Our Wednesday News Analysis | Why Didn’t Iran Put Gaza on the Table? A Difficult Answer

Illustration courtesy: Palestine Chronicle

FOR many years, being accused of being ‘pro-Iran’ was not a terrifying notion only for those living in the West, but also in the Middle East, and yes, including Palestine itself.

A weakened Iran would not simply mean a setback for Tehran.

It would mean a region even more fully dominated by Israel and the United States, more normalization imposed from above,
more pressure to disarm every resistance formation from Gaza to Lebanon,
and more isolation for Palestinians inside occupied Palestine.

A stronger Iran, by contrast, would not magically liberate Palestine, but it would alter the regional balance,
constrain Israeli impunity, and widen the space in which Palestinian resistance can survive and reorganize.

That much is evident from the way regional diplomacy, ceasefire debates, and military calculations have already unfolded during this war.

The accusation itself was always meant to wound, to isolate, to delegitimise. One was either an “Iranian tail,” an “arm,” or an “agent.” The language varied, but the political purpose did not. It was designed to strip entire movements of their agency, to suggest that no Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, or Iraqi force could ever arrive at resistance on its own terms, through its own experience, its own blood, its own history.

Within Palestinian discourse, this accusation was cultivated most aggressively by the camp of the Palestinian Authority, particularly the Fatah establishment orbiting it. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were not to be debated as Palestinian movements with their own popular constituencies, political traditions, and military choices. They were to be dismissed as foreign extensions, as though collaboration with Washington and security coordination with Israel were somehow more “national” than alliance with forces that actually armed, funded, and defended resistance.

The irony was never subtle. The camp, openly embedded in the American order, dependent on its money and political cover, accused others of foreign dependency. The side that coexisted with occupation, and in many ways adapted itself to it, reserved for itself the monopoly on national legitimacy.

That discourse began to crack—not because its authors suddenly discovered honesty, but because genocide in Gaza stripped the region bare. The Palestinian Authority stood by as a spectator, or worse. Arab governments that had spent decades sermonizing about the centrality of the Palestinian cause, either accommodated the mass extermination or openly worked to disarm the resistance—one of Netanyahu’s central strategic goals all along. As Gaza was starved, bombed, and buried, old accusations about Iran started sounding less like analysis and more like propaganda.

The sectarian language also began to collapse under the weight of reality. For years, anti-Iran forces in the region weaponized Sunni-Shia divisions to poison any possibility of a unified anti-colonial politics. Yet when Gaza became the center of the region’s moral and political horizon, it was not the self-proclaimed guardians of Arabism who rose in any meaningful way. It was Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansarallah in Yemen, Iraqi groups, and eventually Iran itself that treated Gaza not as a charitable cause but as the nerve center of a broader confrontation.

Some continued, of course, with the same exhausted nonsense—that Shias and Zionists were somehow interchangeable, that Iran’s support was merely opportunism, that every act of solidarity concealed a plot. But those voices weakened as Gaza itself spoke differently. Under extermination, under siege, under starvation, many Palestinians in Gaza praised Iran openly and shamed Arab regimes just as openly. The old sectarian vocabulary, though never fully dead, was forced onto the defensive.

Then came the war on Iran...

Read more: Why Didn’t Iran Put Gaza on the Table? A Difficult Answer

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BLUEPRINT OF FAILURE: ON IRAN, GAZA, AND HOW EUROPE PLOTTED ITS OWN IRRELEVANCE

Source: Thinking Palestine
https://thinkingpalestine.com/blueprint-of-failure-on-iran-gaza-and-how-europe-plotted-its-own-irrelevance/

By Romana Rubeo
Published May 8, 2026

From Iran to Palestine, from Ukraine to quiet acquiescence under American dictates, Europe appears increasingly devoid of strategic direction. Worse still, in this critical reading of Europe’s relationship with the Middle East—and with its own future—Italian journalist and intellectual Romana Rubeo argues that the continent is not merely adrift, but actively complicit in charting a course toward its own decline.

By clinging to the coattails of the US-Israeli military strategy, Europe is attempting to maintain a vestige of that old hierarchy. (Illustration: Palestine Chronicle)

In the theater of modern geopolitics, Europe has long sought to cast itself as a “normative power”—a champion of the rules-based international order.

However, the lack of actions undertaken during the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the events following the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, 2026, have stripped away this facade.

But why is Europe unable to take the ‘step forward’?

The reason is inextricably linked to the fact that many of the open wounds in the Middle East—specifically the tragedy of Palestine—were originally carved by European hands.

The current “aggression” and the regional instability are not isolated modern phenomena; they are the terminal stages of a crisis initiated by the British and French empires.

From the Balfour Declaration to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Europe functioned as the primary architect of the region’s fragmentation.

By drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and issuing conflicting promises to local populations, European powers established a framework for perpetual conflict to maintain colonial influence over the ‘periphery’.

As the US and Israel engaged in an unprovoked military aggression against Iran outside the bounds of international law, the European response was not one of strategic autonomy, but of paralysis.

At this crucial appointment with history, Europe presents itself covered in shame, offering the world an undignified show of servility and inadequacy.

The Paradigm of Submission: Beyond the Trump Era

One might have expected that the friction of the last decade would have forged a more independent European foreign policy. Yet, the forma mentis (mindset) of the European leadership remains incapable of producing substantial change.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched the so-called Operation Epic Fury, a massive joint military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The operation began with nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours, targeting military infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and the upper echelons of Iranian leadership.

The most significant outcome of the initial wave was the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran, alongside scores of senior officials. The strikes sparked an immediate regional escalation, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and wide-scale Iranian retaliatory missile strikes across the Middle East.

The illegality of Operation Epic Fury has been a subject of intense condemnation among international law experts. The consensus among many respected jurists—including those from the American Society of International Law and UN Secretary-General António Guterres—is that the attacks constitute a violation of the UN Charter.

Over 100 international law experts wrote in a letter on April 13 that “the initiation of the campaign was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter, and the conduct of United States forces since, as well as statements made by senior government officials, raise serious concerns about violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes.”

According to the experts, there are concerns about the jus ad bellum, meaning the decision to go to war, and the jus in bello, as in the conduct of hostilities, which raise doubts about blatant violations of international and humanitarian law. For instance, a strike on the school of Minab, near Bandar Abbas, in the first hours of the war, killed over 120 students, along with their teachers.

Although European leaders partially recognized that the aggression initiated on February 28 ignored the UN Security Council, the reaction was disappointing nonetheless: a disjointed mix of tactical support, mild legal hand-wringing, and internal division.

Germany and the United Kingdom adopted a posture that prioritized the ‘special relationship’ with Washington over the letter of international law.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz notably avoided “lecturing” the US, describing Iran as a “major security threat” whose nuclear ambitions necessitated a firm response. While Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially restricted the use of the Diego Garcia base, he quickly pivoted to allow US forces to use it for “defensive operations” to degrade missile sites, essentially providing the logistical backbone for the campaign.

France attempted to walk its usual diplomatic tightrope. French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the strikes as being “outside international law” and called for emergency UN Security Council discussions. However, Paris condemned Iranian retaliation and rushed to deploy the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to the region, effectively ensuring that French strategic interests remained protected under the umbrella of the US-led operation.

The only European country to stand out and take a firm, principled stand against the legality of the attacks was Spain. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was the most vocal critic, unequivocally condemning the “unilateral military action” as a violation of the international order. Madrid, however, as often happened during the last two years, remained the singular voice that refused to be “complicit in something (…) contrary to our values,” standing alone in its refusal to allow its soil to be used for an unprovoked war.

This is a pitiless mirror of the irrelevance to which the Old Continent has relegated itself in the new world balances. Europe remains deaf to every attempt to carve out the space and margins necessary to survive in an increasingly multipolar world, choosing, once again, to remain anchored to a psychological and political dependency on the Washington-Tel Aviv axis, effectively subordinating its own sovereign interests to a fading unipolarity...

Read more: Blueprint of Failure: On Iran, Gaza, and How Europe Plotted Its Own Irrelevance

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EMPIRES RISE AND FALL: COULD TRUMP’S IRAN FIASCO BE AMERICA’S SUEZ CRISIS?

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/empires-rise-and-fall-could-trumps-iran-fiasco-be-americas-suez-crisis/

By Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J.S. Davies
Published May 12, 2026

The crisis with Iran is at least as catastrophic for US imperialism as the Suez Crisis was for the British Empire. The question is whether anyone in Washington today is capable of grasping the gravity of the crisis and making the required policy shift.

British anti-war protesters during the Suez crisis, September 12, 1956. (Photo: Socialist Worker archive)

The silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s
and now has cornered Trump into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choice between an unwinnable war with Iran and a historic diplomatic defeat.

Americans must insist that this crisis spark the radical rethink of US politics, economics, and international relations that neocons in both parties have prevented for decades.

Trump’s dead end in the Persian Gulf must also be the final end of this ugly, criminal neoconservative era,
and the beginning of a transition to a more peaceful future for Americans and all our neighbors.

Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides, but are also punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis.

In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.

Britain’s imperial domination of Egypt began with its purchase of Egypt’s 44% share in the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. Seven years later, the British invaded Egypt, took over the management of the Canal, and controlled access to it for 70 years.

After the Egyptian Revolution overthrew the British-controlled monarchy in 1952, the British agreed to withdraw and close their bases in Egypt by 1956, and to return control of the Suez Canal to Egypt by 1968.

But Egypt was increasingly threatened by Britain, France, and Israel. Through the 1955 Baghdad Pact, the British recruited Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to form the Central Treaty Organization, an anti-Soviet, anti-Egyptian alliance modeled on NATO in Europe. At the same time, Israel was attacking Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip, and France was threatening Egypt for supporting Algeria’s war of independence.

Egypt’s President Nasser responded by forging new alliances with Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other countries in the region, and, after failing to secure weapons from the US or USSR, Egypt bought large shipments of Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia.

Upset with Egypt’s new alliances, the United States, Great Britain and the World Bank withdrew their financing from Egypt’s Aswan Dam project on the Nile. In response, Nasser stunned the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and pledging to compensate its British and French shareholders.

British leaders saw the loss of the Suez Canal as unacceptable. Chancellor Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “If Nasser ‘gets away with it’, we are done for. The whole Arab world will despise us… and our friends will fall. It may well be the end of British influence and strength forever. So, in the last resort, we must use force and defy opinion, here and overseas”...

Read more: Empires Rise and Fall: Could Trump’s Iran Fiasco Be America’s Suez Crisis?