'The Decisive Victory That Never Was' -- A definitive Israeli account

Alastair Crooke summarises Israeli media revelations about the Mossad plan to overthrow the Iranian government.

[What the Israeli media do not say is that the January riots were instigated by Mossad and the CIA. Many of the people killed were working with Mossad.]

'The Decisive Victory That Never Was' -- A definitive Israeli account

Conflicts Forum edit of strategic perspectives from leading Israeli political & security commentators (translated from the Hebrew press), 28 April 2026
Below is a key analysis published in the Hebrew press by two leading Israeli commentators — Nahum Barnea and Ronen Bergman. Their analysis constitutes a definitive Israeli narrative of events leading to the war on Iran —
“At the end of 40 days of fighting, the operation that was supposed to decide the war with Iran did not take place. Everyone involved in it in Israel is left with a sense of missed opportunity. The question is why it did not happen …”.
“The plan to topple the [Iranian] regime was a central component of the overall war plan, the heart of the plan”.
“Both the political leadership – [Netanyahu] – and senior figures in the security services were freed from the fear of execution. Anyone capable of blowing up thousands of beepers in a single stroke feels they can do anything”.
“The plan aimed for a war in June 2026. By June, preparations would be complete and conditions ripe”.
‘After 100 hours of air operations, the second phase of the plan to topple the Iranian regime was set to begin — first a ground invasion from Iraq by Kurdish militia. Commanders said they intended to reach the Kurdish region of Iran and then, once Iranian Kurds had joined them, to launch a mass march on the capital, Tehran’.
‘Then came the phone call from Ankara … Trump ordered the invasion to be halted hours before the Kurdish forces were due to cross the border … Israel complied’.

The Israeli press confirms that January disturbances in Iran were a Mossad operation

So the January disturbances in Iran were a Mossad operation. 

In other words it was an attempt by Israel to conquer Iran. Mossad's motto was until recently "By way of deception thou shalt do war" (Proverbs 24:6). It is an unjust war which is the greatest of war crimes.

This is incredibly important. I don't like to say I said the January disturbances in Iran were a Mossad operation, had lots of evidence but many guileless people kept telling me they don't believe me.

The 40,000 Iranians murdered by the government are a Mossad/CIA lie of course - the true number is probably less than a tenth of that and many were Mossad assets.

Sina Toossi on X:

A VERY important piece today in Israel’s Ynet by Nahum Barnea & Ronen Bergman on the botched regime change plan in the Iran war.
It confirms regime change was “the heart of the plan,” with Netanyahu and the Mossad driving it and Trump on board: decapitate the leadership, foment protests, and back a Kurdish incursion from the west.
What stands out most is the admission of how central Israeli influence ops in Iran became. Under Mossad chief Barnea, in recent years shaping Iranian public opinion shifted to a core priority, “driving influence moves” inside Iran and effectively turning it into a “weapons system” with effects “far beyond social media.”
The strategy was explicit: topple from above and below, “lean on senior officials” while “fostering mass protest and armed resistance of minorities,” in "parallel."
"The organization" for this op "began four years ago," the piece states, and "reached operational maturity two and a half years ago."
The piece also acknowledges “immense” Israeli work in the “background” of the January protests, which were met with a violent crackdown killing thousands by Iranian authorities, who portrayed them as foreign-backed.

Get your news from The Straits Times and Times of India and informed podcasters, especially the ones on Judging Freedom

Don't get your news from the Western media. I recommend the Straits Times and Times of India. 

Al Jazeera is good on Israel but very biassed against Iran.

Oddly enough the Israeli paper Ha'aretz is more truthful than any Western paper but it is Zionist.

I wasted years following people like Sir Lawrence Freeman and RUSI on the Ukrainian war - but like Dominic Cummings I found Freeman a waste of time and misleading - not an independent academic but part of and the voice of the British defence establishment. 

Instead go to the podcasters like Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Professor John Mearsheimer, Chas Freeman and Retired US Col. Douglas Macgregor.

Aphorisms from the podcasters in the last two days.

Jeffrey Sachs: "Israel is a fascistic state and the only language of Israel today is war destruction darkness." He likens Israeli Foreign Minister Katz's threats to send Iran into the Stone Age to a 7th century BC Middle Eastern document.

The Iron Age threatening Persia with the Stone Age.

Chas Freeman, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia: 

"You hear accusations that are hasbara, accusations from Israel that are accepted in the West, that Iran is the world's greatest supporter of terrorism. Nonsense. Israel is the world's greatest perpetrator of terrorism."

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:

The United States is now a vassal of Greater Israel. 

He explains that by Greater Israel he is thinking of Israel plus American Zionist billionaires. 

My favourite American politician is Republican Ron Paul who podcasts a lot:

Get rid of the Empire. Close all the foreign bases. Bring all the troops home. The duty of the American military is to defend America.

Trump survives

Trump is a mass murderer. The Pentagon has said that 180 people in boats on the high seas in Caribbean and Pacific have been killed by the US since September. 3 survived US strikes.

Most of the small number of people I have asked in real life are cheering on Iran against the USA but some are neutral.

A British friend of mine with whom I had dinner recently takes neither America's or Iran's side in the war but said he wishes Trump had been killed last year. He said that to me last year and made me very angry but I don't feel angry with him now.

One should not do evil that good may come of it but this is what Trump does.

Now another attempt on his life last night.

The Iranian war is a terrible, tragic disaster for the whole world but it continues day by day to be very beautiful to see the Americans hoist by their own petard. America should have left the Middle East, the Far East and Europe in 1992 after the cold war came to an end.

'Trump Inc: organized crime masquerading as politics'

Max Blumenthal thinks that a number of times insiders have benefited from knowing what Trump was about to say to make money from the markets. It's pretty clear he is right.

He now says on 7 April corrupt people close to Trump shorted the oil market moments before the Iran ceasefire, making over a billion dollars. 

He questions how Barron Trump, who has learning difficulties, suddenly amassed $120 million.

I liked Aegina. It is slightly boring but that is another word for peaceful

I went to Aegina for the Orthodox Easter more or less by mistake, intending to revisit my beloved Hydra yet again, but it's a happy mistake. 

Aegina isn't upmarket. It's in its shirt sleeves and relaxing, very beautiful and no steep climbing. 

I visited the archaeological museum, not a good one but topical to see the origins of Western civilisation just as it is falling apart.

Aegina has 4 claims to fame: it was Achilles' kingdom; Athens' naval rival; the first capital of Greece and the closest island to Athens. When I first visited it I thought it a bit tacky but it isn't, nor even too touristy. It's unpretentious.

Seen somewhere on Substack

 

This is heart-breaking: brave journalist Amal Khalil assassinated by Israel, left to die under rubble

Lebanese Civil Defense confirmed late on 23 April the death of Amal Khalil, Lebanese journalist and reporter for Al-Akhbar newspaper, who was deliberately targeted by Israel and trapped for hours under the rubble as the Lebanese government awaited permission to rescue her.

Khalil was reporting in south Lebanon’s Tayri with fellow journalist Zainab Faraj when the strikes took place.

A civilian vehicle accompanying the journalists – who were in a separate car – was first hit by an Israeli drone, killing the two people inside it.

Khalil and Faraj exited their car and took cover behind a tree upon the first strike. Contact was then made with ambulance teams and Lebanese army intelligence, yet the Red Cross was not allowed to act until receiving clearance from the US-led ceasefire monitoring mechanism.

Another drone strike hit right near the journalists' vehicle shortly after, prompting them to shelter near a house.

About an hour later, amid reports that access to the site was being refused and that UNIFIL was asked to avoid the Haddatha–Bint Jbeil Road, a warplane hit Tayri. It was later confirmed that the house where they were sheltering was targeted.

The Red Cross was not given approval to move until 10 minutes after the Israeli warplane struck home.

Rescue workers reached and rescued Faraj, who was seriously wounded, while also retrieving the bodies of the two who were killed in the first strike.

Israeli forces fired at the rescue teams as they attempted to reach Khalil, halting search efforts, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

The rest is here.

Israel wants to return Iran to the dark and stone ages

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz yesterday announced that Israel wants to renew the (unprovoked and illegal) war on Iran and return Iran to the dark and stone ages. "We are waiting for the green light from the U.S., first and foremost, to complete the elimination of the Khamenei dynasty and to return Iran to the dark and stone ages by destroying Iran's major energy and power facilities. This time, our strikes will be different and more deadly, and will deliver further devastating blows to the most painful places, which will shake and collapse the regime's foundations."

Romania and many European countries and the UK (American satellite states) the UK were helping the US bomb Iran and presumably will again.

In Isaiah 1:15 God tells Israel, "And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood."

Spy fiction

"Lord" Mandelson, the close friend of Epstein, was the eminence gris who mentored McSweeney and made Starmer Labour leader and therefore PM. Starmer became Labour leader months after Epstein died so I do not pretend Epstein himself was necessarily involved. Starmer used what were clearly false accusations of anti-semitism to clear out Corbyn and anti-Israel Labour MPs. The media approved. One Israeli spy was found to have been involved in the rebuilding of Labour. There is a big spy story here involving the CIA, MI6, Israel and the Epstein class. Jonathan Cook, Declassified and Peter Oborne know more about this.

Polish PM Donald Tusk: Russia could attack a NATO member in a few months

Russia could attack a NATO member in just a few months, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in an interview with the Financial Times yesterday. 

He said he doubted that the US would defend Europe in such a case. 

Tusk is the madman not Viktor Orban. 

Europe needs to make peace with Russia and stop paying for the Ukraine, to have a good relationship with China too and stay out of American wars.

Caitlin Johnstone is a poetess

March 30th

'The More Murderous Israel Gets, The More We Hear About "Antisemitism". Meanwhile, in real life, people are being mercilessly butchered in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine by Israel and its allies. The uglier it gets, the more aggressive the concern-trolling about “antisemitism” becomes.'

April 14th

'I don’t mind admitting that I hope the US and Israel suffer a crushing, devastating defeat in Iran. I hope this war collapses the entire US empire. My only loyalty is to humanity, and being on Team Human in today’s world means being against the US empire and against Israel.'

Is Dugin right?

 

Alexander Dugin

@AGDugin

We witness total collapse of the West. An absolute fall. Trump was the last hope to save the West. He is now revealed as pure nothing. Corrupted perverted zero. Less than zero. No way out.

4:05 PM · Apr 19, 2026

Iran is a fairly normal country, not a demon

Max Blumenthal is a courageous investigative journalist. His investigations took him and his journalist wife to Iran just before America attacked. He found a normal country. In Tehran women rarely wear hijabs. Some people he spoke to told him they loved America but not its government. Many were worried about the very large number of Mossad sleeper cells. This is a talk given at a conference organised by my favourite American Republican politician, Ron Paul.




Max Blumenthal is not courageous because he went to Iran but because he confronts received opinion and US government lies. He is on the left but was optimistic about Donald Trump after he won in November 2014.

"Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!”

This is the day when people claim that the saint was not that saintly, was off white and (a prentice error) Turkish. But he's the patron saint of England, supplanting my patron saint  King St Edmund of East Anglia, whose feast was recently ignored by the tweets of the  Catholic Bishops of England and Wales in favour of a day commemorating transgender persons.

Yes I am wearing a rose.

Romanian icon on glass of St George.

Iran wants to wreck Trump’s presidency as she destroyed Carter's

Robert Pape says Iran intends to destroy Trump’s presidency so will continue the war at least until November, to develop an atom bomb and be the fourth power in the world. It's hard for me to see how they can fail to achieve these things so I wonder why they have stopped fighting. A war until Christmas is a catastrophe not just for America but the world economy (Russia and Iran excepted). Israel also wants the war to continue.

Pape cannily said that Trump's enemy in this war was not Iran but Obama. 

Why does the European Union "president' not talk to Iran or Russia?

 (Fun fact. When she visited China she had to go through immigration like an ordinary person which was droll.)

Comments on a Facebook thread by journalist Pelle Taylor

[It doesn't matter what country he's talking about. I actually don't know which one it's about. What he's saying applies everywhere.]

On the one hand, I don't know these human rights claims. Our media have been so poisoned by the lies and propaganda of the intelligence agencies; I don't know what to believe. This is not to say that human rights abuses don't happen, but I can't believe it just by the words of the Western mainstream media that they happen, so I don't know what to believe.
Second, I think our warmongers use these invented or real human rights abuses to make wars on countries that only make the situation worse, as we've seen in the Middle East. I know that, for instance, you talked about the Uyghurs, but I'm not an expert on China. I do know that this has been studied well by people, friends of mine like Piers Robinson, who say that the UK specifically used Islamists to destroy Syria, sided with the really bad guys to destroy the country where I have several acquaintances from. Syria seemed like a pretty normal society, presumably if you didn't cross the regime, but they had a National Health Service and could go to the beach in bikinis and live a pretty normal life. The human rights circus is part of the military industrial complex.

Interestingly, one of the Syrian girls I know was part of the student movement that protested against Assad in 2011. She then got a scholarship to Syracuse University in the US. She's not anti-American by any means, but she said that the student movement was quickly infiltrated by hard men with guns who shot at the Assad security forces.

 

When they fired back, the Western headline was "Assad shooting his own people, killing peaceful students." Basically, it was the Maidan playbook a few years before the Maidan coup. 

 

There's so much out there reported at face vaue by a credulous and corrupt media. There was a 60 Minutes show where a masked Mossad agent said, "The world's a stage and we are the directors. Everything you see is fake," or something like that.

The Syrian woman's story could be a description of the CIA Mossad operation in Iran in January of this year - a regime change operation that failed thanks to Russia and led to the US Israeli attack on Iran in February.

Biden would have attacked Iran?

Glenn Greenwald who's a Jewish American Democrat 4 hours ago on Substack.

"Biden's negotiator and adviser for Israel and Lebanon was Amos Hochstein: born in Israel, served in the IDF, whose family still lives in Israel.

"He said on Face the Nation this Sunday that had Biden won a second term, there was a strong possibility that the US would have bombed Iran's nuclear facilities. Also says he supported Trump’s “Operation Midnight Hammer” last year."

The late Queen's 100th birthday today

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen was born one hundred years ago today. 

Had the old King died five years sooner she would have been Empress of India. 

She lived long enough to entertain Ceausescu and Donald Trump and open innumerable drop-in centres in deprived inner city areas. 

Her first PM was Winston Churchill, her last PM was Liz Truss. What a falling off is here. 

During her reign the British flourished as never before and were reduced to servitude to the USA and the EU. A country that had colonised so much of the world was now a colony in many senses. 

Many things were worse when she died than in 1952 but even more were possibly better.

"Comparisons are odious."

"There is properly no history, only biography." Disraeli

William Perry, US Defense Secretary 1994-1997, considered resigning in opposition to NATO expansion

This tells you so much about the nature of the American empire.

William Perry, the US Defense Secretary between 1994 and 1997, considered resigning in opposition to NATO expansion:

“It wasn’t that we listened to their argument and said [we] don’t agree with that argument… Basically the people I was arguing with when I tried to put the Russian point…. the response that I got was really: ‘Who cares what they think? They’re a third-rate power.’ And of course that point of view got across to the Russians as well. That was when we started sliding down that path.”

Mearsheimer thinks Israel not Iran is the enemy of Western values

Israel has decided not to prosecute the IDF soldier that desecrated a statue of Jesus Christ in Lebanon.  He has merely been rebuked.

Much, much more importantly several Christian villages have been completely destroyed by Israel in southern Lebanon.

John Mearsheimer said in the last two or three days that Israel is a much greater threat to Western values than Iran because Iran is not an apartheid state and never attempted let alone carried out a genocide. 

Of course he always uses the word apartheid inexactly (by his definition all the European colonies in Africa would qualify as apartheid states including South Africa before 1948). Nor do I express any opinion on whether the holocaust in Gaza qualifies  as genocide. Whether it does or not the IDF certainly killed far more than even the 80,000 Arabs that the Israelis and Hamas agree on.  Credible reports indicate that hundreds of thousands of civilians died. One report says 450,000, another 600,000.

Professor Mearsheimer is obviously right that Iran never did anything remotely comparable to that. Nor to the CIA Mossad MI6 regime charge attempt in January or the US-Israeli assault on Iran in February  (The UK helped the US.)

I have argued here for many years that Iran is no threat to the West. 

But instead European countries made Iran and Russia their enemies because America wants it. 

Now America is obviously Europe's enemy too.

We need an end to Nato. Europe and Great Britain should not be dragged by the American chariot into the US deep state's war against multipolarity.

On Saturday Trump tried to “use the nuclear codes” on Iran and was stopped by General Dan Caine

According to retired CIA analyst Larry Johnson: During an emergency meeting on Saturday Trump tried to “use the nuclear codes” on Iran and he was stopped by General Dan Caine. According to Johnson “there is seriously something wrong with Trump”. Why do the media not report this?

Note. Since I wrote this it has been reported on British television. 

American defence analyst Brian Berletic on X

 First Principles: Why the US Will Continue War with Iran 

The US' primary goal is global primacy.

Attacking Iran is driven by a desire to isolate Russia and China further by eliminating a partner and fully controlling an economically vital region of the world.

Part of this isolation specifically for China involves cutting off energy exports from Iran to China.

The US can also use its own war of aggression against Iran to implement a defacto blockade on all or much of the energy leaving the entire Middle East to China and also many of China's largest and most important trade partners.

A collapse in consumer demand means a collapse in demand for Chinese production the US has been complaining about and desperately trying to target for years. 

The US is also using this opportunity to normalize a global blockade of all Iranian ships just as it has the "shadow fleet."

This has always been expanding toward a general, global blockade. 

Everything is aimed at a more direct and serious confrontation with both Russia (whom the US is still waging proxy war/covert war on) and China.

Because of this fundamental reality, no "peace" of any kind was EVER possible with Iran unless Iran and its allies could physically impose it on the US which at this point is still not realistic or possible.

So the war will inevitably continue and only the excuses of why it will continue remain to be crafted and presented.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim on X

 Some have said that claims that Israel uses dogs to sexually abuse prisoners are antisemitic blood libels. Unfortunately, there is a good deal of evidence. The organizations that confirmed this include B’Tselem, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Council on American-Islamic Relations. 

Here is the testimony of survivors: 

1) "Nihad" (50-year-old father, Ofer Prison): In an interview with Anadolu Agency, Nihad testified that during a pre-dawn raid on January 14, 2024, Israeli soldiers ordered a police dog to sexually assault him. He described it as "the most painful moments of my life" and noted that the assault left him with deep physical wounds and long-term trauma.

2) "A.A." (35-year-old father, Sde Teiman): Arrested from Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024, A.A. told the PCHR that soldiers took him to a corridor away from cameras, stripped him naked, and unleashed dogs that urinated on him before one dog raped him anally for approximately three minutes. He emphasized that the dog appeared "trained" and "knew exactly what it was doing".

3) "Halim Salem" (Pseudonym, West Bank Detainee): Testified to Middle East Eye that while he was forced to kneel with his head in a toilet, guards brought in a dog that "mounted and raped" him. He recalled that when he screamed, the guards beat him for "disturbing the dog".

4) "Wajdi" (43-year-old, Gaza Detainee): Recounted to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor that during interrogation, he was tied naked to a metal bed and raped by both a soldier and a dog while other soldiers filmed and mocked him.

5) Mohammed Arab (Al Araby TV Correspondent): While detained at Sde Teiman, he told his lawyer he witnessed soldiers forcing dogs to rape prisoners. He stated, "They teach their dogs to have sex with prisoners. Can you imagine?".

6) 18-year-old Gazan Detainee (Sde Teiman): Testified to PCHR that while he and other captives were being raped with bottles by soldiers, there was "also a dog behind us, as if the dog was raping us," serving as a form of extreme psychological and physical humiliation.

7) 48-year-old Detainee (Al-Shifa/Military Outpost): Reported witnessing a dog maul another man’s genitals until the victim bled to death in his arms.

8) The Committee to Protect Journalists and Middle East Monitor have collected dozens of testimonies from journalists who reported being subjected to "dog attacks" and sexualized torture during their detention.

I talked to two guards in Sde Teiman, on more than one occasion. One had seen this happen and said it was too awful to talk about. The other said that he had heard about it from others and believed it was true. This happened. This is happening still. The evidence is too overwhelming.

Former head of MI6 (M) wrote that Putin may pray for mountains in Ukraine as a buffer against the West

"Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: ‘Why didn’t you put some mountains in Ukraine?’ If God had built mountains in Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the North European Plain would not be such encouraging territory from which to attack Russia repeatedly. As it is, Putin has no choice: he must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west".
J. Scarlett, ‘Introduction’, In Marshall, T., 2016. Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Explain Everything about the World, London, Elliott & Thompson, 2016, p.1., (acknowledgments to Professor Glenn Diesen)

Why is the US Israeli empire pathologically obsessed with taking over Iran, Lebanon, Russia, China, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba?

It's an interesting question to which I don't know the answer.

Do empires empires act unthinkingly to destroy competitors, like bacteria destroy other bacteria? I don't think the British empire was like that. Many countries asked to join the British empire and were refused.

America only got Israel to stop bombing children because they were worried about higher petrol prices. This tells you almost everything you need to know to judge America, once an if not moral at least moralistic country.

The Americans have hit 50 schools in Iran.

Yet some people in the UK and Europe want the Americans to win this illegal war.

This is Robert Tombs writing in the Daily Telegraph on June 11 2023. 'This seems the almost invariable pattern, whether in the fall of far-flung empires or in revolutions within single states. No one expected a French Revolution that would bring Louis XVI to the guillotine. No one expected an upper-class rebellion in Palermo in 1848 to turn the whole of Europe upside down. Who thought the suicide of a street trader in Tunisia in 2010 could do the same to the Arab world? The German empire collapsed in 1918 only months after it had nearly won the First World War. Despite emerging victorious from the Second World War, the French and British empires began unravelling just as Paris and London were planning new colonial partnerships.'

I hope that the US-Israeli attack on Iran will start the unravelling the American empire and am confident it will - but how long will it take an dhow bloody will it be?

Omar Bartov the Israeli historian and holocaust scholar condemns Gazan genocide

I read twice Omer Bartov's harrowing book about Jews murdered in his mother's small town in WW2 Ukraine, I reviewed it here and and I visited the town. I recommend it highly though he admits at the start that he feels angry about the events whereas though this is understandable a historian should aim to be dispassionate.




In this clip he says Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, a conclusion he reached reluctantly, and though Israel is redeemable Zionism has morphed into something irredeemable.

Larry Johnson who briefed John F Kennedy says 'We have to really think about an arc of resistance rather than of terrorists.'

Larry Johnson was in the CIA from the early 1960s and briefed presidents from Kennedy to Bush 1. He says Pakistan is now sending troops to help Iran. His latest podcast with Scott Ritter is very good.

"What that tells me is that there is an arc of not evil, an arc of resistance and that the Iranians in my view to their credit were also insisting that Lebanon be included here as eventually Palestine will also have to be included. So, the Iranian regime, if you will, the Iranian government has put itself on the line not only for Iran, but for the Lebanese who are being attacked by Israel, for the others that are being attacked by Israel. That's almost sort of idealistic. It's not very narrowly
focused. And I think that's to their credit. And so we have to really think about an arc of resistance rather than of terrorists. And you have to make sure you realize that Iran is not the chief terrorist sponsor in the world and that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapons still. And that was clear, but the head of national intelligence refused to say it this year after having said it since 2007.

We're all Iranians now

We're all Iranians now. At least since 2000 America has become a much bigger threat to world peace than the old USSR ever was. 

In fact back in the 1980s my callow young self saw that the cold war kept the peace. 

Now Iran is fighting to break the American empire with great courage, manliness, intelligence and arguably even morality, all things the US appears singularly to lack in this war. 

I wonder though why Iran agreed to this sham ceasefire. They surely don't trust the Americans. 

I think they are making a mistake. The Americans have some reason for wanting a pause.

I doubt if Iran can force the US out of the Middle East but it would be good for everyone, most of all the US and Israel, if they do. 

A close (and very philo-Semitic) Romanian friend, whose child learns Hebrew at the Jewish School, said to me a week ago "I support Iran! Not because I am left-wing or right-wing but because they were attacked'. I imagine most middle-of-the-road people agree.

Rape in Israel

American podcast star Ana Kasparian has read out the most damning report on Israel's prisons. Sexual torture is organized state policy, endorsed by the highest authorities. Women are raped for days. Men are raped by dogs. Fire extinguisher nozzles are inserted into bodies.

Her information comes from the Israeli media. I knew much from reading Ha'aretz.

Western media don't report this.

There is as far  i know no proof that Hamas men committed rapes on 7 October and by now there probably would be had it happened.

Jewish Currents: Iran Is Not an Existential Threat - Iran poses no significant danger to Israel, let alone the US.

I recommend this very cogent article in Jewish Currents. I quote

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Israeli and American leaders began describing Iran as a threat to the Jewish state. But this change in rhetoric didn’t occur because Iran’s attitude toward Israel changed. It occurred because Iraq, Israel’s chief bogeyman, had been brought to its knees. With Saddam Hussein hobbled by the 1991 Gulf War and then a decade of brutal US sanctions, the Islamic Republic took its place as Israel’s foremost regional competitor. “Nothing special happened with Iran,” retired Israeli Brigadier General Shlomo Brom told Parsi, “but because Iraq was removed [as a danger], Iran started to play a greater role in the threat perception of Israel.”
To be sure, Iran did grow stronger in the ’90s as a result of Iraq’s decline. It also began backing Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which opposed the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel. And in the early 1990s, Iran restarted its nuclear energy program, which had begun under the Shah. It was this cocktail—Iran’s hostile rhetoric, its nuclear program, and its support for armed anti-Zionist groups—that birthed the current conventional wisdom that Iran represents an existential threat to Israel.

But this claim has never been borne out by Iranian behavior. Despite its antipathy toward Zionism, and its efforts to resist Israeli and American power, the Iranian regime has shown no willingness to imperil itself by trying to destroy Israel. To the contrary, it has repeatedly sought to defuse conflict with both Jerusalem and Washington, if only because it recognizes their vastly superior power. In May 2003, after the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran sent the US government a secret message: If the US lifted sanctions, ceased trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic, and accepted Tehran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy, Iran would end its support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, pressure Hezbollah to disarm, place its nuclear program under international inspection, and support the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which offered to recognize Israel if it accepted a Palestinian state and a “just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.” According to Richard Haass, then head of policy planning at the State Department, the Bush administration spurned Tehran’s offer because “the bias was toward a policy of regime change.”

The way we live now

From an opinion piece in the Washington Post on 8 April by Marc A. Thiessen advising Trump on five things to do in his [unprovoked] war against Iran.

"Fourth, carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations. Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed."

A left-wing  Spanish Member  of the Cortes has just likened Netanyahu to Hitler but she might have likened Trump to  Hitler. I am somebody who until now always hated Hitler analogies.