by Arab Affairs correspondent of NewWorker

The skies over Tel Aviv and Tehran are unusually quiet this week as the cease-fire holds and secret talks with the Americans resume in renewed efforts to resolve the nuclear issue with Iran. Airports are re-opening, shares rise and oil prices are slipping on the global market following the end of what Donald Trump called the “12 Day War”. But the guns still blaze throughout occupied Palestine as Zionist settler gunmen go on the rampage in the West Bank and seven Israeli soldiers were killed and many more wounded in a resistance attack in the south of the Gaza Strip.

The 11-strong BRICS bloc, which includes People’s China, Russia, Brazil and India, have expressed “grave concerns” over the US strike against three Iranian nuclear facilities, which they said were a violation of international law and the UN Charter. And in New York, Russia, China and Pakistan tabled a draft resolution at the UN Security Council condemning last week’s American attack on the Iranian nuclear complexes.

Last week the Israelis wheeled out the son of the hated last Shah of Iran and called for regime change in Tehran and Trump demanded “unconditional surrender”. Now the Israelis lick their wounds as Trump talks about “stability” and the need for new talks with the Islamic Republic.

All sides are, of course, claiming victory. Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian hails what he calls a “great victory”. The Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu says “we have brought down the Iranian nuclear project”, and Trump poses as the great peace-maker who’s bringing all sides to the bargaining table while bragging that his bunker bombs have destroyed the entire Iranian nuclear energy project. Yes, no, maybe…

The Americans certainly stopped the fighting after a curiously theatrical assault on Iranian nuclear facilities – the Iranians were given several hours warning in advance to evacuate the sites – and a similar Iranian reprisal on a key US air base in the Gulf state of Qatar. Not only were the Americans notified in advance of

the raid but later reports revealed that the Iranians had co-ordinated the missile attack with the Qataris as well. Secret Iranian–American talks, possibly involving Turkey and Russia but not Israel, are continuing whatever anyone says in public.

Israel is, perhaps, the biggest loser. They didn’t knock out the Iranian nuclear plants. Their ‘Iron Dome’ and ‘David’s Sling’ failed to stop the Iranian drones and rockets. Swathes of Tel Aviv and Haifa are now in ruins. There was no ‘regime change’ and they had to call for American help to end the war they had eagerly started.

But as Professor Avishai Ehrlich, a member of the communist-led Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) in Israel, says: “Israel today is part of the US global military power projection. The US military controls what happens in the world from 11 command centres (and hundreds of bases). US allies are subordinated to one or more of them. As long as Israel was isolated in its region, it was assigned to the European Command (as in football), where it was alien and irrelevant. During Trump’s first presidency, after the Abraham Accords were signed in 2021, Israel was transferred to the US Central Command (CENTCOM)…

“The Middle East will not quieten down until a just solution is found to the Palestinian question, and due to the centrality of the Middle East in global politics, neither will the rest of the world.”