This article by Dianne Kirby first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.
The agony of the Palestinian people under the Israeli boot weighted with American munitions deepened despite the live-streamed genocide. Notwithstanding the cease-fire, Israeli military operations persisted. IDF supported settler-violence increased. Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, openly pursued West Bank annexation and ‘encouraged’ Palestinian migration.
With world attention now diverted to Iran, Israel’s genocidal project will intensify. More casualties, more starvation, more refugees murdered in tents in Gaza. More West Bank deprivation, dispossession, displacement, death and distress. Failure to address Palestinian injustices and suffering exposed western hypocrisy and moral turpitude. As Europe shamelessly bows before an irresponsible and inept US administration, former Fox News anchor, Pete Hegseth, presides over the Pentagon, boasting: ‘No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.’
Genocide was once the crime of crimes, a war of aggression, the supreme international crime. Yet mainstream mouthpiece media and the self-obsessed, criminally craven political class to which it is beholden, constructs an alternative reality. Israel’s genocide becomes a justified act of self-defence. Iran’s legal military rejoinder to an overwhelming and illegal offensive becomes a reckless response requiring support be accorded the aggressors.
Indubitably, the impunity, and indeed support, long afforded Israel’s US enabled war-crimes in Palestine paved the way for the gratuitous terror bombing now perpetrated on innocent civilian populations. A harbinger of the mass murder planned for Iran came in the first wave of strikes. A double-tap strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school killed 175 schoolgirls under the age of 12 and their teachers. ‘Double-tap strike’ is an informal term for a tactic that provides a pause to allow first responders and medics to arrive. Then follows a second strike to kill survivors and rescuers. An unremarkable war-crime practiced by America and Israel.
Israeli Zionists are stirred by messianic visions of a Greater Israel; Trump and his cronies by the anticipated spoils of war. For forty years, Netanyahu dreamed of destroying Iran. Trump ‘wants to save the oil. He doesn’t want to burn it… it reminds people of higher gas prices.’
Since the early days of his re-election campaign, Trump has doubled his net worth, now approximately 5.4 billion dollars. Also, that of his family. Most damaging are allegations of Trump insiders making millions from prediction markets, gambling on the Iran attack they knew was imminent. Popular preoccupation with Epsteinism, the accumulated wealth and power-broking of elites who profit from mayhem and misery, daily mounts.
Global South commentators on Iran, with lived experience of resource extraction and economic exploitation, reference the ‘Epstein Alliance’ and dub Israel-America the ‘Epstein Duo’. Epstein emails evidence hawkish postures toward deemed US-Israeli adversaries. They speculate on the opportunities to be derived from chaos. They observe how ‘deplorables need an enemy’.
Trump caters to the insatiable monetary appetites of billionaire donors, while pandering to his ‘deplorable’ base imbued with Christian nationalism. Trump entrenched Christian extremism, which considers supporting Israel a biblical mandate heralding end-times prophecy, within government’s highest echelons.
US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, an avowed Christian Zionist, contends God’s chosen people have the biblical right to the entire Middle East. Hegseth, heading the most powerful military force known to humankind, proudly presents as an anti-Muslim crusader.
Under his watch, one military commander who self-identified as a Christian First supporter, informed a combat readiness briefing that the coming conflict was ‘all part of God’s divine plan.’ The Military Religious Freedom Foundation records multiple complaints from troops across every branch of the military about superiors claiming the war is ‘biblically sanctioned’.
Also, that Trump is ‘anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.’ Ensconced in the White House Faith Office, Trump’s militantly pro-Israel personal spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, involved in moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and brokering the Abraham Accords, declared: ‘to say no to Trump is to say no to God.’
Trump’s obscene opportunism combines religion and lucre, God and Mammon.
A deadly combination, a fool’s paradise, a threat to us all.