Things Fall Apart: The Centre Will Not Hold: Where Is The West Headed After Israel & America’s ‘12-Day War’ On Iran?
- Derek Sayer
- Jul 13
- 15 min read
As I write this, the press are reporting that a third ceasefire in Gaza is imminent, with Donald Trump committing to “ensuring negotiations continue until a final agreement is reached.” Whether this will end Israel’s “war,” which began on October 7, 2023 and has now raged for 21 months, killing a documented 57,012 Palestinians (as of July 2) and in all likelihood many thousands more, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, a stocktaking of some of the key events of the last momentous month seems in order.
The “12-Day War”
Israel launched what it called a “pre-emptive strike” against Iran during the night of June 13. More than 200 IDF fighter jets hit more than 100 nuclear and military facilities and residential neighbourhoods in Tehran and other cities, and Israel assassinated 30 of Iran’s top military commanders and 11 of its nuclear scientists in targeted individual strikes.
Between June 12 and June 23 Israel carried out at least 146 air strikes on Iran. By the time the “12-Day War” ended with the US-brokered ceasefire of June 24, the Israeli air force had hit over 900 targets.
Iran retaliated by attacking Israel with successive barrages of ballistic missiles. As of June 24, the IDF had killed 610 people in Iran, including 49 women and 13 children, and injured 4,746. Iran’s missiles killed 28 people in Israel and injured 3,238.
The excuse for Israel’s unprovoked attack—for which, as has become customary for Israel, no evidence was ever provided—was that Iran was “on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon.” Benjamin Netanyahu has periodically made this claim since 1992.
Though US National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March that Iran “was not building a nuclear weapon, and its supreme leader had not reauthorized the dormant program even though it had enriched uranium to higher levels,” Donald Trump chose to disregard his intelligence agencies’ assessment. “I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters on June 17. He knew Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear bomb.
The US entered the conflict directly on June 22, dropping 'big, beautiful™' bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. Trump claimed that the strike had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, but the US’s own intelligence assessments (which the White House soon trashed) suggested the program had maybe been set back at best by a few months. For whatever it is worth, the latest Pentagon assessment is that “We have degraded their program by one to two years”
At the point when Israel attacked, Iran was engaged in ongoing talks with the US to renew the nuclear agreement Donald Trump torpedoed in 2018. One of those targeted in Israel’s first strike was the lead Iranian negotiator, Ali Shamkhani. The IDF bombed his Tehran home, leaving him buried under the rubble with serious injuries. Three weeks earlier Trump boasted of “real progress, serious progress” in the talks, describing them as “very, very good”
None of this inspires confidence in Israel or the US as trustworthy negotiating partners in any future peace process. Why should Iran—or anyone else—believe a word they say?
Circling the wagons
After Israel reneged on its ceasefire agreement with Hamas and launched a renewed Gaza offensive on March 18, killing over 400 people in one single night of terror, and imposed a complete blockade on power, food, and medical aid to the Strip, sections of the press and other influential opinion in the West had increasingly challenged its “self-defence” narrative. For a time at least, political leaders appeared to be listening.
This changed abruptly after June 13. Despite the fact that Israel, not Iran, was the clear aggressor—and notwithstanding the well established principle that pre-emptive actions are permissible under international law only “if the threat is imminent, overwhelming, and leaves no alternative but to act”—most Western states swallowed whatever misgivings they had previously expressed about Gaza and once again fell in line behind Israel.
The calls for “all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate” (Emmanuel Macron) were invariably accompanied by reiterations of “Israel’s right to defend itself”—which is not, on any reasonable view, what it was doing—and an insistence that (in the words of Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand) “Iran cannot obtain nuclear weapons.”
Nothing was said about Iran’s right to defend itself, even though it was the attacked party. Nor did it seem to matter that unlike Iran, Israel does possess nuclear weapons, has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and refuses to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IATA) to inspect its nuclear facilities.
Despite Israel carrying out what international organizations, leading Israeli academics and genocide scholars agree is a genocide in Gaza for nearly two years—during which time it has also invaded Lebanon and southern Syria and bombed Yemen—the West portrays Iran as (to quote Anand again) the “persistent threat to regional stability.”
Absurdly, the politicians took the fact that Iran responded militarily to Israel’s aggression—which is to say, defended itself—as confirmation of this alleged threat.
Writing on behalf of the EU on June 18, Kaja Kallas insisted that “Israel has the right to protect its security and people, in line with international law,” while “Iran must take decisive steps to return to negotiations and pave the way for a diplomatic solution.” What law she had in mind she didn’t say. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter only recognizes the “right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs.”
“Canada condemns Iran’s attack on Israel” began Anand’s June 13 post, without any mention of the Israeli strikes that provoked it. Germany, too, “strongly condemn[ed] the indiscriminate Iranian attack on Israeli territory,” adding that “Iran’s nuclear program violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty and poses a threat to the entire region—especially to Israel.” Once again there was silence on the threat posed by Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the quiet bit out loud during the G7 summit on June 17, letting slip to a journalist: “This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.”
A “Zionist Palestinian state”
On June 24 Mark Carney told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour the Iran-Israel ceasefire offered an “opportunity” not only to end the war in Gaza but for “lasting peace in the Middle East” built around—wait for it—“a Zionist, if you will, Palestinian state.”
This goes beyond anything ventured by Carney’s predecessors Justin Trudeau (who proudly declared “I am a Zionist” on March 3, the same day as Israel cut off Gaza’s electricity supply and blockaded all aid for 11 weeks), and Stephen Harper. At the least, it is tone deaf. Worse, as the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council (CMPAC) put it:
"By suggesting that Palestinians must be a “Zionist” state as the condition for their own statehood, Carney denies them the basic right to define their own national character and political future. Self-determination is a core principle of international law, affirmed in the UN Charter and multiple human rights treaties, and it cannot be made contingent on adopting the ideological identity of their occupier"
The UN General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and “strongly condemning the use of starvation as a weapon of war, demanding a full lifting of the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid, and insisting on the protection of civilians under international law,” which passed with an overwhelming majority of 149 to 12 on June 12—the day before Israel’s attack on Iran—with the backing of the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, was quietly forgotten.
So was an international conference co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia scheduled to take place on June 17-20 at the United Nations in New York, at which, it was suggested, all parties should accept that “Palestinian statehood should not be a result of peace, but rather its prerequisite.” It was even briefly hinted that France might recognize Palestine at the conference pour encourager les autres. But after June 13 all bets were off.
The conference has now been indefinitely postponed. As Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has written, this “has left a critical void in multilateral leadership, precisely when it is needed most.” The only Palestinian statehood still left on the table seems to be Mark Carney’s “Zionist Palestine.”
Shifting public opinion
Notwithstanding this backtracking to business as usual on the part of Western leaders, Western publics seem less and less willing to overlook the continuing genocide in Gaza. The genie is out of the bottle, and the gaslighting isn’t working any more.
A YouGov EuroTrack survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain published on June 3 found that while there was little evidence of support for Hamas (only five to nine percent of respondents believed the October 7 attack on Israel was justified), just six to 16 percent believed Israel was “right to send troops into Gaza” and “responded in a proportionate way to the Hamas attacks.” Between seven and 18 percent said they sympathized with Israel, while 18–33 percent said their sympathies lay with the Palestinians. Germany was the only country where the results were evenly matched (17 percent for Israel, 18 percent for Palestine).
In Britain, in a poll conducted on June 18 by YouGov for Action For Humanity and the International Centre for Justice for Palestinians, over half of respondents opposed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza (55 percent) and only 15 percent supported it. A large proportion of those opposed to the campaign thought Israel was committing genocide (82 percent).
Even in the US, where support for Israel has long been an item of faith for both major political parties, the landscape seems to be shifting. A Quinnipiac University poll in early June showed 37 percent of Americans sided with and 32 percent opposed the Israelis—which is a historically narrow margin. This is consistent with several other polls earlier in 2025.
A Harris-Harvard poll commissioned by the Israeli Knesset reported in the Jerusalem Post on June 26 showed a drop from 53 percent to 41 percent in the percentage of Americans who view Israel favourably, and—most worryingly for Israel’s supporters—found young people were closely split (53 to 47 percent) between supporting Israel and supporting Hamas.
An upset in New York
Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory over establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo in the June 24 Democratic primary election for mayor of New York City has been universally described as a major upset not only because he is a member of Democratic Socialists of America campaigning on an avowedly progressive platform, but—above all—because of his unequivocal support for the Palestinian cause.
Despite refusing to back down on his criticism of Israel’s “genocidal” conduct of its Gaza campaign and being comprehensively vilified as a Muslim (which he is) and a jihadist supporter of Hamas (which he is not), Mamdani won 56 percent of the vote to Cuomo’s 44 percent. His 545,000 votes are the most in a Democratic mayoral New York City primary since David Dinkins beat incumbent Ed Koch in 1989.
Nobody is suggesting that Mamdani’s stance on Gaza is the only reason he won—though his victory does lend weight to the argument that Kamala Harris’s refusal to deviate from Joe Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel played a significant part in the Democrats’ loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
But that a candidate who supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, called for the release of detained Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, and promised to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he ever sit foot in New York, could win so emphatic a victory in the most Jewish city in America, attracting broad-based support across different ethnic groups—including large numbers of Jews—testifies to just how out of touch with the public the official narratives have become.
Predictably, Republicans responded to Mamdani’s win with outraged pearl clutching and unconcealed Islamophobia. But what is most concerning is that while the success of Mamdani’s campaign might point to a road back to power for a Democratic Party still reeling from its 2024 defeat, establishment Democrats were no more enthusiastic.
“Top Democratic donors” are quoted as finding the primary outcome “disgusting,” and Barack Obama has declined to congratulate Mamdani. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, and New York Congressman Tom Suozzi are all holding back on endorsing Mamdani in the mayoral election.
They prefer to confine their “resistance,” it seems, to the gestural theatrics of renaming Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and making marathon speeches to which nobody listens. Just as in November’s presidential election, they would rather lose than antagonize Israel.
The protests grow
In Britain, judges, lawyers, and legal academics and prominent writers have issued open letters condemning the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide and government and media attempts to quash dissent. Even the august British Medical Association voted by large majorities at its annual conference on July 3 to break off relations with the Israel Medical Association and seek its suspension from the World Medical Association over Gaza.
On the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, more than 370 actors and filmmakers proclaimed that “As artists and cultural players, we cannot remain silent while genocide is taking place in Gaza,” condemning “propaganda that constantly colonizes our imaginations.” The signatories included Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Juliette Binoche, Rooney Mara, Omar Sy, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Gere, Mark Ruffalo, Guy Pearce, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Moore, David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodovar, and Guillermo del Toro.
On June 9 “532 Canadians, including academics, lawyers, former and retired ambassadors (including to the United Nations), ministers and public servants, UN human rights experts, and civil society, labour and faith leaders,” wrote to Mark Carney urging “decisive action to end genocide in Gaza.” On July 5 the Anglican Church of Canada adopted a resolution “calling on the Canadian government to uphold their moral responsibilities and impose full and immediate arms embargo on Israel.”
Protest marches continue across the world. From London and Paris to Sydney and Melbourne, from Athens and Barcelona to Dublin and Toronto, hundreds of thousands have hit the streets. This year’s bull-running San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain, turned into a massive show of solidarity with Palestine. On June 15, in one of the biggest demonstrations ever seen in the Netherlands, 150,000 people dressed in red and marched for Gaza in The Hague. On June 21, for the first time on such a scale, 50,000 people marched for Gaza in Berlin.
Revulsion at Israel’s genocide in Gaza is no longer confined to student activists and “lunatic left” professors at Columbia and Harvard, and it can no longer be dismissed as the result of “antisemitism.” The chasm between Western political establishments and the people they claim to represent grows wider by the day.
This is a pervasive crisis of legitimacy.
Ructions at the BBC
Nowhere is that crisis better illustrated than in recent events at the British Broadcasting Corporation.
A recent report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, based on analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content, found that despite Palestinians suffering 34 times as many deaths as Israelis since the present Gaza “war” began, Israeli deaths were given 33 times more coverage and described in much more emotive language. The BBC interviewed significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis, and presenters shut down interviewees’ claims of genocide while making no mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements (including Benjamin Netanyahu’s notorious invocation of the biblical Amalek).
In May the corporation fired Britain’s most popular soccer commentator Gary Lineker and longtime host of Match of the Day, the BBC’s equivalent of Hockey Night in Canada, for social media posts critical of Israel. Lineker had previously blotted his copybook by daring to speak out over government heartlessness toward refugees and migrants.
On June 20, after months of delays, the BBC cancelled a documentary it had itself commissioned on Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s health service on grounds that showing the film would create “a perception of partiality.” Based entirely on first-hand testimonies, the film detailed “how hospitals in the territory have been overwhelmed, bombed and raided. Medics recount being detained and claim to have been tortured.”
Channel 4 showed Gaza: Doctors Under Attack in the UK on July 2 and Mehdi Hassan’s Zeteo media platform made it available for streaming internationally. It was widely hailed as “a crucial film” that “the world needs to see.”
On the same day as the film was broadcast, more than 400 BBC staff, freelancers and industry figures, including 111 BBC journalists—who signed anonymously for fear of reprisals—wrote an open letter to BBC management expressing “concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine.”
The letter expressed particular concern that board member Robbie Gibb, “an individual with close ties to the Jewish Chronicle… has a say in the BBC’s editorial decisions in any capacity, including the decision not to broadcast Gaza: Medics Under Fire [sic].”
Death, death to the IDF
In the midst of the row over Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, a new confrontation erupted over the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury, Britain’s most popular music festival, which regularly attracts over 200,000 spectators and has long been televised live by the BBC.
In the weeks preceding the festival, pressure was put on the organizers by members of the government, including Keir Starmer, as well as the Conservative opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, to drop the Irish band Kneecap from the roster. Kneecap had made themselves notorious with their earlier performances at the Coachella music festival in California, at which they led the audience in chants of “Free, free Palestine.”
On June 18 Kneecap fans “mobbed sidewalks outside a London court” as the trial opened of band member Mo Chara under Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act. His offense was waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in North London on November 21 “in a manner that aroused ‘reasonable suspicion’ he supported the Lebanese militant group.”
The Glastonbury organizers refused to cancel Kneecap’s performance, and the band took the stage on June 28. Reportedly “thousands of fans chanted ‘free Palestine’ and waved Palestinian flags,” but BBC viewers were not allowed to see this because the corporation pulled the plug on the live feed. The broadcaster later uploaded an edited version of the performance to BBC iPlayer as part of its on-demand Glastonbury sets.
Unfortunately for the BBC, another even more controversial set, by the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, slipped under the wire. Looking out from the West Holts stage on a sea of Palestinian flags, rapper Bobby Vylan led the 45,000-strong crowd in chants of “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF.”
Bob Vylan’s entire performance was broadcast live, although “a warning was issued on screen about the very strong and discriminatory language” and it was decided not to make the set available on demand via iPlayer. This did not stop pressure mounting on the BBC, as the police announced a criminal investigation into Kneecap and Bob Vylan’s performances and lurid headlines filled the conservative and tabloid press.
Whacking the moles
Two days later, BBC Chair Samir Shaw issued a contrite statement, which apologized “to all our viewers and listeners and particularly the Jewish community for allowing… Bob Vylan to express unconscionable antisemitic views live on the BBC” and acknowledged that continuing the broadcast was “an error of judgement.”
He promised that “The Executive have agreed to put in place a set of strengthened editorial practices and policies for live music programming” and was “initiating a process to ensure proper accountability for those found to be responsible for the failings in this incident.”
On July 7, the Times reported that Lorna Clarke had resigned her position as BBC director of music “after UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy condemned the “appalling and unacceptable scenes,” adding that “other senior BBC staff have also temporarily relinquished their day-to-day roles over the Glastonbury controversy—pending an investigation.” Needless to say Robbie Gibb is still in place.
Clarke’s is not the only scalp Nandy is after. She is also demanding to know why nobody had yet been fired at the corporation for permitting an earlier documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, to slip through the censorship net and be broadcast in February.
The BBC pulled the program from its iPlayer after it emerged that its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-controlled Gaza administration. By then the damage was done. Palestinian children had been allowed to speak of their own experiences in their own words, and
we can’t have that, can we?
Nandy told the Times that:
"I have asked the question to the board [of the BBC]. Why has nobody been fired? What I want is an explanation as to why not. If it is a sackable offence then obviously that should happen. But if the BBC, which is independent, considers that it is not, I think what all parliamentarians want to know is why"
It seems not to have occurred to her that if parliamentarians—or a government minister—can interfere in the BBC’s internal affairs to the extent of demanding to know why staff have not been sacked, its independence is (to say the least) seriously compromised.
Doubling down
Bob Vylan have now been dropped by their agency, banned from several music festivals in the UK and elsewhere, had a number of European gigs cancelled, and seen their US visas revoked by the State Department, scuppering their upcoming US tour. Their following on Spotify has meantime soared and their 2024 album Humble as the Sun has re-entered the charts. Currently it is number one on the UK hip-hop and R&B albums chart, and number seven on the album downloads chart and number eight on the independent albums chart.
It is difficult to think of a clearer indication of today’s societal rifts over Israel and Gaza.
On the one hand, we have ever-growing public revulsion over Western complicity in the Gaza genocide. On the other, we see the political establishment doubling down on a narrative of Israeli self-defence that is losing whatever emotional purchase it once had—a doubling down that is increasingly enforced by the full power of the state.
In the US, they are deporting pro-Palestine activists and withholding research funding from universities they falsely accuse of being “antisemitic.” In Britain, parliament has just proscribed Palestine Action, a protest group whose most violent action to date has been throwing red paint over military aircraft, as a “terrorist organization”—on a par with al-Qaida, Hezbollah, or Hamas. To support it now carries a sentence of 14 years in prison.
The first arrests have just been made by the Metropolitan Police. They include an emeritus professor, several health professionals, and a 83-year-old retired priest, Sue Parfitt, who said the ban was “a very dangerous move that has to be challenged.”
(Update: Within the last two days, at least 71 people, many elderly, have been arrested at protests in cities across the UK for holding placards reading 'I oppose genocide; I support Palestine Action'. Editor)
Whither the West?
On June 21, 75 German professors published a letter to the German government arguing that “Your current actions, like those of the previous government, are violating international law and are politically highly dangerous: Germany is actively undermining the international legal system that was established after the Second World War, partly as a response to German crimes.”
It concluded by demanding “an immediate end to the restrictions on academic freedom and freedom of speech in Germany”:
"Currently, critical voices on Israel’s actions and its occupation are being defamed using scientifically questionable definitions of antisemitism, events are being cancelled, and protests—including student protests at universities—are being criminalized … The systematic suppression and marginalization of voices expressing criticism and solidarity contribute to Germany’s complicity in Israeli violations of international law—both those already committed and those ongoing—and must end"
The point does not only apply to Germany—or to academia. The demolition of the rule of law in the international arena goes hand in hand with the destruction of liberties at home.
We might well ask, as the Irish poet W.B. Yeats did in an earlier time of troubles:
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
Originally published in Canadian Dimension. Reproduced here with permission of the author. To read more of Derek's work, visit his profile on Academia
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