed by an initiative launched by pro-independence parties from Wales, Scotland and Ireland, who signed a memorandum of understanding in September, pledging joint efforts toward self-determination.

Some critics have also emphasised attempts to derail growing talks about reunification, including in the context of recent events on Garvaghy Road. In late September, members of the Portadown community organised protests and resistance to attempts by the Orange Order’s Drumcree march to pass through the largely Catholic area.

“What happened at Garvaghy Road is a manufactured political crisis, which has been over two years in the making,” wrote Sinn Fein’s Declan Kearney. “The subtext to what is happening is the next year’s Assembly and council elections and the objective of removing Sinn Fein as the largest party in the north and Michelle O’Neill from the position of First Minister.”

“The current perfect storm of whipped-up sectarian polarisation and political instability is a pre-meditated counter-reaction to the growing momentum for Irish unity,” he added. “This is being driven by those sections of the British state, which are determined to prevent the right to national self-determination, and holding a unity referendum.”

No amount of rhetoric and threats of aggression will undermine its people’s will to protect its sovereignty and national integrity, Iran reiterated in the context of talks about the Donald Trump administration’s possible escalation in the war after being crushed in the US midterm elections.

Though Trump admitted that the US-Israeli war on Iran was the main factor in his Republican Party’s losses in the November 3 midterm elections, he attempted to justify his decision to go to the war and even said he will do it again if necessary.

In yet another TV interview after the results were announced on Wednesday, Trump even hinted that the US may have to do “something big” in order to make sure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons.

Iran has always maintained it never wanted to develop nuclear weapons, and its nuclear programme is legal and for peaceful purposes only, and it called the US-Israeli war, launched in February, illegal.

Reacting to US election results, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament and head of its negotiating team, asked the Trump administration to heed the will of the American people and stop the war.

“Conscience or cost of living, Americans said no to war, and we endorse this message. If the US government betrays their public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers, it will learn our no come with a nightmare,” Qalibaf said in a post on X.

The US is the greatest threat to NPT.

Calling the US “the greatest threat” to the nuclear non-proliferation regime, the official spokesperson of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Esmail Baghaei, had warned on Monday against any normalisation of nuclear military threats.

Baghaei’s reaction came hours after journalist Tucker Carlson, citing unknown sources, had claimed that the US is under Israeli pressure to use nuclear weapons against Iran any day after the midterm elections.

Iran claimed that such “explicit or implicit threats against a country’s nuclear facilities and alluding to the use of specific weapons effectively encourage actors to violate fundamental international treaties.”

Earlier in October, various US officials had also threatened the use of “the mother of all bombs” on Iran.

Reacting to fresh threats of escalation in the war, going on for eight months now, various Iranian officials have warned of strong and unprecedented retaliation.

Esmail Qaani, head of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Forces said on Wednesday that any new attack will lead to a multi-front war in the region and may even threaten navigation through the Bab al-Mandab in the Red Sea.

Repeating the Iranian claims that Trump “gambled on war with Iran after being misled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”, Qaani pointed out that the joint force of the Resistance in the region should not be undermined.

He claimed that all the resistance fronts in the region, in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq, are united like never before and have pleaded loyalty to the Supreme Leader.

“Those irresponsible US leaders should know that today the entire Resistance is one front with unity across different arenas. Therefore, do not calculate the depth of the front based on weapons range alone; you must also factor in the depth of the Resistance,” Ghani told Sepah News.

Not even the slightest submissive inclination

In a message to the nation on the occasion of the National Day for Fighting Global Arrogance (Aban 13) on Wednesday, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei warned against “even the slightest submissive inclination towards domineering enemy” and asked the government to make “Iran ever stronger.”

Aban 13 is celebrated in Iran on November 4 every year to mark the occasion of Iranian students occupying the US embassy in Tehran after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The occupation, which lasted for over a year, was launched after it was claimed that the embassy was supporting pro-Shah elements and trying to sabotage the revolution.

Any concession to the Americans “will squander the great capital acquired through the blood of martyrs and the sacrifices of all sections of the nation and will embolden the arrogant enemy to make further excessive demands and commit further acts of aggression and war,” Khamenei said.

He underlined that the successive US administrations have consistently worked to undermine Iran and its Islamic Revolution since 1979 and repeatedly faced defeats.

Referring to the ongoing war against Iran as “the self-inflicted disgrace of the arrogant powers”, Khamenei claimed that it has led to the “declining power and domination, in both its military hard power dimension and its international soft-power dimension” and caused the US “an irreversible fall” and “accelerated the process of its collapse”.

More tankers hit in the Strait of Hormuz.

At least six oil tankers were damaged after they hit sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday and early morning Thursday, the IRGC claimed. It claimed that all the ships were trying to violate the Iranian restrictions and attempting to cross the Strait using the “unauthorised” route in the Omani waters.

Four ships were hit on Wednesday, while two more ships were hit in the early morning of Thursday. The IRGC also claimed two tug boats were also damaged because of the explosion of the sea mines.

A day after the reports claimed the US carried out fresh attacks on its Qesham Island, Iran claimed on Wednesday it drowned yet another US MQ-1 drone.

This was the 15th such drone destroyed by Iran since the beginning of the war in February.

I have been saying this for a long time: the house of cards desperately seeks another emergency-justified round of (inflationary) QE. It now looks like the time for serious rehearsals has arrived. The financial, political, and infrastructural foundations of the current accumulation model are visibly beginning to fray.

Let’s start with Paraguay. Ueno Bank, a major digital lender, collapsed after the country’s central bank found it had breached minimum solvency requirements. Nearly 3 million people—around 60% of the adult population—suddenly found their accounts frozen, apps and cards useless, and pensions blocked. Mass protests and riots erupted. This is what financial “normality” looks like when the plumbing actually fails. No, it’s not a Hollywood movie; it’s ordinary people being unable to access the money that organises their lives.

In the political aftermath, President Santiago Peña—a right-wing economist and close Trump ally whose past business links to Ueno Bank were central to the crisis—resigned and then was impeached. In a matter of hours, a national banking failure turned into a constitutional crisis. The lesson is that in a financially addicted society, a bank’s collapse is never just a bank’s collapse: it destabilises the foundations of social life, from payments and pensions to trust and state legitimacy itself.

Europe, meanwhile, provided its own rehearsal in vulnerability. On 5 November, at least 27 passenger flights received bomb threats, triggering diversion and various kinds of disruptions. Authorities described these scares as hoaxes, since no devices were found. In the same week, hackers remotely manipulated supermarket refrigeration systems across several European countries, switching them into defrost mode and causing widespread food spoilage. French blood banks were also reported to have been targeted.

No attribution has been established. Yet the implicit—sometimes explicit—mainstream message is, of course, that the long hand of Russia is behind it all. But surely there is another, more systemic connection worth examining: the one between a debt-saturated, financially driven mode of production and the intrinsic fragility of critical infrastructure. The point is that the latter can be disrupted without tanks and missiles. In a system that has optimised everything for speed, efficiency, and financial gain, a few keystrokes can generate very useful chaos.

It would seem that the AI bubble is where these vulnerabilities increasingly converge. According to the latest financial filings and market estimates, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Broadcom, and SpaceX together carry more than $4.11 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments (purchase obligations, signed leases, guarantees tied to data centres, chips, energy, and cloud capacity). This is more insidious than ordinary balance-sheet debt. It is, in effect, a mountain of future claims: payments that accounting frameworks do not consistently expose and that markets have not yet fully priced.

Alphabet alone has crossed the trillion-dollar Rubicon. Its latest mandatory filing puts future energy and data-centre payments above $1 trillion: $924.4 billion in off-balance-sheet purchase commitments, plus $130.5 billion in leases not yet commenced. Meta is close behind, with roughly $825 billion in disclosed commitments; its non-cancellable purchase commitments jumped from $349 billion to $455 billion, while not-yet-active leases rose from $279 billion to $356 billion—all in a single quarter.

Harmless “investments”? Hardly. These are contractual claims on future cash flow—claims that must be financed, refinanced, or, eventually, paid. The madness is that they rest on the delusional assumption that AI will generate returns vast enough to justify the most expensive infrastructure boom in history. But the market may finally have started doing the maths. A coordinated repricing? Too soon to say with certainty. For now, it is enough to note that, today, the Nasdaq Composite closed down 5.52%.

The other issue concerns ratings. S&P counts off-balance-sheet leases as debt, while Moody’s and Fitch take a looser approach. So, depending on who’s doing the counting, the same corporate empire can look far more (or far less) leveraged. If the agencies ever standardise their treatment of these instruments, the investment-grade façade holding the financing loop together could weaken considerably. S&P has already cut Meta’s outlook to negative (while keeping its AA rating) over AI capex, negative free cash flow, and rising future lease obligations.

In short, this is how financial pressure becomes a systemic problem. AI infrastructure runs on continuous access to debt and investor confidence. If credit conditions tighten, the cost of the buildout climbs just as doubts about AI profitability deepen: the perfect shitstorm.

The wider implications are fairly obvious. The next monetary rescue will not be sold as a bailout for speculative capital. Instead, it will be framed as a necessary means to protect pensions, savings, access to money and food, national security, or even “AI leadership.” The crisis will go by some other name, while the liquidity will flow to the same institutions that created the critical exposure.

So yes: the system desperately needs another rescue. The only question, I think, is which emergency will be used to justify it—and how effectively those emergency powers will slow money velocity, clearing the way for fresh monetary expansion to reach the usual suspects. The constant inflation of financial assets requires the deflation of life.

As someone for whom all kinds of music and concerts have been an important part of his life, I must confess that I have never liked rap as a music form; indeed, I have thought of it as a kind of anti-song music. But I am well aware of its African American roots and powerful lyrics which portray their poetic quality. That said, they can, nevertheless, be problematic, so while they often rage against injustice, many American rap stars also express visceral sexism and homophobia.

What has come as a genuine surprise recently is rappers vociferously and publicly showing support for the Palestine cause and, by so doing, risking harm to their careers. Clearly, the motivating force has been the Gaza genocide since October 2023. Three rappers have been at the forefront: Bob Vylan (from Britain), Kneecap (from Ireland), and Macklemore (from the USA).

Bob Vylan

In June 2025, at the Glastonbury Festival, probably the most prestigious music festival in the UK, Bob Vylan’s vocalist (Pascal Robinson-Foster) led the fans in chants of “death, death to the IDF”; “free, free Palestine”; and “from the river to sea, Palestine will be free.” Naturally, there was an immediate response from powerful supporters of Israel who doubtless applied immense pressure on various bodies. This led Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, to issue a veiled threat by stating that the BBC, which broadcasts the festival, “clearly has questions to answer” over its coverage. The Labour government questioned why the comments were aired live, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer opined that the remarks constituted “hate speech.” And yet again, when it comes to Israel, there was cross-party condemnation of both the chants and the BBC’s coverage of them, with the fanatical Zionist shadow home secretary Chris Philp demanding that the police should investigate both Bob Vylan and the BBC “for offences under the Public Order Act,” adding that “prosecutions in my view should follow.”

The BBC, itself notorious for its pro-Israel bias, quickly buckled under the pressure: with hypocritical chutzpah, its spokesperson pronounced that “The BBC respects freedom of expression but stands firmly against incitement to violence …The antisemitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves.” So, the BBC decided that calling for the death of a military that has committed genocide is incitement to violence and antisemitic—words that could have been uttered by a general of the IDF.

Unsurprisingly, it proceeded to issue a craven apology: “The [BBC] team were dealing with a live situation, but with hindsight we should have pulled the stream during the performance. We regret this did not happen … In light of this weekend, we will look at our guidance around live events so we can be sure teams are clear on when it is acceptable to keep output on air” (BBC News, 2025, 30 June). Decoding this means that in the future, the BBC will make sure criticisms of Israel are quickly pulled; and they duly removed the concert from BBC iPlayer.

Rather than supporting Bob Vylan and freedom of expression, the organisers of Glastonbury parroted the pro-Israel establishment line by stating that “Their chants very much crossed a line and we are urgently reminding everyone involved in the production of the festival that there is no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech or incitement to violence.”

Bob Vylan’s courageous performance, nevertheless, did have a harmful effect on their careers as US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the band, who were due to embark on a US tour, would have their visas revoked (BBC News, 30 June 2025).

Though it took a while, to their credit, Bob Vylan did not let this meekly pass by, as in July 2026, they filed defamation proceedings against the BBC in the Dublin High Court. The band firmly rejects the BBC charge of antisemitism, arguing that there is a clear distinction between criticism of the actions of a state’s armed forces and antisemitism (Phoenix Law, 2026). Presumably, following legal advice, the choice of the Dublin High Court over the High Court in London is because it is thought the former will be more objective in deliberating such a case.

Kneecap

Kneecap vociferously shows support for Palestinians in their concerts and calls for the boycott of Israel. For example, at the Coachella Festival in April 2025, they displayed the messages “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people”; “It is being enabled by the US”; “F*** Israel, Free Palestine.” Following this, TV personality and wife of Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon Osbourne, called for the band’s US visas to be revoked. (The Guardian, 2025), a sign that the band’s support for Palestine and opposition to Israel will affect Kneecap’s careers.

In 2025, a member of the group (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, stage name, Mo Chara) was charged by the Metropolitan Police with a terror offence after allegedly displaying a flag in support of proscribed organisation Hezbollah at a London concert in 2024 (BBC News, 2025, 21 May). Though this was thrown out, the insinuation meant that Kneecap were in the crosshairs of supporters of Israel, none more so than Keir Starmer who called for the cancellation of their appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2025 arguing that it was “not appropriate.” The band hit back, writing on social media: “You know what’s ‘not appropriate’ Keir?! Arming a f***ing genocide. F*** The Sun and solidarity with Palestine Action.” (The Independent, 2025, 22 June).

Unlike their cowardice over Bob Vylan, to their credit the organisers of Glastonbury did not cancel Kneecap’s appearance. However, the BBC refused to broadcast their concert live but, after carefully scrutinising it, allowed viewers to access footage on BBC iPlayer. But that was not the end of the matter as the local police force stated that they were assessing video footage to determine whether any offences had been committed that might warrant a criminal investigation which they later aborted citing insufficient evidence for a prosecution (The Independent, 2025, 29 June).

Kneecap’s support for Palestine also caused harm to their career as planned concerts in Hungary were banned by the Hungarian government. Kneecap retorted by stating that “it’s clear this is political distraction and a further attempt to silence those who call out genocide against the Palestinians” (BBC News, 2025, 24 July) Scheduled concerts in Germany and Austria were also cancelled by the authorities while the band cancelled their US tour because of legal action in the UK against Mo Chara.

Macklemore

Macklemore is an active supporter of the Palestinian cause. For example, in November 2023, at a pro-Palestinian rally in Washington, D.C., he denounced Israel for committing genocide in Gaza (Billboard, 2023) and in May 2024, he released a song, “Hind’s Hall,” in honour of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the IDF in Gaza, in support of protests against the Gaza war at American universities and donated all proceeds to UNWRA.

Macklemore’s name gained enormous publicity in September 2026, when he was removed from Ed Sheeran’s US tour following concerts in New Jersey where he was the opening act following pressure from pro-Israel individuals and groups, including Jewish Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft, owner of the Gillette Stadium. The reason for his cancellation was remarks he made to the audience:

A big part of the reason why I wanted to do this tour in the first place is so that I could stand up in stadiums like this and say two words that are very, very dear to my heart: Free Palestine.

The following night, at the same venue, he directly addressed his “Jewish brothers and sisters” in the audience:

Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide, is in no way a criticism of you (BBC News, 2026, 14 September).

Rather than pushing back against this censorship, Sheeran proved an unprincipled coward. In stark contrast, all his other opening acts as well as his band members showed solidarity with Macklemore and immediately pulled out of the tour. Macklemore announced that he would donate $1 million, his entire net earnings from Sheeran’s tour to six organisations supporting Palestinians.

While Macklemore was financially harmed by his being cancelled from Sheeran’s tour, he immediately announced three concerts under the heading “Free Palestine Tour” in Dublin, Paris, and London, with proceeds going to various organisations supporting Palestinians. Tickets for all three, which were at major venues, quickly sold out.

So, these three rap acts have been courageous and inspirational, willing to withstand harms to their careers for principle, and against some of the most powerful forces in the world. One hopes that they will prove to be a beacon for other music stars, who should similarly take courage and follow suit.

References

BBC News (2025) 21 May, Kneecap member charged with terror offence - BBC News

BBC News (2025) 30 June, Bob Vylan: BBC says live coverage of Glastonbury set should have been pulled - BBC News

BBC News (2026) 24 July, Kneecap: Belfast rap trio banned from Hungary ahead of Sziget Festival - BBC News

BBC News (2026) 14 September, Macklemore dropped from Ed Sheeran tour after ‘free Palestine’ speech - BBC News

Billboard (2023) 4 November, Macklemore Speaks at Pro-Palestine Rally in DC: ‘This Is a Genocide’

Phoenix Law (2026) 3 July, Bob Vylan Sues BBC for Defamation in High Court over Glastonbury Controversy | Phoenix Law

The Guardian (2025) 23 April, Kneecap says ‘statements aren’t aggressive’ after denouncing Israel at Coachella | Coachella | The Guardian

The Independent (2025) 22 June, Keir Starmer says Kneecap Glastonbury performance is not ‘appropriate’ | The Independent

The Independent (2025) 29 June, Bob Vylan and Kneecap comments at Glastonbury investigated by police | The Independent