A beautiful day in an ugly world just doesn’t cut it anymore. Blue skies feel like an insult. Sunlight, once a balm, now stings. Ask a Gazan whose family is mown down at a food distribution site under a cloudless sky. Beauty mocks. Horror endures. Sunshine doesn’t cleanse the blood.

And then, beneath that same sun, the US bombed Iran.

No longer hypothetical. No longer curling like a threat through the corridors of power. The escalation many feared had arrived, with those black origami-like stealth bombers reigniting US militarism in the region in a way no one could any longer pretend was dormant. Violence is real. Its consequences, vast.

Even an attendant nation like the UK stood at a threshold, with history and its own people watching. Despite 20 alleged Iranian plots on UK soil of late, the country was immediately taking a non-violent stance—urging talks at every turn.

Two days before those B-2s flew, a moment of diplomacy—some said hypocrisy—still lingered. Leading Hezbollah commander Mohammad Ahmad Khreiss had just been assassinated in Lebanon. This was as UK, French, and German foreign ministers met Iran’s Abbas Araqchi in Geneva, Araqchi reiterating Iran’s willingness to return to nuclear negotiations. ‘Europe’s not gonna be able to help on this one,’ warned an unimpressed Trump, MAGA-capped at Morristown, New Jersey. And Tulsi Gabbard still couldn’t get a meeting anywhere.

Suddenly, though, Gaza and Iran were both facing the full force of Israeli firepower, in Iran’s case with serious US back-up. Soroka Hospital in Beersheba—no deaths confirmed the first time—must have feared renewed attacks. The chessboard had been knocked over. Diplomatic pieces lay scattered. Strategic logic had given way to raw escalation.

Iran had its own dark ledger—destabilising neighbours while stifling reform at home. That charge was echoed back towards Netanyahu’s government, which escalated with the killing of Saeed Izadi, head of the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, in Qom. That was before the B-2s flew and therefore before a hastily declared ceasefire and later presidential F-word. Nor was Izadi’s killing a strike on Iran’s nuclear programme but the product of a broader, more powerful, institutional memory.

Netanyahu’s complaint that his son’s wedding had again been cancelled due to........

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