When Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich toured the Lebanese border this week and vowed that “very soon, Dahiya will look like Khan Younis [in southern Gaza],” he was publicly acknowledging that the genocide in Gaza is now Israel’s model for violence across the region. This is what Mondoweiss’s Palestine News Director Faris Giacaman names the ‘Gaza doctrine‘: the evolution from Israel’s older Dahiya doctrine of periodic, disproportionate force into something qualitatively different: a strategy of protracted wholesale annihilation with no defined endpoint and no pretense of proportionality.
The distinction matters. The old Dahiya doctrine was intermittent. Periodic massacres, designed to “mow the lawn,” were constrained by at least a performative acknowledgment that the postwar international order placed limits on how long and how completely a military could devastate a civilian society. October 7 broke that constraint. What followed in Gaza was not an intensified version of the old playbook; it was something new — a genocide sustained for over two years on the explicit logic that there is no meaningful distinction between combatants and the society that produced them. Israeli Defense Minister Katz has now described a “tornado plan” to destroy Tehran, targeting sites of “high visibility in a civilian environment.” Schools have been struck in southwest Tehran. The Gaza doctrine has gone regional, and those watching Beirut’s southern neighborhoods receive mass evacuation orders understand what that means.
Understanding why requires understanding the relationship that made it possible. Mondoweiss’s Editor-in-Chief, Yumna Patel, this week cuts to the core of it. This war happened because Israel wanted it to happen, and because the United States has constructed a relationship with Israel in which American foreign policy is ultimately subordinate to Israeli strategic ambition. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed this plainly when he admitted that the United States entered the war on Iran because it knew Israel was going to attack anyway, and calculated it would take fewer American casualties by going first. That is the relationship in a sentence. Israel is not an ally or a partner. It is a client state that has, over decades — through the Israel lobby, through hasbara culture, through the bipartisan political infrastructure built around unconditional support — effectively reversed the normal logic of the patron-client relationship. Israel sets the agenda in the region, and the United States dutifully follows.
And while the world’s attention has shifted to Tehran and Beirut, Israel is ensuring Palestinians pay for that inattention. The moment the war on Iran began, Israel closed the crossings into Gaza and cut off all aid. Famine, which had briefly receded, is returning. In the West Bank, residents describe conditions of deliberate strangulation. Checkpoints have been closed, movement restricted, and the daily life for Palestinians has gotten more difficult in ways that feel permanent and irreversible. This is the Gaza doctrine applied across the entire Palestinian population. Gaza was never a departure from what Israel does. It was the perfection of it. What is unfolding now across the region is that same logic, scaled up, with U.S. air power behind it.
Mondoweiss readers understand this connection. The war on Iran is not a separate story from the genocide in Gaza. It is the same project, driven by the same logic, enabled by the same relationship. Polls show that most Americans, across party lines, do not support this war. They are being asked to pay for it in blood and treasure in the service of interests that are not theirs. The movement demanding accountability for that relationship is the same movement that has been demanding an end to the genocide. It needs to grow. That work starts with understanding what we are actually looking at, and that is what Mondoweiss is here for.
🇮🇷 The war on Iran
This war was Netanyahu’s long-sought objective and the Israel lobby’s decades-long project. Our reporting this week dismantles the justifications built to sell it, and tracks its expanding consequences for the region and for international law.
READ MORE → Netanyahu finally gets his war on Iran, Michael Arria
READ MORE → Rubio confirms the heresy: the U.S. went to war in Iran because of Israel, Philip Weiss
READ MORE → Understanding the U.S. and Israel’s illegal war on Iran, Craig Mokhiber
READ MORE → Debunking the lies of the Iran War, Mitchell Plitnick
READ MORE → The war on Iran is forcing Gulf states to reconsider regional strategy as the U.S. and Israel lead the region into uncertainty, Mitchell Plitnick
📺 The media goes to war
The U.S. mainstream press, like in 2003, is manufacturing consent for an illegal war while concealing Israel’s role in starting it. Our writers examined the media’s complicity.
READ MORE → The U.S. media goes to war on Iran, Michael Arria
READ MORE → Lies, distortions, and propaganda: how the U.S. mainstream media coverage on Iran hides the truth, James North
READ MORE → The War to Erase October 7: What ‘The Atlantic’ leaves out about Netanyahu and the US-Israeli assault on Iran, Yakov Hirsch
🇺🇸 U.S. politics and the Israel lobby
The Iran war has exposed the Israel lobby’s grip on Washington in ways that can no longer be explained away. Democrats are scrambling. AIPAC’s political strategy is shaky. And the hasbara framework that has long policed debate inside the Jewish community is cracking under the weight of what it is being asked to defend.
READ MORE → It’s time for America to break up with Israel, Yumna Patel
READ MORE → The Shift: War Powers resolution fails in Senate as Democrats scramble to figure out position on Iran war, Michael Arria
READ MORE → Is AIPAC headed for another own goal in Illinois?, Michael Arria
READ MORE → A David Frum response to Ro Khanna shows how hasbara culture has warped the Jewish community’s response to antisemitism, Yakov Hirsch
🇵🇸 Gaza / West Bank
Israel is using the cover of the Iran war to accelerate the destruction of Palestinian life. The crossings into Gaza are closed, aid is cut off, and famine is returning. In the West Bank, systematic strangulation is being applied while the world’s attention is on Iran.
READ MORE → Palestinians in Gaza fear famine returning as Israel cuts off food amid Iran war, Tareq S. Hajjaj
READ MORE → Israel ‘strangles’ West Bank amid war on Iran, Qassam Muaddi
🇱🇧 Lebanon
Israel has opened a second front in Lebanon, displacing millions.
READ MORE → Millions at risk of displacement as Israel bombards Lebanon — Layla Yammine
READ MORE → Israel is using the ‘Gaza doctrine’ in Lebanon and Iran — Faris Giacaman
One of the better commentaries on the stupidity of this war comes from Avraham Burg –
I harbour no illusions about Tehran. The Iranian regime is cursed. It oppresses it citizens, persecutes dissidents and deploys violent proxies across the region. Anyone who witnessed the suppression of protest in Iran’s streets cannot remain indifferent. But the question is not whether the regime is dreadful. The question is whether its dreadfulness mandates a war of this kind. Where were you in Crimea and Ukraine, in Ethiopia and Sudan? Where was this military fervour when North Korea built its nuclear arsenal and displayed intercontinental ballistic tests? There, the world chose deterrence, sanctions, isolation, cautious engagement. Not out of admiration for that regime, but from an understanding that total war could spiral into catastrophe. Why does that logic apply in Pyongyang but not in Tehran?.…A war with Iran is not another limited round. It could open parallel fronts, destabilise regional economies and draw Israel into a prolonged confrontation with a country of vast territory and immense population. Even in a scenario in which nuclear facilities are successfully struck this time, the result would not be stability but a humiliated and enraged regime and fanatics looking for revenge. A fractured Iranian public might rally around a torn flag. And when the response comes, we will once again be told that there is no alternative. There you have the vicious circle at birth, escalation feeding itself.
I won’t remain silent on this cynical war | The Observer
Bibi ” I know how they are. America is something easily maneuvered ” He says it all in this clip. He pushed back against Clinton, the UN, the Oslo Accords. Defined agreements exactly the way he wanted to define them. BB “I gave my own interpretation to the agreements”
Bibi and Amalek: https://www.google.com/search?q=bibi+statement+about+amalek&rlz=1CALBTX_enUS1204&oq=bibi+statement+about+amalek&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDg5MjBqMGoxqAIAsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:cd6d0e90,vid:pMVs7akyMh0,st:0
Smotrich “we need to wipe out the memory of the Amalek any where under the sun”
Israeli soldiers “to wipe off the seed of the Amalek”
BB, Smotrich, Israel Katz, Ben Gvir, many Israeli soldiers etc want to wipe out the Amalek
Deeply concerning that so many scholarly, well informed analyst, historians etc believe Israel are likely to use nuclear weapons and are doing far more harm to Israel in the long run in their latest push of pre-emptive violence, war, destruction.
Colonel Wilkerson, former head of the IAEA nuclear weapons inspection team, former CIA middle east analyst Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Max Blumenthal and others believe Israel is essentially destroying itself in long run via this “Greater Israel” violent rampage through the region.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkEYb-TXJVWLvOokshtlsw
IDF Officials Admit Military Struggling to Intercept Hezbollah Drones From Lebanon: So far, the IDF is sticking with its initial decision not to order evacuations, but army officials noted that the IDF’s success with interceptions has been ‘very partial,’ and that a ‘long war’ is likely — Haaretz
What do people think about former middle east CIA analyst Larry John’s assessment of the situation in Israel, Iran, Lebanon? Alleged weapons shortages?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNjvIkR4obI
There will likely not be accountability for the likes of Netanyahu so long as he convinces so many Israelis and Americans he acts in self-defense because the Palestinian intention remains the elemination of Israel and the Jews.
Mondoweiss would move things forward by publishing debates or discussions on how to achieve co-existence. Such needs to be better understood by voting citizens.