While Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was launching his assault on seven Palestinian NGOs on Thursday, Prime Minister Yair Lapid was pressing the United States closer to an attack on Iran that could send the entire region into an unprecedented conflict. 

Once again, the U.S. mainstream media is missing — or covering up — a central reason that Israel carried out a preemptive attack on Gaza, killing 46 people, including 16 children. Yair Lapid used the attack to go ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu in polling in the election campaign.

Joe Biden’s chilling statements to an Israeli TV interviewer, including that he is prepared to use military force against Iran, present a grim outlook for reviving the Iran deal. 

The Biden administration’s effort to sweep Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing under the rug shows its keenness to extend Trump’s “Abraham Accords” in the Mideast. Those deals make war with Iran more likely, and promote Israeli arm sales and impunity for human rights violations. And as for the Palestinians, they will be completely buried by the Gulf Arab leadership in the rush to please Washington.

Today’s ‘New York Times’ article on the stalled Iran nuclear deal negotiations could have been ghost-written by Israel’s propaganda apparatus. Its selection of experts is comical: five paragraphs of analysis by Dennis Ross and Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Both are ceaseless advocates for Israel.

“Israel’s lawyer” Dennis Ross says the invasion of Ukraine has a sharp lesson for the Biden Administration – the U.S. must build a Middle East coalition to counter Russia and its regional partner, Iran.

“It comes down to: Are you with the Russians or are you with the United States and the West?” asks former Defense Secretary William Cohen. The White House and some Republicans are criticizing Israel’s mixed signals on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The possibility of the Iran nuclear deal being revived seems to have brightened in February 2022, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war may give it more urgency.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett gave a speech to the U.N. General Assembly Monday in which he said that Israel has a diverse democracy “in the toughest neighborhood on earth,” and Iran is trying to destroy Israel through its “terror” proxies.

Here we go again. The New York Times just ran a long, gee-whiz article about an Israeli war crime — the murder of an Iranian scientist inside Iran last year– penned by its Israeli security expert, Ronen Bergman, who has bragged about making appearances for the Israel lobby organization AIPAC and thanked AIPAC for having Israel’s back in the U.S.