Hi there! Another really busy week to review. And though I’m on family business far from home I’ll try to make the best sense of it— for you and also for myself, since I think it’s an immense privilege to be witnessing a time of such deep (and overwhelmingly positive) global change. As I remarked in a short convo on Twitter a couple of days ago, the hegemony that “White”, Western nations have exercised over global affairs for the past few centuries was already noticeably crumbling before October 7, 2023 and February 28, 2026… But the decisions that “Western” (primarily American) leaders made on those two days have vastly accelerated that process. Now, in the war against Iran, the U.S.-Israeli axis finds itself outsmarted and facing an uncomfortable set of challenges from which there is zero easy exit. (I have written quite a lot in recent weeks about the roots of Iran’s resilience to the— still continuing— U.S.-Israeli assault, and the ways in which Iran’s leaders have been able to transform that resilience into a smart and carefully calibrated exercise of escalation dominance over their assailants. Check out this mid-July analysis I wrote of that phenomenon, or the gloss I added to it in last week’s newsletter.) I will write more about this and related matters lower down in today’s newsletter. So here are the topics that I’ll be writing about today:
1. Just World Ed’s latest PalCast ep: Conversation with a Gaza-Palestinian law studentThe latest episode of our Palcast project is titled “International Law Didn’t Fail, World Leaders Failed International Law.” It features Dana Besaiso, a Gaza Palestinian writer and scholar who is now studying for her LLM degree in the UK, with a specialty in public international law. Speaking with hosts Yousef and Tony, Dana reflected on her experience of surviving the genocide in Gaza, sharing her story of displacement, hunger, loss— and also, the determination that has driven her to continue her legal studies in the United Kingdom. The convo examined the human cost of Israel’s assault on Gaza while exploring Dana’s commitment to pursuing justice for her people. Throughout the episode, Dana argued that international law itself had not failed. Instead, she maintained that world leaders and institutions had failed to enforce it. Drawing on her own experiences, she described the first days of the genocide, the repeated displacement of her family, the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon… and then, the emotional burden of living outside Gaza while the destruction continued within it. She also spoke about the solidarity that sustained Palestinians through unimaginable hardship and the deep sense of responsibility she felt to document these experiences through her writing. This episode offers a unique and deeply personal perspective on justice, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for accountability. It is now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 2. What Hamas leaders themselves say about their commitments to the “Board of Peace.” (Hint: It’s not what Trump claims.)One interesting development this week has been that Pres. Trump, unable to claim anything like a strategic, Iran-related achievement from his lengthy, damaging, and expensive war on Iran, tried instead to claim that that war has now led to a non-trivial achievement on the Gaza issue: He “trumpeted” far and wide that the Iran war had led Hamas finally to agree to the diktats of his infamous “Board of Peace” that it disarm completely… But not so fast. The Hamas leaders themselves contest that claim. You will recall that back in early October, they had agreed only to the first phase of the Trump-mediated ceasefire agreement for Gaza— the one that involved them securing the release of all the remaining Israeli captives, and that promised them a total cessation of Israel’s attacks and the delivery of 600 trucks per day of vitally needed humanitarian goods… They never agreed to the subsequent “20-point Plan” that established the Board of Peace and spoke of the complete disarmament of the resistance forces in Gaza. However, in recent weeks, they have signaled their readiness to work with the “National Council for the Administration of Gaza” that was established by the BOP. And now, under their newly elected leader Dr. Khalil Al-Hayya they have started actively exploring modalities for how various different classes of the arms they hold can be handed over to the NCAG’s custody in parallel with Israeli forces undertaking the necessary withdrawals from the areas of Gaza that they now hold. One excellent source on this issue is the Copenhagen-based Gaza-Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada. (Follow him on X if you don’t, already… Also, stay tuned for the release, very soon, of the great Palcast episode that Yousef, Tony, and I recorded with Muhammad just a few days ago… ) Muhammad has been all over Western media outlets in recent days sharing his understanding of Hamas’s position. Here he was, quoted on CNN yesterday:
The biggest of those obstacles is, undoubtedly, the extreme reluctance of PM Netanyahu to comply with Israel’s obligations under the Trump/BOP plan. Indeed, with Trump now increasingly eager to have some achievement to point to from his disastrous (Netanyahu-urged) attack against Iran, the matter of pushing forward the BOP plan for Gaza seems to be driving an increasingly large wedge between Trump and Netanyahu. Both men face key elections in the next three months, and the “achievements” regarding Gaza that they hope to present to their voters in this election period are almost diametrically opposed. 3. Israel’s continued viciousness in Lebanon pushes even Pres. Aoun to protest!As we know, Lebanon’s Pres. Joseph Aoun and PM Nawaf Salam have been slavishly happy to dance to Pres. Trump’s tune regarding conducting direct talks with Israeli officials even as Israel has continued many very damaging military campaigns across the south of their country in direct violation of successive ceasefires concluded with U.S. mediation, the most recent of which was signed on June 26… Then on Thursday night, Israel detonated its most massive explosion yet— right under the historic, nearly 900-year-old Beaufort Castle, perched high on a ridge near Nabatieh, South Lebanon… Plucky journalist Courtney Bonneau posted this quick report on X yesterday: (If you click on Courtney’s video there, you’ll see the dusty debris from that blast sweeping across a street in Marjayoun, a few kilometres away…) Yesterday, even Pres. Aoun publicly denounced Israel’s detonation at the site:
4. The U.S.-Iran conflict metastasizes further across West Asia— and the MediterraneanWhen Israel and the U.S. launched an attack of unprecedented scale against Iran on February 28, Pres. Trump assured Americans that this would be a speedy and successful operation. 38 days later it became clear that this was not so. On April 7-8, Washington and Tehran entered the first stage of a still-shaky ceasefire that was seemingly strengthened somewhat in the “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) that they signed on June 18. That MOU had been painstakingly negotiated, with the mediating help of, primarily, Pakistan, whose negotiators were also helped by colleagues from Oman, Qatar, and some other (even more pro-American) Muslim-majority nations. But Trump remained deeply skeptical of the MOU and was opposed to complying with two of its key clauses:
Please note: Several commentators in the Western media have described the MOU as “ambiguous” regarding the Hormuz arrangements. It was not! The language had been negotiated in detail over the preceding two months; and the presidents of the two countries signed the agreed text in both national languages, to eliminate any possibility of ambiguity. But from the beginning, Trump worked to slide around and violate the provisions of Para. 5,; and he speedily persuaded (or strong-armed) Oman to let him do that by organizing the transit of some ships along a Southern route through the Strait, more distant from Iran’s shores and islands. The Iranians protested those violations. Then, on July 9, they took action. When some of the vessels using the Southern route refused to comply with Iranian warnings that they were violating the terms of the internationally agreed MOU, the Iranian naval forces used (generally non-lethal) warning shots to persuade them to turn back. Many or most of those ships’ captains complied; and anyway the rates at which the big maritime insurance companies would insure vessels using the Southern route meanwhile shot sky-high. Those Iranian actions in defense of Para. 5 of the MOU then spurred another round of exchanges of fire that slowly escalated in range and impact over weeks that followed. The Americans aimed their attacks on Iran at elements of the country’s vital national infrastructure as well as at apparent military targets. The Iranians undertook numerous precision attacks using drones and short-range ballistic missiles, most of which targeted key intel, command, and sustainability systems on the U.S. bases along the South coast of the Persian Gulf— radomes, fuel bladders, interceptor arrays, etc. Along the way, they expanded their target list to include U.S. bases in Jordan, where on July 18 they killed three serving U.S. service-members in the Muwaffaq Salti barracks. And in Bahrain they targeted a big Amazon data center that they claimed had been used to support U.S. military operations in the Gulf. On July 27, the Americans eased the scale of what had been nightly attacks against Iranian targets. But three nights later they unleashed a large-scale attack against the Iranian island of Qeshm where, as an investigation by the New York Times revealed, they had apparently dropped a 2,000-lb bomb on a residential neighborhood, demolishing a family home and killing a husband, wife and their 2-year-old son, while the family’s two other children were pulled from the rubble alive. That report notes that, “The Times found no indication of a military site near the family’s home or any reports of military casualties from the strike, which the Iranian authorities typically announce.” Yesterday, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned bluntly that the United States “will pay the price” for killing those civilians on Qeshm Island. … This was the latest in a string of utterances in which Iran’s leaders clearly spell out their intention to respond to any U.S. actions in a forceful (but still measured) way. See e.g. this or this warning. Meantime, these leaders are also pursuing active diplomatic efforts aimed at building an international alliance capable of forcing U.S. compliance with either the June MOU— or, presumably, an agreement that is even stronger than that one proved to be. This campaign has included continued outreach to all the parties that had helped Tehran achieve the April and June agreements (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, China.) It has also included an intriguing phone call between Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi and his new British counterpart, Ed Milliband. However, the conflict between Iran and the U.S.-Israel axis has also spread to other areas. As we know, this conflict has long been closely tied to the assaults the Israelis have been undertaking in Lebanon. And there are also longstanding links between Iran’s rulers and their allies in both Yemen’s Ansarallah (“Houthi”) movement, and the various “Popular Mobilization Forces” in Iraq. The past few weeks have seen the U.S.-Iran conflict spreading to these other arenas, too. Of particular note has been the sharpening conflict between Ansarallah, in Yemen, and the Saudis, a development that has obstructed Tehran’s campaign to reach a workable accord with Riyadh. … Then, on July 29, there was a mysterious drone attack against an LNG carrier anchored at Egypt’s key Mediterranean gas-hub of Damietta, that set off fierce blazes aboard that ship and another one anchored nearby. Pres. Trump speedily attributed that attack— like earlier attacks on key Saudi oil facilities in Abqaiq— to Iran or its allies. But from Tehran, FM Araghchi stressed that “Egypt is an important friend and partner in the region, and its security is of utmost important to us,” adding that “We must all be vigilant against Israeli plots and false-flag operations designed to undermine regional peace.” On July 30, the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran spread even further West, too. This linkage was the best explanation I’ve seen for the very surprising incursion of some 60,000, mainly Moroccan, young men into Ceuta, a small, historically Spanish enclave at the northern tip of their country, just across the water from the UK-controlled enclave of Gibraltar. Many Europeans were worried that this incursion might presage a much broader o incursion of African migrants into the EU’s long-protected “Schengen Area.” Most local observers noted however that:
Based on these observations, it seemed fairly easy to conclude that this “incursion” was a way for Morocco— which has disagreements with Spain over a number of matters, including the strong opposition Spain’s government has expressed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the U.S.-Israel assault on Iran— to “poke” Spain… perhaps also in alliance with Morocco’s longstanding allies in Tel Aviv and Washington. This week’s events in Ceuta and Damietta indicated that the still unresolved conflict between the U.S. and Iran could metastasize even further in the future… This, at a time when its effects on the global oil markets and the global economy more broadly are already very evident. Here, for example, is the picture from the market-intel firm Kepler on how many vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz July 28-30: (That, compared with roughly 140 ships per day prior to the current war.) 5. Serious questions about the UN’s role, relevance as the contest over the next SG heats upBefore I sign off today I want to note that there will be another notable event in.the weeks ahead that— along with the upcoming elections in. both the U.S. and Israel— will have a large impact on the course of Iran’s thus far notably successful campaign to push back against the hegemony the U.S. and Israel have long exercised across nearly all of the (globally significant )region of West Asia. This is the upcoming session of the UN’s General Assembly, due to open, as always, in mid-September in New York. This session will (yet again) face the challenge of trying to establish why this international body, the UN, should continue to have any relevance at all, given the notable dereliction of its Charter-defined duties in re Israel’s genocide in Gaza that its “leading body”, the Security Council has displayed for the past three years. (And especially with the SC’s adoption last November of its Resolution 2803, by which it ceded nearly all responsibility for the ongoing shitshow in Gaza to Donald “King Leopold” Trump’s grotesquely misnamed Board of Peace.) This year’s UNGA will have another big responsibility, too. It will be voting on who should lead the whole UN as Secretary-General for the next five years (renewable, once.) SG Antonio Guterrez will end his term on December 31. Who will replace him? Thus far, seven candidates have tossed their hats into the ring. The process by which a ”winner” gets presented to the UNGA session is complex and fairly opaque. Before the UNGA gets its chance to vote, the candidates all get pre-vetted by the Security Council members, who engage in a number of rounds of fairly informal “straw votes” to winnow the field. The goal there is to identify one (or maybe more than one?) candidate who can be presented to the UNGA as having a strong level of support while not provoking a veto from any of the SC’s “P-5” members. The first straw poll for this round was conducted on Thursday. This good article from PassBlue explains both the process and what happened in that poll. Apparently each of the 15 delegations in the Security Council gets to pronounce— anonymously— its opinion on each of the candidates presented, with that being expressed as they “encourage”, or “don’t encourage”, or “have no opinion on” this person’s candidacy. The candidates at this point, nearly all of them from South America, are as follows: And here, according to PassBlue’s X account, was how Thursday’s straw poll came out: Very interesting. I’ve found out that the top two there, Rebeca Grynspan and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, have both earlier paid visit to China and had apparently consrtuctive meetings with china’s FM, Wang Yi. Here’s an account of Rebeca Grynspan’s June meeting with FM Wang, and here’s an account of his more recent meeting with Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett. FM Wang meeting with CRB (left) and RG (right) Well, that is definitely it from me, for now. Next week I’ll be back in my home office and y work will be better organized. Meantime, here‘s my obligatory fundraising button: This world we live in is so darned interesting— though very painfully so, for far too many people, I know. But at least we can now have more hope that things are finally moving in a good, anti-colonial, and pro-justice, pro-peace direction! You have a good week, and stay well— ~ Helena © 2026 Just World Educational Foundation |