Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared a new military operation in the occupied West Bank to collectively punish the people of al-Khalil, all in the lead-up to the scheduled national elections early next week. Is the Premier playing with fire?
Following years of ever-escalating settler violence and the intensification of Israel’s military occupation across the occupied West Bank, two Palestinian men in their twenties – Hamouda and Firas al-Ja’ba – decided to carry out a resistance operation against an Israeli army guard post.
The two resistance fighters carried out their attack, injuring four Israeli soldiers and killing two, using pistols and a rifle near the Farsh al-Hawa checkpoint in al-Khalil. The Israeli army called in backup, leading to an armed clash in which both of the Palestinians were killed during a 20-minute clash.
From the CCTV footage of the clash, it appears as if the two Palestinians were not professionally trained and acted alone. No Palestinian movement claimed the attack, although it was widely praised. Israel was quick to blame Hamas and then launch a new military campaign targeting the entire city of al-Khalil.
There are a number of reasons that the attack, which, although the most significant carried out in the West Bank in over a year, is not exactly unusual, has been reacted to in the way we see today.
One reason for this enormous overreaction is that Netanyahu is looking for a boost in the polls. He evidently believes that by launching a brutal crackdown in the West Bank, his population will respond positively and he may win some more votes come Tuesday.
This is why the Israeli Prime Minister claimed that the planned campaign against al-Khalil will be an operation “unlike any seen since the Six-Day War”. He is trying to play on Israeli nationalism, referencing the June 1967 war, during which the Israelis occupied the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. Evidently, this is hyperbole, but it doesn’t mean that the campaign will not be brutal.
Another reason why the attack has been transformed into such a major issue is that it is massively embarrassing to both the Israeli army and Netanyahu personally. Although the two Palestinian fighters do not appear to have had any professional training and did not act on behalf of any resistance group, the Israeli media, military, and government are saying the opposite.
The Israelis are claiming that Hamas was involved; they are also spinning a hero story that by calling in backup they managed to thwart a much larger attack that was planned on Israeli settlers and that what happened was actually a success story of sorts.
This is because the truth exposes the unprofessionalism and cowardice of the Israeli occupation soldiers. Two untrained individuals managed to kill a Staff Sergeant and a Sergeant, injured four others, while all the female soldiers on scene hid from the attackers. In addition to this, it took 20 minutes for them to take care of the threat posed to their forces; they also needed to call in backup despite clearly outnumbering the two gunmen already. Accepting the reality would mean accepting that the army is pretty incompetent, and the Israeli public will believe any narrative that allows them to ignore this truth.
Another element of this is that if you tell the public that the Israeli army managed to thwart a major attack, it shows that under Netanyahu’s leadership, he has learned the lesson from October 7, 2023. The narrative being sold to Israelis is that now the army is acting pre-emptively; it is launching a major campaign to prevent another major attack like the one that happened on October 7. Israelis also simply enjoy watching Palestinians suffer.
However, by launching such a collective punishment campaign, there is a chance that the Israelis could end up getting burned, even if not immediately. West Bank Palestinians have been placed under tremendous pressure; by launching an intensive campaign of this nature, it could end up pushing some people over the edge.
Although the rhetoric surrounding the campaign suggests that the Israeli military is seeking to turn the largest populated city in the occupied West Bank into Gaza, this is unlikely to be what they will do. Instead, they will carry out raids, make life an inconvenience, even more than before, likely killing some innocent people while kidnapping random Palestinians while going through their neighborhoods.
The most intensity will be focused on a few specific neighborhoods that will get the worst treatment. But escalating too hard, too fast, could end up triggering a unifying event, especially due to the Israeli soldiers being psychotic and not even following their own rules. Ultimately, it is because of the checkpoints, killings, torture, and daily harassment that Palestinians carry out resistance attacks like the one we saw this Friday morning.
It is only a matter of time until the pressure being placed upon the people of the West Bank will explode. What makes this predicament starkly different from that of Gaza is that when the situation deteriorates, the Israelis have already entrenched themselves so deeply within that territory that they are extremely exposed.
Netanyahu loves to pledge his intentions to collapse the Palestinian Authority (PA) and annex the West Bank, but this is just posturing for gullible Israeli fanatics who don’t understand how everything works. If the PA does collapse and there is a push to annex the territory officially, then the settlements will be indefensible.
Just as the Israeli public truly believes that they have “the most moral army on earth”, they also believe that they are physically superior too. The former is about as accurate as the latter.
During the Gaza Genocide, the West Bank strategy has been to subdue the Palestinians through brute force and to collaborate with the PA in order to ensure there is no major uprising. It has, until now, worked. However, that strategy of constant torment and increasing pressure also “worked” until October 7, 2023.
People will not live under such horrendous conditions forever; it is only a matter of time before the situation there dramatically changes. Such a shift could occur over something relatively small. When you constantly play with fire, you get burnt.
If the West Bank’s population were to enter a sustained popular uprising, the Israeli military would struggle to subdue it. In the event that other fronts of its regional war were to open, this could be a major strategic catastrophe.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
The speaker of the Yemeni House of Representatives has denounced the European Parliament’s push to blacklist the Ansarullah resistance movement, saying the step is rooted in hypocrisy and double standards.
In a statement on Saturday, Yahya Ali Ahmed al-Raee emphasized that the legislature’s stance on Yemen is nothing more than a political cover for the war crimes being perpetrated by Saudi Arabia and its forces against the Yemeni nation.
“The European Parliament’s latest resolution is a clear sign of double standards and hypocrisy. It is an attempt to distort the position of the Sana’a-based Yemeni government, and blatantly ignores its repeated guarantees and commitment to international maritime security,” he noted.
Raee stated that the European Parliament should have designated Israel as the source of terrorism, given the genocidal crimes it is committing in the Gaza Strip.
The senior Yemeni official noted that the legislative body of the European Union has turned a blind eye to the crimes of genocide, murder, siege, and starvation that the Yemeni people have been enduring for more than 12 years as a result of vicious Saudi assaults and blockade.
He also called on the European Parliament to dispatch a parliamentary delegation to Yemen and document the firsthand crimes and aggression that Saudi Arabia is committing against the Yemeni people.
On Thursday, the European Parliament called on the Council of the European Union to designate Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement as a terrorist organization, including its political and military wings, leadership, and military and security apparatus.
In a resolution, the lawmakers also called for dismantling the group’s funding channels and freezing its funds, economic resources, and assets belonging to entities facilitating its activities.
The resolution strongly condemned retaliatory Yemeni missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, as well as attacks targeting energy infrastructure and commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
The Sana’a administration announced a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia on July 20, in retaliation for “an unjust and oppressive siege” on Yemen that has continued for almost 12 years.
The Yemeni military has reported multiple successful operations targeting ships associated with Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its allies enacted a blockade on Yemen and initiated a large-scale war on the Arab country, with support from the United States and various Western nations in terms of military, political, and logistical resources.
The war has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Yemenis. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia has not succeeded in achieving its goal of restoring a puppet government that aligns with its interests.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf says a United Arab Emirates diplomat’s bid to become the next United Nations secretary-general aims to clear the diplomatic runway for Israel’s expansionist and aggressive ambitions under the so-called “Greater Israel” scheme.
Qalibaf made the remarks in a post on X on Sunday, saying UAE Minister of State Lana Nusseibeh’s candidacy for the UN’s top job also aims to whitewash Israel’s “systematic genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
He added that defending the Gaza tragedy had become a résumé for the UAE’s decision to seek the UN post, drawing a comparison between the country’s pursuit of the position and a fox seeking a job guarding a henhouse.
“Defending the Gaza tragedy is the résumé; the fox is updating the LinkedIn profile to apply for the henhouse guard job,” the top Iranian parliamentarian wrote.
Qalibaf’s post came after Nusseibeh announced her candidacy for the post of United Nations secretary-general on Wednesday, becoming the first woman to seek to lead the world body in its 80-year history.
Nusseibeh, a former UAE ambassador to the UN for more than a decade, brings Palestinian roots and defense of her country’s historic relations with Israel to her candidacy.
She has also faced sharp criticism over the UAE’s alleged role in backing paramilitary fighters who have killed thousands in Sudan’s civil war. The UAE has denied the claims.
In a post on her X, Nusseibeh said she is entering the race because the UN needs to act more urgently, bring people together, and drive the work forward until it produces concrete results.
“That is how we rebuild trust in the United Nations and ensure it delivers meaningful change for the people it exists to serve,” she wrote.
More than 74,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, when the Israeli regime launched its genocidal war on the beseiged territory.
At US conference, viral video creator Nuseir Yassin says Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only a big deal globally because Palestinians have 'the most hated type of enemy -- the Jews'
Israeli soldiers have looted and demolished the family home of Radwan Mortada, a prominent Lebanese investigative journalist who directed the recent viral Al Jazeera 360 documentary “The Trap.” The filmexposes the surreptitious network and planning behind Israel’s notorious pager attack, which left hundreds of Lebanese citizens wounded and maimed, and has become one of the channel’s most-watched in recent history.
Israel’s destruction of Mortada family home on October 17 has drawn condemnation from at least one international press freedom group, the Committee to Protect Journalists. On October 21, the organization issued a statement declaring that it “strongly condemns the Israeli military’s demolition of journalist Radwan Mortada’s family home in southern Lebanon. Just three weeks earlier, Mortada released an Al Jazeera documentary on the Israeli 2024 pager attack. In the days leading up to the demolition, Israeli soldiers launched a sound bomb, a tank tore down the entrance, and soldiers looted personal belongings. CPJ fears this destruction is in retaliation for Mortada’s work, marking another dangerous violation of international law and disregard for the press.”
Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada's investigation into Israel’s pager attacks is one of Al Jazeera most-watched documentaries
Mortada tells The Grayzone's @wyattreed13 how he tracked key players in the attack and got a hold of an unexploded pager
Speaking to The Grayzone, Mortada recalled how he learned that Israel’s military forces destroyed the estate he and his family had painstakingly constructed over almost a decade.
Pillaged and burned
“The story began on Friday, when someone sent me a photo of an Israeli Merkava tank parked right next to my house. A few days earlier, Israeli soldiers had arrived in a pickup truck and looted the contents of the house. And they destroyed the entrance” to the building as well, Mortada recounted.
“It never crossed my mind that they would plant explosives inside and blow it up, especially since my house is not in the Israeli-occupied area, there are no military positions nearby, and it is not a combat zone.”
Nevertheless, “at around 4 am on Saturday, they blew it up. I woke up to phone calls from neighbors in the village telling me, ‘The Israelis have blown up your house.’” Cell phone photos and footage confirmed the distressing news, he says.
“My village, Aita al-Jabal, is not under Israeli occupation, and my house is not within the so-called yellow line,” Mortada explains. There were no clashes or military activities in the area, he notes, and no military facilities or positions anywhere nearby. It is, he says, “a purely residential area.”
Exterior shots show the impressively detailed traditional Lebanese style home built by the Mortada family before Israeli soldiers looted the building and rigged it with explosives.
“Most importantly, the house was not destroyed by an airstrike or during any military confrontation,” he continues. “Israeli soldiers physically entered the property, planted explosives inside the house, and deliberately blew it up.”
While Mortada acknowledges he has no “concrete evidence” that Israel destroyed his family home in retaliation for the success of his documentary, he tells The Grayzone, “I do have suspicions, mainly because of the way the house was destroyed.”
Unlike other houses in the area that were damaged by airstrikes or shelling, Mortada notes, his house was deliberately blown up with explosives planted inside it. Israeli soldiers had occupied the house for several days before looting it and destroying it, video reviewed by The Grayzone shows.
“What makes this particularly suspicious is that my house is not in an Israeli-occupied area, nor is it within the so-called yellow line,” he says. “It is nowhere near a frontline or an active combat zone.”
He lamented, “Israeli hatred and vindictiveness seem to know no bounds.”
Mortada’s home in Aita al-Jabal was located approximately 4 kilometers outside of the so-called “Yellow Line,” a supposed buffer zone Israel unilaterally declared in Lebanese territory which it claims to be clearing of Hezbollah. If Israel’s soldiers didn’t simply rob and demolish the estate out of spite, it could signal an expansion of the areas Israel is targeting.
Interior photos provided by the Mortada family show the intricate stone archways which adorned their home prior to its demolition by Israel.
The first sign of trouble came when Israeli occupation forces assaulted a caretaker who had been living at the house with his family, looking after the garden, Mortada noted. “Israeli soldiers launched a stun grenade at him to force him and his family to leave the property.”
The grenade “was essentially a warning to the caretaker to leave the property with his family. Around the same time, Israeli forces also targeted a water tanker that was delivering water to the house. These incidents made it clear that they wanted him and his family to leave,” he says.
It’s a familiar feeling for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians who’ve been forced to flee the region. Meanwhile, senior Israeli officials have spent months openly boasting of their efforts to destroy every Lebanese home south of the Litani River, and compare the campaign favorably to their systematic annihilation of Gaza. “All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed, in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza,” Israeli defense minister Israel Katz declared in March.
In August, Katz deemed his mass displacement project – dubbed “Operation Silver Plow” – a success, crowing that residents of 24 villages in southern Lebanon now “have nowhere to return to; everything there has been destroyed.”
Now, the boasts have grown even bolder. With blue-and-white flags continuing to appear throughout swathes of occupied southern Lebanon, Israel’s leaders have eagerly provided live commentary of the slow-motion genocide. As an adoring audience cheered inside Israel’s Channel 14 studios on October 17, 2026, Katz declared that the number of villages annihilated by his forces had grown to 60. “Every single village — we’re talking about 23,000 homes — is in ruins.”
For Mortada, Israel’s aggression speaks for itself. “I believe Israel is undoubtedly carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon,” he says. “The objective, in my view, is clear: to prevent the people of southern Lebanon from returning to their villages and their land.”
In the past, “Israel at least attempted to justify its actions by claiming that it was targeting Hezbollah fighters or military positions. Today, however, it has become utterly brazen. Israeli officials openly speak about displacing the population, while their forces systematically destroy homes, infrastructure, and even bulldoze roads.”
“This is not simply about military operations. I believe it is a deliberate attempt to make entire villages uninhabitable and force their residents off their land permanently.”
“Perhaps, ultimately, this is also part of a broader ambition to realize the ideological vision of a so-called ‘Greater Israel,’” Mortada adds.
‘More than a home’
Combined with his testimony, photos of the now-destroyed home give a small glimpse of the loss incurred by the Mortada family when occupying Israeli soldiers seized everything of value and carried out a controlled demolition of the building.
“This house was much more than a home to us. It was a place where three generations of our family’s memories came together.”
Three generations of the Mortada family enjoying the home before its destruction by Israel. Pictured are Radwan Mortada; his daughter, Faya; his wife, Nohad, and his father, Nizar.
When Mortada’s father, Nizar, returned to Lebanon after two decades spent working in Libya, “his dream was to build a peaceful home where he and my mother could grow old together, surrounded by family and the land he had always loved.”
“He chose that particular spot for a very personal reason: There were several olive trees he had planted with his father, my grandfather, when he was just a little boy.”
With his golden years approaching, Mortada’s father expressed a desire to build his home beside those same trees. “For him, it was a way of returning to his childhood, his roots, and the memory of his own father,” he explains.
Mortada explained that the home also “carries the memory of my brother Ali,” who died in 2016 at age 29. Ali suffered medical malpractice after having contracted a bacterial infection during Beirut’s garbage crisis, a tragedy which Mortada says “reflected the corruption and failure of Lebanon’s political system.”
When Mortada family buried Ali in the village of Aita al-Jabal, the family resolved to build a home that would keep his memory alive, and bring them together in their time of grief. “Until then, my siblings, Jawad and Nada, and I had never felt such a deep connection to the village,” Mortada said. “Losing Ali changed that. We wanted to be close to him, and building the house became our way of keeping that connection alive.”
Photos provided by the Mortada family show Radwan’s now-deceased brother, Ali.
The family broke ground on the house in March 2016, shortly after his death.
Having “always loved traditional Lebanese architecture,” Mortada wanted the house to preserve as much as possible of the country’s rapidly-disappearing aesthetic traditions. “At a time when beautiful old houses were being demolished to make way for concrete buildings, we did the opposite,” he says. “We collected stones and architectural elements from ruined heritage homes and used them to create something beautiful again.”
The family spent nearly eight years working on it, carefully considering every detail.
“I approached the process as though I were painting a picture,” Mortada recalls. “It was a labor of love, and we poured so much of ourselves into it.”
Stained-glass windows and hand-painted frescoes lined the home’s walls and ceilings. It’s unclear exactly which paintings and treasures were looted by Israeli troops.
His wife, Nahod, recalled her husband’s excitement in a social media post explaining the significance of the home that Israel demolished later that day: “When I told my husband that I was pregnant with my first child, he was silent for a few seconds. His pupils were shrinking, he seemed to be doing a precise calculation. “When you give birth, the house will be finished,” he said with an enthusiasm I had never heard before.”
“He meticulously attended to every detail, carefully selected the furniture, altered some of the rooms to suit his unborn child, and even built a chicken coop “so my children can experience village life.””
In addition to paying tribute to the memory of his brother, the lovingly-constructed house was also the culmination of a lifetime of hopes and dreams of the entire family, Radwan Mortada tells The Grayzone.
“For my father, the house represented the peaceful retirement he had worked so hard for. For my mother, it was a family home filled with love. And for my siblings and me, it was a place where we could feel close to Ali,” he says.
“That is what the Israeli soldiers destroyed. Not simply walls and furniture, but a home built around the memories of people we loved, including those who are no longer with us.”
Left: Radwan’s brother, Jawad, and father, Nizar, are filling the backyard pool. Right: Radwan’s daughter, Faya, with her father and grandfather.
Compounding the pain of the loss of the family home, Mortada says, is “the feeling of abandonment” by the country’s leaders, who were imposed on Lebanon’s populace by the United States and Saudi Arabia in an effort to force Beirut to normalize relations with Israel. He names Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam as among those principally responsible for the impunity enjoyed by Israel as it bulldozes dozens of villages in the South.
“The Lebanese government has done virtually nothing to protect the people of southern Lebanon or provide meaningful support to those who have lost their homes. People feel they have been left entirely on their own. We have seen no serious action capable of stopping the destruction, nor an adequate diplomatic or legal response, even at the level of the UN Security Council.”
“I believe what is happening in southern Lebanon amounts to ethnic cleansing. Homes are being destroyed, villages are being emptied, and people are being prevented from returning to their land, while the international community remains largely silent.”
Left: Nizar outside the gates of his newly-finished family home. Center and right: Radwan and his wife, Nohad, are seen playing with their daughter, Faya.
“We can rebuild a house. We have done it before, and I hope we will do it again. But how do you replace the years, the memories, and the love that went into creating it?”
“My father wanted to spend his final years beside the olive trees he planted with his father as a child. My siblings and I wanted to have a home near the grave of my brother, and I wanted my children, Faya and Azer, to grow up there, surrounded by our family’s memories. Is that too much to ask?”
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Amidst widespread confusion about the Saudi-Yemen War, British journalist Sami Hamdi has weighed in on the debate. Unfortunately, his stance and analysis not only miss the mark, but are replete with factual errors, undemonstrable assumptions, and an incorrect timeline of how events transpired.
Until recently, the war in Yemen has long been ignored by the corporate media in the West. Despite the conflict being over a decade old, most references to it highlighted a humanitarian crisis and presented a narrative that a Saudi-Iranian proxy war was raging on. “The Houthis” have been labeled as terrorists, and many have found it rather difficult to understand what is truly going on inside the country.
Therefore, the goal of this article is to push back against Sami Hamdi’s portrayal of events inside the country and provide key context that will help a wider audience understand this issue in greater depth. It is not an attack on Hamdi himself, or an attempt to discredit him as a journalist; instead, it is a criticism of his narrative on this issue and a correction of false information he has presented.
The “Both Sides” Argument
Note: Sami Hamdi refuses to call Ansarallah by the actual adopted name of their movement and instead uses the label “Houthis”, which is considered derogatory and tribalistic by their supporters inside Yemen. To be clear, “the Houthis” is used interchangeably with Ansarallah.
The crux of Hamdi’s argument rests upon the narrative that both sides in the war are in the wrong, presenting his analysis as coming from a somewhat neutral stance. He also draws a moral equivalency between the ills of “the Houthis”, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In this regard, he has argued that “the Saudis and the Houthis agree that Yemenis should not have the right to choose their leader”, going a step further to even posit that “the Saudis and Houthis believe that Yemen should not belong to Yemenis”.
To begin with, Ansarallah are a Yemeni movement composed entirely of Yemenis, publicly arguing that their war effort is to return Yemen to its people. Therefore, the concept that they don’t believe that Yemen should belong to Yemenis themselves makes little sense. The argument he employs additionally tries to separate Ansarallah from the Yemeni people, framing the issue as if they are a kind of foreign occupier.
In order to justify this claim, Hamdi argues that “the Houthis” imposed themselves on the country and do not even represent any authentic will of the Yemeni people. This not only attempts to relegate the Houthi family themselves, but also the millions of followers of the Ansarallah movement and its supporters, which represent a large portion of the nation’s populace.
A moral equivalency argument also does not work here. Ansarallah is an indigenous Yemeni movement that runs a government out of the nation’s Capital City and rules over the majority of the nation’s population. Saudi Arabia is a foreign country that has imposed a blockade on Yemen’s people for over a decade. The land, naval, and aerial siege manufactured a man-made famine that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people, while collectively punishing over 26 million others and depriving them of basic necessities.
Despite warnings from the United Nations and footage streaming out of the country, clearly showing the impacts on civilians, with children being disproportionately impacted, the Saudis continued their blockade.
The lower estimates for how many Yemeni civilians have been killed by Saudi airstrikes are around 9,000, while the higher figures often presented by the Ansarallah-led government are closer to 20,000. These attacks have included strikes on mosques, hospitals, schools, funerals and weddings.
The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) would conduct routine massacres, such as bombing a packed school bus on August 9, 2018, killing 51 civilians, including at least 40 children. In October of 2016, a funeral was held for the father of Yemen’s Interior Minister, which drew a number of officials from the Ansarallah movement. The Saudi air force bombed the funeral before launching a double-tap strike that targeted the first responders – 155 were killed and 525 others were injured; the vast majority of whom were civilians.
Riyadh systematically destroyed Yemen’s energy and fuel infrastructure, in addition to its transportation sector. It bombed Yemeni airports at least 227 times, struck countless food storage facilities, and indiscriminately bombarded commercial and public facilities. Nothing was off limits. This was also a war of choice, not of necessity. It asserted itself over Yemen and its decision-making since 2011, in an attempt to dictate who would rule the country, still refusing to lift its blockade after more than a decade of suffering inside the country.
Ansarallah are, factually speaking, a Yemeni movement; Saudi Arabia is a foreign country. As for Iran’s support for them, the Iranians are not responsible for launching a direct attack, imposing a blockade, carrying out civilian massacres, or dictating the post-revolutionary process like Saudi Arabia. No political Party or armed group inside Yemen is without any foreign backers or support from abroad.
Factually Inaccurate Framing Of History
Hamdi sets the stage for his analysis of the Saudi-Yemen War by falsely claiming “the Houthis had just lost their sixth attempt to take over Yemen”. In his narrative, the Ansarallah movement is a rebel faction attempting to impose a tribalistic theocracy on the entire country through a series of wars. According to this logic, the only reason they were not able to achieve this in the past was because of their weakness and because they were blockaded in the northern Sa’ada Province by the Yemeni State.
The six conflicts, taking place between 2004 and 2010, were never in any way attempts to take over Yemen, the Ansarallah movement was not fighting with this as a justification for their armed action against the State, nor does any authoritative source argue this. Either Hamdi is mistaken and should retract this claim, or he is deliberately spreading false information to bolster his narrative.
The movement that calls itself Ansarallah today began forming in the 1990s and was led by a Zaydi Shia scholar, Hussein al-Houthi.
In 1992, members of the Houthi family in the northern Sa’ada Province founded Al-Shabab al-Mu’minoun (The Believing Youth) movement. Their goal was to revive the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam, which they believed was being slowly lost, compromised and directly threatened. To achieve their goals of reviving their religious teachings, they began starting summer schools and cultural clubs.
Hussein al-Houthi, the movement’s founding leader, would go on to participate in Yemeni politics in the mid-1990s, getting elected to parliament on behalf of the al-Haqq Party. He offered scathing critiques of State corruption and mismanagement, while condemning Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States. As a leader of the movement, his platform was built upon anti-imperialism and pan-Islamic unity, teaching that this strategy was the most effective means of defeating the US and Israel.
This kind of anti-imperialist rhetoric was initially tolerated by Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was himself of a Zaydi-Shia background. President Saleh had initially sided with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In retaliation for Saleh’s stance in support of the Iraqi President during the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia expelled around a million Yemeni workers and Yemen grew increasingly isolated.
Then came the US’s so-called ‘War on Terror’ in the early 2000s, when President Saleh decided to switch sides and back the United States, also growing closer to Saudi Arabia. Hussein al-Houthi was causing immense embarrassment to the nation’s dictator. The Believing Youth movement would chant anti-US and anti-Israel slogans in their mosques, while advocating against Washington’s wars in the Muslim World.
In 2004, President Saleh decided to launch a military raid, aimed at arresting Hussein al-Houthi, but it was resisted by members of the movement. The conflict ended with the killing of the Zaydi leader. Although Saleh believed this would be the end of the movement, they had transformed Hussein al-Houthi into a martyr, and his forces achieved the very opposite of crushing the movement. Not a single one of the battles between the rebels in Sa’ada and the Yemeni Army was about who would rule Yemen; they were localized and had nothing to do with an attempt to impose their rule over the entire country.
In fact, President Saleh made a number of requests that the United States intervene in order to help crush the rebels, attempting to argue that they were receiving support from Iran. The US assessed that there was no such evidence that they were being armed by the Iranians, therefore treating the issue as a local problem. Instead, the Americans discovered that the weapons being used against Saleh’s forces were primarily coming from his own army.
The Ansarallah movement never aimed to take over Yemen through these conflicts; it was simply not even on the cards for them to think further than the north at that point. There are no public statements from them that indicate that any of these wars were fought over a divine right of the Houthi family to rule Yemen; this notion is simply false.
“The Houthi” Takeover and the “Internationally Recognized Government”
When Hamdi was recently interviewed on ‘The Thinking Muslim’ program, he made a number of assertions about the Ansarallah takeover of Yemen’s Capital, Sana’a – misrepresenting the series of events that led to this outcome.
He begins the timeline with the overthrow of longtime Dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, then claims that the Yemenis “get together and decide to host a national dialogue”.
“So a national dialogue begins under the auspices of the United Nations. Everybody engages with it and the Qataris insist that the Houthis should also take part in it as well.” Hamdi continues:
“They come to an agreement that the country will be ruled through democratic elections; there will be an interim government; a southerner will be put as President (Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi) in order to ease the southern separatist tendencies. There will be an election where this President will run on his own, so he will have a democratic mandate; then there will be widespread elections, and Yemenis will choose who should rule over them.”
This timeline is totally incorrect. In 2011, the Yemeni people initiated an uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, which ended when the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) drafted an arrangement whereby the dictator would step down and make way for a new leadership in 2012.
The Yemeni national dialogue, as described by Hamdi, did not take place during this period. Instead, the Saudis and their GCC allies decided that the Yemeni Dictator’s Vice President would be installed in power as part of the agreement to allow for a transition of power. An election was held, in which then Vice President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi was the only candidate on the ballot. The election was widely rejected by a range of Yemeni political parties.
Then came the 2013-2014 National Dialogue Conference (NDC) period, which was brokered by the Saudis and their GCC allies. It was endorsed and supervised by the United Nations on the ground, but it was not a UN initiative as Hamdi’s framing suggests.
President Hadi would be granted a two-year mandate to rule as the interim President. This mandate was then extended by a year, which did not come about by any democratic consensus of the Yemeni people.
Although his timeline is incorrect, it is true that Ansarallah participated in the National Dialogue, yet he leaves out key details as to why they decided to take measures into their own hands. In March of 2013, the dialogue began. By November, a member of the Ansarallah delegation had already been assassinated. On January 21, 2014, another member of their delegation was also assassinated, prompting Ansarallah to withdraw from the process and take over the Capital, alongside allied forces. President Hadi then resigned, before escaping and rescinding his announcement.
Another claim that Sami Hamdi makes is that Ansarallah simply toppled the “Internationally Recognized Government” of Yemen in Sana’a, with the process occurring as follows:
“They literally walk into the city and say: ‘This national dialogue that you guys have, this idea Yemenis decide who should rule, is Haram (A sin), we do not accept it. Abdul Malik al-Houthi, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, is the only one entitled to rule in this country’.”
Simply put, this is utter nonsense. There are no such statements that exist to suggest that this was their reasoning; Ansarallah have never publicly argued this position and did not use this reasoning to justify their takeover of the Capital at the time.
He then goes on to offer another invention:
“The Americans, Obama, who is negotiating his nuclear deal with the Iranians, doesn’t want to provoke Tehran; he doesn’t react to the Houthis taking Sana’a; instead, John Kerry comes out and says these Houthis can be reliable allies against Al-Qaeda.”
No such statement exists from John Kerry, who was US Secretary of State in 2015 when Ansarallah took over. In fact, the US reaction was the very opposite of what Hamdi describes. The takeover happened in February, which triggered fierce US condemnation and statements in support of the exiled President Hadi.
Within a month, the Obama administration had already greenlit the Saudi war against Yemen, with the goal of regime change, providing weapons and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition. Washington also decided to permit the inhumane blockade on Yemen, deploying its own naval armada to help enforce that blockade. In April of 2015, the U.S. also backed United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2216 that demanded Ansarallah withdraw from the territories they had captured. It wasn’t until 2016 that John Kerry would actually initiate his ‘Yemen Peace Plan’, which ultimately failed.
To address another of Hamdi’s points, he directly states that the US did not want to take a firm stance against the Houthis because it was negotiating its nuclear deal with Iran. This is also false; the American stance was not only anti-Ansarallah, but it also endorsed and supported Saudi military action. The Iran Nuclear Deal was signed in July of 2015; in April of that year, John Kerry said the following:
“There are obviously supplies that have been coming from Iran. There are a number of flights every single week that have been flying in and we trace those flights and we know those… The United States is not going to stand by while the region is destabilized.”
There is no evidence to support the claim that the US didn’t act because it sought to appease Iran. The opposite is true; they openly threatened the Iranians and took a firm stance, including military action.
When it comes to what is referred to as the “internationally recognized government” of Yemen, between 2015 and 2022, this was the deposed President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who fled to Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia. He long outstayed his mandate, in an election designed by the GCC States and in which he was the only candidate.
Then in 2022, the Saudis decided to remove Hadi and establish a Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council (PLC). The PLC was formed in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, and all its leaders were both selected by the Saudis and live there too. It has no “democratic mandate,” and nobody even knows where the deposed leader Hadi is today. Not exactly a sovereign government.
“The Houthis” Alleged Tribalistic-Theological Belief in Running Yemen
Sami Hamdi elaborates on his point about Ansarallah not wanting Yemeni self-determination in a number of interviews, then going on to argue that “the Houthis” believe that their current leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi is divinely ordained to rule over Yemen. This argument demonstrates a lack of any depth or understanding of the dynamics inside the country, and fails to take into consideration the track record of the movement, which has never promoted such a platform.
The current leader of Ansarallah and his predecessor, who ran the Zaydi revivalist movement that laid the foundations for what exists today, never advocated that they are divinely ordained to run Yemen. There is no statement that indicates this is the movement’s platform or assertions by its leadership that they have such intentions. Neither Hussein al-Houthi nor the current leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, have mentioned the concept as a goal.
However, the argument about the divine right to rule as descendants of the Prophet Mohammed’s family is a real belief. Yemen’s northern tribes have also experienced rivalries because of this concept within Zaydi Shiism. Amongst the tribes, there are those who are considered Qahtani and those who are Adnani. Qahtanis are those tribes who descend from the local population of the country, while Adnanis are those who originate from the north (modern-day Saudi Arabia). The Houthis are Adnani.
One major hurdle that Ansarallah has had to tackle in ruling the country is tribalism, which they have managed to find great success in combating and have gone to great lengths to mend ties with historically opposing tribes. In fact, the Ansarallah movement has managed to dismantle some of the traditional tribal power structures – such as parts of the Hashid and Bakil confederations – to achieve peace amongst tribes.
In 2019, Ansarallah released a document entitled the “National Vision for the Modern Yemeni State,” in which they advocated a democratic approach. They also allow for a parliament and government, composed of multiple parties, to run the nation’s affairs out of the Capital City, Sana’a.
It is true that the Zaydi faith teaches that only descendants of the Ahlul Bayt (Prophet Mohammed’s family) have the right to rule; it is also true that Abdul Malik al-Houthi remains the Ansarallah leader. Yet, arguing that this is what the movement is openly advocating inside the country is off the mark. It removes potential for elements of growth and what the Ansarallah public platform actually is, in addition to ignoring facts on the ground from the overall equation.
Their public platform in Yemen is not sectarian; it is actually advocating pan-Islamic Unity, and it has even taken up the banner of endorsing a democratic system publicly, arguing that the nation cannot be run by foreign influences. Its government is in many ways more representative and certainly more democratic than the surrounding hereditary monarchies surrounding it.
It is important to note that it would be totally inaccurate to describe the Ansarallah-led government in Sana’a as fully democratic; that is not what is being argued. There are advisors from the Ansarallah movement who are present at each level of the government and advocating the overthrow of the system is evidently not tolerated. However, it is a nation under siege, one whose infrastructure has been crippled by over a decade of war and has no access to the outside world, beyond support and recognition provided by their allies in Tehran. Like Hamas in Gaza, they have never been given a chance to properly govern.
If the argument is that Ansarallah has no right to govern based upon their current predicament, then the leaderships in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and across the region should also be considered non-States and illegitimate. The criteria here simply makes no sense, especially given that the people whom the Ansarallah movement rules over have not revolted against them. Bear in mind here that the population they currently govern has for long been roughly a 50-50 split between Sunni and Shia. With the takeover of Taiz City, the Shia will actually be a minority.
One of the main reasons why “the Houthis” is viewed as a derogatory term, as opposed to using Ansarallah to describe a much broader movement that does not just consist of one family, is that the term is deliberately designed to encourage tribalism and sectarianism. In addition to this, it is simply no longer an accurate term to call them “the Houthis” or describe them as “rebels” either.
Another assertion made by Hamdi is that “they (Ansarallah) have shifted dramatically to the Twelver Shia sect”. Not only is this claim baseless, but if it were to be true, then it would completely defeat his argument regarding their alleged belief in a divine right to rule. This is because Twelver Shias do not share the Zaydi belief that only descendants of the Prophet Mohammed have the exclusive right to rule.
Ansarallah are known to be adherents to the Jaroudi School of thought, which is widely regarded as the strictest Zaydi branch. While other Zaydi schools of thought were accused of shifting their positions in order to appease the Republicans in North Yemen – after the fall of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom in 1970 – this school of thought resisted. In fact, the reason why Ansarallah exists today is because of a movement to revive the Zaydi sect.
This is also a conspiracy theory often promoted by Saudi-backed opponents of Ansarallah, who find it difficult to make extreme religious rulings against Zaydi Shiism. This is because the Zaydi branch of Shiism is much closer to Sunni Islam than Twelver Shiism (the sect that currently runs Iran). By claiming that they are no longer even Zaydis, it makes discriminatory sectarian arguments appear more logical. Above all, it lays the foundation for the argument that “the Houthis” are a proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran and that they have no real agency beyond a greedy family desire to rule.
As a point of history, Hussein al-Houthi was vocally critical of the Twelver Shia doctrine and offered various critiques of the Islamic Republic. This clearly didn’t come out of a place of animosity toward Iran, but from theological disagreements, which is demonstrated through the public admiration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and its stances against both Zionism and US imperialism.
If Sami Hamdi were making the argument that it is his personal belief that Ansarallah are lying in their public platform, then that would be a different matter. Yet, that is not what he is out there arguing; he jumbles up the timeline of events, attaches positions to the Ansarallah movement that are not those that it advocates, while seemingly inventing things that simply never happened. At best, it is a complete misunderstanding of reality; at worst, it is a completely dishonest approach.
It appears from his narrative that Sami Hamdi shares the Muslim Brotherhood perspective on Yemen. The Party connected to the Muslim Brotherhood there is called al-Islah and it is aligned with Saudi Arabia. Its leadership is also based in Riyadh. In addition to this, the Party that once had enormous influence and a large youth base inside the country, especially in the Taiz area, has since lost much of its support. It has become a hollowed-out shell of the former Party it was and is now working as an agent of Saudi Arabia, while having previously sought to only align itself strategically with them.
From a pro-Muslim Brotherhood perspective, al-Islah has failed and Saudi Arabia is in large part responsible for this. If Sami Hamdi’s intentions are to argue this stance, then his position makes perfect sense here. Because there is no longer any hope for the Muslim Brotherhood to take over and it has lost its ability to operate independently of its Saudi backers.
Preempting Potential Death Toll Arguments
Unlike the statistics for victims of targeted Saudi airstrikes, there is no comprehensive breakdown of civilian casualties caused by all sides on the ground in Yemen; claims from rights groups that are partisan to either side have published a range of claims, none of which have been independently substantiated.
Independent inquiries conducted by United Nations experts and leading international Rights Groups accuse all sides on the ground of inflicting civilian casualties and a litany of human rights abuses. The most comprehensive investigation was a 41-page report published by the UN Human Rights Council that documented acts of violence between 2014 and 2018.
If we look strictly to the international Human Rights Groups and the United Nations, their conclusions appear to maintain that thousands of civilians have been killed by all sides throughout a large number of battles, and tens of thousands of others were injured. However, all agree that when it comes to the category of who committed the most direct civilian deaths, it is the Saudi-led coalition – and this is not including those who died as a result of the blockade.
As an example of the kinds of unreliable figures produced in order to influence public opinion and claim that Ansarallah are responsible for the most civilian deaths, take the example of ‘The Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms’. Although presenting itself as if it is an independent rights group, it works in favor of the Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council (PLC)’s narratives and publishes reports that exclusively list alleged crimes committed by “the Houthis” but provide no figures on crimes committed by the Saudi-backed forces.
It also refuses to disclose its funders publicly, claims to be based out of Sana’a in Yemen on its website – which it isn’t – and has praised Saudi Arabia as the “sole guardian of the international resolutions that stipulate the protection of civilians in Yemen”.
In every warzone on earth, especially when fighting takes place in urban areas, it is a guarantee that all sides will inevitably end up killing civilians. However, the war of choice, launched by Saudi Arabia and its allies, cannot automatically be compared to the moral standing of the various factions inside Yemen itself.
Riyadh is in a league of its own when it comes to civilian deaths in Yemen. Nearly 400,000 civilians are estimated to have died due to the war, with most of these deaths being attributed to the results of the Saudi-imposed blockade, which continues to be imposed on the country. It deliberately manufactured a famine. Due to the blockade, between April 2015 and October 2018 alone, 85,000 children under the age of 5 died due to starvation and preventable illnesses, according to Save the Children.
If we want to look at the Saudi-backed forces on the ground, they have openly accepted the help of Al-Qaeda against Ansarallah, a fact that even shocked BBC journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi in 2016, when she was covering a battle taking place in the Taiz province.
The UAE was also exposed for having recruited a large number of former Al-Qaeda fighters into its own “counter-terrorism” and “security forces” that it backed inside Yemen; the Southern Transitional Council (STC) being the biggest faction it supported. The main officer core of the Southern Giants Brigades militia, which fights on the side of the Saudi-backed PLC, is composed of former Al-Qaeda and Daesh fighters.
It suffices to say that the moral equivalency argument doesn’t work; it rings a very similar tone to the arguments employed against Hamas in Gaza: “Israel did bad things but”. Interestingly, when we look at the corporate media coverage of the conflict in Yemen, there is more than one similarity to the reporting on Palestine. For example, we hear about claims from a “Houthi-run Yemeni Health Ministry”, just as we hear about a “Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry”.
History also always begins whenever those the media favor start the clock, like when Riyadh’s King Khalid Airport was attacked with a ballistic missile, ignoring hundreds of strikes on Yemeni Airports. Or that Saudi Arabia began its attack on Yemen on March 26, 2015, by committing a civilian massacre at Sana’a International Airport, or that it broke the Yemen ceasefire by bombing that same airport earlier this July.
Conclusion
Intentions aside, Sami Hamdi’s argument works to achieve the same goal as those who argue that there is a moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel. Through this lens, both are guilty and neither side should be considered different from the other; instead, the focus is diverted away from culpability. Both sides are bad; history can be twisted in any way we choose; therefore, there is no stance that can be taken on the issue.
Using his logic, it should not come into consideration that Israel is openly backing Saudi Arabia’s war effort, even providing it with direct targeting data. Meaning that US-manufactured fighter jets are being used by Saudi pilots who pull the trigger on targets chosen by the same Israeli military that chooses targets across Gaza.
In the case of Yemen, Hamdi’s obfuscation shrouds the issue in ambiguity, presenting the war as too complex for the average person to understand. “The Houthis” are an evil foreign Iranian proxy that believes in a Zaydi concept of a divine right to rule, while simultaneously being Twelver Shia’s (who don’t believe this).
Just as Israeli propagandists have historically sought to depict the Palestine issue as too complex to understand, only to inject misleading propaganda into their “both sides” arguments, the Yemen propaganda works upon the same premise. The timeline is always inaccurate, there are countless unsubstantiated claims, and then there is always an accusation that if you identify an aggressor, you don’t care about the blood of the innocents.
The Ansarallah-led Yemeni Armed Forces are the only Arab government that fought Israel in response to the Gaza genocide. They sacrificed ongoing negotiations that could have helped them achieve economic relief in 2023 by deciding to open fire on Israel and to impose a blockade on Israeli Ports. Various Palestinian resistance factions, their fighters and leadership, openly praised and thanked Ansarallah for what they did. Meanwhile, the rest of the Arab governments were either complicit in the Gaza genocide or simply watched on, only offering occasional condemnatory statements.
While Sami Hamdi argues about the Yemeni people, not specifically articulating which Yemenis or Parties he is talking about, there are actually two sides that are fighting in Yemen:
One is backed by Israel and the United States. The other is fighting against Israel and has directly engaged both in battle. It is Saudi Arabia versus Ansarallah in this war. If Riyadh were to win, that means that Israel and the United States would win. These are the broader implications of what is going on and would mean that no Arab government supporting Palestine would be left standing.
Arguing a critique of Ansarallah does not justify Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen with US-Israeli backing. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was not exactly an angel; he stood accused of killing hundreds of thousands of his own people. Just because the former Iraqi leader committed crimes did not justify the US invasion and toppling of his government.
The same argument that Sami Hamdi uses in Yemen was deployed to explain away the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is a regime change war argument. People are able to acknowledge that Saddam Hussein committed various crimes, but still opposed the foreign war and understood that it was waged against Iraq, not just the Iraqi Ba’ath Party. In the early 2000s, there were also people who claimed that those discussing Israel’s role in promoting regime change, and the broader regional repercussions, believed that “Iraqi blood is cheap”.
Whether someone decides to support the Ansarallah as a movement, believing they should be the rulers of Yemen when the foreign-imposed war is over, is another question entirely. This question is also for the Yemeni people to answer internally and should not be dictated by Saudi Arabia or any outside power.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
What is it with anti-Zionist Jews claiming that Christians invented Zionism? The image above is from the beginning of a video by Zachary Foster where he makes the bold claim that “Zionism was a Christian idea”. He begins his story in the 1640s, saying “In the 1640s, you had this movement founded in England known as the Restorationist movement.”
Many comments on this video go something like this:
“Another attempt to absolve them of their crimes”
“You are diminishing Jewish Zionism and its actions”
“hasbara propaganda”
He responds: “The 17th century Christian origins of Zionism have absolutely 0 political implications today. Doesn’t make Israel less genocidal. Doesn’t have an impact on the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu or Gallant. Doesn’t make Israel any less of an apartheid state. Doesn’t make Zionism any less racist or settler-colonialist. Doesn’t absolve Jewish institutions today of their complicit in apartheid and genocide. It’s just a curios [sic] point of history.”
It may be curious, but it’s also wrong. His argument echoes that of Ilan Pappé who, in his book Lobbying for Zionism, claimed the key figure in the invention of Zionism was Lord Shaftesbury in about 1839. Pappé was wrong about that, as I showed in my review of his book. Unfortunately, even though Foster manages to go back two hundred years further than Pappé, he is still incorrect.
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Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of significant moments in the building of Jewish settlements in Palestine from 1211 to 1890, the year in which Nathan Birnbaum coined the term Zionism in his journal Selbstemanzipation, seven years before the First Zionist Congress in 1897. As one can see from the list, the development of settlements in Safed and Hebron long predated the 1640s. So the idea that Jews got the idea from Christians after the 1640s is false. Let’s start with an event celebrated in Zionist historiography, some four centuries before the 1640s.
1211 – The “Aliyah of the 300 Rabbis” – A notable group of hundreds of European rabbis was predominantly French-Ashkenazi and Provençal, though some sources say there were also English participants: the 16th-century chronicler Solomon ibn Verga wrote that “the Rabbis of France and England” went to Jerusalem, “more than three hundred” of them. Historians call this wave the Aliyah of the Tosafists. The key figures in this group, such as Rabbi Samson of Sens, were the leading giants of northern French and Rhenish (German) Jewish scholarship. While others came from Provence (southern France), and the Spanish scholar Nahmanides (also known as Ramban) followed half a century later, arriving in Acre in the summer of 1267, the linguistic and cultural core of that 1211 wave was French-Ashkenazi.
The fate of the Judeans
They settled in Jerusalem, which had been recaptured by Saladin in 1187. The 300 were, thus, among the first Jews to live in Jerusalem for more than a century after they had been banished in 1099 by the Crusaders. It’s worth noting that these Ashkenazi settlers had no connection to the ancient Judeans who had existed in “Judea” more than a millennium before. What’s more, it is suggested by Israeli academic Paul Wexler that the Jewish population before the 300 Rabbis arrived was not the original biblical Judeans either. Wexler, emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, argues that most Jewish groups, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, including the Musta’arabim (Arab or Arabic-speaking Jews), are primarily the descendants of non-Jewish populations. We can note that the term Musta’arabim is preferable to, and older than, the propaganda term adopted by the Zionists to refer to supposedly “indigenous” Jews who spoke Arabic: the “Mizrahim”. The term came to prominence as a classification only after the creation of the Zionist colony and referred to “Eastern” or “Arab” Jews, though it included incoming settler colonists who spoke a variety of languages and were not all “Arab”, including Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, or Syria.
In the case of the Musta’arabim and other Arabic-speaking Jews, Wexler argues that they descend largely from Arab, Berber and other West Asian and North African converts to Judaism in the centuries up to about 1200 AD. Long before then, Hebrew had ceased to be a living language. The older view, which is still reflected in standard reference works, was that Aramaic began to supplant Hebrew as early as the 3rd or 4th century BC. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls overturned that view. After this the consensus became that Hebrew ceased to be spoken around the beginning of the third century AD, a few generations after the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 AD, i.e. in the second century), in which the Judeans were defeated. Estimates differ, but it is generally agreed that Hebrew died out as a native tongue between the second and fourth centuries. Effectively then, on this account, the remaining “Judeans” were either killed or exiled and integrated into other populations.
Those Jews that later spoke Arabic were – says Wexler – converts who “relexified” Arabic with Hebrew words, as opposed to having switched from Hebrew to an Arabic form of the language. In his 1996 book, The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews, Wexler claims that Sephardic and North African/Middle Eastern Jewish communities are largely composed of converted Berbers and Arabs. He views the term Musta’arabi (”Arabised”) literally, suggesting an ethnic Arab substrate that took on a Jewish religious identity, rather than ethnically Judean populations taking on the Arabic language. So, by the time that Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews came to settle in the Levant and replace or overwhelm the “Arab Jews”, there had been very few or – most likely – no “Judeans” living in the territory for perhaps a millennium.
Safed – the first major Jewish settlements in the Levant
Phase 1: The Medieval Trickle (Pre-1492)
Long before the mass expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, individual Sephardic scholars, merchants, and pilgrims also made their way to Palestine.
1488 – The Arrival of Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro – This famous Italian commentator on the Mishnah arrived in Jerusalem shortly before Passover 1488, and his letters home describe the Jewish communities he found. Safed already had a functioning Jewish community, numbering some 300 families in 1481, and in Bertinoro’s time, as an Ashkenazi writer recorded a generation later, “the prayers were said according to the rite of the Mustarabim”. Naturally Zionists see the Musta’arabi as the living link to the biblical Israelites or Judeans at the time of Jesus. But even that tenuous connection is disputed, as we have seen.
Phase 2: The Great Influx (1492–1516)
The definitive arrival of the Sephardim as the dominant cultural force was triggered directly by the Spanish Expulsion of 1492, followed by the expulsions and forced conversions in Portugal in 1496–97.
1492–1498 (The First Wave): Tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Many fled to North Africa, Italy or the Ottoman Empire; relatively few at first entered the territories of the Mamluk Sultanate, which controlled Palestine at the time and was “quite inhospitable” to them. Even so, Spanish refugees began arriving in Safed towards the end of Mamluk rule, and the town, with its cooler climate, became a magnet for these refugees.
Before 1492, the tiny existing population of Safed and Hebron consisted of Musta’arabi Jews (Arabic-speaking Jews who had lived in West Asia and beyond for some centuries). Because the Iberian influx was so massive, the Sephardim culturally overwhelmed the existing Musta’arabi population and absorbed it into the Sephardic umbrella, something the small trickle of Ashkenazim could not have done. Within a generation, one observer noted, the Sephardim had “practically eliminated every other usage”. Even the genocidal Chabad cult agrees that the Arabic-speaking Jews were “overshadowed by and merged into” the Sephardim, effectively wiping out any claim that any of the Jews in the contemporary state of Israel are indigenous to the Levant.
So what did these Jews actually speak? Not Hebrew, which had long survived only as a liturgical and literary language, and not Aramaic, which had replaced it in Palestine but lasted only until the seventh century. After the Arab conquest the Jews of the region adopted Arabic, keeping only their religion and their alphabet: the Musta’arabim spoke Judeo-Arabic, their own Arabic written in Hebrew letters. Aramaic lived on only on the page, in the Talmud and in the Zohar, the classic text of Jewish mysticism, which was written in Aramaic long after anyone spoke it.
After 1492 that changed too. In the towns the Musta’arabim gradually adopted Judeo-Spanish along with the rest of Sephardic culture, though for some decades the Jews of the countryside remained Arabic speakers. Judeo-Spanish, also called Ladino or Judezmo, is at base Old Castilian written in Hebrew characters: the language of Toledo, not of Judea. (The claim that “Ladino” properly means only the language of Bible translations and prayers is one the Encyclopaedia Judaica finds “hardly tenable”.) Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazim, came later and in smaller numbers: at the start of the 18th century only a few hundred Ashkenazim lived in the whole country, and Menachem Mendel’s party of 1777 were, in Michael Freund’s words, “Yiddish-speaking immigrants”.
1516 (The Ottoman Conquest): The Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine from the Mamluks, and the Sephardi element in Safed increased further. Ottoman rule was far more welcoming, and Safed experienced a massive boom in the 16th century: Turkish tax records show some 48 European families there in 1525, and 143 Portuguese-Jewish and 324 Spanish-Jewish households by 1555. While overwhelmingly Sephardic, the town also drew Ashkenazi scholars, who arrived to collaborate, publish, and practise, and in time formed a community of their own.
1522 (The Report of Rabbi Moses Basola): Rabbi Moses Basola visited Safed and found 300 Jewish families, made up of Sephardim, Musta’arabim, and Jews from the Maghreb.
1524 (The Leadership of Rabbi Jacob Berab): By this year Rabbi Jacob Berab, an eminent Spanish exile born near Toledo, was living in Safed, at least for periods. He became its leading rabbi and in 1538 tried to renew rabbinical ordination, cementing Sephardic administrative and halakhic (legal) dominance over the city just as the first small groups of Ashkenazim began trickling in.
1520s–1530s (Initial Influx): Small groups of Ashkenazi Jews arrived and, alongside the existing Sephardic (Spanish-descent) Jews, emerged as a distinct group among the Jews of Safed, later with their own congregation.
1550s (Scholarly Prominence): Renowned figures, including Rabbi Moses Alshech (a biblical commentator born in Adrianople to a Sephardic family, who studied under Joseph Caro and later sat on Caro’s court in Safed), became cornerstones of Safed’s legal and spiritual institutions.
1570 (The Lurianic Kabbalah Revolution): Rabbi Isaac Luria (known as the Ari), who was born in Jerusalem to an Ashkenazi father and a Sephardic mother, moved to Safed in 1569 or early 1570. Over a brief period before his death in 1572, his teachings revolutionised Jewish mysticism globally. He bridged both heritages and reshaped the liturgical customs of European Jewry: the Hasidic prayer rite, according to Chabad, follows his custom.
1577 (Printing in Safed): Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi and his son Isaac of Prague left Lublin in 1573 and, after three years in Constantinople, set up a Hebrew printing press in Safed, issuing three books between 1577 and 1580. This technology helped carry Safed’s spiritual texts – including the works of Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis alike – to the global diaspora: the rapid spread of mysticism from Safed has been attributed to Hebrew printing in the Ottoman Empire.
Early 1600s (Institutional Growth): At the beginning of the 17th century Safed had 21 synagogues, 18 schools and 300 rabbinical scholars, and its community was split into four congregations: Ashkenazim, Portuguese Jews, Provençal Jews, and Italians. One of the synagogues associated with Luria, still known as the Ari Ashkenazi Synagogue, belongs to the Ashkenazim.
1740s–1770s (The Decline and Shift): An epidemic (1747) and a devastating earthquake (1759), which killed 2,000 people, among them 190 Jews, severely crippled the town; by 1764 only 50 Sephardi families remained. However, the community was revitalised from 1777 with the arrival of Ashkenazi Hasidic pioneers led by Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk.
Hebron: The Spanish Enclave Absorbs European Immigrants
Unlike Safed’s rapid expansion, Hebron was a smaller, more tightly knit community. Its Jewish Quarter was structurally re-founded in 1540, by the traditional dating, when Rabbi Malkiel Ashkenazi settled in the town and bought the walled courtyard in which Hebron’s Jews lived, although he is recorded as dying around 1620. He led a group of Sephardic Jews there and founded the Avraham Avinu Synagogue, the town’s oldest.
1540s–1590s (The Sephardic Foundation): The community was tiny: the Ottoman tax registers recorded no more than 20 Jewish households. It was consolidated around a single walled courtyard and the Avraham Avinu Synagogue, while Spanish exiles increasingly shaped its spiritual leadership. Malkiel Ashkenazi served as Hebron’s first rabbi, and the community treated his legal decisions and customs as binding for generations. Late in the century, kabbalists from Safed, including Elijah de Vidas, moved to the town.
1700 – The Aliyah of Judah He-Hasid: A large group of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, reportedly some 1,300 of whom about 500 died en route, set out with Rabbi Judah He-Hasid for Jerusalem, intending to settle there. He arrived on 14 October 1700 and died a few days later; several hundred of his followers reached the city.
1720s–1740s (Ashkenazi Newcomers): Hebron’s Jewish population rose somewhat after the breakdown of Jerusalem’s Jewish settlement in 1721, and with the arrival of Abraham Gershon of Kutow, the Baal Shem Tov’s brother-in-law, who visited in 1748. He related that the single Jewish courtyard was so crowded that his family could not join him there.
1738 (The Avraham Avinu Restoration): As the shared community expanded, the Avraham Avinu synagogue was restored; it was enlarged again in 1864.
1740s–1760s (Socio-Economic Collaboration): Hebron had sent emissaries of its own since the middle of the 17th century, and its emissaries (shadarim) now toured Europe. Between 1753 and 1758, for example, Rabbi Hayyim Joseph David Azulai toured Italy, Germany, Holland, France and England as emissary of the Hebron yeshivah. These emissaries raised charitable funds (Halukkah) to sustain the poor back in Hebron.
1770s (Pre-Modern Transition): By the late 18th century, the foundational groundwork was complete. This set the stage for the early 19th century, when, according to Chabad, a group of Chabad Hasidim founded Hebron’s Ashkenazi community.
After the 1760s many further settlement ventures were undertaken.
1788 – The Alter Rebbe (Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi): While he remained in Europe to lead the Chabad movement, he was a fierce supporter of those who moved. He established a permanent fundraising system to support the settlers, which eventually evolved into the Colel Chabad (est. 1788), the oldest continuously operating charity in occupied Palestine. He was the author of the Jewish supremacist “bible” of the genocidal Chabad cult, the Tanya.
1816 or the 1820s – The Mitteler Rebbe (Rabbi Dovber Schneuri) – Accounts differ on when the second leader of Chabad sent his followers to Hebron. The Jewish community of Hebron traces Chabad’s roots there to 1816–1823, when a wave of Hasidim moved from Safed at his behest, and Steve Rodan’s Times of Israel blog dates Chabad’s arrival to 1816, when Hasidim directed by Dovber Schneuri relocated from Safed. Chabad’s own historian, Shalom Dov Ber Levin, records instead that the families who came in 1816–17 settled in Safed, Tiberias and Jerusalem, and that the Mitteler Rebbe directed them to Hebron in 1821–23, the move taking place between 1821 and 1826. Chabad’s world headquarters dates its history in the city to 1823.
1838 – Moritz Steinschneider – In 1838, along with two lifelong friends, Albert Löwy and Abraham Benisch, he set up a secret society among students at Vienna, called Die Einheit, to encourage Jewish colonisation in Palestine. Some two decades later, in 1860, Steinschneider coined the term “antisemitic”, mistakenly imagining that the scholar he was referring to thought Ashkenazi Jews were Semites and that he was a Judeosceptic. In reality he was a Judeophile. His two friends went on to play significant roles in the founding of the Zionist movement. Benisch later became the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Together Benisch and Löwy founded and ran the Anglo-Jewish Association which bought them into contact with the largesse of the Rothschild family.
1839 – Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai published Darkhei No’am, a Hebrew grammar in whose introduction he called on Jews to prepare for redemption through devotion to Zion and material support for those already living in the Land of Israel. He developed these ideas in Shelom Yerushalayim (1840) and Minhat Yehuda (1843), arguing that the physical return of the Jews to Zion must precede the messianic redemption.
1840s – After the 1840 Damascus affair Alkalai’s writing grew more urgent, and a society he founded in Zemun for the Jewish return to the Land of Israel was active in several of Serbia’s Jewish communities.
1852 – Alkalai established the Society for the Settlement of Eretz Yisrael in London during a tour of Western Europe. While the society was short-lived and disbanded shortly after its creation, it served as a platform for Alkalai to publish his pamphlet, Mevaser Tov (Harbinger of Good Tidings), which called for an organised Jewish association to promote the “regaining of their fatherland”.
1860 – Association for the Colonisation of Palestine (Kolonisations-Verein für Palästina) – Alkalai was an active member of this group, established by Chaim Lorje in Frankfurt an der Oder. He worked alongside Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer to promote agricultural settlement in Palestine.
1860 – Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885): A British philanthropist who visited the “Holy Land” seven times (as far back as 1827), backing agricultural settlement and building residential areas in Jerusalem, such as Mishkenot Sha’ananim in 1860.
1871 – Kol Israel Haverim: On a visit to the Land of Israel, Alkalai founded this society for the settlement of “Eretz Yisrael”. He gave it the same name as the Hebrew translation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in an attempt to create a local branch dedicated to settlement. He settled in Jerusalem himself in 1874.
All of this happened before the invention of the term “Zionism” by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890. So, the next time you hear someone – Zionist or anti-Zionist – talk about the Christian origins of Zionism, feel free to disabuse them of this fanciful notion.
Cyprus hosted the leadership of the pro-Israel US lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in Nicosia on 21 October, pledging to deepen the island’s ties with Israel and the US.
Outgoing AIPAC president Bernard Kaminetsky and his successor, Yehuda Neuberger, led the delegation to the presidential palace for talks with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides.
The talks focused on accelerating the 3+1 Mechanism, a partnership binding Cyprus, Greece, Israel, and the US to coordinate on energy, security, and infrastructure.
AIPAC, in return, pledged to keep championing Cypriot interests in Washington.
Meanwhile, pro-Israel lobbies have been embedding themselves inside the Cypriot and Greek parliaments, with Israel Allies Foundation (IAF) launching caucuses in both legislatures to bring lawmakers into line with Israel’s regional agenda.
IAF president Josh Reinstein unveiled the Cypriot caucus on 14 October after meeting Christodoulides, explicitly pitting the initiative against Ankara by branding Turkiye a “common enemy” of Israel and Cyprus.
Cyprus’s main left-wing opposition party condemned the MPs for turning parliament into a lobby for Israel amid its ongoing genocide in Gaza, while in Greece, one left-wing party warned that it would turn parliament into a tool for whitewashing war crimes.
Israel’s deepening ties with Greece and Cyprus have developed over the past decade into a strategic alignment that combines energy cooperation, military coordination, and shared opposition to Turkish maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The US has encouraged the relationship through the 3+1 format, which brings Washington into the Israel–Greece–Cyprus trilateral partnership and frames it as a vehicle for regional stability, energy security, and cooperation among “like-minded” partners.
Through the arrangement, Israel gains a gateway to European markets through Greece and Cyprus, along with diplomatic backing in disputes over offshore gas fields.
Athens and Nicosia, in turn, receive Israeli military technology and a partner against Turkiye’s assertive stance on maritime zones, airspace, and the divided island of Cyprus.
Washington, meanwhile, sees the axis as part of a broader effort to anchor energy routes and security cooperation in the Eastern Mediterranean while reducing reliance on rival powers, even as the US courts Ankara with offers of F-35 sales and sanctions relief.
Israeli hostility toward Ankara, and its efforts to curb Turkish power, stem from fear that Washington’s growing dependence on Turkiye will erode Israel’s regional dominance.
Despite the friction, Turkiye continued to serve as a conduit for Azerbaijani crude to Israel through the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Pipeline (BTC) and Ceyhan Port, even after cutting direct trade in May 2024 and throughout Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
A Saudi-led military airstrike on a house in the town of Al-Za’azi’, in Yemen’s southwestern Taiz governorate, killed at least one person and wounded four on Thursday, including two minors, according to Yemeni health authorities.
The Saudi coalition also bombed Bajil in Al-Hudaydah, carried out four attacks in Harf Sufyan and two in Bani Suraym in Amran, and hit the Water Corporation building in Al-Hazm, Al-Jawf with two airstrikes, the same Yemeni health authorities reported. Saudi gunfire wounded two citizens and an African migrant in the border districts of Baqim and Munabbih in Sa’dah.
Yemeni Armed Forces spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree reported more than 2,900 Saudi airstrikes and missile attacks in the last 100 days, an escalation that left more than 562 victims, most of them women and children.
Saudi Arabia collaborating with Israeli intelligence in joint campaign against Yemen's Armed Forces —— According to a report published by The Jerusalem Post, Israeli military intelligence is actively sharing strategic target data with Saudi Arabia to assist its campaign against… pic.twitter.com/3PUhxcu46w
According to a report published by The Jerusalem Post, Israeli military intelligence is actively sharing strategic data with Saudi Arabia to assist its campaign against Yemen’s Armed Forces, also known as Ansarallah. The report said a Zionist military official confirmed the intelligence-sharing mechanism and emphasized that degrading Yemeni military capabilities serves Tel Aviv’s strategic regional interests while allowing the IDF to monitor and study tactical operations on the ground.
Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Follow his excellent Substack: https://tritaparsi.substack.com/
It is being reported that the U.S. is evacuating Americans from countries in the Middle East in what could be the beginning of an escalation of the war there.
Could an “October Surprise” be imminent as we get closer to the U.S. mid-term elections?
Report: US Troops and Diplomats Evacuating Posts Across the Middle East
The US military has been scaling back its presence at bases across the Middle East, and the US has ordered staff reductions at multiple diplomatic posts in the region, NBC News reported Wednesday, amid growing signs that the US and Israel may be preparing to launch another attack on Iran.
Sources told NBC that similar drawdowns were carried out before the US and Israel launched the war against Iran on February 28. US troops at bases in Jordan are among those that have been moved as Iran pounded the facilities during exchanges of strikes in the summer, attacks that caused significant US casualties. The US is also pulling troops out of facilities in Kuwait and Qatar.
One US official told the outlet that moving troops out of harm’s way was part of the US military’s planning as President Trump considers restarting “major combat operations” against Iran potentially before or after the November 3 US midterm elections.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also appears eager to restart the bombing campaign as he’s facing elections in less than a week.
Daniel Davis, a retired U.S. military officer who has a popular YouTube following, just interviewed Professor Seyed M. Marandi from inside Tehran a couple of hours before I published this article.
Professor Marandi states that the Iranians are ready for any new offensive from Israel and the U.S., and that if their energy infrastructure is attacked, which is what is being threatened, that the rich Arab Gulf states will all be destroyed, which will drag down the global economy with the loss of all the oil they produce.
This will, in turn, cause the current refugee problem in places like Latin America to become even worse, as they will seek to cross the borders into Western countries like the U.S. and Europe.
Marandi references some recent statements by Trump about San Diego and Los Angeles being bombed, stating that Iranians would have no motivation whatsoever to bomb U.S. cities, which means this would be a “false flag” event caused by the U.S. in an attempt to gain public approval for their war against Iran.
Both Davis and Marandi talk about how none of the reasons given to attack Iran make any kind of sense whatsoever, because there are no winners in such a doomsday scenario that could include nuclear bombs.
It is a product of the Zionist belief system, and really nothing else.
Are Americans prepared to die for “Greater Israel”?
Many Americans are already leaving the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia where the Yemen resistance forces continue bombing areas in Saudi Arabia where many Americans live, such as the Aramco complex in Dhahran.
This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)
See Also:
Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through
On October 21, the Financial Timesreported that Benjamin Netanyahu had instructed his military to prepare a multi-day bombing campaign against Iran for the weekend of October 10—only for Donald Trump to block it until after the November 3 midterms . The operation would have targeted electricity plants, nuclear facilities, and regime sites, surpassing the intensity of the joint offensive launched in February. Trump’s opposition did not end the war. It rescheduled it.
That distinction is the entire story. The veto is being presented as proof that Washington can restrain Jerusalem. In reality, it is a demonstration of an alliance leash—a tether that permits tactical friction while leaving the strategic architecture of the war untouched. Trump can pull the leash to protect Republican seats. Netanyahu can pull it to protect Likud seats. Neither pull ends the war. Both manage the calendar.
The FT report is clear that the operation was not cancelled, only deferred. “There will either be a deal or an attack,” one person familiar with the matter said. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth traveled to Israel on Monday to meet Netanyahu, and Israeli officials presented an updated target bank that included civilian infrastructure not struck earlier in the year. The machinery of escalation remains fully assembled. The only variable that changed was the date.
The strongest defense of the White House is that Trump’s veto proves American primacy. If Washington can tell Jerusalem no, the argument goes, the leash is in American hands. But this confuses a pause with a strategy. The veto covered only the period before November 3. It did not define war aims, set an end date, or require congressional authorization. It was a tactical deferral, not a strategic reversal.
The midterms themselves are a powerless-ballot exercise in war governance. Voters are being told the election is about affordability. They are not wrong. Gasoline has reached $4.28 a gallon, $1.20 higher than a year ago, and half of registered voters name the cost of living as their top concern . Trump’s approval sits at a record-low 31%. But neither party is offering a vote on whether the war should continue, expand, or end. The ballot ratifies a choice between managers of a war that was never put to a vote.
Congress has tried to assert itself. The House has passed war powers resolutions three times, and the Senate approved one on its tenth attempt—only for Republican senators to reverse course the next day after Trump berated them.
The cost of the conflict has reached at least $38 billion, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating an additional $3 billion for every month it continues. The stockpile of interceptor missiles is so depleted that rebuilding it could take five years. None of this has produced a binding vote to end the war. The legislature has rendered itself a spectator.
Netanyahu’s own calendar is just as cynical. Israel votes on October 27. Netanyahu has said a preemptive strike before the election would be “inconvenient”. Israeli commentators have reported that he fears a military campaign in the final stretch could cost Likud power. The alliance leash runs in both directions. Washington pulls it to protect Republican seats. Jerusalem pulls it to protect Likud seats. The war is paused not because either capital has decided it should end, but because both leaders have decided the timing is wrong for their own electoral survival.
For American voters, the question is not whether Trump can overrule Netanyahu on a given weekend. The question is who decides when the war ends, on what terms, and at what cost.
On the current trajectory, those decisions are being made in confidential channels between two executive offices, insulated from legislative oversight and electoral accountability. The ballot is powerless to alter the war’s direction because the war’s direction was never on the ballot.
The real test comes after both elections. If the deferral becomes a pathway to diplomacy, Trump’s veto will have meant something. If it becomes a pause before a new round of strikes—as the updated target bank suggests—then the only thing that changed was the calendar. Independence is not the ability to delay a war. It is the ability to end one on terms you can defend.
If one were seeking to create something like a modern-day folk tale based on current realities and having the theme of “good versus evil” there are any number of real-life narratives available that could be exploited to invite speculation on actual environments that might have served as models for the fiction. I have found much of the bizarre and blood-soaked evil relationship between the United States and Israel, which serves no US interest at all, to be one such arrangement in which two countries have through their own behavior become the most hated in the world. They have successfully established an odd partnership based largely on a common view of which other nations they hate and would like to destroy.
One must consider the monstrous joined-at-the-hip relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv, which is likely soon to become a true military and policy partnership by act of Congress. It will leverage the already existing ability of tiny Israel to manipulate and dominate the large and powerful United States. And there is also something else that should be reckoned with in the arrangement, and that is melding of the desire of the two countries to dominate not only their neighbors but also far beyond that. One can cite the aberrations in behavior that reveal how neither government wants to get along with other nations except in those rare cases where America and the Jewish state are accepted and even honored in spite of not being bound by any rules, decency or even democratic norms.
A prime example of how the completely murderous pathology that guides both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has come to dominate the relationship surfaced last week when Trump endorsed Netanyahu in the upcoming Israeli election. It was a case of two completely evil men finding common ground to congratulate themselves and advance their respective careers, which nearly all of the rest of the world would like to terminate!
Both men are in trouble with their respective electorates in large part because their obsession with endlessly killing anyone annoying be it in the Caribbean or Gaza, has become suspect, largely because the killing is without any actual objective and no real good comes out of the process. This is particularly true for voters in the US who have suffered the bullying by Israel and its domestic Lobby and also bear the tax burden and shortages that are the only fruit that falls from the trees of the conflicts. In Israel the equation is somewhat different as 90% of the Jewish voters want to eradicate even more Muslims and Christians and fully support a new Prime Minister who will kill even more of the vermin.
Observe what a brain dead Trump has to say about his good buddy Netanyahu in a shared phone call in which they first exchanged pledges that they would soon “finish the job,” the “job” in question being the “extermination” of Iran and most particularly its government. Bibi told Trump “Donald, we have a job to finish. You said it, and we’ll finish it together. We’ll finish it, and no one else will do it.” Bibi explained later how “I have spoken about this with President Trump more than once, including the day before yesterday… Finishing the job means bringing down the terrorist regime in Iran. It is the head of this poisonous octopus. You cut it off, and it will fall. We will also have peace with Lebanon. We must complete the elimination of the Iranian regime — that is the primary objective.”
Trump then responded in kind, telling Netanyahu that “You’re a warrior, and you’ve been treated unfairly by your country and from some others … but you’re a great warrior, and we will prove that. We will prove that very soon. I think you’re terrific, Bibi … You’re the man I want by my side, Bibi.” On Truth Social Trump later elaborated how “Bibi Netanyahu has been a Great Warrior Prime Minister and an even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He is “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant, the kind of Partner that the United States of America is demanding of Israel, a Country for which it has done so much.”
Clearly Netanyahu wants to get reelected to stay out of jail for corruption, apart from anything else, and he knows that unconditional support from the United States is essential to achieve that end and keep the wars in Lebanon, Syria and Iran going. What the two monsters were pledging was the total destruction of a nation of 90 million people that prior to the war initiated by Israel and the US had not threatened in any way either nation. That means it was per the Geneva Convention a war crime and besides which it is a violation of the War Powers Act and the US Constitution that Trump had sworn to support. Israel was admittedly the driving force behind the war against Iran, which has done huge damage to the world economy, because it saw the country as a political-military competitor in the Middle East region and Netanyahu was able to convince a stupid and willfully ignorant Trump that the war would be over in a week or two, a walk-over.
In a move that is being interpreted as an additional American support for Netanyahu in the upcoming election, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made an unannounced visit to Israel on Monday and met with the Prime Minister. The talks reportedly took place at the Ovda Air Base in southern Israel, where US refueling planes and fighter jets are deployed. Hegseth also met with some US troops. As Netanyahu and President Trump have discussed the possibility of restarting the full-scale bombing campaign against Iran the appearance and timing of the Hegseth visit, as he is the strongest supporter of resuming strikes on Iran within the administration, suggests that the war will soon be resuming.
Beyond the depressing likelihood that the war against Iran will soon start up again, there is the language employed by Trump, which as usual is inane. So Bibi is a “great warrior”? That comes from a draft dodger who avoided US military service in 1968 not for any moral reason but because it was inconvenient for him so his father arranged for a Jewish doctor to fake the records for a medical deferment. Trump had “bone spurs,” a condition largely unheard of in the real world before Trump came up with it on paper. And now the draft dodger is praising a “great warrior” who sends his men and women out to shoot three year olds as part of a regime that has been killing children systematically and without any consequences since the conflict with Gaza began.
And, unfortunately, the bad news is still coming. There is no doubt Trump has been the most servile president in US history when it comes to his constant supporting Israel even when it carries out genocide and kills American citizens. Trump has never failed to obey Netanyahu, but, it must be observed, he has only done slightly more so than Biden and the Democrats did when they preceded him in office. So one should have doubts that a possible change-over in the US Congress and Senate, where Israeli flags can be seen flying in some of the offices, is going to make much difference when it comes to the United States “standing with our best friend and closest ally Israel.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
A senior security official in Tehran said Iran would consider US political targets, along with the infrastructure of countries participating in a new war, legitimate targets if another round of broad war includes assassinations of officials and the massacring of civilians, Fars News Agency reported late on Wednesday.
The official said Iran has communicated this to its operational ranks.
The official explained that Iran takes a US and Israeli attack as a given and regards American diplomatic gestures as lacking credibility, a view that intensified after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s October 7 speech in Athens, which Tehran sees as giving the war a historical and civilizational cover.
The official said Iranian leaders and elites have reached the unprecedented conclusion that US Middle East policy is directed from Tel Aviv and that “Israel” will not allow a diplomatic solution, because for Trump, “Israel” comes first.
Iran says it is already at war
The official said Iran already considers itself at war with the United States, and sees the US economic and naval blockade and the restrictions on air traffic as a continuation of the military aggression that began on February 28. There is strong pressure across Iranian society for decisive action to break the blockade on the basis of legitimate defense, the official emphasized.
Washington reinstated its naval blockade of Iranian ports on July 14, after collapsing an interim truce and attacking areas across southwestern Iran.
Iran asked the UN Security Council on Wednesday to condemn the blockade and demand it be lifted. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that Tehran’s seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz remains on the table. Iran hinges the reopening of the Strait on a ceasefire across all fronts, a US sanctions waiver on oil sales, and a release of $12 billion in frozen assets.
Trump want to ‘finish the job’
The warning followed US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post on Sunday in which he said Iran has been “systematically destroyed” and that unless it changes course the United States will “soon finish the job.”
The same post gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu his “Complete and Total Endorsement” for “Israel’s” October 27 election. Trump called Netanyahu a “Great Warrior Prime Minister” in the war on Iran and wrote that if “Israel” chooses any other leader, America would have to do the work itself, which he is not inclined to do.
Netanyahu answered with a video and a post thanking “my friend Donald.” He directed part of his message to American voters, saying gas prices would fall once Iran’s government “disappears,” but only under Trump. US midterm elections are on November 3. Trump had declined for months to endorse Netanyahu, and US Vice President JD Vance declined to join him, saying he is focused on American races.
Araghchi replied on X that “last time you wanted to ‘finish the job,’ Iran emerged even stronger,” adding that Tehran has “unfinished jobs too.”
Israeli jets fly to the Iranian border
On Wednesday, Axios reported that dozens of Israeli Air Force jets, with refueling aircraft, flew more than 800 miles on Monday, violating Syrian and Iraqi airspace, as far as the Iranian border before turning back. “Israel” told Washington it was a “power projection” training exercise, which is said was meant to deter Iran ahead of the elections
US officials said “Israel” knew Iranian air defenses would detect the jets, and some said they had the impression “Israel” hoped Iran would fire on them, providing a justification for strikes. Other US and Israeli officials called the sortie unusual only in scale.
The stunt took place on the day US War Secretary Pete Hegseth met Netanyahu at Ovda Airbase. Meanwhile, Netanyahu and Security Minister Israel Katz made new threats, with Katz saying “If Iran attacks Israel, Iran will burn!”
Axios reported last week that Trump and Netanyahu discussed in early October a major new aggression against Iran before the Israeli and US elections. A US official said Trump told Netanyahu to “go ahead and get ready,” though he made no commitment.
Additionally, the US State Department has prepared to order some personnel and family members to leave US embassies across the Gulf, Reuters reported, which would include all personnel at the mission in Saudi Arabia.
More ships targeted in Hormuz
On the other hand, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy has stepped up its operations on ships in and around the strait, which have violated its navigation rules.
On October 9, it said any vessel using an unauthorized route would be pursued and “punished” anywhere in the region. On Sunday, six commercial vessels were struck in and around the strait, the most in a single day since the war began.
On October 12, the IRGC said it had hit a third tanker in two days for navigating without its tracking system and ignoring warnings. Tankers have since caught fire after hitting mines on unauthorized routes. Ships on a non-compliance list kept by Iran’s Gulf Strait Authority now number about 100.
Some speakers at the conference suggested that it is time for Jews to stop accusing Israel critics of antisemitism, and start recognizing that it may be time to cut the cord.
The Zionist leader claims U.S. President Trump agrees with the Israeli approach.
On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Army, the Mossad intelligence agency and the rest of the security services to “topple the regime of Iran.”
During a graduation ceremony for army officers, the Zionist leader maintained that the Persian nation has “resumed its efforts to acquire weapons,” which would represent “an existential threat” to Israel.
Netanyahu asserted that he had conveyed this position to U.S. President Donald Trump during a telephone conversation held on Monday, and claimed that the Republican leader agreed with his approach.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz asserted that the Iranian regime “is going through the moment of greatest weakness in its history,” and warned that this situation could push it to adopt extreme measures against Israel.
US and Israel must 'finish' the job
— Netanyahu calls for resumption of large-scale military operations against Iran, according to FT, citing sources pic.twitter.com/J73zmUBbwC
“Our message to the Iranian regime is clear: we see its attempts, we are prepared to thwart them, and we are ready to respond with all our strength. If Iran attacks Israel, Iran will burn!” he said.
A security source cited by Israel’s Channel 12 television, however, maintains that the security services have no record of the information presented by Netanyahu, and therefore expressed concern about the possibility that it was erroneous information.
The Financial Times reported that the Zionist prime minister is pressing to resume large-scale attacks against Iran and even prepared a plan to do so ten days ago, although he ultimately did not go ahead with it because of Trump’s opposition.
On Monday, without prior announcement, U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth traveled to Israel to meet with Netanyahu, with whom he held a conversation about the Middle East situation, according to what a spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister’s office told EFE.
With that background, the leader of Israel’s leftist Democrats party, Yair Golan, warned on Wednesday about possible military campaigns “for political purposes” ordered by Netanyahu a few days before the general elections in Israel.
US special envoy Tom Barrack conceded that a “ground kinetic” battle in Yemen by the US “seems fruitless” during a talk at the Global Security Forum in Qatar on 20 October.
“I think the president’s been clear that he supports Saudi Arabia and the backing that they need logistically he will supply. But America getting involved in a ground kinetic battle somewhere else seems fruitless.”
Barrack is Washington’s ambassador to Turkiye and special presidential envoy for Syria and Iraq.
He admitted that military force has failed in Yemen and that Riyadh is in a “very difficult position.”
“These kinetic reactions have never worked. It doesn’t work. It’s probably not likely that it’s going to work,” he said.
Barrack questioned whether US meddling across West Asia has helped or harmed the region, arguing that Ansarallah in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the resistance factions in Iraq would lose their reason to exist only once states took responsibility themselves.
He pressed for talks between Riyadh, Sanaa, and regional mediators, urging regional capitals to build their own alliances instead of leaning on Washington.
He went further, admitting that the US has had a hand in 23 regime changes across the region, none of which achieved their aims.
He declined to say whether the US-Israeli war on Iran launched on 28 February was a mistake, while conceding that it had unleashed unintended consequences across the region.
The admission comes as the Saudi-led coalition presses on with airstrikes on Yemen, drawing retaliatory missile and drone strikes by the Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) on the kingdom.
Riyadh has turned to its defense partners under the Mecca pact, including Pakistan and Turkiye, after Washington declined its requests for direct US intervention against Yemen.
Barrack’s remarks follow Washington’s failed bid to subdue Yemen by military force, with more than 1,000 US airstrikes between March 2024 and April 2025 unable to halt Yemeni naval operations waged in support of Gaza, forcing the US into an Omani-brokered ceasefire with Sanaa in May 2025.
The campaign cost Washington $1 billion in its first three weeks alone, as Yemeni forces downed 17 MQ-9 Reaper drones and the US lost two F-18 fighter jets.
Ansarallah leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi said in November 2024 that the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier had retreated hundreds of miles after coming under Yemeni fire, while then US Under Secretary of Defense Bill LaPlante admitted he was “just shocked” by what Yemen’s missiles could do.
Europe fared no better, with Rear Admiral Vasileios Gryparis, commander of the EU’s Operation Aspides, telling Bloomberg in June 2024 that his Red Sea fleet needed to more than double in size and that US–UK strikes on Yemen were “not contributing to the solution,” after France withdrew one of his frigates citing the threat level.
The House version passed with a slim margin of 216-212, and included a provision entitled, “United States – Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” often referred to simply as “Section 219”; the pending Senate bill contains a related, but not identical provision, entitled “Section 1217: United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security (FUTURES) Act of 2026”.
In title, the U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act sounds like one of many bilateral cooperative agreements between the U.S. military and a partner military force anywhere in the world. But in reality, as written, the provision would pressure existing security cooperation entities to expand and accelerate bilateral technological integration through a statutory executive agent arrangement that lacks clear precedent even among the U.S.’s closest allies.
The agreement isn’t necessary to advance cooperation. In practice, it puts undue pressure on the processes designed to protect U.S. interests and technology.
The issue discussed here is not if the U.S. should or should not increase its defense technological cooperation with Israel; the pros and cons are well-documented and highly debated elsewhere. What isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of debate are the implications of putting undo pressure and influence to short cut established security processes for the benefit of any single partner nation, and that is precisely what Sections 219 and 1217 would do.
The U.S. Department of Defense is already well underway in reforming its technology release and foreign disclosure procedures following Executive Order 14268 of April 2025. Short cuts to these reforms, or additional legislation laying on top of ongoing actions, will only confuse and complicate the process, adding additional vulnerabilities in the end.
So which parts of Section 219 put the system at greatest risk? It starts with directing the secretary of defense to designate an executive agent responsible for synchronizing U.S.- Israel cooperative efforts to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research and development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation, with particular focus on counter-unmanned systems, missile and air defense, AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber defense and electronic warfare, biotechnology and medical defense, network integration, and data fusion. These are some of our most sensitive, and classified, areas of research and development. Additionally, Senate Section 1217 directs the secretary of defense to “consult with” (i.e. formally seeking and considering views or input of) the Israeli minister of defense in establishing the initiative, providing a foreign nation with influence over access to and integration of U.S. sensitive technology.
To break this down a bit more…
The power of an executive agent within the Department of Defense is significant. DoD Directive 5101.01 gives an executive agent, within the areas of its assigned responsibilities and functions, the authority to take precedence over other DoD component heads with related responsibilities or functions. Heads of Department of Defense (DoD) Components include the secretaries of the military departments (Army, Navy, and Air Force), the directors of the defense agencies, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Meaning, the executive agent could create significant institutional pressure over the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) on access to and release of sensitive U.S. technology. DTSA is the primary office within the Department of Defense tasked specifically with protecting sensitive technology from release to foreign entities.
An executive agent is assigned by the secretary of defense alone, with no separate confirmation process nor congressional oversight over how it exercises its authority. So, if Congress legislates DoD create an executive agent for his initiative, it abdicates more of this congressional oversight authority to the Executive Branch — at a time when the executive branch already acts unilaterally on issues in which it is supposed to inform/consult Congress.
Once the executive agent pushes the system to embed foreign-original technology or systems in U.S. programs of record (a formally established and funded DoD acquisition program), it becomes fiscally and politically costly to pull those pieces back out. Such a process would require re-competing contracts and re-certifying systems, among other time-intensive tasks. Integration of intellectual property can create long-term dependencies, regardless of future U.S. policy.
Many of the areas of prescribed integration are highly sensitive, presenting significant counterintelligence risk. Sharing and embedding U.S. cyber, AI, and autonomous system developments with a foreign partner before the U.S. has even fully developed sufficient and adequate regulatory provisions to govern the use of this technology puts the U.S. under an unnecessary influence of a foreign partner. Additionally, if U.S. systems are dependent on foreign technology, that foreign partner gains leverage over the U.S., and at a time when the U.S. needs to be more clear-eyed on its own priorities, not those of other nations.
If such cooperation as outlined above was regular business, perhaps some of the arguments could be debated more reasonably. But, it is not ‘business as usual.’ In fact, Section 219 would legislate a relationship distinct and more powerful than others in existence today, even with the U.S.’s closest allies, like the Five Eye partners and NATO. Section 219 creates a multi-generational technological relationship with one partner that would be very difficult to rollback once incorporated into U.S. development and acquisition systems. It is a pure political maneuver with great risk to the U.S.; it is not necessary and is, in fact, dangerous.
At this point, to protect sensitive U.S. technological development and to ensure congressional oversight is not further abdicated, the House should make clear it won’t vote for an NDAA that comes out of conference if it includes this provision, and the Senate should remove or amend its corresponding Section 1217 from the FY27 NDAA and enter into a separate debate over the issue.
Andrew M. Leonard is a retired US Army Colonel and Senior Fellow for Defense Policy and Military Affairs at the Quincy Institute.
Washington and Israel are talking again about “finishing the job” in Iran. Before they do, someone should take a hard look at the bill for the jobs already done. My friend Karl Miller, who has called this region correctly more often than most of the people paid to do it, sent me his latest assessment on Monday. His conclusion is blunt: on the current course, another round of escalation is coming, and the countries paying for it will be the ones that never got a vote.
The Gulf is being bled dry
Start with the people who are supposed to be America’s partners. The IMF’s October outlook reads like a casualty report. Kuwait’s economy is forecast to shrink 16.7 percent this year. Qatar’s will shrink 15.6 percent, and Bahrain’s 11.3 percent. The UAE, long sold as the region’s safe haven, is now expected to contract 3.9 percent, a seven-point swing from the IMF’s April forecast. Saudi Arabia is forecast to shrink 3.3 percent. The only Gulf economy still growing is Oman, and that is because its ports sit outside the Strait of Hormuz.
These are not paper losses. Qatar lost two LNG trains at Ras Laffan in March, about 17 percent of its export capacity. QatarEnergy says the repairs will take three to five years and will cost it roughly $20 billion a year in revenue. Saudi Arabia’s escape route around Hormuz, the East-West Pipeline to Yanbu, is crippled. My sources tell me four of its 11 pumping stations are severely damaged and out of service. Riyadh now projects a deficit of 4.9 percent of GDP, is borrowing to cover it, and has frozen non-essential spending.
Miller explains why this is worse than the headline oil price suggests. A damaged plant produces nothing to sell, but the payroll, the debt payments and the repair bills keep coming. A plant that is still standing but cannot get parts in or cargo out is in almost the same position. A $108 barrel of oil is worth nothing if you cannot ship it. And the cash the Gulf states used to invest at home and abroad is vanishing fast. If a government takes in 100 and must spend 70, it has 30 left over. Cut income to 80 and that cushion drops to 10. A 20 percent hit to revenue wipes out two-thirds of the money for everything else.
The Gulf states bought American protection to safeguard exactly this wealth. Instead, as Miller puts it, they have ended up paying for the costs of American strategy. That is a bargain they will not keep making forever.
A new round means a deeper shortage
Now consider what another round of American and Israeli strikes would do to a world that is already short of energy. Oil flows through Hormuz are running around 11.6 to 11.9 million barrels a day, against a pre-war level of about 17 million. Middle Eastern fuel exports are below half of what they were before the war. The International Energy Agency says diesel will stay tight well into 2027, and that the diesel stocks already burned will not be rebuilt before the second half of that year. Brent is around $108, up more than 75 percent from a year ago.
Every escalation so far has followed the same pattern. Iran answers by tightening its grip on Hormuz. Its allies in Yemen widen their target list. Gulf facilities that were patched together get hit again before they earn back the cost of repairing them. That is the cruelest part of Miller’s analysis: repeated attacks make repairs pointless, because nobody will spend billions restoring a plant that may be destroyed again next month. A new campaign will not reopen the Strait. It will close it further, take more Gulf capacity offline, and push diesel back toward September’s record of more than $200 a barrel, just as Europe heads into winter. France and Italy are already rioting over the cost of living. Imagine them in February.
Israel’s dark future
Miller’s harshest judgment is reserved for Israel, and it deserves a full hearing. He believes Israel will never recover from what it has done in Gaza, which a UN commission of inquiry concluded last year was genocide. In his words, the state is “done economically. It is done politically. It is done morally.” That is strong language, but the argument behind it is not hysteria. It is about how a state wears itself out.
His reasoning runs like this. Israel’s leadership has bet everything on military domination: hit every opponent hard enough that no one dares resist. Force can win battles, but it cannot make anyone accept the result. Every campaign therefore creates the need for the next one. Opponents rebuild, resentment grows, and the circle of countries willing to stand with Israel gets smaller. So the government doubles down with more force, because the alternative, accepting real limits on occupation and on its treatment of the Palestinians, threatens the political project it is defending. War becomes a way to postpone the reckoning, not avoid it.
The cost is already showing. The IMF says Israel’s economy is about 9 percent smaller than it would have been without the war. The budget deficit is heading to 6.2 percent of GDP, and public debt is on track to reach about 74 percent of GDP by 2031. Reservists are pulled from their jobs again and again. Israelis are already fighting over who carries the burden, with ultra-Orthodox men still far less likely to work or serve than everyone else. Foreign investors and partners grow more cautious with each campaign. Miller’s warning is that Israel’s project could become unsustainable long before its military power runs out. A country can keep its tanks and jets and still lose the economy, the alliances and the legitimacy it needs to survive. That is the dark and uncertain future he sees, and I find it hard to argue with.
Trump says Russia is doing nothing. Lavrov says otherwise.
Which brings me to the President’s latest reassurance. On October 13, Donald Trump said he does not believe either Russia or China is helping Iran. On Sunday he went further on social media, insisting that “Russia is doing very little to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared with what it could be doing,” if it is doing anything at all, and that he wants it to stay that way “unless some stupid people get in the way.”
Less than a day later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stood next to Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Tehran and said the opposite. “I am confident that Iran’s cause, like Russia’s, is a just cause,” Lavrov declared. He said Russia “has no intention of abandoning the implementation of agreements with Iran in the economic and investment spheres,” and recommitted Moscow to the 20-year strategic partnership that formally took effect on October 2. He announced that Russian specialists will return to the Bushehr nuclear plant. He called for Hormuz to return to pre-war conditions, and tied that to protecting Iran from renewed attacks. Before landing in Tehran, he called Trump’s approach “wrong.”
To be fair to the President, Russia has not gone to war for Iran, and the partnership treaty does not require it to. There is no mutual-defense clause. But that is a lawyer’s distinction. Russia’s foreign minister does not fly into a capital under threat of attack to call its cause just by accident. Add the reported Russian satellite data reaching Iran’s allies and the steady improvement in the accuracy of Iranian and Houthi missiles, and the picture is of a partner that is careful, deniable and very much engaged. Moscow does not need to fire a shot. It only needs to keep Iran standing while America bleeds its Gulf allies and Europe’s economy.
The bill comes due
If Washington and Israel launch another round, they will be betting that this time force produces a settlement. Three years of evidence says it will not. What it will produce is deeper Gulf recessions, a longer energy shortage, more anger in Europe’s streets, and a bigger bill for an Israel that is already running out of room. Miller’s forecast is that the next round is coming anyway. I hope he is wrong this time. I doubt it.
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