Leak: Rubio’s WMD Scandal Is “Far-Left Terrorism”

 Leak: Rubio’s WMD Scandal Is “Far-Left Terrorism”

U.S. targets "anti-tech," "pro-Iranian" & "antisemitic networks" with new three-letter designation.

Ken Klippenstein July 15th 2026

Little Marco sits atop his throne

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Tomorrow, Marco Rubio will open a summit unveiling a new designation branding his political opponents as terrorists, documents leaked to me reveal.

The unveil will happen on the opening day of the 60-nation summit — which I reported on here — titled, “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” 

That this summit is happening at a time when the Iran war is literally exploding, and while so much else in the world seems to be on fire, is a baffling way for the Secretary of State (and National Security Advisor!) to spend his precious time.

Welcome to the War on FLT, short for “Far-Left Terrorism,” a new acronym appearing in State Department documents about the summit and which I obtained. 

A three-letter acronym for an imagined threat that could be radioactive to a politician’s presidential ambitions. Sound familiar? It’s this generation’s WMD. And it’s going to haunt him.

Rubio, who fancies himself a deep thinker and is already being anointed as the experienced middle-of-the-road alternative to JD Vance, is revealing his true stripes: Trump flunkey, oblivious, and lost in the sauce of the bureaucracy’s ideological hotbox.

Far-left is hard enough to define (who decides what’s “far”?) but to add terrorism takes it to another level of crazy. Not that Rubio cares. The summit will introduce a new visa policy under which State targets “far-left terrorist and other aligned groups” not just for violence against actual people but also “economic sabotage including against public and private property” — a phrase broad enough to cover a broken window or a boycott. 

Rubio has spent a decade cultivating the image of the responsible statesman — fourteen years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the grown-up steadying a chaotic administration. The FLT designation is a good place to watch that image dissolve. The State Department is being turned into another clown car, and Rubio seems happy to be the driver.

State’s talking points drop any pretense that this is a politically neutral endeavor. Officials are instructed to rely on the following talking points (per the leaked documents):

• “We go where the threat is. Political terrorism is resurgent, and far-left terrorism specifically poses a unique and distinctive threat today. Addressing and defeating that is the focus of the Ministerial.”

• “The United States has observed a concerning convergence between violent far-left and anarchist networks and other violent extremist actors, including violent pro-Iranian and antisemitic networks, as well as militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements. This is a trend we are monitoring closely and engaging partners to address.”

• “The Ministerial will focus world attention on the resurgence of political terrorism and bring together the United States and foreign partners to address the terrorist actors, particularly far-left terrorist networks, operating across Europe, Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond. It focuses on improving coordination, information sharing, and practical law enforcement cooperation to counter political terrorism, including violent far-left attacks on law enforcement, critical infrastructure, political figures, and state institutions.”

• “Political terrorism is resurgent, particularly among far-left terrorist networks that have grown more sophisticated. They leverage decentralized cell structures, encrypted communications, and transnational coordination to carry out attacks on rail, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure, as well as targeted violence against political figures and their families. In 2024 alone, there were 21 far-left and anarchist terrorist attacks in the EU — nearly matching the number of jihadist attacks that year.”

• “These are not isolated incidents, but are part of a sustained, transnational campaign of political terrorism that is growing in sophistication and lethality, aimed at dismantling the foundations of self-governing societies.”

• “The Department of State is committed to confronting organized political violence, including from far-left terrorist and other aligned groups that engage in or support terrorist or criminal activities, economic sabotage, or support far-left terrorist-led violent actions.”

• “In support of this effort, the Department of State is announcing a new visa restriction policy that targets members of far-left terrorist and other aligned groups who have supported or incited acts of terrorism; supported violent criminal activity; participated in economic sabotage including against public and private property; financed, recruited, or provided logistical support for violent or criminal actions committed by far-left terrorist and other aligned groups; and/or facilitated the convergence of far left terrorist and other aligned networks for the purposes of economic sabotage.”

• “…this policy will protect U.S. citizens and safeguard the American homeland by restricting entry of foreign nationals who finance, recruit, incite, or otherwise enable terrorist, violent, and criminal far-left terrorist networks — closing the visa pathways that far-left terrorists and other aligned groups could exploit to threaten American lives, undermine economic stability, and coordinate violent actions on U.S. soil.”

Consider who Rubio is comfortable putting in charge of the summit, names I gleaned from an internal State Department roster detailing the event.

Tera Dahl, a senior advisor in State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, is a Michael Flynn colleague from the first Trump administration who was pushed out of the National Security Council by H.R. McMaster. Before that, she wrote for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, co-founded the now-defunct Council on Global Security — a think tank devoted to warning about the dangers of Islam. There, she worked with Katharine Gorka, wife of current Trump terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, authoring a string of pieces praising Egypt’s strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for “leading Egypt towards democracy” as he jailed his critics.

Dahl got her start as a staffer for then-Representative Michele Bachmann — which is its own kind of full circle. In 2012, Bachmann and four House colleagues sent letters to federal inspectors general alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the U.S. government, singling out longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The claim was baseless enough that John McCain went to the Senate floor to rebuke a member of his own party.

Then there’s Monica Jacobsen, another senior official at State’s Counterrorism Bureau, a holy warrior who prioritizes the defense of Global Christians. She testified to Congress this year that her agency would “hold governments’ feet to the fire when they fail to address terrorist threats that undermine religious freedom.”

Then there’s Brent Munyon, Senior Adviser to the Deputy Secretary of Management and Resources. A few years ago, he was a partisan dirt digger for the Republican National Committee. Finally, there’s Oscar Buynevich, Special Advisor for the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, another Breitbart commentator whose career amounted to shoveling culture war slop.

It’s a rogues’ gallery befitting the imaginary Iraqi WMD fiasco, the main contributor to the mess we are still in more than 20 years later. Think Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle.

Welcome to Rubio 2028.

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Michael Roberts: China’s slowdown

China's Slowdown

by Michael Roberts

China’s second quarter GDP growth saw a significant deceleration, down to 4.3% year over year from 5.0% in the first quarter and weaker than forecast. This was the slowest growth in any quarter since the pandemic lockdown hit in 2022. But, even with this Q2 slowdown, China’s real GDP growth for the first half of 2026 remains within the government’s target range at 4.7% YoY.

Nevertheless, Western ‘experts’ continue to argue that this slowdown confirms their view that China is heading down towards stagnation. Take the points raised by Richi Sharma in the FT, made before this latest growth figure.  “Though many forecasters keep expecting China to surpass the US as the world’s leading economy, its growth peaked in 2021. Since then, China’s share of global GDP has fallen in nominal terms from 18 to 16.5 per cent, while the US share has risen to 26 per cent. China’s growth rate has dropped below the rest of the world, including the US. In real terms, independent estimates now put China’s growth in real terms closer to zero than to the official target of 4.5 to 5 per cent.”

Let me answer these points one by one.  First, China’s real GDP growth rate may have peaked in 2014, but the gap between China’s average growth rate since then and that of G7 economies has not disappeared.  On average since 2014, China’s growth rate has been over 4% points higher than the average growth rate in the G7.

Yes, China’s share of global GDP has declined in nominal terms, but that is not the case in real terms.  So Sharma is being disengenuous here.  The contraction in nominal terms is primarily caused by a weakening Chinese yuan against a very strong US dollar and domestic deflation. Because nominal GDP is calculated in current US dollars, exchange rate and price shifts artificially compress the size of China’s economy on the global stage.  In real terms, using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), we can eliminate the effect of currency exchange fluctuations. Then, instead of a fall in China’s share of world GDP of 1.5-2.0% points, in real terms  there has been a rise of 1.4% points.

Historical Trend Data (2021–2026)

Year	Nominal Share of Global GDP	Real (PPP) Share of Global GDP
2021	18.74% (Peak)	18.5%
2022	18.09%	18.7%
2023	17.28%	18.99%
2024	17.00%	19.31%
2025	16.70%	19.63%
2026 (Current)	16.50%	19.89%

Sources: Compiled from tracking by the IMF DataMapper, Statista, and TheGlobalEconomy.

Also China’s growth rate has not “dropped below the rest of the world” as Sharma claims.  Here he falls back on “independent estimates now put China’s growth in real terms closer to zero than to the official target of 4.5 to 5 per cent.”  What are these ‘independent’ estimates?  They come from one particular source, the Rhodium Group, a Western research unit that claims to be China ‘experts’. The Rhodium Group does away with the official GDP estimates, arguing that they are biased upwards and do not take into account weak domestic economic activity.  

Rhodium claims to estimate China’s growth from the bottom up by disaggregating expenditures (not production) in sectors. Their ‘disaggregation’ method basically boils down to reducing official fixed asset investment figures by a significant multiple to the level of investment expenditure on the property sector.  And the property sector, as is well known, has been in a serious slump for some time.  In effect, Rhodium reduces China’s investment growth rate (which overall is falling 5.7% yoy) to the real estate investment growth rate, which is falling at 18% yoy, dragging down the overall rate.  If you use property investment as the measure of China’s investment rate, no wonder you reach zero for overall growth.  

Rhodium estimates China’s growth rate just from ‘demand’ data, like retail sales, credit growth and ‘consumer confidence’.  It ignores ‘supply’ indicators like industrial production, exports and manufacturing in general.  But most Western estimates of China’s GDP do not go down the Rhodium road.  The Bank of Finland, for example, also does not accept the official figures, and instead tracks production metrics like electricity generation, rail freight and net exports.  It finds China’s real GDP growth is about 1% point below the official data, but that still means it’s around 4% a year.

Indeed, China’s industrial production rose 5.4% in the fist half of 2026, with manufacturing up 6% and the tech sector up 14%.

Looking at China’s industry, it’s clear that external demand is the key factor behind the rise, with rail, ships, and aerospace up 18.2%, autos up 8.7%, and computers, communications, and electronic equipment up 15.7%,. Semiconductor production hit a 17-month high of 25.4% yoy amid the continued tech boom.

This is not to dismiss the current slowdown in overall investment growth.  Fixed asset investment dropped 5.7% yoy over the first half of the year and marked the lowest level since May 2020.  Private sector investment fell 8.5% and state-owned investment also fell further, down to 2.3%. Both private and state-owned enterprises appear to be postponing capital expenditure plans, adding to an already weak investment environment.

What is behind this?  The culprit is the continued slump in the property sector and difficulties for local governments in dealing with the buildup in debt that spiralled during the property boom. These are the drivers of the relatively weak domestic demand.

Property prices are still falling, if now at a much slower pace, with even some cities now experinencing a small rise.  But even excluding the property sector, fixed-asset investment was still down by 2.7% in the six months to June, slipping further from a 1.2% fall in the first five months of the year. 

The other factor depressing domestic demand is the overhang of debt left by the property bust, which is now mainly concentrated in local governments.  Loans made by local governments to private developers during the property bubble remain on the books and so many are paralysed in doing any further investments as a result.  While central government and the state banks are expanding investment and credit into ‘new productive forces’ ie. the tech and solar sectors , local governments cannot follow.

So a big reason why China’s overall investment has dropped is the leftover of the property and local government financing spree.  China’s Communist leaders made a big mistake.  They allowed the urbanisation of China and the rise of its cities and the homes in them to be put into the hands of the private sector. They did not institute a state run and controlled national housing development program and instead got local governments to finance private property developers.

Thus the Chinese government allowed a massive expansion of unproductive and speculative investment by the capitalist sector of the economy.  In the drive to build enough houses and infrastructure for the sharply rising urban population, central and local governments left the job to private developers.  Instead of building houses for rent, they opted for the ‘free market’ solution of private developers building for sale.  Of course, homes needed to be built, but as President Xi put it belatedly, “homes are for living in, not for speculation.” 

As a result, the bulk of China’s ‘zombie companies’ are property developers, still acting as a drag on overall growth and investment domestically. Local governments have been left to absorb a lot of these bad debts from local banks and property developers — while they’ve been saddled with restrictive debt issuance limits, and Beijing is still signalling limited support.

China’s economic expansion is still on, but it is heavily dependent on export trade.  Despite Trump’s tariffs and other sanctions (which are added to each day!), China’s exports to the rest of the world have reached record levels. China’s exports surged 27% year-on-year to a historic, record high of $412 billion in June 2026. This growth propelled China’s total export value for the first half of 2026 to $2.12 trillion (a 17.6% year-on-year increase.  This boom was heavily accelerated by two primary catalysts: the global artificial intelligence infrastructure rush and a massive scaling of green technology shipments.

I won’t go into the relentless arguments presented by the Western ‘experts’ that China is causing ‘global imbalances’ from its export success and shifting ‘overcapacity’ through dumping goods at very cheap prices on world markets.  I have dealt with these arguments in previous posts. But there is a new attack. It is the claim that China’s huge rising share of global exports is ‘crowding out’ other Global South exporting economies.  This is a particularly ludicrous argument.  Western ‘experts’ never worried about China’s export success two decades ago when they thought it was based on US and European companies based in China.  But now that China has developed its own industrial firms and leads the way in key export sectors, these experts claim it is damaging ‘poor’ countries. 

Vietnam lends the lie to that.  It is an economy that has a similar model to China ie state-led and state-owned sector, alongside a capitalist sector.  Vietnam’s share of global exports has risen significantly over the last ten years, increasing from approximately 1.2% a decade ago to around 1.35% now. 

China is not ‘crowding out’ Vietnam.The failure of other countries to build export market share is more down to most Global South economies being dominated by foreign multinationals and having no significant state sector or independent plan.  Imperialism has made it impossible for the Global South to ‘catch up’, not China.

China is not expanding domestically fast enough, even though real consumer spending has averaged over 6% a year since 2014 – hardly a snail’s pace as in the G7.  However, it seems likely that the property bust is bottoming and local governments are beginning to deal with their debt overhang.  And investment in new tech sectors is rocketing.  So there is every reason to expect China to meet its current growth target of 4.5-5.0% this year.

Trump Summons "Poltergeist" to Go After Opponents

Out: Iran diplomacy. In: diplomatic summit for rooting out left-wing "political terrorism"

Ken Klippenstein July 14, 2026

Secretary of State Rubio whispers to Trump at a White House roundtable on “Antifa” | Getty

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be hosting a big diplomatic summit in Washington on Thursday — not about the Iran war, but about “political terrorism.”

Sterile as that may sound, it’s a resurrection of an obscure Nixon-era term pointed squarely at the political left and recruiting foreign governments to assist its war on domestic political opponents. As a U.S. diplomatic cable leaked to me puts it, all of this is about combatting “far-left terrorism.” 

To the extent that media have noticed the summit at all, they’ve focused onthe confusion and wariness among some of the over 60 countries invited; but the significance of the term has been completely overlooked. Put simply, it’s a more powerful attack on protest, free speech and the Democratic Party than Trump’s designation of “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist group or NSPM-7. 

The summit is called the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” Unlike familiar organized terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, “political terrorism” refers to domestic opposition, here and abroad. 

Leaked diplomatic cable

If you’ve never heard the term, it’s because the Trump administration has up to now never used it. In fact, this is the first time it’s been used by the federal government in decades.

“This summit is a vital first step in countering rising political violence worldwide, including far-left terrorism, through international collaboration,” a U.S. diplomatic cable dated July 13 says.

Leaked diplomatic cable

“Political terrorism” is a term first adopted by the Nixon administration for its war on “subversives,” carried out in the darkest days of the Vietnam war and a period of intense public protest. Sometimes referred to as “COINTELPRO” (an acronym for Counterintelligence Program), it was a series of covert and illegal actions by the FBI from 1956 through the early seventies that aimed to surveil, infiltrate, entrap and undermine leftist political organizations, everything from civil rights and anti-war groups to the Black Panthers.

State Department spokesman Tommy Piggot hinted at the historical significance last week.

“The resurgence of violent far-left political terrorism is not a new phenomenon — it is an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences,” Piggot said in a statement on the summit.

The administration’s obsession with left-wing terrorism was precipitated by the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — a personal friend of Trump’s and many in the administration. In my reporting at the time, based on interviews with friends of the alleged gunman, Tyler Robinson, I warned that there wasn’t any evidence that the murder was a partisan act, nor that he was a leftist or even political in general.

That reporting, criticized at the time in an environment where seemingly everything was polarized into Team Red White and Blue, has now been vindicated to an extent that I did not anticipate.

Just last week, Robinson’s lover, Lance Twiggs, who is cooperating with federal prosecutors, testified that Robinson barely ever discussed politics and had never once mentioned Kirk before the shooting.

It’s an extraordinary revelation, made under the clearest penalty of perjury one can imagine, given the Trump administration’s investment in framing the killing as an act of “political terrorism.” After the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel even testified before Congress that the Bureau was investigating every other member of Robinsons’ discord chats and even the possibility of a foreign nexus. This was based on his suspicion that the killing was carried out by some kind of organized cell, a theory that promptly fell apart.

The killing was, by all appearances, just a young man with a gun, pissed off about what Charlie Kirk said about the LGBT community.

To the Trump camp, Kirk’s killing solidified their thinking that a vast conspiracy existed amongst the left to destroy the nation. Their counter to this imagined national security threat has been to link Trump’s NSPM-7 national security directive, the nihilist violent extremism label, and the executive order designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization into a larger umbrella: “political terrorism.”

Or as I call, POLTERGEIST, because the “political-terrorism” term is an attempt by the Trump administration to summon a ghost from the Nixon years.

Perhaps the only official definition of political terrorism appears in a declassified 1970 CIA intelligence report.

Cover of declassified CIA intelligence report

“Political terrorism is symbolic action, by those out of power, designed to achieve political ends through the systematic use of violence,” the report says. 

It goes on to differentiate political terrorism from other forms of violence, saying:

“It is distinguished from intimidation (which emphasizes threats), mob violence (normally unplanned and uncontrolled), mass insurrection (larger in scale, later in time), and governmental terrorism (presented as law-enforcement). It may be practiced by anarchists, by nihilists, by their successors the modern totalitarians, by nationalists, and by a variety of social groups with genuine or fancied grievances.”

In 1972, responding to the Black September terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games, Nixon issued a formal presidential memorandum that officially institutionalized counter-political terrorism by creating a Cabinet Committee. Nixon’s 1972 mandate explicitly ordered the heads of the State Department, DOJ, CIA, FBI, Treasury and other agencies to coordinate government-wide actions to “prevent terrorism here and abroad.” 

Again, not terrorism as we normally think of it, but political opposition.

In response to the memo, the State Department appointed its first-ever Special Assistant to the Secretary of State and Coordinator for Combating Terrorism. Within days, the new Special Assistant was peppering the term “political terrorism” in internal memos.

Unlike the Kirk assassination, the Munich Olympics massacre really was carried out by a terrorist group. Black September was a highly structured, centrally-commanded paramilitary with the explicit political goal of compelling the release of Palestinian political prisoners and forcing global visibility onto the Palestinian nationalist cause. It counted among its leaders the intelligence chief of the Palestinian Authority, Amin al-Hindi.

Now compare that with Tyler Robinson, an angsty 23-year-old from a Mormon family who was dating Lance (known to him as “Luna”) Twiggs and was upset enough about Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric on LBGT people to take action, allegedly.

In Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NPSM-7, the president directs the Departments of State Treasury, Justice and various other federal agencies to prioritize investigating and preempting left-wing violence. Sound familiar?

In a section examining the effectiveness of terrorism in different political environments, the CIA report from 1970 says: 

“Terrorism can pose a serious challenge to free societies in which great social injustices or severe economic problems exist (e.g. Guatemala), but terrorism does not do well in free societies in which serious grievances are not widespread [redacted].”

Good thing Americans perceive no “great social injustices” today! 

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Some Comments on the Lies About the War on Iran

 

Some Comments on the Lies About the War on Iran

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

July14, 2026

This is a short clip, and I think a part one of two on Tik Tok. I think the guy identifies his outlet as the Mr. Global Channel. and that he doesn't represent any organization. He has this address @buncevsigal. Also as user 1202.

 

Regardless, I am in complete agreement with his statements here, and the vast majority of Americans would agree with him also. 

 

One point I would make though, and he might have made it in a follow up video I don't know, is that when he talks about Iran attacking 5 countries, and he says it in reference to Iran's response to the hundreds of attacks, I assume bombs drones and missiles, that the US rogue regime has carried out over the past three days; his description needs some clarifying. 

 

Iran is not "attacking" the guy states because it feels like it or for expansionist reasons. Iran’s response is a defensive one and is directed at US military installations. It is attacking US allies that are allowing the aggressor to wage this unprovoked war on Iran from their soil. This is legitimate in time of war surely. 

 

The US policy, especially since 911 is what is euphemistically referred to as pre-emptive attacks. Pre-emptive assassinations of anyone that might even be thinking about hurting the US. pre-emptive missile assaults on anyone rejecting US power in the region and so on. The billions to the genocidal Israeli regime is pre-emptive what? 

 

Admittedly, the Iranians can't attack the US land mass. But still, even in its attacks on US allies in the region (stooges really because among the populations the US is hated) it has stuck to legitimate military targets. Iran, my friends, didn't start this shit. 

 

I read today that the US bombed the wrestling auditorium in Tehran. It is something that boggles the mind that there are not thousands in the streets in the US trying to stop this rogue state from continuing its reckless, violent policies outside our borders, and increasingly violent ones at home. 

 

And I want to remind my working class brothers and sisters that think this is what makes America great as far as they are concerned. If you are a unionised worker, the violence your tax money finances abroad, will be coming to you . Especially when you are faced out on strike. The ICE, that right wing militia populated by the Oath Keepers, The Prayer Boys, Christian nationalists and other right wing elements are all in ICE now. They've found a home. 

 

Read some labor history folks and ponder on what was sacrificed and what violence was perpetrated against working people (And of course, the genocide against Native people and the legacy of slavery stands out as well) for trying to organise to fight for higher wages and some power and protection in the workplace. The millions of poor whites that were either brought here through pressing, or driven by poverty and starvation, or religious prejudice and worked own the great textile mills or mines of the US were horribly mistreated. This is what the future holds if we continue to avoid reality and wait until our backs are literally against the wall before we stand up for ourselves and workers. 

 

And I know this will anger some of you and likely you feel it's unpatriotic whatever patriotism actually is, but we must defend Iran here. and call for an end to this. Its leaders and who they are is an issue that belongs to the Iranian people. 

We must grasp that a defeat for US imperialism in this conflict it caused will benefit working people at home and shift the balance of class focus in the future in our favor. It will benefit our children and our children’s children.

The West won't punish the settlements. Its two-state solution was always a sham

 The West won't punish the settlements. Its two-state solution was always a sham

For decades, the EU has devised ever more convoluted ways to avoid penalising Israel's illegal settlements, even as they devour a two-state solution it claims is the only path to regional peace.

Johnathan Cook July 14, 2026  Johnathan Cook on Substack

If I asked you to cut off your arm, would you do it? 

What if I pointed out that that your arm regularly punched a neighbour in the face so violently that it broke their nose and teeth, and left them unconscious? Would you cut your arm off then?

I’m guessing the answer to both questions is a firm, “No.” 

Which is exactly why the European Union, Britain and the United States have precisely no intention of severing their support for Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however violent the Jewish colonisers who live on stolen Palestinian land prove to be.

For decades, settler militias – backed by Israeli soldiers – have beaten up Palestinians, shot them, poisoned their wells, chopped down their olive groves, torched their homes, all in an attempt to ethnically cleanse them from their historic homeland.

The relentless expansion of these illegal settlements has left any hope of a two-state solution in tatters. The West Bank is now an archipelago of Palestinian villages and towns isolated from one another by marauding violent settlers, apartheid roads only for Jews, steel and concrete barriers, and army checkpoints. 

All of this has happened in full view of western states over many decades. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, ruled back in 2004 – nearly a quarter of a century ago – that these Jewish settlements violated international law and needed to be dismantled. 

It reiterated that demand in a decision two years ago in which it identified Israel as an apartheid state ruling over Palestinians. It warned states to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory”. 

And yet the West has done nothing meaningful year after year as the settlements have stolen more land from Palestinians, made their lives there ever more miserable, and trashed any chance of the West’s supposed ambition of two states living alongside each other.

Remember this when Israel’s apologists tell you to wait for the same court’s definitive ruling – in a year or two, or maybe three – on what it deemed in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, just three months into Israel’s mass slaughter there. 

Not only will any such ruling be far too late to make any difference to the victims of the genocide, but the US, Britain and Europe will do precisely no more to punish Israel for this crime of crimes – one we can see for ourselves without an ICJ ruling – than they have done in punishing Israel for the settlements. 

Punching fist

Why? Because most western states no more wish to impose a penalty on Israel for its crimes than you would want to amputate a healthy arm. 

If they refuse to lift a finger to stop a live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, why on earth would anyone imagine they are ready to do anything to stop Israel’s violent settlers ethnically cleansing the West Bank? 

The settlements are as deeply integrated into Israel as your arm is attached to your shoulder. And in turn, Israel is as much the punching fist of the imperial West’s war machine as the City of London – and its former tax-haven colonies – are the beating heart of the imperial West’s financial machine.

Western elites cannot imagine a world without Israel as their military thug in the oil-rich Middle East any more than you can imagine life without your arm. 

That explains why no one really believed that EU foreign ministers, meeting once again this week to discuss banning settlement products – the bare minimum they have long been obligated to do under international law – would reach an agreement. 

More than 100 legal scholars had earlier written to the European Commission’s top trade and foreign policy officials stressing the EU’s “international legal obligation”.

But as everyone predicted, EU ministers kicked the can down the road – until at least October, when they agreed to more talks about talks. 

The EU has been delaying meaningful action on dealing with the settlements since at least 2004, when the ICJ ruled them illegal. 

A year after that ruling, the EU issued a Technical Agreement that removed preferential trade tariffs of the kind Israeli goods enjoy from any items produced in the illegal settlements. Israel agreed only because there were so many loopholes and workarounds it had no practical effect whatsoever. 

It was another seven years – in 2012 – before the EU started to express concern about these loopholes, including the fact that Israel was routinely mislabelling settlement products as “Made in Israel”. 

Fast forward another three years and the EU finally got around to pretending to be closing the loopholes. In November 2015, 11 years after the ICJ ruling, the EU issued an “interpretative notice” requiring labels on settlement goods stating: "Product from the West Bank (Israeli settlement)." 

Again, Israel simply ignored the notice and continued mislabelling products, or blended them with products made in Israel, making it hard to determine the provenance. 

Pure pantomime

Remember, these lengthy, meaningless battles were not about banning settlement products or even imposing punitive tariffs. They were simply about labelling them correctly. 

To this day, the overwhelming majority of consumers across the EU have no idea, even if items are correctly labelled, which they almost never are, that they are buying products supporting Israel’s violent campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland. 

It was because of this utter farce that civil society organisations started to noisily accuse the EU of complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and demand instead the outright banning of all settlement products. 

These critics have now been banging their heads against a brick wall for over a decade. They have still achieved nothing, as this week’s EU meeting once again confirms. 

Even were they to win a victory a year or two hence on banning settlement products, Israel would still be able to use the same workarounds it has been for the past 22 years to avoid any meaningful impact. European consumers would still be directly subsidising the violence of Jewish settler militias and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. 

All of this has been pure theatre – or more accurately, pantomime – to suggest that some kind of administrative process is in hand, that legal avenues are being pursued, that Israel will one day pay a price for its decades-old programme of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. 

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And yet nothing ever actually happens. The most the EU is prepared to do is throw a sop to its critics by imposing symbolic sanctions on a couple of dozen of the most violent settlers – out of a total settler population of nearly 700,000. 

Those settlers did not end up in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by accident. Most were encouraged there by the Israeli state with offers of cheap housing, lower mortgage rates and higher funding of educational and other municipal services. 

Note too that this abject failure relates to Israel’s explicit goal in expanding its settlements: to eviscerate the two-state solution the West says it craves as the only way to bring peace to the region. 

The fact is Europe, Britain and the US have no interest in the two-state solution. If they did, they would have used the ICJ ruling in 2004 as grounds to ban settlement products, give that ban real teeth, and threaten Israel with a loss of all preferential trade with the West until it abided by international law and removed all obstacles to Palestinian statehood, including the settlements.

They did none of this because that was never their intention. 

Their only concern is keeping Israel – their pit bull in the Middle East – fed and watered. 

If Israel wants the settlements to continue expelling Palestinians off their lands until there are no Palestinians left on those lands, then the West is not going to naysay it. 

Just as if Israel wants to continue deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza for death, as a United Nations inquiry recently determined, then the West will turn a blind eye to that too. 

If Israel’s soldiers and Jewish settler militias want to take a US Congressperson hostage in the West Bank, as they briefly did to Democrat politician Ro Khanna last week, no western leader is going to make a fuss about it.

Israel may be a rogue state but it is a rogue state made entirely in the western elite’s image. The West’s only real concern is in ensuring its own publics don’t realise, as they watch a genocidal state disappear the Palestinians, that they are looking into the mirror.