Isreal vs. Iran: what next?
On Friday, the 13th of June, Israel launched a surprise attack on multiple targets across Iran. Israel strikes hit missile sites and nuclear facilities, and more recently also targeted Iranian state tv.
The two nations have subsequently traded missile attacks over the following days, an escalation to the conflict, which is now the biggest between these two longstanding adversaries.
New Statesman editor Tom McTague meets Lawrence Freedman, Professor Emeritus of War Studies at King's College London, to discuss the conflict between Israel and Iran.
[See also: Netanyahu realises his lifelong dream]
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The National
an hour ago
- The National
John Curtice gives verdict on Corbyn-Sultana party threat to Keir Starmer
The leading pollster said that it was 'of course' possible that the Prime Minister and others could be dethroned at the next General Election, if the Corbyn-Sultana project got off the ground. A senior Labour source told the New Statesman that it was 'not inconceivable' that Starmer, Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood could all be booted out by their constituents in 2029. At the last election, Starmer's vote almost halved, Streeting's majority was reduced to just 528 votes while Mahmood's vote fell by 53%, all facing pro-Palestine independent challengers. Asked whether the trio were at risk, Curtice, of Strathclyde University, told The National: 'Of course it's not inconceivable, just look at the size of their majorities and look at how far Labour's vote's fallen.' He added that his assessment of the data showed it 'wasn't clear that Labour were making much of a recovery' in constituencies with large numbers of Muslim voters. Pro-Palestine independents took four seats at the last election, most notably Labour bigwig Jonathan Ashworth's defeat at the hands of Shockat Adam in Leicester South. But Curtice said that the Corbyn-Sultana party could face challenges along the way, highlighting what he identified as mistakes during Corbyn's time as Labour leader. READ MORE: SNP to press ahead with Palestine recognition vote as Labour 'bargaining' with Israel He said: 'Corbyn clearly has the ability to enthuse a section of the electorate. But does he have the ability to provide leadership?' He pointed to Corbyn's stance on Brexit in the run-up to the 2019 vote, when he said he would grant a second referendum but backed neither Leave nor Remain. 'On an issue that was clearly polarising the electorate and when Boris Johnson was clearly milking the votes on one side, that was just politically utterly the wrong strategy,' said Curtice. 'Corbyn is a sincere politician with a number of very clear beliefs which he can communicate well, he's got that art and he's got that art much more than Starmer does. But leadership is also about being able to take folk who are not your natural supporters with you.' He also expressed doubt about the party's organisational capacity, noting their 'original announcement they couldn't manage to coordinate on'. Sultana appeared to have surprised Corbyn by announcing the launch of the new party, which he only confirmed the day after. Curtice added: 'The crucial question is now: will the fight next year's local and devolved elections? Are they going to be up and ready? At the moment, they're engaging on a consultation about a name.' He said that 'time was of the essence' if the party wanted to fight next year's devolved and local elections, which include London – a city which should be 'prime territory for Corbyn'. Corbyn said: 'Up and down the country, there is huge appetite for the policies that are needed to fix society in 2025: public ownership, wealth redistribution, housing justice, and a foreign policy based on peace and human rights.' "For too long, people have been denied a real political choice. Not anymore. 600,000 people have already signed up to build a real alternative to inequality, poverty and war. This is just the beginning. We are an unstoppable movement for equality, democracy and peace — and we are never, ever going away.'
Spectator
6 hours ago
- Spectator
A century of western meddling in Iran
On 22 June this year, seven B2 Stealth bombers flew on a 37-hour round trip from bases in the US to drop 14 30,000lb bombs on two nuclear facilities in Iran. A third was attacked with cruise missiles fired from a submarine, possibly in the Persian Gulf. Few can say with any certainty how much damage was done to the Iranian nuclear programme, which Tehran insists is only for peaceful purposes, but it is likely to have been considerable. Whether this will slow or accelerate Iran's effort to build a bomb is unclear. This massive demonstration of American firepower brought the brief 12-day war between Iran and Israel to a rapid close. Iran came off considerably worse than its adversary in the conflict, though you would not know it from the rhetoric of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. One joke I heard in Israel in the days after the war's end was that the Iranians were entirely justified in celebrating a tremendous victory over 'the Zionist entity', as they had shown the world how they could destroy more than a dozen of the biggest bombs ever built with nothing more than two multi-billion-dollar nuclear plants. Scott Anderson's fine, thorough and gripping account of the early stages of the Iranian revolution is a useful read for anyone who wants to learn quite how and why relations deteriorated to such an extent with what was once a staunch, if sometimes independent-minded, ally of the West. Some accounts of the Iranian revolution – and there are many – do not bother overly with the deeper history of the country. This is not one, and Anderson covers much ground easily and elegantly. We learn of the rotten Qajar dynasty (1789-1925) and its failure to resist the depredations of imperial freebooters and powers, chiefly Britain. He then moves briskly on to Reza Shah Pahlavi, the uneducated, tough and efficacious cavalry officer who seized power in the 1920s and set about modernising the country in the usual style of military strongmen. Many of his expansive reforms, Anderson notes, caused great concern to Iran's conservative clergy, including a young, gifted scholar called Ruhollah Khomeini. Britain deposed Reza Shah during the second world war and installed his son, the slightly drippy Mohammad, on the throne. In 1953, the Americans – now the growing power in the region – schemed, along with the British, to save the young monarch from the populist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who wanted to nationalise the country's oil industry in a coup that Iranians have never forgotten, as some sloganeering in Iran in June made clear. Anderson describes the growing megalomania and authoritarianism of 'the Shah', as he was soon known to the West, who conceived monstrously ambitious projects without the technical understanding or political skills to make them a success. Israel and the US assisted in setting up a frightening, though not always effective, security service. This helped protect Iran's ruler from growing unrest led by ideologically diverse figures including the charismatic and increasingly vocal Khomeini, whom he exiled to Iraq in the early 1960s. The Shah's 'White Revolution' – a bid to transform Iran's society and economy but not politics – led to massive change throughout that decade, turbocharged by vastly increased oil revenues in the early 1970s. But these fuelled inflation, a huge influx of rural poor into urban slums and fierce resentment of a corrupt, wealthy, westernised elite. For much of this period (and Anderson largely misses this in his otherwise fairly comprehensive account), the extreme left were the vanguard of opposition in Iran. The Shah spoke of the 'Red threat' and the 'Black threat' – the left and the religious reactionaries – but feared the former most. The communist party, Tudeh, had been weakened by decades of repression; but groups spawned in the heyday of the new left's revolutionary moment at the end of the 1960s waged a sometimes spectacular, if ineffectual, terrorist campaign against the Shah's rule throughout the 1970s. Some radical Iranian thinkers made a concerted effort to fuse Marxist-Leninist thought with Islamism. There was much that the two ideologies shared: binary thinking; an appeal to the downtrodden's desire for social justice; visceral anti-Americanism; and enemies such as imperialism, capitalism and Zionism. Ali Shariati, a key thinker, translated from French to Farsi the most celebrated text of Frantz Fanon, one of the foremost intellectuals of the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Shariati turned Fanon's Les damnés de la terre into the mostazafin, 'the exploited' or 'miserable', a text which is still commonly used by the Iranian regime today. The Shah's security services crushed both leftist extremists and the Islamo-Marxists with relative ease. One reason was that support for these dissidents was largely restricted to the educated middle classes. When leftist militants tried to recruit in the miserable, conservative, overcrowded southern suburbs of Tehran where many rural immigrants now lived, they got nowhere. Repression, and the left's failures, aided the radical clerics led by Khomeini in their efforts to first co-opt and then crush the diverse coalition that resisted the Shah through street protests in 1978 and 1979. Anderson does an excellent job of narrating the extraordinary events of the revolution itself, drawing deft pictures of the protagonists, including the Shah's last hapless prime minister, the slightly absurd Francophile Shaphour Bakhtiar. He also interviewed the 86-ear-old former empress – who tried to the last to mitigate the consequences of her husband's increasingly wayward decisions – at her modest home in exile in the US. Anderson has dug deep into archives and published sources that cover the wilful blindness, inconsistency, hubris and ignorance that characterised US policy towards Iran in the years before 1979 and during the revolution itself. He has tracked down and interviewed many who were there, such as the mercurial and well-informed Michael Metrinko, a junior diplomat posted to Iran at the time, and other important players back in Washington. Anyone interested in the woeful roles of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon will find much here, and the missteps of Jimmy Carter are described both fairly and accurately. Some of this is familiar, but Anderson's diligent research and reporting brings much that is fresh too. Inevitably, however, the emphasis on the US perspective and on US actors leaves less space for the multiple Iranian ones, which is a loss. King of Kings winds up pretty much with the beginning of the hostage crisis of November 1979. This is a wise decision, and allows a satisfactory conclusion. Anderson does allow himself a rapid survey of the following years, which in fact saw a 'second revolution' as seismic as the first. Modern Iran is as much a product of the domestic conflict that succeeded the revolution and the bloody eight-year Iran-Iraq war as of earlier events. The period saw the radical clerics led by Khomeini cement their hold on power through the merciless destruction of all internal opposition, the building of a solid institutional structure for the new regime and the expansion of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This eventually led to the succession in 1989 of a new Supreme Leader, a relatively young, middle-ranking scholar who was committed to the revolutionary project, called Ali Khamenei. He remains in power today.
New Statesman
12 hours ago
- New Statesman
The conflicts that shape us
One of the pleasures of editing this magazine is the chance to read the letters. The wit, wisdom and – how should I put this? – advice I receive each week is mighty, and appreciated. It is genuinely helpful to know what New Statesman readers are thinking: what they like in each issue and what they are less keen on. It is, for example, particularly revealing that Jonathan Sumption's essay on Gaza continues to provoke impassioned debate on both sides. The ongoing crisis in Gaza – and the British government's response – is clearly something we must continue to focus on. This week, our international editor, Megan Gibson, digs into the authoritarian instincts of the government's decision to classify the campaign group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. It is a disconcerting read. There is plenty of humour in the letters inbox, too. This week, I especially enjoyed Michael Henderson's note hailing the delights of Italian culture following Finn McRedmond's dispatch from Chianti last week. 'It is indeed a magnificent culture,' Michael wrote, before adding a delightfully controversial 'but' – there is always a but. When it comes to 'ale vs Sangiovese', as Michael put it, 'the English win every time'. By publishing these words, I fear I may have sparked a diplomatic incident. A letter of protest from the Italian ambassador is no doubt already winging its way to us. If so, perhaps I should provoke further – can we agree Cheddar is superior to Parmesan, and nicer on pasta? That cheese with fish is fine? And Marmite, of course, is king of all European condiments? I shall now assume the brace position under my desk. Beyond such culinary disputes, readers have also urged a greater focus on class as the driving force of British politics. I agree, and hope in the coming weeks we will be able to do more on this subject. The very question of what constitutes the 'working class' today is a fascinating topic. I remember visiting Ohio in an attempt to understand why working-class auto workers were abandoning the Democratic Party for Donald Trump. Yet, when I visited their homes, I found many had often already retired with good pensions and no mortgage. Some even spent winters in their second homes in Florida. The very poor in the cities I visited were often African American, did not own their homes and were still voting Democrat. The story, as ever, was complicated. I wonder whether it is fair to assume the university-educated children of middle England inherit their parents' class, even if they do not own assets, cannot conceive of ever doing so and, as Marx might have put it, sell their labour for increasingly poor wages. Are they middle class or part of a new working class? One thing is clear: the lure of a new left-wing party under Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana is strong for this cohort, who should not be ignored – a point made by Jason Cowley in his Diary. The main subject of this week's magazine, however, is the growing sense of unease in the country as we head into the depths of summer. As George Eaton writes, there is now real concern in Westminster at the continuing strike action over NHS pay, mounting fiscal pressure on the government and the spreading protests over so-called asylum hotels. I said when I became editor that I wanted the New Statesman to cover difficult topics like these with old-fashioned reportage – doing the hard work of travelling the country and talking to people. That is exactly what Anoosh Chakelian has done this week, visiting Diss in Norfolk and Epping in Essex to understand what is happening and why. As ever, her reporting is first-rate: thoughtful, compassionate and illuminating. I urge you to read it. Sitting alongside this is another piece of excellent writing from our new culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, who argues that the government must be prepared to have difficult conversations if resolution and integration are to be reached. Elsewhere, Will Lloyd meets a man still searching for justice after the Battle of Orgreave, Freddie Hayward details the continuing radicalisation of the Maga movement in Washington and Will Dunn offers a painfully funny – and at times just plain painful – account of King-Emperor Donald Trump's bizarre visit to Scotland. I hope you enjoy it. If you don't, the Correspondence page is all yours. Oh, and here's one for Finn: a pint of Theakston's beats a pint of Guinness. And now I'm back under my desk. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent
