+ The US and  Israel have bombed 763 schools and 316 health facilities in Iran since the war began, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.

+ Once again, Joe Rogan ripped into Trump and Netanyahu’s war:

All of it’s terrifying. Any time you’re involved with — you’re shooting missiles into towns and blowing things up, blowing up infrastructure, blowing up bridges — you know, and Israel’s blowing up Lebanon now. It’s like, what the fuck are we doing? Like, how is this still going on?… Netanyahu has been telling the United States that Iran was months away from building a nuclear bomb for 30 years, or 20 years at least,” Rogan continued. “They’ve always been saying that. Trump was the first one to go, ‘All right, let’s do something about it.’ But it seems like they didn’t know what the fuck they were going to do…Most people that voted for Trump or wanted Trump to be in office, one of the things that was attractive was this ‘no more wars,’” Rogan said. “And now we’re in one of the craziest ones. And China’s flying in cargo planes filled with stuff. We don’t know what the fuck’s in there. Fun, super fun. Great times.

+ Today, the House failed to pass a resolution to end the war on Iran by just one vote, 213-214. A single Democrat voted to continue Trump and Netanyahu’s war: Jared Golden, the former Marine from Maine. Golden has pocketed more than $1 million from AIPAC and another $2 million from Israel lobby-related donors. As far as I can tell from the FEC database and OpenSecrets, Golden didn’t start getting much, if any, money from AIPAC until after Israel began its genocidal operations in Gaza, when it needed all the political cover it could get. Kind of amazing that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Dan Goldman and Jared Moskowitz didn’t follow suit. I guess all they needed was one. Maybe they drew straws. Thomas Massie was the lone Republican to stand up for Congress’s unambiguous right to declare war.

+ Why would anyone want to be in Congress, enduring the glad-handing, the money grubbing, the banal speeches and artery-clogging food, the snubs, humiliations and insipid conversations with real estate agents, Thursday night preachers and used car lot owners, to end up in a chamber were you have no autonomy, but simply obediently follow the orders of your leadership, right or wrong, even to the point of ignoring the very few obligations you are charged with fulfilling by the Constitution. Is it just for the stock trades?

+++

+ Netanyahu, who, with his permafrost hair and sagging left eyelid, looks about as decrepit as Trump these days, told Israelis that the US “reports to him” every day on Iran and that JD Vance personally relayed the details of the peace talks to him on the way back from Islamabad: “He reported to me in detail, as members of this administration do every day.”

+ Former Shin Bet head, Ami Ayalon, told France’s TV 24 that most Israelis “don’t see Palestinians as people” and are willing to support Netanyahu’s plan to “annex all the West Bank and Gaza” without considering “the rift that we are creating with the Jewish people everywhere in the diaspora.” Ayalon said that most young diaspora Jews “do not understand us” and “do not accept what they see” Israel doing in the Occupied Territories. “Unless we are able to come to an agreement with the Palestinian people, we shall not be able to create stability in the Middle East,” Ayalon said. “If we do not divide this piece of land (between Israelis and Palestinians), we are heading to apartheid.”

+ From Andrew Cockburn’s latest Substack dispatch on Israel’s increasing reliance on assassination to eliminate its adversaries:

Amid many fits and starts, the Israeli assassination program became steadily more elaborate and ambitious. For the proposed elimination of a single senior Palestinian fighter, Iyad Batat, in the West Bank in 1999, according to the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, commanders assembled a joint force consisting of no fewer than nine separate security agencies and units. In Rise and Kill First (2018), his encyclopedic history of the assassination program, Bergman reports that by the year 2000, Israel had launched some five hundred targeted killing operations. By the time the book came out, in 2018, it had conducted eight hundred more.

+ In another sign that the old order is cracking apart, Italy has suspended its “defense” agreement with Israel.

+ Alex Gibney, who secretly made a documentary (The Bibi Files) on Netanyahu’s corruption, which got suppressed in the States: “Netanyahu should be tried as a war criminal. If convicted – and it’s hard to see how he would not be – he should spend the rest of his life in prison, facing the judgment of his cellmates.”

+ Lula da Silva: “I want to say this loudly and clearly: The Israeli president is committing genocide against women and children. This is a historical fact.”

+ Jacqueline Rose in the LRB last year on the Messiah Complex politics of Netanyahu: ‘One of the most dangerous components of modern Israeli statehood as it would come to be personified by Netanyahu is that Israel is always on the brink of disaster, as indeed are all the Jews. It will take catastrophe and a war of resurrection to save them. What should be aimed for is a “restrained catastrophe”, to be managed as a perpetual state of war which will render any definitive settlement impossible.’ So many Messiahs, so little peace…