"Israel’s Suicidal Rupture with the U.S."
by Chris Hedges
"Israel is sabotaging the negotiations with Iran and alienating its last important ally by refusing to halt its attacks on Lebanon and withdraw from its occupation of the south. It is determined to reignite a regional conflagration that could see Iran perpetually close the Strait of Hormuz and plunge the global economy into a global depression. And it continues its genocide in Gaza.
Israel is contaminated by racism and genocidal violence. It is blinded by a repugnant moral superiority. It is corrupted by a class of Zionist billionaires in the U.S. who use their wealth to bend foreign policy to serve Israeli interests. It is equipped with a nuclear arsenal Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened to use. It is a menace to the region. It is a menace to itself. And it is a menace to us.
The first round of a quadrilateral meeting between the United States, Iran and Pakistani and Qatari mediators in Switzerland on Sunday - where the Iranian delegation refused to take part in a planned handshake and joint photo with its U.S. counterparts - focused on the U.S. implementing commitments set in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a preliminary 60-day period.
But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz - following Israeli attacks on Lebanon - disrupted the talks. The closure sent Trump into another one of his habitual tantrums, when he reportedly told “Fox News” correspondent Trey Yingst he had informed Iranian negotiators if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “You won’t even make it back to your f*cking country.”
When told that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian continues to assert Iran’s right to enrich uranium _ a right guaranteed by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which the U.S. co-founded - Trump reportedly said “President Pezeshkian better watch his mouth. He better shape up or we’ll take over the rest of the country.” “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump added in a post on Truth Social, referring to Hezbollah. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Trump’s threats prompted the Iranian delegation to depart the Swiss venue, while Ghalibaf dismissed Trump’s tirades in a post on X. “Don’t they ever stop to think that if their threats had worked, they wouldn’t have reached today’s desperation? We give the Americans’ threats no weight whatsoever,” he said. The meeting concluded with “agreeing on a 60-day roadmap toward a final agreement and establishing mechanisms to advance technical negotiations” under the MoU, according to IRNA News Agency.
Israel’s vision of a “Greater Israel,” designed to ensure Israel’s military dominance throughout the Middle East, depends on harnessing the wealth and military power of the U.S. Over two-thirds of the major arms and munitions Israel imports - without which it could not carry out its genocide of the Palestinians, turn southern Lebanon into a moonscape and bomb Iran, Syria and Qatar - are manufactured and provided by the U.S. And because the Israel lobby, for decades, has owned Congress, because its Zionists allies police and control the media, because it is able to siphon tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to sustain its military adventurism, Israel is blind to its own limitations. It is willing to inflict harm on its allies, including the U.S., in service to itself.
And that is what it now intends to do. Even the obtuse administration of Donald Trump - which has spent over $34 billion on the war with Iran and which WarCosts estimates at over $214 billion when wider economic costs are factored in - has figured this out.
Israel is apoplectic about the MoU, which was signed virtually on Wednesday, that leaves the disposition of Iranian stockpiled enriched nuclear materials to later negotiations, lifts the U.S. naval blockade, releases frozen Iranian assets and issues waivers to allow Iranian oil sales.
The MoU declares an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts.” It proposes a 60-day negotiation period before reaching a final deal, a $300 billion Reconstruction and Development Fund, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iran’s periphery and the termination of all international and unilateral sanctions.
The rhetoric unleashed by Israeli politicians and pundits about Trump and those in his administration over the MoU - reportedly arranged without Israeli participation - is venomous. No one in the Trump administration is immune. Trump’s hapless special envoys and unapologetic Zionist assets, Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, were castigated as “two little Jews” by Yinon Magal, a former Knesset member-turned-pundit who is close to Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump is a “loser.” Vice President JD Vance is “scum.” “Israel Hayom” - the Israeli newspaper owned by billionaire Miriam Adelson, one of Trump’s biggest financial donors - in an op-ed accused Trump of betraying Israel.
“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” Vance retorted. It is more than ironic that Israel would push Trump - who gives the word bribery a bad name - into opposing Israel. But Israel has overplayed its hand. The Arab and Muslim world and the Global South detests Washington for its backing of the genocide and betrayal of the Palestinians. Israel and its Zionist supporters goaded the U.S. into made-for-Israel wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and then, another war with Iran. The alliance and military debacles have turned Israel and the U.S. into pariah states. Now, Israel is turning on the only ally it has left.
The failure by the U.S. to continue to subjugate its interests to those of Israel, even at the cost of economic suicide, is, in the eyes of entitled Zionists, unforgiveable. Israel expects the Zionist billionaire class and the Israel lobby in the U.S., as in the past, to bend to its will.
The Obama White House signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 with Israel pledging $3.8 billion per year in military aid from 2019-2028. Congress authorized an additional $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel to sustain the genocide. Between 1946 and 2024, the U.S. is estimated to have provided Israel with over $300 billion in military and economic assistance, adjusted for inflation.
The cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone are estimated, by Brown University, to be between $4 to $6 trillion, with much of that to be paid in the coming decades in the form of medical and disability payments to war veterans and their families. This time the price is too high.
The defeat of Israel and the U.S. in the war on Iran has dealt a mortal blow to the project of “Greater Israel” and the Abraham Accords. It has crippled the Trump presidency, driving up inflation, plunging Trump’s approval rating to dismal levels, paralyzing the economies of Gulf allies and threatening Republican control of the House and the Senate in the November elections.
Israel has no intention of catering to Trump. It could not care less what happens to him, his administration or the effects of the looming economic catastrophe. But Trump, who always has been and always will be out for Trump alone, is not going to sacrifice himself for someone else’s benefit or airy ideals.
Israeli leaders are so out of touch with reality they are threatening to go to war with Iran without the U.S. Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister and current leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, has called for Israel to build a ballistic missile force and said that if he was in charge, he would direct the Mossad to overthrow the Iranian government.
Israel has no intention of leaving southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights - and other areas of Syria it began occupying following the overthrow of Assad - Gaza - where it occupies 70 percent of the land - or halting its savage ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. It intends to find some place on the globe to ship the two million de facto prisoners of concentration camp Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza are still being slaughtered - over 1,000 have been killed by Israel since the supposed ceasefire went into effect last October - and huddle in overcrowded tent cities without adequate food, clean water or medical care.
These goals may be achievable in the short term, but in the long term they signal the demise of the Zionist state. Democrats are increasingly shedding the albatross of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. “America First” Republicans and the right wing are retreating into their traditional antisemitism.
The genocide ripped the veil off Israel and exposed its dark and murderous visage to the global community. The war on Iran, which Netanyahu sold as an easy win, exposed Israel’s cynical manipulation of the U.S. to the Trump White House. Israelis, intoxicated by the fantasy of being the chosen people, do not have friends. They do not have allies. They have those they use and those they slaughter. “No more insane aid with no conditions, but a condition attached to every dollar and every missile,” the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy writes.
Behave or pay the price. You can no longer do as you please: assassinate, abuse, violate national sovereignty and international law with impunity. In such an atmosphere, Israel will no longer be able to continue to thumb its nose at the international community, for which there is no more unifying issue than opposition to the occupation.
Whether it wants to or not, Israel will have to take this into consideration. The first cracks have already appeared, and how: a deal made with Iran while entirely disregarding Israel, which for years disregarded the United States and the entire world. This is only the beginning: A world that was horrified by what Israel did in the Gaza Strip will want a reckoning. A genocidal state can no longer be the darling of the Western world. A state whose citizens carry out pogroms daily, with the cooperation of its military, will not be a part of the family of nations. The dream is starting to come true. It will be a nightmare.
The game is up. The Israeli domination of the U.S. political system is coming to an end. Israel’s inability to read U.S. and global opinion - or its own population, where over 90 percent believe Israel lost its war against Iran - along with its stubborn belief that its old levers of power can still work, illustrate a leadership that has rendered itself deaf, dumb and blind. It can and will do a lot of damage. It can and will inflict more death and suffering. But it is cannibalizing itself."
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