Do Not Be Afraid To Learn and Speak The Truth To Others.
That is what makes us human.
— Annani Muss
LEARN WHY CONGRESS KEEPS SURRENDERING ITS WAR POWERS
The Biggest Oversight On The Part Of The Founders Was That Congress Should Not Willfully Surrender Its Own Power, An Abdication On Full Display With President Donald Trump’s War On Iran.
To be sure, Trump’s launching of the war is merely the latest, although most profound episode in a long and enduring trend, the entrenching of war powers in the presidency and Congress’s willful abdication of its own prerogatives. Congress’s relinquishment of its duties has come at a high cost to the American people and widened the divide between the foreign policies that voters want and what they, in fact, receive.
The chief impetus for this transformation has been the nationalization of American politics and American elite attitudes on foreign affairs. Since the end of the Second World War, through a combination of mass media and party reforms, such as the adoption of the open primary system, American politics has effectively nationalized.
Sectional political identities and their often-particular views on foreign affairs eroded and became franchises of the national parties. As political spending and defense appropriations sloshed over state borders, the incentives for Congress changed, as representatives and senators now competed to enmesh themselves in a national political economy built around permanent wartime mobilization.
Compounding this was the growth of presidential power, particularly in war and foreign affairs. Throughout the early Cold War, Congress continually surrendered its legislative duties and allowed its oversight functions to atrophy, all in the name of national unity. In a bygone era, Old Right Republicans, like Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft, warned repeatedly about the fiscal, social, and procedural costs of subordinating Congress to the presidency.
Despite their prescience, they lost. After World War II and later the Cold War, postwar politics stunned and eventually eliminated the Old Right’s brand of conservatism that cared deeply about the abuse of presidential power. The efforts of “Moderate” Republicans, capped by those of President Dwight Eisenhower, solidified the power of the postwar presidency as an essential institution of modern America.
Thus emerged a “New Right” that preserved the essential trappings of the progressive wartime state, including the belief that the presidency has wide, and, as many of us have argued, extraconstitutional authority over war and peace. The transformation of American governance, and thus the elimination of competing ambitions, was so total that it survived the turmoil of Vietnam, and more recently, the disasters of the Global War on Terror.
While one party may publicly fret about the abuses of the other, neither, as institutions, sincerely wants to roll back the power of the imperial presidency. Four generations into this “revolution within the form,” as journalist Garet Garrett called it, America’s political class has lost its ability to think outside of its confines. It is easier for Congressional Republicans and Democrats to complain, often about tactics rather than substance, than to do the actual business of representing the American people.
Despite their prescience, they lost. After World War II and later the Cold War, postwar politics stunned and eventually eliminated the Old Right’s brand of conservatism that cared deeply about the abuse of presidential power. The efforts of “Moderate” Republicans, capped by those of President Dwight Eisenhower, solidified the power of the postwar presidency as an essential institution of modern America.
As both parties came to embrace the powers of the imperial presidency, they drifted further from the foreign policy preferences of the median American. Over the past decade, voters have consistently prioritized domestic concerns over foreign affairs. Yet Capitol Hill has shown little inclination to respond, content instead to participate in a system that renders it increasingly irrelevant.
The costs of this transformation have been steep and must be reversed if the United States is to remain a republic in more than name. Americans face mounting debt, rising costs, and economic uncertainty—and have lost a vital channel for debating the most important question facing a self-governing people: war and peace. Congress must rediscover its ambition and reclaim its prerogatives. The American people must demand it.
THE REASON THAT AMERICA’S TALKS WITH IRAN HAVE FAILED IS EXPLAINED BY THREE QUOTES
But The Diplomatic Process To End The War On Iran Is Not Buried Yet. Trump, In A Post On Truth Social, Said That “Most Points Were Agreed To” During Talks With Iran.
“In many ways,” Trump added, “the points that were agreed to are better than us continuing our Military Operations to conclusion.” There is hope among the mediators that the gap could be narrowed and talks could resume before the ceasefire ends on April 21.
But the first round in Islamabad—the highest-level face-to-face talks between the American regime and Iran since the Islamic Republic of Iran came into being in 1979—ended in disappointment. The two nations did not even agree to further talks as was hoped, though, at the time of writing, non-face-to-face talks are progressing and another round of talks is expected this week.
The three quotations below shed light on why a peace deal is proving elusive and what the American regime can do to improve the chances for peace.
QUOTATION #1
Vice President J.D. Vance, during a press conference after the Islamabad talks, complained that the Iranians “have chosen not to accept our terms.” It was for this reason, he said, that the negotiations had failed. And it is this quote that best illustrates the central problem in the American regime’s negotiations with Iran.
The American regime is repeating a failed strategy of demanding maximalist concessions from a country that has already declined to accept them and which does not see itself as having lost leverage attained in the war. From Iran’s perspective, this is dictation, not diplomacy, and it demonstrates a lack of respect.
“The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon,” Vance said. Had he stopped there, there could likely have been peace, since Iran has repeatedly said it does not seek nuclear weapons. Under the Iran nuclear deal, Tehran agreed to mechanisms by which the world community could verify it wasn’t trying to build the bomb. But Vance didn’t stop there.
The vice president added the need for Tehran to commit that “they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.” That is a demand for zero enrichment of uranium and a shuttering of Iran’s civilian nuclear program. Iran is guaranteed a right to that program as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, and they will not surrender their sovereignty or their right to that program.
QUOTATION #2
Speaker of Iran’s Parliament and head of its negotiating team, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, recently tweeted, “The opposing side ultimately failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation in this round of negotiations.”
The American delegation went immediately to dictating terms and delivering ultimatums to Iran without first establishing trust, which is in short supply after Washington used negotiations to buy time before attacking Iran in February. Many Iranians think the negotiations that preceded the “12-day war” in June were also a ruse. “Due to the experiences of the two previous wars, we have no trust in the opposing side,” Ghalibaf said.
Compounding the problem, Trump has broken diplomatic agreements. It was the first Trump administration that unilaterally pulled out of the hard-won Iran nuclear deal, despite Iran’s verified compliance.
QUOTATION #3:
President Trump, shortly after the talks in Islamabad broke down, wrote on Truth Social, “Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.”
The Trump administration is trying to coerce Iran into making concessions. But faced with maximalist demands, an absence of trust, and extreme threats and escalation, it is very difficult for Iran to engage in diplomacy without losing face. Trump’s threats are provocative because they could mean not just a return to war with Iran but a widening of that war.
This week Trump followed through on the Truth Social threat, imposing a blockade on Monday. The State Department has been subordinated to the Pentagon, and diplomacy has been replaced by threats and escalation. “We negotiate with bombs,” as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said.
Trump also threatened that “at an appropriate moment, we are fully ‘LOCKED AND LOADED,’ and our Military will finish up the little that is left of Iran!” He said that if the blockade is not enough to make Iran agree to the American regime’s terms, he could resume strikes on Iran.
Tehran has warned that if Iranian ports are threatened, “no port in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman will be safe.” China’s Defense Minister Dong Jun reminded the American regime, “We have trade and energy agreements with Iran. We will respect and honor them and expect others not to meddle in our affairs. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, and it is open for us.”
And since France has negotiated passage through the Strait with Iran, the threat could even lead to a showdown with a NATO ally. It’s of course unlikely that the American regime and France would find themselves in military conflict, but Trump’s extreme rhetoric has inflamed tensions even with allies. The UK reiterated that it would not help implement the American regime’s blockade, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.
Before the bombing of Iran, mediators said that a peace agreement was “within our reach if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.” During the Islamabad talks, we heard that a memorandum of understanding was “just inches away.” But both times, the talks fell short because the American regime insisted on dictating terms when no trust had been built and resorting to military threats and force while talks were ongoing.
TRUMP CAN’T GET A DEAL WITH IRAN BECAUSE HE IS CONTROLLED BY ISRAEL-FIRSTERS
TRUMP CAN’T GET A DEAL WITH IRAN BECAUSE HE IS CONTROLLED BY ISRAEL-FIRSTERS
President Donald Trump Should Have Learned A Long Time Ago: Israel And Its American Lobby Cannot Be Satisfied. No Matter How Much You Give Them, They Always Want More.
Right now, they want Trump to restart the war with Iran, Israel’s chief adversary in the Middle East.
Will Trump give them what they want? You should fear he will.
In early February, weeks before Trump launched the war, it was argued in The American Conservative that Iran was his “Israeli influence test.” War with Iran would advance Israeli interests, not American ones, so it seemed a good test case for whether American foreign policy served a foreign nation. It was predicted Trump would fail the test, and that was right. So much for America First.
After the war went much worse than Trump expected, he wisely secured a two-week ceasefire in early April, and mere hours before the truce was set to end, he wisely extended it. The American regime and Iran have used the opportunity to engage in diplomacy, mediated by Pakistan, but negotiations haven’t seemed promising—until this week.
Axios reported Wednesday that the Trump administration “believes it’s getting close to an agreement with Iran on a one-page memorandum of understanding to end the war and set a framework for more detailed nuclear negotiations.” The reporter, Barak Ravid, has been derided as a White House stenographer who publishes stories that seem designed to calm the markets rather than uncover the truth. But this time, other journalists have corroborated Ravid’s reporting.
Here’s an important development and cause for hope: Iran seems willing to accept a moratorium on uranium enrichment, a key stage in the process of making nuclear fuel. “I do think there are signs that parts of the Iranian establishment are more open to creative arrangements around enrichment levels or temporary limits, especially given the economic pressure Iran has been under,” Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy said.
Elements of the Islamic Republic have at times denied that Iran was mulling a moratorium. But the journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, which has sources in the Iranian government, told TAC that Tehran seems willing to pause enrichment in exchange for American concessions like sanctions relief. “They have said as much,” Grim insisted.
That would be a big concession on a major sticking point. If the Islamic Republic agreed to a years long moratorium, followed by caps on enrichment far below the amount needed to build nuclear weapons, then Trump could claim to have struck a deal with Tehran better than Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear accord, which he exited in 2018.
Sounds great, right?
Not if you’re one of “the Marks,” a troika of Israel-first American conservatives who exert influence over the president. Mark Levin of Fox News, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post are getting nervous that Trump might give peace a chance.
Levin wrote Wednesday on X, “If the Axios report is close to accurate, the Iranian regime will survive, the Iranian people will face even more extensive brutality, and the Israeli government could fall in the October election. A disastrous result.”
Thiessen complained that Trump on Tuesday paused “Project Freedom” barely a day after it began. That was the American mission to guide vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial chokepoint for global trade which Iran has effectively closed. After Iran launched attacks in the Hormuz, Trump said he was suspending the operation to create space for diplomacy.
Thiessen wasn’t pleased. “They take that as weakness,” he wrote in a tweet reposted by Dubowitz. “They don’t think Trump is willing to bomb them again. They think they have leverage. He needs to prove them wrong.”
That the Marks are freaking out is a good thing, and it wasn’t the only sign this week that the reported diplomatic progress is real.
“One credible signal that peace talks are actually proceeding is this massive airstrike that Israel carried out on Beirut just now,” Grim said on Wednesday. “Whenever you’re getting closer to an agreement, you usually tend to see the Israeli military ramp up its violence.”
Iran has always maintained that the ceasefire covers the entire regional war, including Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon. That’s why Israel massively escalated violence in Lebanon after the ceasefire was announced—to sabotage the truce—and in Grim’s view, it’s why Israel attacked Beirut on Wednesday amid new reports of progress in negotiations.
If Israel is ramping up its sabotage campaign, then Trump just might be on the right track. Still, it’s more likely that he’s careering toward another calamity. After all, Israel and its supporters usually get most of what they want from Trump.
Iran may have dropped its resistance to a moratorium on uranium enrichment, but Trump has developed a new fixation: getting Iran to ship its 900 pounds of highly-enriched uranium to the United States. “We’re going to get it,” he told a White House reporter on Wednesday. In a phone interview the same day with PBS, Trump was adamant. “It goes to the United States,” he said.
Where might Trump have gotten the idea that Iran must give its enriched uranium to America? Take a wild guess.
Al Jazeera reports: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s ally, said on Wednesday the two leaders agreed that all enriched uranium must be removed from Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear bomb.” The Marks, as always, are doing their part. Dubowitz said Iran’s handing over all its enriched uranium, not just the highly-enriched material, was a “good red line.”
If Trump hasn’t figured this out yet, he probably never will: The Israel lobby shapes his diplomacy not to help him get the best deal possible, but to insert poison pills into the negotiations. That’s why they pushed last year for Trump to demand zero enrichment—as the former Trump official Joe Kent explained to TAC in March—and it’s why they’re now pushing him to demand that Iran ship out all its uranium.
Iran experts doubt Tehran would make this concession. “The demand that Iran hand over all of its enriched uranium to the United States is extremely unlikely to be accepted and comes very close to a red line for the Iranian system,” Toossi said.
Like a moth to the flame, Trump gravitates toward the very men who convinced him to attack Iran. He’s been promoting Levin’s lunatic rants and Thiessen’s hawkish op-eds, the White House recently added an FDD staffer to its team of Iran negotiators, and Netanyahu continues to have the president’s ear.
Considering how disastrous the Iran war has been for America’s geopolitical position and Trump’s poll numbers, might the president finally be ready to put America first, rather than let Israel dictate his Mideast policy? Sadly, there isn’t much reason to suppose he’ll pass the test this time either.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS ARE KILLED EACH YEAR BY AMERICA’S ECONOMIC SANCTIONS
Economic Sanctions Have Become The Defining Coercive Instrument Of American Foreign Policy. Currently, Roughly 27% Of The World’s Countries Are Under Sanctions.
These sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, or the United Nations—up from just 4% in the early 1960s. A landmark 2025 study published in The Lancet Global Health by economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot has put a number on the cumulative death toll of these measures.
Unilateral sanctions kill approximately 564,000 people per year, a figure comparable to the total annual mortality burden of armed conflict. Over the 1971 to 2021 period, the aggregate implied toll approaches thirty-eight million deaths. Children under five constitute 51% of sanctions-related deaths.
These findings do not emerge in isolation. Decades of country-level studies on Iraq, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and Afghanistan converge on the same conclusion. Broad economic sanctions that sever national economies from global trade and financial systems are instruments of mass civilian harm. They restrict food imports, destroy pharmaceutical supply chains, collapse public health infrastructure, and trap entire populations inside economic catastrophe engineered from abroad.
The modern sanctions system was born at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 from the experience of the Allied naval blockade of the Central Powers during World War I. That blockade contributed to an estimated 478,500 to 800,000 deaths from malnutrition and disease among German civilians—though historians note that domestic policy failures and other factors also contributed to the toll.
President Woodrow Wilson articulated the logic of translating wartime blockade into a peacetime instrument. His description remains the most honest characterization of what economic sanctions actually are.
Speaking in 1919 to audiences during his League of Nations tour, Wilson described sanctions as “something more tremendous than war”:
“…[an] absolute isolation…that brings a nation to its senses just as suffocation removes from the individual all inclinations to fight…Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside of the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon that nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.”
As historian Nicholas Mulder documents in his 2022 book The Economic Weapon, in the League of Nations’ early years the mechanism was called literally “the economic weapon.” Wilson’s characterization of “peaceful, silent, deadly” acknowledged the instrument’s lethal nature while claiming it spared lives. History has repeatedly demonstrated the first claim was true and the second false.
The most comprehensive quantitative reckoning with sanctions mortality to date was published in August 2025 in The Lancet Global Health. The study analyzed age-specific mortality rates and sanctions episodes for 152 countries between 1971 and 2021.
The core findings are devastating. Unilateral sanctions are associated with an annual toll of 564,258 excess deaths, per the study’s own figures as summarized by CEPR. Children under five constitute 51% of total sanctions-related deaths. 71% of deaths fall in the 0 to 15 and 60 to 80 age groups, confirming that sanctions primarily harm those outside the labor force rather than government elites. The study finds “no statistical evidence of an effect for UN sanctions.”
Mark Weisbrot, CEPR co-director and co-author, stated plainly what the findings mean:
“It is immoral and indefensible that such a lethal form of collective punishment continues to be used, let alone that it has been steadily expanded over the years. Sanctions are widely misunderstood as being a less lethal, almost nonviolent policy alternative to military force.”
The Lancet study’s own cumulative mortality estimates imply that unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union caused approximately 38 million deaths between 1971 and 2021.
No episode of sanctions-induced humanitarian catastrophe has been more extensively studied than the comprehensive United Nations-imposed sanctions on Iraq from 1990 to 2003. Columbia University public health researcher Richard Garfield estimated a minimum of 100,000 excess deaths among children under five from August 1991 through March 1998, with a more likely estimate of 227,000.
Other assessments have placed the toll considerably higher. The Geneva International Centre for Justice documented estimates that “the number of people who lost their lives because of the sanctions range up to 1.5 million people, including more than 500,000 children. The World Health Organisation concluded that the health system had been set back by some 50 years.”
The 2019 CEPR paper Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs found a 31% increase in general mortality from 2017 to 2018, implying more than 40,000 excess deaths. Jeffrey Sachs stated the case bluntly:
“American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless, illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan people.”
Tricontinental Institute calculated that American-led sanctions caused Venezuela to lose oil revenue equivalent to 213% of its GDP between January 2017 and December 2024, totaling an estimated $226 billion in losses.
Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez’s 2024 working paper found that Venezuela’s per capita income declined by 71% between 2012 and 2020, the largest peacetime economic contraction in modern history. He attributed approximately 52% of the GDP decline to sanctions and other politically induced causes. Rodríguez has explicitly described comprehensive sanctions as “siege warfare.” In a University of Denver profile, he noted that the average GDP decline from comprehensive multilateral sanctions is equivalent to the United States’ Great Depression decline. According to Rodríguez’s CEPR survey, 54 countries representing 27% of all nations were under some form of sanctions at the time of writing. In 2024, the Treasury Department added 3,135 persons to the Specially Designated Nationals List, a 25% increase from 2023, according to the Center for a New American Security.
Alfred de Zayas, who served as UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, conducted the first UN rapporteur visit to Venezuela in twenty-one years. His August 2018 report to the Human Rights Council stated that “sanctions can amount to crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute.” He concluded simply that “Economic sanctions kill.” Trita Parsi, co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, noted that one-third of Iran’s middle class fell into poverty between 2018 and 2019 as a result of Trump’s maximum pressure sanctions and Iranian government mismanagement.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) argues that American actions against Venezuela—including the military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, the naval blockade, and seizure of oil tankers—constitute an “ongoing war.” As he stated on Meet the Press in January 2026: “That is an act of war, it’s an ongoing war, to continue to take their oil, ongoing war, to distribute it.” Joy Gordon, who holds the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair in Social Ethics at Loyola University-Chicago, produced the most comprehensive analysis of the Iraq sanctions in her book Invisible War. In her 2020 essay for Responsible Statecraft, Gordon argued that the Iraq sanctions “are the template for the systemic, devastating sanctions we see in place today.”
All in all, economic sanctions, particularly comprehensive unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States, are instruments of mass civilian harm that function through the logic of siege warfare. They fail in many documented cases to achieve regime change or major behavioral changes, while succeeding fully at the harm.
ISRAEL’S SMASHING A FIGURE OF JESUS IS PART OF THEIR ONGOING ERASURE OF CHRISTIANS
If Christians In The West Want To Stand With Middle East Christians, They Must Do More Than Condemn One Grotesque Image. They Must Confront The Evil Climate That Caused It.
An Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon recently took a hammer to a figure of Jesus.
The image was startling, which is why it travelled globally. In a single frame, it captured the kind of desecration many still want to treat as aberrational: crude, visual, undeniable.
Israeli military authorities confirmed the incident in the Christian village of Debel, condemned it, and claimed it punished the soldiers involved.
But the deeper problem is not that this happened once. It is that too many still want to treat as exceptional what Christians in this land have long recognised as part of a pattern.
What happened in Lebanon did not begin in Lebanon. It exposed a posture already visible in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, a Jerusalem-based organization that monitors attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem, documented 155 anti-Christian incidents carried out by Israelis in 2025 and described a “continued and expanding pattern of intimidation and aggression.”
Physical assaults were the largest category, and clergy were the most frequent targets.
BETWEEN ‘SMASHING’ AND ‘SQUEEZING’ INCIDENTS
Rossing’s distinction between incidents that “smash” and those that “squeeze” is especially clarifying.
The smashing is what makes headlines: a desecrated statue, a vandalised church, a viral image.
The squeeze is quieter: spitting, harassment, intimidation, obstruction, and the low-grade humiliation that makes a community feel less secure and less certain that it has a future.
As a Christian, I read the image from Debel alongside the warnings we have heard for years from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Taybeh.
Rossing’s report makes clear that Palestinian Christians are vulnerable not only as a religious minority, but also because of their national identity.
In the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, church leaders have repeatedly warned that settler attacks, movement restrictions, and a deepening climate of insecurity are pushing Christians, especially the young, to consider leaving.
The threat is not only to Christian symbols. It is to a living Christian presence. That presence has been shrinking for a long time, and for multiple reasons.
The dwindling number of Christians in the land reflects decades of cumulative pressure under Israeli occupation: displacement, emigration, slower population growth, economic hardship, and recurring cycles of violence.
A DEEPER DANGER
A 2020 survey of Palestinian Christians found that the strongest drivers of emigration were conditions tied to occupation, including checkpoints, settler attacks, and land confiscation.
Too often, Christians in the West respond more readily to an offence against an image than to the slow erosion of a people.
A shattered statue produces outrage because it is visible. A shrinking church often does not.
One gives the world a photograph; the other unfolds over years through systematic pressure, fear, restriction, economic decline, and the exhausting sense that your future in your ancestral homeland is being closed off.
This is why the image from Debel struck so many of us with such force. It did not merely depict an act of desecration; it revealed a climate.
A society does not arrive at such a moment in a vacuum. It gets there through habits of contempt, the normalisation of intimidation, and the hardening of public life against the Palestinians, including their Christian communities.
A few incidents smash, but many more squeeze, and the constant squeezing leaves a community wondering whether it still has a future.
That is the deeper danger facing Palestinian Christians today.
They are confronting an environment in which harassment becomes routine and disappearance becomes thinkable. In that climate, the question is no longer only whether Christians are protected in theory. It is whether they can endure in practice.
AN INVISIBLE REALITY
For many outside the region, especially those who speak often about Israel and Palestine, this reality remains strangely invisible.
Jesus is invoked constantly, as a symbol of civilization, prophecy, or political identity. Yet the living Christian communities of this region are too often treated as marginal to the story.
People grieve when Christ is struck in stone but say far less when the Christians in the Holy Land are hemmed in by fear and uncertainty.
Palestinian Christians are an integral part of this land’s fabric, and their erosion should alarm anyone who claims to care about the Holy Land.
They are not relics or symbolic props in someone else’s theology or politics. They are living communities with names, histories, memories, graves, and futures that can still be lost.
If Christians in the West want to stand with Christians in the region, they must do more than condemn one grotesque image. They must confront the deeper climate that made it possible.
They must listen to the warnings coming from Christians living there. And they must stop exhibiting practical indifference to the extermination of Palestinian Christian life.
The real question raised by that shattered figure of Jesus is not whether one act crossed a moral line. It is whether the world will finally notice the people who have been living under this pressure for years.
INFECTIOUS DISEASES ARE BEING WEAPONIZED BY ISRAEL IN GAZA
An Infectious Disease Specialist, Went To Gaza On A Three-Week Medical Mission In February 2026. He Found Infectious Diseases Running Rampant, All Directly Due To Israel’s Siege And Genocide.
A young man in his twenties was in the intensive care unit at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza. He was the victim of an Israeli rocket attack three weeks earlier near the yellow line. His left leg was amputated above the knee, and the part of the extremity that remained had multiple external fixators in place; he also had multiple other lacerations and suffered severe abdominal trauma requiring open laparotomy, bowel resection, and ostomy placement. He was intubated and had developed a ventilator-associated pneumonia with a multidrug-resistant bacterium called Acinetobacter. He was on a combination of antibiotics that would probably be ineffective.
In Gaza, there is a lot of what infectious disease specialists refer to as “drug-bug mismatch”—patients often get placed on antibiotics that are ineffective against the offending pathogen due to a limited antibiotic arsenal and a growing antibiotic resistance crisis.
Due in part to ongoing restrictions on the entry of lifesaving medicines by the Israeli Occupation, the antibiotic supply is severely limited in Gaza, often changing week to week based on availability of donations from the World Health Organization. Patients unnecessarily die from often treatable infections because of delays in receiving effective antibiotic therapy.
The collapse of the healthcare system, overwhelming overcrowding in and around hospitals, and breakdown of hygiene and sanitation infrastructure all conspired to facilitate the spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria and exacerbate Gaza’s antimicrobial resistance burden. Even before the genocide, Gaza suffered from high levels of antibiotic resistance, which has since accelerated. Heavy metal contamination from explosive remnants from Israeli airstrikes is also contributing to the selection of resistant bacteria in the environment.
Prior to Israel’s medicide, Gaza was home to 38 hospitals, many providing advanced specialty care; now there are only a handful of remaining hospitals functioning at a fraction of their prior capacity, for a population of over two million people in dire need.
Hospital and public health laboratory capacity is severely limited in Gaza because of targeted destruction of laboratory infrastructure and blockade of supplies by the Occupation. Microbiology laboratories struggle to perform essential, time-sensitive diagnostic tests, such as cultures to identify bacteria from various body specimens and environmental sites, and antibiotic susceptibility tests to predict the best treatment options for the individual patient and the hospital population at large. These constraints also impair infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response measures.
Infection prevention and control efforts have faced extraordinary challenges following Israeli assaults on Gaza’s hospitals and surrounding communities. Hospitals were overwhelmed with civilian casualties, making adherence to basic principles of hygiene such as handwashing, sterilization of medical equipment, and proper wound care nearly impossible. Severe overcrowding facilitated the spread of infectious diseases. Since the “ceasefire”, hospitals have continued to face severe shortages of alcohol-based hand sanitizer, solutions to sterilize medical equipment, and personal protective equipment.
The risk of infection, however, extends beyond the hospital walls. A group of volunteers was invited by a representative of the Ministry of Health to bear witness to life in the tent camps surrounding the hospital. It struck them that each of these tents was crowded with entire families who had experienced multiple displacements. The first thing some noticed was the stench of raw sewage and garbage in the air. Debris littered the ground. Latrines were dug in the sand that would overflow when it rained. These conditions increased susceptibility to communicable respiratory, skin, and diarrheal diseases.
They also created an ideal breeding ground for rodents. One of the resident doctors at Nasser Hospital, described a cluster of leptospirosis cases on the wards in early February. Leptospirosis is a serious bacterial infection that spreads from rodents to people; infection can present with pneumonia, kidney and liver failure, and result in death without proper treatment. Extensive rainfall and flooding in the tents surrounding the hospital likely exposed people to rodent urine and feces, leading to disease transmission.
Walking down the dusty streets of Khan Younis, it became apparent how Israel was attempting to make life unlivable for Gazans by destroying their built environment. The air was thick with particulate matter and smoke, making breathing labored. Patients with underlying breathing conditions were especially vulnerable to respiratory viral infections like influenza and COVID and to bacterial pneumonia; there were several patients admitted with pneumonia to Nasser Hospital.
Visiting the local grocery store, the shelves are stocked with overpriced junk food and highly processed foods. Fresh produce was rare. Even before the genocide and famine, Gaza was kept chronically food insecure, at the brink of starvation, by the Occupation. Malnutrition weakens the immune system and predisposes patients, especially young children, to infection. There was a heartbreaking scene of small children queuing up with large, empty pots outside a makeshift soup kitchen near the hospital, screaming and crying with hunger. Between manufactured malnutrition, traumatic injuries, and the burden of chronic and infectious diseases, it is not surprising that Gaza has one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.
Returning to the case of the twentysomething-year-old patient in the intensive care unit, his assault did not end with the Israeli rocket attack that tore his body apart. He was subsequently subjected to more insidious forms of violence by the Occupation: his ability to fight off infection was compromised because of malnutrition due to ongoing limitations on entry of nutritious food; he developed pneumonia from spread of bacteria in the unit due to restrictions on entry of cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment; and once he developed the pneumonia, his treatment options were severely limited due to an insufficient supply of effective antibiotics.
There are many such patients in Gaza. An elderly woman who developed an infected pressure ulcer on her hip from prolonged sitting on the hard floor of her tent resulting in sepsis and requiring surgical debridement and intravenous antibiotics; a young woman who developed a highly contagious parasitic infestation from scabies due to overcrowding and poor hygiene conditions in her family’s tent; another woman who developed severe gastroenteritis and diarrhea likely from drinking contaminated water leading to dehydration and kidney failure.
A discussion on the threat posed by infectious diseases in Gaza would be incomplete, however, without addressing frontline healthcare workers, who play essential roles in preventing and slowing the spread of infections in the healthcare setting. Gaza’s doctors, nurses, and infection preventionists have endured great difficulty during the genocide, facing multiple displacements and challenges in securing food and clean water. One of the doctors, whose best friend had been killed, said everyone in Gaza had lost someone or something precious to them.
Other hospital staff, particularly those in leadership positions, like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, have been kidnapped, tortured, and unlawfully detained by the Occupation, while others like Dr. Hammam Alloh, a nephrologist from Al-Shifa Hospital, have been murdered, leaving critical gaps in the healthcare workforce; such gaps have been linked to increased risk of hospital-acquired infections.
Gaza’s medical students and trainees have also been denied their right to medical education, including education and training on infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship, over the preceding two and a half years of assault. This poses serious challenges to curbing and decelerating the emergence of antimicrobial resistance in Gaza’s teaching hospitals.
Addressing the growing threat of infectious diseases in Gaza requires bold, urgent action. Firstly, a true ceasefire must be enacted. This includes lifting restrictions on entry of lifesaving medical supplies and medicines, particularly antibiotics. Humanitarian workers must be allowed unimpeded access into Gaza and currently imprisoned healthcare workers must be freed. Patients requiring specialty care must be allowed medical evacuation—many of these patients succumb to infectious complications while awaiting safe passage. Resources must be allocated to rebuilding Gaza’s sanitation infrastructure, healthcare system, and laboratory capacity. Only with these prerequisites in place can hospital infection prevention and control and antimicrobial stewardship programs realize their full potential. Finally, the systems of apartheid and occupation that created the conditions for medicide must be dismantled; Israel must be held accountable for its genocidal actions in Gaza.
From the censorship of student voices to the assassinations of journalists in Gaza, the cost of telling the truth about Palestine has never been higher.
MONEY IS THE REAL REASON IRAN AND THE AMERICAN REGIME CANNOT END THE WAR
Trump Built His Iran Policy On Economic Warfare, But His Unwillingness To Give It Up Could Mean A Deal Is Never Reached, Diplomats And Analysts Say.
Before Donald Trump became president, he honed his hawkishness on Iran, complaining about the “plane loads of cash” it received under the 2015 nuclear deal. Now, his ability to end the war in the Middle East hinges, in large part, on how much money he gives Tehran.
“Money is a big part of this. It’s a key to any compromise from Iran’s point of view,” Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow and Iran expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, said.
Some American and Arab officials say that Trump’s unwillingness to loosen the purse strings is the real reason talks between the two sides are deadlocked and potentially doomed to fail.
Iran has reportedly floated a proposal for the two sides to bypass the issue of its nuclear program and enriched uranium in order to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but the nuclear issue is not the biggest sticking point, some people familiar with the talks say.
“Everyone has ideas about a compromise on enrichment [of uranium], but the hardest circle to square for Trump is lifting sanctions. My understanding is that this is more sensitive than the nuclear file,” said a former US official who has spoken with Gulf and US officials following the talks.
It’s not hard to see why.
Trump built his Iran policy over a decade by waging economic warfare on the country, using the power of the American financial system.
“Trump hasn’t helped himself,” Vatanka, at the Middle East Institute, said.
“The way he misrepresented the JCPOA from the get-go has made life harder for him now, because anything he does will be measured by what he criticised Obama for,” he added, referring to the 2015 nuclear deal by its official name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“THIS IS ECONOMIC STATECRAFT”
The JCPOA granted Iran sanctions relief in return for capping its nuclear enrichment to 3.67 percent and opening the country’s facilities up to stringent United Nations inspections. Trump unilaterally exited the deal and imposed crippling sanctions on Iran. He has shown no appetite to stop using the power of the American financial system against Iran, even amid the ceasefire.
On Friday, hours before the two sides were supposed to meet in Pakistan, the American regime rolled out new sanctions against a Chinese oil refinery and dozens of shipping firms and vessels that transport Iranian oil. The Islamabad talks fell through.
If the war ends with Iran in a better financial position than it started, this would be an embarrassment for the Trump administration, some diplomats say.
Barely a month before the American regime and Israel attacked Iran, American Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took a victory lap at the Davos Economic Forum, recounting how sanctions sent Iran’s currency, the rial, “into free fall” and the Iranian people “out on the streets”.
“This is economic statecraft – no shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here,” he said.
Just as Trump is boxed into waging financial warfare, Iran’s leadership desperately needs cash, experts say.
Iran has benefited from its control of the Strait of Hormuz by selling oil at higher prices amid the war. The American blockade is impacting oil sales, but in the short term, Iran can still sell the crude it has stored on ships in East Asia.
But taking a broader view, any gain from oil sales has to be measured against the roughly $300bn in economic damages wrought by Israeli and American air strikes on the Islamic Republic.
An Iranian business newspaper reported in April that reconstruction would take at least 12 years.
THE WAR ON IRAN IS PROFITING OIL, GAS AND ARMS COMPANIES
As Bills Rise Across The World, Campaigners Call Out The Fossil Fuel And Weapons Firms Raking In Mega Profits
As the death toll in Iran rose above 3,500 and the dual blockade of the vital Strait of Hormuz by the American regime and Iran continues, fossil fuel and weapons companies have seen their profits rise dramatically since the war by the American regime and Israel began two months ago.
The standoff between the American regime and Iran in the Strait of Hormuz has left 1,600 vessels and 20,000 seafarers stranded in the Gulf, as Brent crude tops $107 a barrel.
While hitting the pockets of millions in Europe, Asia and worldwide, the war has created big winners. BP’s first-quarter profit more than doubled year-on-year to $3.2 billion, the highest for the British oil giant since 2023, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Recent analysis conducted by climate charity Global Witness for the Guardian found that major oil and gas companies made over $30m an hour in the first month of the war on Iran.
This comes as UK household energy bills are projected to rise by as much as £300 ($406) a year from July due to shortages caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with recent polling suggesting 44 percent of the public would be unable to afford these increases, as well as triggering global food insecurity.
Meanwhile, the CEOs of Britain’s biggest energy companies have seen their personal fortunes surge by millions following the crisis.
Linda Cook, chief executive of oil and gas company Harbour Energy, saw her shareholdings in the company rise by more than £4m to a total of £26m in the month after American-Israeli strikes began in late February.
In the same period, the value of Shell CEO Wael Sawan’s shares in the company increased by nearly £1.8m, to reach £13.2m, according to the End Fuel Poverty coalition. Centrica boss Chris O’Shea saw the value of his shares rise by over £300,000 and BP’s deputy chief executive Carol Howle’s stake grew by over £500,000.
Globally, Chevron chief executive Michael Wirth saw more than £44m added to the value of his stake in the company, and Equinor, the Norwegian firm that supplies much of the UK’s gas, saw its shares rise by over 45 percent.
Because oil and gas markets are globally priced, “disruptions in supply anywhere in the system raises prices everywhere,” Jagannadha Pawan Tamvada, a professor of business economics at Kingston University, said. Since demand is less flexible, this translates into higher prices for consumers and higher revenues for producers.
PROFITS FROM ARMS
A similar trend is true for defence companies. On Monday, a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) found that global military expenditure had increased to $2.887 trillion in 2025, the 11th year of consecutive rises.
As the United States spends on average $1.8bn a day paying for the war on Iran, Lockheed Martin – the largest Pentagon contractor, which often takes in more taxpayer money than the entire State Department – saw its stock price rise by nearly 40 percent at the beginning of March since the start of 2026.
“I have never seen war and conflict manipulated so nakedly for short-term profiteering… that is an element which is quite unique to the assault on Iran”
– Andrew Feinstein, arms industry researcher
“From an incentive perspective, these outcomes are predictable consequences of systems in which uncertainty and risk are directly monetised,” said Tamvada, with “expectations of future instability” leading to a rise in defence stocks.
The cost of such instability is not felt by these corporations but rather experienced as a benefit. “In effect, risk is socialized downward to consumers while upside is concentrated upwards,” Tamvada said.
“It is not that a shortage increases the companies’ costs. Instead they charge more because they can. They pocket the difference,” explained Ruth London, founding member of campaign group Fuel Poverty Action (FPA).
“The fossil fuel industry kills through poverty, through oil wars, through pollution and through climate change. It has made a killing from the war against Iran. And yet it is subsidised.”
While recent figures suggest almost 10,000 deaths are linked to cold-related health conditions due to fuel poverty every year in the UK, oil and gas bosses rake in millions, worsening inequality that is already “exceptionally high, and rising”, according to FPA.
FOSSIL FUEL TAX EVASION
“Oil and gas price shocks are like Christmas for fossil fuel companies: they can sit back and watch as their profits multiply,” Philip Evans, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace.
“We need a bold government response to tax the profiteering of oil companies in the current crisis,” Evans said.
One way that governments can challenge these incentives is increased taxation on the companies raking in huge pay-days from global instability.
“Oil and gas price shocks are like Christmas for fossil fuel companies: they can sit back and watch as their profits multiply”
– Philip Evans, Greenpeace
Tax Justice UK, which campaigns for taxes on the super rich, sent a letter to the British government with signatories from 40 leading civil society organizations, calling on the chancellor to tackle corporate profiteering from the Iran war and levy adequate windfall taxes to avoid the economic burden falling on consumers.
“During these times of global crises, certain companies make record profits amidst human suffering in Iran and ordinary people in this country end up footing the bill,” Tax Justice UK’s deputy director, Caitlin Boswell.
“We have a tax system that is built on protecting wealth,” she said, due to lobbying from companies that allows them to avoid paying their fair share of tax and continue receiving government handouts subsidising fossil fuel energy.
While the UK government was able to introduce a windfall tax that raised £6.8bn in 2022-2023 on energy companies reaping profits from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, negative framing in the press highlighted the industry’s influence over the media.
Polling shows the cost of living crisis is the number one concern among voters. But, beyond the windfall tax on the oil and gas industry, the Labour government remains reluctant to sufficiently redistrubute the wealth of companies profiting from the energy spike, which, according to Boswell, “just goes to show the sheer power of these vested interest groups and these industries that have… too much political capture.”
RENEWABLE ENERGY
Patrick Galey, head of investigations at Global Witness, said that “the fossil fuel industry is the richest and most powerful to ever exist, and therefore also the most devious”.
Galey said the industry had gone from “decades of denial” relating to climate change, to a “repeated, sustained, designed pattern of obfuscating, of delaying” action to tackle it when the science became undeniable.
“Energy independence engenders genuine geopolitical freedom and independence because you are not having to constantly tiptoe around the autocrats”
– Patrick Galey
The war on Iran has prompted the second energy shock to consumers in the last five years – the first being the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – with forecasts suggesting the fallout from this disruption will be far sharper.
The lesson that needs to be learnt, Galey said, is that we need to pivot away from oil and gas and invest in renewables – not just for the climate, but for national security too.
“Energy independence engenders genuine geopolitical freedom and independence because you are not having to constantly tiptoe around the autocrats that you want to buy fossil fuels from,” he said, pointing to Spain as an example of where the government has been able to stand up to the Trump administration because it is not reliant on American energy.
Not doing so is a result of “government choice”, Galey said, referencing analysis showing that Labor ministers met fossil fuel lobbyists more than 500 times in their first year in power, and that the party’s new intake of MPs from the last general election took more than £45,000 in donations from oil and gas.
“OPEN PLAN OFFICE”
Fossil fuels and defence are among the most heavily subsidised industries in the UK, with an estimated £17.5bn given out in oil and gas subsidies per year, while £1bn in government science subsidies went to BAE Systems, Britain’s largest arms company.
According to Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP in South Africa and founding director of Shadow World Investigations, this is effectively a form of “corporate welfarism”, and a way of “privatising public money” through state subsidies and contracts.
The arms trade is a “very fertile sector for corruption”, Feinstein said, accounting for an estimated 40 percent of global trade corruption, despite representing only 0.5 percent of global trade.
He pointed to the brazen insider trading occurring in America, including on the platform Polymarket, where President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, is an investor and sits on the advisory board.
Trades placed more than $500m in oil futures bets minutes before Trump announced “very good and productive conversations” with Iran, according to the Financial Times, suggesting insider knowledge.
“I have never seen war and conflict manipulated so nakedly for short-term profiteering… that is an element which is quite unique to the assault on Iran,” Feinstein said.
“Wars are being partly fought to enable insiders to play the stock market and to profiteer in the short term on national security announcements,” he said. There is “little attempt to hide it”.
The arms industry also has the “added advantage of secrecy”, Feinstein said. In 2010, BAE Systems was fined $400m by the American regime for corrupt deals.
Nevertheless, these companies are treated as an “arm of the state”, Feinstein explained, and their CEOs have an “incredibly high security clearance” not afforded to other industries, allowing them access to sensitive information and influence over government policy.
While defence companies are privately owned, they receive “massive subsidies” with taxpayer money through the state defence budget, while profits are “appropriated privately”, Anna Stavrianakis, professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, said.
Campaign Against Arms Trade has described the relationship between private defence companies and government as not just a “revolving door”, but an “open plan office”, illustrating the close relationship and influence the industry has over government policy.
The Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, for example, has already carried out “direct interference… with our democratic process”, Stavrianakis said, by meeting with the Home Office amid the crackdown on direct action group Palestine Action, which has targeted Elbit.
“There is a shared set of assumptions between industry and government that protest needs to be contained and that direct action needs to be repressed,” Stavrianakis said.
HIGH GAS PRICES ARE NOT THE ONLY ECONOMIC DAMAGE OF TRUMP’S AND ISRAEL’S WAR
For The Past Six Weeks, As This American-Israeli War With Iran Has Played Out, The Economic Impact Of The Conflict Has Gotten A Lot Of Attention. And Rightfully So.
As anyone who’s consumed any news about this war knows well by now, the Strait of Hormuz is a major energy chokepoint, the Iranian government did exactly what they said they were going to do if Trump and Netanyahu ordered this attack and started blocking ships tied in any way to the government’s attacking them from passing through the Strait, and the American regime, Israeli regime, or really any other government have not been able to do anything about it.
However, throughout all of this, most of the discourse about the economic impacts of the war has focused on the rising prices drivers are facing at the gas pump. That isn’t surprising, as gas prices are an early cost that impact consumers directly.
But the emphasis on pain at the pump threatens to badly understate the economic damage of this war. And it helps feed the false impression that, if this new attempt at a ceasefire holds and the war ends somewhat quickly, gas prices will fall back down as fast as they rose, and then all the global economic turmoil the world’s been worrying about will be avoided.
It won’t. A lot of economic pain has already been locked in by this war. But to really understand it, it’s necessary to keep a few important economic truths at the front of our minds.
First is the fact that the entire purpose of the economy is to produce goods and services that consumers value enough to pay for. All of the production happening anywhere in the economy is geared towards that end.
That’s relatively straightforward with the production of consumer goods. A commercial brewer, for example, chooses to produce specific beers because they think consumers will value those beers enough to pay more money than the brewer spent producing them, making it a profitable production.
But it’s also true for all the production that is not directly tied to a finished consumer good—which is, in fact, most of the production happening in the economy. Businesses produce capital goods like industrial stainless-steel mixing tanks, rubber tractor tires, plastic packaging, or the ingredients of fertilizer because there’s demand for those goods from other businesses that produce later-stage goods and, ultimately, consumer goods.
So, returning to the brewing example, all the production that results in that finished bottle of beer doesn’t begin with the brewer. It requires grain that is planted, grown, harvested, and transported to the brewery. It also requires fermenters, Brite tanks, mash tuns, and canning or bottling systems—all of which need to be produced with other capital goods like stainless steel, which itself requires other capital goods like iron ore.
Every consumer good can be viewed as the end of a long chain of production stretching all the way back to the cultivation of raw materials like iron or timber, or the creation of basic components like resins or plastics. Economists call those basic capital goods at the beginning of the chain higher order goods.
And what’s important to remember about higher order goods is that, first, almost all of them are used in many different lines of production. Iron ore is not exclusively used to help eventually produce beer, it’s used to make a lot of goods that are themselves used to make a lot of other goods. It’s what’s called a non-specific factor of production. Any change in the production of iron ore has widespread consequences across the economy.
And second, production takes time. That’s true for the production of any given good, but it’s especially true if we look across that entire chain of production. The higher order goods that are currently being produced won’t help bring about finished consumer products until months or even years down the road.
All of this is important to understand and keep in mind because the war with Iran is, so far, primarily impacting the production of higher order goods. And it goes far beyond oil.
About 8 percent of the world’s aluminum travels through the Strait. And aluminum is used across many sectors, including construction, manufacturing, and technology. Nearly a third of the world’s helium supply comes from Qatar, which is an important component in semiconductor production as well as MRI systems.
Polyethylene and other kinds of plastics and resins are also greatly affected. More than 40 percent of the world’s polyethylene is exported from the Middle East. And these are used in all stages of production in all sorts of industries—packaging, auto parts, medical equipment, consumer containers, industrial components, electronics, and much, much more.
And there are other often-neglected but extremely important hydrocarbon products being held up, such as petroleum naphtha, which is critical for refining gasoline and producing solvents for cleaning agents and paints. Natural gas condensate is another liquid hydrocarbon used in refining and to dilute other denser hydrocarbons to make them easier to transport. There’s also liquified petroleum gas, or LPG, which is mostly composed of propane and butane. These components are also important for refining as well as residential cooking and heating in many parts of the world. Much of the world’s supply of all these products is produced in the Middle East and exported through the Strait of Hormuz.
Another often-neglected yet critical higher-order good is sulfur. About half the world’s seaborne sulfur trade moves through the Strait. It’s important for refining petroleum and minerals like copper, nickel, and zinc, which are widely used in everything from electronics to medicine.
But the other major use of sulfur is as an ingredient in fertilizer. The sulfur supply shock—along with adjacent shocks in the supply of ammonia and urea, other key fertilizer components primarily exported through the Strait of Hormuz—has created a time bomb in global food markets.
Which brings us to another economic concept that is extremely important to understand if we want to fully comprehend the situation we’re now in. The problem is not merely a rise in prices but, specifically, the destruction of supply. The strikes on production facilities and the severing of supply lines mean there is now not enough supply of the components above available to meet current levels of demand. And because, again, these higher order goods are demanded for the production of lower order and consumer goods, that means, eventually, fewer consumer goods. The rising prices are a symptom of the fact that there is now less stuff available for everyone who wants it than there was before.
The fertilizer shortage provides a good example. The fact that producers cannot get their hands on the supply of ingredients like sulfuric acid, ammonia, and urea they need to meet demand means they are forced to produce less fertilizer than their customers need. Which, in turn, means those customers—industrial and family farmers—have less fertilizer to use during this year’s spring planting season. Which means they produce fewer crops. This leads to less animal feed for livestock and produce overall, resulting in an unavoidable drop in the food supply.
Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in developed countries above the poverty line will primarily experience the shortage as higher food prices. But for the millions of people who are already struggling to secure the food they need, this drop in supply may force them to go without.
That is not a choice forced on all of us by some greedy companies, it is an unavoidable consequence of the economic destruction brought about by this war.
And that same basic process is at play with all the other commodities and higher order goods that were mentioned, as can be seen in the dramatic price increases. Aluminum prices have already surged by 10 percent. Import prices for helium have jumped 50 percent. Polyethylene prices are up 37 percent. Polypropylene is up 38 percent. And the price of petroleum naphtha has tripled since February.
Remember, these price increases are not the whole story. They are the symptom of supply shortages that will work their way through all relevant lines of production and result in fewer consumer goods down the road—all from production disruption that will be slow to start back up again, even when the war is fully over.
That means fewer containers available for goods like nail polish and, yes, beer. It means fewer medical supplies, like IV bags, syringes, and sterile packaging, all of which rely on petrochemical plastics. Also, delays in construction projects as it becomes harder to source asphalt, plastics, and aluminum inputs. And dangerous health issues going undetected because of limited MRI machine availability, and much more.
And that’s not to mention, of course, the oil and LNG shortages that people are already sufficiently focused on. These commodities power nearly all stages of all lines of production and help produce the diesel and jet fuel used to physically move everything in the economy to where it needs to be.
Unlike gas prices, these effects will take some time to develop—especially in America, where our supply chain is momentarily protected from the initial impacts. And they won’t be as clearly tied to the war in the minds of most people. But the costs of all this economic destruction are real, they are substantial, and they are already locked in.
ISRAEL’S EXPANSIONIST AMBITIONS WON’T BE STOPPED BY THE CEASEFIRE IN LEBANON
Israel’s Push For Buffer Zones And ‘Natural Borders’ Suggests The Emerging Ceasefire Is Unlikely To Halt Its Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing In Southern Lebanon.
As of the time of writing, it remains to be seen whether the ceasefire announced between Lebanon and Israel will hold. Despite the undeniable relief in many quarters, from Beirut to Tel Aviv to Washington, it still feels more like a forced, reluctant sop from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Donald Trump than a genuine turning point in Israel’s stated campaign to occupy the south of the country.
It’s not much of a sop, either: What Trump needs from Netanyahu is for him to stop bombing Lebanon, to align the mismatched expectations of Iran and the American regime under their fragile ceasefire. So far, Netanyahu has managed to initiate talks without halting the bombing, and even these talks are an anomaly in the two countries’ shared history.
Given Israel’s propensity to undermine ceasefires and negotiations — whether it is a party to them or not — and its track record of assassinating negotiators mid-process, it seems likely that the Israel-Lebanon dynamic will revert to type before long. This is especially true given that Lebanon is Netanyahu’s nearest and most convenient arena for blowing up Tehran–Washington negotiations and resuming an all-out war before American forces can withdraw.
There is, of course, a specific Israeli-Lebanese history. No other Israeli border has been as consistently restive for so long, and no outside actor has inflicted devastation on Lebanon as routinely or as dramatically as Israel: from cross-border raids in the first decades of statehood, to full-scale invasion in 1982, to the current war — the most lethal conflict in Lebanon since the devastating civil war of 1975-1990.
Lebanon has also been the unwilling setting for a more definitive strain of Israeli wars — those against the Palestinian national movement — and the site of the last major public paroxysm of Israeli conscience, when hundreds of thousands protested the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which were facilitated and enabled by the Israeli army.
There are several reasons why Israel is ignoring opportunities for a peace agreement with the Lebanese government (the current half-hearted engagement, conducted under fire, cannot yet be taken seriously) and instead prefers to bomb, invade, exploit proxies, and, as of this year, ethnically cleanse and openly promise to annex the country.
The two lesser reasons are those cited by both Israel’s supporters and its critics: David Ben-Gurion’s stale security doctrine, which holds that Israel’s natural border is the Litani River, and its stunted sibling, the buffer zone doctrine, now being deployed in both Lebanon and Gaza.
Ben-Gurion first proposed the Litani as the “natural border” of a future Jewish state back in 1918, arguing that the river marked a demographic and economic boundary between the Galilee and Mount Lebanon proper. Over the years, a particularly expansionist faction has adopted his demarcation of southern Lebanon as merely the “northern Galilee,” and the steep-banked river has acquired a new military aura as a more defensible border than the current one. Proponents of annexation and settlement in southern Lebanon invoke ideological, territorial and military arguments.
At the same time, another Israeli military doctrine — the buffer zone — has acquired a fresh lease on life as a putative endgame of the current war. Its logic is to push the front line away from Israel’s internationally recognized borders, especially from civilian communities; in contrast to a demilitarized zone, a buffer zone presumes freedom of operation for the Israeli military.
A PRETEXT FOR ETHNIC CLEANSING?
Unlike expanding Israeli sovereignty to the Litani, the buffer zone idea has been attempted before in Lebanon, during Israel’s 18-year occupation of the country from 1982 to 2000. It proved a resounding failure.
Hezbollah rockets were launched from within the buffer zone into Israeli communities even more frequently than before the occupation, while Israeli soldiers operating in southern Lebanon became constant targets. After hundreds of casualties and amid mass protests at home, the Israeli army withdrew unilaterally. Now both approaches are being proposed again, with the added claim that because Hezbollah relied on support from the civilian population, those civilians must be expelled.
Wildly misreading the lived experience of the heterogenous and interwoven Lebanese society, Israel is reportedly planning to expel only Shia residents, warning Sunni and Christian residents not to harbor their neighbors — a chilling instruction on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Morality aside, there is no reason to assume either doctrine has become more workable in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. A river may serve as an obstacle for infantry, mechanized units, and heavy armor; it might even impede the movement of heavy artillery (though Israel is indeed the only actor utilizing artillery in this particular theater at the moment). But today, from Ukraine to Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the bulk of warfare takes place in the air: Drones, rockets, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles can easily traverse rivers and proposed buffer zones alike, retaining momentum even as ground operations are minimal or deadlocked.
This should be obvious from Israel’s experience with Iranian missiles alone — fired from thousands of kilometers away — but Hezbollah has also launched rockets hundreds of kilometers into Israeli territory. That means the group can move two, three, or four times beyond the Litani and still strike Israeli communities at will.
Even if such a buffer zone were established, Israel would likely seek to retain “operational freedom” far beyond it, and it is only a matter of time before someone proposes pushing the demarcation line up, even deeper into Lebanon.
So why is Israel insisting on this antiquated plan, openly carrying out mass ethnic cleansing in its service? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the causality is, in fact, reversed. Just as in Gaza, where buffer zones serve as a pretext to corral residents of the already crowded enclave into 12 percent of its territory; just as in the West Bank, where “security areas” and “firing zones” have been used to disrupt Palestinian agriculture and push communities off the land, what we are seeing in Lebanon is buffer zones in service of ethnic cleansing, not the other way around.
While the loudly proclaimed endgame of annexation is especially salient for expansionist elements within Netanyahu’s coalition, the “liberal” opposition can’t help but roll over when “national security” is invoked. Some, like opposition leader Yair Lapid, have even promoted the depopulated buffer zone idea as though it were a moderate, halfway measure compared to open-ended expansionist wars.
As elsewhere, the Israeli right is more than willing to let moderates meet it halfway — then halfway again, and again — until the distinction between them all but disappears.
And there is another, deeper reason for the decades-long refusal to pursue a serious, equitable peace agreement with Lebanon. For Netanyahu and many other Israelis, diplomacy and compromise devalue any achievement that could have been secured by force alone, because they suggest that further compromises might follow. In Israel, there is a near-intoxication with hegemonic power, a belief that the sacrifices and losses incurred in pursuing objectives through force are preferable to the uneasy uncertainty that comes as a result of treating other regional actors as equals.
Finally, there is a more immediate incentive for continuing attacks in Lebanon. Whether through oversight or design, the American regime initially failed to include Lebanon in the initial terms of its ceasefire with Iran (contradicting Netanyahu’s own framing of Lebanon as Iran’s forward operating base). This left Netanyahu with a wide opening to collapse the American–Iran ceasefire before it can solidify into meaningful negotiations, and, more critically, before the American regime begins drawing down forces from the Gulf.
This opening remains even as a ceasefire is announced also in Lebanon; Ceasefires are fragile, especially when one or more of the parties are compelled by external actors, and especially when it’s unclear if Hezbollah is meant to be a party to the negotiations — however indirect — or a target. Netanyahu wants the war to resume; he wants America to invade; and he wants state collapse in Iran. He appears to believe he is within reach of that outcome. If the American regime withdraws now, amid midterm pressures at home and a precarious political moment in Israel, he knows such an opportunity may not come again in his lifetime.
Hidden History -- In The Making 