Hi there dear friends and colleagues— This has been yet another big week in the affairs of West Asia (and the world.) I have, however, been busy with some personal affairs. So the longer analytical piece I’ve been planning to write on the determinants and implications of the escalation dominance that Iran has— slowly, judiciously— been exercising against the U.S (and U.S.-Israeli) military presence that is sprawled widely across West Asia… is still in the edit stage. I’ll give you a quick summary of the main points of my analysis on that, lower down in this newsletter, along with some other news from Just World Educational and some quick links to resources on the recent Hamas leadership election. But first, this: America as Israel‘s proxy forceHere’s the place to note that in recent days we have seen unprecedented revelations about the extent to which Israel has successfully subordinated U.S. policy to its own ends:
Of course, we have long known about the control that Israel exercises over many key areas of U.S. policy. We know, for example, that Pres. Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching the illegal (and still ongoing) attack on Iran on February 28 was taken at PM Netanyahu’s urging. Indeed, the legal “justification” for this war that is posted on the State Department’s website states clearly that:
So today, U.S. taxpayers are shelling out billions of dollars to sustain this war effort, and increasing numbers of U.S. service-members are returning home in coffins or on hospital gurneys… Yet since April 7, the Israeli military has not been actively engaged in this war effort, but has instead focused its mega-lethal attentions on its immediate neighbors in Lebanon and Gaza. That is why I think, despite all the allegations in the Western corporate media about Iran operating through “proxies” across West Asia, it is much more accurate to describe the United States as Israel’s proxy in the region. (As for those Iranian allies that have been working alongside Tehran to resist the illegal Israeli-U.S. war in West Asia, at least they know that Tehran is also actively in that campaign with them… Rather than sitting it out on the sidelines as Israel does, just hoping that the blood and treasure of Americans can do their job for them.) PalCast with guests from the occupied West BankOur great colleague Tony Groves tried something new this week for the PalCast podcast series that we’ve been co-presenting for nearly three years along with his Dublin-based “Tortoise Shack” media center: He brought two young Palestinian journalists from occupied East Jerusalem onto the show. These guests were the talented young journalists Zena Tahhan and Leila Warah, who explored how Israel’s settler colonialism continues to have a heavy impact on the lives of Palestinians right across the occupied Palestinian homeland. Leila Warah (l.) and Zena Tahhan Tahhan and Warah discussed the expansion of settlements in occupied Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank, attacks by armed settlers, land confiscation, forced displacement, and the continued detention of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners… Listen to this full episode to gain a deeper understanding of the realities facing Palestinians today! You can find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. About those Hamas leadership elections…On Monday, Hamas announced that as the result of an extensive consultation, Dr. Khalil Al-Hayya has now been chosen as the new head of the movement’s Political Bureau. (Remember that the last three men to hold this post were all killed by Israel— one of them, Ismail Haniyeh, while on a formal visit to Iran in July 2024, and the next two— Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Deif— by Israel, in Gaza.) Dr. Al-Hayya has very deep roots in Gaza but currently lives and works outside Palestine Our great JWE board colleague Rami Khouri, who was my co-author of the groundbreaking book that JWE published in 2024, Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters, made several important points about the significance of Al-Hayya’s election in this mid-week interview that he gave to TRT World. Al-Hayya, he noted,
Two more resources on this:First, obviously would be the book that Rami and I co-authored in 2024, which explains all this and much more about Hamas, its history, its staying power, and its political positions— for the general, non-specialist reader. Learn more about the book and how to buy it here. Second would be this very rich biography of Dr. Al-Hayya, that was published on July 20 by the writer who uses the pen-name Mujamma Haraket. It contains some very harrowing details about the numerous losses Al-Hayya’s family has suffered. One of his sons was killed in the dastardly attack the Israelis launched against Dr. Al-Hayya and the other Palestinian negotiators in Doha, when they were in the midst of their peace negotiations with Israel last September. The Israelis killed another son just in May. And two of his other sons and many, many other family members had been killed in earlier Israeli attacks. Such has been the fate of many or most Gaza-Palestinian families caught under the jackboot of Israel’s genocide machine… MH has many other deeply informed articles and notes on his Substack there. Check it out! More on Iran’s methodical exploitation of its current escalation dominanceIn this essay that I published a week ago I argued— contra those who argued that Iran’s use of (retaliatory) military power against U.S. assets looked ill-considered and extremely risky— that it seems at present that Iran enjoys escalation dominance in this large-scale game of chicken. The events of the past week have borne out that judgment. Both sides have shown themselves willing to escalate the level of their skirmishes to a certain extent. But the Iranians have shown themselves able and willing to undertake—though still in carefully calibrated amounts— even greater degrees than the Americans of both horizontal (geographic) and vertical escalation. In recent days the Iranians have successfully attacked several very significant comms/ISR facilities on U.S. military bases in Kuwait and in parts of Jordan very close to the border with Israel. Read some details here. Meantime their Ansarullah allies in Yemen have had apparent success in blocking the Bab el-Mandeb to crude carriers carrying oil from Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea pipeline-head, forcing the Saudis to send that oil out via the the circuitous (and far more load-limited) Suez Canal route instead. Notes on the roots of Iran’s resilienceI have written a lot over the past few months, including last week, about the sources of Iran’s resilience. This resilience inheres in a number of different arenas of Iran’s society today:
In this latter regard, here was FM Abbas Araghchi meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Kyrgyzstan, yesterday: All these forms of resilience have been systematically built up by the Islamic Republic since its first decade in power, a period in which it successfully— though at massive cost— confronted and fought off a brutal, 8-year-long military assault from Iraq that received considerable support from Washington. …In earlier posts on my personal Substack I had presented snapshots of several dimensions of the IRI’s physical resilience. (Go check ‘em out!) Then, I found info on another key dimension in this recent essay by the smart, Canada-based analyst who writes under the pen-name “Policy Tensor”. These numbers indicate the results of the IRI system’s long-sustained investment in secular education, and in particular in STEM/engineering education. Westerners who consume only the stereotypes about Iranian society peddled by the big corporate media may find these numbers surprising. But Iran is not Afghanistan under the Taliban! The results of the IRI’s longterm investment in STEM education have been evident in every one of the Iranian-designed, Iranian-built, and Iranian-commanded drone and missile systems that we’ve seen in operation over the past five months— and also, during earlier rounds of long-distance skirmishes between Iran and Israel, in 2024 and 2025. Rather than looking at the depth of indigenous Iranian expertise, Western commentators prefer to speculate about possible “Russian” or “Chinese” specialists having engineered those technical achievements. But recall too that for several years now, Iran’s “Shahed” drones have been widely recognized as the first-in-class of modern drone warfare and have been widely copied by Ukrainians, Russians, and others. So people should not be too surprised to learn that the indigenous Iranian development of those technologies built upon a pretty robust STEM-expertise base… As have, of course, Iran’s projects in the nuclear-tech field. (All of which also indicates that even if the Israelis succeeded in assassinating several dozen top Iranian nuclear scientists in recent years, most notably on February 28, that would still leave an extremely deep bench of other scientists very well prepared to step into their shoes.) … It is probably fair to say today that no Western empire has ever before tangled with a liberation movement in the Global South that has commanded anything like the IRI’s current level of technical/industrial expertise. It is also worth putting in here, I think, a link to the WaPo’s July 20 report on a new assessment from U.S. spy agencies which concluded that,
That WaPo report also quotes Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy U.S. national intelligence officer for the Near East, as noting that,
Tehran’s smart restraint in its use of powerThe leaders in Tehran have evidently, until now, taken clear decisions to limit the degree and extent of the escalations they have engaged in. As I have noted earlier, in the current, post-MOU period of skirmishes they have not yet decided to attack either any targets inside Israel or any of the many (vulnerable) U.S. Navy ships lurking around in the Gulf of Oman. They have also not yet undertaken any attacks on vital civilian infrastructure in GCC countries such as desalinization plants, except for one attack they recently undertook on a desal plant in Kuwait that they stated clearly was “in retaliation” for an earlier U.S. attack on one of their own desal plants. (Given Tehran’s evident desire to try to win the GCC countries over to their side in the battle against the U.S., or at least to persuade them to oust the U.S. bases from their countries, its general reluctance to target the civilian infrastructure in those countries makes a lot of sense.) But back to Tehran’s restraint regarding attacks on Israel or on U.S. Navy vessels. Given that the current war was initiated by the U.S. and Israel on February 28 in clear contravention of international law, then any attack on U.S. or Israel military targets would quite clearly be justified, and legal. But the IRI leaders are not at all reckless. They very likely judge that an attack on a U.S. Navy ship that could result in dozens or hundreds of casualties might arouse an anti-Iran ire within the United States that could undercut the “slow and careful” way in which they’ve been pushing their escalation-dominance advantage forward throughout the past four months by, for example, spurring a series of U.S. or U.S.-Israeli attacks of a scale and lethality that we have not yet seen. (And yes, there has definitely been some talk here in DC about “Why don’t we just detonate one of our nuclear bombs over a deserted part of Iran and threaten that the next one goes over Tehran?” Or, see this Newsweek interpretation of a bombastic early-April threat from Trump. Or, indeed, listen to some of the most recent rhetoric coming from Pres. Trump…) The restraint the IRI leaders have thus far displayed against Israel is much more intriguing. Here is one recent interpretation of this phenomenon that I found fairly persuasive— and also topical, no? The theory illustrated there is obviously that the Israeli “goal” is the inner keep of the castle: it is being defended by the outer earthworks made up of the U.S. bases located inside the Arab countries whose flags are displayed… And the Iranian armed forces are working to degrade or destroy those outer earthworks before proceeding to attack the main goal. A crucial part of this theory is also that the stockpiles of vital AD interceptors that are in the joint U.S.-Israeli armories will over time become increasingly depleted by these rounds of (gradually escalating) preliminary skirmishes— even beyond, obviously, the degree to which they were depleted during the first 38 days of the current war. Which as we know was already not trivial:
Hence, timing and the optimal stewarding of its own firepower are both clearly key factors in Tehran’s decisionmaking… … Well, that’s it from me for now. As I wrote earlier here I’ve been busy with some personal matters this week, and will be for some further days to come. I apologize if the thoughts above seem a little scattershot and unfinished, but I still think it is important to share them with you today. Plus, of course, I need to put in my usual request for your financial support for everything we’re doing at Just World Ed. All contributions are very deeply appreciated! Click on the link to learn how to give, either on a monthly basis or with one— or a number of!— more substantial donations. Also, if you’re sending a check, be sure to confirm that you’re the right address, which is clearly posted at this link. (We no longer have the P.O. Box that we used to have before.) You stay well. And stay strong so that together we can all help to build the much more hopeful, rights-affirming, non-colonial, and non-militarized world that all the world’s peoples certainly deserve! ~ HelenaYou're currently a free subscriber to Just World Ed's substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. © 2026 Just World Educational Foundation |