It is now generally accepted that Pine Gap, a military/intelligence facility just outside of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, has played a crucial role in the Palestinian genocide and other US-supported wars in west Asia. In response to the targeting of Iran’s nuclear facilities and defences against Houthi drones and missiles, more and more people are becoming aware of and questioning the facility’s operations.
Since it became operational in 1970, the stated purpose of Pine Gap has changed several times. Initially, the government said it was a space research facility. When its military use could no longer be hidden, the site was then said to be used for the verification of arms control treaties and to provide early warning of missiles launched from the Soviet Union and, subsequently, China. With every new revelation of the true nature of the facility, the Australian and US governments have changed their line as to precisely what Pine Gap’s purpose is. 
In 2013, CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden released a trove of classified documents covering covert US military activities. Some were directly related to Pine Gap; others were about broader programs that Pine Gap may be involved in. In a publicity campaign aimed at increasing transparency about Pine Gap, a former technician, David Rosenberg, wrote a book claiming to be an exposé. But the book, Pine Gap: The Inside Story of the NSA in Australia, was vetted and cleared by the US National Security Agency before it was released. As was the ABC mini-series Pine Gap.
So although we now know a fair bit about what Pine Gap does, we still do not know the whole truth. As more and more of the US military’s operations are conducted by remote control through communications satellites, Pine Gap’s importance is growing. This is reflected in the physical growth of the base itself. New radomes (the dome-shaped structures housing and protecting sensitive antennas and radars) have been built in the last few years, and more personnel have been based there. Much of this new information comes from the excellent work of <a href="https://declassifiedaus.org/author/peter">Declassified Australia’s Peter Cronau</a>.
What we do know is that Pine Gap is the most important US communications base outside of the continental US. This is primarily due to its location. The shooting down of a US U2 spy plane during a reconnaissance flight over the Soviet Union in 1960, coupled with the launch of the first communications satellites in 1962, led to the development of a rudimentary satellite-based communications and spy system by the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation (which later merged with Thompson to become TRW, which has since been acquired by Northrop Grumman—the third largest aerospace and arms manufacturer in the world).
At least three ground stations were needed to control geosynchronous satellites around the globe at an altitude of about 35,000 kilometres. (They are called geosynchronous because their movement is synchronised with the Earth’s rotation and they are therefore fixed above the same geographic point.) The first was to be in the US, and the second in Western Europe. The third would be equidistant from those and preferably in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia was, therefore, the obvious choice. In addition, the base needed to be far from the coast to avoid ship-based spying and in a remote location to keep it as secret as possible from the civilian population. 
While Pine Gap is just one of the three geographical points needed, the US and Western European bases have nearby alternatives should they go offline for any reason. Pine Gap has the distinction of being the only facility of its kind in the region: it is irreplaceable and therefore one of the most important pieces of real estate to US military interests, in Australia or anywhere. Without Pine Gap, the US cannot control the satellite operations that are now essential to the execution of war.
To our knowledge, these operations include things like the early warning systems of the US Defense Support Program (which detects missile launches), a task previously performed by the Nurrungar base near Woomera, South Australia, until taken over by Pine Gap in 1999. This forms a part of the US missile defence shield and that of US allies such as Japan and Israel. Satellites tracking heat signatures would have formed a part of the defences against Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. 
Pine Gap’s 45 satellite dishes control at least four geosynchronous satellites positioned above the Indian Ocean that monitor a vast range from the Pacific to Africa, their central focus being the area from China to West Asia. These satellites are the backbone of US signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the region. They intercept and download electronic signals across all bands, from radio to mobile phone and internet communications, which are then analysed at Pine Gap. They also control military communications between the US and its military in the dozens of bases and fleet deployments from Guam to Egypt.
Modern communications satellites are not geosynchronous and constantly travel around the globe at a much closer altitude of about 400 kilometres. These are the ones we can often see in the sky and are generally used for commercial communications. So while most of the satellite dishes at Pine Gap communicate with geosynchronous satellites, in the last decade or so, a new type of satellite dish has appeared: torus dishes. These are designed to intercept and download communications from low-orbit satellites as they pass through the region, sucking up every bit of data for analysis by the US National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
In short, Pine Gap has the capacity to control US military satellites, track missile launches, control military communications—including those to and from autonomous drones—provide all battlefield communications and intercept all satellite communications in the region. In about one-fifth of a second, information gathered from the ground in West Asia can be transmitted up to a satellite and back down to Pine Gap, where all these communications can be analysed. US military and intelligence agencies can then use the information to obtain targets, among other things.
Which brings us to Palestine.
Palestine is not Pine Gap’s primary focus, which has always been about gathering intelligence to help the US maintain global supremacy. Nonetheless, the US is providing support to Israel, including providing signals intelligence. This is not a new development. For example, we know that signals intelligence gathered and analysed at Pine Gap was passed on to the Israeli military during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
In 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden released classified documents showing that the agency has an agreement with the Israeli military’s signals intelligence, the notorious Unit 8200, to pass on all raw intelligence data collected, including data collected in third-party countries—like Australia. The agreement began in 1999, but earlier information-sharing arrangements have existed since 1968. A top-secret memorandum advised that the intelligence sharing had been broadened from Unit 8200 and the NSA to include the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad. It is noteworthy that this specifically includes information gathered on Australians and citizens from other Five Eyes intelligence alliance countries: Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
The Israeli military obviously does not rely entirely on the US for electronic communications surveillance; it has its own satellite and surveillance capabilities. It is therefore impossible to judge where and how any particular piece of targeting information was sourced. But it would be naive to believe that, over the last two years of relentless attacks, no information from the Australian facility was used.
Pine Gap is classified as a Joint Defence Facility, but the US military, through the National Reconnaissance Office, fully funds and controls it. The Australian government’s policy is that Pine Gap operates with its “full knowledge and concurrence”, though there is no official definition of those terms. 
Along with Australia’s weapons sales, both directly and hidden as “transfers” through the US, the use of intelligence gathered by Pine Gap makes Australia complicit in Israel’s crimes in Gaza. 
Jacob Grech is a member of Renegade Activists.

Jacob Grech

What you need to know about Pine Gap

After decades of hegemony, the two-state solution is no longer considered a viable or desirable solution to the decades-long oppression of the Palestinians among pro-Palestine activists in Australia. In Melbourne, where I am involved, the phrase “two-state solution” has been essentially banned from the platforms of the regular Gaza solidarity demonstrations. 
This is an extremely positive development. For decades, the two-state solution has served as a means to browbeat the more principled and radical supporters of the Palestinian people. Prior to the 1980s, the majority of Palestinian political parties supported the full liberation of historic Palestine, and the two-state solution was used by Labor Zionism to denounce them as extremists and coopt them into a more moderate position. 
The two-state solution reached its zenith in the 1990s during negotiations for the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel. During this period the Palestinian leadership under Fatah abandoned all sorts of rights and principles in exchange for the chimera of a Palestinian statelet in the West Bank and Gaza. While a minority of Palestinian capitalists and politicians have become fabulously wealthy as a result of this process, the Palestinian people have continued to go backwards, losing further rights and territory.
So the clear rejection of the two-state solution by the majority of serious pro-Palestine activists is an important breakthrough. It provides a stronger basis from which to build a movement that can demand real justice. And importantly, it opens up space for discussion about what sort of scenario might actually succeed in achieving genuine liberation for the Palestinian people. 
For most people, the alternative to the perpetual apartheid and oppression entailed by the two-state solution is the creation of a democratic state for all inhabitants of the area. Far from “driving Jews into the sea”, the idea is for Arabs and Jews to live together peacefully, with equal rights in a liberal democratic set-up. In many ways this is a worthy goal, and when it was developed in the 1960s, it was a progressive position for the Palestinian liberation movement to adopt. 
But many of the same issues that make the two-state solution unworkable also apply to one state. Most importantly, the Israeli state will not accept equality between Jews and Palestinians. Its founding ideology is that of an ethno-state: a state that exists for a particular ethnic group, with others as second-class citizens. This means a single state based on equal rights will never be achieved through negotiation or brought into existence through UN mandates or diplomacy. It requires the overthrow of the Israeli state. 
The Western powers, to which Israel is an important strategic and economic ally, would of course never accept this. The only one-state outcome it’s possible to imagine is one in which Israel is in effect allowed to annex the entirety of the Palestinian territory and expel millions of refugees.
Supporters of Palestine often refer to the defeat of apartheid in South Africa as proof that a transformation from a system of apartheid to democracy is possible. But mainstream accounts of this important history tend to downplay the crucial role played by the economically powerful, politically sophisticated and industrially militant black working class, which existed in South Africa but does not in Palestine. By repeatedly bringing the economy to a halt through strike action, these workers made it impossible for South African mines and ports to function reliably, and for capital to profit. This hit the rich where it hurts, and created enormous pressure for change. 
Only when it became clear that the old order was doomed did Western governments impose sanctions to try to expedite the transition so that the vital mines and ports of South Africa could remain functional and be relied on. 
Palestinians have no comparable economic power, excluded as they are from large parts of the Israeli economy, particularly its most strategic sectors. So traditional class struggle at a domestic level cannot create the economic disruption needed to break apartheid and end the occupation of all Palestinian lands.
At a global level, Israel is a nuclear-armed imperial outpost in a central region of world politics and a long-term strategic ally of the US. Far from facing crippling sanctions for its many crimes, it is still being armed, funded and courted by the world’s elites. Indeed, its utility to US empire has been reinforced in the last two years, given the ease with which it has crushed Hezbollah and subdued Iran. 
This alliance is likely to continue as long as imperialist domination remains a central plank of US foreign policy. Even if the US is somehow dethroned, then China or any other rising power would have a strong interest in allying with such a well-armed and strategically important state. China is already the second largest importer of Israeli goods, and Israel imports more goods from China than any other country, $19 billion worth annually according to the United Nations Comtrade database.
So while the apartheid system in South Africa could be ended without fundamentally disrupting the structures of global and regional imperialism, the same is not true in Palestine. In any case, the end of formal apartheid has not fundamentally changed the experience of the vast majority of working class and poor Black South Africans. Their living conditions are actually worse, meaning this is hardly a model to be aspiring to.
The harsh reality is that while many former colonies have been able to achieve some measure of national independence within the capitalist system, there are a number of cases where it is just not possible. In the Middle East, the examples of the Palestinians and the Kurds stand out, where the maintenance of national oppression is absolutely essential to the functioning of capitalism as it has been established over the last century. So just as it is impossible to imagine a capitalist America without anti-Black racism, there will never be a capitalist Middle East without the whole suite of religious, national and caste hierarchies that have been deliberately entrenched in the region. 
It’s long been argued by revolutionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere that overthrowing the Arab regimes, which pose as champions of the Palestinians while simultaneously accommodating to Israel and repressing movements that challenge it, is a prerequisite for a liberated Palestine. But the experience of the Arab revolutions that erupted in 2011 shows that simply replacing one capitalist government with another in no way brings closer the goal of ending the injustices that face the workers and the oppressed of the region. It’s clear now that in a very direct sense the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and that of the masses in the region and beyond, will require a more radical goal. To be precise, only the successful overthrow of capitalism across the region, particularly in key states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, can make possible the liberation of Palestine.
This doesn’t change the fact that the Palestinians will continue to have a central and leading role to play in organising popular resistance to Israel and capitalism, both inside occupied Palestine and in the neighbouring countries. But it does mean that the practice of seeking allies among the Arab regimes, which has been the long-term approach of the leading Palestinian factions, has to be opposed. Not only is it a betrayal of the Arab masses living under these regimes, but it is a dead end for the Palestinian struggle. 
Instead, efforts must be made to link up with the many economic, social and geopolitical grievances of workers and the poor across the region. This can most effectively be done by locating Palestinian oppression in a wider context of regional exploitation, oppression and imperialism, and Israel’s role in maintaining this unequal and oppressive status quo. This involves popularising a systemic critique of Arab capitalism and its role in propping up Western imperialism, and building a movement that can turn this critique into action. 
Those of us outside the Middle East also have an important role to play. Israel can survive and get away with its atrocities only due to endless Western support and funding. We have seen that a mass movement in Australia has been capable of shifting the terrain of discussion and politics, but not core aspects of government policy. It is similar elsewhere. To force Western governments even to begin to break ties with Israel would take immense struggle by workers, the kind of struggle that would make clear to the Albaneses of the world that the choice is between profits and social stability and continued support for genocide.
Standing in the way of this is the existing leadership of the workers’ movement, which has no interest in mobilising workers to make Australia’s support for Israel unviable. Such action would threaten not only the interests of Australian capitalism, which the union leaders do not oppose, but also the electoral fortunes of the Labor Party, which most union leaders are aligned with, and the relatively privileged position of the leaders themselves within the system, not to mention their future career prospects. 
To make the kinds of strikes that could lead to real sanctions against Israel and the arms industry happen today would require a profoundly more radical and organised working-class movement than what currently exists. This in turn presupposes the existence of a serious left in the workers’ movement, both able to lead action and carrying weight ideologically. Socialist-led unions, backed by a militant rank and file, could organise black bans of weapons companies and Israeli shipping lines, and engage in targeted actions to enforce them. The places where this has happened in recent years, for instance the dock workers in Greece, have long traditions of communist influence in the union. 
So both in the Middle East and in the imperialist West, fighting for revolutionary socialist politics grounded in mass working-class organisations is a vital step on the road to Palestinian liberation. This means rejecting both the two-state farce that serves to validate the status quo, and also the sort of liberal utopianism that assumes a single Palestinian state in the framework of capitalism is possible and able to bring liberation. 
Instead, a revolutionary socialist approach means a relentless and uncompromising struggle against all of the institutions that have become so discredited by their response to Israel’s genocide, including every powerful nation state on earth. Only a struggle for a socialist Palestine that unites the revolutionary workers and peasants of the Middle East with an insurgent, anti-imperialist working class movement in the West can hope to achieve liberation.
Omar is a long-time pro-Palestine activist based in Melbourne

Omar Hassan

Two-state solution is rubbish, what will it take to liberate Palestine?

Eighty years ago, the United States government exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the only two nuclear bombs ever used in wartime against a civilian population. Never before in human history had a single weapon caused such widespread death and destruction.
A report by engineers and scientists of the Manhattan Project (the US project that developed the bombs), based on a 1946 investigation in both cities, estimated that more than two-thirds of Hiroshima’s 90,000 buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged, including everything within one mile (1.6km) of ground zero, aside from a few structures made from reinforced concrete. In Nagasaki, buildings with reinforced concrete walls 25cm thick, more than 600 metres from ground zero, collapsed.
In Hiroshima, the bomb destroyed 26 of 33 firefighting stations, killing or badly injuring three-fourths of their personnel. It killed or badly wounded more than 1,800 of 2,400 nurses and medical orderlies, and left only 30 of 298 registered doctors able to treat survivors. Many of those not killed immediately burned to death in the subsequent firestorm, or drowned trying to escape it in rivers, or died within hours or days of radiation sickness. 
The Manhattan Project report estimated that Hiroshima suffered 135,000 casualties—more than half its population—and Nagasaki 64,000 out of a population of 195,000. Both figures were underestimates because they did not include prisoners of war and other foreigners, such as thousands of Korean forced labourers present in both cities.
People who survived the immediate effects of the blasts were not necessarily safe. Two years after the bombings, there was a notable increase in the rate of leukaemia among initial survivors, which spiked four to six years later. The largest number of victims were children.
But while the power of the bombs was unprecedented, the mass slaughter of civilians was anything but new. All of the major powers involved in the war carried out or assisted deliberate massive attacks on civilians: Japan’s 1937-38 Rape of Nanjing, which killed up to 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers; the German Blitz of Britain, which killed around 43,000; the US-British firebombing of Dresden, which destroyed 90 percent of the city’s centre and killed at least 25,000 people, many of whom died of suffocation as all available oxygen was consumed by the conflagration; there are numerous other examples.
If the ruling classes of the warring countries had a similar amoral sense (the belief that any slaughter they engaged in was justified), the course of the war and a technological lead gave the US rulers the opportunity and confidence that they could get away with the greatest atrocities. In the last year of the war, US air raids systematically destroyed Tokyo, taking advantage of the large number of highly combustible houses to create firestorms. Early on 10 March 1945, some 279 US bombers firebombed most of eastern Tokyo, killing 90,000 to 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless; the destruction was even greater than that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In part, the atomic bombs were more “efficient” than earlier air raids: in the 10 March raid on Tokyo, fourteen US aircraft were shot down. But strategic decisions directed against the Soviet Union were a more important consideration. This was summed up by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela in 2003:
“Fifty-seven years ago, when Japan was retreating on all fronts, they [the US] decided to drop the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killed a lot of innocent people, who are still suffering from the effects of those bombs. Those bombs were not aimed against the Japanese. They were aimed against the Soviet Union. To say, look, this is the power that we have. If you dare oppose what we do, this is what is going to happen to you.”
Looking forward to the next war between the “allies” was also evident in a memo issued to British airmen on the night of the attack on Dresden:
“The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949, considerably earlier than the US expected, the US quickly recognised a need to “outcompete” its rivals, beginning serious steps toward developing a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb. An investigation of the desirability and possibility of building the new bomb, chaired by Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had headed the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory, concluded: “The extreme danger to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweighs any military advantage”.
The extreme danger to the human race was less important than the military needs of imperialism. US President Harry Truman approved the development of the hydrogen bomb in January 1950. The first thermonuclear bomb was tested on 1 November 1952. It was more than 450 times as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb, with an explosive force of 15 megatons of TNT.
The US thermonuclear monopoly lasted less than a year, the Soviet Union testing its first hydrogen bomb in the following August. And although 15 megatons was an already unimaginable force, the Soviet government in 1961 tested a bomb with a force of 50 megatons. Within the test zone, brick buildings 55km from ground zero were destroyed. The heat from the blast was capable of causing third-degree burns 100km away. 
That test was, in part, an experiment designed to discover whether there was any inherent limit to the potential explosive power of a nuclear bomb. There wasn’t; in a report for the US Atomic Energy Commission, physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Isaac Rabi concluded that hydrogen bombs potentially have “unlimited destructive power”.
At the time, the 50-megaton thermonuclear bomb was too heavy to be carried by any existing missile or aeroplane. But technological “progress” has since created hydrogen bombs light enough for ten or more to be carried by a single missile.
And yet, today, all of the nine nuclear-armed states—United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea—are attempting to “modernise” their arsenals, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions”.
SIPRI calculates the world nuclear arsenal at 12,241 warheads. “An estimated 3,912 of those warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft ... Around 2,100 of the deployed warheads were kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles. Nearly all of these warheads belonged to Russia or the USA, but China may now keep some warheads on missiles during peacetime.”
In 2010, the USA and Russia agreed to a treaty (New Start) to limit their nuclear stockpiles and the number of warheads deployed on strategic missiles. But that treaty expires next February, and neither side has shown any real interest in renewing it, so the number of warheads able to be fired in minutes if not seconds is expected to increase.
Despite most nuclear arsenals being labelled “deterrents” by those who wield them, no government keeps nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes; they are intended for use when military and political conditions make that seem advisable. While the US and Russia have the biggest stockpiles, does anyone imagine that moral or humanitarian considerations would have more of a restraining influence on Benjamin Netanyahu than they have on Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin? At least one minister within the Israeli government has publicly advocated using an atomic bomb against Gaza—on which Israel has already inflicted destruction comparable to what was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In short, the danger of capitalist governments letting loose nuclear weapons has not significantly decreased since 1945; in many respects, it is greater.

Allen Myers

A warning from history: ‘This is what is going to happen to you’

Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western imperialism’s key military alliance, describe recently announced increases in European arms spending as a collective effort to “safeguard our freedom and democracy”. Some commentators have been even more emphatic in advocating stepped-up European armament. Writing in the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e0bd86f9-fd4a-4802-8199-44daaa97d13a">Financial Times</a> earlier this year, Bronwen Maddox, director of the London-based think tank Chatham House, called military spending “the essential public benefit above all”, placing it above expenditures on hospitals, pensions, education and other social services.
While such “public good” narratives dominate official chatter, another motive lies behind the rhetoric: consolidating Europe as the 21st century’s third global power alongside the United States and China. Three developments illustrate the scale and nature of the economic and military shift now under way.
First is the sharp increase in arms spending over the last decade. In 2024, European NATO members collectively spent nearly US$500 billion on “defence”—a 72 percent increase since 2014, adjusted for inflation. Over the past decade, military budgets more than tripled in Poland, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania, and more than doubled in twelve other European NATO members. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, nearly doubled its military spending in real terms.
Second is the ReArm Europe Plan (as though Europe is currently disarmed), announced by the European Council in March. ReArm authorises European Union member states to increase borrowing to boost military spending by €800 billion over the next five years. It marks a significant policy shift, overriding the debt and deficit limits set by the 2012 European Fiscal Compact—a treaty requiring governments to keep deficits below 3 percent of GDP—and directing the European Investment Bank to prioritise lending to arms manufacturers.
Third is <a href="https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_236705.htm">the Hague Declaration</a> coming out of last month’s NATO summit, which goes further again. NATO is the closest thing Europe has to a unified continental military command. On average, its members spend just over 2 percent of GDP on defence. While the March ReArm Europe Plan allowed for extra spending of up to 1.5 percent of GDP, the NATO summit in June committed members to allocating 5 percent of GDP annually to the military, including security-related infrastructure. It also requires annual progress reports demonstrating “a credible, incremental path” towards this goal.
The aim is to increase Europe’s economic and military power through substantial investments in military-industrial capacity and weapons production. As Andrius Kubilius, European commissioner for defence and space, stated in a media release accompanying the announcement, “This is not just about military strength—it is about our readiness, strategic autonomy, and the future of Europe as a global player”.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for increased European military spending. In 2018, he suggested that it should rise to 4 percent of GDP. At the time, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-tells-nato-leaders-to-increase-defense-spend-to-4-percent-idUSKBN1K12BW/">according to Reuters reporters in Brussels</a>, NATO allies “shrugged off the demand”.
However, the astonishing surge of China’s industrial, technological and military capacities has left US strategists increasingly rattled about Washington’s declining relative power in the western Pacific. European leaders now appear to have recognised an opportunity as the US threatens to reduce its military commitments on the continent. In May, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared his ambition for the Bundeswehr to become the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. French President Emmanuel Macron, a long-time advocate of “strategic autonomy”—that is, less reliance on the US military—affirmed that the EU must become “a space power once again”.
New York Times correspondents <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/world/europe/macron-starmer-merz-trump-eu.html">Michael Shear and Jim Tankersley now report</a> that Britain, France and Germany, “are building parallel diplomatic and defense institutions for a future without the United States as the primary guarantor of economic and military security” in the region. The three countries, which have long been the dominant imperialist states in Western Europe, look to be entering an era of military coordination that is perhaps unprecedented.
The claims that current tensions signal a historic rift between the US and Europe is not particularly convincing, however. Those old enough to remember transatlantic discord over the Iraq invasion in 2002-03, which in part was a US attack on European interests, might recall a State Department spokesperson ridiculing Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg as “chocolate makers” after they held “a little bitty summit” to moot plans for an alternative military command to NATO. Or the time US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed Paris and Berlin as irrelevant “old Europe” has-beens. There was even a directive to congressional cafes to rename “French fries” and “French toast” to “Freedom fries” and “Freedom toast”. (Childish, petty politics predate Trump.)
Today, the European powers will likely uphold and reinforce the broader Western imperial bloc by augmenting their own capacities and allowing Washington to refocus its energies. “The ‘triangle alliance’, as Britain, France and Germany are sometimes now called, are already partners through NATO and the Group of 7—forums that include the United States”, Shear and Tankersley note. “Officials for the three European countries are careful to say that the institutions they are building are meant to supplement those alliances, not replace them.”
Of course, there are no guarantees in this shifting geopolitical landscape. And the leaders of imperialist states rarely say publicly what they are thinking and saying privately. So time will tell how things pan out. 
Yet some outcomes seem certain—most notably, who will ultimately bear the cost of this military build-up. The exemption of military spending from the European Fiscal Compact is particularly significant. Along with the deficit limit, the agreement requires EU members to maintain public debt below 60 percent of GDP. Though only loosely enforced, the compact has long been cited to justify cuts to working-class payments, pensions and public services.
Fiscal restraint, long demanded of governments, has now been relaxed—but exclusively for funds directed to arms manufacturers and related contractors. For everyone else, ever more “restraint” is on the cards. Maddox quoted an unnamed senior European minister speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February: “For 30 years, we have been taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare. Now, we will have to reverse that”. 
In a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989">Financial Times column</a> the following month, Janan Ganesh, a prominent British conservative commentator, asserted that, compared to rearmament, “all other priorities are secondary” and argued for Europe to become “a more militarised, less welfarist continent”. He added, “[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt”.
With European military outlays expected to more than double in the next decade, some governments are relying on increased borrowing or creative accounting to meet their targets. However, borrowing will be only a stopgap if the 5 percent mark is to be met. Many governments hold debt-to-GDP ratios <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w/2-22042025-bp">well above the average</a> (80 percent), and well above the level demanded by the Fiscal Compact. Greece (154 percent), Italy (135 percent), France (113 percent), Belgium (105 percent) and the UK (95 percent, albeit no longer part of the union) have already come under pressure to reduce spending to pay creditors. So even with fiscal rules being relaxed, the spectre of significant cuts to living standards looms.
Berlin has one of the more “balanced” budgets and therefore more fiscal room than most governments. It is embarking on a €400 billion borrowing binge to increase military spending from €95 billion in 2025 to €162 billion in 2029. Yet this month, the government announced that it will cut unemployment entitlements by between one and two billion euros, alongside reductions in rent support payments. “It should be called basic security and no longer citizens’ money”, <a href="https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-government-announces-unemployment-benefit-cuts">Chancellor Merz told Markus Preiss</a>, a presenter on one of the country’s public broadcasters, last week. 
In France, Prime Minister François Bayrou has announced sweeping spending cuts—including public sector lay-offs, eliminating public holidays and freezing tax brackets and welfare payments next year—to reduce the budget by nearly €44 billion. He described the country’s debt as a “mortal danger” that threatens to “crush” France. Yet he insists that military spending is “sacrosanct”. Last Sunday, President Macron announced a €6.5 billion increase to the defence budget.
While a few countries may have little interest in meeting a 5 percent military spending target—Spain has flatly refused to entertain the idea—the major European powers are moving decisively toward rearming and retooling their economies for geopolitical competition. If they succeed, the continent will increasingly come to resemble the United States: a society in which the military-industrial complex becomes economically overweight and increasingly politically influential.
That makes European rearmament a global problem. So too the attacks on European welfare. If some of the wealthiest countries in the world begin treating social welfare as secondary—to be sacrificed in favour of militarisation—it could signal a global shift. Workers worldwide have often pointed to Europe as evidence that governments have the resources to provide for citizens. If the message coming from European capitals is that this can no longer be the case, ruling classes everywhere will point to the new European model as the future, and paint social welfare as the legacy of a bygone era. Workers and the poor will face the prospect not only of being left to fend for themselves in an increasingly dog-eat-dog world, but of being enlisted to kill each other in a 21st-century-style imperialist Hunger Games.

Ben Hillier

Europe’s imperial power play

The line peddled by Western politicians and media outlets is that the US and Israel had to go to war because Iran was just weeks or months from developing nuclear weapons. 
<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iran-produce-nuclear-weapon-couple-weeks-white-house/story?id=123016638">The White House claimed</a> that Iran could have produced a nuclear weapon “<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iran-produce-nuclear-weapon-couple-weeks-white-house/story?id=123016638">in a couple of weeks</a>”. Financial Times correspondents <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/46c60c82-7e5c-4013-a789-459e785d33fd">John Paul Rathbone and Charles Clover warned</a> of “the nuclear mountain that haunts Israel”. And Australian Defence Minister <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/defence-minister-richard-marles-stumbles-over-policy-gap-between-australiaus-in-iranisrael-conflict/news-story/5bf8bf19b4005ac6f1afc989a814dd9a">Richard Marles asserted</a>: <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/defence-minister-richard-marles-stumbles-over-policy-gap-between-australiaus-in-iranisrael-conflict/news-story/5bf8bf19b4005ac6f1afc989a814dd9a">“T</a>he Iranian nuclear ballistic missile program is most definitely a threat to the peace and stability of not only the Middle East”.
The problem is that there is no evidence to support these claims, which have been repeated for more than 40 years by war hawks. 
As early as 1984, shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, British defence journal <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/iran-has-been-two-years-away-from-a-nuclear-bomb-since-the-1980s/389333/">Jane’s Defence Weekly reported</a>: “Iran is engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years”. Timelines have varied since then, but the claim has stayed the same. In 1992, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions">Benjamin Netanyahu asserted</a> that Iran was three to five years away from a nuclear weapon, a claim he repeated three years later, and again in 2002. 
In 2012, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions">Netanyahu displayed a cartoon picture of a bomb</a> in front of the United Nations general assembly while claiming that Iran would be in the final stage of weapons development “at most by next summer”. Somehow, Iran has managed to bend the rules of time, being just a few months or years away from going nuclear for almost half a century.
Intelligence agencies themselves have reached different positions. 
<a href="https://archive.md/kbqyy#selection-355.0-361.59">A 2007 US national intelligence estimate</a>, touted by the director of national intelligence as the “most authoritative written judgments on national security issues”, concluded with “high confidence” that Iran had been trying to develop nuclear weapons, but ceased its program in 2003. It went on to admit: “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005”.
Just three months ago, current US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, <a href="https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/congressional-testimonies/congressional-testimonies-2025/4061-ata-hpsci-opening-statement-as-delivered">in her opening remarks</a> at a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, included the evaluation: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003”.
This isn’t an intelligence failure. The Western ruling classes are manufacturing consent for a major war against a rival state in the Middle East by lying. In some ways, it’s a repeat of the Bush administration’s strategy in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Iraq, according to Western politicians and journalists at the time, had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbP8HGxrgo8">US President George W. Bush</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/18/foreignpolicy.iraq1">British PM Tony Blair</a>
and <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/what-led-john-howard-to-invade-iraq-the-question-remains-shrouded-in-mystery/3p4hsqleo">Australian PM John Howard</a> peddled claims that Iraq had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.
There was no evidence to support these claims. In the months before the US invaded in March 2003, UN inspectors in Iraq found nothing. <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/disarming-saddam-chronology-iraq-and-un-weapons-inspections-2002-2003">The Arms Control Association later noted</a>: 
“UN weapons inspectors worked in Iraq from November 27, 2002 until March 18, 2003. During that time, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspections Commission conducted more than 900 inspections at more than 500 sites. The inspectors did not find that Iraq possessed chemical or biological weapons or that it had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.”
This didn’t matter to Bush and his allies, who were determined to invade and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050629021102/http:/downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html">A July 2002 memo from the British Prime Minister’s office</a>, leaked to the press three years later, showed that a great hoax was being perpetrated:
“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [the US National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record.”
Over the next decade, up to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24547256">half a million Iraqis</a>
were killed either directly or indirectly, as a result of the invasion, occupation and destruction of the country.
Two powers operating in the Middle East are known to have weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them: Israel and the United States.
Although Tel Aviv doesn’t publicly acknowledge its existence, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal">Israel’s nuclear weapons program is an open secret</a>. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons estimates that Israel has between <a href="https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_arsenals">90 and 200 warheads</a>. Israel is one of four nuclear powers that are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea), which means that there is no monitoring of its nuclear program.
Israel is also believed to have extensive <a href="https://www.nti.org/countries/israel/">chemical and biological weapons</a>
programs. <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/lebanon-evidence-of-israels-unlawful-use-of-white-phosphorus-in-southern-lebanon-as-cross-border-hostilities-escalate/">Amnesty International reported</a> on the military’s use of white phosphorus, a horrific chemical that burns flesh down to the bone, on civilian areas of Lebanon in October 2023. The group called for Israel to be investigated for war crimes. But this wasn’t the first time Israel had used chemical weapons—<a href="https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/white-phosphorus-in-urban-environments">it did so in the 2008-09 war on Gaza</a>.
The United States has waged brutal wars to dominate the people of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East for the better part of a century, often involving the most heinous weapons ever produced. 
America was the first state to develop the atomic bomb, and later the even more deadly hydrogen bomb. It remains the only state to have used the weapon against civilian populations. <a href="https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/">The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimates</a> that up to 210,000 people were killed in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US dropped atomic bombs on them in 1945. Hundreds of thousands of people lived, stripped of limbs or suffering from radiation poisoning, for decades afterwards.
The United States has also murdered thousands of people with chemical weapons. The US military dropped napalm by the ton on the people of Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, burning men, women and children alive. In Iraq, having denounced the regime for its non-existent WMDs, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/nov/15/usa.iraq">America admitted to using</a> napalm and white phosphorus.
If the US and Israel truly want to rid the world of WMDs, they should start by destroying their own nuclear and chemical weapons. And if they are worried about threats to peace and security, they ought to stop invading other countries.

Lucas Brunning-Halsall

West recycles old lies to justify attack on Iran

As long as capitalism survives, there will be no reckoning for the Gaza genocide or the naked aggression of Western imperialism in the Middle East. 
Every day, Israeli soldiers murder dozens of defenceless and starving Palestinians queuing for rations among the rubble of their now almost uninhabitable homeland. That no government in the world will do anything about it should be evidence enough of the impunity.
Now, Tel Aviv and Washington are exporting even more violence to yet another country, Iran. How many deaths in this region are they responsible for over the last 25 years? Up to 4.7 million, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Yet these murderers receive sinecures rather than sanctions. 
This perennial spectacle of mass murder, and the spectre of more of it, have not elicited a rethinking of priorities among those who rule the world, let alone contrition or reparations. Instead, they are launching more wars and preparing for others—everywhere. Twenty-seven million active-duty military personnel are spread across the globe. But even this is insufficient. 
“If you have weapons, don’t abandon them; if you have the ability to produce weapons, produce them. Weapons of all kinds”, Lithuanian Defence Minister Dovilė Šakalienė last week told Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. “Saying let’s disarm, let’s be peaceful pigeons—that’s suicidal.”
This exhortation is but a reflection of what’s already happening. Global military spending is rapidly expanding, increasing by nearly 40 percent in real terms over the last decade to US$2.7 trillion (A$4.2 trillion) and accounting for approximately 7 percent of government expenditures worldwide. All indications suggest that this is only the beginning, as an increase in the means of violence in one country begets a commensurate increase in its neighbours’ and competitors’ capacities.
The US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel together already possess more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2,100 are “kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles”—more than enough destructive capability to eradicate all human life several times over. 
Yet more countries are reportedly considering joining this nuclear club—a death cult by any reasonable definition. “The era of nuclear weapons reductions appears to have ended”, notes the SIPRI Yearbook 2025, released this month. “The signs are that a new qualitative nuclear arms race is gearing up and, compared with the last one, the risks are likely to be more diverse and more serious.”
It is too generous to say that the great challenges of the 21st century—the climate catastrophe and decimation of the planet’s ecosystems, the 700 million people undernourished and living in extreme poverty, the 2.2 billion without drinking water, the 3.5 billion lacking safe sanitation services, and more—are afterthoughts to the imperialist states and their capitalist ruling classes.
Increasingly, the primary feature of their system is destruction: destruction of living standards, destruction of life-support systems, destruction of cities and countries and peoples and spirit. The more it destroys, the wealthier the class of billionaires at the top becomes. The arms dealers, the fossil fuel barons, the tech oligarchs, the financiers—all of them profiting, and profiting all the more, as the destitution and destruction increase.
This is capitalism’s logic: unchecked, unending rapaciousness.
Last century, at least 180 million people were killed because of war; not a single year passed without cannons being fired or bombs being dropped. But every part of the world is now linked to the rest by some means. As long as this system grinds on, there will be no respite, let alone a reckoning, and no escaping the calamities resulting from so many natural resources and so much human energy being devoted to the military-industrial complex.
With the world entering a potentially even more destructive phase, there is an urgent need to tear down the existing imperialist order and replace it with a socialist order: a society run according to the maxim “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, and in which cooperation, rather than competition, is the guiding principle.

Editors

Capitalism’s ruthless new order

The Trump administration’s decision to hold a 30-day review of the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal has sparked concern across the Australian political and military establishment. Many are worried Australia will never get the submarines. Far from lamenting this possibility, we should welcome it. The nuclear submarines have one purpose only—to make war in the Asia-Pacific region more likely and more catastrophic.
The Pentagon review is the result of growing worry in the US defence establishment that its shipyards are way behind schedule and incapable of delivering sufficient submarines to equip both the US navy and Australia’s on the timetable set out in the 2021 AUKUS pact. There is a push on now, cloaked in Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, for the US to keep every submarine for itself and talk of a “Plan B”, in which Australia would provide bases for US submarines but not have any of its own. This is what is causing the most apprehension in Canberra.
The first thing to say about this is that the submarines have nothing to do with self-defence, of either the US or Australia. The media and politicians want us to think that China’s increasingly frequent navy and air force exercises indicate that an attack on Australia is a possibility in the not-too-distant future, and that submarines provide an effective deterrent against such an attack. But hard-headed military analysts have consistently dismissed the notion that an attack on Australia is imminent, and a series of defence white papers have all concluded that the likelihood of any nation invading Australia is extremely low. The only nation that has the capacity to do so is, ironically, the United States.
Insofar as China does pose a threat, it is not primarily to civilian lives but to the interests of Australian big business. For decades, the US has dominated the naval approaches to Australia through which pass hundreds of billions of dollars of cargo every year, including weapons from the US, oil from the Middle East and manufactured goods from Europe and Asia, along with Australian mineral exports to Asia. US dominance protects Australian trade, and by extension Australian capitalism, since building a navy big enough to patrol the extensive region from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific is far beyond Australia’s capability. Australia’s alliance with the US enables Australian capitalism to benefit from US power, and saves it having to foot the bill for its own naval force. 
In return for US military protection in the Asia-Pacific, successive Australian governments have provided the US with a safe base from which to operate intelligence gathering in Pine Gap in central Australia and a submarine listening station at Exmouth, along with friendly ports for the US navy. When the US goes to war, usually far from Australian shores, Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal, send troops, aircraft and ships to back it up—Australia has supported the US in every one of its wars since 1945. Often these are only token deployments, but they are politically advantageous for the US in its efforts to rally military backing from other powers.
The US alliance—the imperialist pact that enjoys unwavering bipartisan support despite contributing to millions of deaths in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific since World War II—is therefore mutually beneficial. Australian governments do not support the US because they are weak or lapdogs, but because they understand that having the backing of a superpower allows Australia to punch above its weight in its region. When Australia intervenes in Asia, foreign leaders know it speaks as the US’s deputy sheriff, as former leader John Howard once described Australia’s role.
With the US protecting the broader region in the interests of the US-led imperialist bloc, Australia can get on and use its military—the most powerful in South-East Asia and the South Pacific—to dominate its immediate region, in particular what politicians and diplomats often refer to disparagingly as “our backyard”. That means treating Papua New Guinea and smaller island nations like colonies, extracting minerals, capturing markets and taking over their security forces for the benefit of Australian capitalism.
The “threat from China”, which we hear so much about from politicians and the media, is really about the threat it poses to US and Australian capitalism. They are worried that China’s increasingly powerful armed forces may at some stage be capable of pushing the US navy out of its traditional hunting grounds, overturning more than a century of Western domination in the Asia-Pacific. 
This explains the rapid expansion of US military forces and those of its allies in the region, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The nuclear submarines are therefore not so much about preventing China from invading Sydney, but about equipping Australia with the capacity to carry out long-range missions to attack Chinese ships and Chinese bases close to China’s shores. They are designed to work alongside the growing US presence in northern Australia, ranging from port visits in Perth to air force and marine bases and fuel depots in and near Darwin, to increasingly ambitious military exercises and a troop presence in Queensland. 
The current mad dash for rearmament comes at a tremendous cost. In 2022, the Albanese government estimated the submarines on their own will cost $368 billion over 30 years. The final figure will be far higher. Military spending is projected in this year’s budget to rise from $63 billion to $100 billion by 2034, a rise from 2.0 percent to 2.4 percent of GDP. With the Trump administration demanding that US allies boost military spending to 3.5 percent, the bill will only keep climbing. 
Money spent on the military is money taken from public housing and health care, education and social assistance. Instead of these important social services, we are getting a military juggernaut, the only purpose of which is death and destruction. In the event of war breaking out between China and the US, with Australia riding shotgun, the consequences will be catastrophic. This insanity must be stopped.

Tom Bramble

AUKUS deal should be scrapped

“I saw it with my own eyes. My father was blasted out of the house. His face was burned, and his ears were torn off.” Amin Ahmad, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/16/athlete-pilates-instructor-teacher-human-toll-of-israels-attack-on-iran">speaking to Al Jazeera’s Saeedeh Fathi</a>, recounted his father’s death in eastern Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Sunday afternoon. An Israeli airstrike on the family home left him and his mother trapped inside. 
“I had to force the window bars open and call out for help. Someone brought a ladder, and my mother and I escaped”, he said. Amin’s father was a teacher. He worked all his life with the hope that he would one day retire in peace. “Now he’s dead, and the house is destroyed.” 
Amin’s story is one of hundreds. Israel has so far <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-conflict-news/card/iran-s-death-toll-surpasses-450-rights-group-says-Y8tyR2w2VwItM2BII2Ae">killed more than 450 people</a>, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a nongovernmental organisation that monitors the country. The Western political establishment calls this Israel’s right to self-defence. But like in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Israel’s war on Iran is an act of naked aggression. 
The wounded come in waves to Tehran’s major hospitals. One doctor described it as a bloodbath. He told <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes">the Guardian</a>, “We were overwhelmed by chaos and the screams of grieving family members”. Many of the wounded had been struck by deadly shrapnel from Israeli airstrikes. Patients were found with metal lodged in femur bones and the soft tissues of the hip joints. 
Iranian petrochemical workers on Karkov Island, their workplace having been deemed a high-risk target, were left by their bosses to fend for themselves. In a statement on their Telegram channel, they said: “[The managers] have not even put a plan in place for the possibility of an attack. There is no shelter or equipment. There is no catalog [sic] of instructions on what to do in the event of an attack, where to go, or how to protect our lives”. 
It’s impossible to know the real toll of Israel’s air war. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes">Hospital staff have reported</a> being told not to post online about the number of wounded or dead. But we do know that Israel’s attacks are widespread. 
A Children’s Hospital in southern Tehran. An assistant professor of neonatal medicine and her three-year-old child. A student sitting in her home with her family. They were destroyed in a flash of fire as bombs rained down. Israel says that they’re all “legitimate targets”—just like the hospitals in Gaza; just like the residential buildings in Lebanon. 
“[They have] directly targeted the country’s infrastructure, such as oil and gas resources, automotive industries, water, airports, the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation and even Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah”, a student in central Iran told Red Flag via Telegram. “Israel keeps saying that it’s only targeting military sites, which is not true at all.” 
The Middle East Monitor <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250616-report-israel-threatens-dahiya-style-assault-on-tehran-in-bid-to-destabilise-iran/">reported two days ago</a> that Israel is preparing for a massive, “Dahiya-style” attack on the capital:
“The plan, disclosed by Israeli broadcaster Channel 14, reportedly seeks to destabilise Iran’s government through systematic bombing of strategic sites while coercing mass evacuation from densely populated areas.
“The operation, said to have been greenlit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz, draws directly from Israel’s controversial military doctrine first employed during its 2006 war on Lebanon.
“That assault saw the wholesale destruction of the Dahiya district in southern Beirut—a stronghold of Hezbollah—marking the beginning of what military officials would later describe as a deliberate strategy of ‘disproportionate force’ and the targeting of civilian infrastructure to achieve political objectives.”
Indeed, Defence Minister Israel Katz warned: “Tehran will be treated like Beirut”. 
The Israelis are trying to exploit the deep unpopularity of the Iranian regime to gain support for their war. In a<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO8WlACdCB8">
televised address</a> to the Iranian public, Netanyahu smugly asserted: “We are clearing the path for you to achieve your objective, which is freedom”.
This narrative—that bombing people while they sleep will facilitate their freedom from the forces of political oppression—has been repeated time and again over the last twenty months of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. 
And it continues. Western media outlets <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLqP7SAlrYg">such as the British Broadcasting Corporation</a> have given a platform to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the disgraced former dictator of Iran, who says that Israeli strikes will help “liberate” the country. As if 90 million Iranians are hoping for the return of a US-backed monarchy. As if freedom rises out of the rubble of an Israeli bomb. 
“Most people still oppose the government”, the student in central Iran said. “The rulers of Iran, like many other countries, are dictators ... but they believe the invasion [by Israel] is wrong.” 
World leaders speak of “restraint” and “de-escalation” while arming Israel with advanced heavy weaponry. Netanyahu’s war on Iran is made in America, where the Congress approves billions for “bunker-busting” bombs, where politicians and the media manufacture consent for war crimes. 
President Trump is now <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/17/world/israel-iran-trump#trump-iran">calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”</a>, declaring: “We [Israel and the US] now have complete control of the skies over Iran”. 
Israel is unleashing hell across the Middle East with the backing of the world’s most powerful state and with the support of most of the “civilised” world. They speak of the “Iran-Israel conflict” when it’s an invasion. The Western media and politicians have tried to desensitise the world to such horror over the past twenty months of genocide in Gaza. 
Tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of Lebanese have been slaughtered with impunity. The calculation now is that hundreds or thousands of Iranians added to the toll will not be of any international consequence. But each death is more than a number. It’s a child who will never become an adult; it’s a family torn apart forever. 
Parnia Abassi was one of these lives: a student killed, along with three of her family members, as they slept in their home in Sattarkhan, Tehran. Parnia’s friends described her as funny and full of life. In interviews and <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://hammihanonline.ir/%25D8%25A8%25D8%25AE%25D8%25B4-%25D8%25AC%25D8%25A7%25D9%2585%25D8%25B9%25D9%2587-23/40566-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25DB%258C%25D8%25B1-%25D9%2585%25D9%2588%25D9%2587%25D8%25A7%25DB%258C-%25D8%25B1%25D9%2588%25DB%258C-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B4%25DA%25A9-%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25D8%25B1%25D8%25AA%25DB%258C-%25D9%2585%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B9%25D9%2584%25D9%2582-%25D8%25A8%25D9%2587-%25D9%25BE%25D8%25B1%25D9%2586%25DB%258C%25D8%25A7-%25D8%25A7%25D8%25B3%25D8%25AA&amp;sa=D&amp;source=docs&amp;ust=1750205171857941&amp;usg=AOvVaw2c8RZUFj86VcTYEMPKZiN3">online</a>, they recounted their favourite memories. How she took them camping outdoors for the first time, how she gave them gifts, how her sense of humour often took a moment to sink in and then bowled them over with laughter. 
All of that, gone, in a second. Parnia was an aspiring poet. One of her last compositions reads: 
I burn
I fade,
I become a silent star,
That turns into smoke
In your sky

Bella Beiraghi

The human cost of Israel’s war on Iran

Israel’s military strikes against Iran are the latest evidence, if any more were needed, that the US and its proxies are rogue states.
Despite the US government’s earlier attempts to distance itself from Israel’s aggression, it is clear that Washington was in on it from the start. President Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Friday, US time, that he had spoken to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and knew “what’s going on”. The Financial Times on Saturday quoted “a person familiar with the situation” who indicated that the US had been informed of Israeli plans as early as Monday, “was in the know all along” and “raised no objection”. 
And so came another attack on another country and another people. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. The Zionist state is off the leash, again, promising to continue indefinitely its assault, all the while stocked with weapons and backed by a US carrier group in the Mediterranean and B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. 
Netanyahu insists that Israel faces an existential threat from Tehran’s nuclear program. This flimsy pretext of “existential threats” has been trotted out again and again over the last twenty months to justify everything from the starvation of Gazan children to the flattening of hospitals and schools to terrorist attacks on Hezbollah members to the bombings of Lebanon and Syria to the ever-greater annexation of West Bank territory.
Like its cousin charge of “antisemitism”, which is casually levelled against even the mildest critics of apartheid, anything in the Middle East capable of sneezing in the direction of Tel Aviv is labelled an “existential threat” to the nuclear-armed, US-backed Israeli state. 
Whatever Netanyahu might claim, Tehran is considered enemy number one not because of its military capacities, but because of its recalcitrance. Iran is perpetually in the crosshairs of the US and Israel because no other country in the Middle East bends less to Washington’s will. 
Iran has been demonised, harassed and sanctioned ever since the Western-backed torture state of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979. Washington and London more than tolerated the horrors of Pahlavi’s regime. The two Western governments had conspired, in 1953’s “Operation Ajax”, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalised the oil industry two years earlier.
“Since Venezuela and the Middle East are the only sources from which the free world’s import requirements for petroleum can be supplied, these sources are necessary to continue the present economic and military efforts of the free world”, noted <a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v01p2/d159">a joint departmental report</a> to the US National Security Council eight months before the coup. “It therefore follows that nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world.”
Torture states are acceptable if they serve Western interests. So Pahlavi was installed to prevent popular aspirations from being realised and to ensure that Western companies could again exploit the country’s oil wealth. That is, he was brought in to rule with an iron fist. It went swimmingly for the oil companies and for US Middle Eastern strategy until the Iranian population rose from the dungeons to reclaim their country.
But miraculously, after 1979, the West suddenly became deeply concerned about the human rights record of the Iranian government. Washington and Israel have repeatedly declared it a rogue state and a threat to peace ever since.
The US was so concerned with regional peace that it funded Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, supplying President Saddam Hussein’s regime with weapons and intelligence. Several hundred thousand Iranians were killed during the war. The US also helped the Iraqis launch chemical weapons attacks. 
“[S]enior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks [in 1988]”, Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid wrote in <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/">an exclusive investigation</a> for Foreign Policy journal in 2013. “They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.”
Unlike Israel, Iraq was no solid ally of the US. After he had done the work against Iran, Hussein fell out of favour with Washington. The US invaded in the first Gulf War (1990-91) before imposing sanctions that were responsible for killing an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Questioned about this horror in 1996, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1T5JRVR53Eo">US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded</a>: “We think the price is worth it”. 
Then the US invaded again in 2003 after lying about Hussein’s regime, which, the Americans said, possessed weapons of mass destruction, was sponsoring terrorism and was an imminent threat to regional and even world peace. To keep the peace, US destroyed the country, left <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html">hundreds of thousands dead</a> in the first few years of the occupation, and created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State.
This criminal history isn’t deemed relevant to contemporary reporting of Israel’s attack on Iran. It’s scandalous, but of little surprise, that the media today is parroting the US and Israeli line when both countries have, in recent history, persistently lied, persistently invaded other countries, persistently supported dictatorial regimes, and persistently killed masses of people throughout the region. 
No doubt, the Iranian regime is despotic. It will be a welcome day when Iranian workers overthrow it. But any honest accounting of the last several decades in the Middle East shows the US and Israel to be partners in a criminality that throws shade on Tehran’s record.
It should go without saying that Israel’s aggression, backed again by the US, should be opposed. With its Gaza genocide, assaults in the West Bank, occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the latest attack on Iran, the Zionist state is attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East—a redrawing most favourable to fascists and dictators aligned with one of the greatest purveyors of violence in history.

Rogue empire

Starving Palestinians forced to walk kilometres under scorching heat in a desperate search for food are crowded into metal cages. Drone broadcasts direct civilians to aid distribution points, where Israeli forces open fire on them. The situation is so desperate that many decide to brave the gunfire and attempt to gather food for their families.
“People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food—then they fired from every direction”, Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four, <a href="https://msf.org.au/article/project-news/gaza-dozens-massacred-us-israel-backed-food-distribution-sites">told Doctors without Borders</a>, a humanitarian organisation, earlier this week. “I ran 200 metres before realising I’d been shot. This isn’t aid, it’s a lie.”
Massacres occur almost daily. On 1 June, at least 30 Palestinians were murdered like this. On 3 June, there were another 27. Who can now deny that Israel is waging a war of extermination? As the horrific results of the Zionist state’s project are laid bare, the collaborators—politicians, media organisations and “respectable” capitalist institutions—are searching for alibis. 
Last month, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada for the first time <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-from-the-leaders-of-the-united-kingdom-france-and-canada-on-the-situation-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank">issued a joint statement</a> criticising Israel’s “disproportionate” escalation in Gaza. The asymmetry has been discovered just 600 days into a “war” between one of the world’s best-equipped militaries and a starved civilian population. They should not be allowed to feign ignorance. The architects of these crimes could hardly have been clearer in their intentions. 
At the invasion’s outset, Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze5w2wd4x0o">wrote on X</a>: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. Two days after 7 October, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “<a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/we-are-fighting-human-animals-dehumanization-of-palestinians/">fighting human animals</a>” as he announced a complete siege of the territory.
“It’s time to kiss doomsday”, Israeli MP Revital Gotliv wrote, also on X. “Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza ... with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!” 
Ariel Kallner, another member of parliament, wrote: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suddenly finds distasteful the use of starvation as a weapon of war. On 26 May, he told a press conference: “It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need”. But UNICEF began warning that all children under five were at risk of death from starvation in December 2023. And Israel has blockaded Gaza for almost twenty months. 
Albanese knew exactly what Israel’s endgame was when he refused to criticise US President Donald Trump’s plan for forced relocation back in February. “I’m not going to have a running commentary on statements by the president of the United States”, is all he had to say. Foreign Minister Penny Wong knew that access to food and water in Gaza had been cut off when she said on 10 October 2023: “I think it’s always very difficult from over here to make judgements about what security approach other countries take”. 
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent statement that he “no longer understands” what Israel is doing has been <a href="https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/27/no-longer-comprehensible-german-chancellor-slams-israels-gaza-strikes/">hyped in some quarters</a> as an “unprecedented criticism of Israel’s Gaza operations”. But, like the rest of the world, Merz does understand. He understood it in February when he invited Netanyahu to Berlin, promising to find a way around the prime minister’s <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu">International Criminal Court arrest warrant</a> for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He understood it last year, when his party approved €161 million (A$284 million) of arms shipments to Israel. The entire German establishment understood it as they closed ranks to have opponents of the genocide <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250304-german-ministry-dismisses-lawyer-for-supporting-gaza-rejecting-genocide/">fired</a>, <a href="https://hyphenonline.com/2024/10/04/ava-moayeri-germany-pro-palestine-protest-free-speech-police-arrest-violence/">raided, arrested</a> and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-palestine-activists-deportation-state-repression">deported</a>. 
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy recently labelled Israel’s actions “abominable”. But he’s comfortable with UK-manufactured drones being used by the Israeli army. According to testimony from a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo">retired British surgeon</a>, those drones target and shoot children who survive air strikes. Palestine solidarity activists who attempted to disrupt drone production have been <a href="https://thebristolcable.org/2025/02/filton-18-palestine-action-activists-treated-like-terrorists-elbit-israeli-arms-factory-action/">arrested</a> by “counter-terrorism” police and are imprisoned awaiting prosecution by Lammy’s government. 
Politicians in the West have united to defend their states’ economic and political relationships with Israel, a vital ally for projecting their power and influence in the Middle East. This has been more important to them than the 2 million people whose lives have been devastated in the Gaza Strip. Now that they have proven their loyalty, now that the job is nearly done, now that nobody is standing in Israel’s way, these politicians want to wash their hands of the inevitable results. 
For the same reason, a slight shift is occurring in media coverage. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post publishes <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/israel-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-genocide-2/">opinion pieces</a> decrying genocide. The BBC runs humanising stories on families decimated by Israeli airstrikes. Everyone, it seems, is starting to get the memo that a bit of equivocation and “balance” might be in order, if for no other reason than to begin scrubbing the stains from their reputations. 
But it doesn’t change the fact that corporate and state media outlets have spent 600 days acting as loyal agents for the Israeli military. They’ve treated Israeli accounts of events as facts, silenced dissenting voices and embedded their journalists with Israeli units to be taken on North Korea-style propaganda tours.
One of the most notorious examples occurred at the beginning of the war, when CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson accompanied the Israeli army to Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. The network broadcast “evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari showed CNN a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas guards. “Every terrorist has his own shift”, Hagari told Robertson. 
The problem was that it wasn’t a Hamas roster—it was just an Arabic calendar. Despite the footage already being debunked by Arabic speakers and a protest being lodged by a Palestinian producer at the network, the lie was broadcast, giving the Israeli state cover for war crimes it may have committed at the hospital. 
The systematic bias against Palestinians and their supporters has been so overwhelming that many normally apolitical journalists at major news outlets—from American CNN to the BBC in Britain—have felt compelled to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/5/failing-gaza-pro-israel-bias-uncovered-behind-the-lens-of-western-media">blow the whistle</a>. In Australia, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staffs-concerns-over-gaza-bias-revealed">journalists have complained</a> that editors have effectively banned the use of the word “Palestine” in reports.
It’s not until the damage is done that the rewriting of history begins. Wars that can no longer be defended are re-framed by their perpetrators as unforeseeable and unfortunate mishaps. 
During the US invasion of Vietnam, opponents of the war faced a solid wall of capitalist institutions committed to its prosecution. Intellectuals overwhelmingly supported the war as a defence of freedom against communist tyranny. University heads called the police on protesters targeting their defence ties. American journalists identified with the objectives of “their side”, repeated government justifications for war crimes and assisted in their cover-up. Anybody who stood against this consensus was slandered as a “communist sympathiser”.
When as many as 3 million Vietnamese were dead, the occupation collapsed and opponents of the war were proved right. Then the war was rewritten self-servingly as a “tragedy of good intentions”, a noble mission gone awry. 
It was similar with Iraq. Sponsors of the war falsified evidence to justify the invasion, and suppressed, monitored and smeared opponents. Then, when it all fell apart, they shrugged it off as an intelligence failure. Hillary Clinton brushed aside her support for the war during her first presidential bid, saying: “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way”.
As in Vietnam and Iraq, so now in Gaza. From the beginning, the left and the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel’s aims are clear: an extension of their decades-long project of ethnic cleansing and expansion. From the beginning, we argued that if Israel wasn’t forced to stop, the war would end with the brutal forced depopulation of Gaza. For telling the truth, we were sacked, suspended, slandered and put on trial. 
Israel’s backers now admit the reality of this war, yet they continue to persecute those who oppose it. Now that our leaders mouth rhetorical criticisms, we should demand real action. 
All political prisoners who have been demonised as “terrorist sympathisers” and threats to “social cohesion” should be released. All bogus charges of antisemitism against anti-war and anti-racist activists should be withdrawn. 
States should impose real sanctions on Israel. The “sanctions” announced by the UK government are nothing of the sort, consisting of the pausing of free trade talks and travel bans on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/violent-israeli-settlers-under-uk-sanctions-join-west-bank-outpost">a handful of West Bank “settlers”</a>. The government will continue to send weapons and share intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza, assisting Israel in its targeting of civilians. 
As world leaders try to distance themselves from Israel’s crimes, we must continue to hold them accountable. They’ve been accomplices in this atrocity and implacable enemies of those who have tried to stop it. They must never be forgiven.

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Two-state solution is rubbish, what will it take to liberate Palestine?

A warning from history: ‘This is what is going to happen to you’

Europe’s imperial power play

West recycles old lies to justify attack on Iran

Capitalism’s ruthless new order

AUKUS deal should be scrapped

The human cost of Israel’s war on Iran

Rogue empire

Western collaborators in genocide now scramble for alibis

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