This War Will End When Zionism Does

 This War Will End When Zionism Does

Jim Kavanagh

Iranian strike on the Bazan oil refinery in Haifa, Israel’s largest oil hub, March 30^th

We’re now into the second month of the USraeli war on Iran—a war in which, I have said, we must “stand, and work, for the defeat of USrael.” We cannot celebrate a victory that is not yet won, and the extent of which we cannot be certain. At this point, however, I've seen enough to be hopeful that USrael’s defeat is the outcome in progress.

We should not forget that the ostensible, announced purposes of this war, centered on Iran’s capabilities, especially those confusedly articulated by the U.S. administration, are not the real, larger purpose, set by Israel—which is the defense and extension of the Zionist project in the region. That requires, per the Yinon Plan, that  Israel must  “become an imperial regional power, and …effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states”—and, of course, Iran. For Israel, the destruction of the Iranian state is a key, but only one, element in the buttressing of the Zionist project, which is both advancing and under threat as never before.  

Though I join many others in thinking that failure to destroy the Iranian polity would fatally weaken Israel and the Zionist project, it is not impossible that Israel could retreat on the Iranian front, recompose, and continue to ravage the region for an indefinite time. Especially if it continues to have American support. The loss of American support—and I mean the U.S. polity breaking with and renouncing Zionism as it did South African apartheid—would be more devastating to Israel than any particular result in Iran, though such an outcome would be made more likely by a failure in Iran that was costly to the U.S.

This is a war for and over Zionism (under the protection of U.S. imperialism) through Iran. Iran is acting as the principal protagonist of and impediment to   of Zionism at this moment.

We cannot forget that USrael has neutered most Arab states into explicit or implicit Abraham-accord puppies of Zionism; that Israel is still controlling Syria; that it has destroyed and is occupying and continuing to devastate Gaza; that it is carrying out an accelerated pogrom of the West Bank; and that it has initiated a new Nakba in Lebanon, displacing a million people who “will not be allowed to return any time soon” (i.e., ever) and is indiscriminately bombing residential areas of Beirut (under the Dahiyeh Doctrine, “do[ing] what we did in Gaza"), with no challenge—indeed, hardly any notice—from the “international community.” Per the head of the Knesset Committee on Internal Affairs and the Environment, Israel has "no other choice but to expel and clear the entire territory up to the Litani River, to cleanse it of Lebanese civilians... Sovereignty and settlement."

Apart from Iran, then, Israel’s drive to expand and dominate the region continues relentlessly, and with the customary international impunity. Zionism requires.

https://x.com/DaniMayakovski/status/2034808904040030376?s=20

This is all one big war for Zionism now—not just USrael vs. Iran, but Zionism vs. the World, the First Zionist World War. USrael will not be defeated until Zionism is—until Israeli troops are forced to leave Gaza and Lebanon in order to take a last, losing stand for Zionism on and for the territory of Green-Line Israel.

It’s not the only source of conflict, but, as I think is becoming clearer to more people every day, there will be no peace in the Middle East (and therefore the world) until and unless Zionism is defeated and deleted.

However well Iran does in re-setting the world stage, then, stay in your seats. There’s going to be a lot more commotion before the fat lady sings.

Nonetheless, given the material, military, economic, political, and ideological conditions under which this war started and has been progressing for the past month, certain very hopeful trends that seem impossible to reverse have become clear.

First, and crucially important, the Islamic Republic regime (and I don't use that word in a pejorative sense, but to denote a political and cultural apparatus wider than “the government”) is standing firm. Not only has it not collapsed after the assassination of Ali Khameni, Larijani, et. al., as some USsraeli fools expected, it has become stronger, more unified, more militant, and backed by wider, more adamant popular support. That’s precisely as a result of the assassinations and of USraeli attacks on civilians, like the vicious double-tap murder, via thermobaric incineration, of over 160 school children.

I think it was the US faction of USraeli fools who most expected the regime to collapse. Most of the Israeli faction knew that it would not and/or did not care. Sure, they would have loved an easy victory, but they were not counting on it, as the clueless Americans were, and it also serves the Israeli’s purpose to have an angrier, more militant Iranian government and people who will fight harder. All the better to persuade Israel’s American fools that unrestrained “death and destruction,” including ultimately with nuclear weapons, must be visited upon Iran. Israel was never seeking to change the Iranian regime; it was and is seeking to destroy the Iranian polity.

I should say, too, that I’m uneasy with the response that sloughs these murders off, or romanticizes them, because "martyrs." Sure, killing these leaders won't destroy, and in the context of Shia culture will likely harden, Iranian resistance. But good leaders—especially, in a war context, exceptional military leaders like Ali Larijani—are not a dime a dozen, not interchangeable. These assassinations are real hits, and Iran has to get better at preventing them, if not directly retaliating on equivalent USraeli personnel (without levelling whole apartment blocks). We need victors, not martyrs.

At any rate, after a month of assassinations of its leaders and  “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” the Islamic Republic of Iran stands and fights, harder and smarter every day. The idea that it’s going to be “toppled” like Saddam’s statue in Firdos square (named after the Persian word for “paradise”) by some USrael “shock and awe” and/or by a CIA-Mossad-armed revolution led by Pahlavi and the Shahs of Sunset is gone, baby, gone—belied by the hundreds of drones and missiles hitting Israeli towns and US bases and comprador Arab support infrastructure, and the millions of Iranians in the streets demanding revenge and victory, every day. That fact alone constitutes victory for Iran, means that Iran has already won a victory that will every day become harder for USrael to reverse.

At War For Zionism

 At War For Zionism

Jim Kavanagh

So this is happening—the USraeli war on Iran that, in an essay in October 2023, I saw as the inevitable denouement of Israel’s Gaza ethnic cleansing offensive. The inevitable result of this attack is going to be a regional, if not global, conflagration that will likely create economic and political upheaval around the world (including crisis in the U.S.), probably involve the use of nuclear weapons, and certainly will effect a dramatic change in the balance of geo-political power.

Everyone is aware of the enormous collection of American military assets amassed against Iran. The U.S. has drawn down military potential in other important world theaters, including warships, warplanes, and tankers. Something like 40% of the available U.S. naval fleet and 37% of the AWACS fleet are deployed for this attack. They’re taking air-defense assets from South Korea!

Some of us understand that this enormous strike force is in play because Iran itself has formidable military capabilities, and the Pentagon knows it. Many knowledgeable people have warned that Iran, a large, mountainous country of >90 million people with a strong economic and military infrastructure, is a much larger and harder target than Iraq, or Syria, or Libya. Iran has already shown, in the 12-day war, that its missile inventory can outlast initial attacks, deplete Israeli air defenses, and strike with precision. Iran is also now much better prepared, with substantial support from Russia and China, including important air defense, ISR, and global positioning assets.

The military conflict is underway, each side has the ability to inflict serious damage on the other, and the various speculations about who has what advantage will soon be resolved on the battlefield. I’ll just say, with most observers, that I think the longer the fight goes on, the worse it will get for USrael, which—politically, as least as important as militarily—does not want and cannot sustain a prolonged war.

Donald Trump is certainly counting on a quick, low-American-cost “victory.” He has initiated the kind of regime change war that he promised to end, one that >70% of the American people oppose. Any prolonged resistance, any need to deploy more (especially ground) forces, any dire economic consequences, any significant number of casualties—results that are, I think, in some combination inevitable—will be a military and political disaster for him. The Israelis have different political considerations, but they, too, cannot sustain a prolonged conventional war against a country as big and strong as Iran.

Let’s be clear about what the purpose of this war is, and what the prospects for its resolution are.

First, and most important for American opponents of this war to emphasize and repeat constantly: This is a Zionist war. It is a war for Israel and Zionism. The United States and the American people have no reason to attack Iran. There is nothing for them in it. And they know it. More than 70% of Americans oppose it. Over four election cycles, the American people have soundly rejected regime-change wars, especially in the Middle East, and that rejection was a foundational element of the Trump-MAGA campaign itself. Iran poses no threat to the United States. The various rationales—from notional nuclear weapons to monarchist “democracy”—don’t deserve a moment of consideration. They are as patently phony as Bush’s were for Iraq, and everybody knows it. Nobody wanted this war but Netanyahu and Israel.

Netanyahu explicitly thanked, “my friend, US President Donald Trump, for “allow[ing] us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” Not an American project, but one Netanyahu wished for for 40 years that could not have been done unless the U.S. “allowed” it. Now the U.S. is doing it for and with him.

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, acknowledges, with full confidence that it will be accepted as a sufficient explanation, that the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel was going to, and Donald Trump, the President of the United States, said that “he had no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch.” There are no more powerful American political leaders. For them, for the whole of the American political and media elite, Israel leads and America follows—America cannot conceive of doing anything but follow. Like a dog on a leash.

Here’s what I said in my August 2024 essay foreseeing how Israel was going to walk the U.S. into war on Iran.

Israel is acting with particular contemptuous disregard for the country on whom it most depends, the United States. Israel has only slightly less contempt for Americans than it does for Palestinians. Israel considers Palestinians needless, expendable subhumans. Israel considers Americans unfortunately necessary fools who don't, and don't want to, understand the core of the Zionist colonial project and its necessarily eliminationist policy toward the Palestinians, about whose essential savagery equality-obsessed Americans are hopelessly naive.

Israel thinks of Americans the way a supercilious avant-garde artist thinks of his/her vulgar wealthy patrons. It has to keep its indispensable supporters believing it shares their appreciation of the purely decorative prettiness of things like human rights, peace, living side by side in mutual respect with other peoples, etc., so that they will continue to subsidize the truly important and transgressive Zionist artistry, whose beauty they will never understand.

Israel has been confident of its ability to play its patron in that way, because,  as Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have said many times: “America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction” and  “We have the Senate,  the Congress, and a strong Jewish lobby on our side.” And he is right.  (And don’t forget the Zionist-committed media.) It’s hard to find a ward more contemptuous of its patron than Israel, or a patron more submissive to its ward than the United States.

In fact, Israel is so confident of its ability to get the American government to go along with anything it wants that it has completely dispensed with any effort at prettifying its grotesqueries:

 “Look, we are, as we announced, committing genocidal ethnic cleansing with no limits, deliberately slaughtering and starving children every day, carrying out airstrikes and destructive assassinations in foreign capitals, etc. If you want to continue pretending to yourselves and your citizens that there’s such a thing as fundamentally humanitarian ‘liberal Zionism,’ that we’re interested in ‘ceasefires’ and ‘two-state solutions’ and such—anything other than getting rid of the Palestinians and consolidating Jewish supremacy throughout our promised land—-while we blatantly kill the primary negotiator you want us to talk to, you go right ahead. Keep writing your thoughtful op-eds and expressing your ‘frustration’ and ‘tension’ with us.  Just understand that we are going to continue killing anyone and any number of people, anywhere, at any time of our choosing, until we’ve put down all potential enemies of our colonial project, and we don’t give a damn about what you think about that.  Your job is to keep sending us the weapons we need and bring your soldiers and armies into a major war to protect us from the inevitable blowback from the countries we attack. Capisce?”

To which the Blue and Red bitches—-Biden, Harris, Trump, Vance, RFK, Jr.—-leading the American and Western political pack, bark, “Yes, sir. Your war is our war. We will do anything to protect the Zionist project!” Has anyone ever seen a more pathetically obsequious, self-demeaning political leadership?

So, the American polity—-its dog-trained leadership and its starting-to-yap-back but still too dog-trained populace—-is walking into war. Being walked into war on the Zionist leash. There will be a lot of yelping once their noses are rubbed in it.

Like a dog on a leash. The only revision I would make, happily, is that the populace is now not just yapping but snapping back much more widely and forcefully. Tucker Carlson sees it clearly:

Charlie’s Devils

 Charlie’s Devils

Jim Kavanagh

Charlie, Angel

I did not and do not give one whit about, or want to waste one ounce of intellectual energy on, Charlie Kirk.

I confess that—like, I bet, most of the people (certainly the politicians) now gnashing their teeth and attending prayer vigils—I was blissfully unaware of exactly who Charlie Kirk was, until last week when I suddenly saw him receiving the most ridiculously inflated veneration since Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize. I now know that he was a mediocre right-wing podcaster and wannabe intellectual.

This is the guy for whom there’s a massive, coordinated, multi-media campaign to turn him into a martyred national hero on a par with Lincoln and JFK? Lying in state? Really? I don't believe that even most people who liked Kirk thought he was that important a week ago.

Now, the politically dominant right-wing really—they say it openly—wants to cancel everyone who does not participate in the canonization of Charlie Kirk. You must join in the gala of national mourning and sanctification, or be removed from social media, publicly shamed, and fired from your job, if not rounded up.

Whatever the facts of his assassination turn out to be (Don’t even start!), the speed, thoroughness, and level of state-mandated adamance with which this Charlie canonization campaign took hold smacks of something prepared and organized in advance.

Because it was, and it’s not about Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was the occasion for activating an aggressive campaign of Zionist and right-wing repression that was waiting for an excuse. He—actually, his ghost—is now nothing but an instrument of that campaign, wielded by people who care as much about the real Charlie Kirk as I do.

Here is Charlie Kirk today:

What in the unholy algorithm did I just watch 😱

AI slop of Charlie Kirk in heaven defending Israel from Greta & Hamas 🤣 is making the rounds, and Evangelical influencer is weeping on camera over it pic.twitter.com/DtBG5i8guO

— Abier (@abierkhatib) September 15, 2025

https://twitter.com/i/status/1967602291697209472

This is what it's about: the sanctification of Charlie as a conjoined angelic twin of Israel and the demonization of any dissenters. The purpose of sanctifying Kirk is not to preach his gospel, but to recruit the Republican/MAGA base to a program of repression, destroying the First Amendment rights of expression, dissent, and protest in order to: 1)immediately, prop up falling support for Israel among “America First” young Americans who were attracted go Kirk and whose dissatisfaction with Israel he was listening to;  2) proactively, instigate an even nastier conflict between culture-war “left-right” factions that will divert the populace from the real left vs. right, 99%-vs.-the oligarchy, socio-economic civil war the US capitalist oligarchs rightly fear is coming; and 3)  justify the intensified police-state policies needed to crush it if/when it does come—whether or not any of this has anything to do with Charlie Kirk’s actual message when he was living.

I want to stress that the defense of Israel and Zionism is the immediate, urgent task of those promoting the canonization of Kirk. They certainly are right-wing defenders of capitalist oligarchy, and definitely want to pre-emptively repress any real left that would influence or lead any hint of anti-capitalist uprising. But that threat is not imminent, and they presume their ability to avoid and/or control it. They are also committed Zionists, who at this moment know that Israel and the Zionist project, which has lost all legitimacy in the world, cannot survive without the support of the U.S. government, and they are terrified of the imminent threat that the American populace—including the Republican/MAGA base—will turn decisively against that support.

Which is happening. Influential right-wing figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Thomas Massie are going hard on an America-First rupture with Israel’s aggressions, with effect.  We’ve reached a point where only 22% of younger (18-34) Republicans think Israeli actions in Gaza are justified.  

That’s an amazing, and fast, reversal of Zionist fortune in the American public—crucially, in the younger demographic that Kirk affected most. And the Zionist establishment cannot allow it to continue.

In this precarious context for Zionist support in the U.S, we also have Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil’s Grayzone articles, based on “Kirk’s friend, who also enjoyed access to President Donald Trump and his inner circle.” According to that source, Kirk had refused Netanyahu’s offer of “a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA,” had come to “loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a ‘bully,’” and “was disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the White House firmly under its thumb.” The Grayzone source also says Kirk was “frightened” by the pressure he was receiving from Zionist donors, while Trump supporter, Harrison Smith, said he was told by “someone close to Charlie Kirk that Kirk thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against Israel.”  

I make no claim that Charlie Kirk was on the verge of renouncing Zionism, or that he was assassinated by Israel. I do know that, because he had platformed Israeli critics like Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith, he had been declared anathema by the same people who are now sanctifying, and insisting that you must worship, him.

https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1944540088400281688

My point is not to adjudicate Charlie Kirk’s “real” position on Israel. My point is this: The people behind this canonization campaign do not really care about Charlie Kirk or think he's all that. They are using his ghost to prop up the sanctity of Zionism, to gin up a "right-left" fight to forestall the "right-left" unity that has been coalescing in opposition to Israel and Zionism. It’s a reasonable discussion and potential alliance between leftists and right-populists over Israel—like this Tim Dillon-Max Blunenthal interview—that Israeli and American Zionists are terrified of.

We’re in an unprecedented—and for the Zionists, unacceptable—situation where people on the MAGA “right”—perhaps even more than those on the liberal “left”—are concluding that Israel might have assassinated Charlie Kirk and was likely involved in the JFK assassination, that Jeffrey Epstein was running a Mossad op that may have entrapped Trump, and that the country wasted its blood and treasure in a succession of regime-change wars in the Middle East for the benefit of Israel.

That's why they're going much harder with this ridiculous mythification of Kirk as Israel’s angel than they did even with Trump after his assassination attempts. Not because the person is more important to them, but because the historical moment is—a moment in which Israel is going full indefensible “final solution” in Gaza and dragging the U.S. into another wasteful war with Iran, and most people in the world and in the United States are sick of it. In this moment, the narrative managers don't give a damn about Charlie Kirk; they're concerned about defending and preserving indispensable American support for Israel and Zionism.

So, to argue about Charlie Kirk is to miss the point. It’s like arguing about the hostages in Gaza. The people pushing this campaign care no more about him than Netanyahu does about them. One might say that he, or his ghost, is effectively now their hostage.

J.D. Vance and the Republican leadership no more think Charlie Kirk is really some historic American saint and moral and intellectual giant than John Brennan and the Democratic leadership really thought Donald Trump was a spy for Vladimir Putin. The factions that spin these tales do so to corral their constituents into an ideological and political pen they can control, rather than have them wandering into forbidden places. If you thought Russiagate was about exposing Trump as a Russian agent, you were being played. If you think this narrative is about establishing the sainthood of Charlie Kirk, you are being played. If the words “left” and “right” keep you from seeing that, you are being played. The factions that spin these tales are contemptuous of you for believing them.

What I find upsetting and depressing is how quickly and thoroughly these tales saturate the political and media environment, making it virtually impossible for most people not to ingest and regurgitate them.

Do the people who liked Charlie Kirk because he presented as a free-speech warrior not see what's going on here? What they are being recruited into? It’s really not hard.

And, yes, it's a mirror version of what the liberal Democrats did during Biden—embracing expansive and malleable concepts of “terrorism” and “domestic terrorism,” “misinformation,” protest as “sedition,” “political violence,” speech as violence, etc.—to justify censorship, cancellation, and RICO prosecution. Some of us warned constantly about the precedents being set and the tools put in place that would inevitably be used against those so smugly wielding them. It was not hard to see how pernicious and stupid the Dems use of those tools were, and it was not hard to see—I did—how pernicious and stupid the Trump administration was going to be. Because neither faction really believes in the principles, or saints, they claim to revere.

It's extraordinarily depressing to see how easy it is to manipulate different groups of people with their shiny trinket.  We did succeed in preventing the Disinformation Governance Board. It’s a different administration, but the same Deep State, which now wants (because his work overall lends to this) to fold mandatory Charlie-worship in with mandatory Zionism-worship. We—everyone who wants to challenge that Deep State—better not let them get the “We'll take your social media if you criticize Charlie Kirk” Law, or any of its "We'll take your passport if you criticize Israel" affiliates.

As the man sings, “Everybody plays the fool sometime. There's no exception to the rule.” But time has run out on the American merry-go-round of tomfoolery.

When will enough people wake the fuck up?

___________________________________

U.S./Israel-Iran War: The Issue Is Palestine. The Issue Is Zionism.

 U.S./Israel-Iran War

The Issue Is Palestine. The Issue Is Zionism.

Jim Kavanagh

https://x.com/KashifMD/status/1934065000815231259

On the one hand, I feel the need to say something about the US/Israel-Iran war; On the other hand, I saw it coming and said it right after October 7^th, 2023, in “Israel’s Solution to Gaza: War on Iran.” And I'm really tired and depressed to see it happening  as was inevitable.

The most important thing here is for everyone to understand what this conflict is, and is not, about.

In a short clip I urge everyone to watch, Seyed Mohammad Marandi says it quite well: “The real issue is not Iran's nuclear program. The real issue for the United States is Iran's support for the Palestinian people. That is it…The issue for the United States is Palestine.”

The issue is not nuclear weapons, and we have to stop giving credence to any attempt to fix the public focus on that. The issue is Palestine—or, in other words, Zionism.

It is about Zionism. It is about forcing Iran—the remaining powerful nation-state in the region that has not—to once and for all accept the Zionist colonizing project of expelling and exterminating the Palestinian people, which is underway in Gaza and the West Bank.

Per Marandi:

[The United States] wants Iran to end its support for Palestine. It wants Iran to be something like Turkey …or the Emirates, or Egypt, or Jordan, or Morocco, or it doesn't matter, [to], say, criticize the Israeli regime, but at the end of the day do nothing in reality to oppose its hegemony and domination.

It is indeed a regime-change operation against Iran, and its entire point—the only thing about the regime that has to change—Is for Iran to accept the Zionist project, which means, abandoning support for Palestinian liberation,  accepting Israel as the unchallenged regional hegemon, and ridding itself of any military capacity that would allow effective resistance to any aggression, including against the Palestinians, that Israel might wish to undertake.

Understand: the only thing. If Ayatollah Khamenei announces tomorrow that Iran is capitulating to acceptance of the Zionist project and changes nothing else, sanctions will be lifted and relations with Iran will be normalized. The United States will not care if Iran is Islamist or secular, theocratic or democratic, if women have to wear hijabs or burqas or miniskirts. All the blather about democracy, women’s rights, and secular liberalism will disappear. Even civilian nuclear power would be permitted.

Understand also: If Iran were to capitulate on the nuclear issue and announce that it will forgo all nuclear enrichment, it will still be attacked. If and only if Iran capitulates on accepting the Zionist project and abandoning the Palestinians to whatever fate Israel wants to inflict on them (extermination and expulsion, as we all see), will the attack on Iran stop.

https://x.com/AliAbunimah/status/1935330933063733290?t=QDnR2wcD12Rvp6iGUJ4N7g&s=19

It’s convenient for the U. S. and Israel to present the nuclear issue to the public as the main problem, but it is only relevant to them as a lesser included aspect of the principal issue of capitulation to the Zionist project—“lesser” because, as they know, as the DNI has declared (“I don’t care what she says”),  Iran has no nuclear weapons, but has other weapons and assets that presently do threaten the Zionist project.