The Bessent Doctrine: How the US Treasury Department is Starving Palestinian Survival And Aggression Against Iran

Iqbal Jassat

When Scott Bessent took the helm of the U.S. Treasury Department, Wall Street anticipated an era of calculated, market-driven economic statecraft. Instead, the administration has weaponized the American financial system to wage an unyielding campaign in the Middle East—one that functions as an explicit endorsement of Palestinian erasure. By aligning the full weight of U.S. financial might with the most extremist elements of the Israeli government, Bessent is replacing diplomacy with economic devastation.

The warning signs were clear early in his tenure. Bessent’s decision to formally embrace Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—a far-right figure who has openly championed the total annexation of the West Bank and referred to Hamas as an “asset” to block Palestinian statehood—sent a chilling message.

By treating Smotrich as a preferred strategic partner, Bessent did more than just break with decades of bipartisan American diplomatic precedent; he effectively greenlit the economic starvation of the Palestinian people.

Under the banner of what the administration calls “Economic Fury,” Bessent’s Treasury has engineered a regulatory dragnet that treats Palestinian humanitarian survival as a national security threat.

The department has systematically tightened restrictions on international aid, NGO transfers, and banking channels to the Palestinian territories.

In practice, this means funds intended for basic human necessities—clean water, medical supplies, and food security—are frozen under the broad, shifting definitions of fighting “adversaries” and “terrorist networks”.

To Bessent’s Treasury, a dollar sent to keep a hospital operating in Gaza or a school open in the West Bank is treated with the same hostility as a transaction funding illicit weapons.

Furthermore, this anti-Palestinian stance is deeply embedded in the administration’s aggressive regional isolation strategy.

As Bessent aggressively pursues what he calls “the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world”, the civilian populations trapped within these geopolitical crossfires bear the brunt of the suffering.

By enforcing an uncompromising “you are either with us or against us” ultimatum on global allies, the Treasury Department has frozen out international partners who seek a balanced, rights-based approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

True economic statecraft requires foresight, balance, and a commitment to long-term stability. By reducing U.S. Treasury policy to a blunt instrument of collective punishment and unconditional alignment with right-wing expansionism, Bessent is fulfilling Israel’s Zionist goals.

He is cementing a legacy of hostility that destroys Palestinian livelihoods, destabilizes the region, and further compromises the bankrupt moral authority of the United States on the global stage.

Interestingly he was raised in South Caroline where his father was a real estate developer who went bankrupt.

Regarding Trump’s failed war on Iran, Bessent maintains an aggressive, hardline stance explicitly advocating for maximum economic warfare to collapse the Iranian regime.

Leading the financial strategy during the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict, Bessent favors crushing financial measures as a way to degrade Tehran’s capabilities while avoiding large-scale, direct military escalation.

Bessent has issued a strict ultimatum to the international community regarding Iranian trade, stating, “It is time for our allies and the rest of the world to make a decision. You are either with us or against us.”

Because China purchases over 80% of Iran’s shipped oil, Bessent is actively pressuring Beijing to “get with the programme”. He has warned that any country providing an economic lifeline to Iran will face severe U.S. enforcement actions and economic consequences.

Bessent has publicly stated that the U.S. intends to use coordinated economic isolation to “collapse this regime” and completely squash the Iranian economy.

Agents of Zionism who share Bessent’s hostile agenda, will ultimately realise their folly in pursuing failed policies – in Palestine and in Iran.

When an empire meets its limit – Iran, Trump and the battle for Hormuz

by Ranjan Solomon

 “The deepest form of sovereignty is not the power to command, but the refusal to be commanded.” 

Pedestrians walk past a giant billboard depicting U.S. President Donald Trump and the words “Revenge is inevitable” at the intersection of Jomhuri Street and Vali-e Asr Street in Tehran, Iran, on July 28, 2026. [Fatemeh Bahrami – Anadolu Agency]

There are moments in international politics when a particular confrontation becomes larger than the immediate dispute that produced it. The present confrontation between Iran and the United States is one such moment. On the surface, it is about a nuclear programme, sanctions, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the terms of a ceasefire that was supposed to lead to a broader peace. But beneath these issues lies a much more consequential political struggle: whether the United States can still compel a sovereign country to accept the political order Washington seeks to impose upon it, and whether a country such as Iran can resist that pressure without being forced into a war whose consequences would extend far beyond the Middle East.

The sixty-day diplomatic framework has now expired without producing the peace agreement Washington and Tehran were expected to negotiate. Instead of bringing the two sides closer, the period has exposed just how profound the disagreement remains. Washington has ruled out extending the arrangement, while Tehran has made clear that it will not return to negotiations on American terms. The Strait of Hormuz remains at the centre of the confrontation, with the United States seeking to reopen it under conditions that would demonstrate American control, while Iran insists that its security and sovereignty cannot be separated from the question of who determines what happens in those waters.

This is why the language coming from Tehran is important. Iranian officials have told Washington, in substance, to accept the reality of defeat rather than continue imagining that pressure will produce capitulation. That language is not simply the bravado of a government under military and economic pressure. It represents a political argument about the limits of power.

Iran is saying that the United States may possess overwhelming military superiority, enormous financial power and the ability to impose devastating sanctions, but none of these automatically gives Washington the right to determine the political choices of another sovereign state.

The distinction between military power and political power is at the heart of the crisis.

The United States has spent decades constructing a system of military alliances, bases, naval deployments and economic instruments that has allowed it to exercise extraordinary influence over the Middle East. The Gulf has been treated as an area of vital American strategic interest, while the security of energy supplies has frequently been used to justify an extensive American military presence. But the history of the region also demonstrates the limits of that power. Military occupation has not produced political stability. Sanctions have not necessarily produced surrender. Regime-change projects have repeatedly generated consequences that Washington itself has struggled to control. And threats have a way of losing their effectiveness when the country being threatened concludes that accepting the threat would amount to accepting permanent subordination.

Iran has reached precisely such a conclusion.

Its position cannot be understood without remembering the history of the nuclear agreement. Iran once accepted substantial restrictions on its nuclear activities through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, while the United States and other powers undertook obligations involving sanctions relief and economic normalisation. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from that agreement profoundly altered the political meaning of negotiation for Tehran. The Iranian leadership was left with an argument that remains difficult for Washington to answer: if Iran accepts restrictions today, what prevents a future American administration from withdrawing tomorrow and demanding still more?

The question is not merely technical. It is about trust between states.

Washington wants Iran to provide guarantees concerning enrichment, nuclear capability and regional activity. Tehran wants guarantees that an agreement will not simply become another instrument through which the United States can impose additional demands later. Washington sees Iranian nuclear capacity as a threat to the existing regional order. Iran sees the American military presence surrounding it, the sanctions regime and repeated threats of attack as evidence that its own security cannot be entrusted to American promises.

Both sides therefore speak of security, but they mean entirely different things by the word.

For Washington, security means preventing Iran from acquiring capabilities that could challenge American and Israeli strategic dominance in the region. For Tehran, security means possessing enough independent capability to ensure that Iran cannot be coerced into submission by an outside power. The disagreement over the nuclear question consequently becomes inseparable from the larger question of sovereignty. Iran does not regard the nuclear issue as an isolated technical matter to be settled by American conditions. It regards it as one element in a broader struggle over whether it will remain capable of determining its own strategic future.

This explains why Tehran refuses to negotiate while military threats remain the principal language of Washington.

Diplomacy normally assumes that both sides enter the process with the possibility of compromise. But when one side approaches the table demanding that the other first accept the premises of its own defeat, negotiations become something else. They become an attempt to formalise surrender. Iran’s refusal is therefore not necessarily evidence that it has abandoned diplomacy. It can equally be interpreted as an insistence that diplomacy must begin from a recognition of reciprocal sovereignty rather than from the assumption that one side has already won.

This is where Donald Trump’s rhetoric becomes politically significant.

His suggestion that the United States could declare the Strait of Hormuz American territory is not merely an extravagant statement. It exposes the underlying conception of power that has driven much of the confrontation.

The Strait of Hormuz is not an American possession. Nor is it an Iranian possession simply because Iran has the geographical advantage of controlling the northern shore. It is an international strategic waterway governed by a complicated framework of geography, international law, navigation rights and the competing security interests of states bordering the Gulf. But when Washington speaks of making the strait American territory, it reveals something deeper than a dispute about navigation. It suggests an assumption that American military predominance can be converted into political ownership.

That is precisely the assumption Iran is challenging.

Hormuz has become the physical expression of the larger political confrontation. Whoever can determine the conditions under which shipping passes through the strait possesses enormous leverage over the global economy. Roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil and substantial quantities of gas have historically moved through this narrow passage. Its disruption therefore reaches far beyond Iran, the Gulf monarchies or the United States. It reaches into the lives of workers, consumers and governments across Asia, Europe and the Global South. The current disruption has already contributed to higher energy prices, with Brent crude rising again as hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough have faded.

This is what makes the present crisis so dangerous. A political confrontation between two states has become an economic confrontation involving the entire world.

India, China, Japan and South Korea cannot regard Hormuz as merely an American-Iranian argument. Their economies depend heavily on Gulf energy. Any prolonged disruption affects industrial production, transportation, inflation, household expenditure and the balance of payments of countries far removed from the battlefield.

The poorest countries are particularly vulnerable because they have the least capacity to absorb higher energy and food costs.

The people who pay the price of geopolitical confrontation are therefore often the people who have no voice in determining it.

There is an even larger irony here. The United States justifies its presence in the Gulf partly in the name of maintaining international security and freedom of navigation. Yet the present crisis demonstrates how quickly the assertion of military control can itself become a source of global insecurity. When military power is used to enforce political objectives, the distinction between protecting international commerce and weaponising commerce becomes dangerously blurred.

Iran understands this contradiction.

It knows that the world needs Hormuz open. It knows that a prolonged closure harms the Iranian economy as well as the economies of its adversaries. It knows that energy prices affect ordinary Iranians and ordinary people elsewhere. But it also knows that geography has given it something that cannot be dismissed through sanctions alone: leverage. Iran does not have to dominate the global economy to demonstrate its importance. It merely has to demonstrate that the global economy cannot function normally while Iran is excluded from the political equation.

That is why Hormuz has become a bargaining instrument.

But it is also why the United States is determined not to concede the political meaning of Iranian control. Washington understands that accepting an Iranian-determined reopening could be interpreted as an acknowledgement that American military superiority has failed to translate into political control. The dispute over shipping is therefore really a dispute over the hierarchy of power.

This is the larger story that the nuclear negotiations often conceal.

The United States is still the world’s most powerful military state. Iran is not remotely its military equal. But the history of modern imperialism demonstrates that military superiority does not necessarily produce political obedience. Afghanistan demonstrated it. Iraq demonstrated it. Vietnam demonstrated it. And the experience of sanctions against countries such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran has demonstrated that economic punishment can impose immense suffering without necessarily producing the political surrender expected by the power imposing it.

The question before Washington is therefore not whether it can hurt Iran. It plainly can.

The question is whether it can make Iran obey.

That is a much more difficult proposition.

Iran has survived decades of sanctions, isolation, covert operations, assassination of senior officials and repeated threats of military intervention. Its society has paid an enormous price, and there is no romantic reason to minimise that suffering. But politically, Iran has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to absorb pressure without surrendering the fundamental proposition that its strategic decisions must ultimately be made in Tehran.

This is what makes the present crisis a moment of transition in international politics.

The world is no longer as easily organised around a single centre of power as it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China has become a major economic and strategic power. Russia continues to resist American dominance in its own geopolitical sphere. Regional powers from India to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran increasingly seek room for independent manoeuvre. The countries of the Global South are becoming less willing to accept the proposition that international law and international institutions should operate according to rules selectively interpreted by the most powerful states.

Iran’s confrontation with Washington must be understood within this wider transformation.

It is not an argument that Iran represents a perfect political system. It does not. Nor does resistance to American power automatically make every action of the Iranian state legitimate. A serious political analysis must be capable of making that distinction. What matters is that Iran’s refusal to submit to American strategic demands represents one of the clearest challenges to the assumption that the United States can determine the boundaries of acceptable sovereignty for another country.

That is why Trump’s demand for surrender is so revealing. A demand that Iran raise the “white flag” does not sound like the language of negotiation; it sounds like the language of capitulation. And when the diplomatic framework expires under such circumstances, the failure cannot simply be blamed on Iranian intransigence. The question has to be asked whether the negotiating process itself was ever constructed on the basis of equality.

A durable settlement cannot be built on humiliation.

Iran cannot be expected to accept a settlement that leaves it permanently vulnerable to renewed American sanctions and military intervention. The United States, equally, cannot be expected to abandon all concerns about nuclear proliferation, regional security or navigation. But those concerns can only be addressed through an agreement in which obligations are reciprocal and verifiable, and in which neither side assumes that the other exists merely to obey.

There is still a diplomatic road out of this crisis. Indeed, the fact that Iran has been willing to engage Oman over the question of Hormuz suggests that diplomacy has not disappeared altogether. Iran and Oman have been discussing arrangements concerning navigation even as Washington has objected to the process and threatened further escalation. The existence of such channels is important because it demonstrates that the choice is not inevitably between surrender and war.

But diplomacy requires political imagination.

The United States has to recognise that Iran cannot be bombed into accepting a political identity designed in Washington. Iran, for its part, has to recognise that its control over a waterway of global significance cannot be treated simply as an unlimited instrument of national power. The international community needs a framework that protects navigation, prevents nuclear proliferation, addresses Iranian security concerns, ends collective economic punishment and establishes mechanisms through which regional states themselves can participate in determining Gulf security.

Such a framework would require precisely the thing that great powers often find most difficult: restraint.

The tragedy of the present moment is that both Washington and Tehran possess sufficient power to make the other’s victory extremely costly, but neither possesses the capacity to impose a clean political solution without paying an even greater price itself. That is the meaning of stalemate. It is not weakness. It is the recognition that force has reached the limits of what force can accomplish.

The United States may be able to blockade Iranian ports. Iran may be able to disrupt shipping. Washington can impose further sanctions. Tehran can raise the cost of maintaining the blockade. The missiles, aircraft, naval vessels and sanctions will continue to accumulate, but none of them answers the underlying political question.

Who has the right to decide Iran’s future?
That is the question beneath the nuclear negotiations, beneath Hormuz and beneath the present diplomatic collapse.

And it is a question that cannot ultimately be answered by an American president declaring a piece of international geography to be American territory. Nor can it be answered by Iran indefinitely holding global commerce hostage to its own security calculations. It can only be answered politically.

The emerging world will not be a world without great powers. It will be a world in which great powers increasingly have to negotiate with one another, with regional powers and with societies that refuse to accept the old hierarchy of obedience. The real lesson of the Iran crisis may therefore not be about who wins the next round of military confrontation. It may be about whether the age in which one power could issue demands and call them the rules of the international order is finally coming to an end.

Iran’s refusal to bend is part of that story.

The United States still has immense power. But power has meaning only when it can achieve political objectives. If sanctions produce suffering but not surrender, if military threats produce resistance rather than capitulation, and if diplomatic ultimatums end with the other side refusing to return to the table, then the limits of power have been exposed.

The defeat Tehran speaks about is therefore not necessarily the defeat of America in a conventional war. It is the defeat of the assumption that America can command and the rest of the world must obey. That is why Hormuz matters.

It is not merely a strait through which oil passes. It has become a narrow geographical passage through which the old international order itself is being tested. And the question before the world is no longer simply whether the ships will sail again.

It is whether, in the emerging international order, sovereignty will mean what powerful states say it means – or whether smaller and middle powers will finally insist on defining it for themselves.

The third phase of the Iranian revolution

by Sayid Marcos Tenorio

A man walks in front of a wall mural as daily life continues amid ongoing tensions between the United States in Tehran, Iran, on August 6, 2026. [Fatemeh Bahrami – Anadolu Agency]

There is a recurring tendency among Western analysts to interpret Iran’s political transformations through categories imported from the European experience. The idea that the Islamic Republic is entering a “Third Republic”, for example, suggests a rupture akin to the successive French republics. More problematically, this framing reinforces an Orientalist interpretation of an almost dynastic succession of power in Iran.

It may be more appropriate to understand the current moment not as the birth of another Republic, but as a third historical phase of the same political project that began in 1979.

The first phase was marked by the Islamic Revolution, the war imposed by Iraq and the construction of a new institutional architecture based on Wilayat al-Faqih, the governance of the Islamic jurist. Within this framework, it was necessary simultaneously to preserve the revolution, defend the country’s territory and transform its principles into institutions capable of withstanding immense external pressure.

The second phase began after the death of Imam Khomeini and the rise of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei. During this period, Iran ceased to be merely a revolution struggling to ensure its survival and consolidated itself as a regional power.

It was also during this period that what would later become known as the Axis of Resistance took shape: a political and strategic architecture involving movements and forces which, despite their national and ideological differences, shared opposition to US hegemony and the Israeli occupation.

The third phase is beginning now, under even more dramatic circumstances, following the martyrdom of Leader Seyyed Ali Khamenei and the rise of Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei amid war.

Recent changes in the military and security commands suggest that Iran is institutionalising the lessons learned from the confrontations of recent years. Appointments to key positions in the Armed Forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij popular mobilisation organisation and the Supreme National Security Council point towards greater centralisation of command, stronger intelligence capabilities, preparation of the domestic front and an enhanced capacity for rapid response.

The appointment of experienced commanders to sensitive areas, particularly the IRGC Navy, assumes additional importance at a time when the Strait of Hormuz lies at the centre of regional confrontation.

More significant, however, is the language adopted by the new leadership. Iran’s traditional “strategic patience” appears to be giving way to a doctrine of maximum deterrence, explicitly accompanied by the capacity to conduct powerful offensive operations.

This represents an important shift.

Deterrence no longer means simply absorbing attacks, avoiding a wider war and responding in a calculated manner. It now also means preserving the initiative and imposing sufficiently high costs on the adversary to alter its calculations.

This transformation does not, however, mean that Iran is abandoning the regional dimension of its strategy in favour of a policy focused exclusively on defending its own borders. It is precisely here that Palestine remains central.

Recently, Hamas Political Bureau member and head of external political relations Basim Naim stated that the movement had received “with deep interest” the positions expressed by Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei regarding the continuation of support for the Palestinian resistance and the need to bring an end to the war throughout the region, including Gaza and Lebanon.

The statement is revealing. If the second phase of the Islamic Republic built the Axis of Resistance as a form of regional strategic depth, the third appears set to adapt it to the conditions of a more direct confrontation with the United States and “Israel”.

Within this framework, Gaza is not a peripheral issue in Iranian foreign policy. Palestine remains one of the political and symbolic elements that bind this regional architecture together.

There is, therefore, only an apparent contradiction between increasing offensive capabilities and advocating an end to regional wars. In Iranian strategic thinking, greater military power is intended to raise the cost of aggression and thereby strengthen deterrence.

Diplomacy has not disappeared from this strategy. But it apparently is no longer regarded as sufficient.

The third phase of the Islamic Republic appears to proceed from a harsher conclusion: negotiate whenever possible, preserve alliances, strengthen the resistance and, at the same time, prepare for a prolonged conflict.

Iran, therefore, is not necessarily entering a “Third Republic”. It is entering the third phase of its revolution, inaugurated amid war, direct confrontation with its adversaries and a profound transformation of its deterrence doctrine.

Perhaps none of the previous phases began in a strategic environment that so clearly revealed the Islamic Republic’s capacity for resistance, adaptation and projection of power. It is precisely under maximum pressure from its adversaries that this new stage of the Iranian Revolution is opening — not as an expression of retreat, but as evidence of its capacity to weather the storms and redefine its place in the regional and international order.

Sayid Marcos Tenório is a historian, writer and analyst specialising in Middle Eastern geopolitics. He is President of the Brazil-Iran Friendship Institute and author of Palestine: From the Myth of the Promised Land to the Land of Resistance.

The empire below deck

by Junaid S. Ahmad

An aerial view of the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group while operating at the Arabian Sea, escorted by two military replenishment ships and two U.S. Coast Guard vessels, as fighter jets from Carrier Air Wing Nine conducted flight operations overhead in the Arabian Sea, on February 6, 2026. [US CENTCOM/Handout – Anadolu Agency]

The American aircraft carrier was built to terrify other nations. The USS Abraham Lincoln has instead become something far more revealing: a floating monument to an empire powerful enough to bomb half the world, yet too arrogant, overstretched and politically diseased to care properly for the people it sends to do the bombing.

The symbolism is almost vulgar in its perfection.

A nuclear-powered supercarrier — one of the most sophisticated instruments of organized violence ever constructed — prowls the waters near Iran, launching aircraft and advertising Washington’s capacity to reach virtually anywhere on Earth.

Below deck, meanwhile, sailors endure exhaustion, psychological strain, deteriorating conditions and the torment of a deployment whose end repeatedly disappears over the horizon.

Behold American primacy: exquisite machinery, limitless ambition, exhausted human beings.

The contradiction is not incidental. It is the empire in miniature.

Aircraft carriers are floating political theology. They proclaim that America is everywhere; that oceans are highways of command; that no country is sufficiently distant to escape Washington’s attention. Presidents display them as steel embodiments of “credibility.” Generals shuffle them between regions like casino chips. Think-tank strategists move them across maps while never having to smell the machinery, miss the birthdays or contemplate the psychological wreckage below deck.

And there in lies the obscenity.

The American ruling elite experiences war as abstraction. Sailors experience it as life.

Around five thousand people inhabit the Lincoln. Its crew has endured months at sea and prolonged combat operations. Families have described severe exhaustion and mental-health distress; one sailor was rescued after going overboard, while relatives have alleged additional alarming incidents. The Navy disputes claims of a broader suicide crisis.

Very well. But bureaucratic dispute cannot conceal the larger reality: Washington is stretching human beings because its imperial commitments have stretched beyond political sanity.

The Pentagon calls this “readiness.” Naturally.

Empire possesses a magnificent vocabulary for disguising dysfunction. Exhaustion becomes sacrifice. Overextension becomes resolve. Strategic failure becomes deterrence. Indefinite deployment becomes duty. And when human beings begin cracking beneath the weight, the institution that imposed the burden congratulates them on their resilience.

The ruling elite has perfected the art of converting its incompetence into somebody else’s heroism.

The United States maintains not a military of territorial defense but an apparatus of global coercion: hundreds of overseas installations, carrier groups, bomber fleets, intelligence networks, regional commands and permanent war plans spanning continents. Washington must confront Iran, contain China, reassure monarchies, protect Israel, encircle Russia, patrol oceans and prepare for tomorrow’s crisis while managing yesterday’s catastrophe.
Eventually even an empire discovers that omnipresence is expensive.

The decision to send the George Washington from the western Pacific to relieve the Lincoln captures the farce beautifully. One carrier is exhausted in the Middle East, so another must leave Asia to replace it. Washington plugs one strategic hole by opening another, then publishes a press release describing the maneuver as flexibility.

This is not omnipotence.

It is overstretch wearing aviator sunglasses.

And beneath the geopolitical theater lies class power. The people ordering these deployments do not endure them. Presidents speak beneath chandeliers. Cabinet officials issue solemn statements. Defense contractors count revenues. Television generals discuss “acceptable costs.”

The enlisted sailor becomes the acceptable cost.

He sleeps inside American foreign policy. She misses anniversaries inside it. They inhale its machinery, endure its monotony, absorb its anxiety and discover that the glamorous architecture of global domination contains an astonishing quantity of fatigue, loneliness and industrial grime.

Imperialism always looks cleaner from a satellite.

The sailors are therefore neither simple heroes nor simple villains. They are agents of coercive power and, simultaneously, expendable components within the machinery exercising it. Sympathy does not require absolution. It requires understanding who sends whom to kill, who profits, who decides, and who pays.

American militarism survives by persuading Americans that war happens elsewhere.

The bombs fall elsewhere. Hospitals collapse elsewhere. Families mourn elsewhere.

But prolonged war has a nasty habit of returning home disguised as insomnia, broken marriages, psychological injury and sons and daughters who no longer understand why they were sent away in the first place.

That is the question Washington fears most: why?

Why are we here? Why must American “security” require permanent military domination thousands of miles from American shores? Why does every distant conflict become a referendum on American credibility? And why does preserving that credibility always require someone with less power than the policymaker to bleed for it?

The answer is increasingly obvious.

Because empire cannot admit limits without admitting what it is.

So it continues. More deployments. More enemies. More “resolve.” More exhausted sailors proving the supposedly inexhaustible power of the state exhausting them.

Above deck: roaring jets, nuclear propulsion, billion-dollar technology, imperial choreography.

Below deck: fatigue, uncertainty, human beings waiting to go home.

The bunker remains armed to the teeth.

But beneath the flight deck, the rot is becoming difficult to perfume.

The impunity granted to Israel is as shocking as its violence

by Ramona Wadi

Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, during a news conference at the Knesset in Jerusalem, Israel, on, 05 February , 2024 [Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

More incitement to violence from Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir exposes how colonial violence is aimed at the entire colonised population. Speaking on a podcast with former Israeli hostage Rom Braslavski, Ben Gvir said that Israeli forced should kill 30-40 Palestinians each night in Gaza. 

Braslavski requested to act as executioner should Ben Gvir’s plan come to pass, to which the security minister replied, “I will turn the world upside down to make that happen. I promise you that I will do everything I can and turn the world upside down until it happens.”

As shocking as the comments are, both are the product of an enterprise that knows it can only sustain itself through ethnic cleansing.

In 2025, a poll by the Hebrew University Centre showed that 87 per cent of the Israeli government’s supporters perceived “no innocents’ in Gaza, while 64 per cent of Israelis held the same view.

Israel’s Channel 14 branded all Palestinians killed during the genocide as terrorists. Among settlers that normalise the killings of Palestinians, and which even glorifies those murdering them, Ben Gvir’s comments are unlikely to elicit any lingering shock. On the contrary, Ben Gvir’s wish for extrajudicial killings may well find willing participants. And while Gaza remains within reach of the Israeli military in terms of extrajudicial assassinations, the occupied West Bank faces both Israeli institutions and settlers.

Ben Gvir’s comments were aimed at Gaza, but Israel’s colonisation plans do not only include Gaza. The occupied West Bank, which faces daily violence from settlers, is much at risk from extrajudicial killings. In Ras al-Ain, south of Nablus, Israeli settlers besieged Palestinian families and cut off their electricity, water and food supplies. While attracting international attention, the UN as usual preferred to rely on its usual condemnations while Erika Guevara Ross, Amnesty International Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, described the siege as “an accelerating and well-documented pattern of coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed and funded by the State of Israel.” True, but what is being done with the information that is already mainstream knowledge to the rest of the world?

Likewise, Ben Gvir’s comments have not prompted a reckoning with world leaders or international institutions. Israel has already internalised such thinking – it thrives upon creating victims to sustain itself. The international community, supposedly a reference for human rights under the UN, does not seem to consider Ben Gvir’s threats dangerous enough. Even though Israel has a proven history of torturing and killing Palestinians. 

Killing 30-40 Palestinians per night is not merely a fantasy. It has already been carried out by the Israeli military during the genocide; also exceeding that quota. Ben Gvir has also found someone willing to carry out the assassinations, even on a much larger scale. For Israel, as Ben Gvir again elucidated, Palestinians “are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

If, according to Ben Gvir, killing Palestinians is killing non-people, then Israel is already completely absolved of culpability. This is the type of impunity the UN is harvesting for Israel.  

Trump’s Retreat on Gaza: Shifting from Eliminating Hamas to Talking with It

Alwaght- Trump's advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner recently met Hamas in Cairo. This unprecedented meeting of Kushner, as a Trump's envoy to the Middle East, with the leaders of the Palestinian resistance movement should be seen as one of the signs of a shifting approach of the US government to the Palestinian resistance. The meeting shows that just contrary to the stated policy for elimination of Hamas from the Gaza political future, Washington now finds no way but to directly engage in talks with one of the key players of the Palestinian equation.

From elimination of Hamas to direct talks

The Trump administration has laid out a 15-point plan for Gaza’s future, calling for Hamas’s disarmament, a new governing structure, and a phased withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces. But implementing it without Hamas’s approval is effectively impossible. That’s why, in a striking move, Kushner appears to have bypassed the usual Arab intermediaries and met directly with Khalil al-Hayya, the militant group’s political chief.

Politically, this is a significant moment. It signals that Washington has effectively conceded that it cannot shape Gaza’s future without talking to the very force that still wields significant influence and organizational muscle on the ground.

In other words, what the Trump administration once framed as “eliminating Hamas” from the Gaza equation has now become negotiations with Hamas to reach a deal.

Hamas now the party Washington talking to

The more important issue now is that the US talks with Hamas come at a time Tel Aviv has rejected Washington-designed initiative. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin is against the US initiative and still insists on fully disarming Hamas before any decision to withdraw from Gaza. On the opposite side, Hamas insists on withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces and has established a connection between disarming and the future Palestinian political arrangements. 

So, Washington is now in a situation that on the one hand should persuade Hamas to accept its initiative and on the other hand press Netanyahu for a green light. This amounts to one thing: Hamas now holds the initiative in Gaza, not Washington.

Kushner’s outreach looks less like a diplomatic gambit and more like reluctant realism, the belated recognition that no viable political or security framework for Gaza can be built without Hamas’s cooperation, or at least its tacit consent.

Even the leaked accounts of the negotiations make clear that Hamas is no bit player. It is setting the terms on Gaza’s governance, on its weapons, on the occupiers' withdrawal, and on the broader political future of the Palestinians. Reuters has reported that Hamas has agreed in principle to disarmament, but only within a defined framework, and crucially, it has tied that concession to an Israeli pullout and future political arrangements. That linkage is where Washington’s retreat before the reality of Palestinian resistance becomes unmistakable.

US retreat or facing the fact?

Yet Kushner's meeting with Hamas leaders should not be mistaken for routine diplomacy. It signals a fundamental pivot in Washington's policy calculus.

The US is no longer dictating terms to Hamas. It is now negotiating with the resistance movement over weapons, over Gaza's political future, over the withdrawal of occupation forces, and over how a deal would actually be implemented. Even if the ultimate American goal remains Hamas's disarmament, the path has shifted from unilateral pressure to direct bargaining.

At the same time, Trump has pressed the Israelis to halt their strikes on Gaza, a move that underscores a growing rift between Washington's priorities and the Netanyahu government's stance.

None of this means the Trump administration has abandoned its disarmament objective. Kushner continues to insist that Gaza's reconstruction hinges on Hamas giving up its arms, and that Washington expects the territory to be demilitarized.

But the real shift lies elsewhere: Washington has accepted that even to achieve that goal, it must sit across the table from Hamas, and factor the group's demands into its own calculations.

That is why the Kushner–al-Hayya meeting stands as one of the clearest signs yet that the balance of power in the Gaza war is shifting. Palestinian resistance has gone from being a "security problem" that the US sought to eliminate, to a negotiating partner.

And perhaps the most consequential takeaway for the region is this: to execute its own vision for Gaza, the Trump administration has ultimately been forced to talk to the very force it once vowed to erase from the equation.

Ball in the Israeli court

Wissam Afifeh, a political analyst and writer for the Shahab news agency, summed up the meeting in a single, cutting line: "Hamas told Kushner: We've agreed. Now it's your turn to deal with Netanyahu."

According to Afifeh, the Hamas delegation entered the room with a firm stance: no reopening the debate on the 15-point plan put forward by UN peace coordinator Nickolay Mladenov. That framework had been thrashed out for months, and Hamas had already signed off on it. The time for negotiation, they insisted, was over. What was needed now was not backtracking, but compelling the Israeli regime to follow through.

The delegation also reminded Kushner of Washington's earlier pledge: if Hamas agreed, the US would secure Israel's buy-in. And throughout, Afifeh said, the Hamas team adhered to the principle of "reciprocal steps", no unilateral moves, every Palestinian action matched by an Israeli one at the same moment.

Netanyahu, the obstacle to Trump's initiative

The deeper irony for the Trump administration is this: to salvage its own plan, Washington has been forced to negotiate with Hamas.

After meeting with the militant group, Kushner headed straight to Tel Aviv to try to bring Netanyahu on board with the American road map. But three hours of talks between the two sides ended without a breakthrough.

In effect, the Trump administration now finds itself squeezed between Palestinian resistance on one side and Netanyahu's intransigence on the other, with its own Gaza blueprint caught in the middle.

It is a far cry from the image Trump projected at the outset: that of a president who could simply impose a new order on Gaza.