US-Israeli aggression has destabilized the Middle East and turned it into a powder keg

Through their actions, the United States and Israel have transformed the Middle East into a far more dangerous place, and established themselves as the biggest destabilizing force in the region.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

These words, pronounced by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, were meant to serve as an eternal indictment of aggressive war and a bulwark against the very atrocities it inevitably unleashes. They declared that the crime of starting an unprovoked conflict carries within it every subsequent horror—civilian slaughter, shattered societies, refugee crises, economic ruin, and the slow erosion of global order.

Today, in the wake of the collapse of the two-week ceasefire with Iran announced by President Donald Trump on April 7, 2026, Nuremberg’s verdict echoes with terrifying clarity. The agreement was precarious from the moment it was signed—a cynical pause designed not to end hostilities but to buy time for the continuation of a war of aggression launched by the United States and Israel on February 28. That original assault, and every violation of international law that has followed—including the breakdown of Pakistan-mediated peace talks in Islamabad over the weekend and the subsequent US threats to blockade the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping traffic—embodies the “accumulated evil” Nuremberg warned against. The ceasefire’s swift failure was not an unfortunate accident; it was the predictable consequence of a policy rooted in lawlessness, hubris, and an unshakable commitment to Israeli impunity.

Almost immediately after Trump’s announcement, Israeli forces expanded their strikes deep into Lebanon, hitting more than 100 targets in a single ten-minute barrage across commercial and residential districts of central Beirut. Lebanese health authorities now report civilian deaths climbing rapidly, with more than 280 killed over a 48 hour period alone—the highest single-day toll in the Israel-Hezbollah war—along with hundreds wounded and the overall displacement of more than 1.7 million Lebanese from the southern part of the country. In direct response, Iran once again closed the Strait of Hormuz and imposed tolls on shipping. The fragile truce, which Iranian officials explicitly insisted include an immediate end to the war in Lebanon, lies in ruins. However, Israel refuses to recognize that Lebanon was ever part of the agreement, exposing the selective and self-serving nature of the so-called peace deal.

This breach was not an aberration but the expected outcome of a pattern of bad faith negotiating that has defined Israeli and American policy in the region for years. Israel has violated every ceasefire it has ever agreed to—both in the recent past two and a half years and in the decades prior—including the so-called ceasefire with Hamas signed in October 2025, which it shattered with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of Palestinians and racking up more than 2,000 documented violations by March 2026. The same pattern has played out repeatedly in Lebanon, where Israel stands accused of thousands of breaches of the 2024 ceasefire agreement. 

Netanyahu’s government and the Trump administration now claim the US-Iran truce “does not cover Lebanon,” but that self-serving caveat was never accepted by Tehran. The ceasefire was never meant to hold; it was merely a temporary pause in a war of aggression that Washington and Jerusalem launched—an operation that has already exacted a devastating human and strategic toll and that carries, in Nuremberg’s precise language, the accumulated evil of all the atrocities that have followed. 

The original assault on February 28 remains the root of the entire catastrophe. On that day, US and Israeli forces unleashed coordinated airstrikes across Iran in what was dubbed Operation Epic Fury. The attacks assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials, bombed nuclear and military sites, and indiscriminately killed civilians, including more than 165 girls and staff at an elementary school. There was no armed attack by Iran that could justify such action under Article 51 of the UN Charter, given that negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program were still active at the time. There was no imminent threat, no UN Security Council authorization, and no lawful claim of self-defence could be made by either the US or Israel. The strikes constituted a classic war of aggression—the “supreme international crime” condemned at Nuremberg as the crime that contains within itself the accumulated evil of all subsequent atrocities.

The legal violations are clear and damning. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter is unequivocal declaring that states must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other state. The US-Israeli operation shattered that prohibition in the most flagrant manner. Legal scholars have repeatedly affirmed that pre-emptive wars of choice, launched while diplomacy was still underway, violate the post-1945 international order that was designed precisely to prevent such acts of naked aggression. The subsequent bombing of schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure only compounded the original crime. International humanitarian law—the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I—forbids attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival and demands strict distinction between military and civilian targets. Deliberate or reckless strikes on health centres and schools are war crimes under any reasonable interpretation of the law. 

Compounding the legal atrocities is the incendiary rhetoric from the White House itself. Trump’s own social-media rants have escalated the criminality into genocidal territory. He threatened to make Iran “live in Hell,” promised attacks on power plants and bridges, and declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, such statements can be seen as telegraphing intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national or ethnic group by inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. Threatening to annihilate an ancient civilization—its people, culture, and millennia-old heritage—meets that legal threshold. Experts have already labelled these declarations as potential incitement to genocide and war crimes. 

The fact is that the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz was entirely manufactured by the US-Israeli initial act of aggression. Before February 28, commercial shipping was moving normally through the waterway that carries one-fifth of global oil and gas. Only after the bombs began falling did Iran assert control, reduce shipping volume, and begin collecting toll from ships that were allowed to pass. The closure was defensive and in reaction to US-Israeli aggression, not provocative. Iran’s re-closure of the waterway this week is the predictable consequence of Israel’s violation of the ceasefire’s Lebanon provisions and the mounting civilian slaughter there. 

Each additional provocation only deepens global sympathy for Iran and erodes Washington’s moral authority. This latest escalation follows directly on the breakdown of Pakistan-mediated peace talks in Islamabad, which collapsed without agreement over the weekend despite offering a genuine path to de-escalation. In the wake of that failure, the United States has now threatened a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping traffic—an act of economic warfare that further militarizes the chokepoint and exposes the hollowness of any American commitment to peace. 

The human and strategic costs of this military aggression are already staggering beyond imagination. Civilian deaths inside Iran exceed 2,000. Power plants, bridges, and homes remain in the cross hairs, and the global economic costs are mounting, with a potential to plunge 32 million in to poverty, and create a global recession Additionally, the latest Lebanese massacres—more than 280 dead in just two days—demonstrates that Israel has no intention of honouring even the limited truce it signed. Should the conflict reignite fully, the “accumulated evil” of the initial aggression will metastasize. Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and the broader “Axis of Resistance” will be drawn in. Refugee flows, oil-price shocks, direct retaliation against US bases, and proxy wars across multiple borders would follow. 

The Persian Gulf and the Levant could erupt into a conflagration dwarfing any recent Middle East conflict, pulling in surrounding nations—Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states—in a vortex of retaliation none of them sought. This avoidable war with Iran could easily lead to a wider regional war with some analysts predicting it could even lead to World War 3, as alliances are tested and superpowers are drawn into the fray through cascading proxy conflicts and economic desperation.

Through their actions, the United States and Israel have transformed the Middle East into a far more dangerous place, and established themselves as the biggest destabilizing force in the region. Rather than acting as forces for stability or sincerely committing to peace, their unprovoked aggression has fuelled cycles of violence, resentment, and instability that threaten to engulf the entire region and far beyond. The war with Iran was completely avoidable, yet Washington and Jerusalem opted for missiles and bombs over bargaining in a display of arrogance that has now destabilized multiple borders simultaneously. This choice has not only violated international law but has also sacrificed the safety and lives of tens of millions of innocents on the altar of America’s unequivocal support to its genocidal Israeli ally. 

The main victims of this unholy alliance have been Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, whose lives hold little value in the pursuit of Israeli security objectives and America’s goal of controlling Middle-East oil. From the relentless violations and civilian slaughter in Gaza to the carnage in Lebanon and the war against Iran, these populations have borne the brunt of the suffering, with their homes destroyed, families torn apart, and futures obliterated to appease a rogue terrorist nation that operates with impunity while the US provides diplomatic cover, arms, and political support at every turn.

The evils of war are not abstract concepts to be debated in think tanks. They are visceral, devastating realities that destroy lives, communities, and the fragile fabric of international trust. Wars bring indiscriminate death to children and civilians, widespread population displacements that creates generations of refugees, economic collapse that ripples across continents, and a legacy of hatred that poisons societies for decades. 

In the current scenario American and Israeli actions pose an existential global threat, undermining the very foundations of global peace and security that have held since 1945. By flouting the UN Charter, committing what amount to war crimes, and declaring genocidal intent (as Israel actually commits genocide), they have set a dangerous precedent that could encourage other nations to engage in similar acts of aggression to achieve their geopolitical goals, leading to a breakdown of the global order and the very real prospect of uncontrollable escalation. 

Additionally, the risk of a wider war is not hypothetical. It is imminent, with the potential to draw the world into a conflict of unprecedented scale involving energy chokepoints, proxy armies, and nuclear-armed states. There is also the reality that Trump’s words and actions have thoroughly destroyed America’s reputation on the world stage. Once seen as a leading proponent of diplomacy and the rule of law, the US under Trump is now seen as unreliable, impulsive, belligerent and dangerous. His threats and the childish rampage that characterized his approach to Iran have marked what many describe as the end of the American century, leaving even its closest allies questioning whether they can trust Washington anymore. The world will ultimately pay for Trump’s Iran mess, as global stability hangs in the balance due to his reckless policies and the resulting chaos. A nation that even its allies don’t trust any more is a nation adrift, its moral authority in tatters and its alliances fraying at the seams. 

Canada’s response has been characteristically timid, reflecting the broader erosion of trust among traditional partners. Prime Minister Mark Carney has issued vague calls for “respect for international law and human rights” but has offered no specific condemnation of either Trump’s genocidal threats or Israel’s criminal actions either in Gaza, Iran or Lebanon. Ottawa appears content with platitudes about “deep concern” and “calls for restraint,” prioritizing economic and security ties with Washington over moral leadership. History will judge whether such silence amounts to complicity in the face of clear violations. 

In the end, the shattered ceasefire changes nothing fundamental. The war of aggression began on February 28, and its criminality persists. Civilian infrastructure still lies in ruins; hospitals and schools still bear the scars of illegal attacks. Genocide still continues in Gaza, while additional genocidal rhetoric still emanates from the White House. 

The Strait of Hormuz remains a flash point of America’s own making. And the risk of a wider war—engulfing neighbouring states in uncontrollable escalation—looms larger than ever. If the international community allows this precedent to stand, the UN Charter and the UN itself become meaningless, and Nuremberg’s verdict becomes a historical footnote. The greater danger is that Israeli sabotage of the ceasefire—coupled with the rising tide of Lebanese civilian deaths—will now be used as pretext for renewed attacks while the architects of the original aggression face no reckoning.

Only by naming the February 28 strikes, and every subsequent violation—including the collapse of mediated diplomacy and the provocative U.S. blockade threats—for what they are—an illegal, unprovoked war that has already produced war crimes and follows the example of the atrocities committed in the Gaza genocide—can we hope to avert the regional eruption that still threatens us all. The fault lies squarely with the United States and Israel. Until that reality is confronted through concrete international action, including accountability mechanisms that ensure no impunity for these aggressor nations, peace in the Persian Gulf and the Levant will remain a fragile and ultimately illusory hope. The Nuremberg principles demand nothing less: aggressors must face justice, or the accumulated evil of war will continue to consume us all.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Israel, the US, and the dawn of "technologically advanced barbarism"

Humanity has reached a profound existential inflection point. The fragile 75-year interlude of relative global peace that followed the Second World War is now over.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

The following was inspired by a speech delivered by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges at Princeton on March 25, 2026.

The world stands at a metaphorical precipice, pushed by two nations that have surrendered to the ugly and dangerous impulses of fascism. Because of Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu and the United States under Donald Trump—two narcissistic psychopaths—the world is tumbling toward an time of war, global instability, and economic chaos that we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

As in the past, the rich and powerful will navigate the descent with their yachts, private planes and fortified compounds, and profit from the oncoming misery, insulated by influence and wealth. However, average people, as they always do when the powerful wage war for power, control, and resources, will bear the brunt of the misery with ruined lives, shattered economies, and generational trauma. This is not hyperbole. It is the endpoint of the collapse of the post-World War Two international rules-based order, an order now openly defied by one of the architects of that order (the US), and a nation (Israel) which benefitted from that order since its creation as a settler-colonial state.

The immediate evidence supporting this view has unfolded in the Middle East beginning in October 2023. For more than 900 days Israel has unleashed unrelenting violence in Gaza—labelled a genocide by the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and prominent Israeli Holocaust scholars Raz Segal, Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg. The apartheid nation has reduced swaths of the territory to rubble in what has been called by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges as the opening act of a new global order defined by “technologically advanced barbarism.”

Saturation bombing, forced displacement, and the deliberate targetting of civilian infrastructure have created a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions across the Middle East. In Gaza, over two million Palestinians have been rendered refugees in their own land. And now Israel’s aggression has expanded, with southern Lebanon facing obliteration, as the tactics of the Gaza plan are used as a “blueprint for destruction” perversely framed as a “path to peace” by Israel. More than one million Lebanese—one-fifth of the population—have been ethnically cleansed in mere weeks. Simultaneously, the US-backed war on Iran, launched February 28, 2026, has displaced three million Iranians. In all three conflicts more than six million have been made homeless across the region, a demographic change that clears a path for the idea of a “Greater Israel” stretching “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” This is no isolated geopolitical spasm. It is a deliberate replay of the chaos inflicted on Iraq, Syria, and Libya by the US and its key Middle East ally.

In Iraq, 23 years after the 2003 US invasion, the country lurches under economic headwinds, with the government’s almost total dependence on oil revenues to fund government operations, forcing austerity measures that threaten public salaries and pensions, while unemployment and corruption fuel street protests. Stability is relative, and prosperity remains elusive. The Iraqi economy, more than 90% percent dependent on oil, offers no buffer against regional shocks, like the war against Iran.

Syria, a little over a year after Bashar al-Assad’s fall in late 2024, has achieved fragile transitional gains under Ahmed al-Sharaa—sanctions relief, some territorial integration with territory controlled by Kurdish forces, and an end to the Assad torture state. But it remains economically devastated by 14 years of war, with reconstruction stalled, and new threats from the expanding Israel-US conflict looming over its borders, risking renewed fragmentation.

Then there is Libya, a nation made into a failed state since the 2011 NATO intervention, which endures in a delicately managed stalemate between the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity and the eastern Libyan Arab Armed Forces. Militias control its resources and territory, while oil-funded patronage creates division rather than resolution. Elections remain indefinitely postponed as repression rises, and the country teeters on the brink of renewed collapse, exporting instability across its borders.

In each case there is a pattern—Western-orchestrated regime change or destabilization that results in failed or fractured states, where ordinary citizens inherit poverty, displacement, death and endless insecurity while external powers secure oil, influence, or outright control, and in the process deny it to rivals like Russia or China. The architects of this disorder—Israel and the United States—have taken the strategy used on these three nations and are using it to accelerate the collapse of the rules-based international order which has maintained a fragile global peace for almost eight decades.

In all of this bodies like the United Nations and International Court of Justice, once guardrails against Darwinian power politics, have been relegated to the sidelines. Their resolutions and rulings are contemptuously ignored by these two rogue nations. Fundamental human rights, the evolution towards more open borders between trade partners, and international law lie shattered.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney captured the world’s attention in his January 20, 2026, address at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he spoke of a “rupture, not a transition.” He declared that the old order was dead and was not coming back. He said publicly what had been discussed privately in the back rooms of governments in Ottawa, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and beyond since the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office—great powers now wield economic integration as coercion, tariffs as leverage, and supply chains as weaknesses. “The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must,” he warned, urging middle powers to unite in realism rather than nostalgia.

The post-1945 era of relative world peace—over 75 years without global war, however imperfect—has ended. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s illusory “peace in our time”—a statement made after signing the Munich Agreement with Adolph Hitler on September 30, 1938 allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland—finds its modern echo in the hollow invocations of the “rules-based order” by leaders who exempt themselves and their nations whenever politically expedient.

This psychopathic display of power knows no limits for strong military powers like the US and Israel, making the weak their prey whenever they desire. Oppose them, refuse to bow to their capricious demands, and you face economic blackmail through strangled trade, sanctions, or face the prospect of being targeted with missiles and bombs. Netanyahu has lobbied Washington for four decades to launch a war against Iran but previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, wisely refused, recognizing that there was no existential threat and foreseeing disaster if they took a step in that direction. Trump, prodded by fervent Zionists Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, foolishly took the bait and went where past presidents were too intelligent to tread. Joseph Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned and in his resignation letter stated plainly that Iran posed “no imminent threat,” and that the war began “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Shifting rationales for the war have included: halting Iran’s nuclear program—which Trump said had been “obliterated“ in the US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025—the threat of Iranian missiles, regime change, and threats of state terrorism. They all served as deception for the Greater Israel plan, a vision which included shattering Iran into ethnic and religious enclaves like what happened in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Another goal was to secure the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves and 12% of the global crude oil supply, and controlling what would be left of Iran through proxies. The same thing happened to Iraq, Syria, Libya, and is now happening in Lebanon.

Israel justifies its military actions by invoking the Holocaust and taking advantage of Western guilt over the international community’s failure to halt Nazi atrocities. Yet this invocation reveals a profound hypocrisy when nearly all major Holocaust institutions and scholars steadfastly refuse to condemn the ongoing events in Gaza or draw any historical parallels, effectively hijacking the memory of the Holocaust. They have transformed this singular event into a shield that sanctifies eternal Jewish victimhood while absolving Israel of the crimes of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.

Effectively the slogan “Never Again” has been narrowed to mean “Never Again only for Jews,” with any attempt by Holocaust-related institutions or individual scholars to express even modest sympathy for Palestinian suffering triggering a swift, orchestrated backlash from Zionist organizations and their online trolls. They often include public denunciations, threats of funding cuts, or character assassination, creating a glaring “Palestinian exception” to universal lessons about preventing mass atrocity crimes.

Concrete examples illustrate this selective enforcement. In September 2025, the Holocaust Museum LA posted on Instagram a message stating “‘Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews,” accompanied by imagery suggesting shared humanity. Many interpreted it as a subtle acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering amid the Gaza genocide. After a barrage of criticism and accusations of politicizing the Holocaust, the museum quickly deleted the post and issued an apology, promising more careful vetting of future content to “avoid misinterpretation.”

In a related incident around April 2025, staff at Germany’s Buchenwald Memorial pressured a visitor to remove her Palestinian keffiyeh (black-and-white scarf), claiming it violated house rules during a commemoration event. A German court later upheld the memorial’s right to refuse entry in such cases when the scarf was worn as a political statement. Critics, including the European Legal Support Center, argued that this reflected broader censorship where expressions of solidarity with Palestinians or references to genocide in the current context are increasingly suppressed at European Holocaust memorial sites, often with implicit or explicit support from German authorities.

Scholars who dare cross the line also face intense personal and professional repercussions. Israeli Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg drew fierce criticism for publicly stating “Yes, this is genocide” regarding Gaza. He highlighted an unprecedented level of dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society that he had never witnessed before in his lifetime. Similarly, American-Israeli scholar Raz Segal faced significant backlash—including the withdrawal of a job offer to lead a Holocaust and genocide studies centre—for his October 2023 article in Jewish Currents titled “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” in which he analyzed Israel’s actions in Gaza through the lens of the UN Genocide Convention.

German Holocaust historian Michael Wildt, a leading expert on the Nazi regime, was slandered by the tabloid BILD as a “Jew-hater” after voicing concerns about the situation in Palestine. The article received endorsement from Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, amplifying the attack.

These cases expose the contradiction at the heart of contemporary Holocaust remembrance. The atrocity, which resulted in the death of over 17 million people, six million Jews among them, is upheld as a singular, incomparable event whose lessons must never be diluted. Yet any analogy or universal application of “Never Again” to Palestinian suffering is denounced as trivialization, antisemitism, or betrayal. This selective memory does more than protect a narrative, it undermines the very moral foundation of Holocaust education. If the purpose is truly to guard against future genocides by confronting the dark potentials of dehumanization, ethnic supremacy, and unchecked power, then exempting one group from scrutiny while weaponizing historical trauma against another reveals a profound ethical failure.

The result is a distorted framework in which Jewish suffering retains unique sanctity, while Palestinian deaths are framed as unfortunate necessities of self-defence or security. This hypocrisy erodes the universalist promise of “Never Again,” and risks turning Holocaust institutions into instruments that perpetuate, rather than prevent, cycles of violence and exclusion. True remembrance would demand consistency by applying the same rigorous standards of scrutiny, empathy, and prevention to all instances of mass suffering, without exception. Until that consistency is restored, invocations of the Holocaust in defence of current policies will continue to ring hollow for much of the global audience, particularly in the Global South, which recognizes patterns of selective outrage all too well.

History has shown that genocide is not an anomaly in human affairs. Rather, it is deeply encoded in the patterns of behaviour exhibited by European colonial powers and, more broadly, by “white” and nominally Christian nations throughout modern history.

The British, for instance, nearly annihilated Tasmania’s Aboriginal population through systematic dispossession, violence, and displacement. In the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II’s regime (1885–1908) unleashed mass murder and horrific atrocities against Black Africans, with a death toll estimates as high as ten million, with millions more suffering mutilation, including limb amputations, as punishment for failing to meet rubber quotas.

Germany carried out the slaughter of the Herero and Nama peoples in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) between 1904 and 1908. This campaign featured explicit extermination orders and the establishment of concentration camps, resulting in the deaths of up to 80,000 Herero (more than 80 percent of their population), and 10,000 Nama (roughly half of theirs).

During World War Two, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill played a central role in the 1943 Bengal famine. He refused to divert food aid to millions of starving Indians, reportedly dismissing them as “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine claimed more than three million lives, and is classified as genocide by many scholars.

The United States, for its part, dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. These attacks killed over 140,000 civilians in Hiroshima and approximately 74,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, with total deaths topping 240,000 when including later effects from injuries and radiation. The bombings were justified as necessary to end the war quickly, despite objections from numerous American political, military, and scientific figures who argued that the use of atomic weapons was unnecessary with Japan already on the verge of defeat.

These grim episodes form a consistent and damning historical thread. Whenever European and Western powers have exercised unchecked dominance, the dehumanization of non-European peoples has repeatedly paved the way for mass killing on an industrial scale. Such atrocities are almost always followed by elaborate rationalizations that minimize, justify, or try to erase the crimes from collective memory. Far from isolated aberrations, these events reveal a recurring pattern—one that thoroughly undermines any claim of unique moral exceptionalism by the modern West.

The violence that has engulfed Gaza since October 2023—indiscriminate bombing, deliberate starvation tactics, targeting of civilians, the routine dehumanization of Palestinians as “human animals,” and genocide—represents only the opening chapter of what is coming down the road, according to Hedges. The aggression now spreading to Lebanon and Iran simply extends the same blueprint tested and refined in Gaza. The age of “technologically advanced barbarism,” is here. It is an era in which psychopathic elites—the billionaire “Epstein class” and their political enablers in Washington, Tel Aviv and beyond—operate with superficial charm, grandiosity, habitual deceit, lack of a moral compass, and an absence of remorse.

Humanity has reached a profound, existential inflection point. The fragile 75-year interlude of relative global peace that followed the Second World War is now over. Today, Israel and the United States stand as the greatest threats to world stability. They are exporting chaos across the Middle East without a thought about its impact on the innocent or the economic impacts of their actions around the world. Meanwhile, ordinary people—workers, families, and the displaced—will continue to pay the heaviest price in blood, poverty, and shattered futures.

The choice before the vast majority of humanity is stark and urgent. We can either actively obstruct this descent into a law-of-the-jungle world order, or we can surrender to it. Whatever happens, history will render a harsh and unforgiving verdict on Israel and the US, nations which have deliberately set us on this dangerous path.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Gaza Genocide and the US-Israeli War on Iran signal the collapse of the “international rules-based order”

We are witnessing a repeat of the 1930s, where the League of Nations collapsed because it could not—or would not—restrain the aggression of its powerful members.

 

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

For nearly eight decades, the global community has been lectured on the sanctity of the “international rules-based order.” We were told that the post-World War Two framework—built upon the wreckage of the Holocaust and codified through the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Conventions—was a shield for the vulnerable and a leash for the powerful. This order was founded on the promise of “Never Again,” a solemn vow that the industrial-scale extermination of a people would never be permitted to recur.

 

However, as we enter the 31st month of Israel’s genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—with a so-called ceasefire proving illusory and the slaughter continuing unabated—that shield has been revealed as a sieve, and the vow as a hollow ethno-specific mantra. Compounding this betrayal is the US-Israeli illegal war of aggression launched against Iran on February 28, 2026. In both instances, the two nations have flagrantly violated the aforementioned treaties and conventions, and the fundamental norms of international law. Together, these atrocities signal the effective collapse of the international rules-based order and the myth of universal human rights.

The discrepancy between the “official” reality and the truth on the ground in Gaza is the first indication of this collapse. As of January 2026, mainstream Western outlets cautiously cite a Palestinian death toll topping 75,000. Yet rigorous academic and epidemiological analyses reveal a far more harrowing reality. Peer-reviewed studies and models, including those by Australian scholars Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, Israeli academic Yaakov Garb’s analysis published by Harvard, and The Lancet’s projections, demonstrate that when accounting for bodies buried under millions of tons of rubble, indirect deaths from the total collapse of healthcare, starvation, and untreated disease, the true toll exceeds 680,000 lives—primarily women and children—as of April 2025, with the figure climbing further into 2026 as the Israeli assault continues.

If we accept the figures from these studies—derived from the same scientific methodologies used in other global conflicts—the scale of the slaughter rivals or exceeds the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Yet unlike Rwanda, which the West later lamented as a failure of intervention, the Gaza genocide is a willful failure to intervene in the most transparent genocide in human history. The “rules-based order” is not failing because it’s weak. It is failing because its architects are the primary financiers of the carnage being inflicted on the Middle-East.

The United States has funnelled over $21 billion in military aid to Israel since October 2023, with billions more arriving from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. These nations, which frequently invoke international law to sanction adversaries, have simultaneously provided the diplomatic cover and the weapons required to systematically level 80% of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. By weaponizing international law against the powerless while suspending it for their allies, the Western alliance has exposed the “order” as a criminal cabal that prioritizes geopolitical hegemony over human life.

This betrayal is rooted in a profound, institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia that permeates Western institutions and discourse. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians—who have endured more than a century of occupation, dispossession, and Zionist settler-colonialism—has been crucial in sustaining Western silence and complicity amid the ongoing horrors in Gaza.

A stark illustration of this double standard emerged in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023. The killing of 1,195 people during the Hamas-led attacks triggered swift, intense moral outrage across the Western world, with leaders and media outlets universally condemning the violence as an atrocity. Yet as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza climbed to ten, fifty, and eventually hundreds of times that number—reaching catastrophic scales through relentless bombardment—the same Western leaders responded with only tepid, “measured” appeals for restraint, even as they continued supplying Israel with massive quantities of bombs, missiles and other munitions.

Investigations, including reports from Israeli sources like Ha’aretz and international bodies such as the UN Commission of Inquiry, have since revealed that the October 7 death toll included casualties from Israeli forces’ application of the controversial Hannibal Directive in multiple locations. This procedure, aimed at preventing captures of Israeli Jews at all costs (even if it risked or caused the deaths of Israelis), was invoked during the chaos, leading to incidents that killed hundreds of civilians and potentially endangered others. Despite these complexities and the acknowledgement in some accounts that not all deaths were solely attributable to Hamas, the Western reaction remained one-sided--unqualified horror at Palestinian-perpetrated violence contrasted sharply with muted or enabling responses to Israel’s far deadlier genocidal campaign.

This selective outrage underscores how deeply entrenched biases allow the West to rationalize or overlook massive Palestinian suffering while amplifying lesser-scale violence against Israelis, perpetuating a hierarchy of human worth that has enabled the ongoing catastrophe.

The moral abyss is further deepened by the “visibility” of this genocide. Unlike the Holocaust, which the Nazi regime attempted to hide in isolated camps like Auschwitz, the annihilation of Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide in human history. We see the emaciated frames of starving children and the obliteration of entire families in high definition on our smartphones. We see Israeli soldiers filming their own war crimes for social media, mocking the ruins of schools and mosques. The world watches in real-time as a population of approximately 2 million is squeezed into “safe zones” that are then systematically bombarded.

The fact that this transparency has prompted no meaningful intervention from the powers that defeated the Nazis is a devastating indictment of those nations and our era. It suggests that the “international community” is not a collective of nations bound by law, but a hierarchy of human value where Palestinian blood is deemed “lesser” than that of those within the Western sphere of influence.

The invocation of “Never Again” has been particularly perverted. Originally intended as a universal promise to protect all of humanity from the “crime of crimes,” it has been narrowed into a tool of Jewish exceptionalism. Every year, Western leaders hypocritically stand at Holocaust memorials and pledge to uphold justice, even as they provide the white phosphorus and intelligence used to displace 99% of Gaza’s population. This victim-perpetrator inversion, where the state committing genocide is shielded from accountability by the memory of a previous genocide, is a moral perversity that the international legal system cannot survive.

We are witnessing a repeat of the 1930s, where the League of Nations collapsed because it could not—or would not—restrain the aggression of its powerful members. Today, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice are being rendered obsolete not by their own design, but by the brazen defiance of the United States and its allies. When the ICC seeks warrants for war crimes, it is threatened with sanctions by Washington. When the UN General Assembly votes for a ceasefire, it is ignored.

The betrayal extends directly to the US-Israeli war against Iran. On February 28, under President Donald Trump and in coordination with Israel, the United States launched unprovoked strikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and leadership—including the assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his family. A girls’ elementary school in Minab was deliberately hit, killing at least 165 children, alongside strikes on hospitals and civilian areas with no military value. These actions constitute a blatant and criminal war of aggression with no UN Security Council authorization and no valid claim of imminent self-defence under the UN Charter. Additionally, diplomatic talks with Iran were making significant progress hours before the strikes, and leaks from within the US intelligence establishment confirmed no imminent Iranian threat or nuclear warhead capability.

Under the Geneva Conventions, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian objects qualifies as war crimes. Israeli and American hypocrisy is blatant and staggering in this regard when compared to the war in Ukraine. The same nations that imposed sanctions on Russia for its 2022 invasion of that nation and condemned it for bombing schools and hospitals, offered complicity, muted criticism, or outright endorsement for identical violations against Iran. This selective enforcement—condemning aggression when committed by adversaries but exempting allies—lays bare the double standards that have defined the international order from its inception in the late 1940s.

Both the Gaza genocide and the aggression against Iran directly contravene the foundational principles established by the Judgment at Nuremberg (1945-1946), the bedrock of all international law created after World War Two. The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that “to initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” It established individual accountability for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—principles that directly birthed the UN Charter (prohibiting aggression), the 1948 Genocide Convention (acts with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as Israel’s systematic killings, starvation policies, and destruction of life conditions in Gaza fulfill), the Geneva Conventions (civilian protections violated in both Gaza’s bombardment and Iran’s school and hospital strikes), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By committing these crimes with impunity, the US and Israel have not merely violated these instruments, they have demolished the post-war legal order built explicitly on Nuremberg’s vow to prevent such atrocities from recurring.

In his special address at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invoked Thucydides’ dictum that “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” He declared that the rules-based international order was “fading,” a “fiction,” an “illusion,” and no longer functioning “as advertised.” He acknowledged that nations like Canada had prospered under it for decades, but “we knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false—that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.”

Carney urged middle powers to accept the reality—a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic and military might as a weapon of coercion. This speech inadvertently confirms the core truth—that the order Carney described was never universal or impartial. It primarily benefitted the West and aligned powers—delivering prosperity and security to Canada, the US, and Europe—while adversaries and the Global South were its perpetual victims, subjected to occupation, sanctions, regime-change wars, economic colonialism, and now live-streamed genocide and unprovoked aggression.

Carney’s own actions and those of his government powerfully illustrate the selective nature of the rules-based order he described in Davos—one that privileges Western powers and their allies while leaving others to bear the consequences of the actions of the powerful. In the immediate aftermath of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, Carney quickly voiced support for the actions, framing them as necessary to prevent Iran from completing construction of nuclear weapons and to curb threats to regional stability, even as the UN and international law experts condemned the illegality of the actions. He has similarly refused to issue any outright condemnation of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been condemned as such by genocide and Holocaust experts, and respected human rights organizations.

This pattern of selective outrage extended further when Canada joined European allies in condemning Iran’s actions in blocking or threatening the Strait of Hormuz—actions that disrupted global oil shipments—while remaining conspicuously silent on the longstanding and intensified US economic measures against Cuba, including an effective oil blockade that has exacerbated humanitarian hardships on the island without comparable international push back. Such inconsistencies reveal the hypocrisy Carney himself stated in his Davos remarks.

Palestinians and Iranians, positioned as non-Western and comparatively “weak” actors in this hierarchy, were always intended to endure the system’s double standards. Exemptions granted to the powerful—through sustained US arms shipments to Israel, repeated vetoes of accountability at the UN, selective enforcement of international norms, and diplomatic or rhetorical endorsement of aggressive actions like the Iran strikes—have ensured that the order was intended to serve Western hegemony rather than universal principles of humanity or equity. The unfolding realities in Gaza and Iran stand as irrefutable evidence. What was once presented as a principled global framework was, in practice, a mechanism of power that the dominant nations of the world discard or bend whenever it suits their interests.

The evidence that the rules-based order is now non-existent is overwhelming. After 30 months of ongoing genocide in Gaza, the most powerful nations of the world (primarily the US and NATO nations) have done nothing to stop Israel’s slaughter, which continues despite a so-called ceasefire that came into effect in October 2025. Billions in military aid flowed uninterrupted, International Court of Justice orders were defied, and UN resolutions vetoed. The same superpower that frequently lectured the world on abiding by international law enabled the carnage in Gaza, and then pivoted to fresh aggression against Iran without justification and without consequence.

The Gaza genocide and the US-Israeli war against Iran have shattered the illusion of a global conscience and of the international “rules based order.” They have shown that “Western humanity” is a bedtime fable, a “sick joke” told to citizens who want to believe their governments are the “good guys.” In reality, the “rules” only apply when they serve the interests of the powerful. For the Palestinian and Iranian people, the international order has not been a protector, but a jailer, an executioner, and a propagator of narratives of hate.

As the ruins of Gaza continue to smoulder and the skies over Iran fill with the smoke of an illegal war of aggression, these scenes stand as stark monuments to the end of the post-World War II era. We can no longer speak of “universal human rights” with any credibility while the world’s most powerful nations actively underwrite the systematic erasure of entire peoples. The so-called international rules-based order did not fade away gradually or die of natural causes—it was deliberately murdered in the streets of Gaza and the cities of Iran, with the full knowledge, material support, and diplomatic cover provided by the very nations that once positioned themselves as its chief guardians and moral exemplars.

Any hope for a genuine future of global justice cannot be rebuilt on the shattered, hypocritical foundations of this broken system. The mass graves in Gaza and the fresh rubble across Iran hold far more than the hundreds of thousands of victims claimed by US- and Israeli-led crimes; they also entomb the long-standing pretenses of Western moral authority. The comforting fairy tale—that a system of international laws applies equally to all nations—has been exposed as a dangerous illusion. We now confront a harsh moral abyss, thrust upon the world by the very powers that long preached restraint and accountability. In this new reality, the United States and Israel operate like unchecked gunslingers in a lawless frontier, casting themselves as the corrupt sheriffs determined to “clean up” the Middle East on their own terms, regardless of the human cost or the wreckage left behind.

© The View From Here. © Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

It’s time for regime change in the United States and Israel to restore international law

A global regime-change campaign against lesser violators rings hollow without confronting the architects of global impunity—the United States and Israel.

By Fareed Khan 

A version of this can be found on Substack.

In the pantheon of post-World War Two violators of international norms, no two states rival the United States and Israel in the scale, frequency, or the sheer impunity of their actions. As Noam Chomsky has powerfully documented in works such as Hegemony or Survival and his essay The Dangerous Rogue States Operating in the Mideast, these nations function as twin rogue powers, freely resorting to aggression, terror, and systematic violations of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention.

While other states, like Russia and China, have undoubtedly committed grave offenc

es, some on multiple occasions, none approach the breadth of America's and Israel's combined record—illegal wars, prolonged occupations, orchestrated coups, false-flag operations, and destabilizing interventions spanning continents. If a genuine global campaign is ever needed to enforce accountability through regime change, it must begin with Washington and Tel Aviv.

This is not hyperbole but the logical extension of analyses by Chomsky, William Blum in Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two, Ilan Pappé in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Norman Finkelstein in Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. Their scholarship lays bare a pattern that demands action to address the problem at the source.

Since 1948, when it was created on stolen Palestinian land, Israel’s violations form a continuous arc of territorial conquest and collective punishment. It has occupied and bombed every nation on its borders—Egypt in 1956 and 1967, Jordan in 1967, Syria repeatedly (seizing the Golan Heights in 1967 and annexing it illegally in 1981, in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 497), and Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 2006, and beyond. Palestinian lands have remained under constant and brutal occupation for almost six decades, violating the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibitions on settlement and collective punishment, as well as UN resolutions 242 and 338 demanding withdrawal. Pappé meticulously chronicles this as incremental ethnic cleansing, while Finkelstein demonstrates how Gaza’s siege and repeated assaults meet the Genocide Convention’s criteria of intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.

The International Court of Justice’s ongoing proceedings and UN experts’ findings underscore these breaches. Israel’s actions have displaced millions, killed more than 680,000 in Gaza alone according to one study, and flouted the Universal Declaration’s guarantees of self-determination and freedom from arbitrary deprivation of life. No other state since 1945 has maintained such prolonged, illegal occupations while rejecting UN authority with US protection and complicity.

The US ledger is even longer and more global. Blum’s Killing Hope catalogues over fifty CIA-orchestrated coups, invasions, and destabilizations—the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government (Operation Ajax); installing the Shah as his replacement and sowing seeds for decades of resentment; the 1954 coup in Guatemala that unleashed genocidal civil war; the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende, ushering in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet; interventions in Africa in Congo, Ghana, Angola and Mozambique; Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia); and Latin America (Nicaragua’s Contras, Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989). These are just a few of the operations that routinely violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter banning threats or use of force against territorial integrity or political independence.

The 2003 Iraq War stands as a textbook case of an illegal and unjust war. Launched on fabricated claims about weapons of mass destruction—blatant lies exposed by the Downing Street Memo—without Security Council authorization, it resulted in more than a million Iraqis killed, destabilized the region, and birthing extremist groups like ISIS. Chomsky labels this the hallmark of a “failed state” that exempts itself from the rules it imposes on others.

Both nations have weaponized false flags and covert coups to rationalize their criminal actions. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, later admitted as fabricated, propelled US escalation in the Vietnam War, costing millions of innocent lives. Proposed but unexecuted schemes like Operation Northwoods (1962) relating to Cuba, reveal a pattern of manufacturing pretexts to achieve geopolitical objectives. Israel’s history includes alleged provocations in border conflicts, while joint US-Israeli intelligence has fuelled coups from Tehran to Santiago.

These tactics erode sovereignty, as Blum details—sovereign governments toppled not for security or in response to aggression but for resource control and ideological conformity. The destabilizing fallout has been catastrophic, resulting in civil wars, refugee crises impacting millions, and economic collapse. The war in Iraq fragmented the Middle East, Latin American coups entrenched inequality, African interventions prolonged proxy conflicts. Such chaos, orchestrated by these two rogue nations, repeatedly violated the UN Charter’s core purpose—maintaining international peace and security.

Today, this pattern continues in the unprovoked US-Israeli assault on Iran, launched February 28, 2026. What began as airstrikes under “Operation Epic Fury” and “Roaring Lion” has resulted in the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, targeted nuclear research and missile sites, civilian infrastructure, all in pursuit of regime change. Experts at the UN have condemned it as “flagrant violation of international law” and an “act of aggression,” executed while the US was in diplomatic negotiations with Iran, where progress was being made. Legal scholars and analysts describe their actions as illegal under the UN Charter, lacking Security Council approval or a credible self-defence claim. Iranian retaliation followed, yet the initiators’ stated goal—overthrowing a sovereign government—mirrors the very interventions Blum and Chomsky have chronicled for decades.

This war, with civilian deaths mounting, including strikes on schools and hospitals, exemplifies the hypocrisy often displayed by both the US and Israel—powers that lecture on nuclear non-proliferation while violating it themselves through nuclear ambiguity (Israel) and pre-emptive force (both).

Critics rightly note that other states also have blood on their hands, but none approach the quantitative and qualitative dominance and aggression of the US-Israeli axis.  The US maintains over 800 overseas bases in 70 countries, projects power globally, and has vetoed UN resolutions dozens of times to shield Israel from being held accountable for its criminal actions.

Israel, as Chomsky observes, acts with impunity and with US support, rejecting International Atomic Energy Association inspections while demanding them of Iran. Their combined interventions have reshaped the destiny of nations around the globe, through coups (Iran, Guatemala, Chile), illegal wars (Iraq, Vietnam), and occupations (Golan, West Bank, Gaza blockade). The Genocide Convention, invoked against others, applies here also. Finkelstein’s inquest into Gaza and Pappé’s settler-colonial framework reveal systematic intent. The Universal Declaration’s rights to life, self-determination, freedom from torture are trampled daily at the hands of the leaders of these two nations. No rival tally is comparable.  China’s or Russia’s actions, while serious and at times egregious (Russia's war with Georgia and China's crackdown on democracy protests over the decades), lack this post-1945 breadth of extraterritorial subversion.

A global regime-change campaign against lesser violators rings hollow without confronting the two top architects of global impunity. Chomsky urges recognizing US exceptionalism as the obstacle to peace, while Blum demands dismantling the intervention machine. Pappé and Finkelstein join them with calls to end Israeli apartheid and occupation, with external force if needed. Extending their logic, the world must mobilize and apply universal sanctions, arms embargoes, ICC prosecutions for American and Israeli leaders, support domestic movements to rebuild democratic institutions, and amplify BDS-style isolation for the two nations. Regime change here will mean empowering peoples to reclaim sovereignty—through non-violent pressure where possible, and other means where necessary. Only then can the UN Charter regain meaning, the Genocide Convention deter future atrocities, and human rights become universal rather than selective. The alternative is a world trapped in perpetual hypocrisy—one where the most powerful nations proclaim universal rules while brazenly violating them, sowing the seeds of endless conflict and instability.  

 

Through decades of meticulous scholarship and irrefutable evidence, thinkers such as Chomsky, Blum, Pappé, and Finkelstein have demonstrated beyond doubt that no other states since 1945 have matched the United States and Israel in the sheer scale, duration, and audacity of their violations of international law, human rights, and the foundations of global order, all but making the case for regime change in these two nations.

 

True justice demands that we finally turn the lens inward. Rather than selectively punishing lesser violators while shielding the architects of impunity The international community must summon the resolve to launch a sustained, principled global campaign aimed at regime change in Washington and Tel Aviv, the very epicentre of systemic global lawlessness. Nothing less will restore credibility to the United Nations Charter, halt the cycle of aggression, and secure the survival of a rules-based international order worthy of the name.

© The View From Here. © Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.