What’s in a word? A world of meaning and of pain

March 19, 2026March 20, 2026Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes in

When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, with the serene arrogance of the ideologue, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

State governments weigh the prohibition of potentially inflammatory phrases; lawyers parse syllables; activists insist that what is heard is not what is meant, and what is meant is not what is said. The words hover, untethered from consequence, yet curiously heavy with it. And this is where Lewis Carroll, with his disarming Edwardian whimsy, begins to feel less like a children’s author and more like a diagnostician. Alice, still tethered to an older moral physics, asks the only sensible question: whether words can, in fact, be made to mean so many different things. The answer – never quite resolved in Wonderland is being tested here and now on our streets, in own legislatures, and on our social media feeds. For if words can be made infinitely flexible, then meaning itself becomes negotiable; and if meaning is negotiable, then so too are responsibility and harm.

More than words can say …

We like to imagine that words live quietly in dictionaries, disciplined by etymology and tamed by definition. But they do not live there. They live in history. And history leaves fingerprints.

So, what’s in a word? A root, yes. A history. A memory. A strategy. Sometimes a slur. Sometimes a lament. Often, a rhetorical shortcut. Occasionally a doorway into understanding. We pretend words are neutral. They are not. They are histories. They are wounds. They are strategies. They are prayers. They are threats. They are pleas.

What’s in a word? Enough to start a war. Enough to end a conversation. Enough, if handled carefully, to begin one. The question is not simply what a word means. It is what it does. Does it illuminate complexity, or obscure it? Does it invite argument, or pre-empt it? Does it name suffering without erasing another’s?

Words are fall differentially upon the tongue and the ears; words which some see only as incitement and which the others see only resistance. And yet, these words did not come out of nothing. They arose from lived experience. Palestinians do experience dispossession. Israelis do experience existential threat. Jews carry a historical memory of annihilation that makes the word genocide resonate differently in their ears. Palestinians carry a memory of erasure that makes Nakba less metaphor than inheritance. Each community carries memory as identity. To police to and sanction vocabulary without acknowledging origin and memory is to misunderstand both.

To study a language is to develop a kind of double hearing. You recognise when metaphor shades into innuendo—and when it darkens further into menace.

To study a language is to learn when freedom names a horizon – and when it licenses the powerful to act without restraint. To notice when peace is an aspiration – and when it is a performance designed to defer justice. To recognise when security protects life – and when it expands to govern it; when it names legitimate protection – and when it justifies suffocating control. To feel when homeland gathers memory and when it redraws the map to exclude others. To understand when return is a longing—and when it becomes an argument that displaces those already there.

To study a language is to hear when muqamawwa – resistance – signals dignity – and when it becomes a script that traps a people inside permanent defiance. To know that sumud – steadfastness—can describe dignified endurance and also calcify into the romanticisation of endless struggle. To detect when tadhāmon solidarity – binds people together—and when it flattens complexity into slogan. To recognise when itishhad – martyrdom – honours loss – and when it recruits the living into the service of the dead. To hear when terror names violence—and when it is stretched to delegitimise any form of opposition.

To study a language is to hear when history explains—and when it is curated to absolve.

For years I have studied Arabic – and its roots and patterns: how three consonants generate a constellation of meanings. And I have studied Middle Eastern history with more than academic curiosity – not as spectator sport but with what I would called metaphorical “skin in the game.” Words like jihad, intifada, nakba, aliyah, ‘awda, sumud, words that now ricochet across social media feeds and protest placards, are not abstractions or exotic imports to me. They are layered. Sedimented. They carry centuries in their syntax and sentiment. They are lived terms, argued over, felt in the mouth. And so when someone asks “What’s in a word?” I cannot pretend the answer is neutral.

Intifada. From nafada – to shake off, to shake free. Dust from a cloak. Subjugation from a people. The metaphor is physical, almost domestic. Yet in common Arabic usage, it implies resistance and uprising, and neither are peaceful or passive. In Israeli memory the word is fused to sirens, shrapnel, blown-out windows. It is impossible to hear it without recalling the Second Intifada’s exploding buses and cafés, bloody streets and scattered body parts. So when someone chants “globalise the intifada,” they may imagine solidarity with resistance; others hear a call that premises funerals. The dictionary definition is technically correct. It is also profoundly incomplete. It does not arrive alone; it brings its dead with it.

Or al Nakba. In ordinary Arabic, a misfortune. A bad year. But in Palestinian consciousness it has fossilised into 1948 – villages depopulated, olive groves left untended, families scattered, deeds and keys preserved like heirlooms. It is no longer a generic calamity; it is The Catastrophe. Say it in Ramallah and you evoke dispossession. Say it in western Jerusalem and you may hear, in reply, the memory of a war launched to strangle a newborn state. 1967 is referred to as al Naksa, the setback.

And then there is jihad — perhaps the most mistranslated word in modern political discourse. Its root, jahada, means to strive, to exert oneself. Classical Islamic thought distinguishes between inner moral striving and outward struggle that can be intellectual, and yes, armed defence under defined conditions. Yet modern movements – from anti-colonial insurgencies to nihilistic terror groups – have narrowed and weaponised it. The word has travelled. It has acquired passengers it did not originally carry. To deny that is to be naïve. To reduce it solely to “holy war” is equally ignorant.

Al ‘Awda – the return – carries a weight for Palestinians comparable to the resonance of intifada or nakba. It is not a mere political slogan; it is a moral, legal, and emotional claim bound up with exile, memory, and inheritance and the enduring hope, however fraught, of returning to one’s ancestral land. For Israelis, the concept often triggers apprehension, a fear that the abstract ideal of return could translate into demographic and existential challenge, potentially threatening the state itself. Like intifada or nakba, the word carries histories and futures simultaneously: one side sees longing and justice, the other sees danger.

Hebrew political vocabulary is no less charged. Aliyah – ascent – frames immigration as spiritual elevation. Ge’ulah -redemption – maps theology onto statehood. Am Yisrael Chai – Let Israel Live – evokes covenant, not population. Political vocabulary hums with biblical resonance. It is impossible to excise theology from nationalism in a land where scripture is mapped onto soil.

The power of these words lies not in dictionary meaning, but in the lived and imagined consequences each community projects onto them. So when commentators insist that “intifada just means struggle,” or that “Zionism just means Jewish self-determination,” they are not wrong linguistically. They are incomplete historically. Words do not live in morphology alone. They live in memory.

Let’s cast our etymological web wider and delve deeper in our dictionary and examine words that ricochet across the howling internet in these troubled times. Genocide. Ethnic cleaning. Apartheid. Settler-colonialist. Terrorist. Resistance. Each carries not only denotation but detonation and accusation. Each holds an argument inside a noun. Each is more than description; but also a moral verdict disguised as vocabulary. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck called such terms Kampfbegriffe – battle-words. Words of iron forged in particular historical furnaces, hardened by trauma, and redeployed not merely to describe reality but to shape it.

The same dynamic now saturates discussion of Israel–Palestine. Let’s not pretend that careful language will resolve a conflict this old, this layered, this saturated with grief. But careless language can only make things worse.

Call Israel a “settler-colonial state or an apartheid state” and you situate it in the moral lineage of Algeria, Rhodesia and Pretoria. Call Hamas’ October 7 assault “resistance” and you shift the frame from massacre – to revolt, or to shift the timeframe, to pogrom, the Russian word for destruction, now interpreted as referring to the organised massacres of a particular ethnic group – which, ironically, precipitated the first settlement of European Jews in what was to become Palestine. Call Gaza “genocide” and you summon Auschwitz – whether you intend to or not. Call protesters “terror sympathisers” and you evacuate the possibility of grief motivating them at all. Each move does moral work before the evidence is even considered.

It is here, amid the discourse of colonialism and statehood, that the word genocide warrants careful attention. Unlike settler-colonial or apartheid, which describe systems of domination and segregation, genocide describes intent – the deliberate aim to destroy a people as such. It is not simply a scale of death; it is a moral calculus applied to the machinery of annihilation. To deploy it is to summon not only bodies but histories, to conjure not only numbers but the moral shadow cast by deliberate erasure. In debates over land, displacement, and occupation, it is tempting to apply the term as an ethical accelerant, to compress outrage into a noun. Yet to do so responsibly requires rigor: assessment of intent, systematic targeting, and legal definition. Without that, the word risks inflation, becoming a rhetorical hammer rather than a precise lens. Each word narrows the moral aperture.

And yet, Genocide” now circulates online as hashtag and chant. It trends. It compresses argument into a single, morally incandescent noun. For many who use it in the Gaza context, it is less a legal claim than an expression of horror at the scale of devastation. It is a cry. But cries, once repeated often enough, harden into verdicts.

In Australia, we are hardly innocent of this. We live in a country still wrestling with its own founding vocabulary: terra nullius, invasion, genocide, reconciliation, Voice. These are still contested. We know – or should know – that words can both clarify and inflame. To call Australia “founded on genocide” may be defensible within certain scholarly frameworks; it is also rhetorically maximalist. It shocks the moral nerve. That shock may awaken conscience – or entrench defensiveness. Language is never inert. Words do not merely describe history; they frame it. They allocate blame. They assign virtue. They shape identity.

In That Howling Infinite has spent months untangling these labels. Is Israel a settler-colonial state? Does apartheid apply, and if so, where? Does genocide cross the threshold from metaphor into actionable accusation? Each term compresses arguments into a noun. It performs moral work before the debate even begins.

That compression is seductive. We prefer our tragedies simple: one culprit, one origin story, one clean fingerprint. Words that arrive pre-loaded with moral clarity spare us the labour of nuance. They allow passion and empathy to outrun reason and understanding – which, in an age of instant reaction, they reliably do.

Historical illiteracy compounds the problem. The conflict is older than most of its loudest commentators. Its history is layered with Ottoman legacies, British mandates, partition plans, UN resolutions, wars declared and undeclared, refugees, intifadas, failed peace processes, withdrawals, rockets, settlement blocs, religious revivals, and fractured leaderships on both sides. Yet online discourse flattens this into memes, and to pretend this can be reduced to a meme is historical illiteracy A map. A slogan. A 30-second clip untethered from context. Algorithms reward the sharpest edges. The most incendiary noun travels furthest. Nuance, by contrast, is penalised. It does not trend. It does not fit neatly into a caption. I worry about the generational shift in how these debates unfold. Previous eras had gatekeepers – flawed, certainly – but also editors who demanded sourcing, historians who insisted on chronology. Now discourse is democratised and accelerated. A meme outruns a monograph. A slogan outruns a syllabus.

The language used evolves accordingly. Rhetorical shortcuts proliferate. “From the river to the sea.” “Open-air prison.” “Terror state.” “Colonial entity.” “Death cult.” These phrases are not random; they are engineered for virality. Each word comes preloaded, historical analogies that compress decades into chantable cadences. But chants and slogans compress complexity. They must; that is their function. And that compression distorts: two national movements, two historical traumas, two competing narratives of return and belonging, reduced to a rhyme shouted through a megaphone.

And then there are the slurs: the truncations and code-words. For example, “Zio.” A syllable masquerading as political shorthand yet unmistakably functioning as ethnic hostility. Its power lies partly in deniability. It skirts the boundary of explicit antisemitism while retaining its charge. Deniable enough to evade sanction, sharp enough to wound. But we should be intellectually honest: this phenomenon is not one-directional. The same phenomenon occurs in reverse when “Islamist” becomes a catch-all smear for Muslim political expression, or when “pro-Palestinian” is lazily equated with antisemitic intent. The grammar of dehumanisation is bipartisan: collapsing an entire spectrum of political and religious identity into a caricature designed to foreclose engagement.

So, what, finally, is in a word?

Not merely meaning, but momentum. Not simply definition, but direction. Words do not sit still; they lean. They incline us toward certain conclusions before we have done the work of thinking. They smuggle history into the present tense and call it common sense. They arrive already freighted—with grief, with fear, with memory, with accusation—and we, often unwittingly, become their couriers.

The temptation, always, is to choose the word that does the most work for us—the one that collapses ambiguity, that secures the moral high ground in a single utterance. But that is precisely where language becomes most dangerous: when it relieves us of the burden of holding two truths at once; when it permits us to name one suffering in a way that erases another; when it transforms description into verdict before evidence has even entered the room.

What we do when we misuse words is not trivial. We erode precision. We inflame passions. We collapse law into slogan. We substitute moral theatre for argument. And perhaps most dangerously, we teach ourselves that the loudest noun is the truest one.

History suggests otherwise. It is rarely the loudest words that endure, but the most exacting; not the most incendiary, but the most honest about complexity. The archive is not kind to slogans. It remembers, instead, where language clarified—and where it concealed.

To speak about Israel and Palestine—indeed, to speak about any conflict so saturated with history—is to enter a linguistic minefield in which every term has a past and every past has its partisans. There is no neutral vocabulary here. Only more or less careful usage. Only degrees of awareness. Only the choice, conscious or otherwise, between illumination and incitement.

The task, then, is not to purify language—that is impossible—but to discipline ourselves in its use. To resist the seduction of the Kampfbegriff when it outpaces our understanding. To ask, each time we reach for a word: what history does it carry? What work is it doing? What—and who—does it leave out?

Because if words can start wars, they can also foreclose the possibility of ending them. And if they are capable, at their best, of opening a space for understanding, then that space is narrow, fragile, and easily collapsed by carelessness.

Language will not resolve this conflict. But without care in language, we will not even be able to speak about it honestly.

Coda

To study a language, in the end, is not simply to acquire vocabulary. It is to acquire conscience. It is to hear the echo behind the utterance—the ghost in the grammar. To recognise that every word, especially here, is a small archive: of exile and return, of fear and defiance, of prayer and propaganda. To speak, then, is to handle those archives with a certain humility, aware that one is always, in some sense, trespassing on someone else’s memory.

History suggests otherwise than our instincts: the loudest noun is rarely the truest one. The archive keeps its own counsel. It remembers where language clarified – and where it concealed.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

And in that shadow – linguistic, historical, human – words do their quiet, consequential work.

Postscript

While writing this essay – contemplating the slipperiness of words and widening the lens to the long weather system that has carried them into our mouths – I found myself returning to a simple, disquieting observation: it is no coincidence that so many of the words we have been parsing are Arabic.

It is not that Arabic words per se have become uniquely prone to distortion, nor that there is anything intrinsic to the language that invites what might loosely be called “gaslighting.” What I was circling, rather, is something more historically contingent – and more revealing.

Many of the most contested political ideas of the present moment – intifada, shahid, muqawama, even place-bound words and phrases that travel into English unchanged – are being transmitted untranslated, or only half-translated, into Western discourse. They arrive carrying dense, layered meanings shaped by decades (sometimes centuries) of conflict, theology, nationalism, and lived experience. And then, almost immediately, they are flattened, reframed, or strategically reinterpreted within a different moral and political vocabulary.

In other words, the instability I am sensing is not linguistic but translational – and beyond that, political.

There is, of course, a history to this. One thinks of how words like jihad were narrowed in Western usage to mean “holy war,” their broader theological and ethical dimensions quietly stripped away; or conversely, how certain terms are defended as benign by appeal to their most anodyne, etymological meanings, while bracketing how they are actually heard in context. The same word may present itself as metaphor, slogan, prayer, or threat – depending on who is speaking, who is listening, and what work the word is being made to do.

It is here that the instinct about Wonderland clicks back into place. The move is not uniquely Arabic; it is Humpty Dumpty’s move: control the meaning, and you control the moral frame. But the reason Arabic terms are so prominent in this moment is that the conflicts which have globalised our discourse – Israel–Palestine above all, but also Iraq, Syria, and the wider post-9/11 landscape – have carried those words into English without fully carrying their context with them. They become, in effect, linguistic migrants: visible, charged, and often unmoored.

So yes, it does say something about the modern world. Not that Arabic is uniquely problematic, but that we are living in an age where conflicts travel faster than comprehension, and where words – lifted from one history and dropped into another – become sites of struggle in their own right.

These words have crossed worlds. And in crossing, they have become unmoored enough to be contested, claimed, and weaponised. That unmooring creates opportunity: for some, to soften; for others, to sharpen; for many, to obscure.

It says something, too, about our times – about the way the Middle East has not merely intruded upon but come to dominate political, and indeed social, discourse for more than half a century; at least for as long as I have been paying attention, which is to say, for as long as I have been trying to make sense of the world and finding the same landscape returning, again and again, like a half-remembered refrain.

Let us take June 1967 as a point of departure. For a few brief weeks, the world’s gaze lifted from the humid, grinding quagmire of Indochina and fixed instead upon the sudden, almost biblical drama unfolding in the not-so-Holy Land – a war measured in days but reverberating in decades. Territory shifted, certainly; but something else shifted too: attention, imagination, the sense that this small, overburdened strip of earth had become a stage upon which the modern world would repeatedly rehearse its anxieties.

The focus has waxed and waned since, but it has never truly moved on. 1973 Oil Crisis and the realisation that the region’s tremors could rattle the global economy. The long, theatre-of-the-absurd years of hijackings and televised terror. Camp David’s fragile choreography. The Iranian Revolution, bending time backward and forward at once. The Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. Lebanon’s fracturing. The attritional horror of the Iran–Iraq War. Kuwait and the return of great-power spectacle. Oslo’s brief, luminous promise. Then 9/11, collapsing distance altogether, followed by Afghanistan again, Iraq again – the sense of recursion, of history caught in a tightening loop.

Then the Arab Spring – hope flickering, briefly, before giving way to Syria’s abyss, to ISIS and its grotesque theatre, to the multiplication rather than the resolution of fault lines. And through it all – before it, beneath it, after it – Israel and Palestine remain: a permanent fixture in the taxonomy of torment, sans pareil, the conflict that resists conclusion, that absorbs language and returns it sharpened, refracted, or hollowed out.

It is from this long saturation – this decades-long immersion in images, slogans, translations, and retranslations – that our present arguments about words emerge. They are not sudden. They are sedimentary. Each phrase we now parse carries within it the residue of these moments, these crises, these unfinished stories.

Which is to say: when we argue about what a word means, we are never only arguing about language. We are arguing about history – compressed, contested, and still very much alive.

In That Howling Infinite, March 2026

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

A Lexicon of Disturbing Language

(words that travel intact, and arrive with their weather still clinging to them)

What follows is not a neutral glossary – if such a thing were even possible here – but a kind of field manual for words that arrive already aflame, freighted with history, sharpened by use, carrying within them entire arguments about the world. They are not merely descriptive; they are performative. To utter them is to place a piece on the board, to tilt the frame, to summon histories that do not politely remain in the past.

Some are legal terms that have slipped their moorings and now drift through polemic. Some are borrowed intact from Arabic or Hebrew, carrying their original cadence like an echo that translation cannot quite still. Others are modern coinages – hybrids, sometimes ungainly – that try to compress entire arguments into a single, breathless label. And a few are names – of places, of movements – that have become arguments simply by being spoken.

What unites them is not agreement but charge. They are contested, elastic, often weaponised. They do not just describe reality; they compete to define it. They do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They travel across languages without quite translating; they narrow, expand, harden, or blur as they move. They do not simply describe events; they encode perspectives on those events. To use them is not merely to speak—it is to situate oneself, however unconsciously, within a contested moral and historical landscape.

I. Catastrophe & Historical Singularity

Nakba (النكبة) – literally “catastrophe.” In Arabic it could name any disaster; in English it has hardened into the disaster—1948—fixed, immovable, dense with exile and keys kept as heirlooms. It no longer describes; it declares.
Naksa (النكسة) – “the setback,” 1967. A softer word for a different kind of loss—diminution rather than rupture. Its retention signals an internal Arab chronology, slightly askew from the familiar “Six-Day War.”
Shoah (שואה) – “catastrophe” or “destruction,” used specifically for the Holocaust. Left untranslated in part to preserve reverence, in part to resist the easy metaphorisation that “Holocaust” sometimes invites.
Holocaust – from the Greek “burnt offering” to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and then outward into broader usage. Its expansion has given it reach—and thinned its edges.
Pogrom (погром) – a Russian word meaning violent devastation, carried into English with the memory of anti-Jewish attacks in Tsarist lands. “Riot” feels too incidental; pogrom carries its own geography.

II. Legal Terms, Moral Weapons

Genocide – a word forged in law (Lemkin, 1944), precise in definition—intent to destroy a group. In public discourse, however, it often arrives as accusation before judgment, its moral force outrunning its legal threshold.
Ethnic Cleansing – deliberately imprecise, emerging particularly from the Balkan Wars of the Nineties, but predating that in Türkiye after WWI, Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, and I dia and Pakistan in 1948. Its vagueness is its power: suggestive, elastic, difficult to refute without seeming to concede.
Apartheid – Afrikaans for “apartness,” rooted in South Africa but now globally mobile. Once invoked, it frames the system under discussion—analogy and indictment in a single stroke.
Colonialism / Settler-Colonialism – analytic frameworks that, once applied, tend to fix the narrative: indigenous and invader, permanence and removal. Illuminating, but often closing off alternative readings.

III. Resistance, Struggle, Sanctification

Intifada (انتفاضة) – “shaking off,” like dust from a sleeve. In English it is no longer generic; it points almost unavoidably to the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 and 2000. The word carries images—stones, tyres, and checkpoints—and a moral ambiguity that shifts with the speaker.
Muqāwama (مقاومة) – “resistance,” yet left untranslated to avoid the bland universality of the English. Muqāwama signals a particular ideological and regional framing—Hezbollah, Hamas, dignity under pressure.
Ṣumūd (صمود) – “steadfastness,” though the translation feels thin. Not an event but a posture: staying, enduring, tending olive trees under threat. Translate it, and it risks becoming sentiment; leave it, and it remains an ethic.
Jihad (جهاد) – “struggle,” spanning the inner and the outer. In English, that range has narrowed sharply; the word arrives intact, its semantic field diminished, sharpened toward violence.
Shahid (شهيد) – “witness” or “martyr.” It does not merely describe death; it consecrates it. In English, its retention often signals an attempt to preserve that sacred charge.

IV. Faith, Doctrine, and Internal Tensions

Kāfir (كافر) – “unbeliever,” literally one who “covers” truth. A theological category that, in polemical use, hardens into insult—a boundary drawn sharply between inside and out.
Fitna (فتنة) – “discord,” “trial,” “temptation.” Historically tied to early Islamic civil strife, it carries a deep anxiety about internal fracture. To invoke it is often to warn: this way lies chaos.
Taqiyya (تقية) – a specific Shi’a doctrine allowing concealment of belief under threat. In English polemic, however, it has been stretched well beyond its doctrinal bounds—transformed into a generalised suspicion of deception.
Hudna (هدنة) – “truce.” Yet when retained in Arabic, it often implies something tactical, provisional—a pause rather than a peace.
Fatwa (فتوى) – a legal opinion within Islamic jurisprudence, part of everyday religious life. In English, especially post-Rushdie, it has narrowed into something darker—almost synonymous with a death sentence.

V. Identity, Ideology, and the Politics of Naming

Zionism – a 19th-century movement for Jewish self-determination. In English today, it rarely sits neutrally: liberation for some, colonialism for others. The word refracts entirely different histories.
Zionist – once descriptive, now often accusatory. Its meaning depends less on definition than on tone.
“Zio” – a clipped, abrasive form that has shed any descriptive function. It lands as insult, not argument.
Aliyah (עלייה) – “ascent.” More than immigration; a movement upward, spiritually and historically. The English equivalent feels earthbound by comparison.
Al-‘Awda (العودة) – “the return.” In ordinary Arabic, a simple going back; in Palestinian discourse, the Right of Return—dense with memory, law, and longing. It sits beside the mafteah (مفتاح, the key), object turned symbol, continuity held in the hand.
Settler – on its face neutral; in contested زمین, it hardens into accusation. Biography collapses into ideology.
Hilltop Youth – a specific Israeli subculture that has become shorthand for a certain strain of ideological extremity and violence – detail turned symbol.

VI. Totalising Labels & Historical Echoes

Nazi – historically precise, rhetorically promiscuous. Now shorthand for absolute evil, its overuse both amplifying and diluting its meaning.
Fascist – from Mussolini’s doctrine to a generalised insult; elasticity has eroded precision.
“Islamo-fascist” – a hybrid, polemical term attempting to map European categories onto Islamist movements. It says as much about the speaker’s framework as the subject.

VII. Organisations as Symbols

Hamas (حماس) – “zeal,” and acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya. In English, it does not settle: government, militia, resistance, terrorism – meanings shift with the voice that utters it.
Hezbollah (حزب الله) – “Party of God.” Political party, armed movement, regional proxy; the name itself already contains a claim to divine alignment.
Da’ish (داعش) – acronym for al-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fī al-‘Irāq wa al-Shām (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). Its use, rather than “ISIS,” often signals rejection; the group dislikes the term, so naming becomes a small act of defiance.

VIII. Circulating & Mediated Words

Fawda (فوضى) – “chaos,” but after its journey through Hebrew and global television (Fauda), it now carries a particular aesthetic: kinetic, morally ambiguous, intelligence-driven disorder. Chaos, but stylised.
Blitz – from Blitzkrieg, lightning war. In English, softened into metaphor—“media blitz”—yet still faintly haunted by sirens over London.

IX. Place as Argument

Al-Aqsa (الأقصى) – “the farthest.” Rarely translated, because the Arabic name carries sanctity, geography, and sovereignty in one breath.
Al-Quds (القدس) – “the holy,” the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Its use signals perspective: a city not just inhabited, but claimed, sanctified, contested.
Gaza (غزة) – a place-name that has become a metonym: war, siege, suffering, المقاومة. Geography turned symbol.
Sabra and Shatila (صبرا وشاتيلا) – no longer merely locations; the names themselves are the event. To say them is to accuse.

Conclusion

What began as a request to a Chat GPT -to gather, sort, define – ends, rather predictably, in something the machine cannot quite resolve. Because the instability is not in the definitions; it is in us. In the way we reach for these words, load them, deploy them, defend them. In the way a term like genocide or Zionist or shahid can close down conversation as quickly as it opens it.

These are not just words. They are positions. Each one carries a shadow text: a history remembered, a grievance asserted, a legitimacy claimed or denied. They compress time, flatten complexity, and yet—paradoxically—expand into entire moral universes the moment they are spoken.

And so the lexicon does not settle the argument; it reveals its terrain.

Between the word and the world, as ever, falls the shadow. And it is in that shadow—where meaning slips, hardens, fractures, reforms—that these battle words continue to do their work, long after they have left the mouth that uttered them.

Lay these words out like this and a pattern emerges. Some words narrow as they travel (jihad, intifada). Some harden into proper nouns (Nakba, Shoah). Some expand until they blur (fascist, genocide). Some are left untranslated to preserve their charge (ṣumūd, muqāwama, al-‘awda).MNone of them are innocent.

They do not simply describe the world; they position the speaker within it. Each word a small act of alignment, a quiet declaration of where one stands. Between what a word once held, and what it is now made to carry, between language as description, and language as argument, there falls that same, shifting shadow. And it is there, in that narrow space, that these words continue to live, and to do their work.

Coda: The Grammar of Conflict

These words do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They are anchored in place but mobile in use, precise in origin but elastic in deployment. They compress centuries into syllables, turning speech into stance.

To speak them is rarely innocent. Each carries a shadow text- unspoken assumptions, moral alignments, historical claims. They do not simply describe reality; they compete to author it.

And so the disturbance lies here: between what a word once meant, what it now does, and what we need it to prove.mIn that gap – narrow, shifting, and charged – language itself becomes a kind of battleground, where meaning is not fixed but fought over, again and again.

Go, Move, Shift! Singing the Traveling People

March 14, 2026March 15, 2026Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Born at the back of a hawthorn hedge,
where the black hole frost lay on the ground,
no eastern kings came bearing gifts.
Instead, the order came to shift:
“You’d better get born in some place else.”
So move along, get along,
Move along, get along –
Go! Move! Shift!
Ewan MacColl

“Why …. are we setting ourselves the impossible task of spoiling the Gypsies?… they stand for the will of freedom, for friendship with nature, for the open air, for change and the sight of many lands; for all of us that are in protest against progress … The Gypsies represent nature before civilisation … the last romance left in the world.
Arthur Symons, a gypsiologist of the early 20th century

Back in the day, when I was a nipper in Birmingham, “the tinkers,” as we called them, would camp with their caravans and lorries on what we referred to as the “waste land.” That name seemed self-explanatory to a child: a place where people left their waste, a liminal zone of half-ruin, where pre-war homes and factories had been destroyed in the Luftwaffe raids over a decade earlier. Travellers really did move through those bombed-out spaces, setting up their vardos where council workers feared to tread. They brought horses, music, and a whiff of danger to the drab post-war city.

Their Irish accents created an unexpected affinity. Our parents and relatives were Irish immigrants, and we inhabited an Irish world of history, politics, music, and stories. Listening to them, you could feel the rhythm of lives bound to roads and fields rather than concrete and council by-laws.

Peaky Blinders later turned my home city into a stylised myth. I knew the streets around Small Heath and Digbeth and the canal bridges and tow tracks of Gas Street long before Steven Knight turned them into a smoky dystopia. The series was actually filmed in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but let’s not worry about that. The travelers drift in and out of the Shelby story with their wagons and their horses, their alien tongue and their clan codes, and also, an air of imminent danger – an arcane, half-hidden life. Rewatching the series decades later, it feels less like historical fiction and more like a remembered geography, half real and half myth.

Tom Shelby and his caravan

Advisory

In order to deflect potential criticism and recrimination, please be advised that the following is a mix of memory and music and not an academic paper. It is of historical, sociological and musicological significance only in a general sense, and not does not claim to be. In the light of prior criticisms of my use of the word “tinker” in online discussions about travellers – some readers have insisted that I employed it in a discriminatory and derogatory manner – this is indeed the term that we used back in the fifties and sixties, and whilst it was, indeed, a common term of abuse, it is for all that historically accurate – see the paragraphs immediately below. We cannot unhear in order to accommodate 21st century sensitivities.

An lucht siúil

Those Irish Travellers (an lucht siúil, “the walking people”), also called Mincéirs in Shelta, a secret language mixing Irish and English, are a nomadic indigenous Irish ethnic group. Predominantly Catholic, they are English-speaking but often fluent in their patois. Although historically labeled “Gypsies,” they have no genetic relation to the Romani; their ancestry is Irish, likely diverging from the settled population around the 1600s during Cromwell’s conquest. Over centuries, persecution, famine, and displacement hardened their itinerant ways into a distinct culture – social networks, craft skills, folklore, and traditions of travel and trade.

Many names – tinkler, tynkere, or tinker – were historically derogatory, reflecting society’s unease with their mobility. The “Acte for Tynckers and Pedlers,” passed by Edward VI in 1551, attempted to regulate their wandering, sometimes brutally. Yet, for all the attempts at control, their culture survived: a resilient, mobile society where language, music, and kinship preserve identity against erosion.

Irish Traveller Family’, Killorglin, County Kerry, Ireland, 1954.

Folksong

My childhood soundtrack was full of gypsy ballads that painted freedom in a major key. A Gypsy Rover came over the hill, down through the valley so shady to win the heart of lady; three Raggle Taggle Gypsies stood at the castle gate, singing high and low, and made off with the lady of the house; Black Jack Davy rode up hills and he rode down vale’s over many a wide-eyed mountain, luring a lady gay from her goose feather bed. The songs made the Gypsy a figure of romance and rebellion, a charmer, a rascal and a pants-man; an outsider who steals not just horses but hearts and who answers to no law but the road.

As a boy, I sang them without irony. As a teenager, on the Easter CND march in London in 1966, billeted in an old cinema in Southall, I gave my first public ‘performance’ with an a capella version Ewan MacColl’s beautiful but poignant Freeborn Man of the Travelling People. There was something electric in the way the song moved through the audience – a recognition of wandering, of roots that were not fixed in soil, but in story, song, and kin.

Ewan MacColl’ and Peggy Seeger’s BBC Radio Ballads, especially The Travelling People (1964), but went further, capturing not just the romance but the hard truth of life on the road. I can still hear the defiant swing of Freeborn Man the bitter weariness of Go Move Shift, and the rolling litany of The Thirty-Foot Trailer capturing the sway of a caravan. Each song contained a chronicle of eviction, exclusion, and the stubborn joy of those who refuse to settle. These weren’t just pretty melodies. They were dispatches from a parallel Britain that existed beyond the pale of urban, modernising and dynamic Britain.

The songs, the caravans, the road-weary children and dogs – they are fragments of memory, but also of history. Travellers have always lived on the edge of maps, on the margins of law and land, carrying a freedom that many of us envy in memory but cannot fully grasp in practice.

Ballads of a Vanishing Road

Those three great songs from Seeger and MaColl’s radio ballads form a kind of triptych, each panel catching a different light on the same restless life.

They begin with the open road itself: imagine if you will hedgerows dripping with rain, country lanes that meander through woods and fields, the smell of horses and wood-smoke, and the small birds singing when the winter days are over. A Freeborn Man strides out first, proud and lilting. The open road gleams with dew and possibility – open spaces and resting places where “time was not our master”. The freedom is real enough: the night fires, the sunrise on a new day, the easy rhythm of horse and dog. But you feel the weather changing. “Winds of change are blowing, old ways are going, your travelling days will soon be over.”

I can still hear the icon Yorkshire siblings, the Watersons, singing: “The auld ways are changing’, you cannot deny. The days of the traveler’ over .. It’s farewell toto the tent and the old caravan, to the Tinker, the Gypsy, the Travelling Man, and farewell to the thirty-foot trailer”. Verse by verse the song bids adieu to the things that portrayed the traveling life. The old caravan is no longer a symbol of liberty but rather a target for eviction. “You’ve got to move fast to keep up with the times,” the song warns, “for these days a man cannot dander.It’s a bylaw to say you must be on your way and another to say you can’t wander”.

If Freeborn Man celebrates the open lane, The Moving-On Song reports from the other side of the hedge. Each verse begins with a birth – on the A5, in a tattie field, beside a building site – and each is met by the same cold refrain: “Move along, get along, Go! Move! Shift!” Policemen, farmers, and local worthies take turns as chorus, a modern Nativity rewritten as perpetual eviction. Where Luke gave us shepherds and angels, MacColl gives us by-laws and property values. The travelling child is the Holy Infant born in the wrong postcode, and the only miracle is survival.

I find this song resonates not only as a story, but also as a powerful allegory. At its heart, it is the Nativity turned inside out. It takes the timeless Christmas story – the miraculous birth, the wandering family, the knock at the door – and drains it of every trace of welcome. Instead of angels there are policemen, instead of shepherds there are farmers, instead of gifts there is the repeated command to move along, get along, go, move, shift. Each verse begins with a birth – on a roadside, in a potato field, beside a building site – just as Christ was born in a stable because there was no room at the inn.

But where the infant Jesus is eventually carried to safety in Egypt, MacColl’s traveller child is met at every stop with suspicion: The refrain is a bitter parody of the angelic chorus: a peremptory command instead of “tidings of great joy.” The sound of authority closing ranks, a bitter counter-melody to the dream of freedom. It is the Flight into Egypt without sanctuary, an endless journey where every Bethlehem has a by-law.

This inversion does two things at once. It sacralises the ordinary – making each child born in a trailer or a tent a holy innocent – and it indicts the society that drives them out. Listeners raised on the Nativity can hardly miss the sting: the travelling people are the Holy Family in modern Britain, but the innkeepers are us. MacColl forces a choice – either keep singing “Go, Move, Shift” with the crowd, or recognise the Christ-child in the roadside cradle.

Taken together, these three songs chart the whole arc of the travelling life: the exhilaration of the road, the daily skirmish with draconian laws, the slow extinguishing of a culture that once roamed the hedgerows of Britain and Europe. They are more than nostalgic laments. They are witness statements – melodic affidavits of a people whose very birthplaces are contested, whose freedom is both cherished and criminalised, and whose songs will outlast the by-laws that try to silence them.

The dark side of the road

Ewan MacColl’s words echo still: go, move, shift – because life has often demanded it. And perhaps that is the core of the Travellers’ tale: a dance between space and place, between survival and song, between yesterday and the road ahead.

The songs of my youth were both true and false. The gypsy rover was real enough, but his freedom came at a cost: eviction notices, police batons, barbed wire, and centuries of prejudice stretching from the wastelands of Birmingham to the bean fields of Wiltshire, from Damascus to Transylvania. The travellers remain, in MacColl’s proud phrase, freeborn men and women – though the price of that freedom has always been higher than the ballads admit.

For hundreds of years, the Gypsy way of life – the Irish Travellers among them – was one of ancient traditions and simple tastes. Until their world collided with the 21st century, with bureaucracies, police crackdowns, and urban encroachment. Romance met reality, and reality was hard. Travellers were hounded from one lay-by to the next, fined, fenced, and evicted by councils and constables who never forgave them for existing outside the parish ledger.

The romance of the traveller life had a harder edge. It is not a folk-song idyll; it is cold nights in lay-bys rough ground under wheels, police knocking at midnight. Travellers were, and still are, hounded by bylaws, denied stopping places, and stereotyped as thieves or beggars. In Britain, “tinker” and “gypo” were playground slurs. Councils moved them on, police fined them for parking on common land, newspapers blamed them for every petty crime.

Nor have modern times rendered the traveller life any easier. In the Battle of the Bean Field of 1985, Margaret Thatcher’s days of law and order, hundreds of police in riot gear smashed up a convoy of festival-bound New Age Travellers near Stonehenge, wrecking and burning their lorries and caravans, Wrecking homes and terrorising babies, and displaying the state’s fury at those who dared to live otherwise. The later Dale Farm eviction in 2011 near Basildon, Europe’s largest Traveller site, bulldozed after years of legal trench warfare, proved that little had softened.

I’ve watched video footage on YouTube of riot police in fluorescent jackets confronting families who had chained themselves to caravans, and listened to the late iconoclastic songster Ian Dury, who had long celebrated life on the margins, singing his elegy Itinerant Child – a refrain that could be sung in any layby in Britain or in the migrant camps of Calais.

Slow down itinerant child, the road is full of danger
Slow down itinerant child, there’s no more welcome stranger
Slow down itinerant child, you’re still accelerating
Slow down itinerant child, the boys in blue are waiting

That refrain could be sung in any layby in Britain. It could be sung in the refugee camps of Europe today.

As for those so-called New Age Travellers of the Beanfield and Basildon – part hippie, part anarchist, part rave-culture refugee – they borrowed Romany mystique but lived a diesel-fumed modern reality: buses and sound-systems instead of bow-topped wagons, dreadlocks instead of black curls, and the same hostility from the same authorities.

Dale Farm – The Battle of Basildon 2011

The Other at the Gate

Gypsies and Travellers have always been Britain’s – and the world’s – most visible “Other”- not defined by race alone, but by movement. Where the settled majority built houses, filed deeds, and mapped parishes, the travelling people carried their world on wheels and in stories. That refusal to stay put turned them into a kind of living mirror for the fears of the settled: lawless when laws were written for farmers, suspicious when surnames anchored reputations, dangerous because they belonged nowhere and therefore everywhere.

From the “Egyptians Acts” of the sixteenth century, which outlawed Romani life, to the casual playground taunts the message was the same: you are not one of us. And yet, precisely because they stood outside the pale, they became a canvas for fantasy – the romantic lovers of the ballads, the free spirits in the Radio Ballads, dark prophets in the Peaky Blinders mythos. To the townsfolk they were both temptation and threat, the embodiment of freedom and the price of it.

The wild World and the Wider Road

The Irish travelers of my Birmingham childhood were but one branch of a much older and wider wandering world. Their history – rooted in Ireland’s upheavals and shaped by centuries of marginalisation – belongs to the islands of Albion. But the idea of the travelling people, the caravan on the verge and the road as inheritance, stretches far beyond Britain and Ireland. Across Europe the figure of the wanderer takes on another name: Roma, Sinti, Kalderash, communities bound not to neither land nor country but to a migration that began centuries earlier and thousands of miles away. Their very names carry centuries of misunderstanding.“Gypsy” arose from the medieval belief that these travellers had come from Egypt – hence “Egyptians,” shortened over time to “Gyptians” and finally “Gypsies.” “Roma,” by contrast, is the name many of the people use for themselves. In the Romani language the word rom simply means “man” or “husband,” and by extension “member of the community.” Whatever the label, their deeper history leads eastwards. Linguistic and genetic traits – including shared vocabulary with Hindi, Punjabi and other Indo-Aryan languages – point to origins beyond the Hindu Kush in Rajastan a thousand years ago. From there groups migrated slowly westward through Persia, Armenia and the Byzantine world before scattering across the planes and forests of Europe. By the time they reached England in the early modern period they were already seasoned exiles – strangers everywhere and always and yet, nevertheless, somehow at home on the road, bringing music, craft, and a stubborn freedom.

I encountered these European Roma when hitchhiking through Yugoslavia in the early seventies, and later, travelling in Syria and Israel/Palestine, I saw dusty Domari camps. pitched on the fringes of towns, cousins of the European Roma, their Sanskrit-tinged language betraying the long migration. They were not romantic there either. Arabs called them Nawar, a word laced with disdain, treating them with the same mix of curiosity and disdain that dogs their European kin. They are seen as rootless outsiders, neither honoured nor trusted, often harassed by police and locals alike. they are harassed, marginalised, and sometimes treated as beggars or tricksters. Unlike the semi-nomadic Bedouin, celebrated in poetry and nationalist lore (though these too have been known to be discriminated against). Their tents were not “exotic,” just poor.

Eastern Europe tells an even darker story. In Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, Roma communities were enslaved for centuries-in Wallachia and Moldavia until the 19th century and are still scapegoated in politics and corralled into segregated schools. In Eastern Europe they remain targets of discrimination today, from the eviction of camps in France and Italy to far-right attacks in Hungary and Slovakia.

The twentieth century added its own atrocity: the Porajmos – “the Devouring” – the Nazi genocide of Roma and Sinti that claimed perhaps half a million lives. They were rounded up alongside Jews, homosexuals, and the disabled, marked with black or brown triangles, starved in camps, shot in forests and gassed in Auschwitz. For decades their suffering was barely acknowledged in official memorials, their deaths long footnoted beside the Shoah.

The open road may bring freedom, but freedom can come an unbearably heavy price.

Paul Hemphill, March 2026

Other combinations of memoire and history in In That Howling infinite include: The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir, The Spirit of ’45, Enoch knocking on England’s door, Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life, and One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter?

Here is the well-known old folksong sung by my old friend Malcolm Harrison, recorded in Sydney, Australia in 2005. The Raggle Taggle Gypsy is a traditional folk song that originated as a Scottish border ballad, and has been popular throughout Britain, Ireland and North America. its earliest text is believed to have been published in the early sixteenth century. concerns a rich lady who runs off to join the gypsies. Common alternative names are “Gypsy Davy”, “Gypsum Davy”, “The Raggle Taggle Gypsies O”, “The Gypsy Laddie(s)”, “Black Jack David” (or “Davy”) and “Seven Yellow Gypsies”.

Itinerant Child

Ian Dury and the Blockheads

I took out all the seats and away I went
It’s a right old banger and the chassis bent
It’s got a great big peace sign across the back
And most of the windows have been painted black

The windshield’s cracked, it’s a bugger to drive
It starts making smoke over thirty-five
It’s a psychedelic nightmare with a million leaks
It’s home sweet home to some sweet arse freaks

Slow down itinerant child, the road is full of danger

Slow down itinerant child, there’s no more welcome stranger

Soon I was rumbling through the morning fog
With my long-haired children and my one-eyed dog
With the trucks and the buses and the trailer vans
My long throw horns playing Steely Dan

We straggled out for miles along the Beggar’s Hill
And the word came down that we’d lost Old Bill
You can bet your boots I’m coming when the times are hard
That’s why they keep my dossier at Scotland Yard

Slow down itinerant child, you’re still accelerating
Slow down itinerant child, the boys in blue are waiting
Itinerant child, don’t do what you’re doing
Itinerant child, you’d better slow down

We drove into Happy Valley seeking peace and love
With a lone helicopter hanging up above
We didn’t realise until we hit the field
There were four hundred cozzers holding riot shields

They terrorised our babies and they broke our heads
It’s a stone fucking miracle there’s no one dead
They turned my ramshackle home into a burning wreck
My one-eyed dog got a broken neck

Listen to the song and watch its video HERE

References & Further Reading

Chaos without a compass … Donald Trump’s Persian “excursion”

March 11, 2026March 11, 2026Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Without seeming to realise what he has done, Trump has exposed the raw fact that the US is no longer a full-spectrum military hegemon able to project power simultaneously in multiple theatres across the planet. It has superb armed forces and technology – but that is not the same thing. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, 11 March 2026

The Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War”, the war of my generation, was waged in South East Asia initially by the colonialist France, and then by neo-imperialist America. France’s war ended in defeat and ignominy for French arms and prestige, and a partition that was but a prelude to America’s Vietnam quagmire. [In In That Howling Infinite, see Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey]

America’s War has since been defined as chaos without compass. It was inevitable that acclaimed historian Barbara Tuchman would chose it as one of her vignettes in The March of Folly, her celebrated study of débacles through the ages characterised by what would appear to be a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity.

As Tuchman saw it, exceptionalism and manifest destiny are historically proven folly. Self-belief in American power and righteousness has historically created delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, stubbornness, and an inability to learn from past mistakes or even admitting error – a wooden-headedness that often sees the US persisting on erroneous paths that lead to loss of blood, treasure, reputation and moral standing.

Why did the US’ experience of backing the wrong horse in China in the forties not provide an analogy and warning in Vietnam in the fifties? Why did the experience in Vietnam not inform it with respect to Iran right up to the fall of the Shah in 1978? And why hadn’t it learned anything when it stumbled into Salvador in the eighties? And then, of course, we arrive in the 21st century with no-exit, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Middle East that end in retreat and betrayal with the ‘freedom-loving’ USA still backing the wrong horses by supporting autocrats and tyrants against their own people.

Tuchman was describing a particular pathology of statecraft- the spectacle of governments pursuing policies visibly contrary to their own interests while possessing the intelligence, experience and evidence to know better. Power, in such circumstances, is not lacking. Direction is.

In the American case, she saw something close to a recurring pattern. Self-belief in American power and virtue could generate a peculiar strategic blindness – delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, and a refusal to learn from past mistakes or even admit error. The result was a form of national tunnel vision: the conviction that sufficient determination and force must eventually bend reality to American purposes. Too often the outcome was the opposite — the expenditure of blood, treasure, prestige and moral authority in pursuit of objectives that proved unattainable.

It is difficult not to hear the echo of Tuchman’s diagnosis when considering the widening conflict now unfolding between Israel, the United States and Iran. The scale of the military campaign alone is remarkable. Australian commentator and security expert David David Kilcullen’s description in an article in The Australian, republished below, reads almost like a catalogue of twenty-first-century warfare: thousands of sorties in the first hundred hours, stealth fighters dismantling air defences, B-2 bombers opening corridors through Iranian airspace, naval engagements stretching from the Persian Gulf toward the Indian Ocean, tankers burning in the Strait of Hormuz while drones and missiles ripple across the wider region. Cyberattacks strike data centres, satellite navigation systems are jammed, and the conflict unfolds simultaneously across air, sea, cyberspace and orbit.

In strictly operational terms the campaign appears formidable. Iranian air defences have been degraded, missile launchers and command networks methodically targeted, naval assets hunted down. Western air power increasingly operates across Iranian skies with relative freedom. In the narrow military sense, success seems plausible.

Yet wars are not judged by tactical success but by political outcome. And here the picture grows strangely indistinct.

The most striking criticism of the conflict — articulated most clearly by Aris Roussinos in an article in Unherd republished below – is that no one appears able to define what victory would mean. Possible objectives multiply: regime change in Tehran; destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme; the degradation of Iranian military capabilities; or a wider strategic aim of constraining Chinese influence across Eurasia. Each implies a different war. Regime change requires internal collapse or occupation. Nuclear disarmament ultimately requires diplomacy and verification. Strategic competition with China belongs largely to another theatre altogether.

The result is a peculiar strategic ambiguity: immense military force applied in pursuit of ends that remain fluid, sometimes contradictory, occasionally improvised after the fact.

Roussinos therefore invokes an earlier historical analogy: the Suez crisis of 1956 – as have other commentators. That operation was militarily successful yet politically disastrous. British and French forces seized the canal zone quickly and efficiently, only to discover that the political objective — preserving imperial influence — collapsed under international pressure. Today’s conflict, he suggests, may represent a kind of reverse Suez: a large military campaign unfolding before the political objective has even been clearly articulated.

Hovering behind this debate is another and more recent ghost: Iraq. Kilcullen’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan informs his caution. Removing regimes, he notes in an article in The Australian, is often easier than replacing them. The Taliban returned after twenty years of war. Iraq descended into sectarian violence after Saddam’s fall. Libya’s regime collapsed quickly but left behind a fractured state.

Iran, however, is not Libya. It is a nation of ninety million people with a deep historical identity and a political culture shaped by both imperial memory and the Shiite narratives of martyrdom that animate the Islamic Republic. Foreign attack may weaken the regime — but it may also strengthen the nationalist solidarity on which that regime depends.

Here the shadow of Iraq becomes unavoidable. The question that haunted that war returns once more: what happens the day after victory?

Supporters of the campaign insist that what appears chaotic may in fact be the culmination of long-term strategy. Israeli intelligence has spent years penetrating Iranian networks, sabotaging nuclear infrastructure and eliminating key figures. Others place the conflict within the larger geopolitical contest with China, arguing that weakening Iran constrains Beijing’s long-term influence across Eurasia.

Yet even these arguments leave uncertainty intact. If the central contest lies with China, the Middle East becomes a dangerous diversion. If nuclear disarmament is the aim, diplomacy will eventually be unavoidable. If regime collapse is the goal, history suggests that air power alone rarely produces it.

Meanwhile the war itself expands. Hezbollah strikes from Lebanon. Houthi forces threaten shipping in the Red Sea. Missiles fall across Gulf states. Cyberattacks ripple outward through global infrastructure. Modern conflicts rarely remain geographically contained; the networks of trade, alliances and proxy forces ensure that violence spreads outward in widening circles.

Kilcullen’s observation, delivered with the weary clarity of experience, captures the problem succinctly: war is inherently complex and non-linear, unleashing forces that no strategist can fully predict or control.

Old phrases return easily in such circumstances. One of them comes from Cicero: Inter arma silent leges — among arms the laws fall silent. Yet when law falls silent, prudence often follows. The machinery of war — alliances, domestic politics, military planning — acquires its own momentum. Decisions initially framed as temporary expedients become permanent commitments. Vietnam began with advisers; Afghanistan with a punitive expedition; Iraq with inspections and resolutions. History rarely begins with the word “quagmire.”

What is most striking in the debate surrounding the present war is not the intensity of disagreement but the depth of uncertainty. Some believe the Iranian regime is brittle and nearing collapse; others believe foreign attack will strengthen it. Both views rely on historical analogy; neither fits perfectly.

Which brings us back, inevitably, to Tuchman. Her great theme was not that governments make mistakes — that is the normal condition of politics — but that they sometimes continue down dangerous paths even after the warning signs become visible.

Whether the present conflict will prove another example of such folly remains to be seen. It may yet reveal a coherent strategy whose logic becomes clear only with time. Or it may confirm once again Tuchman’s darker insight about the persistence of wooden-headedness in the councils of power.

For the moment the war continues: vast in scale, impressive in its technology, uncertain in its purpose. And somewhere in the background, like an echo from another era, the old phrase lingers once again – chaos without a compass.

And then, of course, there’s Trump. To return to Ambrose-Pritchard, who opened this essay: “So which will prevail in the tug of war within Trump’s personality: his fear of losing the US midterm election? Or his injured vanity and his psychological need to command “escalation dominance”, always and everywhere?

For other articles on Iran in In That Howling Infinite, see: Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? The quality of mercy … looking beyond Iran’s ghost republic and “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom, and The end of the line … an epitaph for a tyrant

Trump’s reverse Suez

Starmer should beware another quagmire

Aris Roussinos, Unherd, March 7 2026

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, from which France’s political class learned to never again let their country’s security become subject to America’s veto, and Britain’s to never again distinguish between its own national interests and Washington’s whims, it is worth remembering that — judged purely as a military operation — the seizure of the Canal Zone was highly successful. The Canal itself, and a buffer zone around it, were captured within days, with limited casualties; the operation’s technical proficiency was praised by the First Sea Lord, Lord Mountbatten, even as he twice attempted to resign in protest at the political folly of it all.

Yet success or failure will be a harder judgment to make for historians of Trump’s own latest Middle East adventure, which is already starting to look like a reverse Suez: its exposure of the limitations of pure military power; the domestic and international hostility; the fragility of alliance systems lazily assumed to be solid; and the wider overtones of an empire wildly overreaching in an attempt to stave off terminal decline. The difficulty in ascertaining, when this ends, whether or not Trump has achieved his war aims rests simply in the fact that the aims so far put forward have differed wildly, and are often mutually contradictory. The Suez Operation possessed a clearly defined military goal which succeeded, and a wider political one, which failed. As it stands, the Trump administration appears in possession of neither.

The broader arguments against the current conflict were most memorably made by Trump himself, campaigning as an anti-war candidate who would keep the United States out of costly and unmanageable Middle Eastern entanglements. His Vice-President, JD Vance, once articulately made the case against this very war. Having successfully demolished his own policy platform, it is difficult to determine what would now count as victory for Trump. The desired outcomes given, at the time of writing, have ranged from the maximalist deliverance of “freedom” to the Iranian people through full regime change in Tehran, through to inspiring an ideal “Venezuela solution” in which more amenable military figures launch an internal coup, then perhaps installing a Shah, ruling Iran remotely from the more stable comfort of Maryland. Or else simply destroying Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity (which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in June last year). This scrambling for post facto rationales appears to derive from the fact that Iran did not immediately fold, as Trump apparently assumed it would, with the assassination of its leadership: unlike today’s America, it is not a personalist regime.

Yet if America’s war aims are nebulous from a lack of preparation, Israel’s appear haphazard by design. Summing up Netanyahu’s goals, the Israeli strategic analyst Danny Citrinowicz observes that “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.” Whatever Netanyahu’s aspirations, a heavily armed but leaderless Iran, engulfed in chaos, represents a strategic threat rather than a victory for the wider West. In this, it appears that America has launched a war alongside, and at the behest of, a notionally junior partner with wildly divergent goals, and which Washington has already admitted it is unable to rein in. For British politicians, all the warning lights should now be blinking red: even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.

“Even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.”

And if America’s war aims are vague and contradictory, their proposed means of achieving these desired outcomes are too — including Iranian submission through aerial bombing alone — a result which has never yet been obtained in the century-long history of air power — through launching a peripheral revolt in which Kurdish and perhaps Baluchi separatists act as America and Israel’s boots on the ground. The best that can currently be said for Trump’s gamble is that the desired end-state is so nebulous in its imagining, and the approach so scattergun, that almost any off-ramp can be spun as a victory by his imperial court and its attendant sycophants. With no single, coherent outcome proposed, Trump can claim, as he already has, that the war has already succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of planners. This is even as he is warning his base that victory may yet take some weeks, and cautioning Congress that “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary”.

The war was, it seems, resourced for a few days of intensive bombing, with little anticipation of Iran striking back against Gulf states, and American early-warning facilities, with its arsenal of low-cost drones. Policy is now being made on the hoof, with senior administration officials “at each other’s throats” on the need for ground troops. CENTCOM, overseeing the war, has requested an increase in military intelligence analysts “to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September”. The spectacle of a days-long special military operation, entered into with an over-confident faith in hard power achieving a swift political solution, then dragging on interminably, is all too familiar. For Vladimir Putin, certainly, America’s unforced error of embroiling itself in a quagmire US presidents have spent a half-century studiously avoiding is a godsend, depleting Western munitions stocks, replenishing the Kremlin’s coffers through rising oil and gas prices, and weakening Europe’s negotiating power.

Judged on strict military terms, though, the operation has chalked up notable successes. Iranian ballistic missile launches have slowed, and no doubt the aerial onslaught is depleting Iran’s arsenal of both munitions and launchers. The looming switch from stand-off munitions to less sophisticated bombs implies that air superiority has already been achieved, as Israel declared last weekend, or will soon be achieved, as the White House more cautiously claims. Whether or not Israel, the US and the Gulf states will run out of interceptor munitions before Iran runs out of missiles is a matter of speculation for even the best-informed analysts. Even as Pentagon sources brief concern over their dwindling arsenal, the Trump administration, for what it is worth, claims that it possesses “unlimited” stocks of munitions for a war that could last “forever” — while simultaneously blaming Ukraine for running down its weapons stockpile.

The most recent American attempt to exert its will in the region through air power alone, against Yemen’s Houthis, who are vastly weaker than Iran, entirely failed. The Houthis have not yet joined the war, as Hezbollah now has in response to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon: the prospects for escalation grow wider by the day. As for boots on the ground, the much-briefed claims that Iran’s Kurds are willing to join in the war against Tehran remains debatable. The Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq, which hosts exiled Iranian Kurdish militias, has been warned by Iran that their entry into the war will invite an Iranian response, and has stressed its neutrality as a result. It has not even been a month since Washington abandoned its last Kurdish partners: they must now judge whether this time round America will prove a more dependable ally.

For all the military risks involved, it is very possible, though far from certain, that US and Israeli bombing can bring about the collapse of the Iranian state, though what happens next is anyone’s guess. The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, reportedly cautioned before the strikes began “about the potential downsides of launching a major military operation targeting Iran”, citing “the scale, complexity and potential for US casualties of such a mission”, and asserting he was “unable to predict what the result of a regime change operation would be”. Both the Iranians and the Americans have already claimed to have received, and rejected, the other’s request for a ceasefire, with Israel reportedly seeking assurances Washington is not already seeking private talks. In any case, the Iranians have good cause to be wary of negotiating with Trump, given that their previous rounds of negotiations ended in American and Israeli bombing. Indeed, the current war began with Israel’s aerial assassination of the country’s political leadership in the middle of negotiations which, the Trump administration later boasted, were merely a ruse. Some of America’s intended new rulers of Iran, Trump has claimed, have already been killed by Israel. Having launched a war of choice, at a time convenient to him, Trump may now find ending it a far less simple affair.

As it stands, it is in Iran’s interest to drag out the war for as long as possible, expanding it across the wider region, increasing the economic disruption to American allies, and capitalising on the widespread hostility to the war. As both Trump’s anti-interventionist base and the Democrat opposition rightly proclaim, this war has been entered into without any coherent plan, seemingly through Israel’s chain-ganging of the United States into military action it would not otherwise have chosen, an observation claimed as antisemitic by Israel’s advocates in the United States yet which has nevertheless also — bafflingly — been offered as proof of the war’s necessity by America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton, and most recently by Trump himself.

As for Netanyahu, he exultantly claims that bringing America into the war is something he has “yearned to do for 40 years”. The Democrats, repeatedly briefing the attack line that Trump was “the first president stupid enough” to be cajoled by Netanyahu into war with Iran, have now been gifted a path to success in midterm elections which may yet overlap with the conflict itself. When as cynical a politician as Gavin Newsom feels safe questioning future military support to the “apartheid state” Israel, demanding from the podium “Why did we help Israel kill little girls?”, we see the cracks in America’s only true special relationship widening into a gulf. This war was, most probably, Netanyahu’s last chance to enlist the fading superpower against his decades-long foe. Whether it improves Israel’s long-term strategic position is doubtful in the extreme — but none of this is Britain’s problem.

It goes against instinct to praise the Prime Minister for his lawyerly prevarication. Yet given all the risks and uncertainties inherent to this war the arguments against joining America and Israel’s wild gamble are as strong as can be imagined. Just weeks ago, the same Trump administration which now chides us for our caution was threatening to annex European territory, and mocking our participation in its previous disastrous wars. Even if we exclude, as the Prime Minister does not, the moral factors, Starmer is entirely correct to say that this is a war with “no viable plan”. It appears that the Prime Minister, through his twin flaws of excessive deference to both European opinion and international law, may yet be dragged, unwillingly, towards the national interest. We already have our own war to worry about, in which the desire or ability of the United States to negotiate a satisfactory conclusion looks as doubtful from London as Washington’s reliability as a negotiating partner must look from Moscow. American realists may be correct in stating that the Ukraine war, in which Britain is already dangerously over-exposed, is not a core Washington interest — but neither is Netanyahu’s latest war of choice a British or European interest. Simply put, there is no advantage for Britain in joining this distant conflict, and the national interest, as in the Gaza War of which this is a vast escalation, remains in staying out of the affair as far as possible.

It is absurd, then, to watch Reform politicians, so recently bemoaning Britain’s political enmeshment with distant Middle Eastern conflicts and diaspora grievances, caper onstage with Israeli and Iranian monarchist flags, demanding our involvement in this mess. Farage’s hiring as foreign policy adviser of the neoconservative lobbyist Alan Mendoza, who has never yet seen a disastrous war he did not wish to join, was a rare deviation from his sharp political instincts, and a warning of the major strategic risks inherent in a Reform government, however much their domestic agenda may appeal. The Greens will rightly benefit from this misstep, as will, on Reform’s Right, Restore, edging towards a Powellite indifference to distant wars. If he holds his course, so will Starmer too.

The dilemma now for the Prime Minister is whether or not to join the emergent European policy of defensive neutrality, protecting national and continental interests while refusing involvement in the wider campaign. Yet the almost wholesale capture of the British security establishment by an Atlanticist ethos indistinguishable from vassalage, along with the looming American usage of British bases for offensive purposes, will complicate this. Starmer initially refused to permit offensive raids to launch from British territory, a policy which, in Spain’s case, has seen Trump threaten to use its bases anyway. Such threats would appear less stark, no doubt, if Britain had not already placed the sovereignty of Diego Garcia under question, but we cannot all boast the strategic wisdom of David Lammy’s formerbrain. If allowing British bases to be used cannot be prevented, Starmer can either explain why, or — politically more likely — spin a plausible rationale for active involvement, attempting to make a virtue out of compulsion.

Yet there is another path, the one shown by Emmanuel Macron, now expanding across the continent the French-led defence axis initially trialled with Greece. At the same time, Macron is drawing a sharp dividing line between the interests of Europe and her many nation states, and of the erratic empire which alternately threatens and cajoles us. Seventy years ago, a misadventure in the Middle East saw Britain and France adopt opposing positions on American domination, which led us to this impasse. Through an accident of British politics, it falls to as unlikely a figure as Starmer to make just such another historic choice

How US-Israeli strikes on Iran in ever-widening war could spark a global crisis

David Kilcullen, The Australian, March 07, 2026.

Israel’s first air-to-air combat kill signals what it has planned.

On the first night of US-Israeli strikes against Iran last weekend, a friend and former colleague in Dubai sent me a video from his rooftop. Emirati air defences had just intercepted an Iranian drone across the street, metres from his house.

A loud explosion rattled his windows. I could hear car alarms in the background and his wife and young children expressing concern as he calmly escorted them down from the roof. I asked if I could do anything to help, and he came back with one word: “Exfil?”

“Exfiltration” – evacuation from the most heavily targeted areas – is a priority for some locals, most expats and many governments including Australia, which this week mounted one of the largest consular operations in our history.

Leaving not an option

For Iranian civilians facing intensive air and missile strikes after weeks of regime crackdowns that have already killed thousands, leaving is not an option.

Friends elsewhere in the region have decided to stay put, concluding their best bet is to shelter in place. In any case, with US and Israeli aircraft bombing all over Iran, and Iranian rockets striking targets across the Middle East, most have nowhere to go.

Evacuation flights have been made more difficult by sudden airspace closures given lack of warning for the attack, which began with Israeli air strikes while Iran and the US were still in negotiations, right after Omani mediators had announced a possible breakthrough.

Apart from its suddenness – despite a massive US military build-up across the past month, Israel struck without warning – the main feature of the conflict so far is its scope, scale and intensity.

This is by far the largest air campaign mounted by Israel and one of the largest conducted by the US, on a par with the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 or the initial air campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A group of men inspects the ruins of a police station in Tehran struck amid the US-Israel barrage on Iran. Picture: AP

Already, within the first 100 hours, US aircraft had launched thousands of sorties, destroying hundreds of missile sites, command posts and air defences across Iran. Whatever its political framing, in practical terms this is a full-scale war.

The initial main effort was to establish air superiority, with F-35, F-22 and F-15E aircraft destroying Iranian warplanes and air base infrastructure. On the fourth day of the war, an Israeli F-35 shot down an Iranian fighter jet over northern Tehran, the first air-to-air combat kill by an F-35, and Israel’s first such aerial victory in 40 years.

The take-down of Iran’s air force was followed by the destruction of its air defences by US B-2 bombers using stand-off missiles, opening the skies for follow-on attacks by B-1 and B-52 bombers. These non-stealthy aircraft carry a massive bomb load. B-52s have been involved in the campaign already, releasing air-launched missiles up to 370km from their targets. Once Iran’s surface-to-air missiles are suppressed, however, the bombers can operate directly overhead, hugely increasing the weight of bombs dropped.

Expect more

We can expect US and Israeli aircraft, once they can operate with impunity, to further ramp up strikes, roaming the skies over Iran and hitting any identified threat. In effect, they will be working their way down the priority list as successive categories of higher-value targets are destroyed, a process that may take weeks.

A second task – destruction of Iran’s offensive missile launchers, command-and-control systems and storage and production facilities – is now the focus. Israeli and US forces are working in tandem, with Israel focusing on northern and western Iran, and US aircraft striking sites in the country’s central and southern regions.

A satellite image shows damage at Garmdarah missile base in northern Iran on March 4 following precision strikes. Picture: AFP/Satellite Image (c) 2026 Vantor

This aspect of the campaign has been less successful so far. Iran is still launching large numbers of missiles against Haifa, Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, and many are successfully evading Israeli interceptors. Other missiles have been destroyed over urban centres, with falling debris causing casualties on the ground. In strictly military terms, the campaign is going well for Israel and the US. But other aspects of the war have been more problematic.

The killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior leaders in the first strike may have been intended to decapitate Iran’s regime and dislocate its response. But key leaders such as foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and Ali Larijani – former speaker of parliament, leader of the deadly anti-democracy crackdown in January and head of Iran’s national security council – are alive and in place.

Khamenei appears to have delegated launch authority to lower-level commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose aerospace forces control parts of Iran’s missile arsenal, and the Artesh, Iran’s regular military which controls air defence. Junior commanders, cut off from Tehran in the first hours of the war, are making their own target selections, launching missiles and drones as far afield as Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan. Closer in, Persian Gulf states such as Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have been particularly hard hit.

Hiogjh-ranking members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attend an unveiling ceremony of an IRGC underground facility that houses hundreds of domestically built precision-strike missiles. Picture: IMAGO / ZUMA

Iranian missiles are targeting civilian infrastructure, diplomatic posts, military bases, oil refineries, gas terminals, hotels, houses and shopping centres. Desalination plants – critical in a water-poor region – also have been targeted. Iran’s Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, seems to have launched the drone that hit Britain’s Akrotiri Air Base in Cyprus; in response, Israel is bombing Beirut, and Israeli troops and tanks have pushed farther into Lebanon, widening the war and inflicting several hundred casualties.

War on water

The war at sea has expanded even further. US and Israeli strikes destroyed the Iranian navy’s command post at Bandar Abbas this week and damaged at least nine warships including Iran’s sole drone carrier, the IRIS Shahid Bagheri, along with several Soleimani-class corvettes, smaller warships capable of operating independently or supporting fast attack craft in the Persian Gulf.

In a major escalation, the larger Moudge-class frigate IRIS Dena was sunk off Sri Lanka by a torpedo from a US submarine, as it made its way back to Iran after joint naval exercises with India, with the loss of up to 150 lives. In another grim milestone, this was the first time since 1945 that a US submarine has sunk an enemy warship by torpedo.

At least 10 oil tankers are now ablaze or sunk in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint that accounts for more than 20 per cent of global oil flow. Commercial shipping has fallen to almost nothing.

On Thursday, Iran allowed a Chinese-flagged tanker through the strait, and the US has offered insurance and naval escort for other vessels in the area, but shipping companies and captains are understandably reluctant to run the risk, triggering a 90 per cent drop in traffic.

Further west, Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen are restarting their efforts – suspended after last year’s Gaza ceasefire – to interdict shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb, the chokepoint at the southern end of the Red Sea. The Houthis also appear to have launched missiles into Saudi Arabia, which also has been hit by rockets from Iran itself.

Also this week, a Russian-flagged oil tanker was attacked in the western Mediterranean by a Ukrainian sea drone. Ukrainian attacks continue against Russian ships in the Black Sea, underscoring the connection between conflict in Europe and the newly opened front in the Middle East.

On the ground

On land, there is no sign yet of US or Israeli ground troops entering the war, though Israeli aircraft have begun targeting Iranian internal security forces such as the IRGC and its paramilitary arm, the Basij, which might be used to suppress an uprising. US media outlets are reporting CIA plans to arm and support Kurdish separatists against the regime. Kurdish leaders have denied this, even as Kurdish troops in Iraq are massingon the Iranian border, and there are unconfirmed reports of conflict inside northwestern Iran.

Other dissident groups – the anti-regime democracy movement and ethnic separatist Arab, Azeri and Baloch – suffered severely in January’s regime crackdown but may move against the government if the conflict continues. Such efforts almost certainly will fail unless these groups receive arms and support from external players.

Pakistan, which shares a border with Iran and is allied with Tehran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia, is committed to a war against its own former proxy, the Afghan Taliban, but could join in if the war escalates further.

Israeli police and emergency teams respond at the scene after a missile strike hit buildings in Tel Aviv’s Gush Dan area, in Israel, as Iran’s missile attacks in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes continue. Picture: Getty Images

If a ground war does develop, it may look something like the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when intelligence and special warfare teams worked with Afghan allies on the ground, combining with US air power to overthrow the Taliban in less than seven weeks.

Conventional US ground forces are politically problematic for President Donald Trump, given deep scepticism among his MAGA base about foreign wars, American casualties and Israeli intentions.

On the other hand, CIA or special operations teams – given their small numbers and low profile – are seen as less risky, easier to justify, and thus the preferred option.

As in Afghanistan, the question for any ground campaign is what comes next. The potential for full-scale civil war inside Iran, accompanied by state fragmentation and a region-wide flood of refugees, was on the minds of diplomats and intelligence officers with whom I spoke this week, even as the conflict’s future remains unclear.

Taking down the regime is one thing; standing up a stable successor is entirely another, as any Iraq or Afghanistan veteran knows. Many leaders are clearly concerned about this.

All of this makes the current conflict more than just a third Gulf war. Countries that escaped previous conflicts are now suffering direct attacks, up-ending regional relationships as governments scramble to protect their populations. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz involves superpower interests and the global economy much more than previous rounds of conflict. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk that it escalates even further, pulling more countries in.

International response

Broader responses have been mixed. European countries – following inter-allied controversy earlier this year over US threats to seize Denmark’s autonomous territory in Greenland – have expressed reservations, as has the EU.

An intercepted projectile falls into the sea near Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah archipelago on March 1, 2026. Picture: AFP

Britain offered defensive support only, prompting Trump to criticise Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “no Churchill” and complain that the special relationship is not what it once was.

Trump also announced “total suspension” of trade with Spain after Madrid blocked US aircraft from using Spanish bases for the attack. French President Emmanuel Macron declared the US-Israeli attack in violation of international law and called for a return to negotiations, while the UN said it had seen no evidence of ongoing Iranian nuclear weapons programs.

On the other hand, NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte expressed support for the operation.

US adversaries Russia and North Korea – both of which have close relationships with Iran – strongly condemned the attack. China did so too, but so far has offered only rhetorical support. This is somewhat surprising since China is a major weapon supplier to the regime in Tehran and announced, days before the US attack, that it was sending offensive and defensive weapons to Iran.

Under a 25-year agreement signed in 2021, China also accounts for 80 per cent of Iran’s oil exports and depends heavily on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. China has been stockpiling oil for several years, so Chinese leaders may calculate they can afford to wait, letting US stockpiles of bombs and missiles be depleted as the war goes on.

Alternatively, they may be scrambling to catch up with a rapidly evolving situation. Neither Moscow nor Beijing has yet moved to mediate or resolve the war.

Against this background, military lessons are already emerging. Artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated the targeting process, with the campaign running on a continuously updated dynamic engagement matrix rather than a traditional daily task order. Satellite communications are ubiquitous, with small Starlink antennas seen mounted on American Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System drones, themselves an improved copy of Iran’s Shahed-136 drone, the export version of which played a prominent part in Russia’s arsenal in Ukraine.

Beyond showing how adversaries copy each other’s battlefield technologies, the LUCAS drones illustrate how important space systems such as Starlink now are. Space has emerged as what the military calls a “warfighting domain” alongside air, space, sea and cyberspace. GPS spoofing and jamming, as all sides interfere with each other’s navigation satellites, has been particularly noticeable here as in Ukraine, with knock-on effects for civilian ships, aircraft and infrastructure.

Attacks on data centres, including three Amazon Web Services data centres hit by Iranian drones in the Emirates, underline the vulnerability of AI and cyber systems to physical attack.

An ambulance is parked near a sweeping blaze following Israeli bombardment on a solar farm and electricity generation facility in Lebanon’s southern coastal city of Tyre on March 4, 2026. Israeli forces on March 4 advanced into a number of towns and villages in south Lebanon, a source from the UN peacekeeping force in the country, UNIFIL, told AFP. Picture: AFP

The war’s rapid spread outside Iran’s vicinity emphasises how modern conflicts, irrespective of causes, rarely remain geographically contained. Regional proxies – Hezbollah and the Houthis but also pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, Iranian-sponsored sleeper cells in Western countries, and the possibility that resistance groups may play the leading role in any ground campaign – emphasise how even the most conventional conflicts involve irregular warfare, with non-state armed groups operating on their own or advised by specialist operators.

At the strategic level, one lesson is that, irrespective of Trump’s need for a quick resolution to the conflict, lest it undermine his support ahead of critical midterm elections in November, war is inherently complex and non-linear, unleashing forces that cannot be predicted or controlled. Even now, the campaign is illustrating the impossibility of doing regime change from the air, to say nothing of whether regime change is even a viable goal: 20 years of the war on terror would suggest not.

One thing I heard whispered in Washington this week was that – between Venezuela, Greenland and now Iran – others may be concluding they cannot trust American negotiators. The terms of any deal seem increasingly contingent on political whim in the White House, rather than consistent policy, and attacking a counterparts mid-negotiation makes it less likely that adversaries will themselves negotiate in good faith.

This US navy handout photo released by US Central Command public affairs shows US sailors preparing to stage ordnance on the flight deck of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in support of Operation Epic Fury. Picture: US navy/US Central Command/AFP

One congressional staffer gloomily told me this week that, under this administration’s force-based approach to international relations, diplomatic consistency carried less weight, but that wouldn’t always be the case. Russia and China were watching this conflict closely, she noted, and if they saw an opportunity to move against Western interests while the US was tied down in Iran, credibility with allies would matter again, fast. The broader potential for escalation – for Gulf War III to become World War III – is not in the forefront of anyone’s mind at present but the risk is real.

Impact at home

For Australia, the implications of the current conflict are stark enough. As a globally connected trading nation, with millions of Australians overseas and massive exposure to the global system, Australians’ safety and our nation’s prosperity can easily be disrupted by events thousands of kilometres away. Just one illustration of this is petroleum imports, which despite rapid growth in renewables still drive almost every aspect of our economy.

The latest Australian petroleum statistics, from December 2025, showed Australia with 50 days net import coverage, 25 days of diesel consumption, enough jet fuel for 20 days and enough automotive petrol for 26 days. In other words, if global oil supplies are interrupted for more than three to four weeks, Australia’s transportation and production systems start grinding to a halt. The government has rightly advised against panic hoarding, but fuel resilience will become a real issue as the conflict drags on.

There is also the possibility that an expanded conflict may lead to a spike in terrorism risk. Iranian-sponsored terror cells aside, unrest among or against Iranian, Jewish, Kurdish, Arab and other communities is a real issue, one that many Western governments are watching, Australia almost certainly included.

A final possibility is that, if the war drags on or escalates, Australia and other allies may receive a US request for support. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – including joint facilities in Australia – are almost certainly already involved. No request for warships, aircraft or ground troops has been publicly discussed but planners would be wise to be thinking ahead.

In the meantime, and much more importantly, families such as my friend’s – across Iran, Israel, the Gulf states and elsewhere – are sheltering in basements, comforting their kids, hoping they have enough food, water, cash and medical supplies, and worrying what the future holds. Tens of thousands of Australians and other expats are stranded as they seek to leave the region, and millions more locals have no exit in sight. This war is unlikely to end soon, but it has already changed the game

The end of the line … an epitaph for a tyrant

February 28, 2026March 11, 2026Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Ali Hosseini Khamenei (born 19 April 1939, Mashhad, Iran, died 28 February 2026, Teheran) was the second and longest-serving Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, holding office since 1989 (the yet the Berlin Wall fell and tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square). A cleric shaped by the Shi’a seminaries of Mashhad and Qom, he was active in opposition to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and was arrested and exiled several times before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. After the revolution, he rose steadily through the new political order: survived an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm partially paralyzed, and later that year became President of Iran, serving two terms (1981–1989) during the Iran–Iraq War. Following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, the Assembly of Experts selected him as Supreme Leader. In that role, he exercised ultimate authority over Iran’s armed forces, judiciary, state broadcasting, and key strategic decisions, shaping the country’s domestic governance, regional policy, and contentious nuclear program for more than three decades. His tenure was marked by consolidation of clerical authority, periodic internal unrest and brutal repressions, international sanctions, economic collapse, and enduring tensions with the United States and its regional rivals. He is reported to have perished in the rubble of his sprawling presidential compound.

In an eloquent article in The Atlantic, Karim Sadjadpour, American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, casts him as custodian of a mausoleum, spokesman for a ghost, while Orwell hovers like a specter over the scene, reminding us that the dead impose upon the living a worldview and a way of life long after the society beneath it has shifted, urbanised, digitised, globalised. Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic became precisely that: liturgical slogans, policing of women’s bodies, the hijab both banner and boundary. And yet revolutions, like stubborn shadows, rarely die when their architects do.

For the Islamic Republic was never a single body; it was, Sadjapour writes, an ecosystem, vascular and sprawling: clerical networks, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij, foundations controlling vast swathes of the economy, a security apparatus honed by decades of sanctions, war, assassination, and unrest. Khamenei may have been the last of the first generation, the final living ligament to 1979—but institutions outlive men. The IRGC, less ghost than organism, adaptive, entrepreneurial, entwined in Iran’s political economy and regional projection of power, had already evolved into a praetorian creature, more barracks than seminary. The revolution had become its own bureaucracy; the fervour was folded into files, the ecstatic theology into choreography. Khomeini was revelation; Khamenei was preservation. And that may yet be his most enduring achievement: he turned prophecy into paperwork, charisma into system, and systems, unlike prophets, require only control, not belief.

Makes no mistake. The regime and its security apparatus and military industrial complex is lodged in the Iranian throat. It will take more than a gargle of American mouthwash to dislodge it! This stark image encapsulates decades of entrenchment, ideology, and bureaucracy, with a sly nod to futility.

So what now? The hinge has turned, though the door may swing in any direction. Three paths suggest themselves. Consolidation: a successor, deliberately colourless, rises, the Guard tightens its grip, ideology becomes theatre while power migrates behind the curtain, the revolution persists because it can control, not because it inspires. Managed mutation: flexibility, the Islamic Republic’s paradoxical talent; controlled elections, tactical moderation, negotiation where expedient. Rhetoric may soften, “resistance” may become nationalist rather than theological, the ghost changes costume but remains on stage. Fracture: succession is a stress test unlike any other; elite rivalries, public impatience, economic exhaustion, and the memory of Mahsa Amini could conspire to splinter the coercive apparatus. The moral centre of Iranian society has shifted far from the revolution’s founding certainties; the dead can govern only so long as the living consent, or are compelled, to remember in the prescribed way.

Sadjadpour warns that Khamenei’s life’s work was to preserve a revolution “heading for the ash heap.” Perhaps. But ash heaps are treacherous metaphors: they imply finality, neatness, closure. Iran’s modern history – constitutionalism, coups, revolution, reformist surges, Green Movement, uprisings—reveals something less linear and more cyclical: endings that seed beginnings, collapses that mutate, institutions that sediment while eras blur. The Islamic Republic may yet prove more durable than its critics predict, or more brittle than its guardians admit; revolutions, like empires, seldom die cleanly—they fade, calcify, mutate, or fall when no one quite expects it.

Obituaries are tidy things. They suggest closure, a soft percussion of earth on coffin lid, the moral summation of man and era alike. But Khamenei’s political body was never contained within his frame. It was diffused: in barracks, seminaries, intelligence files, oil contracts, prison walls, procurement networks, and the muscle memory of repression. You cannot bury that with a single spade. What makes this moment feel epochal is generational: he was the last living ligament to 1979. The revolution has passed from incandescent revelation to bureaucratic inheritance, from the explosive charisma of Khomeini to the methodical, suspicious choreography of Khamenei, and inheritance is always more fragile than creation. One can die for a revolution; it is harder to live bureaucratically for one.

So: exaggerated? If one means the man, no. If one means the era, perhaps—but eras rarely end cleanly. They blur, overlap, leave sediment, rearrange furniture before the house collapses. The hinge has turned. One can almost hear the machinery shifting—the faint metallic groan of succession in closed systems. Whether the door closes, swings wider, or jams halfway remains uncertain. Perhaps the true exaggeration lies not in the reports of death but in the certainty with which commentators predict what follows.

For now, the obituary hovers between elegy and warning. Something has ended. What replaces it may look familiar, at least at first glance, but history delights in surprising both mourners and celebrants alike. And if one must borrow Wilde properly: it is not the death that is exaggerated—it is our confidence about the afterlife.

This short epitaph is a précis of the article by Karim Sadjadpour in the Atlantic in 1March 2026 written by an AI language model

For other articles in In That Howling Infinite, see: Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? The quality of mercy … looking beyond Iran’s ghost republic and “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom

The limits of Autocracy

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/why-khamenei-is-dead/686198/

Commentator and journalist Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic “Why Khamenei Is Dead” is a meditation on the paradoxes of power, the vulnerabilities of authoritarian leadership, and the way human frailty can undermine even the most fortified regimes. At its core, the article is not simply about the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, killed by Israel on March 1, 2026, but about the systemic weaknesses that made such an outcome possible. For nearly four decades, Khamenei cultivated an aura of invincibility. His public persona was carefully theatrical: he issued “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” chants with a casual ease, almost as if greeting the world, performing ideological menace as ritual. Wood recalls seeing him in 2004 at Tehran University, leaving Friday prayers in a polished armored sedan mere seconds after ending a sermon with these death slogans. The memory emphasizes the performative nature of his power—imposing, ritualized, and calculated—but also, ironically, transient: he was physically close, yet untouchable, a man whose presence inspired awe and terror simultaneously.

Yet Wood emphasizes that Khamenei’s public projection of omnipotence masked a deep vulnerability. Iran’s regime has historically proven resilient in many domains: its institutions function, its missile programs act as deterrents, and its military units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have maintained cohesion. In the past two years, during heightened conflict with Israel and the United States, the regime’s structural defenses held. There were no defections, no breakdowns of command, no collapse of the bureaucratic apparatus. On the surface, Iran remained formidable.

However, the story of Khamenei’s demise is not one of institutional failure but of leadership failure. Wood stresses that leadership—especially at the top—is qualitatively different from structural power. While Iran possessed instruments of coercion and deterrence, the people entrusted to wield them, Khamenei and his inner circle, repeatedly demonstrated incompetence, indecision, and mismanagement. Their missteps—both strategic and operational—rendered what should have been a robust defense porous and vulnerable. No amount of missile silos, armored convoys, or loyal subordinates can compensate for leaders who are themselves the weak link. In Wood’s framing, Khamenei’s death is emblematic of a broader truth: even regimes that appear impregnable crumble when their leadership is flawed or unprepared.

Wood also situates this vulnerability within a moral and psychological frame. He acknowledges that celebrating the death of another, even a reviled autocrat, is morally problematic, yet he simultaneously captures the visceral human desire for retribution. Millions across Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and even Ukraine—regions caught in the crossfire of Khamenei’s ideological ambitions—wished for the opportunity to confront him directly. This duality—the ethical imperative against rejoicing in death versus the natural, almost primal, human desire for vindication—underscores the complex emotional landscape that surrounds acts of political violence. Khamenei, in his own way, was both a global enemy and a personal antagonist for countless individuals.

Beyond morality, Wood’s essay examines the theatricality of power itself. Khamenei’s authority depended on ritualized displays, carefully choreographed public appearances, and ideological performance. Threats and slogans—his “Death to…” chants—functioned less as immediate policy instruments than as a projection of dominance meant to cement fear, loyalty, and perception. Yet this performative power could not substitute for the substance of strategic competence. When leadership faltered—through misjudgment, hesitation, or betrayal—the façade crumbled. The most elaborate defenses cannot shield leaders from the consequences of their own failings.

Geopolitically, the implications are profound. Khamenei’s death is likely to intensify internal debates about succession and strategy within Tehran, potentially destabilizing decision-making in the short term. It may embolden regional adversaries, recalibrate the balance of deterrence with Israel, and force external powers, including the United States, to reassess policy toward Iran. Wood’s piece suggests that this event is not merely symbolic but materially consequential: it exposes the fragility of authority in systems where power is concentrated yet humanly fallible, and where ideological zeal does not automatically translate into operational effectiveness.

Ultimately, Wood’s argument is as much about leadership theory as it is about Iranian politics. Authoritarian regimes often appear indestructible because of their institutions, militias, and propaganda apparatus, yet history shows repeatedly that the personal competence—or incompetence—of those at the very top is decisive. Khamenei’s death, in Wood’s telling, is the product not solely of external force but of internal vulnerability: a leader whose fearsome reputation, ideological fervor, and theatrical command could not mask the shambolic reality of governance. In other words, he was both the architect of Iran’s defiance and the source of its strategic fragility.

In its deepest sense, the essay is a reflection on the human dimension of power: no matter how formidable the structures, the rhetoric, or the image, authority is inseparable from the judgment, courage, and competence of those who wield it. Khamenei’s life—and death—serve as a cautionary tale, reminding us that performance, fear, and loyalty are insufficient substitutes for effective leadership. Wood’s narrative combines historical observation, moral reflection, and personal anecdote to show that authoritarian theater can impress and intimidate, but when push comes to shove, it is the human element that determines survival or downfall. Khamenei’s fall, therefore, is at once historical, psychological, and deeply human: a story of power, spectacle, and the vulnerability at the heart of even the most seemingly impregnable regimes.

This short epitaph is a précis of the article by Graeme Wood in the Atlantic in 1March 2026 written by an AI language model

The following is a brief analysis of what happened on 28 February 2026 when March was about to “roar in like a lion” – which, indeed, was the name given by the Israeli Defence Force to its second aerial assault in Iran in eight months.

The Second American Iranian War – Reckoning Without a Map

On 1 March 2026, following the initiation of U.S. and Israeli air strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran, The Atlantic published analyses by Anne Applebaum, Graeme Wood, and Tom Nichols, each offering distinct yet complementary perspectives on the unfolding crisis. Collectively, their essays examine not only the immediate military events but the deeper political, ideological, and strategic dynamics that underpin the confrontation.

Anne Applebaum emphasizes the ideological nature of the Islamic Republic. From her perspective, Iran is not merely a state defending territorial or security interests; it is a revolutionary regime whose worldview drives both domestic repression and regional aggression. Applebaum’s central concern is process and planning: the strikes were launched without public explanation, congressional authorization, or international consensus, and no coherent strategy has been articulated for post-strike governance. Without a plan for legitimate political transition, she argues, military action risks chaos, nationalist backlash, and the strengthening of hardliners rather than meaningful reform.

Graeme Wood focuses on the operational and geopolitical consequences of the strikes. He highlights the recent escalation in which Iran targeted Gulf Arab monarchies—including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE—marking a dramatic shift from shadow conflict to overt regional confrontation. Wood argues that these attacks may inadvertently unify Tehran’s adversaries, closing off avenues for containment and amplifying the risk of a broader Middle Eastern war. In his analysis, the strikes are not simply tactical military events; they are catalysts that reshape regional political calculations and threaten to escalate a localized conflict into a multi-front crisis.

Tom Nichols frames the strikes in terms of U.S. strategic coherence and the historical perils of regime-change operations. He stresses that regime change is not a discrete military objective but a complex political project, one requiring alignment of domestic unrest, fractures in security forces, and credible alternatives capable of governance. Nichols warns that absent such conditions, air strikes—even if tactically successful—may produce more instability than progress, mirroring cautionary lessons from Iraq and Libya.

Taken together, these three perspectives converge on a central thesis: while Iran is a hostile actor with a history of regional destabilization, military action alone cannot achieve sustainable political outcomes. Applebaum foregrounds ideological complexity and the necessity of post-strike planning; Wood highlights the regional and geopolitical repercussions of escalation; Nichols underscores the asymmetric risks inherent in regime-change gambits. Their combined insights frame the March 2026 strikes as a high-stakes venture, one in which tactical gains may be easily overshadowed by strategic uncertainty and unintended consequences.

The Bombs Without a Blueprint

Applebaum is particularly critical of process. The strikes were carried out without explanation to the American public, without congressional authorization, and without securing international consensus—a procedural void that mirrors a deeper strategic void. U.S. policy, she argues, has long oscillated between pressure and engagement, alternating sanctions with diplomacy, threats with negotiation, but rarely confronting the ideological core of the Islamic Republic. Bombing nuclear facilities or military infrastructure might degrade capabilities, yet it does nothing to dismantle the regime’s revolutionary worldview or empower a credible alternative political force. In the absence of a plan for governance after the strikes, the result is more likely to be chaos, intensified repression, or nationalist backlash rather than democratic transition.

Nichols similarly emphasizes that regime change is a political project, not a military objective. Even successful strikes do not guarantee that the regime will collapse, that protests will coalesce, or that security forces will fracture. The historical record—from Iraq to Libya—underscores the difficulty of building a functioning political order once a government is weakened or removed. The upside—a rapid emergence of a moderate or reformist government—is narrow; the downside—regional war, prolonged instability, economic shocks, and emboldened hardliners—is broad and asymmetric.

Wood complements these arguments by situating the crisis in the regional context. Iran’s missile strikes against Gulf Arab monarchies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, mark a dramatic escalation beyond shadow conflict with Israel or the United States. By attacking states that had previously attempted neutrality, Tehran risks unifying its regional adversaries, erasing remaining arguments for coexistence or containment. Gulf monarchies that had long debated restraint versus confrontation may now lean decisively toward the latter, viewing the Iranian regime as an existential threat that must be confronted. In Wood’s analysis, these strikes have not only military but profound political consequences: they reshape regional alliances, heighten the likelihood of broader war, and create a cascade of strategic uncertainty for both Iran and the United States.

Strategic Whiplash

Applebaum and Nichols also highlight the confusion in U.S. messaging preceding the strikes. During domestic unrest in Iran earlier this year, President Trump encouraged citizens to “take over their institutions,” implying support for revolution. Yet senior officials soon suggested accommodation, framing U.S. interests narrowly around nuclear non-proliferation. This whiplash—between fomenting revolution and hinting at negotiation—reveals a lack of clarity about ultimate objectives, and the strikes themselves appear more a gamble than a coherent strategy.

The risks of this approach are manifold. Iran could retaliate asymmetrically through Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, Houthis, cyberattacks, or strikes on Gulf oil infrastructure, pulling the United States into a wider regional conflict. American forces in the region could become exposed, and global energy markets destabilized. Domestically, hardliners may consolidate power, justifying repression in the name of national survival. The very elements Washington hopes to weaken could be strengthened. Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols each stress that these asymmetric risks are more numerous and plausible than the narrow upside of regime collapse.

Regional Ramifications

Perhaps the most immediate consequence of the March 2026 strikes is the escalation of the conflict beyond Iran’s borders. Wood notes that Iran’s targeting of Gulf monarchies represents a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions. For decades, Tehran benefited from the hesitation, rivalry, and caution of its regional adversaries. By striking countries that had attempted neutrality, Iran may have inadvertently unified the Gulf against it. Saudi Arabia and its allies, long cautious about provoking Tehran, may now view confrontation as inevitable. The calculus of containment and cautious coexistence may be irreversibly replaced by an era of escalation, where Iranian aggression is met with coordinated regional response, potentially with U.S. support.

This shift also reframes the nature of war in the Middle East. What had been a shadow conflict—missile exchanges, proxy skirmishes, and calibrated threats—has become overt. Sovereign states are now active targets, and the implications for regional security, energy stability, and global geopolitics are immediate and profound. The Gulf, long a buffer zone of uneasy coexistence, may now become the front line of a broader confrontation, with consequences that extend far beyond Tehran, Riyadh, or Washington.

Conclusion: Strategy Without a Map

The analyses of Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols converge on a stark assessment: the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, however tactically precise, are untethered from a coherent political strategy. Applebaum warns that ideological complexity cannot be solved with bombs; Nichols reminds us that regime change is a political transformation, not a military objective; and Wood highlights the unintended regional consequences that may escalate the conflict far beyond initial calculations.

Together, they suggest that the March 2026 strikes represent a high-stakes gamble. The narrow upside—rapid collapse of the Iranian regime and the emergence of a moderate government—is contingent on unlikely alignments of internal political and social forces. The downside—regional war, economic disruption, entrenchment of hardliners, and prolonged instability—is broad, asymmetric, and more probable. By acting without a clearly articulated post-strike plan, the United States and Israel have entered a perilous chapter in Middle Eastern geopolitics, one in which the consequences will unfold unpredictably, and in which success cannot be measured merely by the destruction of targets, but by the construction of a viable political order in Tehran and a durable regional equilibrium.

The lesson, as Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols collectively insist, is clear: military action without strategy is a leap into uncertainty. The map may be blank, but the stakes are real, and the cost of miscalculation could echo for decades.

Addendum

We have republished below two articles about the January protests by British historian, author, and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue, who he married to Bita Ghezelayagh, an Iranian artist and architect, in Tehran. They provide a well-written backstory to the above written by one with lived experience of the Islam Republic. From these, once may surmise that Ali Khamanei had only one possible exit.

The Islamic Republic’s bloody endgame

Credit. Carlos Jasso/AFP/Getty

Iran’s fanatics dream of martyrdom

Christopher de Bellaigue, Unherd, 4 February 2026

As America’s advanced warplanes and ships arrive within striking distance of Iran, Donald Trump has promised attacks “far worse” than those of last June, when Iran’s nuclear sites and air defences were attacked and several of its military leaders assassinated. In response, the Islamic Republic has signalled readiness to return to the negotiations that Trump’s 12-day war with Israel against Iran had interrupted. Parley between Steve Witkoff, the American envoy, and Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, is to resume on Friday in Istanbul. It is unlikely, however, that Iran will accept Israel’s demands that it relinquish uranium-enrichment, dismantle its ballistic missile programme and desist from reconstituting its network of regional proxies: effectively, the unconditional surrender that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has consistently refused to entertain. His inflexibility has come at the price of an unremitting Western hostility that has, along with endemic corruption and mismanagement, crashed the economy and provoked the huge protests, revolutionary in character, which erupted across the country last month. The most plausible explanation for Khamenei’s preparedness to talk, then, is that he is playing for time and hoping that, if the worst comes to the worst, he will be saved by Trump’s aversion to wars which last more than a few hours. On 1 February, the Supreme Leader warned that American aggression would precipitate a “regional” war, by which he meant Iranian attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf and civilians in Israel. A few days earlier, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, an adviser of the Supreme Leader — who had a narrow escape when his apartment was targeted by an Israeli airstrike last summer — promised an “immediate, comprehensive, and unprecedented” response, “directed at the aggressor, at the heart of Tel Aviv, and at all who support the aggressor”. But Iran, we now know, is a spent military force and cannot carry out such threats.

Some 1,200 Iranians were killed in the 12-day war, compared with 28 Israelis and not a single American, while enemy aircraft bossed Iranian airspace. Around 90% of the missiles that Iran fired in response towards Israel were intercepted; a mere handful of its 500 or so drones made it into Israeli territory, the rest meeting a similar fate to that of the Iranian drone that flew close to the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on Tuesday, and was shot down by one of the carrier’s jets. For all Iran’s bluster, the imbalance between a belt-and-braces autarky and the world’s most advanced militaries is as stark as that between the Mahdist army and the British at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, when thousands of Sudanese tribesmen were mowed down by Maxim guns to the loss of 47 British lives; or between the Mamluks and Napoleon’s Armée d’Orient a century earlier, when a medieval cavalry was put to flight by modern infantry squares spitting grapeshot. No, it isn’t chaos in the Gulf nor brimstone over Tel Aviv that need concern us should the negotiations fail. It is the possibility of mass slaughter of unarmed civilians in the Islamic Republic itself.

For an ominous pattern of botched outside intervention and the implacable exercise of monopolised force, look no further than last month’s unrest and its suppression. Having begun as street protests by an “army of the hungry”, in the words of Hatam Ghaderi, perhaps Iran’s most perceptive political analyst, the movement took on a radical character after Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah, asked ordinary Iranians to go out and topple the regime on 9 January. The millions heeding his call were further galvanised by Trump’s promise, made a few days earlier, that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters… the United States of America will come to their rescue”.

In the event, thousands were mown down, Omdurman-style, on the streets of Tehran and dozens of other cities by Revolutionary Guardsmen firing Dushkas and AK-47s. We don’t yet know exactly how many people died, though the death toll certainly exceeds by thousands the nugatory figure of 2,985 conceded by the government — dwarfing also the 3,164 people killed by the Shah’s forces over the 16 years of sporadic revolutionary activity culminating in the monarch’s flight in 1979. As for the help promised by Trump, it never came.

The bloodiest episode of civil strife that Iran has seen for at least two centuries could have been avoided had the 86-year-old Khamenei bowed to longstanding demands and stepped aside. This would have paved the way for elections to an assembly to draw up a new constitution — a relatively bloodless transition, involving members of the current regime untainted by the worst excesses of corruption and cruelty, might have been possible. By refusing such a transition and turning his stormtroopers on mostly unarmed crowds — amid reports of the Revolutionary Guards’ snipers shooting bystanders in the head and of knife thrusts aimed deliberately at the genitals — Khamenei has cleared the field of potential unifiers, in the process condemning the Islamic Republic and its internal opponents to a fight to the finish.

“Khamenei has condemned the Islamic Republic and its internal opponents to a fight to the finish”

A former British official with close connections to Western policy-makers told me this week that the thinking among Western countries, including Britain, is that the regime is out of puff and that a collapse as rapid and as straightforward as that of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is likely. But in 30 years of reporting on the Middle East, I have learned never to be surprised by the ignorance and complacency of our policymakers. Iran resists such a reassuring prognosis; a messier denouement awaits.

Do not be fooled by the worldliness of Iran’s artistic and literary culture or the prosperity and accomplishments of its diaspora. For much of its post-Islamic history, Iran has contained a minority of fanatics; the difference is that today’s fanatics have guns in their hands and their backs to the wall. This is what Hatam Ghaderi refers to as the revolutionary “hard core” which has gathered around Khamenei, and is composed of Revolutionary Guardsmen, hardline clerics and members of the Basij militia.

They learned their trade fighting small, dirty wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen; their worldview formed in prayer halls and barracks where a hatred of the godless West is propagated alongside a deep yearning for the return of the 12th Shia imam, who disappeared from view 10 centuries ago and will emerge to inaugurate an epoch of justice and peace. Religious meetings are conducted by men who sing of martyrdom and purity; they regard the killing of godless “rioters” acting at the behest of Israel as a virtuous act. With blood already on their hands, they have no way back into general acceptability, and nowhere to go but further and further into their own fantasies of martyrdom, all the while nurturing fond expectations of divine intervention. There is no reason to exclude Ali Khamenei from their number.

Whatever happens in Istanbul on Friday, and during the weeks to come, the Islamic Republic is unlikely to survive. Its people hate it too much. But its fall will not be the simple event that is seemingly contemplated in Washington and Jerusalem. The correct analogy is not with the kleptocracy that melted away with the fall of Assad but with those members of the Waffen-SS who carried on fighting even after Hitler’s death in 1945, exhibiting the same unappeasable contempt for death and hatred of their enemies that they did when he was alive.

When Reza Pahlavi was asked whether he took responsibility for the slaughter on the streets of his homeland, he replied coldly, “this is a war, and war has casualties”. That words have consequences means something tangible in a world of bullets and flesh and the destiny of a people. Many Iranians have entered a war with their regime that must end with the elimination of one or the other. Trump should think hard before he next promises Iranians his help, and mean it if he does, or he too will have blood on his hands.

The Ayatollah will fight to the death

He could unleash a killing machine

Christopher de Bellaigue, 12 January 2026

Ever since he became Iran’s Supreme Leader in 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s approach to domestic unrest has been defined by three assumptions. The first is that protesters can be discredited through accusations of collusion with the country’s Western foes. The second is that, having engineered the 1979 revolution that brought the mullahs to power in the first place — and suffered the consequences — Iranians will do anything to avoid another upheaval, the poor letting themselves be seduced by government handouts while judicious shows of force dissuade the middle class from taking to the streets. The third is that Iranians are incapable of uniting around a single opposition figure: whether a disaffected insider like Mir Hossein Mousavi, or Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the deposed last Shah, easily caricatured as a creature of the Virginia suburbs and who hasn’t seen his homeland in almost half a century. Such assumptions have seen Khamenei and his acolytes in the Revolutionary Guard, the clerical establishment and the Basij militia ride out crisis after crisis, starting with the Green Movement led by Mousavi in 2009, extending through the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-3 and climaxing in the battering that the country received last summer at the hands of Israeli and US aircraft. Then, calls by Benjamin Netanyahu and Pahlavi himself for ordinary citizens to take advantage of the regime’s military disarray, by going out and toppling it, went conspicuously unanswered. Now all has changed. Initially sparked by economic collapse, two weeks of protests have coalesced into a national movement, one whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. Along the way, the regime’s tenaciously-held assumptions have become obsolete. The authorities have been caught unawares, and seem unable or unwilling to change course. On the contrary, the Islamic Republic remains fatally wedded to the old assumptions while the country enters an unpredictable and explosive new phase. The scene was set by a summer of chronic water shortages and electricity outages. In December, the riyal collapsed and inflation touched 50%, the consequence of mismanagement, corruption and sanctions that the revolutionary oligarchy has knowingly courted and in some cases profited from. Tellingly, the initial protests, on 28 December, were staged not by the hijab-discarding young women, the sort who spearheaded the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rather, the discontent was sparked by the revolution’s traditional supporters: grizzled, pious traders in the bazaar. They were soon joined by youthful members of the country’s dispossessed middle class: nouveaux pauvres with a Jacobin rage in their hearts and supportive compatriots by their side.

The solidarity that is currently being shown between Iranians of different ages, classes and ethnicities is a far cry from the scenes I observed during the 2009 agitation, when bystanders watched with studied neutrality as protesters were dragged away to police torture chambers. Gone, too, is the inviolability of public property. These days, bystanders wade in with fists and kicks to save protesters from the security forces, while police stations and police cars are torched and — according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency — officers are killed. From the province of Kurdistan in the west to Baluchistan in the east and as far south as the refinery town of Abadan, no part of Iran is untouched. At least one small town, in the western province of Kermanshah, has been seized by rebels.

The regime has responded by killing dozens of protesters before cutting the internet on Thursday night. Behind the blackout, as is clear from video and audio files that continue to trickle out, more protesters are dying, more public buildings are being attacked and more hospitals are becoming war zones as parents smash down mortuary doors and remove the bodies of their dead children before the authorities can surreptitiously bury them. Such confrontations are a throwback to the 1979 revolution, which advanced to the rhythm of Shia mourning ceremonies, each funeral being a magnet for more protests and more deaths.

Only a few government services — notably regime propaganda conducted through social media — have been exempted from the blackout. Card transactions, on which the economy depends, have not. With shops shuttered, the protests seem to be growing. In one video clip of a huge nocturnal gathering, a voice is heard: “They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”

“They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”

On Friday, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence wing warned against “any refusal to act” on the part of other organs of the state, a rare public admission of concern on the subject of regime cohesion. The following day the regular army, which usually takes no role in maintaining law and order, announced that it would safeguard strategic infrastructure and public property, also urging Iranians to thwart “enemy plots”.

But such warnings, and Khamenei’s own denunciation of the protesters as “rioters” whose motivation is to curry favour with Donald Trump, derive from the old reasoning that equates any call by Iranians for foreign intervention with unpatriotic betrayal. The country has a long history of such interventions, not least the 1953 coup in which MI6 and the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s legitimate prime minister. Yet judging by the protesters’ cheerful calls for further attacks by the US and Israel, it is clear that they have rejected their parents’ squeamishness. According to the logic on the streets, another Western aerial campaign would be welcome if it advances the goal of toppling the Islamic Republic.

The main political beneficiary of the growing appetite for outside action is Pahlavi, who on Friday exhorted Trump to “be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran”. And, for the first time, the self-styled crown prince is regarded as a serious contender for leadership of a new regime whose main attribute would be its good relations with Tel Aviv and Washington.

It is a remarkable transformation for the diffident 65-year-old who left Iran for Lubbock, Texas as an air force cadet in 1978, and was for years dismissed by liberal and Leftist opponents of the regime as an embarrassing reminder of his father’s corrupt and authoritarian rule. Pahlavi’s support for the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran this summer, furthermore, in which more than 1,000 Iranians were killed, appeared to put him at odds with his compatriots. No longer. On the burning streets of Tehran calls of “Long live the Shah!” ring insistently while Pahlavi’s former Leftist critics, in the words of one veteran Iranian analyst, “have started treating him with respect”.

Pahlavi rises, Khamenei falls. As recently as three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s will was unchallenged and his authority total; since then, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” he had built up across the Middle East has been obliterated by Israel, with his own intelligence services clearly compromised. Most significant, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer removed any possibility of an Iranian bomb, in the short term at least.

“Rat Ali”, as Khamenei has been known since his scurrying departure for an underground bunker during the war last summer, looks every day of his 86 years. His death, preferably violent and painful, is being loudly petitioned. No one knows what conversations are going on between the Supreme Leader and his inner circle, which includes his son Mojtaba, for some time seen as a possible successor. But it is utterly implausible that Khamenei would, as The Times recently claimed, “flee to Moscow” if the regime looks close to falling.

Khamenei lost the use of an arm when he was blown up early in the revolution. He is not a quitter but a quietly stolid fanatic who will leave the Islamic Republic horizontally or not at all. And he has yet to turn the full force of his killing machine on the protesters. Observing all this, and fanning his tail feathers after his exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, is the US president — who, by immediately reimposing his policy of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic following his election last year, has, it is now clear, helped bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump declared on Saturday, “we’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.” By that time, of course, the slaughter of protesters was well underway.

Trump has so far avoided meeting Pahlavi, perhaps judging that the regime remains a long way from collapse, or because, if the time comes, he favours a Venezuela-style decapitation and Khamenei’s replacement from within the current set-up. Hassan Rouhani, a former president known both for his moderation and his toughness, might be a candidate.

As if by providential design, the ousting of Maduro lends an aura of inevitability to the demise of the Islamic Republic. And yet regimes are not toppled by auras. They are not toppled because Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, who was born into a good family in Iran in 1969, says that he is looking forward to “investing aggressively” in his homeland in the “first 100 days” after liberation. They are toppled because the men with guns are killed or lose their stomach for the fight. And of that, so far as we know, there is no sign.

A lot has happened since the summer. Iranians have got over their horror of foreign interventions and have adopted the closest figurehead to hand. A people out of time, they are fighting for a liberal democracy, or — quainter still — a constitutional monarchy, just as the brand seems defunct. Behind the penumbra of the communications blackout, a country of 90 million, an ancient culture dishonoured by its leaders, goes to work on itself.

Ulster’s history and the long shadow of The Troubles

February 23, 2026February 24, 2026Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

This is not a comprehensive history of Ireland. It is, rather, an explainer – a guide for the interested reader to understand how the late twentieth-century conflict, known in euphemistic understatement as The Troubles, began, endured, and proved so intractable. Though the guns and bombs have for the most part fallen silent, memories endure. In some quarters, the bitterness remains, the venom lingers, and the need to keep fighting – at least in memory, at least in ritual – has not entirely faded. As the old rebel song goes, “No surrender is the war cry of the Belfast Brigade”. Its notes echo still across streets, walls, and the ever-present consciousness of a place where the past is never far from the present. Though the hatchet may be buried, many remember where they buried it.

The Troubles did not begin in 1969 when civil rights marchers were viciously ambushed by Protestant gangs. They erupted then. Their deeper roots stretched back to the early seventeenth century, when the English Crown undertook the Plantation of Ulster after the defeat of Gaelic lords in the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603). After the Flight of the Earls in 1607, when those lords fled to continental Europe, James VI of Scotland – now also James I of England – set about remaking Ulster. Confiscated land – taken from Irish Catholic chieftains – was granted to “undertakers” from England and, crucially, from lowland Scotland. This was not mere migration; it was a state project of demographic engineering, designed to pacify and anglicise a rebellious province.

The Plantation was not simply an English imposition; it was profoundly Scottish. Tens of thousands of Presbyterian Scots crossed the narrow North Channel. The geography made it almost inevitable: on a clear day you can see Scotland from Antrim. What had once been a porous Irish sea became, in effect, a corridor of Protestant settlement.

These were not aristocrats alone. Many were farmers, tradesmen, smallholders – industrious, Calvinist, wary of episcopal hierarchy and religious certainly wary of Rome. They brought with them kirk discipline, covenant theology, and a hard-earned suspicion of both Catholic rebellion and Anglican condescension. In the seventeenth century they were themselves dissenters within the British confessional order – not the establishment, though they would become it locally. From that moment, land, religion, and political loyalty fused. Ownership mapped onto confession. Power mapped onto identity.

So when we speak of “settlers,” it is not an abstraction. It is families. It is surnames. It is my own father’s ancestors crossing from Ayrshire or Galloway into Antrim or Down, carving farms from confiscated land, building kirks, speaking Scots-inflected English, marrying within their community, and slowly – almost without noticing – becoming native to a place that had been politically engineered for them. Over generations, the settler becomes the local. The memory of arrival fades; the memory of threat remains.

The seventeenth century hardened the divide. The 1641 Irish Rebellion, with massacres of Protestant settlers, entered Protestant folk memory as proof of Catholic barbarity; Cromwell’s subsequent campaign (1649–53), with its sieges and land seizures, entered Catholic memory as atrocity and dispossession. The Williamite War (1689–91), culminating in the Battle of the Boyne, sealed Protestant ascendancy. In Ulster especially, victory became ritualised memory – parades, commemorations, banners – history as annual rehearsal.

That is one of the deep paradoxes of Ulster: both communities can claim indigeneity and grievance simultaneously. Catholic memory looks back to dispossession; Protestant memory looks back to siege – 1641, the Boyne, 1798. One narrative emphasises loss of land; the other, survival against massacre. Each contains truth. Each edits.

The eighteenth century formalised Protestant dominance through the Penal Laws, which marginalised Catholics politically, economically, and educationally. Landownership remained overwhelmingly Protestant. Catholics were not exterminated; they were subordinated. Resentment, therefore, did not burn out. It banked.

The nineteenth century complicated everything. The Act of Union (1801) abolished the Irish Parliament and bound Ireland directly to Westminster. Catholic Emancipation (1829) removed many legal disabilities, but not structural inequities. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) (1845–52) devastated the island demographically and psychologically; in Ulster, its effects were uneven, reinforcing regional distinctions. Meanwhile, industrialisation made Belfast a Protestant-majority, shipbuilding powerhouse – economically dynamic, culturally British, and deeply anxious about being subsumed into a Catholic-majority Ireland.

By the nineteenth century, the descendants of those Scottish Presbyterians were no longer temporary colonists but industrial citizens of Belfast — shipbuilders, linen magnates, skilled labourers — economically confident, culturally British, and deeply anxious about being subsumed into a Catholic-majority Ireland. As Irish nationalism (increasingly Catholic in composition, though not exclusively) pressed for Home Rule — limited self-government within the United Kingdom. Ulster unionists resisted fiercely. “Home Rule is Rome Rule” was not merely a slogan; it was an inherited reflex. Paramilitary formations appeared before the twentieth century: the Ulster Volunteer Force (1912) to oppose Home Rule; the Irish Volunteers (1913) to advance it. Guns were imported on both sides. The pattern was set.

The First World War postponed the crisis but did not dissolve it. The Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–21), and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) partitioned the island. Six counties of Ulster -with a built-in Protestant majority – became Northern Ireland, remaining within the United Kingdom. Partition did not resolve identity; it institutionalised it.

Northern Ireland’s new parliament at Stormont operated, for decades, as a Protestant-dominated state. Catholics faced systemic discrimination in housing allocation, employment, and electoral boundaries. This was not apartheid in the South African sense, but it was structured inequality, visible and resented.

By the 1960s, inspired partly by global civil rights movements, Northern Irish Catholics began peaceful campaigns for equal voting rights, fair housing, and an end to discriminatory practices. The response from elements within the Protestant community and the security apparatus was defensive, sometimes violent. Marches were attacked. The police (RUC), largely Protestant, were perceived as partisan. In 1969, serious sectarian rioting broke out; the British Army was deployed initially as peacekeeper. Very quickly, it became another protagonist.

From there, the Troubles crystallised: Provisional IRA campaigns against British presence and unionist authority; loyalist paramilitary violence against Catholics; tit-for-tat bombings, assassinations, internment without trial, Bloody Sunday (1972), hunger strikes (1981), urban segregation hardening into peace walls and psychological walls alike. Roughly 3,500 people died between the late 1960s and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. That number, in global terms, is small. Its density in a small place was immense.

Which is why the Troubles cannot be reduced to simple binaries of coloniser and colonised, though that language has its place. The Ulster story is more entangled. Plantation created a settler community; centuries created a rooted one.

The Good Friday Agreement did not erase those centuries. It acknowledged them obliquely: consent as the principle of sovereignty; power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties; recognition that identity in Northern Ireland could be British, Irish, or both. It was less a solution than a framework for managing disagreement without bloodshed.

And that, perhaps, is the long arc: from plantation to partition to power-sharing. Land engineered into loyalty. Religion hardened into political identity. Memory ritualised into grievance. Grievance institutionalised into governance. Governance resisted into violence. Violence exhausted into compromise.

History hardens. Families blur.

Memory, and the Theatre of Symbols

If history is the argument, memory is the costume in which it appears on stage.

In Ireland — and perhaps nowhere more intensely than in the North — the past does not lie quietly in archives. It walks. It marches. It drums. Specifically, the Lambeg drum is a large traditionally orange-painted drum, beaten with curved malacca canes brought out for Unionist and the Orange Order’s street parades. Along with the bagpipes, it is one of the loudest acoustic instruments in the world, frequently reaching over 120 dB. Named for the village of Lambeg it is commonly believed to have come to Ulster with the English settlers orvekse with the army of William of Orange during the Williamite war. Having its roots in 17th-century European military instruments, it was originally smaller. Traditionally it was accompanied by the shrill fife, a small transverse flute similar to the piccolo – and sometimes irreverently referred to as the Audi Orange Flute.

Oliver Cromwell is not merely a seventeenth-century general and dictator; he is a moral shorthand. For Catholics, his name condenses siege, massacre, confiscation – Drogheda and Wexford becoming synecdoche for atrocity itself. “To Hell or to Connacht” may not survive scholarly cross-examination as a verbatim decree, but as memory it requires no footnote. It signals dispossession. It names a wound. Invoke Cromwell and one need not rehearse the details; the symbol carries the freight.

William of Orange – King William III – King Billy – performs a parallel function on the other side of the ledger. Astride his white horse at the Boyne, he is less a Dutch Protestant prince than a guarantor of survival. The Battle of the Boyne (1690) was, in European terms, a minor theatre in a wider war. In Ulster, it became sacrament. Each Twelfth of July, sashes are worn, drums beaten, banners unfurled – if through or adjacent to Catholic areas, so much the better – not to refight the battle but to rehearse belonging and dominion.The Orange Lodge is both fraternal society and mnemonic device. Its rituals keep memory warm. Its parades trace routes that are never neutral, geography turned into catechism.

Thus Oliver Cromwell and King Billy face each other across centuries like bookends of grievance – one representing conquest, the other deliverance – though each is also more complicated than the emblem allows.

Move forward, and symbolism thickens.

The War of Independence (1919–21) and the Civil War (1922–23) fractured Irish nationalism itself. Partition in 1922 was not only a constitutional arrangement; it was an emotional amputation. For nationalists in the North, the new border confirmed abandonment and unfinished struggle. For unionists, it secured a state in which they would not be submerged. The same act – partition – functioned simultaneously as betrayal and salvation.

Martyrs followed. The executed leaders of 1916. The hunger strikers of 1981, their faces rendered in mural form, eyes large and unsurrendered. Martyrdom, in Ireland, has rarely required embellishment; death itself supplies the poetry. Funerals render it local – masked men in military dress fire shots into the damp airship air. Graves become pilgrimage sites. Names become incantation. Commemoration ceremonies bind past sacrifice to present purpose, as if history were an unfinished sentence demanding completion.

And always, the Protestant marches. The Twelfth of July. Apprentice Boys in Londonderry – a name that changes with one’s allegiance. Even the name of the city is a declaration. The ancient Derry” gestures toward Gaelic continuity; “Londonderry” toward plantation charter and imperial connection. To choose a word is to choose a side. Language itself becomes boundary wall.

In 1969, the Bogside in Derry turned symbolic geography into lived confrontation. “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” was not merely graffiti; it was a claim to moral and territorial autonomy. The walls and wire that later cut through Belfast – peace walls, they are called, with a certain exhausted irony – materialised distrust in concrete and corrugated steel. They were defensive architecture, but also mnemonic devices. Every barrier says: remember.

And then the murals.

On the Falls Road and the Shankill, gable walls became galleries of memory. Masked volunteers with rifles. King Billy crossing the Boyne. Bobby Sands’ thin, resolute face. The Red Hand of Ulster. Palestinian flags in nationalist districts; Israeli flags in loyalist ones – global conflicts borrowed to refract local identity. These images are not random decoration. They are narrative shorthand, pedagogy in paint. Children grow up under them. They learn who they are by the stories on the wall.

Symbolism, of course, simplifies. It flattens ambiguities into heroes and villains, saints and tyrants. Cromwell the monster. King Billy the saviour. The hunger striker the pure martyr. The volunteer the defender of the realm. Real history is messier: Cromwell was brutal and also a product of his century’s ferocities; William’s victory secured Protestant liberties while entrenching Catholic subordination; the independence struggle produced both liberation and internecine slaughter. But symbols do not trade in nuance. They trade in clarity.

Yet the Good Friday Agreement, too, is a symbol – though a quieter one. No horse. No musket. No mural of triumphant death. Its symbolism is procedural: consent, parity of esteem, power-sharing. It offers not a martyr but a mechanism. Its genius is almost anti-theatrical. It asks people to live with ambiguity rather than resolve it in blood.

And so Northern Ireland today remains a place where the past is both curated and contested. Bonfires blaze each July; wreaths are laid each Easter; murals are repainted; walls still stand, though some have gates that open by day. Memory has not faded. It has been domesticated, partially, into ritual rather than riot.

Perhaps that is the final paradox. Symbols once mobilised for war now coexist within a fragile peace. The same banners flutter, but fewer guns answer them. The same songs are sung, but often as heritage rather than summons.

History argues. Memory performs.

And in Ulster – and in the bloodlines that carry it beyond Ulster — the stage is never entirely dismantled.

What have I now?” said the fine old woman
“What have I now?” this proud old woman did say
“I have four green fields, one of them’s in bondage
In stranger’s hands, that tried to take it from me
But my sons have sons, as brave as were their fathers
My fourth green field will bloom once again” said she
Tommy Makem

Personal Reflection

For me, this is not abstract history. My own lineage embodies that braid: Scottish Protestant migration on one side, Irish Catholic inheritance on the other – far from Belfast or Derry, those threads met in my family; I grew up carrying both memories, the power of both histories.

When I watch film footage or view pictures of Orange parades and civil rights marches, of explosions, street riots and military manoeuvres, of walls and murals, I am not a casual onlooker viewing a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”, to borrow Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words. I feel weight of dual inheritance. Scottish Presbyterian settlers on one side, Irish Catholic dispossessed on the other – both lineages threading through my own family, colliding and entwining in Birmingham, far from the streets of Belfast or Derry.

I grew up knowing these histories not as abstractions but as intimations, as stories that shaped who I was. Though vicariously, I feel the pull of both pasts – the grievance and the survival, the displacement and the rootedness. Perhaps that is the quiet hope: that memory, with all its violence and ritual, can also be inherited as empathy, that symbols can teach not just fear, but recognition; that families, however braided by history, can live in the space between suffering and reconciliation.

This short history of The Troubles was largely written by an AI language model as an explainer first and foremost, and not as an opinion piece.

Read more on The Troubles in In That Howling Infinite in Free Derry and the battle of the Bogside: and on Irish history, Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody, The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir and O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song

Dreaming in the night, I saw a land where no man had to fight
Waking in your dawn, I saw you crying in the morning light
Lying where the Falcons fly, they twist and turn all in you e’er blue sky
Living on your western shore, saw summer sunsets asked for more
I stood by your Atlantic sea and I sang a song for Ireland
June and Phil McLough

Postscript … from Blood and Brick … a world of walls

In Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, there are imposing walls that have actually stood longer than that in Berlin. Now called the the Peace Walls, they were first erected by the British army in 1969. They were temporary affairs of corrugated iron, as the inter-community conflict solidified and ossified, they were soon extended and upgraded to bricks, steel and concrete. The walls separated predominantly Protestant loyalist and Catholic nationalist enclaves throughout The Troubles, the three decades of bombings, murders, riots and civil-rights protests.

Though not all linked, 38 kilometres of walls still slice through the city, outliving the conflict that engendered them. Only some short sections have been removed – partly they’ve become a tourist attraction, while the communities that live closest to them say they still provide a sense of security – though tensions may have eased, people are easily divided and it’s much harder to bring them together again. In the Shankill and Falls roads area of western Belfast, which were particularly notorious during The Troubles, the wall is splattered with political messaging, which makes it easy to know which side you’re on. One side has portraits of British soldiers and the queen and kerbs are painted red, white and blue. On the other the colours of the Irish flag predominate, framing portraits of Republican heroes and hunger-strike martyrs.

Belfast’s Peace Wall

Blood and Brick … a world of walls

“When we remember Zion” … what’s in a word?

February 17, 2026February 17, 2026Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Zionism derives from the Hebrew Tsiyon – Mount Zion in Jerusalem – and symbolizes the city and the Land of Israel. The term Zionismus was coined in 1890 by Austrian Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum, replacing “Hovevei Zion” (“Lovers of Zion”). While the Jewish attachment to Zion is ancient, dating at least to the Babylonian Exile, modern Zionism emerged in late-19th-century Europe in response to anti-Semitism and rising nationalism, formalising the aspiration for Jewish return to their ancestral homeland.

We’ve been here before – not in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney with placards and police lines, nor in the corridors of Canberra where commissions are announced – but in language. Always in language.

For months now, perhaps years, In That Howling Infinite has been circling the same contested terrain: Is Israel a settler state or a returning people? Is Palestinian nationalism resistance or rejection? Is apartheid an analytic category or an accusation? Is “from the river to the sea” a geography or a prophecy? We have spent months disentangling words precisely because they matter: settler colonialism, indigeneity, apartheid, return, self-determination. Each carries law, history, trauma, aspiration. Each can illuminate. Each can distort. [See One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance] and Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word?]

Now another word – or rather, an old word under new atmospheric pressure – demands the same care: “Zionist.”

Once a self-description, a term of late-Ottoman and Mandate-era political theory, shorthand for Jewish national revival; now increasingly an epithet, flung with the casual certainty of moral indictment.

Before we continue, let us make clear that the following essay is not an attempt to rehearse the full intellectual or political history of Zionism – its nineteenth-century European origins, its varieties (labor, revisionist, religious), its entanglement with empire and nationalism, its debates over diaspora and return. Those accounts are readily available elsewhere, in libraries, lecture halls, and the howling internet. Nor is it an exercise in catechism, for Zionism has never commanded universal assent among Jews; from Bundists to ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists, from liberal diasporists to post-Zionist critics within Israel itself, and among Israelis and Jews today (whom many critics of Israel and its government push to the forefront of their cause as if to demonstrate its righteousness). Jewish history and contemporary politics contains vigorous dissent from the Zionist project. Rather, what concerns us here is a narrower and more combustible phenomenon: the contemporary habit of framing Zionism not simply as mistaken or unjust, but as morally equivalent to Nazism – and the accompanying charge that Jews, through the state that claims to represent their national aspirations, are now committing genocide. It is this rhetorical escalation, and the moral confusion it both expresses and produces, that demands examination.

The escalation and confusion was evident well before October 7 2023. On streets and social media, in university classrooms and in day-to-day conversations, on placards, in memes, sprayed in graffiti, the connection between Israel and the Third Reich was being turbocharged. Zionism was no longer merely criticised; it was Nazified. Israeli policy was not compared to other nationalisms; it was collapsed into World War II. The swastika, once the emblem of genocidal antisemitism, reappeared as rhetorical prop, pasted onto flags and caricatures, deployed for shock and applause.

This escalation did not need Al Aqsa Flood and the war it precipitated to ignite it; merely intensified what had already been normalised. The analogy, once fringe, had drifted toward the mainstream of protest culture. And it matters – not only as prejudice, though that is present, but as a symptom of rage, symbolic power, and the moral weight the Holocaust carries in public imagination. Nazism has become shorthand for illegitimacy; to affix it to Israel is an attempt to delegitimise the state’s moral right to exist.

In an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 February, appropriately, on Saint Valentine’s Day, Jewish campaigner Danny Berkovic argues that the word has become a socially acceptable proxy for “Jew.” He begins with protests during President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia, where “Zionists” were denounced as malign actors and Zionism was equated with Nazism. In private, he recounts being asked whether he was paid by Israel – the old dual-loyalty trope reissued with updated stationery. When he pressed his interlocutor – should Israel exist? should it exist as a Jewish state with equal rights? – the answer was yes to both. By his definition, that made the accuser a Zionist.

Yet the word was being used as moral condemnation. The definitional battle begins there.

Berkovic offers a deliberately minimalist account. Zionism, he says, is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland; that Israel should exist as a Jewish state; that such existence is compatible with equal citizenship for Jews, Christians, Muslims and others. It does not prescribe borders. It does not require annexation. It does not mandate support for any government. It does not preclude criticism. It is a national movement – broad, internally diverse.

On that definition, most Jews worldwide qualify. The overwhelming majority identify in some fashion with Israel’s continued existence. And so when “Zionist” is spat as a term of inherent evil – supremacist, genocidal, morally bankrupt — it does not land as abstract critique. It lands collectively. The elasticity of the word allows hostility to be expressed while retaining plausible deniability. One need not say “Jew.” One says “Zionist.”

There is truth here. Victor Klemperer, diarist of the Third Reich, writing in the shadow of a regime that turned vocabulary into vapour and vapour into poison, warned that words can act like arsenic. Not dramatic at first. Not even noticeable. They accumulate. They settle into the bloodstream of public life. They alter what can be said – and what can be thought. Respectable language can metabolise contempt.

Nowadays, while openly targeting Jews is socially taboo; “Zionist” can provide semantic cover. Equating Zionism with Nazism is not policy analysis; it is moral theatre. Suggesting hidden financial allegiance is not debate; it is inheritance from darker grammars.

But the story does not end with etymology.

Because when critics use the term pejoratively, they are often responding not to 19th century ideologue Theodore Herzl’s pamphlet but to rightwing Israeli politician Bezalel Smotrich’s expansionist programme. The definitional struggle is not purely semantic; it is a contest over which Zionism is politically operative – and therefore morally accountable.

Zionism has never been monolithic. Herzl’s liberal nationalism, seeking refuge and recognition among nations, is not Mandate-era Revisionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s iron wall. Cultural Zionism is not religious messianism. Labour Zionism, draining swamps and building institutions, is not identical to today’s annexationist maximalism. Religious Zionism grafted messianic longing onto modern sovereignty. These strands coexisted uneasily, sometimes violently.

Today, some of the most visible exponents of Zionism in power advocate annexation of the West Bank, legal differentiation between populations, and a theology-inflected claim to the whole land. They call themselves Zionists. Their critics do not invent the association; they encounter it on ministerial letterhead.

So when a protester condemns “Zionists,” the referent in their mind may not be Jewish self-determination in principle, but settlement expansion, permanent occupation, the rhetoric of “from the river to the sea” in reverse – the Greater Israel mirror-image of Palestinian maximalism. To pretend these associations are conjured ex nihilo is disingenuous.

Yet to collapse all Zionism into that current is equally disingenuous.

Here the symmetry becomes uncomfortable. Just as “Zionist” can be weaponised to mean “Jew,” “anti-Zionist” can be weaponised to mean “antisemite,” foreclosing argument before it begins. Language slides in both directions. Each side accuses the other of bad faith; sometimes each is correct.

There are further complications. 1948 is not a footnote. For Jews, it is independence wrested from catastrophe that was the Shoah; for Palestinians, it is al Nakba, literally “catastrophe”, defeat and dispossession. Zionism is not only an abstract right but a historical event – with winners, losers, and descendants who inherit both triumph and grievance. To define it purely as self-determination is to abstract it from its consequences. To define it purely as dispossession is to erase the catastrophe from which it arose.

The phrase “Jewish state” itself contains layers. A demographic majority? A Law of Return privileging Jewish immigration? National symbols and calendar? A civic democracy with Jewish cultural character but equal citizenship? Zionists disagree among themselves. So do critics. These are arguments about the nature of nation-states in a post-imperial world – arguments not confined to Israel. They are not, in themselves, antisemitic. But good faith requires precision.

If one believes Jewish collective self-determination is uniquely illegitimate – that Israel should not exist in any form as a Jewish polity – one must reckon with how that position will be heard by Jews shaped by statelessness and genocide. If one believes Israel should exist but its current government is reckless or unjust, then “Zionist” is an inadequate synonym for critique. If one believes Zionism’s realisation has entrenched unjust domination, that critique must be articulated without collapsing into collective vilification. And if one believes Jews as a group are morally bankrupt, no semantic pirouette will disguise the prejudice.

We have often warned of mirrored absolutes – annexationist dreams on one side, eradicationist chants on the other. “From the river to the sea” answered by “Judea and Samaria forever”, which envisages an Israel from that sane river to the sea. Each imagines exclusivity; each erases the other. The danger is not solidarity per se; it is the surrender of moral complexity.

In the wake of October 7 2023 and its aftermath, a hardening has taken hold across parts of the West: a rediscovery – sometimes embarrassed, sometimes defiant – of solidarity with Israel. The term “Zio,” once flung as an epithet in online polemic, has been reclaimed half-seriously, half-sardonically. If the mere assertion of Israel’s right to exist now qualifies one as a zealot, then so be it. But if Zionism becomes a reactive identity badge – tribal solidarity in the face of hostility – it grows thinner than its history.

Historically, it was a spectrum: cultural revival, agricultural collectivism, diplomatic manoeuvre, spiritual longing, armed struggle, parliamentary debate. Palestinian nationalism, too, emerged from late-Ottoman modernity into Mandate uncertainty and war – not reducible to Hamas, but spanning civic pluralism and Islamist absolutism alike. Both peoples carry aspiration and fear; both narratives are real; neither is complete alone.

Words change their weather. “Zionist” now carries heat – from hatred, from anger at power, from grief, from defiance, from genuine moral outrage at war and occupation. It can be weapon. It can be shield. It can be identity. It can be accusation.

The task is not to pretend the word is pristine, nor to concede it entirely to abuse, but to insist on distinctions.

Zionism is both refuge and sovereignty. It is both survival and statecraft. It contains Tel Aviv’s liberal dissent and Hebron’s fervour; Herzl’s diplomacy and the settler’s certainty. It is Aliyah and, in tragic counterpoint, Al-A’uda – two grammars of return spoken over the same soil. It is refuge after Auschwitz and control over al Aqsa. It is a flag raised over independence, a checkpoint on a road, and a wall bisecting the land. Sovereignty is never morally weightless.

To deny Zionism’s pluralism is to falsify it; to deny its entanglement with power is to romanticise it.

History suggests that when words are repurposed to disguise prejudice, the damage rarely stops with words. History also suggests that when words are simplified to shield power from scrutiny, resentment ferments. If “Zionist” becomes a safe word for hate, something corrosive takes root. If it becomes a talisman against scrutiny, something else corrodes.

Between those distortions lies a narrower path – unsatisfying to partisans, necessary for anyone who believes complexity is not weakness – where language is neither weapon nor alibi, but instrument.

The land remains small. The history immense. The language – elusive, illusive – continues to do its quiet work.

Perhaps our work is to be able to speak about Jewish and Palestinian self-determination without collapsing one into caricature and the other into sanctimony. Whether we can hold two national stories – each ancient, each wounded – without converting either into absolution.

The struggle, in the end, is not over a word alone. It is over whether we are willing to let it mean more than our anger requires.

Afterword

There is a moment when any extended discussion of Israel or Zionism tips into the gravitational pull that American attorney Mike Godwin formulated in 1990 as “Godwin’s Law”: that as an online discussion lengthens, there is a high probability of a comparison to Nazis or Hitler. Conceived, in part, to curb the trivialisation of the Holocaust in the unruly early days of internet debate, the maxim has since migrated into broader political discourse, where the invocation of Hitler often signals not illumination but exhaustion – the moment when analogy replaces analysis and moral thunder substitutes for evidence. It is frequently deployed to suggest that the person reaching for the Nazi comparison has, rhetorically at least, “lost” the argument. Yet Godwin himself cautioned that the law is descriptive, not absolute. It does not predict that every exchange will end in such hyperbole, only that, as tempers fray, the temptation becomes statistically likely. Nor did he deny that some comparisons to fascism may be warranted when describing genuinely fascistic behaviour. In a debate as charged as that surrounding Zionism – where accusations of apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and even Nazism circulate with reckless ease – Godwin’s insight serves less as a gag rule than as a warning: once the Holocaust is instrumentalised as metaphor, the space for proportion, history, and moral seriousness contracts accordingly.

This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, and phrasing.

Read on for Berkovic’s article, and an explainer” in bullet points of the many meanings and interpretations of Zionism.

Zionism – definitions, claims, and contested meanings

In Berkovic’s minimalist framing, Zionism is:

• The belief that the Jewish people constitute a nation entitled to self-determination.
• Rooted in Jewish historical, cultural, and ancestral connection to the land of Israel.
• The view that Israel should exist as a Jewish state.
• Compatible, in principle, with equal civil and political rights for non-Jewish citizens.
• Not inherently tied to:
• Specific borders.
• Settlement expansion.
• Annexation of the West Bank.
• Opposition to a two-state solution.
• Support for any particular Israeli government.
• Compatible with criticism of Israeli policy comparable to criticism directed at other states.

In historical reality, however, Zionism has also been:

• A late-19th and early-20th century nationalist movement emerging from European antisemitism, Ottoman decline, and modern political thought.
• A spectrum of ideological strands, including:
• Liberal political Zionism (Herzl).
• Cultural Zionism (Ahad Ha’am).
• Labour/socialist Zionism (Ben-Gurion, kibbutz movement).
• Revisionist Zionism (Jabotinsky’s “iron wall”).
• Religious Zionism (messianic and covenantal interpretations of sovereignty).
• A movement inseparable in practice from land acquisition, demographic change, and eventually state formation.
• Experienced by Jews primarily as refuge, survival, and national restoration.
• Experienced by Palestinians primarily as dispossession (Nakba) and the beginning of an enduring conflict over sovereignty and land⸻

In contemporary politics, “Zionism” can function as:

• A baseline affirmation of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.
• A broad umbrella identity encompassing Israelis and diaspora Jews across the political spectrum — including fierce critics of Israeli governments.
• A label claimed by religious-nationalist and annexationist actors advocating permanent control over the West Bank.
• A reactive identity marker in the wake of October 7 — reclaimed by some who feel that even acknowledging Israel’s right to exist now invites condemnation

In contemporary polemic, “Zionist” is sometimes used as:

• A synonym for “Jew,” allowing hostility toward Jews to be expressed with plausible deniability.
• A catch-all villain category, attributing collective moral corruption rather than critiquing specific policies.
• A shorthand not for Herzl’s theory of Jewish self-determination, but for the policies of the current Israeli government or the most hard-line currents within it.

Key tensions in the definitional struggle:

• The battle is not merely semantic but political: which Zionism is operative — Herzl’s refuge, Labour’s state-building, or Smotrich’s annexationism?
• Anti-Zionism can range from policy critique to categorical rejection of Jewish self-determination; its moral meaning depends on which of these is intended.
• Equating all Zionism with supremacism erases its plural history.
• Equating all anti-Zionism with antisemitism forecloses legitimate debate about power, occupation, and equality.
• The phrase “Jewish state” itself is contested: demographic majority, civic nation with Jewish character, ethnonational preference, or religious polity?

The core unresolved duality:

• Zionism is both refuge and sovereignty.
• It is both survival after statelessness and the exercise of state power.
• It is experienced as national liberation by one people and as national catastrophe by another.

Any serious discussion must hold those tensions without collapsing them into slogan or slur.

How ‘Zionist’ became a safe word for hate

Danny Berkovic, Sydney Morning Herald, February 14, 2026

At protests against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia, some demonstrators directed their anger not only at Israel’s policies but at “Zionists” themselves – accusing them of malign influence in the media and government. At other recent rallies, Zionism has been equated to Nazism and terrorism.

A sign juxtaposing Zionism and Nazism is displayed at a pro-Palestinian rally last May in Melbourne. LUIS ENRIQUE ASCUI

Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic who survived Nazi Germany, warned that words can act like tiny doses of arsenic – swallowed unnoticed, accumulating slowly, until their poison takes hold. His insight was not about shouted slogans, but about respectable language that can normalise contempt. “Zionist” has entered this territory over the past two years.

In the wake of the Bondi attack, I was involved in a public campaign for a federal royal commission into antisemitism. My role prompted a message from someone I have known for more than 20 years. Had I been paid by Israel for my advocacy, he asked. It was an offensive question. The answer was no.

What followed was more revealing. “Zionists have always been morally bankrupt with a superiority complex,” he told me.

I asked him two simple questions. Did he believe the state of Israel should continue to exist? Yes. Did he believe it should exist as a Jewish state, provided Jews, Christians, Muslims and others were given equal rights? Yes.

By the standard definition, he qualified as a Zionist. He either did not understand the term – or he was deliberately repurposing it.

People hold signs at a vigil outside the Australian consulate in New York City after the Bondi massacre.GETTY IMAGES

That exchange mattered not because it was especially aggressive, but because it was ordinary. It was delivered calmly, with moral certainty, and without any sense of contradiction. It revealed something that has become increasingly common: the use of the word “Zionist” not to describe a belief, but to impugn a target.

Zionism, properly understood, is not complicated. It is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. In practical terms, it is the idea that Israel should exist as a Jewish state. In Australia, Zionism has long been openly supported by mainstream leaders from across the political spectrum as a legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination.

Zionism does not dictate borders. It does not prescribe military policy. It does not require allegiance to any government, leader or political party. It does not exclude any race or religion from Israeli citizenship. It does not preclude criticism of Israel and nor does it demand support for all actions taken by the Israeli state. Expansionism is not intrinsic to it, and nor does it require opposition to a two-state solution. To be clear, criticism of Israel that is similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

Like any national movement, Zionism contains a wide spectrum of political views. Many Zionists oppose Israel’s current government. Many Israelis have protested against it for years. Some of the fiercest critics of Israeli policy are Israeli citizens, who nonetheless consider themselves proudly Zionist.

This clarity matters because once a word’s meaning is hijacked, it becomes available for misuse – or abuse.

In recent years, “Zionist” has increasingly been deployed as an insult. The term Zionist is no longer used to identify an idea, but it is spat to assign blame. “Zionists” are held responsible for a wide range of evils, often without definition or limitation. In many instances, “Zionist” is used synonymously with “Jew”, while maintaining just enough ambiguity to deny that Jews are being targeted at all. So why does this substitution occur?

Because openly targeting Jews is no longer socially acceptable. “Zionist” becomes the workaround – broad enough to encompass most Jews, yet elastic enough to provide moral cover. It allows hostility to be expressed while preserving plausible deniability.

We are repeatedly told that hostility toward “Zionists” is merely political critique. But if that were true, the criticism would be of policy. Instead, “Zionists” are accused of supremacy, immorality, or inherent evil. That is not political criticism. It is collective character assassination.

This matters because Zionism is not an abstract ideology for most Jews. It is bound up with history, vulnerability and survival. For many Jews – including those deeply critical of Israel – Zionism represents the belief that Jews should not again be stateless, dependent on the goodwill of others for protection. To insist that “anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Jews” while knowing that the overwhelming majority of Jews identify in some way with Zionism is disingenuous.

At best, it ignores how the word is actually used. At worst, the ambiguity is used intentionally as cover. This is why the definitional battle matters. Hijacking the meaning of Zionism allows hatred to masquerade as politics. The federal royal commission into antisemitism must grapple with these subtleties if it is to understand Jew hatred in Australia.

Existing legal frameworks are poorly equipped to deal with language that is technically deniable yet socially corrosive. They miss the cumulative effect of rhetoric that repeatedly singles out a group under a different name.

If the commission is to be meaningful, it must confront this linguistic sleight of hand directly. It must be willing to ask whether “Zionist” has become a socially acceptable stand-in for “Jew” – a way to legitimise hostility while denying responsibility for its impact. Because when words are repurposed to disguise prejudice, history suggests the damage rarely stops with words.

Danny Berkovic is a Sydney businessman and an organiser of the bondiresponse.com petition, which pushed the Albanese government to announce a royal commission into antisemitism.

Rojava revisited. Can Syria break its sectarian cycle?

February 12, 2026February 12, 2026Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

In January 2019, In That Howling Infinite published, Rojava and the Kurdish conundrum. The post wrote of Rojava as both experiment and predicament – a small, improbable polity suspended between larger, harder powers, “trapped between the Turkish hammer and the Syrian anvil.” Aris Roussinos, whose work we have reviewed before, now returns to the same terrain with the sombre clarity of hindsight. His recent essay on the collapse of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria reads less like contradiction than culmination. What was foreboding then is aftermath now.

Back in 2019, the drama was framed in the key of Trumpian bombast – promises to “totally destroy and obliterate” Turkey’s economy if Ankara stepped out of line — but the underlying reality was austere. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had borne the brunt of the fight against ISIS, lost thousands of men and women, guarded tens of thousands of jihadist detainees, and constructed, under the thin canopy of American airpower, a fragile, decentralised experiment in multi-ethnic governance. Remove the canopy and the weather would change. The Kurds knew it. So did Ankara, Damascus, Moscow and Tehran.

Roussinos describes that experiment – the AANES – as an attempt to defy the “grim logic” of civil war in divided societies: that conflict eventually collapses into sectarian arithmetic. Ideologically, it was a pivot away from classic PKK ethnonationalism toward Abdullah Öcalan’s “democratic confederalism”: devolved authority, gender parity, communal councils, a deliberate blurring of ethnic hierarchy. In a region shaped by the memory of genocide, forced migration, Baathist Arabisation and mutual suspicion, it was both necessity and idealism. The geography of the Jazira – oil-rich, landlocked, demographically mixed – demanded accommodation if it was to function at all.

Yet even in 2019 the limits were visible. Rojava was romanticised abroad – “an anarchist-lite Paris Commune,” as we noted, perhaps half ironically half-ironised then – but on the ground it was strategically exposed and socially fissured. Arabs and Turkmen did not uniformly welcome Kurdish administration. Kurdish politics itself was riven by clan and party rivalries. Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran all loathed the prospect of a sovereign Kurdistan. The experiment depended not merely on theory but on patronage.

That patronage proved fickle. The likely endgame sketched seven years ago was stark: the Kurds would fight if forced, but ultimately they would deal with Damascus to save their towns and families. Russia would mediate; Turkey would demand a border free of the YPG; Assad would insist on reintegration, autonomy trimmed to vassalage. The analogy to the Paris Commune was offered with unease – bold communal experiments have a habit of ending in blood and absorption.

Roussinos now writes from beyond that threshold. The new Damascus government – jihadist-derived yet internationally tolerated – has reasserted control. The much-vaunted multi-ethnic Syrian Democratic Forces, proudly described as majority Arab, fractured under pressure. Arab components drifted back toward their ethnic kin in Damascus. What remained was recognisably Kurdish: the YPG under another name. Integration proceeded not as confederal partnership but as coerced subsumption.

Pro–Damascus media have seized on the SDF’s recruitment of women, alleging coercion and forced enlistment of minors. While underage recruitment has been documented in past years and prompted formal pledges to demobilise minors -with uneven implementation – broader claims of systematic kidnapping lack clear substantiation and coexist with extensive evidence of voluntary female participation grounded in the movement’s gender-egalitarian ethos. Such allegations serve a wider political purpose: portraying the Kurdish administration as socially aberrant and incompatible with a re-centralised Syrian state, framing critique of specific practices as part of its broader delegitimisation. In Roussinos’ terms, this is another instrument of Syria’s recurring cycle: peripheral autonomy is undermined not only by coercion on the battlefield but also by shaping perception, marking alternative governance as morally and politically untenable.

His larger point is less about Kurdish miscalculation than Syrian structure. Since independence, Syria has oscillated between peripheral revolt and centralised coercion. Its demographic entanglement – Sunni Arab majorities, Alawite and Druze minorities, Kurds without a state, ancient Christian communities – renders majoritarian triumph unstable and decentralisation fragile. The AANES sought to transcend that arithmetic; it ultimately succumbed to it. Meanwhile, sectarian reprisals against Alawites and Druze in western Syria deepen minority distrust of Damascus, reinforcing the very cycle the new regime claims to end.

The pattern is not uniquely Syrian. Lebanon’s confessional balancing act has veered between uneasy accommodation and paralysis; Iraq’s post-2003 settlement oscillates between sectarian mobilisation and fragile cross-sectarian moments; the Balkans, from Bosnia to Kosovo, demonstrate how externally brokered pluralism can freeze conflict without dissolving its underlying fears. In each case, demography and memory shape politics as much as constitutions do. Power-sharing without trust calcifies; centralisation without restraint provokes resistance. The pendulum swings.

What is striking is the dialectical twist. The Kurdish movement in Syria attempted to move beyond ethnonationalism toward a post-national confederalism. Its collapse may instead accelerate a harder pan-Kurdish nationalism – the revival of the Ala Rengin flag, the renewed invocation of Rojava as West Kurdistan, the rhetoric of betrayed nationhood. When pluralist experiment yields vulnerability, ethnic consolidation gains appeal. The effort to dissolve identity politics may intensify it.

Can Syria break its sectarian cycle? Roussinos leaves the question open, but the burden is heavy. It would require disciplined control over disparate armed factions, credible guarantees to minorities, and a majority willing to exercise restraint rather than vengeance – feats rarer than battlefield victories. The Kurdish experiment failed not simply because it was naïve, but because it unfolded within a regional system that punishes fragility and rewards coercion.

In 2019, the mood was, borrowing from King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly.” In 2026, the darkness feels less theatrical, more structural. The Kurds remain what they have long been: resilient, battle-hardened, accustomed to betrayal. Their attempt to sketch another way -neither Baathist despotism nor jihadist dominion – has been curtailed. Yet the problem it sought to solve endures, not only in Syria but in every state where demography, memory and power are tightly braided. The lesson, as Roussinos insists, reaches well beyond the plains of the Jazira.

Paul hemphill, February 2026, with assistance in drafting by ChatGPT

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

Can Syria break its sectarian cycle?The Kurdish experiment was doomed

Aris Roussinos, Unherd 10 February 2026

Can Syria break its sectarian cycle?

‘The remorseless logic of a country, like neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq, held hostage by its own tangled demographics.’ (Delil Souleiman / AFP / Getty Imges)

It is generally expected that, whatever the ostensible cause of a civil war, in a country divided on ethnic and religious lines the fighting will sooner or later assume an interethnic or sectarian flavour. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), now having surrendered its autonomy under assault from the Syrian state’s new jihadist-derived government, was, whatever else it may have been, an attempt to rebut this grim logic. Indeed, the dusty and unprepossessing plains of the Syrian Jazira — the northeastern portion of the country, east of the Euphrates — served for more than a decade as an unlikely political experiment in the management and diffusion of ethnic conflict.

Whether noble or naive, this project now looks doomed as AANES’s great power backers turn their fickle attentions to Damascus, and the Damascus government has in turn successfully reasserted its control through military coercion. Within a matter of days, as its Sunni Arab levies turned their affections to their ethnic kin in Damascus and their guns on their former allies, Northeast Syria switched from a bold experiment in multi-ethnic governance to a desperate, rearguard battle for Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. The war, at its presumed end, reverted to the dynamics of its earliest days, when Ahmed al-Sharaa, then leader of the Syrian al-Qaeda faction Jabhat al-Nusra, had attempted, along with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and tribes of changeable loyalties, to seize control of the oil-rich, and newly Kurdish-run region, Syria’s breadbasket.

Simultaneously rich in resources yet neglected by its central government, and host to the country’s richest mix of ethnic and religious minorities, alternately the tools and the victims of the central state, the Syrian Jazira had always run according to its own dynamics. Both colonial French and independent Syrian administrations in distant, Levantine Damascus expended significant, if sporadic, effort in absorbing this neglected region of Mesopotamia within the modern state system, privileging one ethnic group against another for reasons of statecraft, and building model towns and vast dams, as evocative in their current dilapidation of failed modernities as the ancient tells dotting the landscape, now repurposed as gun emplacements, are of earlier lost civilisations.

Perhaps the AANES experiment can now be added to this melancholy list. Birthed from the fusion of Kurdish nationalism and Marxist-Leninist thought that initially drove the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) independence movement, the AANES, a project of the PKK’s Syrian sister organisation, the Democratic Union Party ‎(PYD), performed an attempted shift to anarchist political theory. The thought of the American writer Murray Bookchin, as reworked by the PKK’s occluded godhead figure Abdullah Öcalan from his Turkish jail cell, was its most notable innovation. Echoing Öcalan’s rejection of the PKK’s previous project of independence for the Kurdish nation, the AANES presented itself as an explicitly multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian state in which the greatest possible autonomy was devolved to religious and ethnic communities, beneath the benign framework of Jazira’s de facto autonomy from Damascus. In practice, the quasi-anarchist devolution of power resulted in the proliferation of bureaucratic structures. Local empowerment, similarly, meant the elevation of new elites loyal to the project, and the freezing out of dissidents, particularly rival Kurdish factions. Imperfect though it may have been, compared to the overt totalitarianism of the Baathist state, the anarchic infighting of the FSA rebels, and the gothic cruelties of ISIS, history is likely to remember it more favourably than today’s discourse would suggest.

“Perhaps the AANES experiment can now be added to this melancholy list.”

Barely populated until the French Mandate period, except during the annual circulation of nomadic Bedouin shepherds, the portion of Syria east of the Euphrates underwent during the early 20th century a transformative period of internal and external immigration and development analogous, in a modest way, to that of California or Australia. Ethnic Kurds fleeing the collapse of proto-nationalist rebellions in Ataturk’s Turkey, along with Syriac Christians fleeing the Seifo genocide and many uprooted Armenians streamed south across the culverts and rusting tracks of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway line, which still marks the modern border, joining their ethnic kin residing there from the beginning of recorded history. Ethnic Assyrians from British-Mandate northern Iraq similarly sought French protection from the predation of the Iraqi state and its Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen auxiliaries, establishing a string of fiercely Christian villages along the Khabur river. Northeast Syria was shaped by the cultural memory of ethnic conflict; its past decade of governance was an attempt to evade the return of its attendant cruelties.

As such, the AANES project was always as much one of necessity as Leftist idealism. The Kurdish regions of northern Syria, stretching West of the Euphrates into Aleppo, were separated from each other by clusters of Arab and Turkmen towns and villages, in large part the result of the Baathist state’s settlement of Arabs from Syria’s desert hinterland to hinder any Kurdish attempts at secession. While the early successes of the Syrian Kurds under the PYD, following a negotiated handover of control by Assad’s overstretched government, resulted in what was essentially the occupation by its YPG military forces of Arab settlements, loyal to one or other rebel or jihadist faction, America’s decisive intervention in the war against ISIS resulted in both sudden and unexpected great power backing for Northeast Syria and an evolution of Kurdish political attitudes towards local Arabs.

Partly at America’s behest, in a failed attempt to assuage the Syrian rebels’ combative Western think-tank diaspora, and partly a genuine attempt to impose progressive governance among a population Kurds frequently portray as stunted by its own reactionary obscurantism and crude ethnic chauvinism, Northeast Syria’s autonomous quasi-government undertook a project of delegating political and military authority to Arab regions won back from ISIS. It was an ambitious goal which seemed, for a decade, to have won majority acquiescence, if not affection. It became the boast of the regional administration that its armed forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was now predominantly composed of Arabs, a feat of enlightened governance that rapidly proved hollow, over the past two weeks, when the majority of these Arab fighters effortlessly switched sides. Having lost almost all its Arab accretions, the SDF was once again, in practice, the Kurdish YPG, an ethnic militia fighting for purely Kurdish goals. Now that, under the threat of military defeat, a shrunken version of these forces will be subsumed under the Damascus government’s control, their future role — on paper, and in reality — remains to be seen.

The integration terms finally accepted, at gunpoint, by the autonomous administration last weekend, though better than those of a fortnight ago are worse than those of the unimplemented March agreement. Consequently, much has been made in recent days of the AANES’s failures to come to terms with al-Sharaa’s shock capture of the Syrian state just over a year ago, and negotiate a settlement with the new reality. Certainly, the region’s political focus had, since the seeming cornering of the Sunni Arab rebellion into its Idlib Bantustan, centred on negotiating re-integration into Assad’s Baathist state in a manner that preserved some means of political and military autonomy. Yet Assad, over-confident of his own position as victor of the long and bloody war, refused to offer more than integration into the central state on terms that amounted to surrender. The new regime in Damascus now offers little different: what has changed is its greater power of coercion, and international backing, compared to its previous Baathist iteration.

Putin, once an occasional, tacit partner of the Kurds west of the Euphrates, has fully backed the new Damascus government, another instance where Russia, once America’s rival in Syria, shares increasingly aligned interests with the Trump White House. Calls for the protection of Kurdish cultural rights and social norms by European states are outweighed by their overriding political interest in the accelerated removal of their more than one million mostly Sunni Arab refugees. Regionally, the success or otherwise of the Northeast’s reintegration will determine Israel’s ability to justify its military protection of Druze autonomists in the southern province of Sweida. Relations with mostly Shia Iraq, which has its own reasons to look askance at Sunni jihadist governance and is currently making a show of reinforcing its border with Syria, will be fraught at best. Given the sheer improbability of fate’s wheel suddenly projecting al-Sharaa into Assad’s Damascus palace, it would be foolhardy to offer any firm predictions, rather than vague anxieties, for the country’s future.

For the Kurds themselves, the experiment in enlightened multi-ethnic governance proved, at the crucial moment, a dramatic and costly Achilles heel. The result, over time, will likely be the weakening of PKK ideology in favour of some form of pan-Kurdish ethnic nationalism, whose early stirrings are apparent in the flow of volunteers from northern Iraq to defend their ethnic kin, the sudden revival of the Kurdish flag, Ala Rengin, in Northeast Syria, and in the readoption of the ethnic term Rojava, or West Kurdistan, in place of its previously bland geographic descriptor. When even Abdullah Öcalan’s nephew Ömer, an MP in Turkey’s parliament for the movement-aligned DEM party, feels compelled to proclaim “Long live the Kurds and Kurdistan”, and “the Kurdish nation will not forgive the enmity committed against it”, we sense the tectonic plates of Kurdish politics shifting away from Leftist post-national idealism towards an embryonic ethnic nationalism. The decade-long experience of Kurdish self-governance, military success and international diplomacy will shape whatever follows the likely collapse of the AANES statelet, whether what replaces it will coalesce in the mountainous redoubts of eastern Turkey, Western Iran and northern Iraq, or in the grey cities of the European diaspora. So, too, will bitter analysis of the project’s failings.

Yet it would be unfair for harsh self-criticism to so soon follow hindsight. For all its faults, the Kurdish project of autonomy from the Syrian central state evolved, through managing the dynamics of their multi-ethnic region, into one that ironically and idealistically attempted to make the very idea of equable Syrian co-existence a political possibility. Inversely, the current Damascus project of re-centralisation has, in western Syria, been accompanied by sectarian massacres and other abuses, which have increased the antipathy of peripheral minority populations towards the central state. Sunni Arab supporters of the al-Sharaa government, whose decade-long displeasure at having their ethnic kin ruled by minorities is accompanied by certainty of their own natural right to rule those same minorities, have made much of Kurdish intransigence while minimising or even justifying the starkest governance failures of their own new regime. Yet the past year’s massacres of Alawites and Druze, punctuating the failed integration talks with the AANES, only heightened the Kurdish disinclination to disarm and dissolve its forces and place the fates of its people in the benevolence of the central state.

Syria’s post-independence oscillation between peripheral revolts and centralised coercion, the very cycle that produced both Assad and his own overthrow, is simply the remorseless logic of a country, like neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq, held hostage by its own tangled demographics. Whether or not the new Syria can break this cycle is an open question. It will take great feats of governance, and of control over his own disparate armed forces, by al-Sharaa to avoid the logic of Syria’s demographic confusion weakening his own state-building project just as, suddenly and catastrophically, it did for the Kurds. Syria’s ethnic and religious complexity makes it a hard country to rule, historically veering, as a result, between instability and oppression. The Kurdish attempt to find another, progressive path ultimately failed, for the same reasons. The lessons, it ought not to need underlining, reach far beyond Syria’s borders.

Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

The quality of mercy … looking beyond Iran’s ghost republic

January 9, 2026January 9, 2026Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Whilst most media commentary focuses on questions like “will it be any different this time?”, “will outside incitement or intervention actually work?” , and “who can or will replace the current regime?”, this article by Unherd’s Us editor Sohrab Ahmari, and the comments thereon go variously beyond, behind, or beneath, to consider the potential, if any, for those famous “bright sunny uplands” that Churchill foresaw at the end of mortal strife. A précis follows, and also, a discussion of past, recent and contemporary efforts to realise the quality of mercy.

Beyond Iran’s Ghost Republic

What persists, for now, is a ghost regime: a sad remnant of the last of the great modern revolutions that, like some apparition in a haunted house, is condemned to remain at the scene of its own demise …The Islamic Republic clamoured so much for death, sweet and glorious death, it lost sight of the basics of life: bread, water, electricity. Ghosts don’t need such things, but people do
Sohrab Ahmari, Unherd, 8 January 2026

Most media attention on Iran’s latest unrest fixes on the usual coordinates: will this time be any different from 1999, 2009, 2017, or 2022? Will foreign powers, quietly nudging or overtly intervening, succeed where the street protests have failed? And, inevitably, who might step into the vacuum should the current regime falter? These questions, while immediate and superficially urgent, only scratch the surface. Beneath them lies a far subtler and, perhaps, more consequential inquiry: what kind of life, if any, might the Iranian people permit themselves once the machinery of coercion is loosened? Where, if anywhere, are the “bright sunny uplands” that journalists, analysts, and policymakers treat as both metaphorical and material destinations?

The Islamic Republic has already, in practical terms, collapsed into a ghost. Its proxies lie defanged, its currency teeters toward ruin, and the strictures of ideological policing have been quietly suspended in many cities. It clings to slogans, chants, and ceremonial gestures – Death to Israel! Death to the Great Satan! – long after the infrastructure, credibility, and political capital to back them have evaporated. Ghosts do not need electricity, or potable water, or functioning hospitals, but living people do. And the contrast between the familiar deprivation of Tehran and the gleaming towers, highways, and shopping malls of Istanbul, Dubai, and Riyadh is almost unbearable: the regime sold transcendence and martyrdom, but delivered only rationed life, graft, and perpetual economic anxiety.

Yet a collapse of the state apparatus does not automatically produce moral renewal. This is where both the film It Was Just an Accident and the commentary converge. The plot of Jafar Panahi’s latest work stages a moral test familiar to anyone who has witnessed, read, or lived through the aftermath of institutionalized terror: a man who suffered under the regime confronts a former torturer. The temptation to exact revenge – to allow history’s pain to be paid back in equal or greater measure – is immediate and compelling. Some characters urge restraint, others insist that justice without retribution is an idle abstraction. The film’s tension mirrors a larger societal question: can a people accustomed to cycles of repression, humiliation, and ideological fervour imagine a life beyond revenge, beyond the simple arithmetic of punishment and vengeance?

The comments on Ahmari’s article highlight the same moral and civic dimensions. Several voices underscore a paradox that no headline can capture: the Islamic Republic’s obsession with death and martyrdom was not merely symbolic; it was infrastructurally catastrophic. Water systems were ignored, electricity grids left to decay, the economy warped around fantasies of resistance and martyrdom. Yet, this same absolutist, apocalyptic impulse is not unique to Iran. As some observers wryly note, the West is not immune to ideologies that glorify moral purity and abstract heroism at the expense of lived reality. Certainty, as one commentator put it, often replaces curiosity; neat explanations flatter intelligence and virtue, while obscuring the messy work of sustaining life.

History offers uncomfortably blunt lessons. After the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia did not attempt exhaustive justice; it largely absorbed foot soldiers back into ordinary life, relying on a rough amnesty and the communal refusal of vengeance. This might be Iran’s imagined future: to survive and flourish, ordinary citizens may need to exercise a similarly imperfect, sometimes clumsy, forgiveness. And yet the impulse to retribution is alive and articulate: Hamid in Panahi’s film embodies the argument that the fanatics who ran the Islamic Republic had no regard for life, and must be repaid in like coin.

Here, we converge on a truth both grim and hopeful: Iran’s fate will not be determined by foreign powers, strikes, or special forces. The country’s reckoning cannot be outsourced. The only way to allow the blood to run dry, to create the possibility – however tenuous – of “bright sunny uplands,” is through an internal moral negotiation: a willingness to forgive, to rebuild, to live with one another despite the weight of memory and injustice. Forgiveness, in this context, is not an ideal; it is a strategic, civic, and existential necessity. Anything else risks a continuation of cycles that have already brought the country to the nadir described in headlines, film, and commentary alike.

The wider reflection, then, is less about predicting the regime’s fall than understanding the texture of human life that might emerge afterward. If Iranian society cannot cultivate mechanisms for restraint, empathy, and imperfect justice, then the collapse of the ghostly structures of the Islamic Republic will be little more than a ceremonial end to one cycle of totalising politics – ready to be replaced by another. Yet, if these “bright sunny uplands” are glimpsed, they will be the product not of weapons, tweets, or sanctions, but of courage, patience, and the audacious, often maddeningly slow, work of ordinary humans learning to forgive. In that possibility – fragile, improbable, and entirely human – lies the truer story of Iran, past, present, and perhaps future.

Forgiveness and the Possibility of Civic Renewal

Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering – remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened.
Attributed to South African Bishop Desmond Tutu

When societies emerge from cycles of repression, violence, and ideological zeal, the first question is often: who will exact justice? Who will punish, and who will pay? Yet history and moral reflection suggest that the question of revenge is only the beginning. More crucial is the question of forgiveness: whether communities traumatized by systemic harm can find a way to release the past, preserve dignity, and allow life to take root. Iran, in the aftermath of decades of ideological extremism, structural neglect, and repeated cycles of protest and repression, faces precisely this moral crossroads.

Desmond Tutu, whose work with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission helped a nation emerge from the moral abyss of apartheid, offers a clarifying lens. He reminds us that forgiveness is not weakness, nor a cover-up, nor the erasure of injustice. “To forgive is not just to be altruistic; it is the best form of self-interest,” he said. “If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator.” Forgiveness, in this sense, liberates the victim as much as it addresses the harm done. It is a deliberate, often risky act that preserves dignity, confronts wrongdoing honestly, and opens space for a new civic beginning. True reconciliation, Tutu insists, does not soften the truth: “Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth.” Forgiving does not mean forgetting; it is remembering without exercising the right to strike back, allowing life to continue without being perpetually tethered to past harm.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu 1931-21

The necessity of forgiveness becomes clearer when we look beyond Iran to societies that have struggled with similar dilemmas. South Africa’s post-apartheid transition, Northern Ireland’s gradual peace after the Troubles, and the painstaking reconciliation efforts in postwar Bosnia demonstrate that societies can arrest cycles of revenge when moral courage is coupled with institutional frameworks. Mechanisms such as truth commissions, negotiated agreements, or cultural rituals allow communities to confront trauma without succumbing to vengeance.

In South Africa, perpetrators were not erased from memory, but acknowledging harm, offering testimony, and sometimes asking for forgiveness created a space in which ordinary life could resume without blood-soaked reprisals. In Northern Ireland, decades of sectarian violence required not only formal accords like the Good Friday Agreement but persistent civic labor, everyday compromises, and the cultivation of mutual recognition across communities. Peace did not arrive because conflict ended; it arrived because people, institutions, and leaders collectively committed to the moral and civic work of restraint, remembrance, and imperfect forgiveness. Bosnia, by contrast, demonstrates how fragile such processes can be: tribunals, localized reconciliation projects, and political compromises made progress possible, but resentment and mistrust lingered for decades.

The lesson is that the labor of forgiveness is painstaking, morally taxing, and never complete; it requires social frameworks, cultural patience, and individual courage.

Other contemporary crises provide a darker counterpoint. Syria, ravaged by civil war, sectarian fragmentation, and foreign intervention, shows how cycles of violence can ossify when forgiveness is absent and survival becomes the primary moral calculus. Gaza and the Palestinian territories, trapped in occupation, blockade, and repeated military incursions, reveal how structural oppression perpetuates the need for revenge, making reconciliation seem both urgent and impossible. Myanmar and Sudan illustrate what happens when accountability fails entirely: persecution, displacement, and entrenched cycles of terror prevent civic life from taking root, leaving ordinary people imprisoned by histories they cannot escape.

In the Iranian context, the challenge is both urgent and intimate. A society habituated to ideological terror and systemic neglect faces a moral crossroads: the temptation of revenge is immediate, visceral, and understandable, but it risks reproducing the very cycles of harm that have brought the country to its present nadir. Panahi’s film It Was Just an Accident dramatizes this dilemma: victims confront their former torturer and wrestle with the question of retribution versus restraint. It is a moral negotiation that mirrors the broader societal question. True recovery cannot be imposed from the outside; no foreign military, sanctions regime, or spectacular intervention can replace the painstaking, often agonizing internal work that forgiveness demands.

Tutu’s reflections provide a moral compass for this work. Forgiveness is neither altruistic fantasy nor moral softening; it is self-liberating, dignity-affirming, and socially generative. “When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.” For Iran, the stakes of this insight are enormous. The collapse of the regime, already a ghost of its former ideological self, creates the space for moral and civic imagination, but it is up to the Iranian people whether that space becomes a playground for revenge or a canvas for rebuilding.

Viewed comparatively, Iran’s predicament is neither unique nor exceptional. Across South Africa, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Syria, Gaza, Myanmar, and Sudan, we see the same pattern: cycles of violence thrive when forgiveness is absent and collapse is coupled with fear, trauma, and structural weakness. Yet the examples of South Africa and Northern Ireland also offer hope. Even societies deeply scarred by ideology and systemic harm can, through deliberate moral labor, cultivate restraint, empathy, and civic imagination. The “bright sunny uplands” are not gifts of fortune or foreign intervention; they are the product of human choice, moral courage, and the willingness – however faltering and tentative – to forgive, remember, and begin again.

For Iran, the possibility of civic renewal rests on this moral labor. To forgive is to free oneself from the chains of the past, to preserve human dignity, and to allow ordinary life – bread, water, work, community – to flourish once more. It is difficult, risky, and imperfect work, but it is the only path to a society that can move beyond the cycles of ideological terror, revenge, and ruin. In choosing forgiveness, Iranians do not erase the horrors of the past; they confront them honestly, remember them fully, and, in so doing, claim a future that is no longer dictated by blood, fear, or vengeance.

For more on the Middle East in In That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany, Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? and “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom

The cycle of revenge. Iranians must learn to forgive

A still from the film ‘It was Just an Accident,’ directed by Jafar Panahi. mk2 Films

Sohrab Ahmari, Unherd, 8 January 2026

It’s become a running joke on Iranian social media — screen captures of Western headlines regarding previous popular uprisings in the country that read: “This isn’t like previous protests in Iran.” The message is that this latest tumult spells the end of the Islamic Republic. Except those earlier headlines appeared in 1999, 2009, 2017, 2022. The storms of popular discontent raged and then dissipated, but the regime didn’t budge.

We are told that the current uprising, sparked initially by anger over inflation, is different. But contrary to expectations, we’re unlikely to see a spectacular end to the regime in the manner of the ouster of Ceaușescu or the fall of the Berlin Wall — the 1989 moment whose eternal return liberals the world over yearn for. No, there won’t be a spectacular collapse, because the Islamic Republic of Iran has, in a sense, already fallen.

Its Arab proxies are defanged. Its nuclear program is partially buried under President Trump’s bunker busters. Its currency is reaching Zimbabwean levels. And it has largely given up enforcing its hijab and other Shiite morality norms in many urban centers. A much more likely ending is one in which more nationalist elements within the current regime take over, with or without a little push by outside powers.

What persists, for now, is a ghost regime: a sad remnant of the last of the great modern revolutions that, like some apparition in a haunted house, is condemned to remain at the scene of its own demise, faintly repeating the slogans of its former vitality, wondering if anyone still cares. Death to Israel! Death to the enemies of the jurisconsult! Death to the Great Satan!

The Islamic Republic clamored so much for death, sweet and glorious death, it lost sight of the basics of life: bread, water, electricity. . . . Ghosts don’t need such things, but people do. Especially people who look around at the likes of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and behold gleaming prosperity, rising living standards, normality. Their own lot, meanwhile, is defined by diminished expectations, massive graft, and life and treasure wasted on building an arc of “resistance” against the Jewish state that was destroyed in a matter of months.

Against this haunted backdrop, it’s up to the Iranian people to decide, now, how they want to live together, and with their region and the world. Will they forgive each other? Or repeat the cycle of totalizing politics, repression, and revenge that brought them to their current nadir in the first place? As it happens, Iran’s greatest living director, Jafar Panahi, addresses these questions in his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, which hit the screen in major cities just as the latest unrest began.

A taut thriller in the style of Jean-Pierre Melville, the film tells the story of Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri in a quietly stunning performance), a worker who happens upon, and kidnaps, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), the intelligence officer who’d tortured him when Vahid joined a labor strike over unpaid wages.

Vahid is about to bury Eghbal in the middle of the desert when he’s gripped by doubt. The real Eghbal had lost a leg fighting in the Syrian Civil War. But the man in the shallow grave insists that his prosthetic leg — whose squeaking sound led Vahid to believe he’d found his erstwhile torturer — is a recent addition. What if he’s got the wrong man? What if he’s about to murder an innocent? This simple doubt becomes the driving force of the film’s plot.

Vahid reunites with a fellow prisoner — Salar, a dissident intellectual — who urges him to free Eghbal, or whoever he is. “This business doesn’t have an ending,” Salar warns Vahid. This could mean that Vahid could face real-world consequences. But it also suggests that the blood in Iran will never run dry if people continually seek revenge. Vahid isn’t convinced. He’s lost everything to the regime Eghbal represents, and he’s bent on making him pay.

Salar refuses to help directly, but he introduces Vahid to a photographer, Shiva, who was also imprisoned for her political activities and tortured by Eghbal. Other former prisoners soon join the group. One of them, Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), instantly identifies the man in Vahid’s van as their torturer (by his smell) and thrills at the thought of inflicting suffering and death upon Eghbal.

Others are more hesitant, partly out of the same doubt that initially stays Vahid’s hand, but partly over deeper qualms: Will torturing and murdering a killer improve anything? No, Shiva and others begin to think. But Hamid is adamant, and it’s notable that while the rest of them are professional-class types who’ve landed on their feet, he’s been less fortunate (and, the film suggests, he was something of a loser even before his prison stint).

Thus unfolds the unlikely moral and philosophical debate folded into the film’s thriller script — a debate that confronts many ordinary Iranians opposed to the Islamic regime. Panahi, to his credit, gives Hamid a decent chance to make his case: to wit, the fanatics who run the Islamic Republic have no regard for the lives they ruin, and anything short of a willingness to act politically — in the Schmittian, friend-enemy sense of the term — is just playing around.

But in the end, the other side “wins” the debate. The kidnapped man’s phone rings. It’s his daughter, crying for her father to come home because her pregnant mother is unresponsive. The gang treks over to his house and drives mother and child to the hospital, where the baby is safely delivered. The group even pools cash to tip the nurses, as custom demands.

Only afterward is it revealed that — spoiler alert — the man in the van really is the torturer who’d subjected them to dozens of mock executions; who’d beaten Vahid so badly, he’s developed kidney problems; who threatened to rape the women before killing them (since, under Shariah law, virgins go straight to paradise).

I won’t spoil more of the plot. What matters is that the Hamid temptation — let us torture the former torturers, execute the executioners — is all too real, and it can derail whatever comes next into another national dead-end. No foreign intervention and no Trumpian Delta Force can save Iran from that outcome. It is up to Iranians themselves to forgive each other, and finally permit the blood to run dry.

Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About I

Trump, Venezuela, and the Dog that caught the car

January 3, 2026January 4, 2026Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Seems like I been down this way before
Is there any truth in that, señor?
Bob Dylan, Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)

In That Howling Infinite’s recent interest in Venezuela is less about Venezuela itself than about a familiar American habit resurfacing in a new theatre. We have seen this pattern before – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya – each intervention launched with confident rhetoric, elastic legal reasoning, and the quietly held belief that regimes, once struck, will obligingly collapse into something better. The names change; the logic does not. Venezuela now feels like the latest rehearsal space for a drama that has not yet finished running elsewhere.

This is where the US’ old Monroe Doctrine returns, not as doctrine so much as reflex. A Monroe Redux: stripped of 19th-century solemnity, repurposed for a world of drones, covert action, and press-conference deterrence. The Western Hemisphere is once again imagined as a special moral jurisdiction, even as the Middle East – long the cockpit of American intervention – appears exhausted, over-militarized, and politically unrewarding. Latin America, by contrast, offers proximity, asymmetry, and deniability. The geography has changed; the instincts have not.

This preoccupation also intersects with a longstanding fascination with the lessons of historian Barbara Tuchman’s acclaimed The March of Folly. Tuchman’s insight was not that governments lack information, but that they persist in policies demonstrably failing by their own stated objectives. Vietnam, later memorably described as “chaos without a compass,” remains the archetype: motion mistaken for strategy, escalation substituting for purpose. Iraq was folly recast as liberation; Afghanistan, folly prolonged as nation-building; Libya, folly laundered through humanitarian language. Iran hovers perpetually as folly-in-waiting, the regime-change itch that never quite gets scratched, yet never entirely disappears.

Viewed through this lens, Venezuela appears less as an isolated crisis than as a familiar historical rhyme. A little bombing here, a little bluster there; symbolic strikes presented as prudence, restraint marketed as strategy. It is not yet tragedy—history rarely announces itself so obligingly – but it carries the unmistakable scent of policies drifting, of a compass quietly returned to the drawer.

Tuchman’s opus is often misread as a study of stupidity. It is nothing of the sort. She was writing about persistence – about the peculiar ability of governments to continue down a path long after its internal logic has collapsed, armed with information but imprisoned by momentum. Vietnam was not born of ignorance but of escalation mistaken for purpose. Reading the accounts of Trump’s Venezuelan operation – no longer merely a “dock strike” but a full-blooded decapitation raid – one hears that same low, familiar hum: motion without destination, force without horizon.

A leap in the dark

Everyone knew something like this was coming. Few expected it to be so clean. A president seized, command structures stunned, Caracas rattled just enough to demonstrate omnipotence without visibly levelling the city. From a tactical standpoint, it was impressive – the sort of operation that flatters planners and tempts presidents into believing that history, this time, might behave itself. But history rarely does. Leadership can be removed; regimes, less so. Chavismo survived Chávez’s death and Maduro’s long decay. Movements, unlike men, do not collapse neatly when the head is severed. They mutate. They harden. They endure.

This is where the metaphor shifts and darkens. The United States now looks less like a chess grandmaster and more like the proverbial dog that finally caught the car – triumphant, panting, and unsure what to do next. Decapitation creates ownership. Once you have removed the figurehead, ambiguity evaporates. The question is no longer whether Washington is intervening, but what exactly it intends to build, sustain, or suppress in the vacuum it has helped create.

A week ago, US action might have been interpreted as calibrated escalation: signalling without war, pressure without conquest, violence as message rather than mission. That logic may have held when the strike was offshore, symbolic, plausibly deniable as a prelude rather than a crossing. It is harder to sustain once the president of a sovereign state has been bundled onto a ship and flown north in handcuffs. Symbolism has consequences. At some point, signalling becomes authorship.

The deeper assumption underlying both phases – the demonstrative strike and the decapitation raid – is the same one that has haunted American foreign policy for decades: that limited, spectacular violence produces rational political outcomes. That elites defect under pressure rather than close ranks. That populations blame their rulers rather than the foreign power violating their sovereignty. That humiliation weakens movements rather than mythologising them. This faith survived Iraq, limped through Afghanistan, and still stalks Washington like an unkillable ghost.

What reads in Washington as restraint reads elsewhere as undeclared war. What Beltway strategists describe as “calibrated” looks, from Caracas – or Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, each of whom have form – like arbitrariness dressed up as doctrine. In his most recent foreign policy forays, Trump has fired missiles into Nigeria and sent special forces into Venezuela. He cannot wield enough influence to get his way with major powers, so he targets smaller ones. The White House spins this as a demonstration of American strength, but those who rule in Moscow and Beijing will not be fooled. Nor should anyone else. Whilst ostensibly demonstrating American strength, it also highlights its weakness. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it might be somewhere else entirely. The pattern is not coherence but surprise. Power exercised as theatre.

Trump’s foreign policy has always oscillated between maximalist rhetoric and minimalist follow-through. He threatens fire and fury, then settles for a crater and a press conference. He speaks the language of conquest while practising the art of nuisance. Yet Venezuela marks a subtle shift. This is no longer nuisance alone. By removing Maduro, Trump has crossed from menace into management, whether he wants the responsibility or not. Chaos, once unleashed, has a habit of demanding supervision.

The international reaction follows a script so familiar it almost performs itself. International law is solemnly invoked by states that otherwise treat it as optional décor. Yanqui imperialism is dusted off and waved aloft. Blood for oil, regime change, darkest chapters, dangerous precedents – all the old tropes re-emerge, not because they are always wrong, but because they are always available. France, China, Russia, the EU condemn the breach while sidestepping the harder question: what is to be done now that a criminalised, hollowed-out regime has been removed not by its people, but by force?

Latin America splits along its habitual fault lines. Argentina’s Milei cheers liberty’s advance. Brazil’s Lula warns, with weary accuracy, that violence justified as justice tends to metastasise into instability. Neighbouring Colombia braces for refugees. Cuba mutters “state terrorism.” The region remembers – perhaps too well – that external interventions rarely end where their authors imagine.

What is most striking, though, is how little this seems to disturb the American political bloodstream. The legal basis for seizing a foreign head of state is treated as a technicality. Congressional war powers hover faintly in the background. The risk of retaliation, miscalculation, or long-term entanglement is acknowledged, then politely ignored. The old muscle memory of American power keeps flexing, long after the strategic rationale has atrophied.

And so Tuchman returns, not as a moralist but as a diagnostician. Folly is not recklessness; it is normalisation. It is the steady acceptance of contradiction as policy. Trump’s Venezuela adventure now embodies this perfectly: escalation without ownership, ownership without vision, action without explanation. Each move can be defended in isolation. Together, they form a strategy that cannot quite say what it is for.

Hovering over all of this – absurdly, yet tellingly – is the mirage of the Nobel Peace Prize so coveted by President Trump. The prize is not awarded for the mere absence of war, but for the construction of peace: treaties, frameworks, institutions that reduce violence rather than rebrand it. Bombing here, abducting there, tearing up agreements while demanding credit for not starting new wars is not peace-making; it is anti-diplomacy. Peace defined negatively, as something that has not yet collapsed.

One imagines the Nobel Committee reading this Venezuelan episode with a raised eyebrow: sovereignty breached as messaging, escalation choreographed like a reality-show arc, regime change gestured at but not owned. Peace prizes are not usually awarded for keeping one’s options open.

In the end, Trump’s Venezuelan jiggery-pokery is fascinating for the same reason Vietnam remains endlessly analysed. It shows how great powers drift — not because they are blind, but because they cannot quite decide what they are looking for. Chaos without a compass is not the absence of movement. It is movement mistaken for purpose. And history, as Tuchman patiently reminds us, is unforgiving toward those who confuse the two.

Wrong way, go back?

Soon after the American militarily impressive operation, The Atlantic published an cautionary opinion piece by staff writer Colin Friedersdorf arguing that Trump has effectively launched a regime-change war against Venezuela without constitutional authority, democratic consent, or a plausible plan for what comes next. The core charge is not primarily strategic incompetence but constitutional betrayal.

He contrasts Trump’s actions with past presidents who, whatever their later failures, at least sought congressional authorisation before waging major wars. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor and George W. Bush before Afghanistan and Iraq are invoked not as moral exemplars but as constitutional ones: they recognised that the power to initiate war belongs to Congress, and that legitimacy flows—however imperfectly—from public consent. Trump, by contrast, has dispensed with permission altogether.

Friedersdorf dismisses the administration’s legal justifications as threadbare. Labeling Maduro a “narcoterrorist” or pointing to a US indictment does not, he argues, amount to lawful grounds for war against a sovereign state. These are prosecutorial claims masquerading as casus belli, not a substitute for authorisation under domestic or international law.

Strategically, the article warns that toppling Maduro would be the easy part. Venezuela is already riddled with armed groups, including Colombian militants who use its territory as a base for smuggling and mining. Removing the regime risks unleashing forces that would not “go quietly,” echoing Iraq and Libya more than any clean counter-narcotics success.

Friedersdorf argues that Trump is uniquely unfitted for a regime-change war for several interlocking reasons, combining personal disposition, governance style, and historical patterns of behaviour. Unlike previous presidents who sought congressional authorisation—Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, George W. Bush before Afghanistan and Iraq – Trump bypassed the Constitution entirely. For Friedersdorf, this is not merely a procedural violation; it signals a reckless disregard for the legal and democratic frameworks that constrain American war-making, a disregard which has tangible consequences when planning complex military operations overseas.

Second, Trump’s track record of self-interest and transactional politics undermines confidence in his strategic judgment. Friedersdorf points to a “lifelong pattern” in which Trump has pursued personal, familial, or financial gain, sometimes at the expense of institutional norms or public welfare. A regime-change war in a resource-rich country like Venezuela, Friedersdorf suggests, is exactly the kind of environment in which such temptations could manifest: the conflation of national interest with personal enrichment. Unlike professional soldiers or presidents with experience in foreign policy and national security, Trump’s incentives are highly idiosyncratic, making the outcomes of a war unpredictable and potentially self-serving.

Third, Friedersdorf questions Trump’s capacity for sustained leadership and operational management in a conflict that, by its nature, requires patience, coordination, and political nuance. Toppling Maduro may be “easy” in the sense of a tactical strike, but the aftermath – stabilising Venezuela, managing humanitarian fallout, and navigating regional politics – requires sustained commitment. Friedersdorf doubts that Trump possesses the temperament, patience, or skill to oversee such a complex and prolonged effort. The concern is that he could declare victory prematurely, mismanage occupation or transition, or escalate in ways that deepen instability rather than resolve it.

Finally, Friedersdorf critiques the political myopia and disregard for public opinion in Trump’s approach. Polls reportedly showed a majority of Americans opposed to military intervention in Venezuela, yet Trump proceeded unilaterally. In Friedersdorf’s assessment, this combination—constitutional bypass, personal opportunism, lack of leadership discipline, and political insensitivity—makes Trump not just ill-prepared, but dangerously mismatched to the responsibilities of a regime-change war, with risks to both American legitimacy and Venezuelan stability.

In short, Friedersdorf sees Trump as uniquely unfit because the personal, constitutional, and strategic factors that would constrain a conventional president are either absent or inverted in him, making a complex foreign intervention unusually perilous. And, even if the intervention were to improve Venezuelans’ lives – a possibility Friedersdorf does not dismiss outright – it would still represent a violation of American democratic norms.

The concluding warning is blunt: by choosing war despite public opposition and without congressional approval, Trump has shown contempt for both the Constitution and the electorate. If Congress does not assert its authority now, Friedersdorf fears this episode will become precedent – another step toward endless wars of choice launched by executive whim, not collective decision.

In short, the article frames Venezuela not merely as a foreign-policy gamble, but as a constitutional crisis in miniature – one that exposes how fragile America’s war-making restraints have become when a president decides they are inconvenient.

What happens now?

Everyone knew something like this was coming; perhaps fewer expected it to be executed with such clinical speed. The pre-dawn abduction of Nicolás Maduro by US forces is less a surprise than a punctuation mark — a moment where long-signalled intent finally hardened into action. A foreign head of state removed in two hours. Mission theatrically accomplished. Endgame conspicuously absent.

It is challenging, but not impossible, for American forces to amass massive military hardware, materiel and personnel offshore, bombard a small neighbour and send special forces into its capital. It is much harder for an American president to control what happens in the aftermath. This explains why global leaders are so cautious about this operation. No major European leaders have endorsed the use of force to bring down the Venezuelan government.

The real test for Trump is what comes next. He has been rightly critical of the US invasion of Iraq, and his MAGA movement favours “America First” rather than “regime change” overseas, but now he pursues a regime change of his own, with only a vague assurance that he and his lieutenants will run Venezuela for an unspecified time. The objective has a strategic element, in trying to slow the flow of drugs into America, but most of it is nakedly commercial. While other presidents might not have said this out loud, Trump is direct: he wants US control of the Venezuelan oil fields, with US oil companies investing and making money, so that oil production will increase.

In an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Hearal on 5th June, Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute think tank and a fellow at Princeton University, usefully lays out five post-Maduro scenarios, though what binds them is not optimism but ambiguity. The first – Trump declares victory and walks away – would be the most American of outcomes: maximum disruption, minimum follow-through. Chavismo, minus its latest avatar, shuffles on; Washington expends enormous leverage only to abandon it; the refugees keep coming. The dog catches the car, looks briefly triumphant, and then isn’t quite sure what to do next.

The second scenario – a popular uprising washing away Chavismo – flatters liberal intuition but ignores institutional rot. Venezuela’s civic muscle has atrophied after years of repression, criminalisation, and mass emigration. Armed colectivos remain invested in chaos. What sounds like democratic renewal risks becoming a weak interim regime, punctuated by violence, oil-sector infighting, and amnesty wars.

Scenario three is the familiar regime-change fantasy: escalate, sanction, manage an election, install a friendly opposition figure, promise reconstruction. The problem, as ever, is legitimacy. A government midwifed too visibly by Washington inherits the original sin of imperial sponsorship. Chavismo’s anti-imperial narrative – long threadbare – would suddenly acquire fresh oxygen, while external actors queue up to meddle by proxy. Another low-grade insurgency beckons.

The fourth option – US custodianship – is the one Trump has effectively name-checked: trusteeship without the label. Stabilise the bureaucracy, revive oil production, choreograph elections, dangle sanctions relief, keep troops nearby “just in case”. It is administratively coherent and politically radioactive. It risks converting a crisis of governance into a crisis of sovereignty, hardening nationalist resistance and validating the very mythology the intervention claims to dismantle.

Which leaves the fifth, and perhaps most honest, outcome: managed instability. No clean victory, no decisive collapse. A weakened Chavista elite, a divided opposition, fragmented security actors, and a US that calibrates pressure without appetite for occupation. A low-boil conflict, indefinitely deferred resolution, limbo as policy.

Hovering over all this is Monroe Doctrine 2.0 – a message not just to Caracas but to Havana, Managua, Bogotá, Panama, even further afield. This was less about Maduro than about signalling who gets to set terms in the hemisphere, and who doesn’t. A muscular reminder that alignment matters, and misalignment carries costs.

For Venezuelans themselves, the prognosis is bleakly familiar: another external intervention, another promise of order, another season of uncertainty. The screw tightens, the rhetoric soars, the moral justifications proliferate – and ordinary people remain suspended between liberation narratives and lived precarity.

History suggests this is not an ending but a prologue. The question, as always, is whether anyone involved is genuinely prepared to live with the consequences of what they’ve just begun.

Caveat emptor

It is worth recalling, in this context, what ultimately happened to Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein – two leaders who, in different ways, became objects of Western fixation and regime-change temptation. Saddam was toppled by overwhelming force, hunted down, tried under a hastily constructed legal order, and hanged; the state he ruled collapsed with him, unleashing sectarian violence and regional instability that still reverberate. Gaddafi, having abandoned his weapons programmes in the hope of rehabilitation, was nevertheless pursued once the opportunity arose, cornered during a NATO-backed intervention, and killed by a mob in a Libyan drainage culvert. Libya followed him into fragmentation, militia rule, and proxy warfare.

In neither case did the removal of the strongman deliver the orderly political transformation that had been implicitly promised. What followed was not liberal democracy but vacuum – power without legitimacy, violence without direction. These episodes linger in the strategic memory not merely as moral tales but as practical ones: regime change is easy to threaten, harder to execute, and almost impossible to control once unleashed.

Muammar Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein in captivity

Feints, refrains and unfinished business. 2025 in review

December 27, 2025December 30, 2025Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach

We called 2024 a “year of everything, everywhere, all at once”, and it earned the name. Crises collided, news arrived faster than we could process it, and the world seemed to exist in a state of constant shock. 2025 did not bring relief. Instead, the chaos began to settle. Wars dragged on, political divides hardened, social tensions deepened, and technology reshaped how we saw and understood it all.

It was the year the world stopped exploding in real time and started being what it had already become: messy, uneven, morally complicated, and stubbornly persistent. A year, indeed, in a world of echoes, refrains and unfinished business. And we spent the year watching power bargain brazenly in plain sight, trying to describe what was happening while it unfolded around us.

From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Syria, from America’s self-inflicted fracture to Australia’s sudden wake-up call on Bondi Bondi, 2025 forced a reckoning: the world did not pause, but it did sort itself – deciding what we would notice, what we would ignore, and what we would learn to live with. Alongside human crises came the continuing advance of AI and chatbots, and the dominion of the algorithms that now govern attention, proving that disruption can be structural as well as geopolitical.

Gaza: War, Then “Ceasefire”

The war in Gaza dominated the year internationally and here in Australia, even as attention ebbed and flowed. Military operations continued for months, followed eventually by a “ceasefire” – a word doing far more work than it should or even justified. Fighting paused, hostages living and dead were returned and prisoners released, but the devastation remained: tens of thousands dead, cities demolished, humanitarian catastrophe unresolved. And the causes of the consequences standing still amidst the ruins and the rubble.

Western governments continued to back Israel while expressing concern for civilians, a contradiction that grew harder to defend, while street protests and online anger seethed all across the world. At the same time, antisemitism surged globally, often hiding behind the language of anti-Zionism. Two realities existed together, and too many people insisted on choosing only one.

By the end of the year, the war had not been resolved – merely frozen. Trust in Western moral leadership had been badly damaged, and Israelis and Palestinians remain in bitter limbo.

See Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy

Iran, Israel and America’s bunker busters

Long-simmering tensions between Israel and Iran spilled into open conflict. What had once been indirect – proxies, cyberattacks, covert strikes – became visible. A brief but destructive war of missile exchanges ended with the United States asserting ordinance, deterrence and control.

The episode was brief but telling. It showed that America still reaches for its guns quickly, even as it struggles to define long-term goals. Another line was crossed, then quickly absorbed into the background of “normal” geopolitics.

Russia, Ukraine and Trump’s “Peace”

Ukraine entered 2025 mired in stalemate. Front lines barely moved. Casualties continued to mount. Western support held, but with clear signs of fatigue. And Donald Trump’s re-emergence reshaped the conversation. His promise to deliver instant “peace” reframed the war not as a question of justice or sovereignty, but of exhaustion. Peace was no longer about what Ukraine deserved, but about what the world was tired of sustaining and what the “art of the deal” could deliver.

The war didn’t end. It simply became something many wanted to stop thinking about. Not Ukraine and Russia, but. The carnage continues.

Donald Trump’s one-way crush on Vladimir gave us the one of the+most cringeworthy moments in global politics – Trump greeting the Russian president in Alaska: As the US president rolled out the red carpet for the world’s most dangerous autocrat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine accelerated. Trump got precisely nothing out of the meeting, except for the chance to hang out with a gangster he so obviously admires and of whom he is embarrassingly in awe.

Syria: Free, but stranded at the crossroads

A year after Assad’s fall, Syria remained unstable and unresolved. The regime was gone, but the future was unclear. Old sectarian tensions resurfaced, often in bloodshed, new power struggles emerged, powerful neighbours staked claims and justice for past crimes remained distant.

Syria in 2025 was neither a success story nor a collapse – but suspended between heaven and hell, a country trying to exist after catastrophe with the rest of the world largely moving on.

See Between heaven and hell … Syria at the Crossroads

Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime

Sudan: what genocide actually looks like

Sudan’s civil war continued with little international attention. Mass killing, ethnic cleansing, famine, and displacement unfolded slowly and relentlessly. This was genocide without spectacle. No clear narrative. No sustained outrage. It showed how mass atrocity can now occur not in secrecy, but in plain sight – and still be ignored.

see The most nihilistic war ever …Sudan’s waking nightmare

America: a country divided against itself

The United States spent 2025 deeply divided, with no sign of healing. Pew Research polling showed that seven out of ten republicans think that the opposite side is immoral while six of ten democrats thinks the same of their rivals.

Trump’s return to power sharpened those divisions. His administration governed aggressively: mass deportations, punitive tariffs, the dismantling of foreign aid, political retribution, and pressure on democratic institutions. The country looked inward and outward at the same time – less cooperative, more transactional, more openly nationalist. Democratic norms eroded not overnight, but through constant stress and disregard. With three years still to run and the tell-tale midterms approaching, allies and cronies are adjusting, bickering rivals are taking notes, and uncertainty has become the defining feature of American leadership. Meanwhile, #47 is slapping his name on everything he can christen, from bitcoins to battleships.

See, for light relief, Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer

Monroe Redux: the return of “the Ugly American”

US foreign policy took on a blunt, old-fashioned tone. Pressure on Canada and Mexico increased. Talk of annexing Greenland resurfaced. Venezuela, caught in the maw of Yanqui bullying and bluster, waits nervously for Washington’s next move. The administration promised imminent land operations – and then bombed Nigeria! The revival of the old Monroe Doctrine felt, as baseball wizz Yogi Berra once remarked, like déjà vu all over again, not as strategy, but as instinct. Influence asserted, consultation discarded. The “ugly American” was back, and unapologetic.

See Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?

Europe at a inflection point

Europe in 2025 didn’t collapse, as many pundits suggested it might, but it shifted. Far-right ideas gained ground even where far-right parties didn’t win and remained, for now, on the fringes albeit closer to electoral success. Borders tightened; policies hardened; street protests proliferated – against immigration and against Israel, Support for Ukraine continued, but cautiously. The continent stood at a crossroads: still committed to liberal values in theory, but increasingly selective in practice.

Uncle Sam’s cold-shoulder

Rumbling away in the background throughout year was the quiet but cumulative alienation of America’s allies. Not with a single rupture, but through a thousand small slights. transactional diplomacy dressed up as realism, alliances treated as invoices rather than covenants, multilateralism dismissed as weakness. Europe learned that security guarantees come with a mood swing; the Middle East heard policy announced via spectacle; Asia watched reassurance coexist uneasily with unpredictability.

The new dispensation was illustrated by the Trump National Security Strategy. It is at once candid and contradictory: it outlines a narrower, realist vision of American interests, emphasising sovereignty, burden-sharing, industrial renewal, and strategic clarity, yet it is riddled with silences, evasions, and tensions between rhetoric and likely action. Allies are scolded for weakness while the document avoids naming Russia’s aggression, underplays China, and projects American cultural anxieties onto Europe. These contradictions expose both strategic incoherence and the limits of paper doctrine against presidential temperament, leaving Europe facing an irreversible rupture in trust and revealing a strategy as much about America’s insecurities as its actual global posture.

The post-WW2 order has not so much been dismantled as shrugged at, and indeed, shrugged off. Trust eroded not because the United States has withdrawn from the world, but because it has remained present without being reliable, and presumed itself to be in charge. Power, exercised loudly but inconsistently, has discovered an old truth: allies can endure disagreement, but they struggle with contempt.

Australia in 2025 … high flight and crash landing

Though beset by a multitude of crises – the cost of living, housing, health and education services – the Albanese Labor government was returned comfortably in May, helped by a divided, incoherent, and seemingly out of touch opposition. For the rest the year, federal politics felt strangely frictionless with policy drift passing for stability. The Coalition remained locked in internal conflict, unable to present a credible alternative. The Greens, chastened by electoral defeat and in many formerly friendly quarters, ideological disillusionment, treaded water.

But beneath the surface, social cohesion frayed. Immigration debates sharpened. Antisemitism rose noticeably, no longer something Australians could pretend belonged elsewhere. Attacks on Jewish Australians forced a reckoning many had avoided and hoped would resolve once the tremors of the war in Gaza had ameliorated. Until 6.47pm on 7th December, a beautiful evening on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. Sudden, brutal and in our summer playground, sectarian violence shattered the sense of distance Australians often feel from global disorder. At that moment, politics stopped feeling abstract. The world, with all its instability, barged in and brought the country down to earth.

See This Is What It Looks Like

Lifesavers on Bondi Beach, 20 December 2025. Edwina Pickles

Featured photograph and above:

A handful of bodies on Bondi Beach, and behind them, the howling infinite of expectation, obligation, and the careful rationing of human empathy. The smallness of the beach against the vastness of consequences. On December 20, 2025, Bondi’s iconic lifesavers formed a line stretching the entire length of the beach -silent, solemn, a nation visibly in mourning. Similar tributes unfolded from Perth to Byron Bay, gestures of unity in the face of a shock that touched the whole country.

The Year of the Chatbot: Promise, Power, and Risk

And now, a break from the doom and gloom …

2025 was the year when artificial intelligence became part of daily life. Chatbots ceased to be experimental and became integral, transforming from novelty to utility seemingly overnight. People used it to write, research, translate, plan, argue, comfort, and persuade; institutions and individuals adopted it instinctively. Setting tone as much as content, the ‘bots have lowered barriers to knowledge, sharpened thinking, and helped people articulate ideas they might otherwise struggle to express. Used well, they amplified curiosity rather than replace it.

The opportunities are obvious – but so are the risks. Systems that can clarify complexity can also flatten it. Chatbots sound confident even when wrong, smooth over disagreement, and made language cleaner, calmer, and more persuasive – but not necessarily truer. They reinforce confirmation bias, outrage, and tribal certainty, generating arguments instantly and flooding the zone with plausible-sounding text. As information has became faster, cheaper, and less reliable, Certainty has spread more easily than truth, so truth has to work much harder.

Dependence is subtler but real. Outsourcing thinking – summaries instead of reading, answers instead of wrestling – did not make humans stupid, but less patient. Nuance, doubt, and slow understanding became harder to justify in a world optimised for speed. Yet conversely, man people still seek context, history, and complexity. Used deliberately, AI could slow the pace, map contradictions, and hold multiple truths at once.

By the end of 2025, the question was no longer whether AI would shape public life – it already had. The real question is whether humans would use it as a shortcut, or as a discipline. The technology is neutral. The danger – and the promise – lies in how much thinking we are willing to give up, and how much responsibility we are prepared to keep.

See The promise and the peril of ChatGPT

Algorithm and blues

Alongside the chatbot sat a quieter, more insidious force: the algorithm itself. By 2025 it no longer simply organised information – it governed attention. What people saw, felt, and argued about was shaped less by importance than by engagement. To borrow from 20th century philosopher and communication theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan, the meme had become the message. Complex realities were compressed into images, slogans, clips, and talking points designed not to inform but to travel. The algorithm rewarded speed over reflection, certainty over doubt, heat over light. Politics, war, and grief were all flattened into content, stripped of context, and ranked by performance. What mattered most was not what was true or necessary, but what disseminated.

Passion without Wisdom

I wrote during the year that we seemed “full of passionate intensity” – Yeats’ phrase still apt in the twenty first century- but increasingly short on wisdom and insight. 2025 confirmed it. Anger was everywhere, empathy highly selective, certainty worn like armour. People felt deeply but thought narrowly. Moral energy surged but rarely slowed into understanding. The problem was not indifference; it was excess – too much feeling, too little reflection. In that environment, nuance looked like weakness and patience like complicity. What was missing was not information, but judgement – the harder work of holding contradiction, of resisting instant conclusions, of allowing complexity to temper conviction. Passion was abundant. Insight, increasingly rare.

Looking Toward 2026

Looking back on 2025, it seems that there were no endings, neither happy or sad. Just a promise, it seems, of more of the same. The year didn’t solve anything. It clarified things. And if it clarified anything, it was that the world has grown adept at managing, ignoring, or absorbing what it cannot fix. It revealed a world adjusting to permanent instability. In this year of echoes, refrains, and unfinished sentences.

Passion, intensity, and outrage were abundant, but patience, wisdom, and insight remained scarce. Democracies strained under internal and external pressures. Wars lingered unresolved. Technology reshaped thought and attention.

Some argue that hope springs eternal, that yet, even amid the drift and the fractures, glimpses of understanding and resistance persisted, that although the world has settled into its chaos, we can be riders on the storm. But, I fear, 2026 arrives not as break, a failsafe, a safety valve, but as continuation. It looms as a test of endurance rather than transformation. In my somnolent frame of mind, I’ve reached again for my Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed …”

After the chaos of 2024 and the hardening of 2025, the question is no longer what might go wrong. It’s what we’re prepared to live with.

And so we come to what In That Howling Infinite wrote in 2025.

What we wrote in 2025

It was a year that refused neat endings.

It began in a wasteland – Gaza as moral ground zero – and moved, restlessly, through revolutions real and imagined: Trump as symptom and accelerant, Putin as a man racing his own shadow, Syria forever at the crossroads where history idles and then accelerates without warning. Gaza returned, again and again, sunrise and false dawn, as spectacle and strategy; Sudan burned in near silence; Venezuela re-entered the frame as empire’s backyard as the US disinterred its Monrovian legacy. In That Howling Infinite featured pieces on each of these – several in many cases , twenty in all, plus a few of relevance to them, including an overview of journalist Robert Fisk’s last book (The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue). A broadranging historical piece written in the previous year and deferred, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement, provided a corrective of sorts to the distorted narratives that have emerged in recent years due to a dearth of historical knowledge and the partisan weaponisation of words.

It was almost as light relief that we turned to other subjects. Of particular interest was AI. Approaching remorselessly yet almost unrecognised in recent years, it banged a loud gong and crept from curiosity to condition, from tool to weather system, quietly rewriting the newsroom, the internet, and the idea of authorship. ChatGPT and other chatbots appeared not as saviours but as promise and peril in equal measure. By year end, we were fretting about using ChatGPT too much and regarding it as something to moderate like alcohol or fatty foods. We published three pieces on the subject in what seemed like rapid succession, and then pestered out – sucked into the machinery, I fear.

What with so much else attracting our attention, we nevertheless managed to find time for some history – including a particularly enthralling and indeed iconoclastic book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the story of an Anzac brigade lost in Greece in 1942; “the Lucky Country” revisited after half a century; and a piece long in the pipeline on the iconic singer and activist Paul Robeson.

In August, as on a whim, for light relief, we summoned up a nostalgic old Seekers’ song from the mid-sixties, a time when the world was on fire with war and rage much as it is today, but for us young folk back in the day, a time of hope and hedonism. For us, the carnival, clearly, is not over. The machinery is still whirring, the music still loud, and the lights still on. History is insisting on one more turn of the wheel, and the dawn, so often promised, so frequently invoked, has not yet broken.

January
The Gaza War … there are no winners in a wasteland
The way we were … reevaluating the Lucky Country

February
Let’s turn Gaza into Mar e Largo
Trump’s Second Coming … the new American Revolution
Cold Wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads

March
Trumps Revolution… he can destroy but he cannot create
Where have all the big books gone?
Putin’s War … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history

April
The Trump Revolution … I run the country and the world
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye
Let Stalk Strine .. a lexicon of Australian as it was spoken (maybe)

May
The phantom of liberty … the paradoxes of conservativism
Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war
The continuing battle for Australia’s history

July
A mighty voice … the odyssey of Paul Robeson

August
109 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent
High above the dawn is breaking … the unlikely origin of a poo song

September
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Trump’s peace plan
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy
Will there ever be a Palestinian state?
Why Osana bin lost the battle but won the war
The Night of Power … Robert Fisks bitter epilogue
The promise and peril of ChatGPT
Who wrote this? The newsroom’s AI dilemma

October
AI and the future of the internet
Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer

November
A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare
Answering the call … National Service in Britain 1945-1963
Tales of Yankee Power … at play in Americas backyard

December
Delo Kirova – the Kirov Case … a Soviet murder mystery
Between heaven and hell … Syria at the crossroads
This Is What It Looks Like
Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?
Marco Rubio’s Venezuelan bargain

Read out reviews of prior years:

That was the year that was – retrospectives

A song for 2026: Lost love at world’s end …

It is our custom to conclude our annual wrap with a particular song that caught our attention during the year. Last year, we chose Tears for Fears’ Mad World. It would be quite appropriate for 2025. But no repeats! so here is something very different. An outwardly melancholy song that is, in the most ineffable way quite uplifting. that’s what we reckon, anyway …

The Ticket Taker is on the surface a love song for the apocalypse; and it’s it’s one of the prettiest, most lyrically interesting songs I’ve heard in a long while. I could almost hear late-period Leonard Cohen and his choir of angels.

The apocalypse is both backdrop and metaphor. We’re not sure which. Is it really about a world ending, or just about the private ruin of a man left behind by love and fortune. The lyrics are opaque enough to evade final meaning, but resonant enough to keep circling back, like the ferry itself, between hope and futility. A love song, yes, but also a confession of entrapment: the gambler’s hope, the ark one cannot board.

The “Ticket Taker” song was written by Ben Miller and Jeff Prystowsky and is featured on The Low Anthem’s album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. It features on Robert Plant’s latest foray into roots music – this time with English band Saving Grace. This flawless duet with Suzi Dian is mesmerising and magical.

Jeff will tell you that the song is “pure fiction,” that Ben “just made it up one day” – but fiction, as we know, has a way of smuggling deeper truths than fact dares admit.

Tonight’s the night when the waters rise
You’re groping in the dark
The ticket takers count the men who can afford the ark
The ticket takers will not board, for the ticket takers are tied
For five and change an hour, they will count the passers-by

They say the sky’s the limit, but the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books, cradle and all
They say before he bit it that the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gambling man with a ticket in the rain

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm

Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse
I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil, and one of gold
I keep a place for Mary Anne, soon she will come home

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark

	What’s in a wo… on Shaping facts to feelings…
	What’s in a wo… on Same old stone, different rock…
	What’s in a wo… on Standing on the high moral gro…
	Leonard Small on Pity the nation that is full o…
	Go, Move, Shift! Sin… on One ring to rule us all…

	What’s in a wo… on Shaping facts to feelings…
	What’s in a wo… on Same old stone, different rock…
	What’s in a wo… on Standing on the high moral gro…
	Leonard Small on Pity the nation that is full o…
	Go, Move, Shift! Sin… on One ring to rule us all…