The Medina Charter: A Prophetic Blueprint for a Fractured World.

By Salim Mohamed  Badat

Introduction: A Model for Unity in Times of Division. 

In 622 CE, Prophet Muhammad (saw) migrated from the persecution of Mecca to the oasis of Yathrib, later known as Medina. It was a city fractured by tribal rivalries, political unrest, and religious diversity. 

What he established there wasn’t merely a Muslim enclave, but a revolutionary social contract: the Medina Charter (Sahifat al-Madina), arguably the world’s first written constitution.

The Charter laid down guiding principles for co-existence, justice, mutual responsibility, and freedom of religion. At a time when warlords dictated laws and exclusion was the norm, the Prophet laid the foundations of an inclusive, ethical polity. 

In our current age of extremism, state betrayal, religious intolerance, and collusion with oppressive powers, the Medina Charter isn’t just relevant, it’s urgent.

Unity of the Ummah Beyond Borders and Bloodlines.

“The believers and Muslims of Quraysh and Yathrib and those who follow them shall constitute one Ummah (community) to the exclusion of all others.”

This clause dissolved tribal identity in favor of a unified moral and spiritual brotherhood. In contrast, the modern Muslim world is mired in sectarian division and nationalistic agendas. Whether it’s Sunni vs. Shia, Arab vs. non-Arab, or the artificial borders drawn by colonial powers, our disunity is a betrayal of this foundational principle.

Groups who claim exclusive ownership of Islam violate this very essence. Their persecution of fellow Muslims, be they Sunni, Shia, Sufi, or otherwise, is not just un-Islamic, it is anti-Medinan. The Prophet accepted Jews, polytheists, and even hypocrites into the fold of coexistence, yet today, some "believers" refuse to accept other Muslims.

This disunity is weaponized by enemies of Islam, chief among them, the genocidal regime of Israel, which exploits Muslim division to entrench its brutal occupation of Palestine. Had the Ummah upheld the unity enshrined in the Charter, the siege of Gaza would not have endured this long.

Justice and Mutual Support: 

Foundations of a Humane Society

“The believers shall not leave anyone among them destitute; they must help him.”

Economic disparity and systemic injustice plague many Muslim majority societies today. Billionaire elites flourish while poverty ravages the masses. Corruption, nepotism, and political repression are rife.

If the Charter were alive in our governance, zakat and waqf institutions would thrive; no child would go hungry in a land of plenty; no political prisoner would rot in jail for speaking truth. Palestinians in Gaza would not be left to beg for international aid, they would be supported by a powerful, unified Ummah.

This is not idealism, it’s prophetic realism. The Prophet established a model of solidarity where the welfare of the weakest was the responsibility of all. Are we upholding this legacy? Or have we abandoned it for power, wealth, and proximity to Zionist influence?

Loyalty and Integrity in Alliances.

“No believer shall enter into any alliance with the enemies of the other believers.”

This principle is hauntingly relevant today. How many Muslim states have formed military, economic, or intelligence alliances with the very powers responsible for the destruction of Muslim lands, chiefly Israel, but also Western imperial interests in Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and beyond?

From the normalization of ties with apartheid Israel to the silent complicity in the genocide in Gaza, many so-called Muslim leaders have betrayed not only Palestine, but the very spirit of the Prophet’s polity. The Medina Charter demanded loyalty to the community of believers, not for ethnic or sectarian reasons, but on the basis of shared justice and moral responsibility.

The Prophet (saw) did not make peace with those who oppressed the weak among his community. The Muslim states that today celebrate "peace" accords with Israel, while Gaza bleeds and Jerusalem is desecrated, are not following the Prophet. They are echoing the hypocrites of Medina, who sought alliance with Quraysh even as believers were under siege.

Religious Freedom: A Revolutionary Principle in an Age of Persecution. 

“The Jews of Banu Awf are one community with the believers. The Jews have their religion and the Muslims have theirs.”

This clause enshrines religious freedom not as tolerance, but as dignity. In a tribal society where difference meant hostility, the Prophet (saw) upheld la ikraha fid-deen, "There is no compulsion in religion." (Quran 2:256)

Ironically, the same  takfiri Muslims who use religion to persecute minorities at home are silent about Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians and Muslims, including entire communities in Gaza. If the Prophet (saw) lived among us, would he be silent while Al-Aqsa is stormed, churches are shelled, and children are burned alive?

The Medina Charter is a direct refutation of extremism and complicity alike. It reminds us that Islam is not an ideology of exclusion, but a deen of ethical inclusion.

Collective Security: A Shared Duty of All.

“Each party must help the other against any attack.”

This is the foundation of modern mutual defense. NATO borrows from this concept. But while Western nations uphold such compacts, the Muslim world remains fragmented and silent in the face of occupation, aggression, and siege.

The Prophet (saw) didn’t wait for a UN Security Council resolution. He forged a society where Muslim and non-Muslim citizens defended each other against common threats. Today, Gaza is besieged not just by Israel but by our silence.

If this clause were alive in our hearts and institutions, the attacks on Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran would be countered with unified resistance, not silence or even sabotage. The blood of every Palestinian child is not just on the hands of the Zionists, but also on those Muslim regimes who enable their aggression.

No Protection for Wrongdoers.

“No one shall offer protection to a wrongdoer.”

This is justice in its purest form, non, negotiable, impartial, and transcendent. How many war criminals, corrupt leaders, and tyrants are protected today under the guise of sovereignty or national interest?

From embezzlers living in luxury to warlords evading prosecution, Muslim societies today often shield wrongdoers rather than confront them. Israel’s war crimes, exposed time and again, are defended by so-called Muslim allies in international forums, eager to maintain trade or diplomatic ties.

The Medina Charter demands the opposite. If justice dies, the Ummah dies.

The Prophet (saw) as the Final Moral Authority.

“In any dispute or controversy likely to cause trouble, the matter shall be referred to Allah and His Messenger.”

This doesn’t mean abandoning civil law, but reflects the need for ethical, principled leadership. The Prophet was not just a judge, he was Al-Amin, the trustworthy. He ruled with integrity, compassion, and accountability.

Compare this to today’s rulers, autocrats who silence dissent, monarchs who shake hands with Zionist generals, puppets who defend Israel’s right to "self-defense" while denying Palestinians their right to exist. They rule with fear, not prophetic guidance.

Ethical Warfare and Sanctity of Life.

“No believer shall kill another believer for the sake of an unbeliever.”

“The city of Medina shall be a sanctuary for the people.”

The Prophet did not glorify war. He regulated it with ethics, forbade the killing of innocents, and declared Medina a sanctuary.

We live in an age where Israel bombs hospitals, destroys refugee camps, and drops white phosphorus with impunity. Yet some Muslim governments still call them “partners for peace.”

Let us be clear: Muslims who kill civilians or betray the Ummah in the name of diplomacy are the furthest from the Prophetic model. They are not defenders of Islam, they are its saboteurs.

Conclusion: A Charter for Our Time.

The Medina Charter is not a relic, it is a roadmap. It speaks directly to our time of fragmentation, betrayal, injustice, and hypocrisy. It calls Muslims back to the essence of their deen: justice, mercy, unity, and dignity.

To invoke the Charter is not to romanticize the past, but to reignite the Prophetic spirit in our fractured present. It demands we challenge oppression, expose hypocrisy, defend the oppressed in Palestine, and rebuild a just and inclusive society.

The Prophet (saw) did not just preach Islam, he lived it as governance, ethics, and mercy. And he left us a blueprint in the Medina Charter.

The question is: will we honour it, or betray it?

Salim Mohamed Badat 

Author exploring the intersection of faith, politics and justice 

https://salimbadat.substack.com/p/the-medina-charter-a-prophetic-blueprint

Vijay Prashad: The Petrodollar & the War on Iran

The illegal U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is exposing the Oil-Dollar-Wall Street complex that binds oil, financial markets, and dollar power, with consequences that reach far beyond the region.

Wall Street, New York. (Joe Lauria)

By Vijay Prashad

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

As you and I worry about how war and inflation will impact our families and nations, bond traders are fixated on the numbers on their screens, calculating what might happen to seemingly arcane financial instruments. 

Their job is to protect the treasure of the wealthy. For the past fifty years, the relative stability of the U.S. dollar — above all as embodied in U.S. Treasury securities — has rested in part on what is called the “petrodollar” system.

When petroleum prices are relatively stable, the costs of production and transport are more predictable, inflation is easier to contain, and the prices of bonds and other financial assets are less likely to swing wildly. In such conditions, the wealthy can multiply their paper wealth with greater confidence. 

Despite the existence of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil cartel since 1960, the United States continues to shape the terms on which much of the world’s petroleum is shipped, priced, and paid for through its monopoly on violence — by securing key chokepoints and client states with its bases and fleets and by using sanctions to make oil sales involving targeted states or firms harder to insure, finance, transport and settle financially.

Coups and wars also serve to discipline states that seek too much control over their own resources or wish to move outside this dollar-centred order.

Inflation — a sustained increase in prices over a period of time — is the enemy of financial wealth, as it depreciates the purchasing power of financial assets. 

Since the world economy is dependent on energy derived from oil, a rise in oil prices leads to a rise in the price of all other commodities and the overall cost of production and transport, lowering the value of bonds and other financial assets that depend on low inflation.

Holders of financial wealth therefore tend to favour policies that curb inflation through austerity, restrictive fiscal policy, and by keeping the prices of oil — and therefore costs of production, including wages – down. The wealthy prefer holding assets that are stable relative to the prices of commodities and wages, which is why the U.S. dollar has been their currency of preference for holding wealth and denominating major debts and contracts. 

By offshoring production to poorer countries, the U.S. has kept wage levels and inflation low at home and maintained the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar. Although there have been moments of crisis, no other currency has come close to replacing the primacy of the U.S. dollar, since no other state combines the military reach, sanctions power, alliance networks, and financial depth required to command the pricing of key commodities like oil.

Bond traders and their clients are now worried that Iran has already shown it can restrict passage through the Strait of Hormuz and thereby challenge Washington’s ability to police the movement of the oil that transits that chokepoint — more than a fifth of the world’s total. 

In 2025, roughly 21 million barrels a day transited the strait at an average price of $69 a barrel, totalling around $530 billion per year. The global oil market is priced between $2–3 trillion per year. A significant share of this enormous hoard has traditionally been reinvested into U.S. Treasury bonds and dollar-based financial assets.

If Washington can no longer guarantee the terms under which that oil moves and, worse, if more of the proceeds are going to be held in non-dollar currencies (such as the Chinese yuan, which is the currency of settlement that Iran prefers), this will provoke great turbulence in the dollar-denominated bond market which is the heart of the global financial system.

Zhao Dewei / (China), Night Market, 2013.

Those of you who are not specialists on the subject may be wondering: what exactly is “the bond market?” What is a “dollar-denominated bond?” What is the “petrodollar,” or indeed, the “petroyuan?” How does this entire system work? Financial markets are conceptually simple but operationally complex, often appearing opaque because they are laden with jargon and because specialised actors seem to be interpreting and acting on the basis of abstract expectations and relative prices.

This newsletter is a primer on some of the key concepts needed to understand the global financial system in the context of the illegal war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran. For the specialist, the answers to the questions that follow may be too simplistic while for the general reader, some conceptual questions may not be fully answered. That is the limit of any primer, so forgive us in advance.

What are bonds? Bonds are a category of debt security — a tradable financial instrument. A bond is best understood as a claim (or IOU) on a future stream of payments. When a bond is first issued, it is a loan made by an investor to a borrower, usually a government or corporation. In return, the borrower promises to pay interest at regular intervals (called coupons) and to repay the original sum (called the principal) at a set future date (called maturity).

For example, if a government issues a 10-year bond for $1,000 at 4 percent interest, the buyer gives the government $1,000 upfront, receives $40 a year in interest, and gets the $1,000 back after ten years. If the bondholder does not want to wait until the end, they can sell the bond to someone else in a secondary market. 

Put simply: bonds are a form of interest-bearing or fictitious capital: legal claims on future profits or tax revenues rather than ownership of productive assets themselves. In contrast to bonds, stocks represent ownership shares in a company.

Shareholders may receive dividends (which are not guaranteed), and the value of their shares may rise or fall according to the company’s performance, potentially becoming worthless. Bonds typically offer lower returns with lower risk than stocks, while stocks carry higher risk but greater potential returns.

What is the bond market? The bond market is where governments and corporations issue and trade bonds. There is no single marketplace, since the bond market is decentralised. Most bonds are traded directly between banks, institutional investors, and individual investors through major financial centres such as New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt. The dollar bond market consists of bonds issued in U.S. dollars — mainly U.S. Treasuries and other dollar-denominated bonds issued by corporations and by governments outside the United States. 

U.S. Treasuries are bonds issued by the U.S. government. They include bills (short-term debt that mature in under a year), notes (medium-term debt that mature in two to ten years), and bonds (long-term debt that mature in twenty or thirty years). Central banks, commercial banks, pension funds, insurers, corporations, and other investors hold these bonds because they are among the most liquid and widely accepted financial assets in the world.

A significant share of global dollar surpluses — including some oil-export surpluses, which we will get to — has historically been recycled into these bonds. This mechanism helps finance the U.S. government’s debt (currently at almost $39 trillion) through purchases of U.S. Treasuries while reinforcing global demand for the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency — the most universally accepted currency for invoicing trade, settling payments, and holding reserves and wealth.

Mohammad Ariyaei (Iran), Garden of Angels, 2023.

What is the petrodollar system? As mentioned earlier, the world oil market amounts to about $2–3 trillion a year. So, where do the profits from all those oil sales go? After the 1973–1974 oil shock, and especially through the arrangements Washington built with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies, most global oil trade came to be invoiced and settled in dollars.

This meant that oil-importing countries needed dollars to buy oil, while oil-exporting countries accumulated large dollar surpluses. Oil-exporting states, central banks, and sovereign funds then reinvested a significant share of those surpluses into dollar-denominated assets.

This recycling of oil revenues into dollar-based financial instruments links energy markets to financial markets, sustains demand for dollar-denominated bonds, helps keep U.S. borrowing costs lower than they would otherwise be, and reinforces the U.S. dollar’s status as the world reserve currency.

A key part of this process has been the Eurodollar market — the offshore market in U.S. dollars, where dollars are deposited and lent outside the United States — which helps channel oil surpluses into global financial markets. This entire system could be called the Oil-Dollar-Wall Street complex.

The United States has weaponised the petrodollar system to sanction countries that do not cooperate with U.S. foreign policy on political grounds.

The U.S. Treasury Department has restricted targeted countries from accessing dollar-based finance, forcing compliance with U.S.-dominated markets. Countries that resist, like Iran, have sought alternatives to the dollar oil trade; this is why Iran has said that countries that pay in Chinese yuan can travel safely through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Oil-Dollar-Wall Street complex sustains U.S. power (using sanctions) even as it pushes countries to pursue diversification, risk management, and alternative currency arrangements.

If oil profits are no longer held in dollars, would this impact the dollar bond market? If oil revenues are no longer held in dollar-denominated assets, global demand for dollar assets — especially U.S. Treasury bonds — could decline. This could reduce foreign purchases of U.S. Treasuries, raise U.S. borrowing costs, depreciate the value of the U.S. dollar, and weaken the dollar’s role as world reserve currency. But this would not be a simple or immediate process.

The overall impact of such a process would depend on how quickly and widely, alternative currencies replace dollar-based oil trade. In the short term, there will be disruption rather than a smooth transition or an immediate collapse of dollar dominance.

Charles Hossein Zenderoudi (Iran), Zamin Larzeh (Earthquake), 1971.

What is the petroyuan? The petroyuan refers to oil trade that is priced in U.S. dollars and settled in Chinese yuan. It emerged in 2018, when the Shanghai International Energy Exchange launched its yuan-dominated crude oil futures market. The petroyuan is estimated to be a small share — no more than 5 percent — of global oil trade.

Despite the emergence of the petroyuan, it cannot overtake the petrodollar because the yuan is not fully convertible. Due to Chinese government regulations, the yuan cannot be freely exchanged with other currencies at market rates, limiting its use in global transactions. U.S. financial markets are more liquid — meaning dollar assets can easily be converted into cash — because of the large deficit that the U.S. government runs to ensure the flow of dollars to the global economy.

Entrenched financial systems, geopolitical alliances, and global institutions still favour the U.S. dollar, making large-scale transition to a yuan-based oil trade slow and constrained. While many Belt and Road Initiative countries have adopted the yuan in their transactions, the Chinese government is primarily interested in using its currency to support domestic economic growth and facilitate trade. China is not interested in providing a stable and liquid store of wealth for international financiers, nor does it desire the deindustrialisation and domestic and international polarisation that full currency convertibility would entail.

Iran Darroudi (Iran), Eshgh Khamoush Shodeh (Love Has Been Silenced), 2008.

We hope the above primer has helped explain some of the more arcane parts of the present conjuncture. These concepts and processes are important to understand because Iran has linked yuan-denominated oil trade to safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz as a leverage against the United States.

By controlling a chokepoint carrying major global oil flows, Iran can bypass sanctions, undermine the petrodollar system, and strengthen ties with China. While this may not in itself destroy the petrodollar system, it inflicts upon the U.S. a significant cost for its unwillingness to come to a grand bargain and end an almost fifty-year conflict.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow atChongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations.  His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Jeffrey Sachs: Ending Israel’s War on Peace

To make peace last in the Middle East, the U.S. must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognized borders of June 4, 1967.

Aftermath of an Israeli strike on Beirut, on April 8. (Megaphone/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)

By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

Common Dreams

A two-week ceasefire has partially halted the Israel-U.S. war on Iran. The war accomplished precisely nothing that a competent diplomat could not have achieved in an afternoon.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and it is open again now, but with more Iranian control.

Meanwhile, the chaos continues. Israel is intent on blowing up the ceasefire, as this was Israel’s war from the start.

Israel dazzled U.S. President Donald Trump with the prospect of a one-day decapitation strike that would put Trump in charge of Iran’s oil. Israel, in turn, was out for bigger prey: to bring down the Iranian regime and thereby become the regional hegemon of Western Asia.

The foundation of the ceasefire is Iran’s 10-point plan, which Trump (perhaps unwittingly) called a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” The plan makes sense, but it is a major climbdown for the U.S. and probably a redline for Israel.

Among other points, the plan calls for an end to the wars raging in the Middle East, almost all of which have Israel at their root cause. The plan would also resolve the nuclear issue, essentially by going back to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Trump ripped up in 2018.

The Iran War, and the other wars raging across the Middle East, trace back to one core Israeli idea, that Israel will permanently and steadfastly oppose a sovereign Palestinian state and will topple any government in the Middle East that supports armed struggle for national sovereignty.

It is crucial to note that the U.N. General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions, such as Resolution 37/43 (1982), affirming that political self-determination is so vital, that armed struggle in the quest for self-determination is legitimate.

The U.N. was born, in part, out of the determination to end the centuries of European imperial domination over Africa and Asia. Of course, there would be no cause for armed struggle if Israel would accept a political solution, notably the two-state solution that has overwhelming support throughout the world.

Netanyahu’s core goal may be summarized as Greater Israel. This means no Palestinian sovereignty, and no clear boundaries for Israel even beyond the boundary of historical Palestine under British rule after WWI.

Zionist extremists like Netanyahu’s political allies, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich favor Israeli control over parts of Lebanon and Syria, as well as permanent control over all of what was British Palestine.

America’s Christian Zionists, exemplified by the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and a strong voter base of Trump, speak of God’s promise to Israel of the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates. Crazy stuff, but these are real beliefs, nonetheless, and they are conveyed in the White House.

Israel’s strategy is therefore regime change in every country that resists Greater Israel, a plan already foreshadowed in the famous political document “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” written by U.S. Zionist neocons as a platform for Netanyahu’s new government in 1996.

We’ve had constant wars in the Middle East since then to implement the Clean Break vision. This has included the war in Libya to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi, the wars in Lebanon, the war to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the war to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and now the war to topple the Iranian regime.

Condolences at the Iranian embassy of Baku on March 4, following the Feb. 28 U.S.-Israeli assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. (President.az/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)

This is not to say that the U.S. lacks its own grandiose ideas. Israel wants regional hegemony, this is not a secret. Netanyahu confirmed these ambitions in his recent remarks about Israel becoming “a regional power, and in certain fields a global power.”

On the other hand, American officials dream of global hegemony. And Trump dreams of money. He craves the Iranian oil and repeatedly said so.

In any event, it’s clear that this war was Netanyahu’s creation. He and the Mossad chief came to Washington to sell Trump a bill of goods. It’s not hard. Trump was suckered, while everybody else had their doubts about Netanyahu’s claims of an easy one-day decapitation strike — essentially a replay of the U.S. operation in Venezuela.

It’s pathetic to “listen in” on the White House discussion, as revealed by The New York Times. Netanyahu, a con man, presented rosy scenarios of regime change that U.S. intelligence contradicted, yet Trump foolishly accepted.

Trump and Netanyahu were cheered on by Christian Zionists (Pete Hegseth), Jewish Zionists and real-estate developers (Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff), a faith healer (Franklin Graham), and high-level sycophants (Secretary of State Marco Rubio and C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe).

Trump and Netanyahu in the White House on Sept. 29, 2025. (White House/Daniel Torok)

Until Tuesday evening, it looked like Trump might lead the world blindly to World War III.

The vulgarity and brutality of his public rhetoric was unmatched in U.S. presidential history.

Now we know that he was desperately seeking an off-ramp and using Pakistan for that purpose. While Trump was telling the world that Iran was begging for a ceasefire, it was Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire. The Pakistani leader delivered it.

The ceasefire is good, and the 10-point plan is good, even if perhaps Trump didn’t know what was in it when he said that it was a good basis for negotiation. Israel will, in any event, work overtime to break it, and has already started to do so, with carpet bombing of Beirut that is killing hundreds of civilians, and with other strikes.

A permanent U.S,-Iran agreement is the last thing that Netanyahu wants. That would end his dream of Greater Israel.

Yet there is a way to peace and that is for the U.S. to face reality. Israel is the real “terror state,” waging perpetual war throughout the Middle East for a wholly indefensible reason — to have unchecked freedom to terrorize and rule over the Palestinian people and to expand its borders as Israel’s zealots see fit.

To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the U.S. must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognized borders of June 4, 1967.

Iran’s 10-point plan can be the basis of a comprehensive regional peace — if the U.S. accepts the reality of a state of Palestine. In that case, Iran would likely agree to stop funding non-state belligerents, and Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and the entire region could live in mutual security and peace.

That outcome should be the basis of a negotiated agreement of the U.S. and Iran in the next two weeks.

The American people have made their views clear. A 2025 Pew survey finds most Jewish Americans lack confidence in Netanyahu and back the two-state solution. Most Americans now view Israel unfavorably, the highest unfavorability in history.

Sympathy for Israel has hit a 25-year low. Now the political class must catch up with the public.

The peace is within reach, if the U.S. grasps it. Iran’s proposal is serious and the ceasefire is a fragile opening for a comprehensive settlement.

The question is whether the U.S. will, once again, allow Israel to destroy the peace, or rather this time stand up for America’s interests and the world’s interests in a lasting peace.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.

Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

Caitlin Johnstone: Israel or Peace

Israel is a genocidal apartheid state whose entire existence is premised upon a strategy of unceasing violence and abuse in the middle east. As long as that state continues to exist in its present iteration, peace will never be attainable.

President Donald Trump hosts a bilateral dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Monday, July 7, 2025, in the Blue Room. (Official White House Photo/Daniel Torok)

By Caitlin Johnstone

Caitlin’s Newsletter

Israel is already aggressively sabotaging the Trump administration’s two-week ceasefire with Iran by slaughtering huge numbers of civilians in Lebanon, a nation which is explicitly off-limits for any attack under the ceasefire conditions agreed to by Tehran.

The U.S. and Israel are trying to claim that Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire agreement, but Pakistan, whom the U.S. appointed to mediate the agreement, says this is false. The New York Times reports that the White House took part in Pakistan’s public messaging which explicitly included Lebanon in the ceasefire conditions, before changing its tune after Israel attacked.

Iran has reportedly responded to these violations by again halting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

This serves as yet another reminder that the world can have peace or it can have Israel — but it cannot have both. Israel is a genocidal apartheid state whose entire existence is premised upon a strategy of unceasing violence and abuse in the middle east. As long as that state continues to exist in its present iteration, peace will never be attainable.

Meanwhile, Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate are finally moving on a War Powers Act to stop the U.S. president from going to war with Iran, and I’d say better late than never but at this point that would barely even be true.

Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Chris Murphy are currently slamming the president not for his horrifying mass atrocities in Iran but for losing the Strait of Hormuz and failing to achieve objectives like completely disarming their conventional missile program.

As I have said here previously, it’s clear that the reason the Democratic Party failed to oppose Trump’s warmongering with Iran was because they supported it too.

The actual, official 2024 Democratic Party platform accused Trump of “fecklessness and weakness” for failing to go to war with Iran during his first term. Kamala Harris labeled Iran the #1 enemy of the United States.

In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that Trump’s depravity in Iran proves everyone should support Democrats, but it’s clear the Democratic Party is just the more polite-looking face on the same evil power structure.

The Grayzone’s Wyatt Reed has an article out about a freakish BBC piece which cited an anonymous Iranian who allegedly told them he supports the U.S. and Israel “hitting energy infrastructure, using an atomic bomb, or leveling Iran.” Following public outcry, the quote was removed and replaced with completely different words — initially without any editor’s note of any kind.

Reed documents how the BBC reporter behind the story, Ghoncheh Habibiazad, is a London-based Iranian monarchist with an extensive history of agitating for regime change war against her home country, including with the U.S. government propaganda operation Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Last month The Times ran an article titled “Some Iranians say one thing’s worse than bombs: no bombs”. Western powers are always aggressively pushing this self-evidently false claim that people in empire-targeted countries want bombs dropped on them, in much the same way slavery proponents argued that Africans were happiest as slaves because God made it their nature to serve.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s impossible to have enough disdain for the western press.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.