Washington and Tel Aviv Treat Law as Optional
The U.S. unleashed devastation on Iranian missile depots and air defenses in what it called swift punishment for the death of two service members, while Tehran claimed new strikes on American bases in Kuwait. Negotiation failures have renewed military strikes in the Middle East, with both Iran and the U.S. vowing not to back down.
The International Court of Justice ruled in 2024 that Israel must vacate Palestinian territories. The U.S. and Israel said, in effect, “Make me.” That ruling sits unenforced while the bombardment continues. This week, Israel escalated strikes on Gaza and attacked a funeral as it continues what Zeteo describes as its genocidal war and apartheid policies.
Two capitals, one doctrine. Washington strikes Iranian soil. Tel Aviv ignores the world's highest court and bombs a funeral procession. Both calculate that no force exists to compel compliance. The ICJ rules; the White House shields its ally. The pattern extends beyond the Middle East. The Intercept notes that turning on allies has always been the American way, a consistent feature of imperial foreign policy.
At home, the repressive apparatus sharpens. Consortium News reports the United States appears to be reinvigorating COINTELPRO for the 2020s, this time with police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance. They know they're losing their grip. They know they are vastly outnumbered. They are afraid. CounterPunch describes American prisons as real-life sites of body horror, discussing the “Haunting Prison.”
Resistance persists across the global South and the industrial core. Truthout reports Indian workers resisting efforts to train their AI robot replacements, offering lessons for workers elsewhere to disrupt the relentless onslaught of surveillance capitalism. In Australia, the World Socialist Web Site documents educators urged to vote no on a sell-out ballot, repudiating a government-union conspiracy against their rights.
This impunity is measured in the rubble of Gaza, in the mourners targeted at a funeral, in the cratered landscape of a regional war driven by U.S. and Israeli escalation, in the prison cells and surveillance dragnets that warehouse the poor, in the workplaces where bosses deploy AI to replace the workers who built the wealth. The workers, tenants, and displaced who pay the price have no air force, no veto, no swift punishment for the architects of their suffering. The pattern is not hidden. It is the visible architecture of a system that protects capital and empire first, last, and always.