The following is an essay that first appeared in the July 24, 2025, issue of the London Review of Books (LRB), a prominent literary journal based in London, United Kingdom.
The author of the article is Adam Shatz, LRB’s U.S. editor. Shatz is also a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is a visiting professor in the Human Rights Program of Bard College in New York.
In this review, Shatz raises important issues that deserve further discussion in light of the gruesome October 7, 2023, attack led by Hamas that targeted civilians in Israel, the genocidal war Israel unleashed in retaliation on the entire population of Gaza, and a new wave of violence by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Zionist settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. He doesn’t mince any words in describing the horrors the Israeli regime has been inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza for nearly two years.
“As much as forced displacement, killing, starvation and humiliation, the promotion of criminality… has become a defining feature of Israel’s rule inside Gaza,” Shatz points out.
“The regime of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and now genocide has eroded Israel’s moral capital, and opposition has not only grown, but has begun to make itself felt in a new generation of progressive activists and politicians,” says Shatz in concluding his essay.
“Even so, it’s extremely difficult to imagine the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system, or to imagine a serious challenge to its domination emerging anytime soon. In a world of rising authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, where the rule of law has all but crumbled, the brutal, pitiless state run by Netanyahu looks more like a pioneer than an outlier.”
Shatz also examines political developments in the Mideast and beyond in the aftermath of the recent U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. He spells out the implications of last year’s Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which decimated the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and caused a substantial death toll among the broader civilian Lebanese population, and of the overthrow of the Assad dictatorship in Syria and continuous incursions and bombings of Syria by the IDF since Assad’s demise.
“Even without any evidence of a Syrian intent to attack, even in the presence of clear conciliatory signals from the al-Sharaa government, Israel has continued to go after supposed weapons caches and to occupy parts of southern Syria,” Shatz’s essay points out.
This was evident in the Israeli bombings of Syria’s presidential palace, military headquarters, and defense ministry in Damascus on July 16, 2025, in response to armed clashes between Druse militias and Bedouin tribes in Suweida, in the country’s south.
About a year ago, on June 27, 2024, World-Outlook published another essay by the same writer, Author Adam Shatz on ‘Israel’s Descent.’
In introducing that article, World-Outlook noted that “we have expressed our own views on the Palestinian national liberation struggle, the history of Israel’s creation as a colonial settler state, and the character of the October 7 attack by Hamas, in several previous articles. These include The Palestinian Struggle and Lessons from South Africa, On the Character of the Oct. 7 Attack by Hamas, Why Opposition to Zionism is Not Antisemitism, and others.”
We also expressed our views recently on the imperialist assault on Iran in the editorial Oppose U.S.-Israeli War on Iran.
World-Outlook is publishing the review that follows for the information of our readers. The headline, text, and second endnote below are from the original. Photos, breakers (or subheadings), and the first endnote are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we are publishing Shatz’s latest essay in two parts, the first of which follows.
— World-Outlook editors
*
(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)
Adam Shatz
Adam Shatz is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which includes many pieces from the paper, and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He has written for the LRB on subjects including the war in Gaza, Fanon, France’s war in Algeria, mass incarceration in America and Deleuze and Guattari. His LRB podcast series, Human Conditions, considers revolutionary thought in the 20th century through conversations with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards. Sign up here.
The World since 7 October
By Adam Shatz
On 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people’. If Khamenei were to refuse, he added, ‘that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens.’
That Petraeus was recommending Iran, a country of ninety million people, be reduced to Gaza-like conditions hardly occasioned comment: murderous threats from US officials against foreign leaders and their people no longer provoke shock, much less condemnation; they’re simply part of the ‘conversation’ about how the US should manage its empire.
On 22 June, the US air force dropped GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on uranium-enrichment sites at Fordow and Natanz, and fired Tomahawk missiles at the nuclear research centre near Isfahan. Initially, it seemed as if Trump was following Petraeus’s counsel, but then he rushed to proclaim victory, declaring that the strikes had demolished Iran’s nuclear capacity (according to a preliminary classified US report, the programme has been set back by only a few months); he then prevailed on Israel and Iran to accept a ceasefire.
Israel’s strikes had caused extensive damage to residential neighbourhoods and property; as many as a thousand Iranians were killed. But Khamenei was not assassinated, despite Israel’s threats, and the US did not bomb Iran to smithereens, even if Trump compared his actions to Truman’s use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima (‘that stopped a lot of fighting, and this stopped a lot of fighting’) when he welcomed Netanyahu to the White House on 6 July. The starvation and killing in Gaza grew still worse, but so long as Israel and Iran were at war, Palestinian suffering was off the front page.
In the hallucinatory manner that is the signature of Trump’s foreign policy, all three parties could claim victory: Netanyahu, because the Israeli air force had eliminated the top leadership of the Revolutionary Guard, in lightning strikes as devastating as the destruction of the Egyptian air force on the first morning of the Six Day War of 1967; Khamenei, because the regime survived and fired ballistic missiles deep inside Israel, striking five military bases, causing considerable damage in Haifa and Tel Aviv, and the deaths of 28 civilians, including a Palestinian family who lived in one of the many Arab villages without a bomb shelter; and Trump, who could present himself as both warrior and peacemaker, winning over neocon never-Trumpers like William Kristol while reassuring his base that he wasn’t pursuing yet another costly Middle East ground war.
At his meeting with Trump, Netanyahu revealed that he had nominated the president for a Nobel Peace Prize. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, spoke with a striking lack of bitterness (and transparent calculation) about the man who had just bombed his country: ‘Trump is capable enough to guide the region towards a bright and peaceful future,’ he said, so long as he can prevent Israel from dragging it into a ‘pit’ of endless fighting.
Tehran has launched a purge of suspected traitors
Since the ceasefire, the regime in Tehran has launched a purge against suspected traitors, several of whom have been hanged, and expelled hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. Israel has established control of Iran’s skies and may send its fighter planes and drones there again, as it routinely does over Lebanon and Syria. All this could have been avoided. Ten years ago, the UN Security Council, the EU and Iran reached an agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), intended to ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme would be directed to peaceful ends.
Three years later, however, the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement, although it seemed to be working and there was no evidence that Iran had violated it – a move vigorously championed by Israel and its supporters. As a direct consequence, Iran began to increase the levels of uranium enrichment at Fordow and its other facilities.
Nonetheless, when Israel launched its surprise attack on 13 June, Iran was still in talks with the US, and Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified to Congress in March that Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon. (Ridiculed by her boss, she changed her story after the US entered the war.)
It’s tempting to read Trump’s decision to bomb Iran in psychological terms, something he has encouraged. ‘I may do it,’ he said on 18 June when asked by reporters. ‘I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.’ Perhaps he wanted to avoid any impression of weakness, even if that meant infuriating MAGA critics of foreign wars like Carlson and Steve Bannon; perhaps he didn’t want to be left on the sidelines and denied his share of the credit as Israel pummelled Iran.
But Trump’s personal motivations are less important than the fact that the United States has given its imprimatur to Israel’s regional hegemony. The US has been Israel’s patron since the 1967 war, providing vast financial and military support, as well as a reliable vote on the UN Security Council against any resolution condemning Israeli war crimes. In 2003, the US launched an unprovoked war against Iraq promoted by Israeli hawks, including Netanyahu. Yet until now it has shied away from sending military personnel to join an Israeli offensive.
Netanyahu’s success in luring the US into the war was one of the great triumphs of his career, but he had to settle for a brief onslaught. When Trump made plain that he wanted Israel to stop bombing, Netanyahu had little choice but to acquiesce. (Under a Democratic president, the US might not have joined the war, but the fighting could well have dragged on, amid impotent cries of ‘concern’ about casualties.) Still a precedent has been set, and a new regional order has emerged, based on the uncontested domination of a small state that continues to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence with impunity, led by a man who is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
The war with Iran is far more than an attempt to prevent nuclear weapons from getting in the hands of mullahs (if it even is that); it is the culmination of Israel’s effort to restore its image of invincibility, which 7 October shattered, to settle scores with its enemies and to make itself the master of the region.
At the moment, it is exulting in its power, as it has not done since the end of the 1967 war, when the Jewish state tripled the territory under its control and was flooded by a wave of messianism. Its principal victims are the people of Gaza and the West Bank, but Israel also appears to be pursuing a long-range plan to weaken, if not to render defenceless, the other states in the region, so that none is in a position to challenge it.
The instability and precariousness of such an order are evident to American and European politicians, but they prefer to remain discreet about them for fear of being accused of sympathy for Hamas or antisemitism. Most of the Democrats who criticised Trump for launching a war without congressional approval were noticeably reticent when it came to Israel’s unilateral assault.
The new order was not built in 12 days
The new order was not built in twelve days. The attack on Iran was the most recent instalment in a war for supremacy that began on 7 October 2023, when Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza crossed into southern Israel and killed more than a thousand people, roughly two-thirds of them civilians. Some of Israel’s most influential war planners wanted to strike Hizbullah right then, on the basis that the Lebanese militant organisation provided Iran with a shield against Israeli attack. When Israel assassinated Hizbullah’s senior officials, including its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, last September, Iran lost its ‘lung’ in the Arab Middle East, as a Shia cleric once described Lebanon.
Two months later, Iran lost another key Arab ally when the Assad dictatorship fell to a Sunni Islamist insurgency, led by a former jihadist, Ahmed al-Sharaa, whom Trump has since praised as ‘attractive’ and ‘tough’. The decision to attack Iran was reportedly made at a meeting advertised as a conversation about the fate of the remaining hostages in Gaza, twenty of whom are believed to be alive, a reminder of Netanyahu’s priorities.
For Netanyahu, Iran was an irresistible target: a supposed nuclear threat and a symbol of evil in the eyes of the Israeli Jewish public for its support of Palestinian militant organisations. Attacking it would allow him to distract attention from the horrors of Gaza and the fate of the hostages, to continue resisting pressure for a ceasefire and to avoid having to face trial on corruption charges (Trump is now calling for those charges to be dropped).
The Iranian regime is not only militarily weak, it is also widely loathed by Iranians for its oppression and corruption. Among the regime’s officials and civil servants, the ardour of revolutionary Shiism long ago gave way to cynicism, with the Revolutionary Guard smuggling liquor and the Basij looking the other way when women took off their hijabs. The regime is also infested with spies: Israel’s campaign couldn’t have proceeded so smoothly, or with such velocity, without the help of a network of spooks and informants.
The struggle between Iran and Israel has always been a bit of a puzzle. They are not neighbours and have no territorial dispute. Both are ethnic minority states in an Arab-dominated region, with religious cultures steeped in ancient memories of persecution; both invoke a sense of solitude and existential vulnerability, a self-image that confounds (and often outrages) their far more vulnerable neighbours.
Tehran’s stance on the Palestinian cause
When Iran was ruled by the shah, the countries were allies. But in his last years in power, he became increasingly frustrated by Israel’s expansionism and arrogance, warning of the Zionist lobby’s influence over Washington in an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.
After the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini embraced the Palestinian cause with a fervour unmatched elsewhere in the Arab world, hoping to transcend his country’s Persian and Shia identities, and to win support from the people of the region for Iran’s anti-imperialism. During the war with Iraq, he insisted that the ‘path to Jerusalem runs through Karbala’, as if the battle with Saddam Hussein were the first stage of the liberation of Palestine.[1]
The Israelis responded by arguing that the path to Pax Israeliana ran through regime change in Tehran. Netanyahu has long been a vociferous advocate of military confrontation with the Islamic Republic, and in a video address released in the first days of Israel’s assault, he made an explicit appeal to the Iranian public: ‘As we achieve our objective, we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom.’
In the early hours of the war, some Iranians were pleased that a number of the regime’s top officials had been killed in targeted attacks, but few embraced Israel’s version of ‘liberation’, particularly as the strikes became increasingly chaotic and indiscriminate. On the penultimate day of the war, Israel carried out a series of strikes against Evin prison, a symbol of tyranny and oppression under both the shah and the Islamic Republic. Seventy-nine people died, both prisoners and visiting family members. Many Iranians were furious that their self-styled ‘liberator’ had killed the very people who had suffered most under the regime.
One of the immediate effects of the joint Israeli-US attack has been to reinforce a narrative that many Iranians had ridiculed: that the regime, whatever its flaws, is a bulwark against foreigners who would turn their country into another Libya, Syria, Iraq or, worse, Gaza, either by promoting regime change or by fomenting ethnic strife. One dissident, Sadegh Zibakalam, expressed a common view when he said that ‘even if we are part of the opposition, we cannot remain indifferent to an invasion of our homeland.’
The regime has shrewdly appealed to these nationalist feelings, which tap into collective memories of foreign conspiracies, above all the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh, orchestrated by the CIA and the British. When Khamenei made his first public appearance since the war began, at a ceremony for the Shia festival of Ashura, he requested that in place of the usual religious hymn a song about Iran should be performed. Thanks to the invasion, there is now considerable popular support for Iran’s decision to withdraw from co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. For all Trump’s triumphalism, the ‘twelve-day war’, far from having ended Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon, may accelerate it.
Israel, however, may prefer this situation to a diplomatic agreement that would allow Iran to enrich uranium for civil purposes, bringing an end to sanctions and leading to Iran’s reintegration into the international order. After all, Israel now has control of the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria – almost boundless room for manoeuvre – and has always favoured unilateral military assertion over diplomacy. ‘The most likely outcome of the war,’ according to Robert Malley, one of Obama’s negotiators in the JCPOA, ‘will be a situation of no war, no peace, more unilateral strikes.’
Regionalization of Israeli ‘mow the lawn’ strategy
Iran will hunker down, focus on regime maintenance and hope for a better deal, while Israel will strike at Iran whenever it sees the merest hint of a threat. ‘It’s the regionalisation of the “mow the lawn” strategy practised in Gaza and Lebanon,’ Malley said. In the case of Syria, he added, where Israel has carried out repeated strikes, built nine bases and expelled hundreds of people from their homes for military use, ‘it has gone beyond “mowing the lawn” – it’s “mow the hell of whatever dirt may still be there.” Even without any evidence of a Syrian intent to attack, even in the presence of clear conciliatory signals from the al-Sharaa government, Israel has continued to go after supposed weapons caches and to occupy parts of southern Syria. They did this because they could, because Syria was in no position to lift a finger in response.’
Israel’s regional ‘mow the lawn’ strategy could exact a steep diplomatic price. Before 7 October, it appeared to be headed towards normalising relations with the Gulf states. But the devastation of Gaza has aroused anger among young Arabs, and Arab governments that once saw Israel as a useful counterweight to Iran’s ambitions now feel that its aggression and adventurism know no limits.
As Mohammed Baharoon, head of a research centre in Dubai, put it, ‘now the madman with a gun is Israel, it’s not Iran.’ Israel’s violent raids into Syria, and its insistence on keeping the Golan Heights, have given al-Sharaa little incentive to co-operate. Nor is Lebanon in any rush to sign a deal that would be opposed by Hizbullah, which still has a significant domestic constituency.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, who wants to establish the kingdom as the leader of the Arab world, isn’t likely to risk alienating young Saudis who are horrified by the massacres in Gaza by normalising relations with Israel, particularly when – as Malley points out – ‘he can get from Israel much of what he needs in terms of intelligence and security co-operation without paying the price that normalisation would entail.’
The more likely scenario is that he will continue to focus on repairing relations with Iran. Hard power can only get you so far if you have no soft power. But Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment don’t seem concerned about these diplomatic costs – or about the collapse of the country’s moral reputation as a result of the wanton destruction of Gaza. They simply shrug off the criticisms; after all, they say, the world is against us. In fact, Israel still has the governments of the US and most of the West behind it.
Agonizing sense of desertion felt by Palestinians
The twelve-day war has only deepened the agonising sense of desertion felt by Palestinians. For a time, Europe’s position on Israel’s war in Gaza appeared to be shifting. When, in March, Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire, European officials who had previously held their tongues began to speak out – even in Germany, which tends to be allergic to any criticism of the Jewish state. Various diplomatic initiatives were planned, including a UN conference on a Palestinian state chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.
Then came Israel’s attack on Iran. ‘In the blink of an eye,’ Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian analyst based in Copenhagen, told me, ‘all of it was cancelled. My email was flooded with announcements of events that had been called off. People seemed almost ecstatic they didn’t have to talk about Gaza.’ Shehada is from a large Gazan family which, since the war, has become a much smaller family. The only official who expressed regret to him that the subject of Gaza was being shelved yet again was Norwegian.
Not until the US joined the war did Shehada’s contacts express any criticism of it. ‘If the US had attacked Iran first, we would have condemned it,’ one told him. ‘But because it’s Israel, it’s much harder.’
The destruction of Gaza grinds on – ‘war’ seems an inadequate term, if not an obscene obfuscation, of such a lopsided struggle. The majority of its inhabitants have been forced into a sliver of land in the south, amounting to about 15 per cent of the territory. Potable water is scarce, baby formula impossible to find; raw sewage floods the streets; drones circling overhead produce a relentless, unbearable din.
During the war with Iran, the IDF killed hundreds of people in Gaza waiting in line for food from the misleadingly named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is based in the US, backed (and possibly funded) by Israel and staffed by security contractors. The GHF distribution sites are located near military zones and require long, difficult journeys to reach, made still more arduous by hunger.
According to Shehada, ‘it is now etched in people’s minds that trying to get food is a death sentence.’ Massacres that would have caused a scandal a decade ago are now an almost daily occurrence. On 30 June, the IDF killed 41 people at al-Baqa Café, a popular seaside establishment in the north. It has killed more than seventy healthcare workers in the last two months, among them the surgeon Marwan al-Sultan, director of the Indonesian Hospital, which was the last functioning medical centre in northern Gaza (it was shut down in May).
According to the Gazan Health Ministry, more than 57,000 people have been killed in the war so far, roughly 17,000 of them children. The Israelis refer to the health ministry as ‘Hamas-controlled’, in an attempt to discredit it, but – as public health experts elsewhere have pointed out – its figures are likely to be a significant underestimate, since they don’t include those missing under rubble, or indirect deaths from disease, malnutrition or lack of medical care. It hasn’t escaped Palestinians’ notice that Israel’s strikes against Gaza have been far less precise than its strikes against Iran and Lebanon: a measure of the contempt in which they are held.
The French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu visited Gaza with Médecins sans Frontières during the ceasefire, and has published a powerful account of his trip.[2] ‘Even though I have been in a number of war zones in the past, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, via Syria, Iraq and Somalia,’ he writes, ‘I have never, but never, experienced anything like this.’
Already desperate and hungry, the people of Gaza have to pay astronomical prices thanks to the growth of organised crime, encouraged by the Israeli authorities, who have been providing Kalashnikovs to the clan of Yasser Abu Shabab, a resident of Rafah who was involved in smuggling networks and is said to have links with Islamic State. ‘We activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas,’ Netanyahu said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ (In fact, Abu Shabab’s thuggery appears to have fostered a revival in support for Hamas, which had, until recently, fallen into disfavour among Gazans.)
As much as forced displacement, killing, starvation and humiliation, the promotion of criminality – of a lawless ‘grey zone’ of the kind evoked by Primo Levi, in which members of a persecuted group are enlisted to police, brutalise and, at times, kill their own – has become a defining feature of Israel’s rule inside Gaza.
(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)
NOTES
[1] In its recent editorial, Oppose U.S.-Israeli War on Iran, World-Outlook explained that the pronouncements in support of the Palestinian cause by the Iranian regime and its proxies in the region are nothing but demagogic grandstanding aimed at propping up the theocracy in Tehran.
The editorial pointed out that “Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian American scholar and author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine, explained last fall in a videotaped interview, available on YouTube, [that] Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ had nothing to do with Palestinian national aspirations.
“There was an axis,” Khalidi said. “It was essentially created by Iran as a deterrent to protect the Iranian regime… That was what their alliance with Syria was for, that was what their support for Hezbollah was for, that was what their support for Hamas was for, and that’s why Iran supported Assad and the so-called Houthis in Yemen. Each of those actors had a degree of independence, they weren’t Iranian clones or controlled by Iran, but Iran supported them, massively, at a huge cost.”
[2] Un historien à Gaza (A Historian in Gaza) by Jean-Pierre Filiu (Les Arènes, 203 pp., £11, May, 979 1 0375 1378 6).
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Categories: Palestine/Israel, World Politics