Stop Netanyahu before he kills us all

We may soon see several nuclear powers in direct conflict, dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation.

For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed the Middle East toward war and destruction. This man is a powder keg of violence. In all the wars he advocated, Netanyahu always dreamed of the main war: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian government. His long-desired war, which has just been launched, could end up killing us all in a nuclear apocalypse, unless Netanyahu is stopped.

Netanyahu’s obsession with war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin. The previous generation believed that Zionists should use any form of violence (wars, assassinations, terror) to achieve their goals of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.

The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, advocated exclusive Zionist control over the entire region that had been the British Mandate of Palestine. At the beginning of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted about 87% of the population and owned ten times more land than the Jewish population. By 1948, Arabs still outnumbered Jews by roughly two to one. Even so, Likud’s founding charter (1977) declared that “between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there shall be only Israeli sovereignty.” The now infamous slogan “from the river to the sea”, often characterized as anti-Semitic, actually reveals Likud’s anti-Palestinian war cry.

Israel’s war against Iran is the final move in a decades-long strategy. We are witnessing the apogee of Zionist extremist manipulation of US foreign policy.

The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist goals despite their blatant illegality in light of international law and morality, which advocate a two-state solution.

In 1996, Netanyahu and his U.S. advisors developed a strategy known as “Clean Break”. They advocated that Israel should not withdraw from the Palestinian territories occupied in the 1967 war in exchange for regional peace. Instead, Israel should reshape the Middle East according to its interests. Fundamentally, the strategy envisioned the United States as the primary force in achieving these goals, waging wars in the region to dismantle governments opposed to Israeli domination over Palestine. The United States was called upon to wage wars on Israel’s behalf.

The “Clean Break” strategy was effectively implemented by the United States and Israel after 9/11. As revealed by NATO’s supreme commander at the time, General Wesley Clark, shortly after the attacks, the United States planned to “attack and destroy the governments of seven countries within five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.” The first of these wars, in 2003, was aimed at overthrowing the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the U.S. became bogged down in Iraq. Yet the U.S. supported the partition of Sudan in 2005, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched the CIA’s covert operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, together with the UK and France, overthrew the Libyan government through a bombing campaign. Today, these countries are in ruins, many of them embroiled in civil wars.

Netanyahu was an enthusiast for these wars of choice, either publicly or behind the scenes, along with his neoconservative allies in the U.S. government, including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, among others.

In a 2002 statement before the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu defended the disastrous war in Iraq, declaring, “If you topple Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that this will have enormously positive repercussions in the region.” And he continued, “And I think the people next door, in Iran, the young people and many others, will say that the era of such regimes, of such despots, is over.” He also falsely told Congress, “There is no question that Saddam is seeking, is working, is moving toward the development of nuclear weapons.” The slogan to rebuild a “New Middle East” was used to justify these wars. Initially proclaimed in 1996 through “Clean Break,” it was popularized by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2006. As Israel brutally bombed Lebanon, Rice said, “What we’re seeing here, in a sense, are the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to make sure that we’re moving toward this new Middle East, not going back to the old one.”

In September 2023, Netanyahu presented at the UN General Assembly a map of the “New Middle East” that completely erased a Palestinian state. In September 2024, he detailed this plan by presenting two maps: one part of the Middle East as a “blessing” and another, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, as a “curse”, by advocating regime changes in those countries.

Israel’s war against Iran is the final move in a decades-long strategy. We are witnessing the apogee of Zionist extremist manipulation of US foreign policy.

The pretext for the Israeli attack on Iran is the claim that the country is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. This claim is unfounded, as Iran has repeatedly proposed negotiations precisely to eliminate the nuclear option in exchange for an end to the sanctions imposed by the United States for decades.

Since 1992, Netanyahu and his supporters have claimed that Iran would become a nuclear power “within a few years”. In 1995, Israeli officials and their allies in the United States pointed to a five-year time frame. In 2003, Israel’s director of military intelligence said Iran would have the nuclear bomb “until the summer of 2004.” In 2005, the head of the Mossad said Iran could build the bomb in less than three years. In 2012, Netanyahu declared at the UN that “it was only a few months, possibly weeks, before they would have enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.” And so on.

This pattern of successive deadlines over more than 30 years is part of a deliberate strategy, not failures of foresight. The accusations are pure propaganda; there is always an “existential threat.” More importantly, there is Netanyahu’s false claim that negotiations with Iran are futile.

Iran has reiterated that it does not want a nuclear weapon and has long been willing to negotiate. In October 2003, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa banning the production and use of nuclear weapons, a decision that was officially cited by Iran at an IAEA meeting in Vienna in August 2005, and has since been referred to as a religious and legal barrier to obtaining nuclear weapons.

Even for those skeptical of Iranian intentions, the country has consistently advocated a negotiated agreement with independent international verification. In contrast, the Zionist lobby has opposed such agreements, pressuring the United States to maintain sanctions and reject any treaty that would allow strict IAEA monitoring in exchange for the cancellation of sanctions.

In 2016, the Obama administration, along with the UK, France, Germany, China and Russia, signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, a landmark agreement to closely monitor Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. However, under heavy pressure from Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby, President Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Predictably, when Iran responded by expanding its uranium enrichment, it was accused of violating an agreement that the United States itself had abandoned. The double standards and propaganda are evident. On April 11, 2021, Israel’s Mossad attacked the Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz. After the April 11 attack, Iran announced that it would further increase uranium enrichment, as a bargain, while repeatedly calling for the resumption of negotiations for a JCPOA-like agreement. The Biden administration rejected all of these proposals.

At the beginning of his second term, Trump agreed to open new negotiations with Iran. Iran promised to give up nuclear weapons and accept IAEA inspections, but retained the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. The Trump administration initially accepted this, but then backed down. Since then, there have been five rounds of negotiations, with both sides reporting progress each time.

The sixth round was supposedly scheduled for Sunday, June 15. Instead, Israel launched a preemptive war against Iran on June 12. Trump confirmed that the U.S. knew about the attack in advance, even as the administration was talking publicly about the impending negotiations. Israel’s attack was made not only in the midst of negotiations moving forward, but just days before a UN conference on Palestine that would have advanced the cause of a two-state solution. That conference has now been postponed. Israel’s attack on Iran now threatens to become an all-out war that could involve the United States and Europe alongside Israel, and Russia and perhaps Pakistan alongside Iran. We may soon see several nuclear powers in direct confrontation, dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation. The Doomsday Clock is 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to nuclear apocalypse since its inception in 1947.

Over the past 30 years, Netanyahu and his allies in the United States have destroyed or destabilized a 4000 km swath of countries stretching from North Africa through the eastern Mediterranean and West Asia to the Horn of Africa. Their goal has been to block the creation of a Palestinian state by overthrowing governments that support the Palestinian cause. The world deserves better than this extremism. More than 180 UN countries support a two-state solution and regional stability. This makes more sense than Israel dragging the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse in pursuit of its illegal and extremist goals.