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By Alfred W. McCoy

In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Among the “antique legends” most helpful in understanding the likely outcome of the current U.S. intervention in Iran is the Suez Crisis of 1956, which I describe in my new book Cold War on Five Continents. After Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, a joint British-French armada of six aircraft carriers destroyed Egypt’s air force, while Israeli troops smashed Egyptian tanks in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula. Within less than a week of war, Nasser had lost his strategic forces and Egypt seemed helpless before the overwhelming might of that massive imperial juggernaut.

But by the time Anglo-French forces came storming ashore at the north end of the Suez Canal, Nasser had executed a geopolitical masterstroke by sinking dozens of rusting ships filled with rocks at the canal’s northern entrance. In doing so, he automatically cut off Europe’s lifeline to its oil fields in the Persian Gulf. By the time British forces retreated in defeat from Suez, Britain had been sanctioned at the U.N., its currency was at the brink of collapse, its aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire was heading for extinction.

Historians now refer to the phenomenon of a dying empire launching a desperate military intervention to recover its fading imperial glory as “micro-militarism.” And coming in the wake of imperial Washington’s receding influence over the broad Eurasian land mass, the recent U.S. military assault on Iran is starting to look like an American version of just such micro-militarism.

Even if history never truly repeats itself, right now it seems all too appropriate to wonder whether the current U.S. intervention in Iran might indeed be America’s version of the Suez Crisis. And should Washington’s attempt at regime change in Tehran somehow “succeed,” don’t for a second think that the result will be a successfully stable new government that will be able to serve its people well.

70 Years of Regime Change

Let’s return to the historical record to uncover the likely consequences of regime change in Iran. Over the past 70 years, Washington has made repeated attempts at regime change across the span of five continents — initially via CIA covert action during the 44 years of the Cold War and, in the decades since the end of that global conflict, through conventional military operations. Although the methods have changed, the results — plunging the affected societies into decades of searing social conflict and incessant political instability — have been sadly similar. This pattern can be seen in a few of the CIA’s most famous covert interventions during the Cold War.

In 1953, Iran’s new parliament decided to nationalize the British imperial oil concession there to fund social services for its emerging democracy. In response, a joint CIA-MI6 coup ousted the reformist prime minister and installed the son of the long-deposed former Shah in power. Unfortunately for the Iranian people, he proved to be a strikingly inept leader who transformed his country’s oil wealth into mass poverty — thereby precipitating Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

By 1954, Guatemala was implementing an historic land reform program that was investing its mostly Mayan indigenous population with the requisites for full citizenship. Unfortunately, a CIA-sponsored invasion installed a brutal military dictatorship, plunging the country into 30 years of civil war that left 200,000 people dead in a population of only five million.

Similarly, in 1960, the Congo had emerged from a century of brutal Belgian colonial rule by electing a charismatic leader, Patrice Lumumba. But the CIA soon ousted him from power, replacing him with Joseph Mobutu, a military dictator whose 30 years of kleptocracy precipitated violence that led to the deaths of more than five million people in the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and continues to take a toll to this day.

In more recent decades, there have been similarly dismal outcomes from Washington’s attempts at regime change via conventional military operations. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks, U.S. forces toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Over the next 20 years, Washington spent $2.3 trillion — and no, that “trillion” is not a misprint! — in a failed nation-building effort that was swept away when the resurgent Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, in August 2021, plunging the country into a mix of harsh patriarchy and mass privation.

In 2003, Washington invaded Iraq in search of nonexistent nuclear weapons and sank into the quagmire of a 15-year war that led to the slaughter of a million people and left behind an autocratic government that became little more than an Iranian client state. And in 2011, the U.S. led a NATO air campaign that toppled Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s radical regime in Libya, precipitating seven years of civil war and ultimately leaving that country divided between two antagonistic failed states.

When Washington’s attempts at regime change fail, as they did in Cuba in 1961 and in Venezuela last year, that failure often leaves autocratic regimes even more entrenched, with their control over the country’s secret police strengthened and an ever-tighter death grip on the country’s economy.

Why, you might wonder, do such U.S. interventions invariably seem to produce such dismal results? For societies struggling to achieve a fragile social stability amid volatile political change, external intervention, whether covert or open, seems to invariably be the equivalent of hitting an antique pocket watch with a hammer and then trying to squeeze all its gears and springs back into place.

The Iran War’s Geopolitical Consequences

By exploring the geopolitical implications of Washington’s latest intervention in Iran, it’s possible to imagine how President Donald Trump’s war of choice might well become Washington’s very own version of the Suez crisis.

Just as Egypt snatched a diplomatic victory from the jaws of military defeat in 1956 by shutting the Suez Canal, so Iran has now closed off the Middle East’s other critical choke point by firing its Shahed drones at five freighters in the Straits of Hormuz (through which 20% of global crude oil and natural gas regularly passes) and at petroleum refineries on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s drone strikes have blocked more than 90% of tanker departures from the Persian Gulf and shut down the massive Qatari refineries that produce 20% of the world supply of Liquified Natural Gas, sending natural gas prices soaring by 50% in much of the world and by 91% in Asia — with the price of gasoline in the U.S. heading for $4 a gallon and the cost of oil likely to reach a staggering $150 per barrel in the near future. Moreover, through the conversion of natural gas to fertilizer, the Persian Gulf is the source for nearly half the world’s agricultural nutrients, with prices soaring by 37% for urea fertilizer in markets like Egypt and threatening both spring planting in the northern hemisphere and food security in the global south.

The extraordinary concentration of petroleum production, international shipping, and capital investment in the Persian Gulf makes the Straits of Hormuz not only a choke point for the flow of oil and natural gas but also for the movement of capital for the entire global economy. To begin with the basics, the Persian Gulf holds about 50% of the world’s proven oil reserves, estimated at 859 billion barrels or, at current prices, about $86 trillion.

To give you an idea of the scale of capital concentration in the region’s infrastructure, the national oil companies of the Gulf Cooperation Council invested $125 billion in their production facilities in 2025 alone, with plans to continue at that rate for the foreseeable future. To keep the global oil tanker fleet of 7,500 vessels that largely serves the Persian Gulf afloat, it costs nearly $100 million for a single large “Suezmax” tanker — of which there are about 900 normally on the high seas, worth a combined $90 billion (with frequent replacements required by the corrosion of steel in harsh maritime conditions). Moreover, Dubai has the world’s busiest international airport at the center of a global network with 450,000 flights annually — now shut down by Iranian drone strikes.

Despite all the White House media hype about the terrible swift sword of America’s recent airstrikes, the 3,000 U.S.-Israeli bombing runs against Iran (which is two-thirds the size of Western Europe) in the war’s first week pale before the 1,400,000 bombing sorties over Europe during World War II. The striking contrast between those numbers makes the current U.S. air attacks on Iran seem, from a strategic perspective, like shooting at an elephant with a BB gun.

Moreover, the U.S. has limited stocks of about 4,000 interceptor missiles, which cost up to $12 million each and can’t be rapidly mass-produced. By contrast, Iran has an almost limitless supply of some 80,000 Shahed drones, 10,000 of which it can produce each month for only $20,000 each. In effect, time is not on Washington’s side if this war drags on for more than a few weeks.

Indeed, in a recent interview, pressed about the possibility that Iran’s vast flotilla of slow, low-flying Shahed drones might soon exhaust the U.S. supply of sophisticated interceptor missiles, Pentagon leader General Dan Caine was surprisingly evasive, saying only, “I don’t want to be talking about quantities.”

Whose Boots on the Ground?

While economic and military pressures build for a shorter war, Washington is trying to avoid sending troops ashore by mobilizing Iran’s ethnic minorities, who make up about 40% of that country’s population. As the Pentagon is silently but painfully aware, U.S. ground forces would face formidable resistance from a million-strong Basij militia, 150,000 Revolutionary Guards (who are well-trained for asymmetric guerrilla warfare), and Iran’s 350,000 regular army troops.

With other ethnic groups (like the Azeris in the north) unwilling or (like the Baloch tribes in the southeast, far from the capital) unable to attack Tehran, Washington is desperate to play its Kurdish card, just as it has done for the past 50 years. With a population of 10 million astride the highland borders of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the Middle East without their own state. As such, they have long been forced to play the imperial Great Game, making them a surprisingly sensitive bellwether for larger changes in imperial influence.

Although President Trump made personal calls to the top leaders in Iraq’s Kurdistan region during the first week of the latest war, offering them “extensive U.S. aircover” for an attack on Iran, and the U.S. even has a military airbase at Erbil, Kurdistan’s capital, the Kurds are so far proving uncharacteristically cautious.

Indeed, Washington has a long history of using and abusing Kurdish fighters, dating back to the days of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who turned their betrayal into a diplomatic art form. After he ordered the CIA to stop aiding the Iraqi Kurdish resistance to Saddam Hussein in 1975, Kissinger told an aide: “Promise them anything, give them what they get, and f… them if they can’t take a joke.”

As Iraqi forces fought their way into Kurdistan, killing helpless Kurds by the hundreds, their legendary leader Mustafa Barzani, grandfather of the current head of Iraqi Kurdistan, pleaded with Kissinger, saying, “Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people.” Kissinger did not even dignify that desperate plea with a reply and instead told Congress: “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

Last January, in an amazingly ill-timed decision, the Trump White House betrayed the Kurds one time too many, breaking Washington’s decade-long alliance with the Syrian Kurds by forcing them to give up 80% of their occupied territory. In southeastern Turkey, the radical Kurdish PKK Party has made a deal with Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan and is actually disarming, while Iraq’s Kurdistan region is staying out of the war by respecting a 2023 diplomatic entente with Tehran for a peaceful Iran-Iraq border. President Trump has called at least one leader of the Iranian Kurds, who constitute about 10% of Iran’s population, to encourage an armed uprising. But most Iranian Kurds seem more interested in regional autonomy than regime change.

As Trump’s calls upon the Kurds to attack and the Iranian people to rise up are met with an eloquent silence, Washington is likely to end this war with Iran’s Islamic regime only further entrenched, showing the world that America is not just a disruptive power, but a fading one that other nations can do without. Over the past 100-plus years, the Iranian people have mobilized six times in attempts to establish a real democracy. At this point, though, it seems as if any seventh attempt will come long after the current U.S. naval armada has left the Arabian Sea.

From the Granular to the Geopolitical

If we move beyond this granular view of Iran’s ethnic politics to a broader geo-strategic perspective on the Iran war, Washington’s waning influence in the hills of Kurdistan seems to reflect its fading geopolitical influence across the vast Eurasian land mass, which remains today the epicenter of geopolitical power, as it has been for the past 500 years.

For nearly 80 years, the United States has maintained its global hegemony by controlling the axial ends of Eurasia through its NATO alliance in Western Europe and four bilateral defense pacts along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia. But now, as Washington focuses more of its foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere, U.S. influence is fading fast along the vast arc of Eurasia stretching from Poland, through the Middle East to Korea that scholars of geopolitics like Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman once dubbed the “rimland” or “the zone of conflict.” As Spykman put it succinctly once upon a time: “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

Since the rise of Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy in 2016, major and medium powers along that entire Eurasian rimland have been actively disengaging from U.S. influence — including Europe (by rearming), Russia (by challenging the West in Ukraine), Turkey (by remaining neutral in the present war), Pakistan (by allying with China), India (by breaking with Washington’s Quad alliance), and Japan (by rearming to create an autonomous defense policy). That ongoing disengagement is manifest in the lack of support for the Iran intervention, even from once-close European and Asian allies — a striking contrast with the broad coalitions that joined U.S. forces in the 1991 Gulf War and the occupation of Afghanistan in 2002. With Trump’s micro-militarism in Iran inadvertently but clearly exposing the limits of American power, Washington’s fading influence across Eurasia will undoubtedly prove catalytic for the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to move far beyond the old order of U.S. global hegemony.

Just as Sir Anthony Eden is remembered ruefully today in the United Kingdom as the inept prime minister who destroyed the British Empire at Suez, so future historians may see Donald Trump as the president who degraded U.S. international influence with, among other things, his micro-military misadventure in the Middle East. As empires rise and fall, such geopolitics clearly remains a constant factor in shaping their fate –- a lesson I try to teach in Cold War on Five Continents.

In difficult times like these, when events seem both confused and confusing, Mark Twain’s “broken fragments of antique legends” can remind us of historical analogies like the collapse of the power and influence of Great Britain or of the Soviet Union that can help us understand how the past often whispers to the present — as it indeed seems to be doing these days in the Straits of Hormuz.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.

Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.

Resources – as the Venezuelans know – are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized.

Let them eat dirt.

International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.

They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.

Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.

“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in “The World After Gaza.” “The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil – the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies – cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”

The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.

They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse. No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in “1984.” “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.

Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.

These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.

It won’t be long.

The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.

If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.

Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.

True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in “The Sane Society.”

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.

The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza. Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as the Chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ranjan Solomon

The war that is coming is not the first one. There were other wars before it. When the last one came to an end there were conquerors and conquered. Among the conquered the common people starved.”
Bertolt Brecht – a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet.

War in West Asia has once again revealed a painful truth: the language of strategy and security often hides the deeper reality of human suffering. Political leaders speak of deterrence, regime change, nuclear threats and military objectives. Yet beneath these calculations lies the lived reality of ordinary people whose lives are shattered by forces far beyond their control. The ongoing confrontation between Iran, Israel and the United States is not merely a geopolitical contest; it is a rapidly expanding human tragedy.

The present war escalated dramatically after joint United States and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets in February 2026, justified largely in terms of concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme and regional influence. The attacks triggered a wave of retaliatory missile and drone strikes by Iran across the region, transforming what had long been a shadow conflict into open warfare.

As with most wars, the first and most immediate victims have been civilians. Hundreds have been killed and thousands injured across the region, with major cities in Iran and Israel experiencing direct missile strikes. Early reports indicate that more than a thousand people have already died in Iran alone, with children among the casualties and entire residential areas struck during the bombardment.

The destruction is not limited to loss of life. Hospitals, schools and vital infrastructure have been hit or severely damaged, undermining the basic systems that sustain civilian life. The World Health Organization has warned that attacks on healthcare facilities in Iran have already been documented, raising serious concerns about the collapse of medical services during the conflict.Israel has suffered severe consequences too as well as US combatants. In war situations, it is the innocents who face the worst consequences without choice.

Beyond the immediate violence lies another profound consequence of war: displacement. Fear of further attacks has forced large numbers of people to flee major urban centres. Tens of thousands have left Tehran alone, while millions across Iran have reportedly moved internally in search of safety.

In neighbouring countries such as Lebanon and across the wider region, similar patterns of displacement are emerging as civilians attempt to escape the expanding theatre of war.

Displacement brings with it the erosion of normal life. Families abandon homes, children lose access to education, and livelihoods disappear overnight. For many, exile becomes a prolonged condition rather than a temporary interruption. Refugee movements triggered by this conflict could place enormous strain on neighbouring states already dealing with the aftermath of previous regional wars.

The psychological consequences are equally devastating. War leaves invisible wounds that statistics rarely capture. The trauma of bombardment, displacement and sudden loss reshapes individual lives and collective memory. Children who grow up under the constant threat of missile sirens and air strikes carry these experiences long into adulthood.

What makes the current conflict particularly alarming is its potential to widen geographically. Unlike earlier localized confrontations, this war has already begun to involve multiple actors across West Asia. Armed groups allied with Iran operate in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, while American military bases across the region have become potential targets for retaliation.

Such dynamics create a dangerous chain reaction in which the battlefield expands beyond national borders. The war has already caused displacement in Lebanon and heightened tensions across the Gulf. If the conflict continues to escalate, millions more civilians could find themselves trapped in its widening arc.

The economic consequences are also reverberating far beyond the region. Disruptions to energy supply routes and fears over the security of the Strait of Hormuz have pushed global oil prices sharply upward. These shocks ripple across the global economy, affecting fuel prices, food costs and inflation in countries far removed from the battlefield.

For ordinary people in developing countries, including India, these economic tremors translate into rising costs of living and greater economic insecurity. Thus the human consequences of this war are not confined to West Asia; they extend globally through interconnected markets and supply chains.

At the heart of this unfolding tragedy lies a deeper paradox. Wars are often launched in the name of security, deterrence or national survival. Yet they frequently produce the very instability they claim to prevent. The confrontation between Iran, Israel and the United States risks entrenching cycles of retaliation that make lasting peace increasingly difficult.

Moreover, the war threatens to overshadow and deepen existing humanitarian crises across the region. Gaza remains devastated from previous rounds of conflict, with reconstruction painfully slow and humanitarian access restricted. The expansion of regional hostilities risks diverting attention and resources from populations already living in extreme distress.

History repeatedly demonstrates that wars in the Middle East rarely remain contained. The conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan all began with limited objectives but evolved into prolonged humanitarian catastrophes with global consequences.

The present war carries similar risks. A prolonged confrontation could deepen regional instability, trigger further displacement and strain already fragile political systems across West Asia.

Ultimately, the most enduring cost of war is not measured in military gains or strategic advantage. It is measured in broken families, shattered communities and generations forced to rebuild lives amid ruins.

The Iran–Israel–USA war therefore demands not only diplomatic attention but moral clarity. The pursuit of military dominance in a region already scarred by decades of conflict can only deepen the cycle of suffering.

If the world fails to prioritise de-escalation and genuine diplomacy, the tragedy unfolding today may become yet another chapter in the long history of wars whose consequences are borne not by the powerful who declare them, but by the ordinary people who must live with their aftermath.

Ranjan Solomon has worked in social justice movements since he was 19 years of age. After an accumulated period of 58 years working with oppressed and marginalized groups locally, nationally, and internationally, he has now turned a researcher-freelance writer focused on questions of global and local/national justice.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Lylla Younes

Among the most targeted groups of Israel’s expanded war on Lebanon have been medical workers. Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Authority has been the hardest hit.

BEIRUT, LEBANON—In early October 2025, Lebanese paramedic Haj Qassem Sultan stood outside Marjayoun Government Hospital in southern Lebanon and addressed Lebanese TV.

“Our message is clear. Even if we are killed one by one, we will not abandon our duty,” he said. “We will continue to serve Khiam and Marjayoun and Al-Taybeh and Debbine and all of our sacred land.”

He was attending a memorial for seven of his colleagues who were killed exactly one year earlier in an Israeli airstrike on ambulances parked outside the hospital. Five other paramedics, including Sultan, were wounded in the attack, in what human rights groups said was an apparent war crime.

On Friday, Sultan was killed in another Israeli strike on an Islamic Health Authority (IHA) medical center in Burj Qalaouiyah in southern Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil District. The bombing destroyed the facility, killing 12 people, including on-duty doctors, paramedics, nurses, and three patients.

The majority of the victims worked with the IHA, a healthcare and emergency service provider affiliated with Hezbollah that operates rescue and medical services in Beirut’s southern suburbs and across much of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

Sultan “was very loved, very respected,” IHA spokesperson Mahmoud Karaki told Drop Site News. “He was always present among the people. Everyone knew him.”

The day after the attack, Israel doubled down on its attacks on emergency workers with its military spokesperson, claiming without evidence that Hezbollah was making “military use of medical facilities and ambulances” and that occupation forces would target them if they did not cease.

A strike on Monday on a house in Kfar Sir, just north of the Litani River killed one person. When an ambulance from the IHA arrived, a second strike killed two paramedics and wounded another, according to the state-run National News Agency. Two more IHA ambulances were targeted on Monday in separate strikes, killing four more paramedics.

“Some of our personnel have been killed at our medical centers, others while they were out in the field, trying to pull people out from under the rubble,” he said. “The exact place they went to do their rescue work was targeted again once they arrived,” he added, a tactic known as a double tap strike.

The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, condemned the escalating attacks on medical workers in Lebanon. “These incidents highlight the ongoing assault on Lebanon’s healthcare system, which is crucial for the populations it serves,” Ghebreyesus wrote in a social media post. “WHO condemns this tragic loss of life and emphasizes that health workers must always be protected. According to international humanitarian law, medical personnel and facilities should never be attacked or militarized.”

Israel dramatically escalated its assault on Lebanon with relentless airstrikes and ground incursions on March 2, two days after the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran. Last week Israel ordered the forced displacement of all of southern Lebanon and launched a ground invasion. Over the past two weeks, at least 850 people have been killed across the country, including over 100 children. More than 850,000 people have been displaced. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz likened the operation to the genocidal assault on Gaza and said on Monday that Lebanese residents in the south of the Litani River would not be able to return to their homes indefinitely.

Among the most targeted groups of Israel’s expanded military campaign have been medical workers. Over the past two weeks, Israeli attacks have struck 13 medical and ambulance centers and forced five major hospitals to shut down, according to the health ministry. At least 38 have been killed so far, including personnel from the IHA, the Red Cross, and the Islamic Risala Scout Association, a medical and rescue organization affiliated with Lebanon’s Amal Movement. The IHA has been the hardest hit, with more than two dozen killed, according to Karaki.

The Israeli military itself has been accused of using ambulances in military operations in Lebanon. Most notably, during its attack on the town of Nabi Chit in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley last week that killed 41 people, the Lebanese Army accused Israeli commandos of moving through the area using ambulances marked with the insignia of the IHA.

Human rights groups say Israel’s targeting of medical personnel and infrastructure is part of a deadly pattern that emerged during Israel’s assault on Gaza. Hospitals in the enclave were systematically bombed, raided, and destroyed and some 1,700 health care workers were killed during the first two years of the genocide, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. During Israel’s assault on Lebanon between October 8, 2023 and late November 2024 when a “ceasefire” was put into effect, Israeli attacks killed at least 222 medical and civil defense personnel and injured hundreds more, according to the Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

Researchers with Amnesty International examined four cases in which Israeli forces struck first responders in Lebanon during that period. According to Kristine Bekerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, the organization found no evidence that the facilities or vehicles hit in those attacks were being used for military purposes at the time.

“We looked at attacks affecting the Islamic Health Authority, but we also examined strikes on organizations with no connection to Hezbollah, like the Lebanese Civil Defense and the Red Cross, and in different parts of the country,” Bekerle told Drop Site. “We saw a range of civilian actors—some loosely affiliated with Hezbollah, others with no affiliation at all—being killed, wounded, or targeted.”

“From an international law perspective, civilians and civilian objects should not be targeted for attack,” Bekerle added. “But healthcare workers, facilities, and ambulances are especially protected.”

Bekerle noted that the Israeli military has a long record of publishing lies, but even if the claim were true, it would not justify broad attacks. Under international humanitarian law, an army must demonstrate that a specific object is being used for military purposes, for example, a particular ambulance in a particular location at a specific time. “You cannot simply declare that all ambulances are legitimate targets,” Bekerle said.

“What we’re seeing between Lebanon and Gaza is this big broadening of what constitutes an ‘acceptable’ target to the military,” she added. “The reality is that a civilian entity affiliated with a non-state armed group is not automatically targetable.”

Israel’s massive and unprecedented displacement orders in Lebanon have made the work of Lebanese first responders all the more dangerous.

Moussa Shaalan, a medic with the Lebanese Civil Defense in the coastal city of Sour, told Drop Site that the current war is the hardest he has experienced in more than three decades of service.

“The difference this time is that there are many more people in the villages,” Shaalan said. “They say they can’t afford the rent in other parts of the country…and that when they fled north, they were humiliated. They tell you they would rather die at home,” he added. “So the demand for emergency services under dangerous conditions is much higher.”

Most of the places being struck are still densely populated and full of children, Shaalan added. He fears the death toll will continue to rise, particularly since Israel has begun targeting civilian infrastructure such as bridges and roads that enable rescue teams to reach the wounded.

Karaki, the IHA spokesperson, said Israel’s attacks on first responders are part of a broader effort to force people from the region.

“The presence of a team of first responders offers a last remaining sense of security for people who have chosen to remain steadfast on their land,” he said. “That’s why the occupation targets healthcare workers who have nothing to do with what’s happening on the battlefield.”

Lylla Younes Investigative journalist and writer based in Beirut

17 March 2026

Source: dropsitenews.com

By Ranjan Solomon

“When the powerful wage war, it is the voiceless who are buried beneath its silence.”

We all want the horror in Gaza to end. But the reality is harsher than we are willing to admit: it has not ended. It has been pushed into the shadows.

Today, the world’s gaze is fixed on the escalating confrontation involving Iran, the United States, and Israel. Missiles, retaliation, and the spectre of regional war dominate headlines. Yet, beneath this spectacle, another crisis deepens – less visible, less reported, but no less devastating.

Gaza is being starved, not in isolation, but in the cover provided by a wider war. This is not conjecture. Analysts and humanitarian observers have already warned that the Iran war has shifted global attention away from Gaza, allowing Israel greater operational and political space to intensify its actions. The consequences are immediate and severe: border crossings have been restricted, aid deliveries curtailed, and the fragile lifelines sustaining Gaza’s population have been further weakened.

War, in this sense, is not only fought with bombs. It is also fought through distraction.

The Politics of Distraction

Every major conflict produces a hierarchy of attention. Some crises dominate the global stage; others are relegated to its margins.

The war with Iran has done precisely this – it has reordered global concern. Diplomatic energy has shifted. Media bandwidth has narrowed. Public outrage, once focused on Gaza’s devastation, has been diluted. Even humanitarian advocacy struggles to break through the noise of a larger, more geopolitically “significant” war. This shift is not neutral. It has consequences on the ground. When scrutiny diminishes, impunity expands.

The reduction of international pressure creates a permissive environment—one in which policies that might otherwise provoke outrage can proceed with minimal resistance. In Gaza, this has translated into tighter restrictions on aid, reduced humanitarian access, and worsening conditions for an already besieged population. The logic is brutally simple: what the world does not see, it does not stop.

Starvation as Strategy

The humanitarian situation in Gaza was already catastrophic. Now, it is entering an even more dangerous phase. More than 100,000 children face acute malnutrition. But this statistic, stark as it is, does not fully capture the violence of what is unfolding. Acute malnutrition is not merely hunger – it is the systematic breakdown of the human body. Fat reserves are consumed, muscles deteriorate, immune systems collapse, and, ultimately, vital organs fail.

This is not an unintended by-product of war. It is the result of policies that restrict food, fuel, and medical supplies. Since the escalation with Iran, crossings into Gaza have been repeatedly closed or severely limited, disrupting the flow of essential goods. The impact is immediate: shortages intensify, prices rise, and humanitarian agencies struggle to maintain even minimal levels of support. In such conditions, aid itself becomes precarious—subject to political calculation and military priorities. Starvation, therefore, becomes a tool.

The Destruction of Self-Sufficiency

To understand the depth of Gaza’s crisis, one must look beyond aid and examine the destruction of its internal capacity to survive.

Over 86 percent of Gaza’s farmland has been damaged or destroyed. Irrigation systems lie in ruins. Water wells are unusable. Greenhouses have been flattened. The infrastructure that once allowed Gaza to produce its own food has been systematically dismantled. This is not incidental damage. It is structural.

A population that cannot feed itself becomes dependent. And dependency is not merely an economic condition- it is a political one. It places survival itself under external control. In this context, the Iran war amplifies an already existing dynamic. By diverting attention and reducing scrutiny, it allows the continuation—and deepening—of policies that entrench this dependency.

War as Cover

History offers countless examples of how larger conflicts create cover for actions elsewhere. The present moment is no different.

As missiles fly between Israel and Iran, Gaza recedes from the centre of international concern. The urgency that once drove calls for ceasefire, humanitarian access, and accountability is replaced by the immediacy of a new war.

This is not to suggest that the Iran conflict is fabricated or insignificant. It is real, dangerous, and regionally destabilizing. But its political effect is unmistakable: it reshapes priorities. And in that reshaping, Gaza is pushed further into invisibility.

Even the language of diplomacy reflects this shift. Proposals framed as regional stabilization – often associated with figures such as Donald Trump – risk subsuming Gaza within broader geopolitical calculations. In such frameworks, Palestinian rights are not central; they are negotiable. The danger is clear: Gaza becomes a bargaining chip in a larger game.

The Illusion of Humanitarianism

In response to Gaza’s suffering, the international community often turns to humanitarian aid. While necessary, this response is fundamentally limited. Aid can alleviate immediate suffering, but it does not address the structures that produce that suffering. When the flow of aid itself is controlled, restricted, or weaponized, it becomes part of the problem.

The Iran war exacerbates this limitation. With resources, attention, and political will redirected, humanitarian efforts in Gaza face additional constraints. Funding becomes uncertain. Access becomes more difficult. The already fragile system of support begins to fracture. In such a context, humanitarianism risks becoming a substitute for justice—a way of managing crisis without confronting its causes.

Resistance in the Ruins
Yet, even in these conditions, Gaza is not passive. Across the territory, farmers and community groups are attempting to rebuild what has been destroyed. With minimal resources, they are repairing irrigation lines, restoring wells, and cultivating small plots of land. Greenhouses are being reconstructed. Crops are being grown.

These efforts are fragile and limited. They cannot compensate for the scale of destruction. But they represent something vital: the refusal to surrender to imposed dependency. To grow food in Gaza today is not merely an economic activity. It is a political act. It asserts the right to live with dignity. It challenges the structures that seek to reduce a population to perpetual reliance on aid. It insists that survival must not be dictated by external control.

A Crisis of Conscience

The question that emerges is not only political, but one of justice.

What does it mean for the world to watch one war while another continues in its shadow? What does it mean for attention to shift, for outrage to dissipate, for suffering to become background noise? The answer is uncomfortable. It means that global concern is not evenly distributed. It means that some lives are rendered more visible -and therefore more valuable – than others. It means that silence, even when unintended, becomes complicity.

Gaza today is not only a site of humanitarian crisis. It is a test of whether the international community can hold multiple truths at once—whether it can recognise that a new war does not erase an ongoing one.

Beyond the Shadow

Gaza cannot be allowed to disappear into the margins of a larger conflict. The war with Iran may dominate headlines, but it must not obscure the realities on the ground in Gaza. The restriction of aid, the destruction of infrastructure, and the use of starvation as a weapon demand continued attention and accountability. To see Gaza clearly requires resisting the logic of distraction.

It requires insisting that no war, however large, justifies the neglect of another. It requires recognizing that the suffering in Gaza is not an isolated tragedy, but part of a broader system of power and control. Above all, it requires a refusal to accept that some crises matter more than others. Because in Gaza, even now, life continues under conditions designed to extinguish it. And in the shadow of war, that struggle becomes even harder to see – and even more urgent to confront.

Ranjan Solomon has worked in social justice movements since he was 19 years of age. After an accumulated period of 58 years working with oppressed and marginalized groups locally, nationally, and internationally, he has now turned author- researcher-freelance writer focussed on questions of global and local/national justice.

23 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ashraf Zainabi

Power does not always end with a bang; more often, it loosens quietly. The story of the Roman Empire is a case in point. Rome did not collapse the day the barbarians arrived. By then, something essential had already weakened. Its frontiers were wide, its armies still formidable, its name still carried weight, but the confidence that once bound everything together had begun to slip. That is usually how decline begins, not with defeat, but with hesitation.

It is in this light that recent remarks by Donald Trump about NATO should be read. Calling an alliance a “paper tiger” may sound like routine political rhetoric, but such language rarely appears out of nowhere. It tends to surface when there is already a sense, quiet but growing, that something is no longer working as it once did.

For decades, NATO symbolized certainty. It carried the promise that its members, despite their differences, would stand together when confronted with a serious threat. That promise was never tested lightly, and perhaps that is why it held. The Cold War provided a clear structure, a defined adversary, a shared fear, and a common purpose. The world today is less clear.

The tensions around Iran have exposed a subtle but important shift within the alliance. The United States, along with Israel, has adopted a firm and forward posture. Several European members, however, have responded with caution. Their reluctance is not dramatic; there are no formal breaks or dramatic exits. But there is a noticeable pause, a weighing of costs, a preference for distance. This is not simply disagreement. It is a difference in instinct.

Rome experienced something similar when its provinces began to respond to the centre with calculation rather than commitment. Orders were still issued, but they were no longer followed with the same certainty. Local priorities began to take precedence over imperial ones. The empire still functioned, but it no longer moved as one. There is a quiet parallel here.

NATO today still speaks the language of unity, but its actions suggest a more careful, case-by-case approach. Participation is no longer assumed; it is discussed. Commitments are no longer automatic; they are considered. This does not mean the alliance is collapsing, but it does indicate that its internal rhythm has changed.

One place where this change becomes visible is the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow stretch of water carries a significant share of the world’s oil, making it critical far beyond its geography. Any disruption there is felt quickly, in fuel prices, in markets, in everyday life, from Europe to Asia and from Arab to Africa and to Kashmir.

For Washington, securing such a route appears as a shared duty. For many European governments, the same situation looks different. The risks of deeper military involvement, the pressures at home, and the memory of past conflicts all shape a more cautious response. Neither side is unaware of what is at stake. They simply judge the path forward differently. This is where alliances are tested, not in agreement, but in divergence.

Another feature of Rome’s decline was not just what happened, but how it was seen. As long as Rome appeared stable, its authority held. But when cracks became visible, confidence faded quickly. Allies hesitated. Rivals grew more assertive. Perception began to shape reality.

The same risk exists for NATO. When disagreements are expressed openly, especially in sharp terms, they travel far. They are heard not only within the alliance, but beyond it. Questions arise, not always spoken, but present, about how firm the alliance really is. And once such questions take root, they are not easily dismissed.

For places like Kashmir, this may seem distant, yet the effects are not. A shift in the security of the Strait of Hormuz can influence fuel costs overnight. A change in how major powers align can alter the broader environment in which smaller regions exist. The world is interconnected in ways that do not allow such developments to remain isolated.

Still, it would be too simple to say that NATO is declining in the way Rome did. History does not repeat itself so neatly. What it does offer, however, are patterns, warnings about what happens when systems grow complex, when burdens become uneven, and when shared purpose begins to blur.

NATO is not an empire, and it does not face the same conditions. But it does face a similar question, how to remain coherent when its members no longer see every issue through the same lens. That question does not have an easy answer.

It may require a quieter kind of adjustment, less about grand declarations and more about redefining expectations. It may mean accepting that unity today does not look like it did in the past. Or it may demand a more serious effort to rebuild a common understanding of what the alliance is meant to do. What is clear is that ignoring the shift will not reverse it.

Trump’s remark, stripped of its tone, points toward a gap, between what is expected and what is offered, between leadership and participation. Whether that gap widens or narrows will shape the alliance in the years ahead.

Rome, in its final centuries, still carried the appearance of strength. Its symbols endured even as its substance weakened. By the time the end came, it felt less like a sudden fall and more like the conclusion of a long process.

NATO stands far from such an end. Yet, like all large systems, it is not immune to the slow pressures that history has shown time and again. The real question is not whether it is decaying. The real question is whether it can sense the early signs, and respond before they become something more difficult to contain. Till these questions are discussed and answered, NATO is indeed declining towards decay.

Dr. Ashraf Zainabi is a teacher and researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora J&K

23 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Every war led by Benjamin Netanyahu is framed not as policy, but as fate.

“There are moments in which a nation faces two possibilities: to do or die,” Netanyahu declared on October 28, 2023, as Israel expanded its genocide in Gaza.

The wording is familiar. The urgency is always absolute. The implication is unmistakable: Israel is not choosing war. It is forced into it.

For many, the claim is inherently contradictory. How can a state initiate war—and in Gaza’s case, sustain a genocide—while insisting that it is merely defending itself from annihilation? Yet within Israeli political discourse, and across much of Western media, this contradiction is rarely interrogated. It is normalized.

That normalization is not incidental. It is foundational.

Long before the establishment of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948—the Nakba, or catastrophe, for Palestinians—the language of existential threat was deeply embedded in Zionist political thinking. Survival was never framed as coexistence, but as triumph. Security was never separated from expansion.

In recent years, that fatalistic language has returned with renewed intensity.

The events of October 7, 2023, brought a sudden end to what had been, for Netanyahu, a moment of unprecedented political triumph. Prior to the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Israel was not merely secure—it was ascending. A parallel “flood” was underway: normalization.

Arab, Muslim, African, Asian and even Latin American states were steadily incorporating Israel into their political and economic frameworks. The so-called isolation of Israel was collapsing.

Netanyahu was openly celebrating this shift. In September 2023, speaking alongside US President Joe Biden, he said, as reported by Reuters: “I think that under your leadership, Mr President, we can forge a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” adding that such a deal would “go a long way first to advance the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, achieve reconciliation between the Islamic world and the Jewish state.”

Days later, addressing the United Nations, he spoke of “the blessings of a new Middle East,” according to the official transcript of his September 22, 2023, UN speech.

This was not merely political rhetoric. It reflected a broader strategic project: Israel’s integration into the region, not through justice, but through power—through alliances with wealthy Gulf states, economic expansion, and geopolitical repositioning.

The genocide in Gaza shattered that trajectory.

Far from cementing Israel’s regional and global standing, the war has accelerated its isolation. According to a June 2025 Pew Research Center survey, majorities in most of the 24 countries surveyed held unfavorable views of Israel, while confidence in Netanyahu remained low across nearly all regions.

This shift is not limited to the Global South. It reflects a broader erosion of Israel’s legitimacy, even among traditional allies.

In response, Israeli political discourse has returned—almost instinctively—to the language of existential war.

Even when Netanyahu attempts to revive earlier narratives about shaping a “new Middle East,” the rhetoric repeatedly collapses back into warnings of annihilation. This reveals a deeper truth: within Israeli political thinking, the alternative to dominance is not coexistence, but destruction.

Part of this can indeed be explained through the logic of settler colonialism. Expansion is not incidental to settler-colonial projects; it is built into them. Such systems do not merely occupy land. They must continuously secure, reorder and enlarge their control, while presenting indigenous resistance as irrational violence.

Other settler-colonial societies remained colonial in essence while their territorial expansion was curbed by larger geopolitical constraints. Israel has never truly encountered such limits. It has not been meaningfully held accountable. Shielded by unconditional US support and enabled by Western powers that were themselves former or current colonial actors, it has had every structural incentive to continue.

But Israel’s fixation on existential danger even at the height of military superiority points to something deeper. It suggests a political culture haunted by its own origin story.

One possible explanation is moral and historical illegitimacy. Israel knows, at some buried but irrepressible level, that it was founded on the destruction of another people, on expulsion, massacre and erasure. A state built on the ruins of Palestine cannot indefinitely silence the history beneath it.

Still, there is more to the story.

Even before the genocide in Gaza, Israel was gripped by internal debates about its own continuity. In 2023, amid a profound political crisis, President Isaac Herzog warned of a possible “constitutional collapse,” according to Reuters. At the same time, Israeli discourse increasingly invoked the so-called “eighth decade curse,” the notion that Jewish political entities historically falter as they approach their eighth decade.

As noted in various newspapers, Netanyahu has been described as viewing himself as uniquely capable of leading Israel “into its eighth decade and beyond,” reflecting a deeper anxiety about national continuity.

October 7 brought these fears roaring back. So did the emergence of a more assertive regional pro-Palestine camp, particularly within what is often called the Axis of Resistance. True, several Arab regimes remained aligned with Washington and eager to contain the fallout. But in doing so, many only further exposed their own fragility.

From Israel’s perspective, this convergence of pressures reinforces both real and imagined fears—not only to state security, but to the ideological foundations upon which the state was built.

What makes this especially striking is that Israel has failed to secure decisive strategic outcomes in war after war. In Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and beyond, it has relied on overwhelming force without achieving lasting political resolution.

Here lies the central irony.

Israel’s fears, long framed as hypothetical or exaggerated, are being transformed into tangible risks—not by inevitability, but by Israel’s own actions.

The result is a self-fulfilling trajectory: a march toward deeper isolation, perpetual conflict, and internal uncertainty—driven not by necessity, but by an inability, or refusal, to imagine an alternative.

That march may yet reach its logical end.

The deepest irony is that Israel once had alternatives. It was not fated to choose this path. But a just coexistence—one grounded in equality and historical reckoning—has never been intelligible within Zionist political vocabulary. There, coexistence is recast as disappearance.

And so Israel is not merely confronting a crisis.

It is undoing itself, by its own hand.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

23 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak

In the middle of all the chaos in the world, Forbes magazine did not forget to celebrate its ritual of publishing its 40th annual World’s Billionaires List on 10 March 2026. The list not only reveals the continuing billionaire boom in the numbers and the growing concentration of power and wealth, but also highlights the rise of global inequality. Fortunes and fault lines move together in a world of plenty and pleasure controlled by so few, while the vast majority of people struggle to manage their everyday lives and to fulfil their basic needs for a dignified living.

According to the Forbes list, there are 3,428 billionaires in the world, and their combined net wealth has increased from $1 trillion in 2000 to $20.1 trillion in 2026. In the last year alone, billionaires’ wealth increased by $4 trillion from 2025 to 2026. In 2026, 400 billionaires were added to the list—the highest number since the publication of the Forbes Billionaires List began in 1987. This means the world has produced more than one billionaire per day over the past year while millions of people lost their jobs. In this year’s list, there are 20 billionaires with 12-figure fortunes as members of the $100 Billion Club, collectively owning $3.8 trillion, while 700 million people struggle to survive on $2.15 per day.

These billionaires are not merely the products of their own talent, hard work, creative abilities or family linages, just as the 700 million people living in poverty do not suffer because of a lack of hard work, skills, or talent. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and the suffering of marginalised masses, are products of the marketisation of politics in which people’s labour generates profits for these billionaires. States and governments create policies that facilitate the concentration of wealth by perpetuating conditions of poverty and inequality under the exploitative working conditions of capitalism, which defines and dominates the political economy of capitalist development across much of the world. Corporate-driven states and governments are responsible for producing these billionaires, who in turn control the state directly and indirectly—through funding, promoting propaganda for electoral manipulation, owning media, consultancies, public relations and advertisement industries and influencing policymaking to serve their interests at the expense of the people.

Geographically speaking, out of a total of 3,428 billionaires, more than half (1,757) are from the United States (989), China (539), and India (229). American billionaires own the lion’s share of global billionaire wealth—$8.4 trillion out of the total combined billionaire wealth of $20.1 trillion. These three countries face enormous challenges of rising wealth inequality amid a continuing billionaire boom, which creates very different life experiences based on ownership, access to power, and the everyday struggle to survive the pressures of marginalisation.The ten richest Indian billionaires alone own more than $1 trillion, while India’s GDP today is around $4.51 trillion. This not only reveals the scale of wealth ownership and inequality, but also reflects the nature of the state and government in India, which appears to stand with the billionaire class while leaving the working masses to face a deepening cost-of-living crisis.

The profit-making market machine is never dull for these individual billionaires, as the state and government stand firmly behind them. Meanwhile, working people make all the money: they produce all the goods and provide all the services, harvest all the food, and construct all the schools, colleges, universities, roads and communication networks, houses, and hospitals. Yet they themselves often suffer from hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, and ill health. These facilities are not accessible for working people. These conditions are not accidental; they are the outcome of the design of the capitalist system and its control over states, governments and their policies. In this process, billionaires have effectively transformed democracy into a form of billionaire oligarchy and society into an orderly marketplace of commodities, where profit over people has become the rule rather than merely an outcome.

The Forbes list of billionaires not only reveals the scale of wealth concentration as a form of economic injustice rooted in different regimes of capitalist exploitation, but also points to the political structures that facilitate such an economic system—one that benefits 3,428 billionaires who are not blessed by gods or goddesses, but by the policies of states and governments across the world. In a world of 8.3 billion people, only a tiny fraction—the 3,428 billionaires—live lives of extraordinary privilege, while the vast majority struggle to manage and survive in 2026. These numbers tell the story of the exploitation of the masses amid limitless wealth accumulation by billionaires that extends beyond the boundaries of nation-states. These billionaires are not merely wealthy individuals with corporate ownership; they are also powerful shareholders of capitalist system.

These billionalires club represent a class network of collaboration and cooperation without territorial boundaries, fuelling the forward march of right-wing reactionary forces and their war-mongering imperialist agendas. As cheerleaders of capitalism, they preside over a system that ruins the lives and livelihoods of people in order to amass wealth, undermines citizenship rights, and erodes economic justice—thereby breeding inequality and exploitation, the very lifeblood of capitalism. Therefore, the struggle against the capitalist system remains central to ensuring a more equitable distribution of wealth and to building an egalitarian society grounded in fairness and justice in all its forms.

Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a political commentator

12 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

Hindutva & Zionism: Exclusionary Religion, Racism, and Nationalism

A Formula for Forced Displacement and Genocide

By Areeka Khan, Genocide Watch

This report examines the historical origins and social impact of Hindutva in India and Zionism in Israel and Palestine. It explores how these ideologies shape national identity, citizenship, and belonging, and how they produce, sustain, and justify exclusion, forced displacement, apartheid, and genocide

1. Introduction

India’s soil is layered with memory. Under its surface are the wreckage of empires and the footprints of refugees. India’s air vibrates with Sanskrit chants from temple courtyards and azaans from mosque minarets. India’s markets resound with the polyphony of hundreds of languages. India is a multicolored tapestry woven from the braided threads of a thousand cultures.

India is not just a nation. It is a subcontinent where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and Christians have lived together for millennia. Yet, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a new imagination took shape, one that sought to tidy up the mess of history, to scrape away its sedimentary layers, and declare the land singularly Hindu.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar called it Hindutva—not a religion, but a nation carved out of blood, ancestry, and devotion to a mythical Hindu civilization. In his 1923 The Essentials of Hindutva, he argued that being Hindu was not about gods or prayers but about ancestry, territory, and culture. India, he wrote, was a fatherland (pitrbhu) and a sacred land (punyabhu) only for Hindus, including reluctantly Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, while explicitly excluding Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands, he spat, lay elsewhere. In a single stroke, Hindutva turned millions of Indians into strangers in their own homes.

Savarkar’s imprisonment by the British in the Andaman Islands hardened his creed. From his cell he seethed at the privileges granted to Muslim inmates—religious texts, communal prayers—while Hindus were denied the same. To him, this was not just prison politics; it was proof of an eternal conspiracy. Out of these resentments, he fashioned a theology of revenge, sharpened in later works like Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History and Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?

His writings sanctified violence, dressed up grievance as destiny, and suggested that cruelty was not only permitted but necessary. In Six Glorious Epochs, he mourned that Hindus, when invaded by Muslim rulers, had suffered the barbarity of rape, forced conversion, and slaughter. In Savarkar’s arithmetic, brutality against Muslims was not shameful, but payment of an unpaid debt, overdue.

A century later, Savarkar’s words are no longer confined to pamphlets on dusty bookshelves. They are government policy. They justify pogroms. They are expressed in lynching videos passed around on WhatsApp, like postcards of lynchings sold in the segregationist American South.

In 2015, Mohammad Akhlaq was murdered in Dadri over rumors of beef in his fridge. In 2017, Junaid Khan, fifteen years old, was stabbed to death on a train after being called a “beef-eater” and a“Pakistani.” Dairy farmer Pehlu Khan was lynched in Rajasthan despite showing his papers proving that his cattle were legal. Rakbar Khan died as police delayed his medical care. Tabrez Ansari was beaten for hours in Jharkhand and forced to chant Hindu slogans until he stopped breathing. These murders were not isolated crimes or accidents. They were the enactments of Hindutva’s script. They were warnings written on the bodies of Muslims.

Beyond the mobs, Hindutva has crept into law, schoolbooks, television anchors’ scripts, and judges’ verdicts. Anti-conversion laws, advertised as cultural protection, are weaponized to harass and humiliate Muslims and Christians. Textbooks are airbrushed. The architectural achievements of Muslim emperors are denied and turned to dust. Hindu kings glow in nationalist halos. Newspapers vomit conspiracy theories about “Love Jihad.” Police file cases against victims instead of their assailants. Courts stall or shrug until cases against murderers are dismissed. The state no longer merely tolerates Hindutva—it has become its open ideology.

What began as a cultural and political theory now masquerades as manufactured consent, shaping citizenship, subjecting food, love, prayer, politics, and history to police surveillance. Hindutva does not just govern India; it colonizes imagination itself.

2. Palestine: Memory, Exile, and the Birth of Zionism

Four thousand kilometers (2500 miles) away in Jerusalem, the maps of history were already ancient when colonial rulers redrew them. Ottoman rule had mapped its provinces, Crusaders had marched and fallen, empires had come and gone, but the land remained stitched together by villages, markets, olive groves, and marriage. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived as neighbors—sometimes quarrelsome, sometimes close, always entangled in the ordinary rhythms of farming, trade, and worship. Palestine was not a blank canvas; it was a manuscript written and rewritten across centuries.

In the late 19th century, Jewish communities in Europe—trapped in ghettos, ravaged by pogroms in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine—lived in a continent that treated them as parasites and scapegoats. They fled, but persecution followed them. America turned them away. The Holocaust had not yet plunged Europe into night, but its darkness was already gathering.

Responses diverged. The General Jewish Labour Bund insisted on fighting for dignity where people already lived, adopting the Marxist languages of solidarity and class struggle. Others, like Theodor Herzl, Menachem Usishkin, and Vladimir Jabotinsky, conjured another answer: emigrate to Palestine. Herzl sought imperial patrons, Usishkin argued that Palestinians must be removed, and Jabotinsky declared that only forceful domination could secure survival. Chaim Weizmann polished Zionism to make it shine for diplomats, winning over Britain. The Jewish National Fund and Histadrut laid the groundwork for Israel by buying land, fencing it, and forbidding Palestinian labor.

In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, a colonial promissory note promising Palestine as a “national home for the Jewish people” without consulting a single Palestinian.

Between 1920 and 1947, waves of Jewish immigrants arrived under British protection. As settlements expanded, Palestinian farmers were displaced, and resistance committees—like the Arab Higher Committee—were dismissed as nuisances by the imperial office. The land was quietly being prepared for dispossession.

Under Nazi Germany, the Holocaust ravaged Europe. Six million Jews and six million others were exterminated in camps and forests, leaving survivors staggering into the ruins of Europe in nothing but death camp rags. For many Jews, Palestine became not just a future homeland but the only imaginable refuge. Zionism was fertilized by the ashes of crematoria—part survival instinct, part colonial opportunity, part imperial convenience.

In 1947, Jews owned 6.6% of Palestine’s land. In 1947, the UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) carved Palestine into fragments, granting the Jewish minority 55% of the land while ignoring Palestinian opposition.18 What began as civil conflict between Jewish and Arab communities in Mandatory Palestine quickly escalated into a regional war following the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948.

The ink on Israel’s independence declaration was hardly dry when all of Israel’s Arab neighbors attacked, determined to destroy Israel. By the time armistice agreements were signed in 1949, 5,000 to 13,000 Palestinians and 6000 Jewish Israelis were dead. Israel emerged controlling 78% of the territory of Mandatory Palestine — far more than was allocated under the UN plan. No Palestinian state was established.

Israel’s Arab neighbors attacked again in three wars. The Six-Day War ended in 1967, with Israel occupying the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Israel’s effective control increased to nearly allof historic Palestine.

In 1948, the Nakba began. 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from Israel and over 400 Palestinian villages were demolished. Olive groves were abandoned. Palestinian families carried keys to homes they hoped to return to. Exile calcified into permanent forced displacement.

In 2026, Israel maintains military control over nearly all of Palestine, with 700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Jewish settlements in the West Bank violate international law, including:

Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), Article 49(6) – which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies;

UN Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 2334 (2016), which affirm that territory cannot be acquired by war;

The Hague Conventions (1907) – which require an occupying power to administer the territory without making permanent changes for its own benefit.

2. The Impact of Zionism

Zionism, some scholars argue, is not only an ideology for ethnic and religious nationalism. It is also a justification for settler colonialism. Patrick Wolfe called it the “logic of elimination.” The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” justified two goals in one sentence: depriving Palestinians of ownership, and making Jewish settlement appear inevitable.

In 1975, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 labeled Zionism as a form of racism. This designation was revoked in the Oslo Accords, reflecting the deep political and conceptual ambiguity surrounding Zionism itself.

For Jews, Zionism represents a national liberation movement, a refuge from persecution, and the hope of Jewish survival after the Holocaust.

Zionism was never unanimously supported by Jews. Bundists, Reform Jews, followers of the Lubavicher Rebbe, and advocates of accommodation with plural societies like the USA opposed Zionism. They argued that Jewish survival did not require emigration to Israel or dispossession of half of Palestine. But history, written in Jewish blood and Palestine’s soil, spoke louder than the voices of doubters.

For Palestinians, Zionism has been experienced as a settler-colonial project. Most Palestinians see Zionism as a justification for forced displacement of Palestinians and dispossession of Palestinian territory.

For Europeans, Americans, Russians, and others, the meaning of Zionism has varied with diplomacy, ideology, and realpolitik, sometimes valorized, sometimes condemned.

At the time of the 1978 Camp David Accords, there were 7,400 Israeli settlers in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem), and 500 in Gaza. The Oslo Accords (1993–95) did not resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. They created a labyrinth of split authority, with Gaza fenced off and the West Bank carved into checkpoints and cantons. Settlements spread faster than ever, and the so-called “peace process” became a process without peace, scattering Palestinians into disconnected territories.

International institutions circled but did not bite. UNSC resolution 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) called for Israeli withdrawal and negotiation. But the U.S. armed Israel, vetoed UN resolutions, and nullified international consensus. The world nodded and looked away.

3. When Religious Ideas Become State Ideologies

If Zionism and Hindutva were only ideologies, they might have remained utopian fantasies. But both ideas found states as sponsors, bureaucracies to command, and armies to enforce their logic. Once ideas seize institutions, they stop being debates and become daily life measured in checkpoints, laws, censuses, and corpses.

Institutionalization makes abstract ideas into concrete reality. In this reification of exclusionary religion lies the kinship of Hindutva and Zionism. They are not just parallel projects in different historical and cultural settings. They mirror each other. The founders of Hindutva studied Zionism and learned how to make myth into legitimate statecraft.

In India, the RSS and its political offspring, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), slipped from the margins of Indian politics into the center, carrying with them the dream of a Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu Nation. In 2014, Narendra Modi—whose tenure as Chief Minister of Gujarat was soaked in the blood of the 2002 genocidal massacres—was sworn in as Prime Minister of India.

Under Modi, Hindutva ceased to be an ominous backstage whisper. It became state policy. Vigilante mobs lynched Muslims accused of eating beef. Courts looked away. Police filed charges against victims instead of their attackers. The state was no longer a neutral referee; it picked the side of Hindu bigotry.

In Israel, Zionism was adopted as a state ideology in 1948. The “Jewish and democratic” contradiction hardened into law as Palestinians inside Israel’s borders became “Arab Israelis,” citizens in name, but separated suspects in practice. The Occupation of 1967 extended Zionism’s reach from the UN recognized boundaries of Israel into Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Settlements rose like fortresses. Checkpoints were arms of muscular control. The Occupied Territories became testing grounds for domination: ID cards, permits, curfews, bulldozing Palestinian houses, and collective punishment.

Both India and Israel weaponized law. India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) opened doors for every refugee from neighboring countries except Muslims. It defined legitimate citizenship along religious lines.

Israel’s Nation-State Law (2018) declared that only Jews have the right to self-determination as citizens of Israel, reducing Palestinians to permanent squatters in their own homeland.

In both countries, these laws were not just manifestations of exclusionary policies. They were declarations of the intent to impose apartheid.

Governance turned faith into surveillance. In India, the National Register of Citizens rendered Muslim refugees who came to Assam from Bangladesh in 1971 stateless overnight. Muslim families who had lived in Assam for generations, but who lacked paper proof of citizenship, went missing from lists that determined who belonged to India.

In Israel, family reunification laws forbade Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza from marrying Palestinians inside the 1948 borders of Israel, splitting families with merciless precision.

Both states spoke of “security.” Both meant exclusion.

Even landscapes were conscripted. In India, mosques were demolished, their sites rebuilt as Hindu temples.

In Israel, olive groves were uprooted to make way for bypass roads and separation walls. The soil itself was laid waste for belonging to the wrong people. The land was rebuilt according to scripture: temples for Hindus, West Bank settlements for Jews.

Religious governance is legitimized theology. Not secular law, but sacred decree enforced by state police. Not democracy, but majoritarian rule dressed as destiny. Hindutva and Zionism do not just govern the state. They govern memory, space, even time—deciding who has a past worth keeping, who has a future worth living.

4. The Enemy

Every empire, every racist, ethnic, or national supremacist project, needs its negative shadow. For Hindutva and Zionism, survival depends on conjuring an eternal Enemy—always present, never defeated, forever justifying violence. This is the deepest kinship between Zionism and Hindutva: the invention of the Other.

In India, that Other is the Muslim. Not simply a neighbor, not simply another citizen, but the ghost of Mughal rule, painted as the eternal invader even after seven decades of independence. Schoolbooks are rewritten so that centuries of coexistence shrink into a story of conquest and humiliation. From Babri Masjid to Aurangzeb’s tomb, the past is not history—it is weaponry. Hindutva propagandists. From Babri Masjid to Aurangzeb’s tomb, the past is not history—it is weaponry. Hindutva propagandists even claim that the Taj Mahal was not built by Shah Jahan for his late wife but was constructed by Hindus as a Hindu temple. Pogroms in Gujarat, lynchings over beef, riots in Delhi: each is narrated not as aggression but as self-defense against a permanent threat.

In Israel, the Palestinian is the eternal enemy. A refugee child in Gaza, a farmer in Hebron, a student in Jerusalem—all are collapsed into the personified “Other.” All are “terrorists.” The state does not distinguish between armed resistance and existence itself. A child throwing a stone, a grandmother keeping the keys to her demolished house, a poet writing of return: all are threats to national security. This flattening of identity is what allows Israel to bomb refugee camps in the name of “counterterrorism.”

The enemy is not only killed. He is made ungrievable. Judith Butler calls it the “differential allocation of grief.”

“Our” deaths are mourned. Deaths of “Others” are statistics. When a Hindu mob lynches a Muslim man in India, the news cycle frames it as “communal tension.” When an Israeli airstrike buries a Palestinian family, it is “collateral damage.” Euphemisms do the clean-up work for massacres.

Both Hindutva and Zionism depend on siege mentalities. Hindutva insists that 200 million Muslims are an internal army, waiting to divide the nation. Zionism insists that six million Palestinians are an existential threat to Israel. In this logic, numbers do not matter; even a starving child is cast as a danger to the state. For Israel, nuclear weapons are the necessary deterrent to Pakistan, Iran, or other Muslim nations that could use nuclear weapons to destroy Israel.

The “Enemy” is necessary to maintain an exclusionary ideology. Without the Muslim, Hindutva loses its fuel. Without Palestinians, Arab nations, and Iran, Zionism loses the mortal threats that justify Israel’s existence. The Enemy is the scaffolding that holds the edifice of exclusionary religion upright. That is why for extreme Zionists, peace with genocidal Hamas Palestinians, Hezbollah, and Iran is impossible. Peace would disarm the Enemy. Without the Enemy, the justification for a Greater Israel collapses.

Those who would attempt to make peace with the Enemy are traitors. That is why after he signed the Oslo Accords, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist.

5. Citizenship, Belonging, and Exile

Hindutva and Zionism both understand that to truly exile the Other, you not only drive them from their land—you strip them of belonging to a nation. You turn them into ghosts in their own country.

In India, this work sharpened with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)(2019). It opened the door to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who are fleeing persecution in neighboring countries. But it slammed the door shut to exclude Muslims. The CAA law is not about defining the rights of refugees. It is about excluding Muslims from becoming citizens of India.

Coupled with the National Register of Citizens, millions of Muslims in Assam were rendered stateless overnight. Their names are now missing from government lists that record who has the rights of Indian citizenship, including the right to vote and the right to live in India. The lives of Muslims shrank into piles of documents: ration cards, voter slips, land deeds. A missing piece of paper could erase generations of residence in India.

In Israel, exclusion has been underway for decades. The Law of Return (1950) granted every Jew in the world the automatic right to citizenship, even those who had never set foot in Palestine. Palestinians expelled in 1948, meanwhile, were forbidden to return to their homes. In 2018, the Nation-State Law stripped away the pretense. Only Jews, it declared, had the right to self-determination as Israeli citizens. Palestinians became permanent residents in their own homeland, without citizenship, tolerated but never equal.

Both India and Israel stage belonging rituals as loyalty tests. In India, Muslims are asked to prove loyalty by chanting “Bharat Mata ki Jai” (identifying India as a Hindu state) on demand. They must accept their mosques as rebuilt on the sites of destroyed Hindu temples. They must bear their persecution in silence.

In Israel, Palestinians are asked to accept their dispossession as necessary to obtain jobs in Israel. They must prove at entry points and checkpoints that they have clearances from Israeli authorities that they are not terrorists. Arab Israelis must live in Israel invisibly. Israeli citizenship is conditional, always under review.

These requirements are exclusionary theology written in bureaucratic ink. The state is saying: your birth does not entitle you to civil and human rights. Your history does not anchor you in this nation. Your very existence is provisional. It is the slow violence of paperwork, the quiet terror of never being able to prove that you belong and are fully human.

6. Culture as Battlefield

If citizenship documents decide who belongs on paper, culture decides who belongs in practice. Hindutva and Zionism walk hand in hand—rewriting, erasing, renaming, demolishing. They are a religious form of Stalinism: expunging names, rewriting history, remaking maps, demolishing temples.

In India, history is rewritten with saffron ink. Textbooks quietly drop Mughal emperors, gloss over Partition, exalt myths as facts. Temples rise where mosques once stood. In 1992, the Babri Masjid was torn down brick by brick by bare hands and sledgehammers. It has now been replaced by a gleaming Ram temple, dedicated by Prime Minister Modi himself. Such destruction is less about faith than about conquest. It is meant to tell an entire people: “Your memory is rubble. Ours is marble.”

In Israel, the story is uncannily similar. Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 are replanted with pine forests. Their Arabic names are stripped from maps. Their ruins are buried under parks and Jewish settlements. Mosques are shuttered. Palestinian Christian churches are monitored. Teaching the history of the Nakba is outlawed from classrooms. The word Nakba itself cannot be spoken except in whispers. The erasure of Palestinian culture in Israel is methodical. The forced displacement of Palestinians makes self-censorship necessary for survival.

Both Hindutva and Zionism share an obsession: to own the past to control the future. Every defaced shrine, every demolished home, every rewritten textbook repeats the same message: “You don’t belong here—you never did.”

This is why the battle is not only over land or law but over imagination itself. It is about who gets to dream, who gets to tell stories, who gets to say, “This was ours.” Hindutva and Zionism know that memory is the foundation for resistance. So, they seek to erase it, to police it, to bomb it out of existence.

Culture, then, becomes the front line. Not only in the clash of monuments and curricula but in kitchens, in lullabies, in prayers whispered under siege. It is in these quiet acts of remembering, that Hindutva and Zionism face their most dangerous adversary: the refusal to forget.

7. Fear and Narrative

Fear is the scaffolding of state power. Advocates of Hindutva and Zionism understand that violence is only half the work. The rest is in the mind. The Other must not only be contained. The Enemy must be imagined as omnipresent, omniscient, omnithreatening. Fear must become habit, ritual, doctrine.

In India, Muslims are cast as conspirators, seditionists, invaders dressed in local skin. Mob violence, legal harassment, and social media vibrate with the same pulse: “You are not safe here.”

In Israel, Palestinians are statistics instead of persons with names. The protester throwing stones, the mother holding her baby while lining up for food in Gaza, the old man weeping over the bodies of his dead grandchildren—each is framed as a mortal threat. Checkpoints, ID cards, airstrikes, settler patrols: all operate under the rubric of “security,” a euphemism that conceals dispossession.

Both the Indian and Israeli regimes weaponize history. Past humiliation becomes present entitlement. For Hindutva, centuries of “Muslim rule” justify lynching and legal discrimination. For Zionism, European anti-Semitism justifies forced deportation, occupation, settlement, and siege. Victimhood becomes a license to kill.

Trauma is spun into ethnic and religious supremacy.

Yet the Other is stubbornly human. Every demolished mosque, every lynched Muslim, every bombed school, every uprooted olive grove represents a life that refuses to vanish quietly. The existence of the Others, their grief, their memory—these are the cracks in the fortress of fear.

Fear is distributed through words, through laws, through media narratives. Citizenship, surveillance, and curriculum work together: the state tells the majority, “You are besieged,” and tells the minority,“You are disposable.” The same narrative is rehearsed endlessly, until it is accepted as fact: the Nation survives only by defeating the Enemy at every turn.

But fear has its limits. It may govern bodies, but it cannot govern memory, imagination, or solidarity. For every act of exclusion, every act of terror, there are witnesses who insist on visibility. Palestinians, Muslims, Christians, Dalits—they do not disappear. They speak, they resist, they remember. And in that stubborn insistence, the narrative of fear cracks and crumbles off the sand into the sea.

8. Resistance and Recognition

For every ideology that conjures the Other, there is resistance. For every state that demands obedience, there are people who refuse it. Hindutva and Zionism may wield armies, laws, and textbooks—but the human spirit bends neither to propaganda nor to fear.

In Palestine, resistance is woven into the very fabric of daily life. Gaza children fly kites over rubble-strewn neighborhoods, their strings defying drones. Families clutch the keys to homes bulldozed in 1948, passing the memory of those houses down through generations. Prayers are offered at checkpoints; poets and musicians transform mourning into song, grief into global witness. Even in the shadow of siege, Palestinians refuse erasure simply by existing, by naming their villages, by insisting the Nakba is not a footnote but an open wound.

In India, resistance takes its own forms. Women of Shaheen Bagh sat through the winter of 2019. Indian Constitution in one hand, hope in the other, they turned protest into pedagogy. Students at Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh raised their voices even as police batons fell on their heads, reclaiming public space through song, speech, and silent defiance.

Resistance is not only survival—it is creation. Counter-histories are written in exile; counter-spaces are carved out in occupied lands; counter-dreams are stitched from scraps of stolen memory. Each act, each chant, each poem, each carefully tended olive tree insists that plurality, justice, and belonging are not concessions from the state—they are rights. They exist independently of recognition.

Resistance and recognition are two sides of the same coin. To resist is to declare one exists; to recognize is to honor that existence. Hindutva and Zionism may write laws, redraw borders, and destroy buildings—but they cannot exorcise memory, nor silence the lives that insist on being seen.

9. The Future

The story is not over. Every empire, every ideology, imagines its own eternity. Zionism dreams of a secure, Jewish-only homeland, walled and surveilled, where Palestinians are contained or erased. Hindutva dreams of a Hinduized India, cleansed not by armies alone but by law, education, and imagined history. Both envision a world where the majority is permanent, the Other provisional, where democracy is a costume stitched over single hued religious supremacy.

The consequences of realizing these visions are stark. Democracy hollowed out, reduced to a game for those who fit the prescribed identity. Minority rights erased, subject to the whims of majoritarian law. Neighboring states guarding militarized borders, populations excluded, resentment festering into cycles of violence and migration.

The dream of a “pure” nation, achieved, is not triumph—it is a warning that the explosive mixture of exclusionary religion, racism, and militant nationalism may succeed for a time, as it did in Islamic jihads, the Crusades, European colonialism, US “Manifest Destiny,” Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. But its dominance comes at the cost of genocide, measured in millions of deaths, slavery, and tyranny.

Zionism and Hindutva may imagine themselves as permanent, unchallengeable, inevitable—but humanity persists. It is in that human persistence, in that stubborn refusal to be erased, that the true stories of India and Israel live on — in their lands, peoples, and histories.

This darkness is not inevitable. History is not a line but a braid: conquest, resistance, memory, imagination, solidarity and freedom movements intertwine. If the humanity of Others is cradled like a secret flame, a different world is possible. One where fear does not dictate who belongs, where plurality is celebrated rather than erased, where law protects rather than weaponizes, where memory is honored rather than buried.

The future is in the balance. It is written in keys Palestinians keep to homes that no longer stand. It is murmured in Urdu couplets and flown in kites in Gaza. It is whispered in protests at Shaheen Bagh and Jamia. It is carved in olive trees and ruined mosques. It is taught in lessons and sung in lullabies that never vanish. The erased write themselves back into life every day. The future is a page unturned and unburned. It is a place where love is stronger than hatred, and where justice is more powerful than genocide.

19 March 2026

Source: genocidewatch.com

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak

Anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-apartheid, and anti-racist foundations of the Indian freedom struggle laid the foundations of the foreign policy and international relations of post-colonial India. Only fifteen months after Indian independence, on 25 November 1948, Article 40 of the Draft Constitution of India (1948) adopted the principle that “the State shall promote international peace and security by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations, by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among governments, and by the maintenance of justice and respect for treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another.” This draft article was later incorporated and enacted on 26th of January 1950 as Article 51 in Part IV—Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution of India, which directs the Indian state to pursue foreign policy to achieve the ideals in which “the State shall endeavour to— (a) promote international peace and security; (b) maintain just and honourable relations between nations; (c) foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another; and (d) encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration.”. These constitutional provisions provide the moral foundation of Indian foreign policy.

Unlike the Westphalian colonial, imperialist, and racialised capitalist nation-states of Europe and the United States, Indian foreign policy is not governed by self-centered and ficticiaous national interests sans the interests of people but by the principles of international peace, security, law, and justice. These principles provided direction to many post-colonial states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to incorporate similar ideals into the praxis of their foreign policies. The moral fabric of Indian foreign policy has thus influenced the principles governing international relations in many post-colonial countries. India provided moral leadership to the world when the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, articulated the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, known as Panchsheel: (i) mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; (ii) mutual non-aggression; (iii) mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; (iv) equality and mutual benefit; and (v) peaceful coexistence. These principles were first signed by India and China and were later adopted as core principles of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). They were further deepened in the Bandung Declaration adopted at the Afro-Asian Conference held in Indonesia in 1955. In this way, these values and principles not only guided the foreign policy of India but also influenced the foreign relations of more than 120 countries under India’s moral leadership.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was not merely about maintaining an independent foreign policy or refusing to take sides. It was about taking the side of justice, equality, and freedom at a time when a bipolar world order was imposed upon the world during the Cold War period. NAM emerged as a collective and internationaist force that sought to shape international politics in favour of world peace and actively opposed the war-mongering policies of colonial, racist, and imperialist powers in Western Europe and the United States.

India, under its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, demonstrated this principled and moral position by condemning the USSR’s Operation Whirlwind, which led to the invasion of Hungary, without any hesitation, even while maintaining strong and friendly relations with the Soviet Union. Such clarity and independence in India’s position during 1956 gave the country an extraordinary stature as a moral leader of post-colonial states and an uncompromising advocate of world peace.

India stood with Africa during its struggle against European colonialism and racist apartheid regime. Indian stood with Latin America in its struggle against American imperialism. India also stood with the Jewish people during the Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe. It provided refuge to Jewish communities, including those known as the “Tehran Children,” in India during 1943. At the same time, India was among the first countries to recognise the State of Israel while opposing Zionist politics that led to the occupation of Palestinian land. India strongly supported the Palestinian struggle and their right to statehood, advocating a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. India also stood with Arab countries in their fight against colonialism and feudalism. Indian, African, and Arab nationalist movements and states worked together to build the Non-Aligned Movement as a moral force for world peace.

These historical legacies of Indian foreign policy were first diluted by the Congress Party and its successive governments when they adopted neoliberal economic policies to pursue a free-market economy and formed economic and political alliances with Western European countries and the United States. American foreign policy, particularly through its Global War on Terror, gradually incorporated India into its strategic framework. The Indo–US nuclear deal, led by the Congress Party government, further strengthened Indo–US relations and softened earlier tensions and anti-India positions within American foreign policy. This growing Indo–US relationship, along with the War on Terror framework, also reinforced the existing ties between India and Israel and diluted India’s earlier position in strong support of Palestinian struggles for independence.

The ideological foundations and historical legacies of Indian foreign policy were further diluted by the first BJP government led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and later by the BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has been steadily dismantling the foundations of Indian foreign policy brick by brick. Hindutva, Zionist, colonial racist, and imperialist ideologies share significant similarities in their orientations, particularly in their grounding in supremacist ideas of puritan ethno-nationalism in the service of crony capitalism. These ideological convergences bring leaders such as Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu into close alignment. These three leaders are undermining the historical and ideological foundations of multicultural societies in Israel, India, and the United States. Rather than working for the interests of the American, Jewish, Israeli, and Indian peoples and their countries, their political orientations advance projects of imperial domination in pursuit of unfettered capitalism.

India, under Hindutva politics and the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has weakened India’s political and economic independence, as well as the moral ethos and constitutional foundations of its foreign policy. This has adversely affected India’s foreign relations and diminished its position in world affairs as a moral force for world peace. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown little moral or political resolve in opposing the Israeli war that has devastated the Palestinian people, undermining peace and stability in the Middle East, the Arab world, and West Asia. He has also failed to condemn American and Israeli attacks on Iranian targets, including schools and civilian areas, which have reportedly resulted in the deaths of schoolchildren, women, and unarmed civilians in the streets of Tehran. Such silence risks isolating India and weakening its long-standing historic and uncompromised reputation as a resilient moral force for world peace on the international stage.

Hindutva politics and its alliances with Zionist and imperialist forces are primarily about upholding the interests of crony capitalism in the name of national interests. This reactionary alliance has harmed lives and livelihoods, damaged the environment, and undermined world peace. The hollowness of Hindutva foreign policy, and its reactionary propaganda hidden behind the rhetoric of Indian nationalism, is now increasingly evident. The Hindutva government under Narendra Modi has failed to uphold the interests of the Indian people, the nation, and world peace. By forming such alliances and abandoning the internationalist ethos that historically guided Indian foreign policy, it has pursued a directionless strategy of so-called “multi-alignment.” This approach threatens India’s historic relationships and friendships with Russia and with countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Arab world, and Latin America.

Indians must defeat Hindutva in order to oppose Zionist imperialism and its system of racial capitalism, while resetting India’s foreign policy, foreign relations, and international friendships based on peace and solidarity. This would help re-establish the moral, internationalist and constitutional ethos of Indian foreign policy and its independence in the pursuit of world peace and opposition to all wars.

Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a political commentator

15 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org