Israel is turning on its last important ally in an act of suicidal hubris.
When Jewish Upon a Star – by Mr. Fish.
Israel is sabotaging the negotiations with Iran and alienating its last important ally by refusing to halt its attacks on Lebanon and withdraw from its occupation of the south.
It is determined to reignite a regional conflagration that could see Iran perpetually close the Strait of Hormuz and plunge the global economy into a global depression. And it continues its genocide in Gaza.
Israel is contaminated by racism and genocidal violence.
It is blinded by a repugnant moral superiority. It is corrupted by a class of Zionist billionaires in the U.S. who use their wealth to bend foreign policy to serve Israeli interests.
It is equipped with a nuclear arsenal Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened to use.
It is a menace to the region. It is a menace to itself. And it is a menace to us.
The first round of a quadrilateral meeting between the United States, Iran and Pakistani and Qatari mediators in Switzerland on Sunday — where the Iranian delegation refused to take part in a planned handshake and joint photo with its U.S. counterparts — focused on the U.S. implementing commitments set in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a preliminary 60-day period.
But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — following Israeli attacks on Lebanon — disrupted the talks.
The closure sent Trump into another one of his habitual tantrums, when he reportedly told “Fox News” correspondent Trey Yingst he had informed Iranian negotiators if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “[Y]ou won’t even make it back to your fucking country.”
When told that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian continues to assert Iran’s right to enrich uranium — a right guaranteed by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which the U.S. co-founded — Trump reportedly said “[President Pezeshkian] better watch his mouth. He better shape up or we’ll take over the rest of the country.”
“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump added in a post on Truth Social, referring to Hezbollah. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Trump’s threats prompted the Iranian delegation to depart the Swiss venue, while Tehran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, dismissed Trump’s tirades in a post on X.
“Don’t they ever stop to think that if their threats had worked, they wouldn’t have reached today’s desperation? We give the Americans’ threats no weight whatsoever,” he said.
Ghalibaf in Iran’s Majlis, or parliament, 2023. (Hamed Malekpour/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
The meeting concluded with “agreeing on a 60-day roadmap toward a final agreement and establishing mechanisms to advance technical negotiations” under the MoU, according to IRNA News Agency.
Israel’s vision of a “Greater Israel,” designed to ensure Israel’s military dominance throughout the Middle East, depends on harnessing the wealth and military power of the U.S.
Over two-thirds of the major arms and munitions Israel imports — without which it could not carry out its genocide of the Palestinians, turn southern Lebanon into a moonscape and bomb Iran, Syria and Qatar — are manufactured and provided by the U.S.
And because the Israel lobby, for decades, has owned Congress, because its Zionist allies police and control the media, because it is able to siphon tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to sustain its military adventurism, Israel is blind to its own limitations.
It is willing to inflict harm on its allies, including the U.S., in service to itself.
And that is what it now intends to do. Even the obtuse administration of Donald Trump — which has spent over $34 billion on the war with Iran and which WarCosts estimates at over $214 billion when wider economic costs are factored in — has figured this out.
Israel is apoplectic about the MoU that leaves the disposition of Iranian stockpiled enriched nuclear materials to later negotiations, lifts the U.S. naval blockade, releases frozen Iranian assets and issues waivers to allow Iranian oil sales.
Trump signing the memorandum of understanding with Iran at the Palace of Versailles on June 17 as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio looks on. (White House /Daniel Torok)
The MoU declares an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts.” It proposes a 60-day negotiation period before reaching a final deal, a $300 billion Reconstruction and Development Fund [for Iran], the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iran’s periphery and the termination of all international and unilateral sanctions.
The rhetoric unleashed by Israeli politicians and pundits about Trump and those in his administration over the MoU — reportedly arranged without Israeli participation — is venomous.
No one in the Trump administration is immune. Trump’s hapless special envoys and unapologetic Zionist assets, Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, were castigated as “two little Jews” by Yinon Magal, a former Knesset member-turned-pundit who is close to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump is a “loser.” Vice President J.D. Vance is “scum.” Israel Hayom — the Israeli newspaper owned by billionaire Miriam Adelson, one of Trump’s biggest financial donors — in an op-ed accused Trump of betraying Israel.
Kushner with Netanyahu in the West Wing Lobby of the White House on Sept. 29, 2025. (White House /Joyce N. Boghosian)
“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” Vance retorted.
It is more than ironic that Israel would push Trump — who gives the word bribery a bad name — into opposing Israel.
But Israel has overplayed its hand.
The Arab and Muslim world and the Global South detests Washington for its backing of the genocide and betrayal of the Palestinians. Israel and its Zionist supporters goaded the U.S. into made-for-Israel wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and then, another war with Iran.
The alliance and military debacles have turned Israel and the U.S. into pariah states.
Now, Israel is turning on the only ally it has left.
The failure by the U.S. to continue to subjugate its interests to those of Israel, even at the cost of economic suicide, is, in the eyes of entitled Zionists, unforgiveable. Israel expects the Zionist billionaire class and the Israel lobby in the U.S., as in the past, to bend to its will.
The Obama White House signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 with Israel pledging $3.8 billion per year in military aid from 2019-2028. Congress authorized an additional $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel to sustain the genocide.
Vice President Joe Biden, Netanyahu and Obama at the White House, July 2010. (White House /Pete Souza)
Between 1946 and 2024, the U.S. is estimated to have provided Israel with over $300 billion in military and economic assistance, adjusted for inflation.
The cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone are estimated, by Brown University, to be between $4 to $6 trillion, with much of that to be paid in the coming decades in the form of medical and disability payments to war veterans and their families.
This time the price is too high.
The defeat of Israel and the U.S. in the war on Iran has dealt a mortal blow to the project of “Greater Israel” and the Abraham Accords.
It has crippled the Trump presidency, driving up inflation, plunging Trump’s approval rating to dismal levels, paralyzing the economies of Gulf allies and threatening Republican control of the House and the Senate in the November elections.
Israel has no intention of catering to Trump. It could not care less what happens to him, his administration or the effects of the looming economic catastrophe.
But Trump, who always has been and always will be out for Trump alone, is not going to sacrifice himself for someone else’s benefit or airy ideals.
Israeli leaders are so out of touch with reality they are threatening to go to war with Iran without the U.S. Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister and current leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu Party, has called for Israel to build a ballistic missile force and said that if he was in charge, he would direct the Mossad to overthrow the Iranian government.
Israel has no intention of leaving southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights — and other areas of Syria it began occupying following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad — Gaza — where it occupies 70 percent of the land — or halting its savage ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
It intends to find some place on the globe to ship the 2 million de facto prisoners of concentration camp Gaza.
Palestinians in Gaza are still being slaughtered — over 1,000 have been killed by Israel since the supposed ceasefire went into effect last October — and huddle in overcrowded tent cities without adequate food, clean water or medical care.
Gaza under Israeli attack, 2023-2025. (Jaber Jehad Badwan /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
These goals may be achievable in the short term, but in the long term they signal the demise of the Zionist state.
Democrats are increasingly shedding the albatross of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. “America First” Republicans and the right wing are retreating into their traditional anti-Semitism.
The genocide ripped the veil off Israel and exposed its dark and murderous visage to the global community. The war on Iran, which Netanyahu sold as an easy win, exposed Israel’s cynical manipulation of the U.S. to the Trump White House.
Israelis, intoxicated by the fantasy of being the chosen people, do not have friends. They do not have allies. They have those they use and those they slaughter.
“No more insane aid with no conditions, but a condition attached to every dollar and every missile,” the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy writes:
“Behave or pay the price. You can no longer do as you please: assassinate, abuse, violate national sovereignty and international law with impunity. In such an atmosphere, Israel will no longer be able to continue to thumb its nose at the international community, for which there is no more unifying issue than opposition to the occupation.
Whether it wants to or not, Israel will have to take this into consideration. The first cracks have already appeared, and how: a deal made with Iran while entirely disregarding Israel, which for years disregarded the United States and the entire world.
This is only the beginning: A world that was horrified by what Israel did in the Gaza Strip will want a reckoning. A genocidal state can no longer be the darling of the Western world.
A state whose citizens carry out pogroms daily, with the cooperation of its military, will not be a part of the family of nations. The dream is starting to come true. It will be a nightmare.”
The game is up. The Israeli domination of the U.S. political system is coming to an end.
Israel’s inability to read U.S. and global opinion — or its own population, where over 90 percent believe Israel lost its war against Iran — along with its stubborn belief that its old levers of power can still work, illustrate a leadership that has rendered itself deaf, dumb and blind.
It can and will do a lot of damage. It can and will inflict more death and suffering. But it is cannibalizing itself.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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+ Otherwise Occupied The Jewish Ku Klux Klan Has a Calculated Plan for the Palestinians,
Amira Hass, Haaretz, 6/15/26
“…That’s the role of the “Jewish Ku Klux Klan” – and Bennett is fully onboard with their vision, even if he occasionally condemns the most extremist elements…”
“…The local KKK hopes its violence will spur an angry Palestinian reaction to justify murdering more Palestinians and expelling the majority of them to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon…”
“…Be aware that for every news report that you read about an act of settler terror, the Jewish Ku Klux Klan is carrying out dozens more acts of assault, harassment and bullying, while the army attacks and abuses Palestinians in dozens of neighborhoods and checkpoints to protect the KKK and its missions…”
+ Mr. Fish takes requests: Please channel Philip Guston’s ‘Riding Around’ and the Blue and White KKK.
+Riding Around (1969): the Klan gave Guston ‘parodic purpose’
hxxps://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/h663ZX5XzoVGBmiAPhmDbf-1920-80.jpg.web
404 page not found at the link to “riding around”.
Okay thanks Valerie, see if this works:
hxxps://bilder.deutschlandfunk.de/FI/LE/_2/bc/FILE_2bc07a9273d2e287764eb31a6d7ad278/43863666-jpg-100-1280×720.jpg
And, Mouin Rabbani of MiddleEastMonitor had this to say about the Jewish KKK:
#1 US government never aided the KKKlan
#2 US never armed the Klan
#3 US never held the Klan up as “Heroes”
MEMO: “The Jewish KKK” and the Catastrophe Jewish Critics Warned Was Coming | Palestine This Week This week, we begin with Hannah Arendt, the Jewish intellectual who warned that a state built without Palestinian consent would be condemned to permanent war.
hxxps://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260624-the-jewish-kkk-and-the-catastrophe-jewish-critics-warned-was-coming-palestine-this-week-with-mouin-rabbani/
The beginning of the end for those engaged in genocide… We can only prayer and hope! May it be swift and just…
Pretty wild how when I first scanned the top image my brain put a Nazi swastika in the flag. I immediately thought, “Oh, theyre gonna catch some flak for that. It wasnt until I saw it again, after reading the article, that I realized it was a Star of David. Excellent work as usual from Chris Hedges.
A bottom line of history is that money and power corrupts.
Result is a Hitlerite sense of superiority, revulsion toward anything that even slightly annoys, and an immense sense of entitlement.
If that was a description of Russia, China, Iran, then we would probably have already nuked them.
But because this country has become heavily corrupted by money and power, we dance through the tulips doing our best to ignore what is reality.
The predictions of Mr Hedges and the quoted Gideon Levy will not come to pass unless and until the US $$$, military, intelligence and diplomatic aid to Israel is cut off.
Mr Trump owes his second term to the $$$hundreds of millions donations to his campaign by the billionaire Zionists. Why do they, the Israel lobby and Netanhayu now give up on their project or quietly accept the cut off of the critical US support?
This group has its grisly methods. How obtuse must Mr Trump actually be not to see that?
Billions were also provided Mr. Clinton, Biden, and Ms. Harris and the democrat party. How obtuse were they in pursuing Israeli policy?
I suggested it would require all the robust obtuseness, and then some, attributed to Trump by others (here from Hedges) for him to think that he/she can STOP “pursuing Israeli policy” without grave risk.
The three “Democratic” dolts you mention were certainly obtuse in their myriad other ways but they never stopped such pursuit and certainly never made public any thoughts they might have had to the contrary.
Hedges (and Levy) apparently think the Israel project will go away because the world is justifiably tired of it. I said Israel will not go away unless and until its US support is permanently withdrawn.
Trump’s current performance is well beyond his opaque norm, required in his attempt to cover the result of his latest and most disastrous international recklessness. But I doubt he is actually contemplating ending US pursuit of Israeli policy … without regard to which particular character flaw may be the cause.
Let it be!
Israel is the extreme case of tribal racism: the scam of the “superior” tribe “chosen” to slaughter for profit.
Zionist corruption discredited US politics and mass media by making wars for Israel across the Mideast.
We must root out corruption of US politics and mass media by the zionist, militarist, and anti-socialist oligarchs. This requires Constitutional amendments to isolate elections and mass media from economic power. A FISA/OFAC license for such political influence by China might actually restore democracy.
Make “Israel” Palestine Again!
The only solution.
this is an article from the Guardian:
*Israel continues to commit genocide by targeting children in Gaza, UN inquiry finds*
(hxxps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/23/israel-deliberately-targeting-gaza-children-to-commit-genocide-un-inquiry-finds)
But don’t speak up and criticise Israel if you live in Canada or Briton. You’ll be charged with Antisemitism
It’s their right don’t you know ? Those innocent children are only going to grow up hating their oppressors, best to kill them all. Ask any politician, it makes perfect sense !
add germany, where freedom of speech has lost
its true meaning quite a while ago, too, much to
not just my dismay.
is it any wonder? given that ,my’ country still blindly
follows US leads, and for lack of imagination as to
viable alternatives, still hosts europe’s largest US airbase?
Russia phobia grips Europe, and it’s all by design.
It’s keeps money flowing into the military… two new Aircraft Carriers for Briton, and American F35’s for them… good for an Integrated Military Industrial Complex in the West, especially the U.S and Israel.
It is difficult for a country to tell another to stop assassinations when they just assassinated most of the leaders of one themselves, for starters.
We are twin global monsters on many levels.
Cutting all aid to Israel would be a great way to go, asap.
Thank you, Chris
Peace, World
“The game is up. The Israeli domination of the U.S. political system is coming to an end.”
It can’t happen soon enough. All the senseless slaughter needs to stop now, and will only end if the U.S. stops funding the genocide. If Israel were willing to embrace a one state solution, there would be no need for the endless war that has engulfed the Middle East. Instead, Israel has focused on stealing the land of Palestinians who have lived there for centuries, in the process creating generations of enemies. Zionists are outraged that Iran is funding proxies such as Hizbollah and Hamas, but never a mention of the U.S. funding of Israel. If the American public ever wakes up to how we’ve been fleeced, these non-stop wars would end immediately. We can only hope.
The rot goes too deep, these little set backs won’t change anything apart from the public face of the rot. The Jewish lobby/zionists were already influencing the government in the 50s and 60s, their power was illustrated by what happened when JFK/RFK tried to impose controls, here we are nearly 70 years later and nothing has changed other than the power/rot is all encompassing and complete.
A demilitarized 2-state solution is needed:
1. States with tribal groups (Czechoslovakia; Serbocroatia) fragment in civil wars;
2. The zionists would focus on subjugating Palestinians in a quasi-democracy.
A single state could work only after a century or more of cultural reconciliation.
The two state solution is a zionist construct that, by design, would never work.
South Africa managed to evolve from an apartheid state to a democracy in four years. Remove the USA funding and Israel could achieve the same in less than ten years.
If only, if only, it was a ‘game’.
Gideon Levy, 20 minutes of harsh truth from 2015: hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGO3eBxQX7Q
Let’s not forget that 90% of Israel’s population support the genocide of Palestinians and the expansion of borders. Netanyahu and his government are only part of the problem, change the government and the problem remains, the actual problem is Israel. Full democracy or else destruction is the only choice.
Norman Finkelstein called them a deranged society built on Jewish supremacy and bloodlust.
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8T0G1ILNDE
What a great summary of present condition of Israel.
Bon appétit!
People really still believe this tired old trope about a split between Israhell and the U.S.? Please. It’s all kabuki. Trump will promise to reign in Israel, Bibi will sputter in outrage, deals will be signed, Israel will do what it wants anyway and Trump/the U.S. won’t do a thing about it. Lather, rinse repeat. This kabuki has been going on since decades, only the names of the actors have changed.
GOSH !!!
You know the story of CJ. Hopkins in Germany ? He was harassed by tribunals for publishing a meme of a Covid mask with the contours of a swastika on it…
Some days ago even the High Constitutional Tribunal in Germany declined to make a decision thus clearing this satire as a case of freedom of expression.
Mr Fish’s picture would have the police standing at my door in Germany and my house searched if I ever put a link of yr article with this picture on social media in Germany.
(Not to mention German “staatsräson”…)
100 % sure about that – so I better stay shtum…
This as to how it goes here on the other side of the Atlantic nowadays.
Andreas
Gideon Levy writes:
“This is only the beginning: A world that was horrified by what Israel did in the Gaza Strip will want a reckoning.”
The reckoning should include all the bloody countries who facilitated, aided and abetted this genocide. They are as guilty as the zionist israelis. Now the hypocrites want their pound of flesh.
Great piece. The US should have cut off Israel decades ago. I doubt that it will, even now…
“When Jewish Upon a Star – by Mr. Fish.”
Very clever Mr. Fish.