The fact that there is tensions in the government regarding Israel means that the entities that found value in Israel are losing out to those that don't. So-called America-first powers no longer see 1st-tier support of Israel as in the interests of the US.
This will not go well with Zionists, who are still supported by massive backing and financial interests. They will spend a LOT of money to keep Israel the US's "top ally" despite it being no such thing in any meaningful way. Israel is a tool of the Western imperial forces.
The fact that this story is breaking means that Zionism is getting more-and-more toxic to people in power.
[0] https://michael-hudson.com/2023/11/israel-as-a-landed-aircra...
Israel definitely wanted us to do this, but they've been trying to sell US presidents on this for decades without success. MBS and the Saudis also want this, but you rarely read about that in the news; likewise with the UAE and quite a few others who have even been running their own direct strikes on Iran.
The thing is, and I realize this is a rough climate to say this into: Jews have been the official scapegoats for the Middle East and Europe for what... 1500 years now? That doesn't just go away, and the political expediency of Trump covering his ass and the ass of his Saudi/UAE sources of billions (through Jared, Ivanka, Eric, etc) can't be thrown under the bus to do it.
Meanwhile Israel is being run by a universally loathed man who can't shut up, so it's just easier to pretend that's it all their fault.
Well, it is clear to see that this is Netanyahu's ploy, but the thing is that Trump constantly lies about this. "There are negotiations", but then the US bombs again. To me it seems as if Trump operates in a way that makes it impossible to have anything else but drop bombs onto Iran. In this way he resembles Putin, who tries to occupy more and more land belonging to Ukraine. Putin has no alternative to this either, similar to Trump. (Yes, Putin could in theory stop his war, but he tied his identity to it. I don't see how he can stop it, without having achieved officially stated goals of his genocidal invasion.)
Makes the MAGA military look incompetent. The US has a history of botched wars around the globe, most of which have little to do with Israel. If I'm drawing from data, then the Iran conflict is consistent with the post-war military movements of the US.
Now that the communists are no more, Israel is the next best scapegoat. The way I see it, Israel's current leaders are happy to be scapegoats because the war benefits Ben Gvir and a radicalized Likud. It allows them to consolidate domestic power and pursue aggressive foreign objectives under shadow of the Iran conflict.
I hope Netanyahu has thought this through. He has burned through 100 years of western guilt in the span of 3 years. To break even, Israel's military excursions must secure outsized outcomes, to the tune of decades of security. Because, I believe we are entering a couple of decades of bipartisan & unprecedented* anti-semitism.
* Figuratively speaking. Historically ofc, anti-semitism is pretty precedented.
It was a good idea if it was also timed during the popular uprisings. But the 20,000+ die-hard citizens that would have effected regime change were slaughtered months ago. So now it's just a scared populace hunkering in place while USA warships and jets dominate their country.
And the Iranians fire off the occasional drone swarm on UAE.
> Why now all of a sudden?
What changed is geopolitics. Official and publicly calling them a threat.
What this also changes is how gov works with companies. How these companies can subcontract and to who. Which, let's be honest, most companies don't give a rats ass if they are hacked. Sure, they lose money, but it's almost always a slap on the wrist and since every company works this way there's no market signal to express that you care even if you do. (I'd still encourage people to install apps like Signal, degoogle, and all that. Your individual choices still do matter, even if it's only us nerds)
John Kiriakou [1] will spend 3 hours talking about the CIA's torture program (illegal) and NSA spying on Americans (illegal). In the same conversation, he will insist that the US would never spy on Israel because it is illegal.
Who is this fooling ?
[1] Senior ex-CIA official, whistleblower & internet meme phenomenon.
But no one without at least a TS really knows
Same reason that CISA (2015) was passed less than two years after the Snowden revelations.
Once the secrets are open, the feds can codify them into law. They were never going to change their behavior.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the talking points start being ‘Israel caused high gas prices!’ soon.
The right wing pundits are already working overtime on X and elsewhere to blame Israel and concoct all sorts of explanations why Trump authorized the strike (the most amusing is that he "was possessed by demons").
Blaming Israel may have been coordinated with Netanyahu, who has nothing to lose and is probably perfectly fine with the blame as long as he gets his war and parts of Lebanon.
Blaming Israel has many historic precedents from Clinton to Trump, often through planted leaks or deliberate hot mics.
Polling shows support for Israel is far greater among Trump loyalist voters than non-loyalist Republicans, so this is surely false.
Perhaps you're confusing "MAGA" with actual American nationalists, who are statistically irrelevant.
https://www.aipac.org/memos/america-israel-defense-ndaa-224
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/06...
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-israel-military-congres...
> Israel has “a hyper-aggressive intelligence service,” said Emily Harding, vice president of the Defense and Security Department and director of the intelligence, national security and technology program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington. “They are exceedingly interested in what we are up to,” Harding said of the Israelis.
And these are considered their closest allies.
What do they do with others.
The lesson Israel has learned from the Holocaust is “we can do better”, and they’re being empowered to see that through.
Why is this news now?
Us gives Israel money, Israel uses that money to buy people in power in the US, those bought people then ensure US taxpayewr money flows to israel to...and so the cycle continues.
Nothing explains the US being subservient to Israel than this.
Not even a teeny weeny bit of spying on your allies?
I wish I was joking.
https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/aipac-says-it-was-pro...
https://www.reddit.com/r/illinois/comments/1ry8tha/aipac_ope...
One can only imagine that many of these countries were also spying on us in various capacities, albeit with fewer resources. Israel is a bigger concern because they're extremely good at it, but I'm sure it's nothing new.
>While it is commonplace for allies and adversaries across the globe to spy on each other, the current and former U.S. officials said Israel’s recent efforts have gone well beyond what is typical and expected espionage.
They used to for their warcrimes, genocide, apartheid, and literally every other thing they are guilty of.
TurboTax had IDF soldiers in uniform in their offices. [1]
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-... [1] https://thegrayzone.com/2026/04/28/tech-giant-employees-idf-...
Mazel Tov!
Funds for Israel flow. Trump was yelling expletives down the phone at Netanyahu this week. Trump has been leading an Israeli war.
It’s dizzying, and it’s almost as though there is a lack of sound minds involved.
Has the US ever been easier to manipulate or spy on?
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/sean-strickland-says-hes-b...
Trump is like the ultimate tool of corruption - whether it is Russia or Israel or whoever, you name it. Dude flops to the highest bidder. No wonder US oligarchs are currently controlling the USA.
What kind of weak hasbara is this? You guys fell off your game bad.
What is effective, isn't blackmail, but complicity. Doing bad things together. Then you get a shared interest. The people Epstein had blackmail on, knew that he wouldn't use it casually, because after all there would be no way to use it without implicating himself. But if he were desperate, he might. So the victims had an interest in keeping Epstein not desperate.
So it's the bad things they do together which is dangerous. Even things they do in full view of the public can work, because the threat isn't necessarily that the public finds out, it's that if one is held accountable, then all are at risk.
It’s like how Israeli lobbying orgs state that “claiming Zionist orgs control the media is antisemitism”, and then the solution is literally “we should use our contacts & supporters in the media to stop this kind of rhetoric”. Beautiful.
So Israel wants to know what Trump is going to do next.
I could understand why anyone who starts a joint venture with trump would be nervous about trump selling them out. It is trump after all. Probably is a logical thing to be concerned about.
Sure he does. They did it today!
Trump is sitting in a chair in the corner of the room of any negotiation he's in. He's weak at best.
situational awareness is best when first hand, as someone may be lying to you, or may not even know what they are doing in the first place.
That and the Saud's, despite an appalling human rights record, are politically difficult to blame for anything (including Bin Laden), because of their (brilliant) petro politics - playing the Eastern bloc off against the West incredibly well.
If that's not pushing agenda, I don't know what is.
More like his life. He will not survive the end of this war.
Do you have an example?
Keep in mind that the elite class couldn’t give two shits what the peasant class thinks. In fact, having us believe in false conspiracies helps distract the masses from the true conspiracies :)
A lot of them think support for Israel leads to the apocalypse and Jesus’s return. It doesn’t end well for the Jews in that story.
Trump had to cater to them in his first term but, since he's taken over the party, they're in the backseat.
This admin is special in that it blames proxies for wars that it started or provoked. Biden owned the Ukraine war, Trump blames the EU for wanting to continue the Ukraine war while Anduril and Eric Schmidt (https://www.techradar.com/pro/ex-google-ceo-is-key-to-ukrain...) are selling and testing their new drone tech.
In the case of Israel, you can say that there is direct influence from Kushner, Witkoff and Mark Levin. We'll see if Congress and Senate will get a 2/3rd majority to stop the war agaist a potential Trump veto. I don't think so. Until they do, I consider all resolutions with a simple majority to be theater for the midterm elections.
I think at most we get a indirect "confession" like Andrew Bustamante gave in some podcasts like here, where he answers to the question if the US spies on the Mossad that everybody spies on everybody and than distract to the case were the US was caught spying on (it's ally) Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZklvHVsaT4
PS: I guess at the end you didn't spy until you were caught spying.
Guess what happens anyways?
That said, he probably isn't wrong at all about this particular thing.
I wonder who would benefit from spending such time and effort for so little...
There was never a world where this was a good idea. We had a diplomatic agreement that worked, nuked it for no gain, and now there isn’t a viable way to influence Iran.
Diplomacy can’t function again because they don’t trust the US (fair, correct.)
The IRGC cannot be replaced without a ground invasion, which the US won’t do (fair, correct.)
The US can’t unilaterally remove one ton of buried nuclear material from the middle of a hostile state.
This was always stupid.
I see this repeateded a lot but it doesn't follow to me that the facility that was bombed in midnight hammer was created and begun operating after that agreement was cancelled. It seems clear to me that Iran never stopped using that facility.
It seems to me that Iran's goal is to develop a nuclear weapon and there isn't a piece of paper that will stop them. I don't really fault them, it's a very sane thing to do to secure your border a la North Korea.
I'm not sure there is a non-military way to influence Iran to not develop a nuclear weapon.
They could have if they'd done what Israel wanted and destroyed all the oil infrastructure. The IRGC is heavily dependent on oil revenue for funding its oppressive apparatus; without it hundreds of thousands of militia would go without pay and eventually desert. For whatever reason Trump didn't want to do this; likely not for humanitarian reasons given his nature, but for some reason he seemed to really care what Turkey and Pakistan think, both of whom don't want to be flooded with refugees.
Where you're definitely wrong is on the "diplomatic agreement that worked". Iran continued to enrich violating the agreement, the agreement was time bound and not indefinite (and would have already expired anyways), and it enabled them to sell oil and raise a lot of money to fuel their wars, missile programs, nuclear programs and other ambitions.
No, actually it is you who is wrong. Iran absolutely complied with the JCPOA. It is after US withdrew from the agreement that they pursued enrichment further.
You would think the traffic and surveillance cams hacked by the Israelis would’ve shown the extent of this bloodbath.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-security-cameras-surveil...
> As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone, two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME—indicating a dramatic surge in the death toll.
https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...
Imagine infiltrating the Iranian surveillance camera network and being unable to produce footage of 30k people massacred across two days.
I do not like Iran because of its actions in Syria and Yemen, but even with my bias, I could hear the bullshit Western elitist consent manufacturing engine starting up from miles away.
Was it 100% peaceful prior to the Crusades? Of course not. But not anymore so than anywhere else in the world. Did it become a mess once they arrived? Yes, and they slaughtered everyone, including Christians, when they came, let alone Jews and Muslims and everyone else that wasn't them.
So, we need to stop pretending like the US and European colonizing entities do any kind of good wherever they go. It's just about enriching the elites through military contracts while subverting any peoples' attempts to have autonomy for themselves.
Are you talking about the Ottoman Empire? Pretty violent.
Anyways, I can't cover the history of the region in an HN comment...
That's an extremely historically ignorant take. Turkey alone genocided 2-3 million Christians in the 20th century (Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks), well before Israel existed.
isn't it obvious that the "popular uprisings" were part of a scheme to overthrow the government to install some US-friendly puppet (or better: Israel-friendly, since that's the only thing that counts), and that the supposedly slaughtered protesters are exactly the reason that is normally put forward to justify an attack on an enemy country?
> The Times reported that Barnea’s predecessor, Yossi Cohen, viewed regime change in Iran as unlikely and deemphasized the Mossad’s work on that project, instead working on ways to weaken the regime through sanctions and targeted assassinations of nuclear scientists.
> But Barnea has adopted the opposite approach, directing the agency’s energies toward regime change over the past year
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-frustrated-that...
https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/survival-online/2019/07...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iaea-report-says-iran-ha...
I know people don't like AI but here's a Gemini Pro summary (all these have references not copy-pasted here, you can find them just as easily as I can)
The 2018 "Atomic Archive" Revelation
For the first two years of the JCPOA, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was unaware of several locations. That changed in early 2018 when Israeli intelligence agents raided a warehouse in Tehran and stole a massive archive of documents, CDs, and blueprints. This "Atomic Archive" detailed the "Amad Plan"—Iran’s structured nuclear weapons program that was officially halted in 2003. More importantly, the documents provided the IAEA with a roadmap to previously undeclared sites where Iran had worked on uranium conversion, high-explosives testing, and centrifuge development in the early 2000s.
IAEA Investigations and Uranium Traces
Acting on the archive data, the IAEA demanded access to several suspect locations in 2019 and 2020, most notably sites at Turquzabad, Varamin, and Marivan. What they found fundamentally shifted the compliance narrative: Uranium Traces: Environmental sampling at these sites revealed particles of anthropogenic (man-made, processed) uranium. The Cover-Up: Satellite imagery and IAEA inspections showed that Iran had spent months actively bulldozing, scraping, and sanitizing these sites to destroy evidence before allowing inspectors in.
Retained Material: The IAEA concluded that Iran had retained undeclared nuclear material or contaminated equipment at the Turquzabad warehouse as recently as 2018—squarely in the middle of the JCPOA implementation period. Did hiding these sites violate the JCPOA?Technically, the distinction comes down to the difference between active enrichment and material declaration.
No Active Bomb-Making (2016–2019): Neither the U.S. intelligence community nor the IAEA found evidence that Iran was spinning secret centrifuges or actively manufacturing a weapon at these sites while the JCPOA was in effect. The traces found were leftover from the pre-2003 weapons program.
NPT Safeguards Violation: However, by retaining undeclared nuclear material and lying about the past existence of these sites, Iran violated its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The JCPOA Implication: The premise of the JCPOA was that Iran had to come completely clean about the "Possible Military Dimensions" (PMD) of its past program to establish a baseline for inspectors. By keeping an archive of its weapons program and hiding contaminated sites, Iran proved it had deceived the IAEA during the foundational negotiations of the deal.
So, while Iran was adhering to the strict mathematical limits on its active centrifuge count and uranium stockpile between 2016 and 2019, the discovery of the undeclared sites proved they were simultaneously running a concealment operation.
Thanks. You proved my point. Did you even read the first article you posted?
> "...the material in question is probably from a clandestine project that was first discovered in 2005 and reported by the IAEA the next year. ... If the material was from that time period, it would be a safeguards violation but not a violation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which regulates nuclear activity from 2016. The green salt project was halted in 2004, and while all the documentation was carefully preserved ... there has been no indication of it having been resumed"
Your second article is from 2025 and it probably refers to last couple of years.. The US withdrew in 2018... Of course they continued enrichment after that withdrawal.
Let me add a bit more:
"The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear program June 6 [2018], and, unsurprisingly, the report found that Iran is complying with its commitments under the multilateral deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)." [1]
Again. You are wrong on this one! Iran adhered to JCPOA. US pulled out. Iran continued enrichment beyond limits defined by JCPOA as the agreement was dead by then.
[1] https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2018-06-08/iaea-report-conf...
Your reference to the 2018 report does not prove your point.
Yes the article states the facts that Iran was not declaring their materials but somehow tries to spin it towards the agreement is still working. The fact is "didn't declare". The spin is an opinion.
Iran hid their nuclear sites. They were not inspected or monitored as part of the agreement. When they were found out they prevented access while they erased the evidence. I'm not sure in what universe we can conclude the agreement is working given this evidence.
Even under the most ideal conditions the JCPOA would have already expired and Iran would be back to making weapons.