Category: Israel

The Predators: United States, Israel, and Russia and Their Bella Ultra Inferre

1 October 2026

By Stephen Gowans

The UK government claims to have foiled a planned “terrorist” attack on a USAF air base masquerading as an RAF air base in the English countryside, claiming the thwarted attack was likely orchestrated by Iran.   

The Wall Street Journal commented that using “proxies to plot an attack on a U.K. military installation would mark a significant escalation given that Britain isn’t directly at war with Iran”—an acknowledgement that Britain is at war with Iran, even if not directly. It added that “Iran has targeted British bases abroad during the war” “including Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Akrotiri in Cyprus.” It failed to mention that the bases were used by US forces to attack Iran. It’s incomprehensible that anyone should expect immunity from attack for a party that materially aids an aggressor.  

Moreover, how can an alleged planned attack on a UK military facility that has been used by Washington to prosecute a bellum ultro inferre (an unprovoked war of aggression) be characterized as “terrorist” without completely rewriting the definition of terrorism to mean an attack on the military of a foe rather than on its civilians?

Whether you want to call RAF Fairford a concealed US military base, or a shared British-US military facility, three things are clear: One, the base is used by the US military. Two, it has been used to carry out an unprovoked offensive war on Iran. Three, it is, as a consequence, fair game for Iranian retaliation. If you’re going to participate in a war, don’t whine if the enemy plans to strike back.

To be sure, the story of the alleged plot is sufficiently turbid to raise questions about whether there actually ever was a plot to begin with. But if the plot is genuine, and it was orchestrated by Tehran, it is perfectly legitimate.

Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy writes that all Jewish parties in Israel are committed to annihilating Gaza

All leaders of the major Jewish political parties in Israel wish to return to war in Gaza, or more accurately, to resume a genocide by means of massive violence preparatory to the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza, which means they all favor the total and final annihilation of Palestinian Gaza, or what the Nazis would have called a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation.

Given that the Israeli orgy of violence started three years ago, and that the aim of resuming it will be to complete the job begun on 8 October 2023, we might call the project the Endlosung, which is to say, the final solution.

I should add that while Israel has inflicted massive violence on the Palestinians, it is not through violence alone that it carries out its genocide. Violence is the means by which Israel has made Gaza uninhabitable. The aim is not to kill all or even a substantial part of the Palestinian population, but to leave Palestinians with no option but to quit Gaza, or die.  

Jewish colonizers have been using both violent and non-violent means to efface the Palestinian natives from their territory and to replace them with a Jewish majority for the last century. Genocide does not depend on violence alone, or even require it. Even so, the Jewish colonizers have, since 7 October 2023, discovered a newfound lust for violence, which they have been able to indulge, thanks to the largesse of the United States and Germany, which provide the Zionist Vernichtungskrieg 99 percent of its military aid. The Zionists could not run a settler colonial apartheid state, subjugate the Palestinians, occupy parts of Lebanon and Syria, bomb Iran, assassinate Iranian leaders and scientists, support pogroms in the West Bank, and reduce Gaza to rubble, without the substantial assistance of the United States and Germany. In return, Israel does the West’s “dirty work“, as Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has pointed out.

Soviet support for the Zionism is racism resolution

On 10 November 1975, the UN General Assembly approved resolution 3379, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism.

It was sponsored by the Arab League and Muslim-majority countries, and backed by the Soviet bloc.

The claim that Zionism is racism was a curious stance for the Soviet bloc to take, since it was inconsistent with Soviet support for the two-state ‘solution,’ which in turn, was inconsistent with Lenin’s championing of decolonization.

In backing the two-state ‘solution,’ the Soviets endorsed the Jewish colonization of Palestinian territory, and by implication supported the very Zionist racism they claimed to oppose. At the same time, they rejected Lenin’s anti-colonialism in promoting a colonialist endeavor in Palestinian territory.

Sadly, the contradictions persist in the communist movement today, where support for the two-state proposal is nearly universal, except among many Trotskyist groups. One can’t be a champion of decolonization while backing the colonization of Palestine. Nor can one be against racism while endorsing a racist Zionist state.

An End to Israel Altogether

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has called for Israel to end its occupation of southern Syria, not because the occupation is predatory and imperialist, but because “it may well push residents of southern Syria into the arms of” what the newspaper calls “the Iranian axis.”

That the occupation may drive occupied people into the arms of a coalition that opposes occupation, evinces clearly what “the axis” is: an anti-imperialist resistance against the predations of the US-backed Jewish supremacist state in the Levant.

The axis comprises Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah (the Houthis), a branch of the Iraqi PMF, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Marxist PFLP. Before its overthrow by rebranded US-backed Al Qaeda forces, Baathist Syria was also a member. The thread that connects these groups is not Islam (for how would we explain the inclusion of the Marxist PFLP and secular Arab nationalist Syria?) Nor is it Twelver Shia Islam (for neither Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Ansar Allah fit this category.)

The occupation of southern Syria, which is said by Haaretz to represent a tragedy in embryo, is no different, but in its recency, from the US-backed Zionist occupations of Syria’s Golan, southern Lebanon, Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Palestinian territory known as 4 June 1967 Israel (the first territory the Zionists occupied, representing the 78 percent of Palestine supporters of the two-state proposal believe should be reserved for an ethno-supremacist Jewish state. Miko Peled asks why it is that two-state supporters think Zionist colonizers should get over three-quarters of Palestine, while the Palestinians are relegated to less that one quarter of their country. This makes little sense, considering that there are as many Palestinians living in historic Palestine as Jews. We might call the two-state solution a proposal to carve up Palestine into one big state for Jewish colonizers and a reservation for the natives.)

While I agree with Haaretz that Israel should exit southern Syria, I part company with the newspaper on the reasons for calling for the occupation’s end (because it is predatory, and not because it will strengthen the resistance, which is desirable) and also on the scope of what ought to be called for. If one settler colonial occupation is indefensible, so too is every other. Rather than calling for an end to Israel’s occupation in Syria, one ought to be calling for an end to Israel altogether, the decolonization of the Levant, and the demise of the US imperialist project in the region.

The big enemy and the smaller one

While Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and the settler colonial regime he represents are execrable, and while it was encouraging to have witnessed scores of UN delegations walking out on the genocide-leader’s address to the UN General Assembly, Donald Trump and the imperialist regime he leads are doubly repugnant, and yet only two delegations (Iran’s and Cuba’s) walked out on Trump’s belligerent, self-serving, gasconade before the UN.

Worse, even Trump’s threat to inflict a Vernichtungskrieg on Iran—in the grand hall of an organization ostensibly dedicated to saving humanity from the scourge of war—failed to offend the conscience of UN delegates sufficiently to induce them to walk out. Apparently, a man who is carrying out a genocide of a Palestinian population of 7 million offends the conscience of UN delegations more than his enabler who has repeatedly threatened to carry out a genocide of 90 million Iranians.

 The United States ought to arouse, not less indignation than Israel, and not as much, but far more, considering that not only is it the principal patron, armorer, defender, and promoter of the Jewish supremacist state in Palestine, but its own conduct, apart from its support of Israel, is even more repugnant.

Consider, for example, the unprovoked war of aggression on Iran; the thuggish kidnapping of the Venezuelan president; the effort to conquer Cuba, and to do so by reducing the entire population to misery; the ICE-led fascist pogroms against immigrants and the cold-blooded murder of our comrades Rene Good and Alex Pretti; and on and on ad nauseam.

On top of these offences, Washington makes every one of Israel’s crimes—from racism, to apartheid, to colonization, to genocide—possible.

That makes the United States worse than Israel.

To treat Netanyahu and the US-backed Jewish supremacists in Palestine as outliers while blithely accepting the Zionist state’s chief sponsor—and the world’s most predatory country—as a state worthy of respect, is insupportable and evidence of a widespread failure to order our political enemies from greater to lesser.

Of course, the reason why Trump received a polite reception and Netanyahu did not, is because Trump has the power to punish nearly every country, and Netanyahu does not.

So, delegations are careful about how they express their indignation, and whether they express it at all. It depends on the power of the one who provokes it. Which from the perspective of Washington is just fine. Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate so long as they fear.

On the responsibility of citizens to condemn their own country’s imperialism

In a Washington Post op-ed, NHL Hall of Fame goalie Dominik Hasek wrote that the Washington Capital’s star Alexander Ovechkin, a Russian citizen, must condemn “Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine and the horrific crimes associated with it,” otherwise he acts as “a walking advertisement for” his government’s actions.

Here’s what Hasek wrote:

“Every citizen acts as a representative of their country and serves as a walking advertisement for its actions — unless, of course, they publicly condemn those actions. At present, this means that every Russian citizen, and especially every supporter of President Vladimir Putin, serves as an advertisement for Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine and the horrific crimes associated with it, including the mass abduction of Ukrainian children. This applies to all Russian citizens.”

Hasek’s argument might be more compelling if he applied the same logic to the support of US citizens for comparable US crimes. Were Hasek to do so, his argument, using his own words with appropriate substitutions, would look like this:

‘Every citizen acts as a representative of their country and serves as a walking advertisement for its actions — unless, of course, they publicly condemn those actions. At present, this means that every US citizen, and especially every supporter of President Donald Trump, serves as an advertisement for the United States’ imperialist war on Iran and the horrific crimes associated with it, including the mass killing of Iranian schoolgirls. This applies to all US citizens.’

Hasek’s logic also fits with US participation in the genocide of the Palestinians. The United States provides Israel with the arms to carry out the genocide, and the diplomatic backing that enables Israel to pursue its heinous crimes with impunity. This means, per Hasek, that unless every US citizen condemns their country’s participation in the genocide, they are walking advertisements for complicity in a horrible crime.

I join Hasek in condemning Russian imperialism. And I invite him to join me in denouncing US and contingent Israeli imperialism and their horrific crimes.

The United States and Russia. Two predatory powers—one obviously much stronger and more predatory— struggling for control of Ukraine

Readers might ask: How can you characterize Russia as a predatory power for its war on Ukraine, without recognizing US predation on Russia? The answer is that I do recognize US predation on Russia, and I denounce it as firmly as I do the raptorial wars of the United States on Iran and the Palestinians. But while the United States preys on Russia—and does so through NATO and its support for Ukraine—this fact in no way gainsays the reality that what Moscow risibly calls its “special military operation” is a bellum ultro inferre, an offensive war. I see the conflict in Ukraine as a war between Russia and the United States for control of Ukraine; what Lenin would have called a predatory war.

When Hidden Enemies Serve the Reaction and Reveal Themselves

“Either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case, they … serve the reaction.” — Friedrich Engels

24 August 2026

By Stephen Gowans

The question of whether the nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the conduct of its government in the country’s internal affairs is acceptable is hardly germane at this moment, when a single question has been made immediately relevant by current circumstances: Is the war of the United States and Israel on Iran acceptable and is the resistance of Iran against the imperial marauding of Washington and its Zionist proxy-state, admirable, desirable, and worthy of support?

In an open letter that appeared in The Guardian on August 20, 2026, a group of mainly US intellectuals denounced Iran under cover of rejecting “the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism.” It was a transparent effort to change the channel. The signatories—Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, and Walden Bello, among others—addressed themselves to Iran’s political prisoners, writing that “On one side, you face the domination of the Islamic Republic; on the other, the imperialist forces that republic claims to stand against.” The word “claims” insinuated that the republic doesn’t really stand against US-Israel imperial forces. Furthermore, the qualification slyly intimated that real anti-imperialists should stand against Iran and its “false” anti-imperialism.

 “We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.”

Why broach this subject now?

We can speculate about the motives of the signatories. A pusillanimous desire to be held in high esteem in polite society? The inability of the beautiful soul to navigate the dilemmas of the real world? Who really knows?

Is the open letter any different in its intended effects from denouncing the ideology of Hamas and the conduct of its internal affairs in Gaza in the middle of a stepped-up US-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinians? However deplorable the attempt to change the channel might be, one should never lament occasions when those who would throw one to the wolves identify themselves in advance.

Yet to say the signatories are hidden enemies, is hyperbole. They’ve hardly concealed their political orientation as anti-authoritarians.  They described themselves as “former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism,” (though, given their suggestion that Iran’s fighting back against US-Israeli aggression is faux anti-imperialism, it’s not clear what their understanding of anti-imperialism really is.)

Anti-authoritarians are always opposed to the state as an instrument of repression, and will, therefore, only ever support revolutions and resistance movements that fail and never the ones that succeed, since those that do succeed must of necessity repress their enemies, including taking political prisoners. Anti-authoritarians are utopian luftmenschen (quixotic characters with their heads in the clouds) who should not, and generally aren’t, taken very seriously by anyone concerned with the way the world really works. The world of politics, especially when it involves war and revolution, is not a world of graduate seminars. The important questions of the day, observed Bismarck, are decided, not by words, but by blood and iron. And as Saint Just once cautioned, those who carry out revolutions by half measures do nothing but dig their own graves. The same can be said of wars. Kill or be killed. Imprison or be imprisoned.

Perhaps the signatories are not at all unlike those Friedrich Engels had in mind when he wrote of the socialists of his day who had “launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority,” and for whom it sufficed “to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned.”

“Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”

Replace “the movement of the proletariat” with “the movement against the muscular imperialism of the United States and its tool, Israel,” and Engels’ concluding paragraph to his reflection “On Authority” places the open letter of the US anti-authoritarian intellectuals in perspective. Either “one of two things must be true,” Engels wrote.

“[E]ither the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case, they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.”

None of this is to endorse the repression of all of those the Iranian state counts as its enemies, or to draw an equals sign between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the proletarian movement; they are clearly two entirely different things. But it is to say that, which of Iran’s repressions are justifiable and which are not (a matter which will depend on one’s political goals) is a question for another time and hardly relevant when Iran is under attack and the priority of those who seek to fight, rather than serve, the reaction, is to do what one can to bring about an end to yet another eruption of US-Israeli imperial aggression. That means remaining focused on the immediate aim, not changing the channel to issue quixotic anti-authoritarian proclamations.

Post script

In March of this year a group of ‘left’ academics, including Gilbert Achcar, a man Lenin would surely have characterized as a “social parson and opportunist,” issued a petition which said “No to war and no to the Islamic Republic.”

The petitioners proclaimed that “We, the beautiful souls of humanity, courageously oppose all things foul and rotten and bravely support all things sweet and good.” Since the petition was aimed at no decision-maker, and was merely a statement, it was clear that its goal was to announce to the world how morally admirable its signatories are.

Among the the world’s foul things, the beautiful souls identified Iran’s “anti-Western rhetoric, slogans calling for the elimination of Israel,” and “support for proxy forces,” which is to say, allies, like Hezbollah, with which Iran shares a common enemy in US imperialism and its instrument, Israel. Slogans calling for the elimination of Israel are surely a terrible thing. It is inconceivable that anyone of a high moral standing could ever want to see the end of settler colonialism, ethnic supremacy, and apartheid in Palestine, much less an end to the genocide of the Palestinians.

At least two of the signatories–Angela Davis and Robin D. G. Kelley–later signed the Guardian open letter.

Kelley has since retracted his signature from the Guardian piece, saying the letter wasn’t what he thought it was. However, given his apparent penchant for endorsing communications that excoriate Iran at the moment it is under attack by the United States and Israel, his retraction has deservedly been met with a fair degree of skepticism.

Antisemitism on Canadian Campuses: Debunking a New Report by the Government of Canada

By Stephen Gowans

August 9, 2026

A Canadian-government-sponsored report has concluded that antisemitism is widespread on Canadian university campuses. Some media outlets have picked up on the report. According to the CBC, the new report shows that “Antisemitism on campus is ‘systemic’ and going unaddressed.” Israel’s Haaretz reports that the research found that “95 percent of Jewish Students on Canadian Universities Have Encountered Antisemitism.” Meanwhile, The Canadian Press let its readers know that the study reveals that “Jewish students on Canadian campuses report pervasive antisemitism.”

But what the report really shows is that there is a growing wave of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian activism on Canadian campuses—hardly a revelation. The authors, whose political biases and methodological lapses will become evident in a moment, have turned this commonplace into an alarming trend by a slight of hand: They have defined criticism of Israel as hatred of Jews.

It’s difficult not to conclude that the motivation behind the report is to discredit pro-Palestinian activists by smearing them as antisemites, with the clear intention of shutting down criticism of Israel at Canadian universities. Once you consider who sponsored the report (a pro-Israel, pro-Zionist Canadian government); who wrote it (the lead author is a Zionist who was once the executive director of pro-Israel organization); and who was surveyed (Jewish students who identify Israel and Zionism as important parts of their lives), it becomes clear that the report is not to an honest attempt to gauge antisemitism on campus but a politically motivated effort to discredit students who have organized against Israeli atrocities in Gaza as Jew-haters.

All of this starts to become clear when the report reveals that it “uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism,” a definition that has been widely discredited for falsely conflating antisemitism with antizionism.  The Government of Canada’s “Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism” (Ottawa adopted the definition in 2011) cites the following as examples, among others, of antisemitism:

  • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
  • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
  • Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
  • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

All these examples refer to attitudes toward Israel, a state, and Zionism, a political movement, not Jews as an ethnoreligious group. The action depicted in the third example—using antisemitic images to denote Israel—may be crude, stupid, and intolerable, but the target is Israel, not Jews. This illustrates the problem with the IHRA definition, and why it’s considered invalid. If it were true that hatred of an ethnocratic movement (Zionism) or ethnocratic state (Israel) was the same as hatred of an ethnoreligious group (Jews), then it would be true that anti-fascism represented anti-Italian hatred, that anti-Nazism equaled anti-German animosity, and that opposition to South African Apartheid amounted to intolerance of white people.

The report’s pro-Zionist orientation is further evidenced by its definition of antizionism as “a movement that calls for the erasure of Israel and denies the Jewish people the right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland.” In defining antizionism this way, the report’s authors make the claim—which would hardly be accepted by pro-Palestinian students on campuses—that the Jewish people have a right to dispossess the Palestinians of their country, land, homes, and property.

The report’s authors argue further that antizionism relies “on libel and distortion to claim that the Jewish collective, Israel, rather than the individual Jew, is uniquely evil. It further asserts that Jews, who have thousands of years of history in this place, are fabricating a legitimate claim to their ancestral homeland. Antizionism claims that Israel, exceptionally, is the one state that must be eradicated.”

These claims are false. First, antizionism is not a doctrine concerned with definitions of evil, let alone unique evil. Second, it doesn’t deny that many, though not all, Jews claim Palestine as a homeland, only that Jews are not the only peoples who have lived in Palestine, and that prior residency or what the Pentateuch says Yahweh promised to Moses do not justify the colonization of Palestine and the dispossession of its inhabitants. Finally, antizionism is only anticolonialism specific to Palestine. Anticolonialism has opposed other settler colonial states, including Algeria, Rhodesia, and Apartheid South Africa, declaring that these states too needed to be eradicated as ethnocratic political orders. Much as Israel’s supporters like to think the Zionist state is being singled out, it is not.

The report’s lead author, Jack Jedwab, served as Executive Director of the Quebec branch of the Canadian Jewish Congress, from 1994-1998. The CJC became the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (note the priority of ‘Israel’ in the title), a pro-Israeli outfit that “educates Canadians about the central role Israel plays in Jewish life and identity” and which monitors “issues that affect the Canada-Israel friendship”—like the growing disapproval of Israel in Canadian society, owing to its connections to genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism.

Citing the report, the CIJA is urging “university leaders and governments at every level to carefully consider this report and the recommendations by the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics.” NECA recommends that Canadian universities formally adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a gambit that would allow university administrators to suppress pro-Palestinian activism on campus by labelling it as antisemitic. The body also recommends that universities define Zionism as a part of a Jewish student’s identity. In this way, antizionist activism can be proscribed and punished as antisemitic speech and conduct.

Survey Results

If the authors’ overly broad definition of antisemitism leaves much to be desired, so too does their survey methodology and treatment and reporting of the results.

Below are the percentages of surveyed Jewish students who say they have experienced or witnessed various instances of what the authors call “antisemitic” incidents.

Over the past 12 months, how often have you experienced or witnessed the following on your campus?

(Scale: Often or Occasionally)

  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Zionists. (81%)
  • Vandalism of school property motivated by antisemitism. (71%)
  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Israelis. (67%)
  • Antisemitic remarks/gestures directed at others. (59%)
  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Jews. (56%)
  • Intimidation or threats directed at Jews. (54%)
  • Exclusion from an event or group (on campus). (36%)
  • Antisemitic remarks/gestures directed at you. (34%)
  • Physical violence directed at Jews. (22%)

Notice that two of the incident types concern Jews as Zionists and Jews as Israelis, not Jews as Jews. Second, the most frequently reported incident of hate or discrimination concerns Zionists, followed by Israelis. Jews, as a group, come last. This says that more of what Jewish students report as antisemitism is anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli conduct than antisemitism.  

Who were the Jewish students the study surveyed? According to the report, they were recruited “through Jewish student organizations, community networks, and related channels.” Nine of every 10 said that attachment to Israel was important to them and nearly as many said the same about Zionism. Since pro-Israel, Zionist Jews have long been inclined to label criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitism, it comes as no surprise that these students would view the growing wave of pro-Palestinian activism and opposition to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, apartheid, and settler colonialism as a sign of rising Judeophobia.

A final remark on the results. The study used a four-point scale of often, occasionally, rarely, or never.  The percentages sum two points—often and occasionally. This invites the question or whether the answers leaned more to “occasionally” than “often”, or whether results based on the percentage saying “often” alone would tell a different story—one less likely to arouse media interest? Not that it would matter much. When a government that officially equates antizionism with antisemitism hires researchers who equate antizionism with antisemitism to survey students who equate antizionism with antisemitism about their experiences with antisemitism, it would be naive to think that the findings would claim anything other than campuses that are bursting with antizionist activism are hotbeds of antisemitism.

Conclusion

The report is a transparently dishonest attempt to shut down pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist activism on campuses by misrepresenting opposition to Israel as Jew hatred. It was sponsored by the Canadian government, which supports Israel and has adopted the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism. Its first author is a Zionist, who once held an executive position in a pro-Israel organization. The study surveyed overwhelmingly pro-Israel, pro-Zionist students—students inclined to see opposition to Israel as antisemitism. Likewise, the study’s authors accept a discredited definition of antisemitism, which conflates opposition to Jewish ethnocracy with hatred of Jews as an ethnoreligious group. Additionally, the results, for what they’re worth, show that incidents labelled as antisemitic tend most often to be directed at Jews as Zionists and Jews as Israelis than Jews as Jews.

Based on the study’s evident political bias, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the aim of the research was to paint pro-Palestinian activists as antisemites. It would appear the study pursued this goal in order to support the Zionist and pro-Israel project of pressuring governments and university administrations to prohibit and punish campus campaigns against Israeli apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism.  This is a study with a clear pro-Israel agenda. It cannot be taken seriously as a measure of antisemitism on Canadian campuses.

The Meaning of the US-Iran MoU

18 June 2026

By Stephen Gowans

Below are my brief comments on some aspects of the 14-paragraph Memorandum of Understanding between Washington and Tehran.

Paragraph 1

In the first paragraph “The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran” indicate that they are making commitments on behalf of themselves and “their allies in the current war.”  

The language of the MoU is ambiguous throughout, and the ambiguity is evident here. Who are the signatories’ allies? It’s clear that “allies” covers Israel in the case of the United States and Hezbollah in the case of Iran, but it’s notable that this isn’t spelled out, and that no effort is made to define who the allies are.

A further ambiguity: The paragraph says that military operations will end “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The document, however, doesn’t define the fronts, other than Lebanon. Are the Persian Gulf countries fronts? Iraq? Jordan?

Implied in the definition of Lebanon as a front, is that Hezbollah’s current military operations are actions taken on behalf of Iran, rather than, or, in addition to, actions specifically related to Israel’s ongoing occupation of south Lebanon and its campaign to destroy the Shia organization. Are Hezbollah’s military operations a necessity of self-preservation in the face of Israeli efforts to annihilate the organization and empty south Lebanon of its Shia population, or are they aid to Iran, or both?

More significantly, the fact that both parties make pledges on behalf of their allies, indicates that Washington and Tehran consider themselves the senior partners and their allies subordinates.

This shouldn’t be controversial in the case of the United States and Israel, but has become so owing to a ridiculous popular fallacy that Israel, a country of 10 million people with a GDP of $720 billion, controls the foreign policy of the United States, a country with 34 times the population and 44 times the GDP, and which is a state, moreover, on which Israel depends for its survival.

No matter how ridiculous the idea is on the surface, legions of Americans have found some comfort in scapegoating Israel for their own government’s actions. It is much easier to blame Zionist Jews, working in the shadows, manipulating world events—a trope much beloved of reactionaries throughout history—than to recognize that murder, genocide, invasion, occupation, and conquest are the very hallmarks of US foreign policy. The US government was vicious and bloodthirsty long before there was an Israel and the Israel lobby.

It is instructive to recall that in 1895 US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge hailed the United States as unequalled in conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion in the nineteenth century.  Its record in the eighteenth century was no less unattractive, and the tens of millions slaughtered and burned to death in US colonial and neo-colonial wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries recall that sanguinary imperialism is embedded in the history and character of the United States.  

To believe that wars of aggression and support for colonial and apartheid regimes are somehow alien to the fundamental values of the US state – as John Mearsheimer and his votaries do – is to blind oneself to US history, even recent history, and to be ignorant of the fundamental nature of the US state.

Bernard DeVoto once remarked that US history “began in myth and has developed through three centuries of fairy stories.” The notion, conjured by Mearsheimer and his followers, that the United States wouldn’t be involved in wars of aggression, wouldn’t be participating in genocide, and wouldn’t be supporting a repressive, racist, and anti-democratic regime, were it not for the influence of Israel and its lobby, is yet another fairy story, added to the mountain of comforting illusions that make up US historiography and Americans’ sense of who they are—or who they wish they were—as a people.

In any event, “the Jews made us betray our fundamental values” theory of US foreign policy has been decisively refuted by events, no less by the MoU. The agreement:

  • Was negotiated without the involvement of the fantasized Israeli motive force of US foreign policy;
  • Achieves none of Israel’s war aims;
  • Is universally opposed by Jewish Israeli leaders across the entire political spectrum;
  • Is reviled by the Israel lobby.

On top of implicitly defining Israel as a US vassal state that marches to the beat of a US drummer, the first paragraph commits both parties and their allies to “refrain from the threat or use of force against each other,” (my emphasis). No sooner had Trump signed the MoU, than he violated it, warning the Iranians that “if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.” He added: “It’s amazing what bombs can do.”

On two occasions, as US and Iranian negotiators were meeting to work out the terms of the MoU, US war secretary Pete Hegseth equated negotiation with bombing.

In March he said: “We negotiate with bombs.” He repeated himself this month. “If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs. And we’re very good at it. Nobody better in the world.”

Hegseth’s threats, however, didn’t rise to the barbarity of Trump’s 7 April vow to annihilate “a whole civilization” if Tehran didn’t submit to his demands.

For their part, the Iranians could reply (but haven’t) that “We negotiate by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and striking US Persian Gulf allies with ballistic missiles and drones.”

Paragraph 4

The fourth paragraph states that “The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.”

In keeping with the MoU’s ambiguity, no definition is offered of what “proximity” means or whether the United States will remove its forces permanently, or only temporarily. These questions are deferred to negotiations scheduled to take place over the next 60 days, or longer, if mutually agreed.

The United States will likely make withdrawal of its forces contingent on Iran meeting front-loaded commitments to scale back its nuclear program.  In this way, once Iran satisfies US demands, Washington can renege on the deal, a danger not to be taken lightly, given US conduct in the past, and Trump’s track record. Indeed, the reason Iran began enriching uranium to near military grade, was to pressure the United States to return to the JCPOA, after Trump disavowed the agreement, and after Biden declined to re-enter it, trying instead to coerce the Iranians into accepting new conditions.  

Paragraph 6

In the six paragraph Washington “undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least U.S.D. 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development.”  

Based on press reports, Washington sees this program as an investment opportunity, not reparations. We destroy your infrastructure and rebuild it at a profit for us, rather than repairing it at our expense.

Paragraph 7

In the seventh paragraph Washington pledges “to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran … in an agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal.”

This means that the United States agrees to lift sanctions contingent on Iran satisfying US demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program. It’s very unlikely that Washington will offer sanctions-relief before Iran eliminates its stockpile of highly enriched uranium or satisfies whatever other demands Washington makes regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

There is a very real danger that if Iran complies with US demands, Washington will fail to honor its commitment to lift sanctions. If the Trump administration follows standard US operating procedure, it will either claim that Iran is cheating, and that sanctions therefore won’t be lifted, or will invent new reasons to impose new sanctions on Tehran for some new Iranian trespass. Or Trump could change his mind and decide he’s not going to honor the deal. He has done it before.

Paragraph 11

In the eleventh paragraph, Washington “undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The assets will be unfrozen according to “procedures” to be “mutually agreed on” over the next 60 days. The fact that procedures to release the assets remain to be negotiated, means Washington could slow-roll negotiations of the procedure to hold up release of the assets in order to exert leverage on other issues.

In endlessly lambasting Obama for sending “pallets of cash” to Iran, Trump created the impression that Obama paid a ransom to get Tehran’s signature on the JCPOA. Of course, Obama was doing what Trump himself has pledged to do in the MoU: return to Iran what is rightfully Iran’s.

Having agreed to unfreeze Iran’s assets, Trump did a volte-face and came clean, explaining that: “We have taken a lot of their money, and we have their money. We have taken their money, it’s not our money, it’s their money, and we froze it. At a certain point in time I guess we’re going to have to give it back.”

The idea that in unfreezing Iran’s assets the United States is paying Iran a ransom is an inversion of reality. Meeting US demands to scale back its nuclear program will be the ransom Iran pays to Washington to recover its stolen assets.

Conclusion

Au fond, the MoU is an agreement to pause the war, open the Strait of Hormuz, and lift the US naval blockade, while Washington and Tehran negotiate a final agreement to scale back Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief, reconstruction, return of Iran’s stolen assets, and withdrawal of US forces from some undefined part of West Asia, either permanently or temporarily.  

Strictly speaking, the MoU does not commit the parties to only pause the war, but to end it. By signing the agreement, Washington and Tehran “declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” (my emphasis.) Trump voided the declaration immediately, when he pledged to return to war if the parties fail to arrive at a final agreement, calling to mind the words of Otto von Bismarck: “Great questions of the time are decided not by words but by blood and iron.”

The Via Crucis of John Mearsheimer

John Mearsheimer developed the theory of the Israel lobby because the facts contradicted his Realist theory of international relations. Now the facts are contradicting the very same Israel lobby theory he developed to plug the holes in his IR theory.

15 June 2026

By Stephen Gowans

It’s difficult to argue that Israel and the Israel lobby control US foreign policy when Washington arrives at an agreement with Tehran:   

  • That Israel had no say in;
  • Achieves none of Israel’s war aims;
  • Is universally opposed by Jewish Israeli leaders across the political spectrum;
  • Is met with skepticism by pro-Israel hawks in the US.

Even if the agreement falls apart, it is still the case that Washington has acted in a manner that is hostile to what Israelis perceive as their interests.

“The Israel lobby” is a category of explanation invoked to account for the failure of certain theories to explain US actions (e.g., some Realist IR theories, or the theory that US foreign policy is fundamentally benign in its intentions if not always its actions.)

The problem lies with the theories. They don’t explain what they set out to explain.

John Mearsheimer is a Realist IR theorist, and the most vocal exponent of the theory that 1) Washington acts against US interests in West Asia and in favor of Israel’s and 2) it does so because its foreign policy has been hijacked by the Israel lobby. He readily acknowledges that his IR theory doesn’t explain US behavior in West Asia.

Steve Walt and I, who are both card-carrying Realists, wrote this book called the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. And lots of people over the years have delighted in pointing out, in a “got-ya!” moment, that the Israel Lobby book contradicts our Realist theory. Because the Israel Lobby book says that domestic politics causes the United States to act in non-strategic ways. This is what the Israel Lobby book says. It says that when it comes to Israel, the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave. It’s because of the Lobby; domestic politics. And people expect us, when they level that charge at us, to be defensive and say ‘Oh no, the Lobby book really fits in with our theory.’ But our response is, ‘You’re absolutely correct. The Israel Lobby contradicts my basic theory of international politics.’ [1]

You may notice that Mearsheimer engages in some question-begging here (question-begging in the sense of assuming the truth of what he’s trying to prove in his premise.)  He says “that when it comes to Israel, the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave,” and then adds “It’s because of the Lobby.” An alternative explanation is that the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave because the theory is wrong. Instead, he assumes the theory is correct, and that something else must be going on to obscure its validity. Presto, the Israel lobby theory is born.

The problem, however, is that the Israel lobby theory has as many holes in it as there are holes in the original theory it was designed to plug. That’s evident in the obvious rift that has developed between Washington and Tel Aviv over the question of how to proceed on Iran.

Apart from being an add-on to save Mearsheimer’s IR theory, the Israel lobby theory is also a political tool used by some activists to mobilize support for pro-Palestinian positions by deliberately fostering a misunderstanding that a foreign power has hijacked the US state and that US citizens are paying for wars fought in Israel’s interests and not US interests.

The truth is that US citizens are paying for US wars—and the wars are being fought in the overlapping interests of US billionaires and Israeli colonizers. They may not want to face up to the fact that their government’s conduct is vicious and tyrannical, and may prefer, instead, to see the United States as a fundamentally benign but helpless giant manipulated by an Israeli Svengali, but this is nothing more than a comforting illusion.

The reality is that the domestic billionaire class that shapes US foreign policy goals has set objectives that, for the most part, mesh with the settler colonial project of Israel. Broadly speaking, the overarching US objective is to prevent the emergence of an independent regional hegemon in energy-rich West Asia.

Owing to its cultural, ethnic, demographic, and economic connections with the West (Israel sees itself as part of the West, a Western outpost in the East), and its complete dependency on Western support to survive, Israel is uniquely placed to act as a US janissary—a protector of US interests in the Land of the Five Seas [2] and elite combat force equipped and motivated to assert US interests. Guardian of the interests of great powers in the Arab and Muslim worlds has, from day one, been the role sought by Zionists for a Jewish state. The quid-pro-quo has always been understood as: We look after your interests in the region against those of local forces of independence, and you guarantee our survival.

A troubling aspect of the Israel lobby theory is its resonance with a Nazi theory.  

Hitler did much the same as Mearsheimer in explaining why something didn’t happen that he thought should have happened.  

Mearsheimer says the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave because policy-making in Washington has been taken over by decision-makers who are committed to Israeli goals and Israeli goals are inimical to US interests.

Similarly, Hitler said Germany should have won the First World War and didn’t because Jews penetrated German policy-making circles and took over German decision-making and pursued Zionist goals that were hostile to German interests. How else could one explain, asked Hitler, that no enemy troops had ever set foot on German soil, and still Germany lost the war? In this, Hitler anticipated Mearsheimer’s wondering how Realist IR theory failed to account for US behavior in West Asia. For both, a Zionist take-over offered a ready explanation of failed expectation.

Overlapping interests, not Israeli colonization of foreign policy decision-making in Washington, account for why US and Israeli decision-makers are so often in sync. Occasionally, however, the goals of the two states depart, as they do, now, on Iran. Israel wants to finish off Iran, destroy Hezbollah, and continue its expansion into Lebanon. Washington wants to prevent the world economy from going off an oil- and fertilizer-scarcity cliff, and is prepared to make concessions to Iran that Israel doesn’t like in order to avoid a world-wide calamity.

When US and Israeli interests fail to align, the US asserts its greater strength, and Israel tries to maintain some degree of autonomy by negotiating the terms of its subordination. But it remains, as always, a subordinate state and instrument of US policy. For its part, the US remains, as always, the guarantor of its janissary Jewish state’s survival.

1. John Mearsheimer in Athens: Why Realism Explains Better than Alternative Theories, Address to the Council for International Relations and the Institute of International Relations, Athens, Greece, 2 June, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVuZbW4qKNY

2. The territory bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Arabian Sea, and Red Sea.

Whether the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or Israel, It’s All Stolen Land

By Stephen Gowans

13 June 2026

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, “left-wing UK leaders” are “slamming” an Israeli real-estate event, alleging that it seeks to sell properties to Jews on stolen West Bank land.

While efforts to impede the ongoing Judaization of Palestine are commendable, there is a fundamental problem that lurks in the campaign’s understanding of what is and isn’t stolen Palestinian land. The reality is that all the land in historic Israel that is claimed by Jewish settlers—both within the 1967 borders and outside—is stolen.

Failing to acknowledge this reality implicitly legitimizes Israeli colonialism and all earlier thefts of Palestinian land. While it identifies land stolen in 1967 as Palestinian, it tacitly accepts land stolen in 1948 as legitimately belonging to Zionist settlers.

Of course, it can’t be true that land taken from Palestinians by Zionist violence in 1967 is Palestinian land, while land taken from Palestinians by Jewish settler violence in 1948 is not.

All the same, the illogic is concealed behind the claim that the violent transfer of Palestinian land to the new Israeli state in 1948 was legitimized by the UN partition plan.

This view, however, is wrong for a number of reasons.

1.) The plan was legally invalid, since it was based on a General Assembly resolution, and

1a.) General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and

1b.) the General Assembly didn’t have the authority to partition Palestine. (Indeed, the UN Charter accords to neither the General Assembly or the Security Council the authority to create new states);

2.) The Palestinians rejected the plan;

3.) The Zionists also rejected it, as evidenced by the fact that:

3a.) They didn’t implement it; and

3b.) They conquered territory in excess of what the plan allocated to them.

The plan apportioned 56 percent of Palestine to one-third of the population that was Jewish (mainly settlers), and only 42 percent to the Palestinians, who comprised two-thirds of the population. (Two percent was allotted to what was to be an internationalized Jerusalem.)

By early 1949, the Zionists—keen to control as much of Palestine as they could—had conquered 78 percent of the territory (versus the 56 percent they were supposed to have under the plan.)

Still, even if the partition plan had been legally valid, it remained flagrantly colonial, since it endorsed the expropriation of the territory of the existing inhabitants by a group of settlers animated by the project of expelling as much of the Palestinian population as possible and them imposing a regime of Jewish ethnoreligious supremacy on those that remained.

The partition plan has become embedded in international law, but colonialism does not become just by virtue of its inclusion in international law. International law is the instrument of the colonial powers that formulated it. They formulated it to defend and promote their interests—not to protect weaker peoples and states.

The great powers make, and have made, international law, and when it doesn’t suit their purposes, they break it. So it is that they have read the partition plan into the global legal order, even though the plan was invalid under the very same order.

There exists today one Jewish supremacist state in all of historic Palestine. All the land, both within and beyond the 1967 borders, is stolen. The ineluctable conclusion is that home sales to Jewish settlers anywhere in historic Palestine, (not only in the West Bank), are auctions of stolen land.

The competing view that only settlements in the West Bank represent confiscated Palestinian land, endorses the colonial fiction that Jewish settlement within the 1967 borders is not colonial and has not taken place on the dispossessed land of the Palestinians. On the contrary, all the territory controlled by the US-backed colonial settler regime is colonized and stolen.

The solution to colonization is not colonization of all but 22 percent of a people’s territory—what’s proposed in the two-state “solution”—but decolonization, the creation of one democratic state, in which all people are equal, regardless of their ethnicity or religious identity.

That’s what Palestinians proposed from the very beginning. It is a multidimensional solution, one that remedies both the problems of settler colonialism (by creating its antithesis, the democratic state of all its citizens) and the problems of anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism (by depoliticizing ethnic and religious identity and thereby establishing the full equality of individuals, regardless of the religion they practice or the people they identify as.)

From the 22 percent of historic Palestine that the two-state proposal envisages for a Palestinian state; to Jawlan (called the Golan Heights by Israelis; conquered by the US-backed colonial settler regime in 1967; ethnically cleansed of its Syrian population; settled by Jews; and annexed by the Israeli state in 1981); to Israel itself: it is all stolen land. Failing to recognize this reality perpetuates an injustice and blocks implementation of the only fair and democratic solution to the multiple problems at the center of the Zionist colonization of historic Palestine and Jawlan.

Nazi Myth. Zionist Myth.

By Stephen Gowans

4 June 2026

A national Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published an editorial on 4 June 2026, lambasting Canadian prime minister Mark Carney for failing to condemn anti-Zionism. The editorial board pressed Carney to equate opposition to Israel’s existence with demonizing Canada’s Jews.

The editorial was titled “The Missing Words in Carney’s Speech”, a reference to a speech the prime minister had made to condemn what he described as a growing wave of anti-Semitism in Canada. “It was good that Mr. Carney went to a synagogue and addressed antisemitism,” argued the editorial, but added that “He should have said: ‘If you oppose Israel’s existence, if you demonize Jewish-Canadians, you are wrong, you are hateful and I stand against you.’”

The growing wave of anti-Semitism in Canada is a myth. As I explained in a previous post, B’nai Brith Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, has invented “a national crisis” of antisemitism by defining opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel’s conduct as Judeophobia. The organization, along with other pro-Israel partisans, are pressing Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian, pro-democracy and anti-Zionist, anti-colonial political positions. Carney’s speech added grist to the mill of the anti-Palestinian argument, but the Globe and Mail felt he hadn’t gone far enough.

Let’s be clear

1/ Zionism is not Judaism and nor are “Zionist” and “Jew” the same. Indeed, there are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jewish Zionists.

Zionism is a settler colonial, ethno-supremacist, apartheid ideology, that is the foundation of laws and practices that maintain the dominance of one ethnic group (Jews) over all others in historic Palestine. Nazism, and the ideology of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, shared the same ethnic chauvinism and colonialist mentality.

2/ Conflating Jew and Judaism with Zionist and Zionism is reminiscent of the Nazis conflating, in one instance, Jew and Judaism with international banker and finance capitalism, and in another, with Bolshevik and Bolshevism. The Nazi’s “Judeobolsheviks” have become “Judeozionists” in the hands the Globe and Mail and other Israel supporters.

The conflation is a form of anti-Semitism, since it argues that ethno-supremacism and settler colonialism are inherent in Judaism (which they are not) and that all Jews, and only Jews, are ethno-supremacists who support settler colonialism (manifestly untrue.)

Neither were all Jews Bolsheviks or finance capitalists, though the Nazis would have had you believe they were. Likewise, The Globe and Mail would have you believe that all Jews in Canada are ardent Zionists and die-hard supporters of Israel. In point of fact, all Jews do not support an ideology and regime of ethnoreligious exclusion and rule over colonized natives and many of those who do support these abominations are not Jews. There is, therefore, no necessary connection between Jew and Zionist.

We can look at this another way.

Despite the Nazis’ self-appointment as representatives and champions of the German race, anti-Nazism was not hatred of Germans. Anti-Nazism=anti-German is an obvious logical fallacy, but one Nazis were happy to promote.

Likewise, despite Israel’s self-appointment as representative and champion of the world’s Jews, anti-Zionism is not hatred of Jews. Anti-Zionism=anti-Jew is also an obvious fallacy, but it is one, all the same, that Israel and its supporters are indefatigably keen to propagandize.

Having no other argument to make—how can one argue that settler colonialism and its offspring, apartheid and genocide, are good things?—Zionists reliably fall back on the myth that Nazis relied on to defend their own settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide: Anyone who rejects the ethno-supremacist ideology I’ve adopted as self-appointed representative of my ethnic group, is obviously against my ethnic group.

Germans didn’t appoint the Nazis to represent their “race.” Nor did all Germans support the Nazis. Saying that all Germans were Nazis and that opposition to the Third Reich therefore amounted to demonizing Germans, is plainly absurd. It’s also a slur against Germans.

And yet this is precisely the argument Zionists, no less the Globe and Mail editorial board, make when they equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

The world’s Jews didn’t appoint Israel to represent them. Not all Jews support Zionism. (And most of the world’s Zionists are not Jews, but evangelical Christians. For example, CUFI, Christians United for Israel, has more members than all the Jews in the United States.) Saying that all Jews are Zionists and that criticism of Zionism is therefore demonization of Jews is no less absurd than saying all Germans were Nazis and anti-Nazism is demonization of Germans.

The truth of the matter is that Israel and its Zionist ideology are bleeding support, and the pro-settler colonial, apartheid, anti-Palestinian Israel lobby is trying to stop the hemorrhaging. Their answer: Invent a crisis of antisemitism, blame it on anti-Zionism, and press governments to implement laws and practices to silence activists calling for the decolonization and de-Zionization of historic Palestine.

Plus ca change. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, The Globe and Mail strongly supported apartheid South Africa and opposed the ANC, Nelson Mandela, and the liberation movement. Had it been able to, it might have argued that the prime ministers of the day should have dressed down ANC supporters, telling them that: ‘If you oppose the apartheid regime’s existence, you demonize white-Canadians.’” The newspaper, the organ of Bay Street, Canada’s financial center, will, it seems, forever be on the wrong side of history.

B’nai Brith Canada Invents a Crisis of Antisemitism to Pressure Governments to Criminalize Political Opposition to Israel

B’nai Brith Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, has invented “a national crisis” of antisemitism by defining opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel’s conduct as Judeophobia in order to press Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist political positions.

30 April 2026

By Stephen Gowans

On April 27 B’nai Brith Canada issued its Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, arguing that “Canada is in the throes of a national crisis of antisemitism.” The report documented 6,800 incidents of antisemitism” in 2025, the “highest volume recorded” since the group began its tracking in 1982.

What is B’nai Brith, how does it define antisemitic incidents, and what actions does it want governments to take to address the crisis it has identified?

B’nai Brith is a pro-Israel lobby group which “works tirelessly to support and defend Israel” and whose mission is to “stand unequivocally with the State of Israel,” according to its website. The group does not represent Canadian Jews as a whole. Not all Canadian Jews are Zionists or supporters of Israel. Instead, the outfit represents Israel and Jews in Canada who stand firmly with the Jewish state.

Significantly, B’nai Brith describes its support for Israel as “unequivocal.” It backs Israel, right or wrong. In 1988, a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 people. Then US president George H.W. Bush refused to apologize for the incident, saying that “I will never apologize for America.” B’nai Brith is the George W. Bush of Israel. It will never apologize for what it calls “the only Jewish state in the world.”

The group’s commitment to defending Israel is evidenced in its definition of antisemitism. The organization uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, prepared by an outfit that is as ardently pro-Israel as the B’nai Brith.  The IHRA definition has been widely criticized for 1) not being a definition at all, but a list of examples of what the group calls antisemitism, with no explanation of the principles than undergird the examples; and 2) for including anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel in three of its 11 examples.

The IHRA cites the following as an example of Jew hatred: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” While anti-Zionists do not deny Jews the right to establish a state per se, they do deny Jews (and anyone else for that matter) the right to establish a national state on the country of another people. Israel’s existence depends on the non-existence of Palestine. In practice, Jewish self-determination is equivalent to the denial of Palestinian self-determination.

A careful and precise interpretation of the IHRA example above would exclude anti-Zionism as an example of antisemitism were an anti-Zionist willing to accept the creation of a Jewish state on a genuine terra nullius (unoccupied, unclaimed land). Indeed, I would argue that virtually all anti-Zionists fall into this category, since their opposition to Jewish nationalism lies not in Jews creating a state, but in the cancelation of one people’s right of self-determination (the Palestinians’) to assert another’s (that of Jews).

However, it is clear from the B’nai Brith report that the organization has interpreted the IHRA example to mean that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The report describes criticism of Zionism, (e.g., that “Zionism is analogous to “settler colonialism”) as “demonization of Jews who believe in the right of the Jewish people to practice self-determination in their ancestral homeland,” and that this criticism, or “demonization”, creates “a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community.”

I would make a few points in reply:

  • Jews, to be sure, did have a state in Palestine in antiquity. But the Palestinians’ ancestral claim to the same land is equally strong. Indeed, it seems likely that today’s Palestinians are the descendants of Jews who lived in Palestine in antiquity, and were converted to Islam during the Muslim Expansion of the seventh century.
  • Palestine was the ancestral homeland of many peoples. That Jews once had a state there does not negate the rights of other peoples who have also had a presence in the same territory. The Palestinians, significantly, have an unbroken, multi-millennial presence in the land.
  • Criticism of Zionism does not create a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community. The categories Zionist and Jew are no more coterminous than are the categories Zionism and Judaism. There are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jews, let alone Jewish Zionists. And not all Jews are Zionists; some are ardently anti-Zionist. Zionist and Jew are not the same. Criticism of Zionists is not equal to criticism of Jews. Likewise, criticism of Zionism is different from criticism of Judaism; one is a nationalist ideology, the other a religion.

It is likely that a majority of Jews in Canada support Israel and hold Zionist views. Based on this reality, B’nai Brith advances the sophistical argument that criticism of Zionism and Israel amounts to criticism of Jews (again, illegitimately conflating Jew and Zionist), and that, therefore, this criticism amounts to antisemitism. The argument is tantamount to claiming that anti-Nazism, at the height of the Nazi’s popularity, was an expression of hatred of Germans as a people. Only if one conflates Nazism with German ethnicity can this sleight of hand be pulled off.

Other indications that B’nai Brith defines anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian positions as antisemitism:

  1. The pro-Zionist organization objects to pro-Palestinian student clubs at Canadian universities celebrating Palestinian resistance, decrying armed Palestinian resistance as “terrorism.” As an organization that stands unequivocally with Israel, we can be sure that the B’nai Brith regards the Irgun and Stern Gang—Jewish insurgent groups which, from 1931 to 1948, practiced terrorism in Palestine—as groups that resisted British colonialism.  Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and the British preferred to call them terrorists, even fascists. Of course, one can be a resistance fighter and use terrorist methods, as much as a state can be a state and practice terrorism, Israel being an emblematic case. The categories are not mutually exclusive.
  • The pro-Israel group objects to the use of the terms “massacre” and “genocide” by Canadian journalists reporting on Israel’s conduct in Gaza and deplores the Canadian media’s “focus on civilian casualties and humanitarian imagery” along with the “presentation of casualty figures.” Moreover, it defines the following headlines as examples of anti-Israel media bias linked to antisemitism:
  • “Israel killing journalists and getting away with it, say advocates.”
  • “More than 400 dead in Gaza as Israel makes ‘extensive’ strikes ending ceasefire, standoff.”
  • “Winnipeggers rally to condemn Israel’s attacks on Iran, humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

The points above make clear that the B’nai Brith is little more than a pro-Israel public relations outfit that objects to any and all criticism of Israel, and seeks to neutralize opposition to the state it tirelessly defends and stands by unequivocally by smearing the state’s opponents as Jew haters.  In the organization’s view, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, and Israel-critical positions are antisemitic by definition. Political positions are cast as expressions of irrational hatred. When it reports that there is a crisis of antisemitism in Canada, what the Israel lobby group really means is that there is a growing tide of opposition to Zionism, hostility to Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians, and intolerance of Israel’s character as an ethno-supremacist, apartheid, state.

Name-calling critics of Israel and anti-Zionists as anti-Semites is fairly harmless.  But B’nai Brith has no intention of stopping at traducing Israel’s opposition. Its real intention is to pressure Canadian governments at all levels to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist positions by portraying them as hate-speech.

The pro-Israel lobby group calls on the:

  • Federal government to designate the Lebanese, Egyptian, and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations;
  • Provincial and territorial governments to prosecute antisemitic hate crimes, which, given the organization’s broad definition of antisemitic hate, includes any expression of opposition to Jewish nationalist ideology and ethno-supremacism and all support for pro-Palestinian positions;
  • Municipal authorities to ban “events that promote hatred”, by which it means pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist events, including Al Quds Day.

To understand how dishonest both the B’nai Brith and its report are, consider what a pro-Palestinian report would look like if it mimicked the pro-Israeli lobby group’s approach. It would define denial of a Palestinian right of self-determination on the Palestinians’ ancestral homeland as anti-Palestinian hatred. Denouncing Hamas as a terrorist organization; denying the Nakba as a genocide; disputing the stamp of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocidal; dismissing as false or exaggerated reports of torture and sexual assault in Israeli prisons; denouncing the October 7 attacks as acts of terrorism rather a campaign of national liberation; rejecting the reality of Israeli apartheid; all of these–in other words, adopting the B’nai Brith’s own political positions—would be defined as hate speech rather than political speech. The media would be censured for describing October 7 as a massacre and focusing on Jewish casualties, as well as for failing to place Palestinian atrocities within the appropriate context. Media “bias” would be blamed for an avalanche of anti-Palestinian hate incidents. Finally, the report would call on governments at all levels to criminalize political speech that is critical of the Palestinian cause.

Canadians might think of the B’nai Brith as a Jewish advocacy group that works to overcome antisemitism. In reality, it is a pro-Israel lobby group that uses antisemitism as a weapon to smear people and organizations that oppose its pro-Israel political positions. The outfit poses as a representative of all Jews in Canada, but is, on the contrary, only a champion of Israel and Zionists, not Jews and Judaism. Its self-avowed mission is to work “tirelessly to support and defend Israel”, which it does, in part, by attacking opponents of Israel as antisemites, using a definition of Jew-hatred that includes opposition to Israel and the nationalist ideology on which the state is founded.

There is no crisis of antisemitism in Canada. The “crisis” is a myth invented by the Zionist outfit to pressure Canadian governments, at all levels, to criminalize pro-Palestinian positions and anti-Zionist advocacy—that is political speech—as hate speech. B’nai Brith must be resisted, exposed for the pro-Israel lobby group it truly is, and contained as a menace to the right of political advocacy.

They Demonize Our Revolutionaries

20 April 2026

By Stephen Gowans

On April 14, Ezra Klein, the New York Times’ columnist and podcaster, sought a “reckoning with Israel’s ‘one-state reality’.” He organized a discussion with Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, a pair of academics who had written a 15 July 2025 article in Foreign Affairs, The Promise and Peril of Recognizing Palestine. Their article asked whether “a two-state solution [could] emerge from a one-state reality?”

The discussion had two merits: First, it acknowledged that a Jewish supremacist state exists from the river to the sea. As Lynch and Telhami put it in their Foreign Affairs article:

Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.

Israel, in other words, is a democratic state for Jews, and a Jewish state for Palestinians, on whose country, land, and homes, Israel has been built. The philosopher Domenico Losurdo called it a Herrenvolk democracy—a democracy for (and only for) a master people. Others call it, correctly, an apartheid state. The three descriptions are congruent.

The second merit was Telhami, who offered a number of important insights. I’ll cite but one.

Israeli strategy from Day 1 has been to have what they call escalation dominance. It is a one-sided deterrence; it is that whenever there’s a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand, and it will always have the upper hand. In effect, you’re saying you have to have strategic dominance over every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East. That’s half a billion people. And you are a country of 10 million. That is why Israel doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons

The last sentence, perhaps, requires some elaboration. Consider this: On April 18, New York Times’ reporters Mark Mazzetti, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes began a report on the US-Israeli war on Iran with the following: “The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.”

Note that the reporters didn’t say the two aggressors attacked Iran because it had threatened either country or any of their allies, or because they were motivated by human rights considerations. Instead, they wrote that the United States and Israel launched their war to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear arms that would provide Tehran a means to deter future US and Israeli aggression. These arms would, in Telhami’s words, check US and Israeli escalation dominance. Were Iran to achieve this objective, it would deny the two aggressor states strategic dominance over “half a billion people” and “every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East.” Thus, it is not a nuclear threat to the physical safety of Americans and Israelis that Washington and Tel Aviv seek to deter, but a threat to their ability to dominate West Asia and its hundreds of millions of people.

Klein, a man who acknowledges that he does not count himself among those who want to see Israel cease to exist (though the idea that anyone should want an apartheid state to continue exist is troubling), offered his own commentary, some of which had merit.

  • He argued that “the one-state reality” [which is to say, Israeli apartheid, is] not accidental. It was, and is, not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land — in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes.”
  • He noted that “More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the previous two decades combined.”
  • He lamented that “Israel has allowed — has protected — a terrifying rise in settler and military violence toward the Palestinians who live” in the West Bank, adding that “There is no doubt, if you go there, who rules the West Bank — and it is not the P.A.”
  • He pointed to how “Israel has used the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people, adding that “it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes.”
  • He acknowledged that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians a state of their own.

Sadly, Klein’s merits are outweighed by his egregious faults. Significantly, he fails to explain how Israel’s resolve to deny the Palestinians a state of their own has left the Palestinians bereft of any option but violence to redress a fundamental wrong; and that this, by itself, explains the outbreak of Palestinian violence on 7 October 2023.  

Palestinian rebellion was met on the Israeli side by Tel Aviv stepping up its decades-long efforts to erase the Palestinians as a people. These efforts have been evinced, to use the language of the Genocide Convention, in the:

  • Killing of Palestinians in large numbers;
  • Inflicting on them serious bodily and mental harm; and
  • Imposing on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their demise.

Klein excuses these genocidal acts as “what any state and any people would do.” That’s doubtful. What any state and people might have done, and certainly could have done, is begin to redress the historical injustices that produced the rebellion. As Marx observed about the 1857 Indian Rebellion against the country’s British colonizers: “There is something in human history like retribution.” (The Indian Revolt, 16 September 1857) Or, to borrow from Marx again, with appropriate alterations of language for time and place: “However infamous the conduct of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023, it was only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of Israel’s own conduct”. Any serious effort to prevent future Palestinian violence, would address the root of the violence, not try, by escalation dominance, to suppress it, so that the fruits of the injustice Zionists have visited upon their victims — the theft of their land, homes, property, and country — can continue to be enjoyed by Israeli Jews into the future. That is what is meant when one says Israel’s response to the Palestinian rebellion is justified because it is what any state or people would do.

Genocide is built into settler colonialism. Settlers seek the land of indigenous peoples for the exclusive use of their own ethnic group. European settlers did so in North America, Australia, and New Zealand; German settlers did so in southwest Africa; and the Nazis tried to do so in eastern Europe, where Slavs, Jews, and Roma–the occupants of the land Hitler coveted for Lebensraum and German settlement–paid a terrible price. Jewish settlers have done the same to the natives of Palestine. In all cases, the result has been genocide. Settlers drive indigenous peoples off land they covet by expulsion, extermination, or both. Settler colonialism rests on the logic of the elimination of the natives.

Settler colonial states of the past have acted just as Israel, a settler colonial state of the present, has. But that’s hardly a justification for genocide. The Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen shot 34,000 Soviet Jews and dumped then in the Babi Yar ravine in September 1941 in retaliation for Soviet agents detonating mines in occupied Kiev which killed as many a three-hundred German soldiers. This was an instance of settler colonial forces undertaking harsh reprisals against the violent rebellion of the natives, in this case, against an ethnic group, Jews, viewed by the Nazis as being intimately linked to the political leadership of the resistance, or terrorists, as the Nazis called them. According to Klein’s logic, the Nazi reprisal killings were justified as “what any state and any people would do.”

It might also be pointed out that if Israel did “what any state and any people would do,” then Hamas and Hezbollah have done what any colonized and oppressed people would do. Colonized people never allow the colonizer to despoil their country, land, homes, and property, without putting up a fight. We might call this an iron law of history. To borrow Marx’s language, the inevitable rebellion of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023 no more lends itself to moralizing – for or against – than does an earthquake in California or a snowstorm in Canada, both inevitable events. It’s what colonized and oppressed people have always done and will always do. So, if we can point to genocide as what any colonial settler state and settler people would do to the people it’s oppressing, we can also point to violent rebellion as what any colonized people would do to the people who are oppressing them.

Klein’s heart bleeds for Palestinians who have been denied a state of their own and for the Shia of south Lebanon who the Israelis have driven from their homes, perhaps never allowed to return. But in his view, Hamas and Hezbollah, the inevitable response to Zionist settler colonialism, are anathema. Israel’s “right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah,” he says, “is undeniable.” Sure, as much as the SS’s right to reprisal against Jews for the killing of three-hundred German soldiers at Kiev was undeniable. Zionists will object that you can’t compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But you can. As a settler colonial state, Israel shares much in common with its settler colonial cohorts: the United States, Canada; Australia; New Zealand; and Germany.

Klein must, in the words of the Syrian singer Siba, “demonize our revolutionaries,” as much as Israel must “eradicate our roots; demolish our homes; criminalize our existence; falsify our origins; separate our loved ones; and slaughter our children.”

Those who pity the oppressed but condemn their rebellion and demonize their revolutionaries are no friend of the oppressed. They aid the oppressor. But, then, I suspect Klein is alright with that.

Who Rules the US Revealed in Washington’s Cuba Demands

The idea that US foreign policy is driven by national security and human rights considerations is contradicted by the list of demands the US State Department issued to Havana last week. In reality, US foreign policy is driven by the interests of US businesses and investors, as the US demands make clear.

Cuba must:

o Transition to a market-based economy;

 o Expand its private sector;

o Open its door to foreign-investment;

o Compensate U.S. citizens and corporations whose assets and properties were nationalized in the 1960s;

o Release political prisoners;

o Expand political freedoms.

Washington “signaled that the United States would not tolerate resistance to its demands.”

The New York Times’ headline that reported on this meeting said that US officials travelled to Havana to lay out proposals, when, in point of fact, as the text of the article indicated, the US delegation issued demands to which it said it “would not tolerate resistance.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Epstein Avant La Lettre

I have been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, the first modern autobiography. I was shocked by one incident the eighteenth-century composer, novelist, and philosopher describes.

Rosseau writes of “a little girl of eleven or twelve,” named Anzoletta, who he and his friend, Carrio, bought from her mother with the aim of enjoying her “sensual pleasures,” that is, keeping her as a sex slave.

Carrio, who was a lady’s man, grew weary of always going to women who belonged to others and took it into his head to have one of his own; and as we were inseparable he suggested to me an arrangement which is not rare in Venice, that we should keep one between us. I agreed. The next question was to find a safe one. He made such thorough investigations that he unearthed a little girl of eleven or twelve, whom her wretched mother wanted to sell. We went to see her together…She was fair and gentle as a lamb. … We gave the mother some money, and made arrangements for the daughter’s keep. (The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Book Seven, Penguin, 1953, p. 302.)

Rousseau says that he developed a parental affection for the girl that prevented the relationship from developing into a sexual one. All the same, he and Carrio bought the girl with the intention of “being the corrupters of her innocence,” as Rousseau writes.

What is striking is that the theorist of liberalism passed over the incident without showing the faintest pang of conscience, though at other times he expressed great remorse for actions that by today’s standards pale in comparison with the intended sexual enslavement of a prepubescent girl.

Throughout his Confessions, Rousseau claims to tremble in outrage at wrongs and the exploitation of the weak, though clearly his aversion to injury inflicted on the weak was far from universal, and likely very much limited to inflictions upon people such as himself, and certainly not on little girls of poor families.

What Might Lenin Have Thought About the US-Israeli War on Iran (and the War in Ukraine)?

Facit indignatio versum

(Indignation makes my verses) – Juvenal

1 March 2026

Stephen Gowans

In his analyses of the causes of the first world war, Lenin stressed the importance of understanding the policies the belligerent states pursued before the war. Borrowing from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the Bolshevik leader argued that war is politics by other (namely, violent) means. Clausewitz put it this way: “War is policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of the pen.” Lenin echoed Clausewitz: All “war is but a continuation by violent means of the politics which the belligerent states and their ruling classes had been conducting for many years, sometimes for decades, before the outbreak of war.”

So, what policies were the belligerents pursuing by the pen, before they took up the sword? The answer, in Lenin’s view, explained what caused the war. If “you have not studied the policies of [the] belligerent groups over a period of decades … then you don’t understand what this war is all about,” he wrote.

All the belligerents, argued Lenin, were pursuing the same policy: they were reaching across the world for opportunities to dominate its economic surpluses wherever they could be found.  They had been able to do this, for a time, without each greatly impeding the other. However, they had arrived at the point where this was no longer possible. The sum total of opportunities had been completely claimed, and acquiring new ones, could only mean encroaching upon the opportunities that other states, or more specifically, other ruling classes, claimed for their own. The cause of the war, then, was “the whole policy of the entire system of European states in their economic and political interrelations.” The war, said Lenin “steadily and inevitably grew out of this system.”

The word ‘system’ is important. Lenin saw powerful states as actors hopelessly entangled in a system of inter-state relations which pit one against the other for economic advantage. This was a system in which individual states, acting on behalf of, and as the instruments of, individual ruling classes, competed for opportunities to exploit labor and acquire raw materials in order to appropriate as much of the world’s economic surpluses as they possibly could. As a class, said Engels, the bourgeoisie has a common interest and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country, is directed against bourgeois of other nations outside the country. What do ruling classes do? Exploit the labor of subordinate classes. So, when the common interest of one ruling class is directed against the common interest of another, it is directed against encroaching on territory over which the other exploits labor.  The community of interest against the ruling classes of other states took both non-violent (by the pen) and violent (by the sword) forms. “These policies,” argued Lenin, “show … continuous economic rivalry between the world’s … greatest giants, capitalist economies.”  

In light of his analysis, Lenin believed that the question of which belligerent fired the first shot in the war—that is, which, in today’s terms, launched a war of aggression contra international law—was beside the point, for each was pursuing a policy that would inevitably lead to war.  As he put it: “This war is the continuation of a policy of … conquest, of capitalist robbery on the part of [the states] involved in the war. Obviously, the question of which [state] was the first to draw the knife is of small account to us.” Why? To reiterate: “Everybody was preparing for the war; the attack was made by the one who considered it most auspicious for himself at a given moment.” Another would have turned to the sword first, if, in the moment, violence was the means judged to be most suitable to the pursuit of policy.  For this reason, Lenin refused to blame Germany for starting the first world war, even though the Kaiser declared war on Russia and France and invaded Belgium.  “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?”

Much of the discourse on the current war in Ukraine is concerned with the question of which state started it. If we take Lenin’s view, the question is of no consequence, since the origin of the war lies not in Valdimir Putin’s decision to send Russian troops thundering across the border into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, or the decisions of US and NATO leaders to renege on their promises to assuage Russian security concerns by forbearing from NATO expansion into the former Russian sphere of influence. It lies instead in the rivalry between the Atlantic Alliance and Moscow for the economic interests of their respective ruling classes.

When I say the economic interests of the ruling classes I don’t mean specific deals, or pipeline routes, or mining concessions, although they may be involved. I mean, something broader: the ability of a ruling class to exploit opportunities for capital accumulation over as wide a territory as possible—which means at home, and if the state is strong enough, abroad. The existence of multiple ruling classes obviously complicates matters. Since there are multiple states, hence multiple ruling classes, there are multiple ongoing efforts to exploit the same economic spaces. This isn’t to say that security concerns aren’t relevant. The first job of a ruling class is to survive. Security concerns very likely played a part in Moscow’s decision to try to conquer Ukraine. But why do exploiting ruling classes want to survive? To exploit.

The Imperialism of Peace

Lenin’s analysis produces the interesting and important concept of the imperialism of peace. If war, in Lenin’s view is simply one means of pursuing a policy for economic space and opportunity, then soft-power, diplomacy, and other non-violent forms of inter-state intercourse, are but alternative methods of pursuing the same policy.  In the words of the German-Polish Marxist, and cofounder of the German Communist Party, the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, policy is pursued as either war or armed peace. Peace treaties may stay a violent hand for a time, but they do not eradicate the rivalry that gives rise to war. On this matter, Lenin and Luxemburg were ad idem with the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that a “treaty of peace makes an end to the war of the moment, but not to the conditions of war which at any time may afford a new pretext for opening hostilities” (emphasis added). This is a radical view. To end war, the conditions of war must be eradicated. Peace treaties simply paper over the problem and fail to address the root of war.

In the view of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Kant, inter-state rivalry is ubiquitous and interminable; competition among states is always present, even when violence is absent from their intercourse. If we define war as the effort of one ruling class to impose its will on another, then states are always at war, even if they are not using violence to get their way. Kant again: “A state of peace among men who live side by side is not the natural state, which is rather to be described as a state of war: that is to say, although there is not perhaps always actual open hostility, there is a constant threat that an outbreak may occur” and “the separate existence of a number of neighboring and independent states…is in itself already a state of war.”

Incessant struggle, even in times of formal peace, calls to mind the observations of numerous other thinkers. Lenin’s view was hardly novel.

Clinias of Crete, a character in Plato’s final dialogue, The Laws, contended that “Even what most men call peace is but a name. The reality is that every state, by a law of nature, is engaged at all times in an undeclared war against every other state.”

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan that: “In all times kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independence, and in ceaseless competition [for power], are in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns, upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a position of war.”

British prime minister Pit the Elder in 1763 accurately predicted that the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years’ War, would be nothing but an armed truce.

French marshal Ferdinand Foch presciently characterized the Treaty of Versailles as “not a peace [but] an armistice for 20 years.”

While every state may be at war with its neighbors, some states are more able, as a matter of their great size and strength, to wage it. Washington is at war with every state (that is every other ruling class) that does not submit to US hegemony. Almost always the war is carried out as the imperialism of peace. For decades, Washington has waged war on Iran by mainly economic means, punctuated, every now and then, by violence, but violence has been the exception. The rule has been daily non-violent coercion extending over decades. The US war on Iran aims to contain and weaken the state so that it is incapable of extending its own domain to territory the US state currently dominates; to demonstrate to other states that what happens to countries that fail to toe the US line is that they will be menaced, throttled, and undermined by the United States, its proxies, or both; and to make Tehran more compliant with US demands favorable to US ruling class interests.    

Washington has long held Iran in a cruel economic vice that has immiserated Iranians. The predictable and intended outcome of this campaign has been civil unrest. The program has paid off handsomely for Washington, with the Iranian economy collapsing under the weight of US cruelty. Iranians took the street to demand their government provide relief from the pain, relief Tehran had not the power to provide. Even capitulating to US demands would not bring about the desired relief, since Washington refused to provide any immediate easing of its sanctions. On 20 January, The Wall Street Journal quoted US Treasury Scott Bessent: “U.S. financial pressure ‘has worked because in December, their economy collapsed. This is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft, no shots fired.’” To be clear, the reason why civil unrest erupted in Iran was because the United States brought it about, not by accident, not unintentionally, but by malice aforethought.

Bessent’s acknowledgement that the collapse of the Iranian economy is the product of US “economic statecraft”, which is to say the imperialism of peace, is virtually absent from the analyses of the quality, but all the same, Chauvinist and pro-imperialist, US media. No matter how sound their analyses might otherwise be, they cannot help but propagate the fiction that the collapse of economies undermined by US “economic statecraft” is due to the “economic mismanagement” of the targeted “regime.”  Thus, the victim is blamed for the miseries the US ruling class visits upon the victim’s citizens. This is true of the US imperialism of peace in Venezuela and Cuba as much as Iran.

As shocking and deplorable as the current US-Israeli attack on Iran is, is it any more shocking and deplorable than the decades-long dropping of economic atom bombs on the people of Iran by the US state and its bootlicking vassals, Canada, the UK, Germany, and so on? Indeed, it may turn out that US “economic statecraft” has created more misery in Iran than will be created by all the US and Israeli bombs that will be dropped and all the missiles that will be fired in the current campaign of violence. This isn’t to lessen the gravity of the violence unleashed on the Iranians, but to point out that a program of deliberately wrecking an economy and immiserating a people in order to expand the domain over which US and allied billionaires can dominate the world’s economic surpluses is equally deplorable and is as richly deserving of condemnation and opposition as the use of violence to achieve the same end.

Mendacity

As to the claim that Washington and its toadies are engaged in an operation to deter an Iranian threat, we can dispense with this piece of nonsense immediately. The notion that Iran is developing a nuclear arsenal and ICBMs to reach the United States is the kind of bald-faced, shameless, mendacity in which the US administration specializes. As the New York Times reported two days ago:

President Trump and his aides assert that Iran:

  • Has restarted its nuclear program;
  • Has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days; and
  • Is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.

But:

  • There is no evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.
  • American intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.

What’s more, US intelligence is of the view that Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons.

Iran, a country dwarfed in population, GDP, and military assets by the United States alone, to say nothing of the United States and its allies, is no more of a threat to the United States than a Boy Scout troop armed with peashooters is a threat to a platoon of US Marines. All threats the chronically mendacious Washington cites are greatly inflated because Washington regards as a threat any state that 1) does not submit to US “leadership” and 2) has a means of self-defense. Iran will only be characterized as a non-threat when it has given up every means of defending itself. Indeed, US demands in its phony negotiations with Iran can be understood as an ultimatum to surrender all means of self-defense or face a withering attack.

Even if Iran had ICBMs and nuclear-warheads to place atop them it still wouldn’t be a threat to the physical safety of any person in the United States. North Korea is a nuclear-armed state with, what might very well be the ability to deliver warheads to the continental US by ICBMs, but it is hardly a threat. The reason why is that Pyongyang can’t survive a war with the United States, and therefore would never start one. The same would be true of a nuclear-armed Iran. What a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat to is Washington’s latitude to bully Tehran and impose its will on the state. That, in turn, is a threat to the US ruling class project of dominating as much of the world as possible. This, of course, is the aim of every exploiting ruling class, but few have the resources to pursue the goal. Most must be content with defending spheres of exploitation within their own territory, either by resisting the aggressions of larger states seeking to encroach on their own domestic sphere of exploitation, or coming to an arrangement that makes concessions to the larger state’s menacing demands. As for Iran, its failure to follow the path of North Korea is largely responsible for the peril in which it now finds itself. No country in Iran’s position that wishes to pursue an independent path free from the domination of the United States (or any other meddling great power) can afford to be without a nuclear deterrent.* Washington may sincerely believe Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program and developing ICBMs because it makes sense for the Iranian state to do so in light of Washington’s own conduct.  It should be clear by this point that a view that is consistent with Lenin’s would deny that Washington will ever refrain from behaving in ways that encourage its victims to proliferate. The raison d’etre of the US ruling class is not to live in peace with other ruling classes, but to weaken them and turn them into vassals, and if that can’t be done, to crush them. Letting them be is not an option, any more than choosing not to try to score goals is an option for a hockey team.

International Law

Lenin’s view of war raises a question about whether international law has any practical significance. I would say that the answer is manifestly in the negative and I would hardly be alone in this view. Kant, for example, observed that “Codes [of international law] whether couched in philosophical or diplomatic terms, have not—nor can have—the slightest legal force, because states, as such, are under no common external authority.” Nothing has changed in two hundred years to contradict Kant’s thinking. Large powers and their proteges regularly violate international law without the slightest reservation and do so with impunity. They get away with it because there is no overarching, independent, authority equipped with the means to enforce compliance with international law. The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. Given this sad reality, it is “an illusion,” remarked the Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding, “to preach international law in a world … of capitalist struggle where [the] superiority of weapons is the final arbiter.”

I point this out because much discourse about war, apart from ignoring the imperialism of peace, attaches itself to outraged diatribes against the failure of various states (usually the United States and Israel, the accustomed miscreants) to abide by international law. Carrying on a discussion as if international law and the rules-based order have any significance as guardrails on the conduct of powerful states, focusses attention in the wrong place. The Tartuffe of international law, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, admitted in his vaunted World Economic Forum address what anyone not stultified by the propaganda of the United States and its international lickspittles already knew: That “the story of the international rules-based order was partially false; that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient; that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying vigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” If Venezuela, Iran, or Cuba were to violate international law, they would be held accountable and punished by the UN Security Council, largely a plaything and instrument of the United States.** When the United States and its proxies (Israel especially) violate international law, as they regularly do, nothing happens, except that a chorus of progressive voices bleats fecklessly about US and Israeli crimes, on the assumption presumably that ‘speaking truth to power’ will make the malefactors mend their ways. As the nineteenth-century French novelist Balzac is reputed to have observed: “Laws are spider webs through which big flies pass and little ones get caught.” Despite all the bleating, the big flies continue to pass through the spider webs with scarcely a concern.

To echo Hilferding, it is an illusion to preach international law in a world of struggle among states where the superiority of weapons is the final arbiter. As Lenin, and before him, Marx, argued, though not precisely in these words, inter-state war ends when inter-state rivalry ends. And inter-state rivalry ends, when states end. What should not be forgotten is that the long-range project of socialism is not only the end of class, which is to say the end of exploitation of one group by another, but, as a consequence of this, the end of states.  We say, declared Lenin in a lecture on war and revolution, our aim “is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.”

Notes

*On the other hand, nuclear weapons would not be a panacea for Iran. While they would very like dampen the war-lust of Washington and Tel Aviv for bombing Iran, they would do little to stop the US-led siege warfare that cripples the country and immiserates its people.

Moreover, Iran’s geopolitical situation is different from that of North Korea, and concluding that what is strategically sound for North Korea is also strategically sound for Iran, may be an error.

North Korea borders two significant powers, Russia and China. As states outside the US orbit, Russia and China are willing to trade with Pyongyang if it’s to their advantage. This makes the DPRK less vulnerable to US economic warfare than Iran, which is isolated geographically from China.

Additionally, Iran is located in, what is for Washington, a strategically important region. West Asia produces a substantial fraction of the world’s petroleum resources, which Washington aims to control in order to exercise leverage over China, Japan, and Europe, which depend on energy imports from the region. In order to control the region, Washington needs regional states to be submissive to US preferences. Inasmuch as Iran refuses to act as a US client, it has been the target of US conventional and economic warfare.

North Korea, in contrast, occupies territory that is less strategically significant for Washington, and therefore, Pyongyang can be more readily ignored. It matters little from the US coign of vantage that North Korea zealously asserts its independence. Doing so doesn’t affect US strategic interests. While it is true that China is considered the United States’ single most important strategic threat, and North Korea abuts China, Washington’s focus on the Indo-pacific region is mainly confined to maintaining control of the First Island Chain, the belt of islands running from Japan through Tawain to the Philippines and Malaysia.

An independent North Korea, then, is less of an impediment to US geopolitical ambitions than an independent Iran, and the United States is therefore less likely to be moved to attack it, nuclear arms or otherwise. It’s not clear that the same calculations apply to Iran. Why take a gamble on attacking North Korea, if the outcome might be a nuclear counter-strike? On the other hand, Washington might be prepared to gamble on attacking a nuclear-armed Iran, in light of Iran’s greater strategic importance.

** While the Security Council by no means invariably produces resolutions reflecting US preferences, on matters that do not abridge the interests of other permanent members, the council tends to go along with US wishes. Witness, for example, UNSC Resolution 2803 of 17 November 2025, which effectively ceded Donald Trump a personal autocracy over Gaza.  It is from this very same resolution that Trump’s Board of Peace was born.  There has been much talk about Trump using his Board, of which he is the chairman, as an alternative to the Security Council.  A case might be made that the Security Council is not the plaything and instrument of the United States, for if it is, why would Trump seek to establish the Board of Peace as a new Security Council? It’s true that a whole loaf is better than nine-tenths of one, but wanting a whole loaf doesn’t prove that you don’t already have nine-tenths of it. In any event, the Board of Peace is comprised, apart from its chairman, of leaders of states with insignificant power that have joined to curry favor with the US president. The Board’s power is in no way equal, much less greater, than that of the Security Council.  It may be able to compel its few members to go along with Trump’s whims, but the Security Council, in theory anyway, can compel the compliance of every UN member state.