Max, how did Iran defeat Trump's Israel-first Republicans?

Well, this is the subject of a piece I just put out on Substack building on a little note I wrote last night on TwitterX.

Iran defeated the U.S. in war, in a war which Donald Trump's National Security Director and Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted Trump carried out on behalf of Israel to defend Israel from a non-existent, non-imminent threat.

And within a week, as I said at the time, the United States was defeated resoundingly in that war due to two factors.

Number one, Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has proven to be a vice grip around the neck of Trump and his cult-like Republican Party, particularly in the American heartland.

And number two, due to the U.S. spending one-third of its interceptors within just a few weeks of the war and most of its standoff munitions, making it virtually impossible for them to end Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz.

So the most significant losses last night that I see for the Republican Party are not necessarily what we saw in Michigan, for example, where Mike Rogers, who has been the biggest voice of the national security state, former FBI agent, bearing the legacy of the George W. Bush neocons, huge cheerleader for the Iraq War and the Iran War, who said that he actually joined public life in order to defend Israel, was defeated by Abdullah al-Sayed.

Tell me your thoughts on what the election has done to the Democratic Party, which now has an El Sayed AOC wing and a Chuck Schumer, Josh Shapiro wing.

I wondered if you could, if you would, could you interpret what you think the results mean in the short to medium future?

That is the most difficult question right now.

And I think when we go back to this interview in a month or even in a week and definitely in a year, my answer won't matter that much.

And so it's important to... kind of pan out.

But we do need to nail down the details right now just so those who are watching who aren't following the minutiae of Israeli elections or Israeli politics kind of understand where we are.

This was an election in which Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister from the ruling Likud party, which is the traditional party of the right-wing nationalist bloc of Israel, which is in some ways different from right-wing nationalists in other countries because there are so many different ideological currents in it.

Netanyahu is the longest ruling Israeli prime minister in Israeli history, in Israel's very short history.

in the West Bank by black clad figures Mike Huckabee the ambassador dodging the dodging the obvious significance of that attack on a US citizen is it all building up whether Israel attacks Iran again with or without US and British support In the short term, are we looking at more, you know, sordid racist

But before we get there, what is your take on the Israeli elections and who do you think will be ruling Israel?

Yeah, just to clarify, I just spoke to the international affairs director and spokesman for the office of the Tehran municipality because I wanted to talk about the impact of the U.S. naval blockade on Iran and what comes next.

And so so we'll talk about that.

But your question on the Israeli election.

It's one of the more difficult election results to unpack, The 2009 election in Israel sort of inspired me to begin work on my book Goliath, which you can see behind me, because it represented a permanent transition in an Israeli society to the right, to a messianic form of Zionism, and Netanyahu was sort of occupying the center And since then, my theory has sort of proven, has been proven correct.

Netanyahu is the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history.

And he still is at the helm after an election in which many outside observers, pollsters, thought that the change block represented by former IDF chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, would actually overtake Netanyahu.

Rubio's world is it not

Does the Avigdor Lieberman bellicosity fairly represent Gotti-Eisenkot? In other words, is it possible that Eisenkot is more voracious, more genocidal, more murderous than Netanyahu?

Well, he can be every bit as murderous as Netanyahu, and prior to 2009, he was.

I mean, he had far more blood on his hands going up to 2009 than Netanyahu.

He's responsible for the Dahiya doctrine, which is a doctrine of state terror that Israel applied in southern Beirut in 2006.

Going back to the Second Intifada, Eisenkot was in charge of the quote-unquote mowing the lawn operation in the West Bank, where after Operation Defensive Shield, when Ariel Sharon sent in bulldozers to destroy the Jenin refugee camp and to basically maul Palestinian resistance by destroying their neighborhoods, Eisenkot was in charge of just mass arrests, mass repression.

It was a brutal campaign.

Eisenkot is pledging to destroy and totally disarm Hamas within 18 months in Gaza, which will mean more, quote unquote, mowing the lawn in application of the Dahiya doctrine.

What happens to Netanyahu when he's out of office? Is it true that he's back on trial in two or three serious corruption matters as an ordinary criminal defendant?

Right, now moving on, because we've gone off script

... that was why the Russian army entered.

You, you never wanna talk about context.

We don't wanna talk about the context of the United States support and EU supporting the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Ukraine in twenty fourteen, shattering Ukraine's sovereignty, the NATO-ification of Ukraine, the US and the UK planting billions of dollars of weapons on Russia's borders.

There was provocation.

And what's really going on with this discussion now? We're years into this conflict, years into this proxy war where Ukraine has been turned into a proxy state, where the US with UK and EU help, has fought a war for Israel on Iran that has totally failed.

Peace through strength didn't work there.

Yeah

states.What do you, uh, see in the Israeli, uh, elections, and is it significant that Gadi Eisenkot is le- leading, his coalition is leading Netanyahu's, uh, at this stage about 10 days before the election?

I, I still think Netanyahu could pull this out, and one reason is that Gadi Eisenkot is leading a Zionist officially racist coalition, which will not coalition with any of the Arab parties that will put him over the top.

It's that simple.

Um, Netanyahu also may be deeply unpopular across the board in Israel, but he's also the most popular politician in Israel, and also the only one who I think is able to communicate Israel's propaganda imperatives to the West because of his, uh, long history in Washington, growing up in Philadelphia, his connection with all of these Western leaders.

Whereas Gadi Eisenkot comes out of the military and just doesn't have a command of the English language.

So who is Gadi Eisenkot? He is the former Israeli Army Chief of Staff.

When he was the Northern Commander of the Israeli military, he established the Dahiya Doctrine, which we've talked about many times here.

Mm

It was not mentioning that Benjamin Netanyahu more likely than not knew about this 10 days before it happened.

Well, it was an occasion for New York State and Texas, among other states, to lower the U.S. flag to half-mast at the state capitol in Albany and the state capitol down in the heart of Texas.

I think there are many other states that participated in this very strange ritual for an attack that happened in another country in which foreigners were mainly members of a foreign army were killed.

There will be no flag lowering for the victims of the Gaza genocide, which ensued, including 21,000 child victims.

And every politician in both parties had to issue statements pouring out tears for the victims of October 7th.

It's become a ritual that is more observed in more sacred and passionate fashion than 9-11 has been in my lifetime.

And it is also now an effort to paper over the reality of why October 7th happened, which was a siege that had been taking place since 2005, in which one of the architects of that siege, an Israeli academic named Arnon Sofer, who consulted for various governments, said we have to kill and kill and kill all day, every day in order to maintain control of Gaza.

Right

How, if at all, is this playing a role in the Israeli Knesset elections?

Well, this is a major boon for Netanyahu, and it's being interpreted by many outside of Israel as a false flag, partly for that reason, and also because Israel has lied so frequently, not just since October 7th, but just generally, that no one believes Israel's version of reality.

Anything involving Israel is seen in terms of conspiracy because of the conspiracies laid by the Israeli state and Israeli intelligence.

I think back to Leslie Stahl's notorious and disgusting interview with a masked Mossad agent who was boasting about the pager operation, which left hundreds of Lebanese citizens injured and maimed, including many children.

And he boasted that we create the script, we write the script, and you're just living in our reality, and we're basically creating reality.

He may have meant something different from inventing reality, but the way that the global public interprets Israeli actions is now almost largely through the realm of conspiracy.

And the timing of this Fly Dubai incident benefited Netanyahu in a way that's going to lead to many questions.

Uh, h- how d- does the, uh, election look for Netanyahu now, either as a result of this or immediately before it?

How was that received when he said it? Do you know?

Well, it depends on which audience, but I think many Iranians were not expecting Pezeshkian to deliver such a defiant and concisely worded speech outlining Iran's, the victorious outcome of Iran, its defiant stance toward the U.S. and Israel, and the double standards that have been imposed on Iran.

It was also received, I would say, very well by the U.S. media.

Pezeshkian's speech received front-page write-ups from the New York Times and the Washington Post, not the Wall Street Journal, but it received half a page in the Wall Street Journal.

And it was a, you could call it a victory speech.

Pezeshkian opened the speech by listing many of the atrocities that the U.S. committed on the first day, assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and at the same time massacring over 135 school children in Minab, massacring 12-year-old female athletes in Lamord, actually using an experimental Lockheed Martin precision-guided missile.

And then he pivoted and said, but Iran will not bow.

I guess he's a well-paid spokesperson for the Zionists who've engaged him.

That was the, the last real attempt, was the Boland Amendment.

Yeah.

Um, so Efrain Rios Montt was a US-backed dictator who was also close to, like, the Christian right, Christian Zionists like, uh, Pat Robertson.

He was the first evangelical president.

Um, and Israel comes in and says, "We will supply him.

We'll give his soldiers Uzis to basically mow down the Mayans and the, what's left of the Guatemalan insurgency, and destroy entire villages, and we will train them." Rios Montt said that, that our model for the Venez- the Guatemalan soldier is the Israeli commando, and Reagan won't have to sign off on anything, and we will show how valuable we are as a US ally.

So, uh, yeah, Israel provided them with the computer they used and the, and the surveillance systems to round up activists who opposed his rule.

Correction, terrorists from the group Palestine

And why would you extend it if you had knowledge that there was any kind of threat on the horizon? All of that, I think, builds to people believing that it's something more than, I don't know, soft bigotry of low expectations that Netanyahu had of Hamas, but more of a, I hope this harm happens so that I have a pretext to do X, Y, and Z.

Netanyahu was nearly overthrown after October 7th.

He was terrified.

He was shaken.

He's been misunderstood by people, especially people outside of Israel, as the most hawkish figure when, yeah, he always wanted the U.S. to wage war on Iran.

That's true.

That's his life's work.

The question is whether or not there are opportunities that you see here to exploit this Haaretz story, to actually change the material relationship between the US and Israel, instead of sort of resting on our laurels that the messaging battle has in some respects been won.

Why does she hate you?

Yeah, and apologies to Gray Zone viewers to whom we're simultaneously streaming this.

We're not endorsed by any precious metals there.

We're just backed by our weight in pure, unadulterated investigative journalism.

I think anyone who's been watching Judge Napolitano's Judging Freedom or The Gray Zone knows that while I was reporting from Iran and producing some journalism that was very inconvenient for the U.S.-Israeli Epstein coalition, showing the war crimes that they committed from the ground and being one of the very few English language or American reporters to have done so.

so.I was targeted by Laura Loomer on behalf probably of one of an array of, uh, of cri- of, of crime bosses from New York to Tel Aviv to Kiev sporting gold chains with Magen Davids on them and she was demanding my arrest, that I be hauled off the plane on my way back, that I be raided at 5:00 a.m., swatted, uh, e- you know, everything short of death.

And when I returned to Dulles Airport, my phones were seized by Customs and Border Protection.

As we speak late August, early September, about a little more than a month before the election, does it appear the Likud will be forming a new government or does it appear Netanyahu will be out and his political woes will be, his legal woes will be regenerated?

What was he talking about when he said the Islamic Republic of Britain?

Well, this was, uh, from two weeks ago during a, a trip to the UK on a podcast where Netanyahu was referring to Muslim immigration to Britain and that, uh, the, that Britain would become the Islamic Republic of Britain, and that it would have to be handled the same way that Israel has handled the Islamic Republic of Iran, where Israel initiated two unilateral, unprovoked wars on Iran.

So essentially, he was threatening Britain and telling them, "If you turn away from your special relationship with Israel..." And Britain, I mean, right now is effectively occupied territory if you look at how they're treating Palestine solidarity groups like Palestine Action.

Uh, but Netanyahu was nevertheless threatening that if these Muslim immigrants ever get any measure of political control or some figure like Jeremy Corbyn comes to power, Israel will treat you like an enemy and will wage essentially hybrid war.

Israel's already waging hybrid warfare on the United States.

Netanyahu has referred explicitly to the US as the eight- eighth front in his eight-front war.

The other seven fronts are in the im- on the immediate periphery of Israel.

Right

Right

...

the ultimate yes man who apparently had just lied to him about munitions, but he still chose him to live.

Um, of course, the plot was completely phony.

We knew it came from Israel.

The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Israel had fed a tip to the US that the Iranians were planning to kill Trump in, uh, at this summit.

This was after the Khomeini funeral, which I reported on, in which many common Iranians were in the streets calling for retaliation on Trump for killing their dear leader who they, they loved, considered a guide.

Uh, what happened recently in the West Bank that caused Ambassador Mike Huckabee, of all people, to refer to the Israeli so-called settlers as terrorists?

Wow.

Anyway, yeah, yeah.

W- I'm, I'm getting, you know, sidetracked a little bit, but I'm just trying to give you as much background as possible over what I witnessed and what I did.

Me and, uh, Professor Marandi actually went to the first day of the funeral at the Grand Mosque in Tehran, the Mosallah, which anyone can watch at The Gray Zone right now.

It's like an hour long, and it shows you what it's like going through the streets of Tehran with Professor Marandi and then actually getting to the site of this funeral, going through various security checks and walking in.

And I think, you know, just for the, just for the visuals and the atmosphere alone, I, I was really proud of what I was, what I was able to pull together.

This is journalism.

Yeah, so-

Right.

Nikolai Mladenov is the director of the Board of Peace.

He's the former defense minister of Bulgaria, which is a country that, like Donald Rumsfeld would have identified as New Europe, one of these former Soviet bloc states that became a frontline NATO state.

And is a gr- greater tool of NATO and the US than a powerful, like a country with an industrial base like Germany.

So Mladenov was, and, and, and Mladenov came out of WINEP, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is one of the major Israel lobby think tanks in Washington.

His fellowship was endowed by a wealthy Zionist American family.

He, uh, introduced this plan.

What's going on there? Why are all these people from Morocco and Libya trying to get in there?

No, you're the plaintiff

... of crime.

I'm the plaintiff.

The government is on the defensive, and I think it's a really positive result because a lot of journalists are getting their phones seized, especially under this administration.

And we just saw yesterday or two days ago, uh, Matthew Cole, who's, like, a way more, you know, mainstream journalist than me, who was freelancing for The New York Times, and he published this piece, um, about a 2019 raid by Navy C- Seal Team Six in North Korea, a secret raid in which they were to plant an electronic surveillance device on the shores of North Korea.

They got, um, found out accidentally by fishermen, and so they decided to kill all the fishermen that, that were there in order to cover their tracks.

Uh, they killed them, they shot them, and then they punctured their lungs with knives so they would fl- go to the bottom of the sea, so no one would find them.

Yeah

Why do you refer to Netanyahu's most recent trip two days ago as desperate?

Well, since I offered my analysis last Monday at The Gray Zone on Netanyahu's eighth trip to Washington, uh, to meet with someone he's treated as his employee, President Donald Trump, since Trump reentered office for a second term, there is-- there are new revelations or leaks out of the Trump administration that Trump has been exasperated by the state of the war.

He wants to find a way out, but can't.

He feels trapped.

He has no idea what the war is about anymore, nor does the American public.

Uh, two-thirds of the American public strongly opposes the war.

The war has failed.

I mean, you can't come, come up with words as strong enough to, uh, describe him.

How is Israel threatening US press freedom?

Well, Israel has been threatening US press freedom for decades through its lobby, which has sought to punish anyone who reports the truth.

That, for example, Representative Ro Khanna just experienced when he went to the West Bank and experienced settler terror.

Representative Ro Khanna showed that Palestinians have been telling the truth, that settlers are terrorists who assault them and assault anyone who comes to aid them, and that they are being supported by the Israeli military and the Israeli government to the hilt.

Uh, you know, years ago, even just re-reporting on that would have been much more difficult than it is today.

So now you can see it's not just the Israel lobby.

I think it's almost impossible to call figures and groups that are based in Israel, but pretending to be American or, uh, figures who are sponsored directly by the Israeli government influencers to just refer to them as the, a lobby.

What is Aoun's relationship to Hezbollah?

Uh, I was wondering w- what exactly happened here?

Well, it, it relates to the whole story.

I mean, I'm being ...

We're, we're facing a new, more intense framework of repression in the United States, which is being administered by a kind of class of white collar criminals who are under the influence of Zionism and the State of Israel.

And so in some ways it wasn't entirely shocking, but it is completely illegal what they did to me.

I went on this ...

Or, or it should be under the Constitution.

This is quite interesting because, uh, it seems to be heading two directions at once.

First question, you know, why did you go to Iran, and in particular, why would you want to be known to have attended the Ayatollah's funeral?

[laughs] Well, I went to Iran on a press visa, just like every other journalist who was there.

All the mainstream members of the press entered the same way I did.

I applied through the Iranian e-Visa system, picked up my press visa at the interest section, and went in and covered the largest funeral.

Not just the largest funeral, I think it was the largest gathering in human history.

And I gained insights I would've never gotten about the state of the Islamic Republic and its constituents and what they wanted as, you know, we were on the brink of returning to a US/Israeli imposed war On Iran.

While I was there, I was able to interview officials.

Mm

How were you treated there? Did the police stop you? Did the government check you? Did the government seek your, um, uh, electronic devices?

That's a great question that no one's asked me.

Uh, remember I went last year in May of 2025, and I was able to basically just go wherever I wanted.

Uh, I went to Isfahan in a taxi cab, you know, just freely hung out in that city.

There was...

That was a month before the 12-day war.

The 12-day war began with Mossad cells inside Iran launching drone attacks and car bombings from inside the country as well as assassinations, and since then, Iran's security has been facing, you know, internal disruption.

[laughs]

What happened?

Well, I went to Tehran, Iran, on, uh, July 4th, uh, lack of Independence Day in, uh, Israel-influenced United States.

Arrived there to report on the largest gathering in human history, the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated by the US-Israeli coalition in his office on February 28th.

I was there to report on the war.

I was there to visit the sites of US-Israeli atrocities, and obviously, this was a threat to the main element controlling the Trump administration, because I immediately came under attack from Israel-aligned or simply Israeli elements, uh, that were painting me not as a journalist, but as some kind of extremist who had gone there to pay homage to Khamenei, which even if it were true, uh, would not have...

Uh, I, I still would have had constitutional protections to do that, but that's not what I was doing.

I was credentialed with a press visa.

So they haven't lost their mojo, have they? They're still confident that they control levers in power.

But how do the NGOs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the media themselves, how did they fertilize the field upon which this war grew?

I mean, were it not for the liberal NGO class and the Democratic Party, Operation Epic Fury, or what I call Epstein Fury, would not have been possible.

40,000 killed, by the way, is the figure that was widely reported by the Iranian government.

Well, I've seen it go up to 100,000.

Soon, I imagine it could be at 6 million.

But this all began on January 7th and 8th in Iran.

There were some protests in marketplaces.

class as another

Isn't that so?

Well, I've been saying that I think Netanyahu, while he's, he's blamed for the position that Israel's in, actually, uh, managed to buy Israel a lot of time.

He toppled the, uh, Biden administration.

He basically helped destroy Kamala Harris, and he's destroying Donald Trump, and he could destroy any further administration because he has been able to connect, uh, so deeply through the Israel lobby and through Israel's cutouts in the US, which he helped develop going back to the 1980s and '90s as the main Hasbarist or propagandist for Israel.

Uh, he, he's been able to, uh, forge this r- unprecedented relationship between the Likud controlled state of Israel and the Republican Party, and I don't, I don't think replacing Netanyahu will provide Israel with a clear answer.

Israel's, the crisis Israel faces is not be- is not Netanyahu.

The crisis is the anachronistic colonial structure of Zionism, and Netanyahu has been able to try to paper over the contradictions.

How do you read the, um, recent New York City primaries, uh, in which serious, serious, serious progressives, uh, defeated, um, mainstream liberal Democrats, including the defeat of an incumbent congressman, Dan Goldman, who was Jewish, by a progressive who also is Jewish?