Sooner or later in every armed conflict, someone will trot out the well-worn aphorism that “Truth is the first casualty of war.” And certainly, in the Iran war truth beat a hasty retreat as soon as the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran and Lebanon on February 28.
But what was meant to be an operation which would be all over within days has now lasted three months. And, during that time, truth – and at points, reality itself – has come in for a thorough beating from all sides.
This week we’ve heard from Iranian state TV, which announced it had obtained a copy of an “unofficial framework for a memorandum of understanding” of how to end the conflict. The main points, which included a plan for Iran to control traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in partnership with Oman and giving Tehran access to billions of dollars of frozen assets, come across as highly improbable to say the least.
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump immediately dismissed this as “a complete fabrication”, going on to threaten to bomb Oman if it turned out to be true. “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up”, he told a reporter on Wednesday. “They understand that. They’ll be fine,” he added.
The US president followed this up with a post on TruthSocial in which he said it should be mandatory for an array of Arab and Muslim countries across the region to sign up to the Abraham accords and normalise relations with Israel. Trump sees this as the landmark achievement of his first term of office. But after signing up Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in 2020 and Kazakhstan in 2025, there have been no other takers and the agreement is now seen by many experts as dead in the water.
Saudi Arabia, which was always high on the US president’s target list, said the only way it would contemplate joining was if Israel recognised Palestinian statehood. So this plan is also a non-starter, writes Simon Mabon, an expert in Middle East and Gulf politics. And the idea, also floated by Trump, that even Tehran would see the light and sign up to the accords, normalising relations with Israel, stretches the bounds of reality even further.
Mabon examines how improbable the whole scenario is, given the seething tensions churning through the Middle East.
Read more:
Trump’s call to expand Abraham accords is destined to fail
Meanwhile Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Professor of International Law at La Trobe University in Australia, explains the background to the accords and why many countries in the region are more likely to find their own path to stability.
Read more:
Trump can’t sell the Abraham Accords on a Middle East that has lost trust in the US
And so it is, after another week of claim and counterclaim, that the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed to traffic. A great deal has rightly been made about the shock this has caused to the global economy and energy prices. But, as Farhang Morady, an expert in International Development at the University of Westminster notes, the closure of the strait has also shut down a number of other key Iranian exports.
Before the war, Iran was the world’s second-largest exporter of methanol after China, shipping roughly 10 million tonnes each year. The war has removed over 30% of the global seaborne methanol supply from the market. Then there are pistachios, of which Iran is once again second-largest exporters after the US. And cement, of which Iran ships 70 million tonnes, mainly to its neighbours.
This is clearly going to have a seriously deleterious effect in Iran’s already parlous economy. But as Morady points out, Iran is involved in supply chains all over the world, which are all now under serious strain.
Read more:
Methanol, pistachios and cement: the other Iranian exports being choked by the war
Greater Israel
Meanwhile Israel’s assault on southern Lebanon continues unabated, with the casualty count well into the thousands as well as millions of people displaced. Israel now occupies the land south of a “yellow line”, which it says it intends to keep. It also occupies significant chunks of territory in southern Syria.
At this point it wouldn’t help to be drawn into the merits of Israel’s argument that it has to have control over this territory to prevent attacks from hostile elements operating close to its northern borders.
But there appears little if any justification for the rapid spread of settlements on the West Bank on land which was intended under the agreement struck in 1993 between Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and the then Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as land earmarked for a future Palestinian state.
The settler land grab – and accompanying violence – led the EU earlier this month to sanction various settler groups and individuals.
AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg, File
Ambra Suriano has tracked the development of settler ideology from its earliest – largely secular – development to the almost messianic fervour to restore Israel to its biblical greatness in the era of kings David and Solomon.
It’s a movement that has gone from existing on the fringes of Israeli politics to command a huge amount of influence and political clout thanks to the inclusion of two extreme pro-settler ministers in the Netanyahu government since 2022.
Read more:
Greater Israel: the origins of the settler movement now threatening to annexe the West Bank
Colourful primaries
The action is really hotting up in the run-up to November’s midterm elections in the US. It’s primary season, where the two main parties ask their registered members to choose the candidates going forward for election in the 33 Senate seats and 435 districts in the House of Representatives that are up for grabs.
Popular wisdom is that with the US president’s approval rating hitting all-time lows in various polls and with his administration being blamed for a hugely unpopular war, the Republicans are likely to face a backlash and could lose their majority in both House and Senate.
Many Republicans are concerned that Trump’s decision to oust incumbents he dislikes in favour of true believers won’t help matters. Clodagh Harrington, an expert in US politics at University College Cork, has the story.
Read more:
Trump’s primary challenges to his Republican foes make GOP nervous in run up to midterms
