If, however, the strike on the water tanks was deliberate, it was a war crime. Iranian media alleged that it deprived 20,000 people of drinking water in 113º F. (45º C. ) temperatures and 60% humidity. This affected men, women and children. The reservoir held 70K cubic feet of water and the water tank 17K cubic feet. Drinking water was unavailable for 12 hours.

Photo by IRIB News of alleged US damage to water facility. Public Domain in U.S.

Fatemeh Jarareh, the female representative in parliament of Hormozgan Province, called the attack a “blatant war crime against humanity.” She accused what she called the “terrorist army” of the United States of deliberately targeting key infrastructure necessary to human life and livelihood.

The government said that repair crews restored water transmission lines in twelve hours and said that over the following 24 hours drinking water would stabilize.

During the 39-day all-out war in March, Iran asserted that the US or Israelis had damaged a desalinization plant providing drinking water to residents. Bahrain likewise said that a desalinization plant providing water to 30 villages had been damaged by an Iranian drone.

Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move. If Iran felt its inhabitants were systematically being deprived of water, it could likely take out all the desalization plants in the territories of its Arab Gulf neighbors, without which none of those countries could survive more than three days. That is how long it takes for renal failure from lack of water to kick in and kill you; it is why rescue teams after an earthquake gradually stop searching in the rubble for survivors after 36 hours, since the likelihood of someone surviving longer than that without water is low.

Some 80% of water in the United Arab Emirates, a country of 11 million, comes from desalinization plants. Their total destruction would provoke a vast exodus of the population and raise questions about the survival of the country, where 88% of the residents are non-citizen migrant workers and expatriates. In turn, the Emirates’ ability to export petroleum would be drastically impeded, hurting the whole world.

Hence, the Trump administration should think long and hard before hitting such civilian infrastructure in Iran. The whole Gulf region is full of glass houses, and if they are all shattered, the energy crisis would be unprecedented.

Currently, much of the international debate centers on a single official: Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov. The former United Nations Special Coordinator has been designated by the United States as the Executive Director of the Trump administration’s newly established ‘Board of Peace’—an international council founded to oversee the implementation of Washington’s 20-point Gaza roadmap.  

The issue, however, is much bigger than a single Washington-backed bureaucrat. A growing number of Palestinians and political analysts accuse Mladenov of manufacturing the very conditions that continue to obstruct progress on the agreement’s transition to its second phase. 

Under the framework, the official transition to this second phase—which Trump and the Board of Peace declared to have begun in January 2026—demands sweeping, one-sided Palestinian concessions, most notably the total disarmament of armed factions.  

This demand is a recipe for the failure of the entire project, especially given that Israel has completely failed to implement the most basic requirements of the agreement’s first phase. It has refused to halt its routine military incursions, has failed to withdraw its forces to the originally mandated ‘Yellow Line‘ demarcation, and continues to deny entry permits to the technocratic committee slated to assume civil governance of the Strip.

Mladenov’s insistence on Palestinian disarmament before the agreement can advance—without a single guarantee of Israeli compliance—conveniently flips the narrative. It cynically reframes systematic starvation and the blockade of medical and construction supplies as a Palestinian failure to honor commitments.

In reality, Mladenov holds no real cards; he is merely a cog in a larger machinery controlled by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister has made it explicitly clear that he has no intention of following any peace roadmap, planning instead for the permanent, incremental takeover of Gaza.

Speaking at a conference in an occupied West Bank settlement on May 28, Netanyahu explained his strategy with total clarity, abandoning all diplomatic doublespeak: “We are currently squeezing Hamas; we now control 60% of the territory of the Strip—you know this. We were at 50, we moved to 60. My directive is to move to…” he said, pausing as an audience member shouted “100!”  

Netanyahu smiled and responded: “Let’s go step by step. First of all, 70. Let’s start with that. We’re pressing them from all sides, we’ll deal with the remnants.”  

This is the actual blueprint of the Israeli government, declared openly to domestic audiences. The admission was so brazen that even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed frustration at Netanyahu’s candor. Testifying before Congress on June 2, Rubio remarked, “We have a plan—it doesn’t call for that,” referring to further Israeli territorial expansion. 

Yet, Rubio quickly reverted to Washington’s standard line: “And at the end of the day, we understand that what we want, and I think what the Israelis would ultimately want, is a Gaza that is governed by a non-Hamas entity.” 

While the immediate priority for Palestinians is not governance but life-saving food, clean water, medicine, and basic survival, Netanyahu and Rubio view the entire crisis through a political lens.

The US-Israeli plan is predicated on achieving, through diplomatic strangulation and engineered famine, what they failed to fully achieve through military might.

A rare, decisive answer came from United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, who summed up the UN position plainly: “One hundred percent of Gaza should be for the Palestinian people.” The problem, however, is that the UN’s rhetoric is backed by no real enforcement mechanisms. 

The international community has walked directly into a trap, outsourcing the future of the Gaza Strip to the Trump administration and its Board of Peace. Even the designated technocratic committee has been rendered entirely irrelevant, excluded from a decision-making process left solely to diplomats beholden to the White House.  

The situation on the ground remains catastrophic. Since the fragile, heavily compromised ceasefire took effect on October 10, regular Israeli violations and airstrikes have killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians and wounded thousands more—the vast majority women and children. When added to the horrific toll of the initial two years of war, the official number of Palestinians killed has surpassed 73,000, with over 173,000 injured.  

Photo: A young boy in a gray shirt works in a muddy trench in a refugee camp in Gaza, by Hosny salah from Pexels

Furthermore, credible epidemiological studies and medical journals have concluded that the true death toll is vastly higher. 

With nearly the entire population of Gaza living in sub-standard tents and surviving on the meager rations permitted through Israeli checkpoints, it is the highest form of immorality to demand political concessions in exchange for basic sustenance. 

Netanyahu’s “step-by-step” annexation does not hinge on what Palestinian factions decide to do; his expansionist timeline is shaped independently of Palestinian compliance.

Arab, Muslim, and allied nations must fundamentally shift their diplomatic strategy. They must firmly insist on completely delinking humanitarian aid from the future governance or demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. 

Starvation cannot be tolerated as political leverage for war criminals. Netanyahu is emboldened by a history of international impunity, speaking openly of expanding his military footprint regardless of the consequences of such action. 

The international community must remind Israel’s government that the survival of millions of Palestinians cannot be held hostage to the political ambitions of an extremist coalition. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Via Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

(The Conversation) – The US military launched strikes against Iran on June 9 in response to the downing of a US Army helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier. These strikes, which the US military called “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression”, came after Donald Trump claimed he was in the “final throes of what will be a very, very good deal” to end the war.

Iran swiftly carried out retaliatory attacks of its own. The powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps branch of Iran’s armed forces says it has struck US bases in Bahrain and Jordan. And it has warned of “even more severe attacks” if the US repeats its strikes.

This episode took place days after Israel and Iran had briefly returned to direct conflict. Triggered by Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where a ceasefire was supposedly in effect, both sides launched various rounds of tit-for-tat strikes before announcing they would halt hostilities.

At first glance, these incidents appear contradictory. Diplomacy is supposed to be the alternative to war and ceasefires are supposed to reduce violence. Yet with the US, Israel and Iran once again exchanging attacks, and as military operations continue in Lebanon despite ceasefire arrangements, diplomacy and conflict increasingly seem to be unfolding simultaneously.

For decades, policymakers assumed that war and diplomacy were distinct phases of international politics. States negotiated until talks broke down, and fighting followed. Eventually, battlefield realities or international pressure pushed adversaries back to the negotiating table. Diplomacy then functioned as an exit ramp from conflict.

The aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war exemplified this model. Sustained diplomatic efforts following the conflict culminated in the 1978 Camp David accords, which laid the groundwork for a definitive peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. This treaty was signed the following year and remains in effect to this day.

However, this model is becoming difficult to recognise, with the Middle East nowadays characterised by a different dynamic. Negotiations between warring parties continue during military confrontations, ceasefires coexist with airstrikes and mediators shuttle between capitals even as threats escalate.

The problem is not that diplomacy is failing. Instead, it is that diplomacy is no longer serving its traditional purpose. Rather than ending conflicts, diplomacy is helping to manage them – a distinction that matters because a conflict that is managed is not necessarily a conflict that is resolved.

Managing conflict

The latest escalations between Israel and Iran, and now Iran and the US, illustrate this dilemma. None of these parties appear to want a full-scale regional war, as the costs would be enormous and the consequences unpredictable. Yet each of them is unwilling to abandon what they see as vital security interests.

Israel views Hezbollah’s military capabilities as a major threat and therefore has a strong incentive to weaken the group. Iran, on the other hand, sees defending Hezbollah as critical to its security because the group serves as a key deterrent against Israel and extends Tehran’s regional influence. And the US struck Iran in an attempt to uphold deterrence and signal that attacks on US personnel and assets would carry consequences.

The result of this is a cycle of calibrated escalation. Military force is used not to secure decisive victory but to signal resolve to adversaries, reassure allies and domestic audiences, and persuade opposing leaders that the costs of further escalation outweigh the potential benefits. Diplomacy, meanwhile, works not to eliminate the underlying dispute but to prevent escalation from spiralling beyond control.

This creates a dangerous equilibrium. When diplomacy functions primarily as a mechanism for crisis management, leaders face less pressure to make the difficult compromises that lasting peace requires. Negotiations can continue indefinitely while violence persists, ceasefires become pauses rather than settlements and conflict becomes chronic.

The old distinction between war and peace is becoming blurred in the Middle East. Rival powers do not move neatly from diplomacy to conflict and back again. Instead, they are operating permanently in the space between the two. This should concern policymakers.

Much of contemporary diplomacy remains based on assumptions that no longer fully apply. Negotiations are often treated as evidence of deescalation, while ceasefires are assumed to signal progress towards peace. Yet neither necessarily tells us much about whether a conflict is actually moving closer to resolution.

The latest exchanges between the US and Iran, as well as Iran and Israel, therefore raise a troubling possibility. The greatest danger may not be that the Middle East slides back into a wider war. It may be that it settles into a condition of permanent confrontation in which violence periodically erupts, diplomacy periodically intervenes and neither fundamentally changes the underlying reality.

Photo of Manama by Charles-Adrien Fournier on Unsplash

For decades, the central challenge of international politics has been how to move from war to peace. The challenge emerging today is different, with negotiators grappling with the much more difficult task of ending a conflict when war and peace are happening at the same time.

Bamo Nouri, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of International Politics, City St George’s, University of London and Inderjeet Parmar, Professor in International Politics, City St George’s, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A key architect of this movement is the Black American convert amina wadud, an Islamic feminist theologian whose radical actions and provocative statements have earned her death threats and hostile fatwas from traditional clerics, but whose vision of Islam has earned her a passionate following among Muslims seeking justice and equality. Like Malcolm before her, she has harnessed Islamic principles to a social justice movement, and has paid dearly for doing so.

The Lady Imam: How amina wadud’s Life and Faith Changed the World, By Carla Power. Penguin Random House. Published June 16, 2026. Click here to order.

wadud became the world’s most famous—and infamous—Islamic woman scholar in 2005, when she strode to the front of a Muslim congregation gathered at Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and broke with 1400 years of Islamic tradition by claiming her right to act as the spiritual leader of men as well as women. After news about a Black American woman leading men and women praying side by side made headlines, the death threats, fatwas and trolls came swiftly. So too did the joy among Muslim women and queer people seeking more inclusive and expansive interpretations of Islam.

Like Malcolm before her, she was born into a Christian household battling racism and poverty. Christened Mary Teasley, the daughter of a Methodist preacher and a discontented housewife, wadud was sent as a teenager to live with affluent white families in Massachusetts. After cross-country hitchhiking and a stint in a Buddhist ashram, she converted to Islam as a twenty-year-old Ivy League student. Her ground-breaking 1992 book Qur’an and Woman, a reading of the scripture from a female perspective, would go on to serve as a theological scaffold for women taking on Islamist interpretations of gender relations during the 90s.

Like Malcolm before her, she’s been vilified for her frank critiques of the status quo, and her take-no-prisoners pronouncements on race, gender, and power. She drew widespread ire from online trolls after she called the Prophet Ibrahim a “deadbeat Dad” for abandoning Hajar with a nursing baby in the desert—a statement even some admirers felt was too incendiary. She’s been called crazy. A CIA agent. An exhibitionist. A “devil in hijab.” A “soldier of Satan.” A diva. A victim of a slave mentality. A heretic. An enemy of Islam. Among the virtues wadud shares with Malcolm, notes scholar and novelist Michael Muhammad Knight, is “the courage to be hated.”

Malcolm and wadud also share daring evolutions. On Malcolm’s famous hajj in 1964, his views on race were challenged by the Islamic spirit of unity. On seeing white Muslims amid the pilgrims of all races, he realized “we were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the ‘white’ from their minds, the ‘white’ from their behavior, and the ‘white’ from their attitude.”

Where Malcolm evolved from petty criminal to public intellectual, from disaffected Christian to Muslim leader, wadud has adopted a frank dynamism in her outlook and faith. Her early Islamic orientation was strictly Salafi—there’s a picture in my biography of wadud, The Lady Imam, of her vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard c. 1974 in a niqab. Like Malcolm, wadud has been unafraid to reassess and revise her worldview as she encountered realities of living in Muslim-majority countries. Her early efforts as an activist with the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam and the global woman’s organization Musawah, were focused on women’s issues. But after an explosive incident at an HIV/AIDS conference of Muslim leaders, she has since broadened her thinking to include the LGBTQ+ community. Today, she identifies as queer.

wadud hasn’t met with the violence that felled Malcolm and so many other Black male thinker-activists. Now 73, she lives peacefully in a village of rice planters in Java. That said, her importance as a major Black American thinker, and her contributions to Qur’anic analysis have been too often minimized and overlooked. “Faculties are not vying for her, students are not demanding, the American Muslim community is not touting her scholarship, and those with financial resources are not providing chairs in institutions for her to continue,” wrote the professor emerita at DePaul University Aminah McCloud Al-Deen in A Jihad for Justice, an online collection of essays on wadud. “Is it because she is African American, American, female, what?”

After my six years researching her biography, my own theory is that wadud remains an outsider to mainstream institutions through a mix of factors, which include the challenges of being prickly and gifted, Black and female, Muslim and controversial, nomadic in lifestyle and syncretic in outlook. Like Malcolm X, who was widely reviled by mainstream America in his time, it may also be that she’s often a few steps ahead of the rest of us.

XLIV.

The mighty Mahmud, the victorious Lord,
That all the misbelieving and black Horde
      Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
Scatters and slays with his enchanted Sword.

FitzGerald admitted to mashing the quatrains together, and there is no one source for this stanza in the Persian. Many verses urge the dispelling of sorrow and at least two advise against fear.

I have already discussed, regarding 1:6, FitzGerald’s use of no. 92 in the Calcutta manuscript of the Rubáiyát which is reproduced at this site:

با باده نشین، که مُلْکِ محمود این است
وَزْ چنگ شنو، که لحنِ داوود این است؛
از آمده و رفته دگر یاد مکن
حالی خوش باش، زان‌که مقصود این است

My (Juan’s) translation of this one is:

Sit with the wine, for this is Mahmud’s shore;
the harp is playing David’s melodies.
Recall this hectic to and fro no more–
be happy now: our purpose lies in this.

So line one of C92 is likely the inspiration for the mention of Mahmud as a symbol of the way wine gives existential courage.

—-
Order Juan Cole’s contemporary poetic translation of the Rubáiyát from

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As for the metaphor of Mahmud’s campaigns in Hindu India 1000-1027 CE being like the soul’s conquest of fear and sorrow, that likely came, as Edward Heron-Allen and A.J. Arberry argued, from the great mystic Farid al-Din `Attar’s Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr). FitzGerald made a very compressed translation of some of its passages, which, however, he did not publish in his lifetime. Attar also uses Mahmud’s strike at the renowned Hindu temple of Somnath in Gujarat in 1026, where he destroyed the figure of Shiva and looted the site of its treasures, in an allegorical way. He depicts Mahmud after the campaign as being in a quandary about whether to give an extra share of the booty to his warriors or to the Sufi saints who prayed for his victory. (The Sufis won, in Attar’s telling).

Mahmud of Ghazni, Ghaznavid ruler, conquering Qasdar (modern Khuzdar) in India, miniature from the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din Il-Khanid Tabriz Ms Or 20 f.108v. Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons .

The husband and wife team of Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, in their classic rendering of the The Conference of the Birds, translated this passage thusly:

Shah Mahmoud at Somnat

lines 3122–43

Its worshippers flung treasure on the ground
And as a ransom gave the glittering mound;
But Mahmoud would not cede to their desire
And burnt the idol in a raging fire.
A courtier said: “Now if it had been sold
We’d have what’s better than an idol – gold!”
Shah Mahmoud said: “I feared God’s Judgement Day;
I was afraid that I should hear Him say
‘Here two – Azar and Mahmoud – stand, behold!
One carved his idols, one had idols sold!’”
And as the idol burned, bright jewels fell out –
So Mahmoud was enriched but stayed devout;
He said: “This idol Lat has her reward,
And here is mine, provided by the Lord.”
Destroy the idols in your heart, or you
Will one day be a broken idol too –
First burn the Self, and as its fate is sealed
The gems this idol hides will be revealed.
Your soul has heard the Lord’s commanding call;
Accept, and at His threshold humbly fall.
Your soul and God have formed a covenant;
Do not turn back from that first firm assent –
Will you object to what you once averred,
Swear true allegiance and then break your word?
Your soul needs only Him – through good and ill
Keep faith, and what you promised Him fulfil.
Another story of Shah Mahmoud in India
Mahmoud began his Indian campaign
And saw before him, drawn up on the plain,
The massive army of his enemy –
In fear he prayed to God for victory
And said: “If I should win this doubtful day,
The dervishes will bear the spoils away.”
They fought, and Mahmoud’s conquest was complete –
His captives piled their treasures at his feet.

lines 3144–64

The king declared: “1 will fulfil my vow;
The dervishes shall have this booty now,”
But all his courtiers cried: “Can gold and jewels
Be given to that crowd of cringing fools?
Reward the soldiers who have won this war,
Or have it piled up in the royal store.”
What should he do? Shah Mahmoud was unsure.
Just then his eye caught sight of BoulHossein,
A pious fool whom many thought insane;
He said: “Whatever that man says, I’ll do –
No kings or armies influence his view.”
They called the madman over to the king,
Who welcomed him and told him everything.
The madman said: “O king, these anxious pains
Are not worth more than two small barley grains –
If all your dealings with the Lord cease here,
forget the vow you made and never fear;
But if you think you might need Him again
Then keep your promise to the final grain.
God gave the victory to you; now where
In this agreement is your lordship’s share?”
So Mabmoud gave the gold where it was owed,
And took his way along the royal road.’

The Persian can be found here.

Map of the Ghaznavid Empire. Wikimedia Commons . Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

For more commentaries on FitzGerald’s translations of the Rubáiyát, see

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Commentary by Juan Cole with Original Persian

( Middle East Monitor ) – The pattern is now visible. On 1 June, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire. Within days, both sides violated it. On 5 June, Israeli airstrikes killed three Lebanese army officers and six others on a road south of Nabatiyeh. On 6 June, Israeli helicopters struck Beirut’s southern suburbs in retaliation for Hezbollah drone attacks. On 3 June, Hezbollah leader Naim Kassem called the ceasefire agreement “absurd, humiliating, and insulting” and rejected it entirely. The ceasefire lasted less than a week before it became what all the previous ones became: a framework in name, warfare in practice.

But here is what is not being said plainly: this is no longer a ceasefire breaking down. This is a ceasefire that was never real, now settling into its permanent form.

What emerges is not escalation toward a resolution. It is a managed stalemate. And every actor from Israel, Hezbollah, the Lebanese state, to the United States, has incentive to keep it exactly this way.

The ceasefire that was never a ceasefire

The 16 April ceasefire was supposed to be temporary. A ten-day pause. A negotiating window. It was extended on 23 April to three weeks. Extended again on 15 May to forty-five days. On 1 June, a new agreement was reached with explicit terms: Israel would not target Beirut’s southern suburbs. Hezbollah would not attack Israel. The Lebanese state would extend authority southward. All of this would be verified and enforced.

None of it was real. Not because the negotiators were dishonest. Because the framework assumed conditions that do not exist.

The Israeli military occupies approximately one-fifth of Lebanese territory. It has pushed further into the country than at any time since its 1982-2000 occupation. It is not occupying on the basis of a military offensive that ended, it is occupying while a ceasefire nominally holds. Every “violation” is not a breach of the ceasefire. It is the ceasefire’s actual operation.

Hezbollah has not disarmed. It has not withdrawn from southern Lebanon. It has not accepted the subordination to state authority that the ceasefire framework demands. Instead, it has continued limited military operations, attacking Israeli forces and launching drone strikes when Israeli aircraft strike Hezbollah positions. This is not defiance of the ceasefire. This is the ceasefire’s actual structure.

The Lebanese state has announced phases of disarmament and state consolidation. The military made declarations of progress on “establishing a state monopoly on arms.” None of this corresponds to reality. The state has not disarmed Hezbollah because it does not have the capacity. It has not extended authority south of Litani because Israel occupies that territory. The state’s announcements are not lies. They are the performance that makes managed stalemate possible.

What exists now is not a ceasefire that will hold or break. It is an arrangement where all parties continue operating while maintaining the fiction that a ceasefire exists.

Why all parties prefer this to everything else

Consider what each actor would face if the ceasefire actually ended:

Israel would need to decide: invade further northward toward Beirut and risk a full conflict with a Lebanese state it has no desire to fight, or stop and accept that Hezbollah remains in the south. Invasion carries costs that exceed benefits. Accepting Hezbollah’s presence seems unacceptable publicly. But accepting it under the cover of a ceasefire framework that is nominally holding? That is manageable.

Hezbollah would face: full escalation against Israel while weakened from eighteen months of bombardment, facing Iranian inability to resupply at scale, and watching Israeli forces consolidate in Lebanon. Or disarmament, which means surrendering the military capacity that gives it political legitimacy. Or this: continue limited military operations, enough to maintain credibility with its base that resistance continues, while avoiding escalation that would trigger Israeli response beyond what the population is already enduring.

The Lebanese state would face: attempting to disarm Hezbollah and triggering sectarian conflict that collapses the government, or accepting that disarmament is impossible and watching the state’s legitimacy erode. Or this: announce disarmament phases, make symbolic gestures, maintain the appearance of state consolidation while actually exercising no authority in the occupied south. This preserves the government’s international standing while avoiding internal collapse.

The United States would face: escalation involving Iran and broader regional conflict, or withdrawing from mediation and accepting that Middle East strategy has failed. Or this: maintain a framework that is nominally active, declare ceasefire extensions and new agreements when violations spike, give each actor the diplomatic cover they need while the actual situation on the ground remains frozen.

Every actor prefers managed stalemate to the alternatives.

The mechanics of permanent occupation

What makes managed stalemate permanent is that it does not require consensus on what is actually happening. Each side can narrate the situation differently.

Israel occupies territory and conducts military operations. These are violations of a ceasefire by Israel’s official position: targeted strikes against Hezbollah infrastructure and “imminent threats” to Israeli forces. By Hezbollah’s position: evidence that the ceasefire was never meant to be honored. By the US position: unfortunate incidents that do not constitute ceasefire collapse, provided both sides commit to negotiations.

Hezbollah conducts drone attacks on Israeli forces. These are violations of the ceasefire by Israel’s position: evidence Hezbollah is not committed to peace. By Hezbollah’s position: legitimate resistance to occupation. By the Lebanese state’s position: regrettable but not the state’s responsibility, as Hezbollah is a separate actor.

The Lebanese state announces progress on disarmament while exercising zero authority in the occupied south. By its position: the state is consolidating control gradually, in phases. By Israel’s position: insufficient progress, justifying continued military presence. By Hezbollah’s position: an illusion designed to serve Israel’s interests.

Each narrative is internally consistent. Each can be maintained indefinitely because none requires proof. The proof is in the territory that remains under Israeli control, the population still under Hezbollah’s de facto protection, the Lebanese state is still unable to exercise authority south of Litani.

The question that will not be asked

The real question is not whether the ceasefire will hold. It will hold because it is not a ceasefire, it is an occupation arrangement with diplomatic cover.

The question is not whether Hezbollah will disarm. It will not, because disarmament means surrendering the military capacity that makes it politically relevant to the Shia community that experiences Israeli occupation directly.

The question is not whether the Lebanese state will extend authority southward. It cannot, because it does not control the territory and has no military capacity to contest Israeli occupation.

The real question is: how long before the fiction becomes accepted reality?

The answer: it already is. The ceasefire framework has been “extended” four times in eight weeks. Each extension is a renewal of the fiction. Each violation is reported as aberration rather than pattern. Each new agreement comes with new terms that will be honored in form and violated in practice. Eventually, the extensions stop being announced. The violations stop being reported. Israeli military presence in Lebanese territory becomes accepted as the new status quo. Hezbollah maintains control of the south through Israeli sufferance. The Lebanese state exercises nominal authority from afar. The international community declares the situation “stabilized.”

Photo by El Jundi Pexels

This is not peace. It is not war. It is the permanent condition that all parties have learned to prefer.

The ceasefire will not collapse because there is no ceasefire to collapse. What exists is a managed stalemate that serves every actor better than escalation or actual resolution. It will persist because breaking it costs more than maintaining it. And the cost of maintaining it, permanent Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory, Hezbollah’s effective control of the south, the Lebanese state’s irrelevance in half its own country, has become the price of avoiding worse outcomes.

Lebanon did not lose the south in a war. It lost it in a ceasefire. And because the ceasefire is not real, the loss will never be reversed. It will only be gradually accepted.

OPINION: The ceasefire framework is exposing Lebanon’s institutional collapse

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Professor of History Afshin Matin-Asgari specializes in 20th-century Iranian political and intellectual history. He received his PhD from UCLA in 1993 under the direction of Professor Nikki Keddie and has been teaching in the University of California and California State University campuses since then. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles.

He is the author of three books and some twenty scholarly articles. His most recent book, Axis of Empire, a history of Iran/U.S. relations was published by Verso in the UK and Penguin Random House in the US in 2026.

The term Axis of Evil, first coined under the G.W. Bush administration, gave impetus to the 2003 Iraq war. Now, Axis of Resistance, an alliance led by Iran against US and Israeli domination, has become the new slogan.

In his current book, Professor Matin-Asgari covers the period from the early 1900s to the present time, even touching on the recent war against Iran.

He writes: “Nearly half a century of the most onerous U.S. sanctions had failed to change the behavior of a regime which now stood at the threshold of going nuclear. Instead of changing, the Islamic Republic had grown more defiant in international relations and domestically repressive, blaming American sanctions for its failing economic performance and growing popular discontent.”

Here is our interview:*

Fariba Amini: You wrote your first book on the Confederation of Iranian students, perhaps the largest student movement in the world. Why did you decide to write about the student movement against the Shah?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: I was among the thousands of young Iranians active in the Confederation of Iranian Students in Europe and the US during the 1970s. By the time I joined, in the mid-1970s, it had split into several leftist factions competing and cooperating with each other around the common goal of drawing the world’s attention to dictatorship and repression in Iran. The Confederation was perhaps the world’s largest and most effective student political organization of the 1960s-1970s. Despite its shortcoming, it was the only venue where young Iranians could practice relatively pluralist politics, something that was impossible under the Iranian monarchy. After the 1979 Revolution, I decided to write a history of the Confederation as my doctoral dissertation, which later became my first book.

Fariba Amini: For your recent book, you have chosen the title Axis of Empire. Why this title? How is your book different from other books written about Iran-U.S. relations?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: The title “Axis of Empire” was suggested by my good friend and colleague Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, to whom the book is indebted in many more ways. It refers to what makes my approach different from other studies of US-Iran relations, namely my central narrative assumption about the imperial or imperialist character of American interactions with Iran. The three or four recently published studies of US-Iran relations also note imperialist US policies toward Iran, something that is central, or axial, to my book’s narrative.

Axis of Empire: A History of Iran-US Relations. By Afshin Matin-Asgari. Penguin Random House, 2026. Click here to buy.

Fariba Amini: You paint a negative picture of the role of the United States in Iran. Were there also moments in history when the Americans had a positive role?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: I call America’s relations with Iran imperialist because it has imposed intertwined military, political and economic structures of domination on the Pahlavi monarchy and systematically undermined the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic. The culmination of this policy is the current US-Israeli war against Iran, which despite the Islamic Republic’s contribution to its making, is a clear case of imperialist aggression. Of course, and depending on one’s point of view, it is possible to find some positive aspects in the long history of US-Iran relation, for example, American Presbyterian missionaries’ contribution to modern education in Iran or similar contributions by the US Peace Corps during the 1960s-1970s.

Fariba Amini: In the chapter about oil and the negotiations between Mosaddegh and the U.S. administrations, unlike other scholars, you conclude that neither Truman nor Eisenhower wanted to come to a compromise over the oil issue. Yet, in his book, Envoy to the Middle World, Ambassador George McGhee mentions that the Truman administration tried very hard to appease Dr. Mosaddegh’s government, but it was the British who persuaded the Americans to hold firm. How do you come to this conclusion?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: My basic argument is that the Truman administration was not an “honest broker” and did not support Mosaddegh against British intransigence, its real objective being the breakup of Britain’s monopoly of Iranian oil to get a big share of it for American companies, exactly what happened after Mosaddegh’s overthrow. This is the scholarly consensus on British and American conflict with Iran over its oil nationalization, argued most persuasively in works by Ervand Abrahamian.

Fariba Amini: You mention in the chapter about the Coup, that on August 18, Mosaddegh’s biggest mistake was that he forbade all demonstrations for or against his government. On that day, a few hundred paid hooligans took over the city. Mosaddegh’s head of the Tehran police, general Afshartoos, had been abducted and murdered, allegedly by agents of the MI6. Tehran was in turmoil. Don’t you think that Mosaddegh did not believe in using force? He didn’t want any bloodshed. He may have survived if he had used the army to crush the rioters, but it was against his principles. So how can you criticize his actions considering who the man was?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: Though Mosaddegh’s personality looms large over the oil nationalization movement, my analysis attributes his overthrow to structural factors beyond one individual’s personality traits. Well before August 1953, Mosaddegh’s National Front coalition had fallen apart and his government could rely only on a few small parties, having lost significant popular support as well. The armed forces were deeply penetrated by the US, which means Mosaddegh could not have used them effectively even if he had tried to do so during the coup. Iran’s strongest political organization, whose presence in the streets might have stopped the coup, was the communist Tudeh Party, which Mosaddegh did not trust and whose offer of help, on August 18-19, he rejected. In the end, I explain Mosaddegh’s overthrow in terms of complex interactions among several domestic and international actors, something beyond Mosaddegh’s personal leadership qualities. Though I politically sympathize with Mosaddegh, I believe obsession with leaders, whether Mosaddegh, the Shah or ayatollah Khomeini, confuses our historical thinking.

Fariba Amini: Under the Shah, as you point out, Iran became a client state, buying vast amounts of armaments, sometimes in cash, from the United States. But at the end, Mohammad Reza Shah could not hold on to his throne. What were some of the reasons?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: The answer is not simple. Following many scholars, I argue the Shah’s relation with the US underwent changes, experiencing ups and downs. Two chapters of my book trace US-Iranian political, economic and cultural relations during the 1960s-1970s in some detail. I note, for example, that in the early 1970s, the Shah imagined himself independent of Washington. But by the second half of that decade, his relations with the US saw growing tension, in part related to the criticism of the Shah in the American news media, itself largely due to the activities of the Iranian student opposition. To simplify things, one could say Iran was drifting toward a revolutionary situation because the Shah could not manage a multi-pronged economic and political crisis, which carried over to his relations with the US. The revolutionary drift might have been averted had the Shah restored constitutional government in 1976-1977, something he accepted by the end of 1978 when it was too late.

Fariba Amini: We now come to the chapter in your book about the Iranian Revolution which you cover extensively. As an intellectual of the left, don’t you think that the Iranian left and even liberals did not know their society well? How could a cleric having been exiled for years in Najaf, quite isolated and unknown, suddenly lead one of the most significant revolutions of the 20th century?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: I don’t find the blame game concerning who was more responsible for the revolution’s misdirection useful or interesting. The Iranian left was quite diverse, and its overall understanding of society was no less complex than that of any other political tendency. From 1976 through most of 1978, Iran’s secular liberal and leftist intelligentsia asked for the restoration of constitutional government, a sensible demand the Shah refused to accept, thus paving the way for Khomeini’s rise to lead a mass revolutionary movement seeking his overthrow. Khomeini was no unknown cleric on the margins of politics, but he became the revolution’s undisputed leader only in 1978 when a hitherto secular reformist opposition acquired a revolutionary Islamic character.

Fariba Amini: Towards the end of your book, you talk about the Trump administration’s dealings with the Islamic Republic. Is he just a patsy of Netanyahu when it comes to Iran or does he have an independent policy?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: By all accounts, Israeli leaders, and particularly Netanyahu, had tried to drag the US into a war with Iran since the mid-1990s. After September 11, 2001, the Israel lobby pushed Iran to top the list of US enemies in President GW Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” However, while successive American administrations avoided direct military confrontation with Iran, they gave Israel a free hand to undertake acts of aggression that made Iranian retaliation more likely, leading to the 12-day war of June 2025. Trump joined that war to the limited extent of bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. But he embarked on a massive invasion of Iran last February, apparently being convinced by Netanyahu that the Islamic Republic would fall or surrender when faced with full-scale American Israeli attack. This proved to be a big mistake, drawing the US into a war it can neither win nor disengage from.

Fariba Amini: How has the Iranian society changed since the events of January 2026 when thousands Iranian citizens were reportedly killed?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: By late 2025-early 2026, many in the Iranian diaspora, particulary the monarchists, assumed the Islamic Republic was on the verge of collapse, needing a final push through a mass popular uprising. This proved a tragic illusion when the regime put down popular protests by massacring thousands last January. Exactly how many people were killed or the extent of direct foreign involvement in the January 2026 protests remains unknown, but the event showed the regime could not be toppled with Reza Pahlavi or Iran International TV asking people to come out and die in street protest. Nor could it be toppled by the combined firepower of Israel and the US, as the current war has shown. One may despise the Islamic Republic, but it has proven far more resilient than anyone expected.

Fariba Amini: Are we witnessing a different era in the long life of the Islamic Republic and its relationship with the West?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: What has emerged from this war so far is a different Islamic Republic that functions quite effectively under tremendous pressure and even after the elimination of its top military and political leadership. The Revolutionary Guards manage the war and seem to be running the country efficiently, though with an iron fist, with the help of surviving leaders of the old political establishment. But the regime emerging from the war is not the Islamic Republic we used to know. Already, the role of clerics and Islam is less pronounced, while a nationalistic military-technocratic elite, perhaps more competent but no less repressive than the Khamenei regime, seems to be in control. The extent and brutality of American damages inflicted on Iran, epitomized in the massacre of Minab children, indicate foreseeable US-Iranian relations, under any political regime in Tehran, can hardly improve beyond a cold armistice. Fantasies of restoring relations to something like what existed under the Shah are as absurd as Trump’s promise of turning Gaza’s genocidal grounds into a resort.

Fariba Amini: Has this war changed the fabric of the region?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: I am not a geo-strategist, and no one can predict exactly how this ongoing war will change the Middle East or the (Persian) Gulf region. Clearly, Trump’s failed misadventure vis-à-vis Iran, as well as his unleashing of Isreal’s genocidal aggression in Lebanon and Palestine, has badly damaged America’s standing in this vital and unstable region of the world. Pipe dreams such as the Abraham Accords are dashed and Saudi Arabia and Gulf states must think twice before resuming their overt military and political reliance on the US. Finally, Israel’s blood-drenched triumphalism looks like a strategic political failure, turning the Zionist state into an international pariah, which is also losing support among the American public and even segments of the political establishment who hold Israel responsible for getting the US involved in an unwinnable war and trying to prevent a resolution to this war.”

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* Minor edits were made by the author after initial posting.

(The Conversation) – Iran fired barrages of missiles at Israel for the first time in two months on June 7. The initial trigger was an Israeli strike against a Hezbollah target in the Lebanese capital of Beirut earlier that day, an attack that Donald Trump had only recently asked the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to avoid carrying out.

Israel’s military soon launched retaliatory strikes on targets in western and central Iran, again defying calls by Trump for restraint. Iran subsequently launched fresh strikes of its own, before the Iranian military announced it was bringing its attacks to an end. In a statement, Iran warned it would carry out a “more severe” response if Israel’s attacks on Lebanon continue.

What caught my attention about this round of fighting is the geopolitical context in which it has occurred. Iran is trying to establish a new regional order, based on new rules. And it might just pull it off.

The first notable feature of this order is that Iran dictates to Israel and the US what they may and may not do. Iran started this latest round of fighting not because of an attack on Iranian territory, but as an attempt to dictate Israeli military actions in Lebanon.

Six months ago, Israel could do as it pleased in Lebanon without Iranian intervention. Now, thanks to Trump and Netanyahu’s war, Tehran feels empowered enough to try and place limits on Israeli action on Israel’s own borders.

We have seen, somewhat more obliquely, the same principle apply in the Strait of Hormuz over the past month or so. Iran established a chokehold over the vital waterway shortly after the start of the war in late February. And it has no intention of letting its control go.

This, too, is part of Iran’s new regional order. It is telling its opponents: do as we say or we tighten our stranglehold on the global economy. For now at least, US actions show that Washington would rather accept the continued existence of this reality than fight to change it.

A second aspect of the new regional order is Iran’s expanding ways of inflicting pain on its enemies in order to force acceptance of this new world. Iran has established that it can rain missiles on Israel, strike infrastructure across the Gulf states, kill American soldiers and choke the global economy of oil, all without facing a realistic attempt at regime change.

Iran also still has many cards in its pocket. These range from expanding the scope of energy and desalination targets it hits across the Gulf to activating the Houthis to block energy traffic in the Red Sea. The Houthis have announced a ban on Israeli shipping in the Red Sea following the latest escalation.

The US has threatened many times now to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure, invade its Kharg island export terminal or to escort ships through Hormuz. However, it has backed down from all of them out of fear of the consequences.

Strained US-Israeli ties

The third feature of the new regional order is that Israel and the US no longer march in lockstep. Trump responded to Iran’s attack on Israel by emphasising that his priority was to stop Israel from retaliating. “I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate,” he said following the initial Iranian strikes.

Netanyahu has managed to manoeuvre Israel into a position in which a Republican president is telling him not to respond to incoming Iranian missile barrages targeting Israeli civilians. This situation would scarcely have been believable six months ago.

Separating Israel from the US is a longstanding dream of Tehran. So far at least, there is no hint that Trump is threatening to withhold missile interceptor defences from Israel over the resumption in hostilities. But even while keeping American defensive aid, it would be very difficult for Israel to sustain further conflict with Iran.

Hunting missiles launchers would alone prove a challenge, because Israeli air power would be stretched much more thinly without American assistance in hitting targets. If the northern front against Hezbollah remains active as well, the Israeli military’s resources will be even more strained.

And for how long is the US going to accept running down its missile interceptor stocks in order to defend Israel from a bout of warfare that its famously mercurial president told the country not to start? In the short term, perhaps for a while. But over the longer term, it is not sustainable for the US to dedicate a substantial portion of its missile defences to protecting Israel.

The fourth and final feature of the new regional order is that peace seems impossible to imagine. Netanyahu cannot accept an Iranian veto over Israel’s actions in Lebanon, nor absorb the implications for Israeli deterrence if he lets attacks from Iran go unanswered.

Photo by Shai Pal on Unsplash

Trump cannot get his peace deal with Iran while Israel is bombing Lebanon. And Iran has the incentive to keep pushing for more, inflicting more costs on its opponents, because in the new regional order it can do so without many consequences.

This is the result of a disastrous war of choice which will go down as one of the most ill-conceived in American history.

Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.