Trump tries to shred his MOU with Iran. Can the rest of the world save it?Plus: Israel continues lethal rampages in Palestine, Lebanon. And more...
Hullo there— Yet another jam-packed week to report on here. The highlights, at the geo-historical level, were Pres. Trump (yet again) throwing caution to the winds and re-igniting the hostilities against Iran that Washington and Tel Aviv so violently initiated back on February 28. Plus, the Israelis continuing their lengthy campaign to shred lives, societies, and communities throughout Palestine and southern Lebanon—along with all the constraints of international law. Plus, Trump continuing his cruel strangulation of Cuba… Plus, plus, plus… (I gather there are also things going on in the worlds of international soccer and international tennis? Great for those with the leisure and the ability to follow them.) In today’s newsletter, I’ll quickly address the following items:
Here goes: Discussing the US war on Iran with Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman on the Electronic Intifada Livestream on ThursdayI was deeply honored to be Ali and Nora’s guest on the EI livestream this past Thursday. My segment covered key aspects of the U.S.-Iran standoff in the Persian Gulf and the fallout from that standoff throughout West Asia and more broadly. During that convo I noted the particular hostility with which Pres. Trump and his people— along with, perhaps, the Israelis?— had planned to launch a significant new violation of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran that he himself had signed back on June 18… And to time this violation to coincide with the final funeral rites for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who as you will recall was murdered by the Israelis (along with many family members and dozens of top Iranian officials) in the opening salvo of the long-planned, joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that then ensued. We also discussed the relevance of the truly massive, millions-strong crowds that had attended the late Supreme Leader’s funeral gatherings in Tehran, in other locations in Iran, and also— crucially— in the two Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala, over the preceding days. Bottom line: The (quite illegal) killings of Khamenei and all those other non-combatants on February 28 did not lead, as the war’s planners had hoped, to the splintering or collapse of Iran’s 47-year-old system of governance. Quite the opposite! Drawing on my own family’s history of living in London under the Nazi Blitz, I noted that an exactly parallel process had happened in Iran under the U.S.-Israeli Blitz, with large numbers of citizens who might earlier have had doubts or questions about their government now rallying hard in defense of their nation’s sovereignty. In the livestream convo, we also discussed (among other topics):
We’ve uploaded a full (PDF) transcript of this convo to the JWE website: here. But I urge you to watch the whole of the livestream, which has its usual very informative segments from Nora B-F, Roqaya Chemseddine, Jon Elmer, and Ali, as well. Update on the prospect for Iran-U.S. and related diplomacyI want to note that though much of the corporate media seems to be headlining an assessment that “the U.S.-Iran MOU is dead”, and in some cases that the Iranians themselves have declared this to be so, this does not (yet) seem to be the case. What is true is that from very soon after the moment that he signed the MOU printed out in two languages, English and Farsi, at the Palace of Versailles on June 18, Pres. Trump was very significantly in violation of several of its clauses, including the crucial Paragraph 1, in which— apparently, also on behalf of his “allies”— he undertook, inter alia, to “ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.” He was violating some of the MOU’s other clauses over the two weeks that followed June 18, as well. But then on Tuesday, July 7, he undertook the most blatant violation yet: the organizing of a small convoy of tankers from Arab Gulf countries that would transit the Strait of Hormuz in a way that directly violated the MOU’s Paragraph 5. In that para, the administration of passage through the Strait for the 60 days following June 18 was clearly assigned to Iran, with no role at all defined for any arm of the U.S. government. After that clear violation Iranian actors, with a very thin veneer of “deniability”, opened fire on those unlucky ships, with no casualties reported. And immediately the U.S. military’s Centcom command (in which Israel’s military has for some years now been deeply embedded) launched multiple, clearly pre-planned attacks against Iran describing these as “retaliations” for the attacks on the ships… Exchanges of fire continued throughout the three nights that followed. Meantime, during his appearances at the NATO summit in Türkiye, Trump escalated a vile war of words against Iran and declared the MOU “dead”. There is a serious question under international law, as to whether one party to a duly agreed and signed “Memorandum of Understanding” can simply exit it and declare it dead. There is an even broader question, in the realm of global politics, as to which powers in this thing called the “international community” can take effective action to end Washington’s outrageous and blatant scofflawry, the costs of which are already being felt by all participants in today’s highly interlinked global economy. The front-line responsibility for preserving (and also, hopefully, strengthening) the MOU surely rests with the government that was the MOU’s lead mediator/enabler: Pakistan. A key supporting role should also be played by Qatar, which hosted the key follow-up meeting held June 22 in (or near) Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, at which under joint Pakistani-Qatari auspices the Iranian and U.S. delegations agreed on some key modalities for implementing the earlier MOU: I’ve been happy to see from media in Iran and elsewhere that the Qatari Prime Minister & Foreign Minster Mohammed bin Abdulrahman (“MBA”) has been in Iran, holding meetings with Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi, and also that today Araghchi has been holding talks in Oman, which is another key actor. Then on Friday afternoon (Islamabad time), Pakistani Chief/Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was posting this on X about some of his latest international contacts: Its seems quite notable that, at a time when the whole world economy (including, of course, the U.S. economy) is once again poised on a knife-edge that could, thanks to Trump’s belligerency, see numerous peoples of the world plunged into misery— we now, once again, see the chances of averting this hanging on the actions taken by a handful of mid-sized, but deeply involved powers. May they succeed! (Notable, too, that the UN, which should be playing the lead role in resolving this crisis is now deeply missing-in-action.) More dire news from Palestine— and the long-overdue campaign to free Dr. Abu Safiya and his colleaguesLongtime readers of this newsletter will recall that for roughly the first 18 months of the genocide in Gaza, I would regularly post the very helpful bar graphs that UN-OCHA produced, showing the number of “trucks per day” that the Israeli military would allow humanitarian aid groups to take into Gaza. Then at some point in early 2025, UN-OCHA stopped releasing those graphs. In the “Ceasefire Agreement” that Israel and Hamas signed under U.S. auspices last October, Israel agreed to allow 600 trucks per day of very sorely needed aid to go into Gaza. Here was what the Logistics Cluster/WFP reported for June 2026: That is an average passage of fewer than 73 trucks per day. It is my understanding, including from this information page, that these numbers cover the passage of all humanitarian goods into Gaza, not just those organized by the WFP or even just those related to food items. The situation of the two million-plus of our fellow humans whom the Israeli military is crushing into ever smaller and smaller portions of Gaza, remains dire indeed. (Listening to dear Nora’s report at the head of last Thursday’s EI livestream was, as always, quite heartrending.) But the situation of the 9,000-plus Palestinian political prisoners— hostages— whom the Israeli authorities continue to hold in dungeons of unspeakable cruelty is also now, belatedly, starting to garner international attention. The long-imprisoned head of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, has long been a potent emblem for all these prisoners. Here in the U.S., several lawmakers have started to raise demands that he be freed. I was delighted to learn that on Thursday, the government of France officially joined the international campaign for his release. This is a website with good information about the ongoing campaign. And this is a poignant account of Dr. Abu Safiya’s work before his December 2024 abduction, and of what has befallen him since. Update from LebanonI’m sorry that I haven’t had time to write much about Lebanon recently. But the headlines from this recent UN-OCHA report on Lebanon caught my attention: (Worth noting: the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, seems fairly well able to continue operating in Lebanon— which Israel has for the past year or so completely prevented it from doing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.) Over this past week, there have been several reports of the Israeli military attacking and killing residents of various locations across South Lebanon. But as I learned from the always excellent “Resistance Report” that Jon Elmer contributed to last Thursday’s EI Livestream, PM Netanyahu has recently released a map (at 2:13:00 or so on the livestream) showing where the two U.S.-supervised “pilot zones” are that were agreed in the framework agreement that the Lebanese and Israeli governments signed on June 26: In those two red-lined zones, the Lebanese government is supposed— with U.S. help-- to ensure that all Hizbullah presence is completely cleared out. (But apparently according to Netanyahu’s understanding, it is quite okay for Israel’s occupation forces to remain in the whole of the rest of the area south of the Yellow Line…) I just add three thoughts:
Our latest PalCast episode: “If You Cannot Say Genocide”In yet another great episode of Palcast, co-hosts Yousef and Tony had as their guest Arab American poet and essayist Yahia Lababidi, a writer of Palestinian descent whose work has explored questions of conscience, justice, and witness. In this convo, Lababidi reflected on his forthcoming book, If You Cannot Say Genocide, and discussed why naming Israel’s genocide in Gaza matters. Lababidi explained that the title of his book came from a poem he wrote more than two years ago, challenging readers to confront the reality of genocide instead of avoiding the word. He described poetry as a form of “spiritual journalism” that reaches beyond facts to remind people of their shared humanity. Drawing on the work of writers such as Mahmoud Darwish and Refaat Alareer, he argued that poetry helped make distant suffering immediate and personal while appealing to the conscience of the reader. The conversation also explored changing attitudes toward Palestine in the United States. Along the way, Lababidi reflected on censorship within the American publishing and cultural sectors, recounting how his earlier book Palestine Wail was dropped by its original publisher out of fear of backlash. Now that I’m no longer a book publisher (sigh), I’m delighted that other publishers are taking up the work of foregrounding voices such as Lababidi’s! If You Cannot Say Genocide is now available for pre-order, but won’t be shipping until October. In the meantime, hurry to your favorite podcast-listenting app and listen to this full conversation! Here, at Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Rami Khouri’s updatesOur valued JWE board member Rami Khouri has been doing some great work in the international media, as always. These two recent offerings were of particular note:
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