[News] The Iran Fiasco: Trump and Israel Go Down the Drain together

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestinechronicle.com
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-iran-fiasco-trump-and-israel-go-down-the-drain-together/>
The Iran Fiasco: Trump and Israel Go Down the Drain togetherApril 17, 2026
------------------------------
US President Donald Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. (Photo: video
grab. Design: Palestine Chronicle)

*By Jeremy Salt <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/jeremy-salt>*

No options are left. Israel is going to bully its way to regional
domination or more probably, eventually come down with a thunderous crash
that will shake the world.

It took no time at all after the declaration of a ceasefire for Israel to
declare that it would continue attacking Lebanon. The suspension of
fighting on that front was explicit in Iran’s 10-point memorandum on which
acceptance of the ceasefire was based. Israeli attacks on other ‘resistance
fronts’ – Gaza and Lebanon predominant – would also have to stop.

But they did not, and literally within ten minutes on April 8, mass
bombardment killed more than 350 Lebanese civilians, many of them women and
children. This was Israel’s operation of ‘Eternal Darkness,’ and Lebanon’s
‘Black Wednesday

Israel is now destroying all the Lebanese villages along the 1949 armistice
line. The operation is called ‘Operation Silver Plow.’ Israel Katz, the war
criminal who holds the title of ‘defense minister,’ said, “All the houses
are being removed,” not that they were being blown up.

The latest ‘victory’ is the vengeful destruction of the football stadium in
the town of Bint Jbeil, where Hasan Nasrallah gave his ‘spider’s web’
speech in 2000 after Israeli ground troops ran like frightened rabbits from
the occupied south.

The pilots of the 50 planes who murdered hundreds of civilians in the
ten-minute attack on ‘Black Wednesday’ were at no risk because Lebanon has
no air force to speak of. They knew they were killing civilians.
Presumably, in a court charged with war crimes, they would argue they were
just obeying orders.

Despite the mass murder of their own citizens, the (Sunni) prime minister
and the (Maronite) president immediately opened negotiations in Washington
with the regime committing these crimes.

The ceasefire that Israel has violated every day since it was declared is
not even on the agenda. The only item on the Israeli-dictated agenda was
disarming (Shia) Hezbollah. As always, the worst of the enemies in
‘confessional’ Lebanon are within its borders.

For 80 years, the evidence of Israeli barbarity has accumulated in a
massive pile. The mind goes back to the shelling of Gaza’s markets in the
1950s, the bombing of the Bahar al Bakr primary school in 1970, killing 46
students and wounding 50, the shooting down in 1973 of a Libyan airliner
that had lost its way in a sandstorm, killing 108 passengers and crew.

In Beirut that year, this writer saw the photos of a village mukhtar’s
Mercedes crushed by a tank rolling into southern Lebanon. The mukhtar had
driven out of the village with elderly female relatives packed into the car
when the tank appeared on the crest of a hill. He didn’t have to turn
around, and the tank just rolled over the car, crushing its occupants into
a pile of metal about two feet thick.

This war crime never made the news, and the pilot never would have been
punished because the same regime that administers ‘justice’ is responsible
for these endless atrocities.

The ‘occupation’ is just the tip of a massive pyramid of state criminality
going back to the 1930s, when Zionist settlers were rolling ‘barrel bombs’
from the back of a truck into Palestinian markets. Whether they were men,
women or children didn’t matter. Their ‘crime’ was being Palestinian and
the owners of every way of the land the Zionists were going to steal.

The onslaught on Iran has so far involved the killing of about 3500
civilians, including hundreds of children. The attacks have been launched
at civilian targets across the country, including schools, universities,
hospitals, residential buildings, oil and energy depots and a gas field.

The damage to the Gandhi hospital included the total destruction of the IVF
department, thus recalling the destruction of nine out of ten IVF clinics
in Gaza, with the loss of thousands of embryos in what UN officials called
a “textbook example” of genocide.

Gaza was the template for the mass destruction in Iran and Lebanon,
beginning with the murder of Hasan Nasrallah in September 2024.

The mass bombardment of Beirut at that time was followed by the pager and
walkie-talkie attacks, rigged so that they would blow up in the hands of
the people holding them. In an extra vicious touch, sufficient time was
allowed for them to be raised to the face before they exploded.

Thirty-two people were killed, and 3250 wounded, including children and
medics. Some were blinded, some had their fingers blown off. OCHR (the UN
Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights) called the attacks a
“terrifying” violation of international law.

Netanyahu celebrated by giving Trump a golden copy of a pager to mark the
occasion. The pager attack was a war crime but Trump thanked Netanyahu and
praised such a “great operation.”

In the operation ‘Eternal Darkness’, 160 bombs were dropped on Beirut and
more than 40 towns across Lebanon in ten minutes. The targets ranged from
the Beka’a valley to Suq al Gharb and Kaifoun in the hills around the
mountain resort town of Aley, east of Beirut. The dead included at least 70
women and 30 children.

The latest revelations about the barbarity of the regime come from Euro-Med
Human Rights Monitor. The subject is again the complete depravity within
Israeli prisons, including the infamous Sde Teiman.

In July 2025, Israeli prison guards were videoed sexually assaulting a
Palestinian prisoner (apparently with a baton) behind the cover of their
shield, causing serious internal injury. Five soldiers were charged.
Despite the evidence, these charges were recently dropped by the military
because of “procedural difficulties.”

This prison is especially notorious for the sadism and cruelty within its
walls. Accusations of rape and even rape by dogs trained for the task have
been made before, but Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has now added more
detail in a 69-page report on torture in Israeli prisons, ‘Another Genocide
Behind Walls.’

The report is based on evidence from former prisoners. Female prisoners in
particular were reluctant to talk about what they had endured, but the
picture that emerges corroborates accounts already told going back several
years.

One woman who did give evidence was raped day after day. Male prisoners
were sodomized with metal rods, wooden sticks and even fire extinguisher
nozzles, causing serious internal injuries. Actual male-on-male rape was
reported in at least one act. Prisoners were also beaten around the
testicles with kicks and rifle butts, so badly that the testicle of one
prisoner had to be removed.

The intention is not just humiliation but psychological destruction. The
intention of stripping naked male prisoners in Gaza and order them to squat
blindfolded in helpless rows was the same.

Electrocution was also used in the Sde Teiman attacks, but the most
depraved acts of all were the use of dogs trained to ‘rape’ prisoners,
again confirming the evidence of former Sde Teiman prisoners going back
several years.

After 80 years, no more evidence is needed to pass judgment on Israel. When
it was admitted to UN membership in 1949, it swore to abide by the UN
Charter. Instead, it has violated it at every turn. It has rejected every
single resolution upholding the rights of the Palestinan people. Its war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international law
could not be contained in a shelf of books.

Apart from the fact that it never should have been created on someone
else’s land, Israel should have been suspended long ago from the UN for the
crimes it was committing and expelled if it still refused to live within
the law. If it wants to behave like an outlaw, it should surely be treated
as an outlaw.

In an article written for Consortium News (‘Ending Israel’s War on Peace,’
April 10), Jeffrey Sachs says the US “must join the rest of the world to
force Israel to live within its internationally recognized borders of June
4, 1967.’

Unfortunately, the “rest of the world” is doing nothing to force Israel to
live within these borders, so there is nothing for the US to join. It
wouldn’t anyway. Israel doesn’t even say what its hypothetical borders are
because it wants to leave them open for further expansion. Why would the
world want to recognize the borders of a state when it refuses to recognize
them itself?

Furthermore, Israel’s “internationally recognized borders” is an assumption
that is questionable in law. The outstanding example is West Jerusalem. The
US and a handful of other states might recognize West Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital, but it is as much stolen and occupied as the eastern part of the
city. The partition resolution of 1947 set it aside as a *corpus separatum*
to be placed under international administration. Israel had no intention of
respecting that and managed to seize half the city before international
intervention brought the war to an end.

Although West Jerusalem had a predominant population of recently arrived
Jewish settlers, the great bulk of land and fixed property across the city
belonged to Palestinian Muslims and Christians. ‘Still belongs,’ it would
be more appropriate to say. The passage of time does not change the nature
of stolen property.

There is no logical, moral, or legal reason why occupied West Jerusalem
should be treated differently from occupied East Jerusalem or why the
Palestinians of the 1948 generation should be left aside in any
hypothetical negotiations with Israel. The starting point for any
settlement in the unlikely event that the point is ever reached is 1948,
not 1967.

The West Bank is no longer a bargaining chip, not that it ever really was.
The Jewish settler population is about 530,000, with a further 250,000 in
East Jerusalem and 50,000 on the occupied Golan Heights.

Israel has just turned 34 ‘outposts’ into settlements and is steadily
building up the Jewish settler population in occupied Syria. It has no
intention of handing back any stolen territory. Jeffrey Sachs says the
world should force Israel to live within the law. How this could be done,
he doesn’t say.

In the US, opposition to Israel has risen to heights thought unclimbable
just a few years ago. Pew Research polling in late March 2026 shows a 60%
unfavourable view, compared to 53% in 2025 and 40% in 2022. ‘Very
unfavourable’ is up from 10% in 2022 to 28% in 2026. No confidence in
Netanyahu to ‘do the right thing’ polled at 59%.

Among registered Democrats, the 80% unfavourable view of Israel has risen
from 69% in 2025 and 53% in 2022. Among older Republicans, 58% favourable
compares to 41% unfavorable, but amongst the younger (18-49), 57%
unfavorable has risen from 50% in 2025.

These statistics can be coupled with a parallel drop in approval of Trump’s
job performance. Current polling shows 40% job approval and 59%
disapproval. Support has crashed within his own MAGA movement, with former
loyalist Candace Owen calling him a “genocidal lunatic” after he threatened
to destroy Iran “as a civilization.”

These two sets of figures point to an obvious solution for Trump – blame
Israel. After all, Netanyahu and Mossad chief David Barnea clearly deceived
him. He expected a short victorious war against Iran and instead got a
long, losing one, so why not pay them back?

He owes Israel nothing. The relationship is entirely transactional. He used
Israel’s billionaire backers, and they used him. They might still need him,
but almost at the end of his political life, does he really need them?

The American public is clearly ready for a break with Israel. The ‘special
relationship’ is on its last legs, but Trump is showing no sign of wanting
to cash in on American disenchantment by shifting the blame for the Iranian
fiasco to Israel.

Given Trump’s narcissistic nature, this seems out of character so maybe
there’s something Epstein gave to Mossad after all that could ruin him.

There is nothing left to talk about with Israel now. The ‘peace’
conversation has been totally exhausted. No options are left. Israel is
going to bully its way to regional domination or more probably, eventually
come down with a thunderous crash that will shake the world.


*– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus
University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years,
specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent
publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History
of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The
Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press,
2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.*
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial
position of The Palestine Chronicle.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20260417/c0b9f06d/attachment-0001.htm>