Displaced Palestinians roam the shattered streets of the Gaza Strip. Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan.

As I write this, the press are reporting that a third ceasefire in Gaza is imminent, with Donald Trump committing to “ensuring negotiations continue until a final agreement is reached.” Whether this will end Israel’s “war,” which began on October 7, 2023 and has now raged for 21 months, killing a documented 57,012 Palestinians (as of July 2) and in all likelihood many thousands more, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, a stocktaking of some of the key events of the last momentous month seems in order.

Israel launched what it called a “pre-emptive strike” against Iran during the night of June 13. More than 200 IDF fighter jets hit more than 100 nuclear and military facilities and residential neighbourhoods in Tehran and other cities, and Israel assassinated 30 of Iran’s top military commanders and 11 of its nuclear scientists in targeted individual strikes.

Between June 12 and June 23 Israel carried out at least 146 air strikes on Iran. By the time the “12-Day War” ended with the US-brokered ceasefire of June 24, the Israeli air force had hit over 900 targets.

Iran retaliated by attacking Israel with successive barrages of ballistic missiles. As of June 24, the IDF had killed 610 people in Iran, including 49 women and 13 children, and injured 4,746. Iran’s missiles killed 28 people in Israel and injured 3,238.

The excuse for Israel’s unprovoked attack—for which, as has become customary for Israel, no evidence was ever provided—was that Iran was “on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon.” Benjamin Netanyahu has periodically made this claim since 1992.

Though US National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March that Iran “was not building a nuclear weapon, and its supreme leader had not reauthorized the dormant program even though it had enriched uranium to higher levels,” Donald Trump chose to disregard his intelligence agencies’ assessment. “I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters on June 17. He knew Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear bomb.

The US entered the conflict directly on June 22, dropping big, beautiful™ bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. Trump claimed that the strike had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, but the US’s own intelligence assessments (which the White House soon trashed) suggested the program had maybe been set back at best by a few months. For whatever it is worth, the latest Pentagon assessment is that “We have degraded their program by one to two years.”

At the point when Israel attacked, Iran was engaged in ongoing talks with the US to renew the nuclear agreement Donald Trump torpedoed in 2018. One of those targeted in Israel’s first strike was the lead Iranian negotiator, Ali Shamkhani. The IDF bombed his Tehran home, leaving him buried under the rubble with serious injuries. Three weeks earlier Trump boasted of “real progress, serious progress” in the talks, describing them as “very, very good.”

None of this inspires confidence in Israel or the US as trustworthy negotiating partners in any future peace process. Why should Iran—or anyone else—believe a word they say?

After Israel reneged on its ceasefire agreement with Hamas and launched a renewed Gaza offensive on March 18, killing over 400 people in one single night of terror, and imposed a complete blockade on power, food, and medical aid to the Strip, sections of the press and other influential opinion in the West had increasingly challenged its “self-defence” narrative. For a time at least, political leaders appeared to be listening.

This changed abruptly after June 13. Despite the fact that Israel, not Iran, was the clear aggressor—and notwithstanding the well established principle that pre-emptive actions are permissible under international law only “if the threat is imminent, overwhelming, and leaves no alternative but to act”—most Western states swallowed whatever misgivings they had previously expressed about Gaza and once again fell in line behind Israel.

The calls for “all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate” (Emmanuel Macron) were invariably accompanied by reiterations of “Israel’s right to defend itself”—which is not, on any reasonable view, what it was doing—and an insistence that (in the words of Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand) “Iran cannot obtain nuclear weapons.”

Nothing was said about Iran’s right to defend itself, even though it was the attacked party. Nor did it seem to matter that unlike Iran, Israel does possess nuclear weapons, has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and refuses to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IATA) to inspect its nuclear facilities.

Despite Israel carrying out what international organizations, leading Israeli academics and genocide scholars agree is a genocide in Gaza for nearly two years—during which time it has also invaded Lebanon and southern Syria and bombed Yemen—the West portrays Iran as (to quote Anand again) the “persistent threat to regional stability.”

Absurdly, the politicians took the fact that Iran responded militarily to Israel’s aggression—which is to say, defended itself—as confirmation of this alleged threat.

Writing on behalf of the EU on June 18, Kaja Kallas insisted that “Israel has the right to protect its security and people, in........

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