IRAN: Everything You Need To Know But Were Too Afraid Of The Israel Lobby To Ask

Israel’s ‘strategic perspective’ requires everywhere and always an enemy. This designated enemy will be tarnished by a blood libel, an abstraction: he, she or they will be said to be antisemitic, baying for Jewish blood. This blood libel ignores the truth, because when facts and reality are scrutinized, it’s Arabs that are being exterminated daily en masse, with western grants of government privilege, not Israelis. You have to hand it to Israel. It has positioned itself as the world’s cross, a curse that every individual not Jewish-Israeli is born into and must carry like an albatross. ~ilana

The costs of Israel’s warmongering have pyramided. Is it not time to look this particular gift horse in the mouth? ~ilana

IT’S ABOUT PALESTINE. Of all the known facts about Israel’s war of aggression against Iran, now nominally suspended by Trump, this is the most important. Incisively put by Craig Mokhiber, “Iran is the last, independent, frontline state that refuses to submit, to normalize the crimes against the Palestinian people.” Quite simply, “Iran was being punished for its support for the Palestinians.” If you are free of the prefrontal lobotomy that comes with subscriptions to the Murdoch or Adelson Media; you will grasp this.

Israel’s unprovoked, illegal war against Iran was not in anticipatory self-defense by any stretch, explains Mokhiber—prominent and principled scholar on the international law (always bringing it back to its natural-law elements). It was old-fashioned aggression, Normalized by Israel and its sponsors, wars of aggression are considered the “supreme crime” in international law (the natural law and libertarian law are agreed).

Israel’s trademark terrorism was aimed at sundering Iranian sovereignty. Before the Iranian Revolution, locus of control over Iranian affairs resided in Washington, D.C., a synonym, we can now all agree, for Tel Aviv. The 1979 Revolution took decision-making away from Tel-Aviv and returned it to Teheran. What the 1979 Iranian Revolution militated against; Israel seeks to reinstate.

For its part, the United States of America, Israel’s lickspittle co-belligerent, is now viewed, certainly in West Asia, as a mulish military power that doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola.

Trump, you’ll recall, stumped our county—the president has forgotten at whose pleasure he serves—promising peace. He delivered war. Commentators Chas Freeman and Scott Ritter, both in-the-know, had divulged early on that the president had been engaged in “diplomacy-as-deception” with Iran. Having connived with Israel, Trump knew in advance of Israel’s impending “surprise” attack. He had engaged in fake negotiations with the Islamic Republic. With the help of the CIA, Mossad and MI5—the Israeli terrorists then smuggled the needed materiel into Iran. A con-man, concluded Dr. Foad Izadi, an Iranian academic.

Not that Israel needs a reason to war—but more so than a war of aggression for regime change, Israel’s June 13 sneak attack on Iran was meant to eliminate Iran as we know it.

Professor John Mearsheimer, one of America’s most distinguished scholars of international relations, offers a description of Israeli aims in terms that contradict the defunct, deceptively Panglossian ideas of a “two-state solution” and a “peace process.” Over and above regime change, Israel, in Mearsheimer’s always-careful estimation, has a “deep-seated interest” in breaking apart—in fracturing—the surrounding nations.

Iran’s ‘Rogue’ Status 

Israel’s gestalt is annihilatory. As shown during two years of genocide and ongoing destruction in neighboring countries, Israel is an “annihilatory state.” The Hebrew verb lechasel (לחסל), to eliminate, is used quite promiscuously by the pedestrian minds on the piss-poor TV panels, on the street and in the Knesset.

There exists in Israel a condition that is as much a part of the nation’s collective “soul,” as it is the “souls” of individual Israelis. The mindset is Jewish supremacy; the shared endeavor emanating from it is regional, military supremacy.

Commensurate with this pathology; Israel does not seek to live alongside its Arab and Persian neighbors as an equal. Rather, it aims to maintain hegemony across the Middle East. Wherever and whenever the pro-liberation, pro-Palestinian axis of resistance surfaces, Israel will move—not to negotiate with or resolve “conflicts” with it, but to eliminate it and restore Israeli hegemony. 

To wit, notice how Israel, methodically and spitefully, picks off peace negotiators. The “genocidal entity” made an attempt on Ali Shamkhani’s life. He was lead negotiator on nuclear talks with the United States, before June 13. The illegal and immoral assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas chief diplomat, falls into this category of elimination (chisul/חסול). There were others. Against the laws of war, Iranian scientists and non-combatant elite military personnel were targeted in their family homes—and will continue to be eliminated at a pace, in line with Israel’s predatory, cannibalizing nature.

This annihilatory impetus, the core of Israel, accounts for why, as has been observed, documented and anatomized over 20 months, Israel revels in wiping out Arab (and Persian) human capital—intellectuals, men and women of the arts, in the applied and theoretical sciences, reporters, activists, healers and humanitarians. If you wanted to enjoy your neighborhood; you would not perennially reduce it to a primordial, pre-civilization stage, as in Gaza, by wiping out knowledge, experience, strength; smarts, beauty and goodness.

This eliminatory core of Israeli society, as I emphasized in March of 2024, accounts for why Israel targets “the very fabric of a society—immeasurable human capital—including otherwise- indissoluble, extended family networks, the kind of generational bonds we in the West can only dream of, whittled down and depleted in numbers and in their native energy.”

At bottom, these Israeli atavists—during the offensive in Iran, they murdered nearly 900 Palestinians in Gaza—don’t want educated, erudite neighbors, equals with whom to make magic in the region; they want subjects they can sanction and slaughter into submission. All the better to bring them to their knees, where they now languish, Iran, Yemen and Palestine excepted.

As Israel sees it, the Arab Peninsula and the Levant must bow not toward Mecca and Medinah but to the Mad Dog Medinah (מְדִינָה is country in Hebrew). Regional submission is achieved by reducing the region to rubble, on any pretense and at every turn, and making it utterly dependent financially on America, which itself is, as we now know, in thrall to Israel. With a coopted Arab world, the US can assume the status of dictator as well as benefactor. 

On the facts, then, which is the rogue state, Israel or Iran?

Israel launches wars of aggression on its neighbors. Iran does not. Israel, not Iran, is a promiscuous proliferator of nuclear weapons. It is believed to possess “90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads and has produced enough plutonium for 100-200 [more] weapons.” Iran is a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel is not. Unlike Iran, so far, Israel has rejected any IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) oversight, any inspections and safeguards. In marked contrast, Israel, not Iran, is a genocidal entity. Israel, not Iran, had begun this war, is conducting air raids on neighboring nations, and committing mass murder daily.

Iran & Terrorism

And unlike Israel, Iran doesn’t practice state terrorism; it reluctantly and ably defended the realm.

Warnings, stateside, of “a heightened threat environment in the United States” from Iran have been issued by the US National-Terrorism-Industrial-Complex. These generally portend a false-flag operation. The “country of origin for the largest number of foreign-born terrorists” is Ameri-Israel’s good friend Saudi Arabia. Between 1975 and 2024, the Saudis were responsible for 2,354 murders on American soil; Iranians for … none… not one.

To change that, FBI entrapment operations, dubbed sting operations or counterterrorism, are routinely launched—and are likely underway right now. Beware! These stings are governed not by laws passed by Congress, but by creative handles. A vintage FBI entrapment method is when some needy simpleton is enticed by FBI agents into committing a crime he or she had no intention of committing until approached.

Bum joke, perhaps, but we all need a laugh. As a likely example of entrapment, I give you the case of Masih Alinejad, an inconsequential Iranian-American regime-change “journalist.” The woman, with her mad-hatter, tumbleweed hair, mouths the kind of cliched ideas of which we have an abundance in America.

Ms. Alinejad had alleged that she had been the target of a kidnapping plot by the Iranian mullahs. She also said “the Federal Bureau of Investigation had approached her eight months prior with photographs taken by the plotters.” Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more.

Come off it, Ms. Alinejad. In rebuttal, I’d say that I don’t believe that the Iranian supreme leader (whose life the grubby Israelis have recently threatened) wants her back. I don’t believe the mullahs think Masih is a keeper. If anything, theirs was a desperate plea: America, please keep Iranian regime-change agitators like Masih Alinejad away.

IRAN & WMD

The current status of Iran’s nuclear capability has never been the issue, although the “genocidal entity,” Israel, is pursuing, and will pursue, “wars to preserve its own nuclear monopoly” in the region.

Before she turned tail (to wag the dog for Trump), Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), “delivered the U.S. Intelligence Community’s (IC) collective conclusions covering a broad swath of national security issues and geographic areas—including the threat posed by Iran and its possible development of a nuclear weapon.” “The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” reported Gabbard, who “was echoing an assessment that U.S. intelligence agencies have been making since 2007.”

Not unrelated to the manufacture of Israel’s casus belli is that the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) appears to no longer act impartially, as it did in the build up to war on Iraq, under the leadership of Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei. The utterances of Rafael Grossi, the IAEA’s mercurial director general, had helped justify kinetic action against Iran.

Prior to Israel’s unprovoked war of choice on Iran, the vainglorious Grossi had been roaming the region, raising alarm about the Islamic Republic. Distilled, Grossi’s May 31, 2025 report, “Verification and monitoring in the Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015),” very plainly equates his annoyance with Iran with weapons-grade enrichment by Iran.

Rafael Grossi’s hornet’s nest is in the IAEA’s use of Palantir necro-software. According to Wikipedia, Grossi’s hokum WMD report was generated for the IAEA by Palantir Artificial Intelligence software.  Palantir makes a tidy sum in the necro-industry, peddling software for mass surveillance (and attendant, “alleged” executions). In Gaza, Palantir software is “alleged” to have enabled Israel’s Unit 8200 in the algorithmic generation of kill lists.

Without evidence other than “a mosaic of AI storytelling,” Grossi had continued to cook up stories against Iran. Following the June 22 American aerial and amphibian strikes on that heavily sanctioned nation; Grossi took to blabbering about amounts, down to the kilogram, of uranium enriched and secreted away in Iran. Sometimes it was 400 kilograms, other times 900. Post haste, the agency’s WMD sightings have since been walked back. “We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon,” Grossi sheepishly told CNN’s Christian Amanpour on June 17.

The costs of Israel’s warmongering have pyramided. Is it not time to look this particular gift horse in the mouth?

Back To Beginnings: Palestine 

What is the basic cause for this trouble in the greater Middle East, asks Dr. John Mearsheimer, speaking to the Notre Dame International Security Center. Who is responsible for the offensives begun, after October 7, by Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and assorted militia in Syria and Iraq, against which the United States elects to wage low-grade wars?

There are two dueling opinions. The genocidal regime and its partners—they had planned, before October 7, to drop the Palestinians out of history—all blame Iran. Iran is said to form the gravitational pull; is the “master puppeteer” of Hamas, Hezbollah, even the plucky Yemeni Ansar Allah movement.

These Israel-centric asininities are enforced by the West’s obedient “terrorist” designations—and by discussions so riddled with cliches as to be devoid of meaning. A favorite reductionism, for example, is the “proxy” word, disgorged by the clubby DC foreign-policy establishment and Israel’s sub-intelligent ruling elite. By Foreign Policy Inc’s telling, these complex and variegated regional Arab communities—the Resistance—are engaged in an unprofitable, punishing enterprise spanning decades, because commanded by Iran. Never mind what the principals themselves say.

In its deeply rooted intellectual mendacity, the Western foreign-policy establishment does not believe that patriotism, nationalism, and fellow-feeling exist among groups outside the Occident. (I’m being cynical.) Unchallenged, the national security and foreign policy conglomerate contends that the Houthis’ valiant military intervention on behalf of the Palestinians, massacred daily with Western imprimatur, is no more than the protest of marionettes manipulated by their Iranian masters. As this mindset goes, only Anglo-Ameri-Israeli “soldiers” act in solidarity with their people.

The countervailing theory, “the alternative scenario,” argues Dr. Mearsheimer, is that Israel is responsible.” That “it is largely a result of Israel’s occupation that the Palestinians attacked Israel on October the 7th. Having assessed the evidence for the theory of Iranian hegemony over resistance militias, Mearsheimer, a scrupulous scholar of “great-power politics” (and a patriot who served in the US Air Force for five years), has found there to be “little evidence that Iran is responsible for all these conflicts in the Middle East.” For the longest time, Dr. Mearsheimer has argued that on the evidence, “Israel is principally responsible for the conflict in the Middle East. Israel and its barbaric Occupation of the Palestinians.”

Israel’s baleful presence in the de facto annexed territories is why every American president has understood the imperative of a solution to the Palestinian plight, without which Intifadas—one, two, three, ad infinitum—would culminate in events like October 7.

The “blame-Iran, change-the-Iranian-regime” tedious cant was begun by Israel in the 1970s and is at the behest of Israel, seconds Dr. Stephan Walt. It was during the 1990s, that the US acceded to Israel and began excluding Iran. In 1994, confirms Ali M. Ansari, professor of Iranian History at the University of St. Andrews, “In line with Israel’s budding rapprochement with the Arab world” and the signing of “a peace treaty with Jordan”—Israel “switched its strategic perspective from one that cast Iran as a [regional] balancer to one that saw Iran as the enemy. Henceforth, the United States would be encouraged by Israel to ostracize and isolate the Islamic Republic.” (“The Shallow Roots of Iran’s War With Israel,” Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2024.)

What Dr. Ansari cannot say, I will: Israel’s “strategic perspective” requires everywhere and always an enemy. This designated enemy will be tarnished by a blood libel, an abstraction: he, she or they will be said to be antisemitic, baying for Jewish blood. This blood libel ignores the truth, because when facts and reality are scrutinized, it’s Arabs that are being exterminated daily en masse, with western grants of government privilege, not Israelis.

You have to hand it to Israel. It has positioned itself as the world’s cross, a curse that every individual not Jewish-Israeli is born into and must carry like an albatross.

**

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1999, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

Image credit.

©2025 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, July 1
LewRockwell.com, July 3