How the rapture explains the rupture over Israel on the American right

How the rapture explains the rupture over Israel on the American right

Joshua Zeitz writes: It’s no secret that Israel is losing ground in American public opinion on both the left and the right, even as many American Jews feel newly besieged by rising antisemitism. On much of the left, activists and intellectuals increasingly interpret Israel and Zionism through anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks, casting the conflict in the moral language of oppressor and oppressed. On the right, a different but equally consequential shift is underway. Influential conservatives like Tucker Carlson have come…

Read More Read More

Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution

Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution

Michael Lynk writes: In 1982, Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, spoke to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., about research that he and other social scientists in Israel were conducting into the political implications of the rapidly expanding Israeli settler population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). That year, there were 22,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, with another 76,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and 6,500 in the Gaza Strip. According to an Anthony…

Read More Read More

Intel report warns large-scale war ‘unlikely’ to oust Iran’s regime

Intel report warns large-scale war ‘unlikely’ to oust Iran’s regime

The Washington Post reports: A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment, a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials say has “only just begun.” The findings, confirmed to The Washington Post by three people familiar with the report’s contents, raise doubts about President Donald…

Read More Read More

Iran rejects Trump’s demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ as a ‘dream’

Iran rejects Trump’s demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ as a ‘dream’

The Guardian reports: The president of Iran has rejected Donald Trump’s call for the country’s unconditional surrender as a “dream”, while issuing a rare apology for Iranian attacks that hit neighbouring states, even as missiles and drones continued to strike Gulf countries. In a prerecorded address broadcast on state television on Saturday, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said the country would never capitulate, responding to remarks by the US president, who said on Friday that only Iran’s total submission could bring…

Read More Read More

Drone strikes targeting Amazon datacenters raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower

Drone strikes targeting Amazon datacenters raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower

The Guardian reports: It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacentre by the armed forces of a country at war. At 4.30am on Sunday morning, an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacentre in the United Arab Emirates, setting off a devastating fire and forcing a shutdown of the power supply. Further damage was inflicted as attempts were made to suppress the flames with water. Soon after, a second data centre…

Read More Read More

Iraqi Kurds insist on neutrality while ‘there is no clarity for us on what the U.S. policy is’ on Iran

Iraqi Kurds insist on neutrality while ‘there is no clarity for us on what the U.S. policy is’ on Iran

Axios reports: Iraq’s Kurds are caught in a three-way vise as the Iran war spills across their border: They’re uncertain, based on President Trump’s messaging, whether the U.S. actually wants regime change next door. They’re under pressure to open the border from Iranian Kurds who want to fight the regime. And they’re facing a public threat — backed by a private warning — that Iran will retaliate if those militants attack from Iraqi Kurdish soil. Why it matters: The Kurds of northern Iraq…

Read More Read More

‘Operation Epstein Distraction’: Trump’s bloody Iran ‘hype videos’ seem to target rightwing Gen Z males

‘Operation Epstein Distraction’: Trump’s bloody Iran ‘hype videos’ seem to target rightwing Gen Z males

The Guardian reports: Rap and EDM. Clips from action movies. Heads-up displays from video games. As the war with Iran approaches its second week, the White House has leaned into an online propaganda campaign that seems less about intimidating Iran or projecting US strength abroad than it is about reaching a rather niche domestic audience: young rightwing American men who spend a lot of time online. Over the past couple of days, the White House and officials affiliated with the…

Read More Read More

White House blocks intelligence report warning of rising homeland terror threat linked to Iran war

White House blocks intelligence report warning of rising homeland terror threat linked to Iran war

The Daily Mail reports: Donald Trump’s White House is blocking top US intelligence agencies from warning law enforcement across the country about rising threats to the homeland tied to his war with Iran, the Daily Mail can reveal. The FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center were preparing to put out a joint intelligence statement on Friday to state and local authorities alerting them of a heightened threat due to the ongoing war in Iran, a senior DHS official…

Read More Read More

Bodycam video indicates ICE lied about fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas

Bodycam video indicates ICE lied about fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas

CBS News reports: Video of the March 2025 fatal shooting of American citizen Ruben Ray Martinez obtained by CBS News appears to contradict claims by federal officials that Martinez was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent because he “accelerated” and “intentionally ran over” another agent with his car. The killing of Martinez, who was 23 at the time, in South Padre Island, Texas, on March 15, 2025, was reported by local news outlets at the time. But it…

Read More Read More

Trita Parsi: Iran’s regime won’t fall. It was built for this

Trita Parsi: Iran’s regime won’t fall. It was built for this

  Iran’s strategy isn’t to defeat the US militarily. Trita Parsi argues that it’s to make the cost high enough, fast enough, to collapse domestic support before Iran loses. With MAGA turning against the war, oil markets destabilizing, and both parties alarmed by talk of ground troops, Trump urgently needs a face-saving exit. Plus, Parsi believes that Iran’s revolutionary system was built to withstand exactly this kind of pressure.

Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target U.S. forces, officials say

Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target U.S. forces, officials say

The Washington Post reports: Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East, the first indication that another major U.S. adversary is participating — even indirectly — in the war, according to three officials familiar with the intelligence. The assistance, which has not been previously reported, signals that the rapidly expanding conflict now features one of America’s chief nuclear-armed competitors with exquisite intelligence capabilities. Since the war began Saturday, Russia has passed Iran the…

Read More Read More

Qatar energy minister warns war will force Gulf to halt energy exports within weeks, report

Qatar energy minister warns war will force Gulf to halt energy exports within weeks, report

Reuters reports: Qatar expects all Gulf energy producers to shut down exports within weeks if the Iran conflict continues and drives oil to $150 a barrel, ​the country’s Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi told the Financial Times in an interview ‌published on Friday. Qatar halted its production of liquefied natural gas on Monday, as Iran continued to strike Gulf countries in retaliation for Israeli and U.S. attacks. The country’s LNG production is equivalent to ​about 20% of global supply and plays…

Read More Read More

The U.S. could lose the Gulf

The U.S. could lose the Gulf

Marc Lynch writes: Iran’s bombardment of its Gulf neighbors has inexorably dragged them into a war that they had desperately hoped to avoid. The potential entry of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia into direct war alongside Israel and the United States represents the first full-scale manifestation of America’s ambitions for the Middle Eastern order it has overseen for decades. Washington has always dreamed of Arab-Israeli cooperation against Iran without resolving the Palestinian issue. Here it is. It…

Read More Read More

Why Europeans must stand up to Trump’s illegal war in Iran

Why Europeans must stand up to Trump’s illegal war in Iran

Ellie Geranmayeh and Julien Barnes-Dacey write: Europeans had weeks of notice that US president Donald Trump was about to trigger a war in the Middle East. The conflict is now wreaking carnage in the world’s most energy-rich region on an hourly basis, increasing the direct costs to Europeans and boosting Russia’s war coffers. But Europe’s collective response has been, at best, a fiasco—and at worst, strategic lunacy. Europe on the sidelines Instead of looking for ways to press Trump to…

Read More Read More