These days it seems all quiet on the West Asian front. Just the quiet, ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and the usual affronts. However, if you look at a map, the White Empire is getting choked out, and if you look at their markets, it's starting to hurt.

The Empire has lost control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran and now the Bab el-Mandeb to Yemen. This is America's equivalent of Britain's Suez Crisis, it marks the nadir of their power and their collapse as an imperial power. You can already see the imps cowering and running for cover. The South Korean stock market has collapsed and the Japanese yen has to be stabilized with euros. None of this will hold, none of this can hold, without holding onto the trade routes, which the Empire cannot hold. America is returning to its natural position, 10,000 kilometers away, with nothing to do with it. It's taking time, but look, it's already begun. The quiet is the storm.

Bab el-Mandeb

The Strait of Hormuz is where a lot of stuff comes from, but through the Bab el-Mandeb is where even more stuff must go. Iran took the Strait of Hormuz months ago and has imposed a new security architecture on the region, which they marked by breaking the siege on Yemen, imposed by the American proxy, the Saudis. The Saudis harried the civilian planes Iran was sending, and in response to that Yemen retaliated in force.

Yemen has imposed a maritime blockade on the Saudis since July 22nd. As of August 5th, they have targeted eight tankers and turned back 29 (see Yayha Saree, who's never lied to me). Saree has called this 'a blockade for a blockade' and a 'siege for a siege'. After decades of starving and attacking Yemen, you can't say that the Saudis don't deserve it. And now the pressure on the White Empire behind them has been doubled.

Yemen hit Aramco facilities in Jazan and Yanbu, taking Jazan (and 400,000 barrels per day) offline entirely. The Saudis say they're going to 'tentatively' reopen by August 15th, with Oil Price saying "Tentatively is doing some fairly heroic work there." Saudis, of course, are anything but heroic and are trying to blame (and bomb Iraq) to save face. Meanwhile, they're using proxies on the ground to attack Yemen, which is not going well. Saree reports "the death and injury of hundreds of Saudi mercenaries."

When your proxy needs a proxy, and they get sent back in boxes, things are not going well. Things are not going well for the White Empire here. After losing the Persian Gulf, they have retreated to the Red Sea, where Yemen already defeated them. The Empire has been surviving by the grace of China, really, and also by pipelines and shipping through the Red Sea. But now Yemen has cut off their retreat.

The Persian Gulf

What are they retreating from? The Persian Gulf, where they took a beating and lost all their bases. Before the war they started, the United States controlled the Persian Gulf by default. They always knew that their Gulf bases were indefensible in the case of hot war with Iran, but the status quo held as long as America didn't go to war with Iran. But that's over now, as is their control of the Persian Gulf. We are witnessing a process that Amerikanets calls 'debasification'. Distant America held the water of Hormuz because they held land tribute from satraps like Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait, but now that's all gone.

The US Fifth Fleet was based in Bahrain, but they withdrew all vessels in February and, chaotically, at least 1,500 colonizers shortly afterwards. Now they're back in Tampa, Florida where they belong (until land back, inshallah). This debasification has happened all across the region. As American state media reports, "there have been evacuations at other U.S. military bases in the region, though the exact details are unknown at this point." What is, increasingly, known is the satellite footage. These bases are blown.

As predicted in their own report, called the 'tyranny of geography', Iran is just too powerful in Iran. The indefensible White line across the Persian Gulf has been rolled back, and even their retreat to Jordan and Saudi has been cut off. None of these bases are safe, and Iran is increasingly targeting troop barracks to make the message plain. As Nasrallah said, when American troops enter vertically and horizontally, the Americans will leave the region, and then they may not even have to take Jerusalem, inshallah.

I return to the geographical point, which is that the United States is 10,000 kilometers away on another continent and has no business in the Middle East, or even in America, honestly. America can only stand athwart geography yelling 'stop!' if it has a foothold, and now it does not. Just two feet in the ass, showing it the way out.

The Map

Let's look at the map again, but differently. This is a Spilhaus projection which is fun because it turns the world into a Mediterranean world. You can see the world as one big ocean with land on the sides, which is kinda true, especially if you're a boat. As a boat sees it, the ocean is really one big road going from Panama to Malacca, with a toll booth in the middle (east).

As Port Economics, Management and Policy puts it, "the configuration of the global maritime shipping system is relatively simple. The central axis is a circum-equatorial corridor linking North America, Europe, and Pacific Asia through the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, and the Panama Canal."

The Suez Canal is the choke point that broke the British Empire and the Bab el-Mandeb/Strait of Hormuz is the same choke point moved over. This is what breaks the American Empire now (it's all one White Empire to us on the bottom). 'Americans' will be like 'we don't need the Middle East, we've got our own genocided continent, we're just genociding abroad recreationally.' Which is true. America can survive without this shipping lane, but American Empire cannot. And in that Empire is where they're feeling the pain.

The Imps of Imperialism

White Empire has always been a financial proposition, the wallet is the only place they feel anything. After World War II, America inherited the empire from Britain, with occupied Europe and Japan as spoils of war. It still holds European euros and Japanese yen on its books as, effectively, stabilizers.

But now we are describing the point described by Marx in relation to Britain/India, but it applies as well to America and its conquered territory in Europe and Japan. He said, "These systems have in common the relinquishment, by the native States of the right to self-defence [NATO], of maintaining diplomatic relations, and of settling the disputes among themselves without the interference of the Governor-General. All of them have to pay a tribute, either in hard cash, or in a contigent of armed forces, commanded by British officers." Does this not describe the situation of Europe, Japan, and South Korea? It's the same phenomenon, it's one White Empire, as I keep going on and on. As Marx said,"'It was,' says an English writer, 'a system of fattening allies, as we fatten oxen, till they were worthy of being devoured.'"

That is what's happening now. As pressure from the choking in the Middle East builds up, 'America's' is using its colonies to delay consequences. The US Treasury is selling euros to buy yen. But they cannot avoid consequences, only delay them. They're robbing Peter to pay Paul.

America is doing a 'joint intervention' in the yen, pretending both that Japan is a real country and that this isn't just market manipulation. They're doing this because Japan would otherwise sell US Treasuries and impact them. So they're dumping euros instead. They're jumping from one colonial foot to another, while the ground is shifting beneath them.

The man doing this certainly knows something about currency manipulation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was George Soros's hatchet man, tanking various currencies, from Asia to Great Britain. Putting him in charge is like appointing an Al-Qaeda guy as a flight attendant, I don't think he can help himself. He might pretend to fly for a while, but he's going to crash the whole thing. Bessent described the recent joint manipulation, saying,

Intervention is a signaling mechanism. And the US wanted to signal that we have confidence in the Japanese policies so we will need to see follow through from the Japanese policies. But I do believe that part of the inflation uptick in Japan was a result of the weak yen and also the energy prices. I think we will get to the other side of the Iranian conflict, energy will come down, and then as we no longer have excess yen weakness, that that will also contribute to inflation coming down and that Japan and the yen can go into a virtuous cycle.

The yen, of course, has only been trending upwards, the country is, on average, 400 years old and has -3 children, there is no virtuous economic cycle incoming. And Japan, of course, has no real policy control. It's a colony, America made them seppuku their economy in the Plaza Accords. There was nothing they could do about it then and there's nothing they're going to do now. Japan is just downstream of America's misadventures in the Middle East and they'll be first to drown. The crash has already come to South Korea, their stock market is down over a third, but it's the same imperial bubble.

Bessent talks about this being a temporary intervention like Trump talked about Iran being a temporary war. It's nothing of the sort. There is no 'other side' of the Iranian conflict in sight and the pressure building up will hit the imperial core soon. For many people, it has hit them already. A lot of signals are flashing like 1929, and a Greatest Depression is incoming. You can look at the relative quiet on the homefront and think that they have somehow avoided consequences but the quiet is the storm. They have lost the map, they are losing the markets and soon – though not soon enough for the people of Palestine – they will reap the whirlwind.

Many years ago, my old university was hosting a “film and philosophy” conference. Not having the interest or intellectual clout to submit a paper to deliver, I was nevertheless roped in to guide the guests around, operate the lights during lectures, and (in one memorable instance, a mere week after having passed my driving test) … Continue reading "(The Curse of) Queen Kelly (1929; US; Erich von Stroheim)"

Nate Bear Do Not Panic

Israel is home to thousands of international criminals accused or found guilty in a second country for committing a wide-variety of crimes.

Many of the individuals are dual-nationals who have taken advantage of their ability to move seamlessly between Israel and their second country of citizenship to commit crimes and, in some cases, evade justice.

The scale of the criminality, and the volume of cases (relative to the population of Israel), is astonishing.

I was prompted to look into this after finding out that Timur Mindich, the ultimate financial beneficiary of the Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point, fled to Israel last year just days before being charged as the mastermind behind a $100 million embezzlement scheme involving Ukraine’s state nuclear power company. Mindich also happens to be the co-owner of Kvartal 95 Studio, the production company founded by Volodymyr Zelensky.

Mindich, like many in this article, has taken advantage of Israel’s controversial Law of Return which allows any Jew in the world to claim Israeli citizenship without having to renounce their home country passport.

Some of those accused and charged have made minor or international headlines, some haven’t, but the scale of the issue was such that I thought it would be useful to document my research here.

In some cases, Israel has refused to extradite the wanted person despite requests from the country in which the crimes were committed.

Staying on Ukraine and refused extradition requests, we have Oleksandr Dubilet, the former Chairman of the Board of Ukraine’s PrivatBank. Dubilet is currently a fugitive in Israel and the subject of multiple criminal investigations and extradition requests for his role in embezzling at least $100 million dollars following the 2016 privatisation of PrivatBank. To date, Israel has refused to extradite him.

Israel as a bolthole for financial fraudsters is a common theme. One of the most significant SEC fraud cases in recent years involved over 150 Israelis (some with dual US-Israeli nationality, others not), wanted for their role in conducting binary options fraud worth upwards of $100 billion.

Binary options are a type of financial bet where the outcome is essentially all-or-nothing. Instead of buying a stock or currency, you bet on whether the price of a stock or currency will be above or below a certain level at a specific time. While not illegal, the Israeli companies were accused of rigging and manipulating prices and expiry times and using fake identities.

For a decade until 2017, Israel was the global centre for the online binary-options industry. The Israeli police failed to investigate, so hundreds of cases were filed in Israeli courts by people from dozens of countries who had been defrauded.

One of the most notorious fraudsters was Lee Elbaz, the CEO of Yukom Communications, a dual US-Israeli national. She was arrested in 2017 when on holiday in New York and eventually convicted of wire fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Other prime Israeli movers in the binary options fraud business were Yossi Herzog and Yakov Cohen, both connected with Yukom and other binary options front companies. They were charged with $140 million fraud in 2019 but despite being under a DOJ criminal investigation the US choose not to pursue their extradition, while other Israeli co-conspirators in the Yukom case have joined Elbaz in serving jail sentences.

Other Israeli kingpins in the binary options sector include Ran Amiran and Malhaz Patarkazishvili, also known as Pini Peter. They were charged with $100 million fraud by the SEC for their role managing the fraudulent options trader Spot Option. Because it was a civil case and the DOJ wasn’t involved they weren’t eligible for extradition from Israel and continue to reside in Israel. It was reported in 2021 that Amiran had reached a financial settlement for the damages with the SEC, likely so that he could once again travel to the US. Peter, a friend of Netanyahu’s, remains unrepentant, despite being ordered to pay the US government $87 million, a judgement he has appealed against.

There are hundreds of other Israel-linked individuals charged with binary options fraud identified on the SEC website, including joint German-Israel nationals Gil and Raz Beserglik who ran binary options call centres out of Germany to scam people.

Another hotbed of Israeli fraud is the moving industry, where companies pose as legitimate household goods movers only to steal belongings or withhold items unless additional payment is made. One of the largest “hostage load” prosecutions was of Advanced Moving Systems, an Israeli-run company which lured customers with artificially low moving estimates and then extorted them by holding their household goods hostage until they paid fraudulently inflated prices. Many of the dozens of people behind the scam remain wanted, with their current location unknown. Dozens of other Israelis connected with fraudulent moving companies also remain on the run, and have likely fled to Israel. (Incidentally, the Israelis arrested by the FBI on September 11th and quickly released were working for a Mossad counterintelligence operation using a moving company as cover. But that’s another story).

Penny stock fraud is another rich seam for Israeli crooks. This type of fraud is when the stocks of small companies trading under $5 a share are marketed to people, often older and uniformed, using high pressure sales marketing tactics with the caller promising guaranteed returns, often claiming to have inside information. One of the largest in recent years saw dual US-Israeli citizen Sharone “Barry” Perlstein and numerous Israeli co-conspirators charged with creating at least 15 fraudulent public shell companies to sell millions of dollars worth of penny stocks using fraudulent tactics. Previous penny stock fraud cases had also implicated Israeli nationals.

The diamond industry has also attracted a fair share of Israeli swindlers. One of the most well-known is Mordechai “Moti” Ferder, a California-based luxury jeweller at the centre of one of the largest fraud scandals in the American jewellery industry. Ferder was accused of juicing his company’s accounts to boost the valuation before selling to an investment company, while in reality he was racking up liabilities worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2025, with an FBI investigation underway, Ferder fled California for Tel Aviv.

Then there is Gery Shalon the Georgia-born Israeli responsible for hacking JP Morgan and carrying out the largest theft of customer data from an American financial institution in history.

Outside the fraud cases, Israel also attracts politicians attempting to shield themselves from justice in their home countries. One of the most notorious and ongoing cases is that of Tomás Zerón, the former director of the Criminal Investigation Agency of Mexico. Zerón is accused by Mexican authorities of having direct involvement in the kidnap, torture, and likely murder of dozens of university students. Often known as the Iguala mass kidnapping and considered one of Mexico’s most heinous human rights abuse cases, in 2014 forty-three leftist students were kidnapped on their way to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. Zerón is said to have known or ordered the students to be handed over to a cartel group to be murdered and their remains disposed of. Zerón fled to Israel and despite an extradition order, an Interpol red notice and numerous requests from Mexico to hand him over, Israel has refused, reportedly as punishment for Mexico’s criticism of Israel at the UN.

Another Mexican diplomat who fled to Israel is Andrés Roemer. Formerly Mexico’s Ambassador to UNESCO based in Paris, and Consul General of Mexico in San Francisco, Roemer fled to Israel in 2021 after being accused by 61 women of rape and sexual assault. Mexico has demanded his extradition, but he remains in Israel.

Roemer is not alone. Israel is a haven for Jewish sex criminals and paedophiles to hide from justice, with the phenomena so prevalent that even CBS News has written about it. Probably the most famous names associated with fleeing to Israel after being accused of sex crimes are the Hollywood directors Brett Rattner and Bryan Singer. Rush Hour director Rattner, a good friend of Netanyahu’s, fled to Israel in 2023 after being accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct and assault on set.

Singer, director of two X-Men films and 90s hit The Usual Suspects, fled to Israel around 2020 after being accused of sexual abuse, including abuse of children.

Israel is a magnet for criminals of all flavours, and this brief compendium is the mere tip of an iceberg. The Law of Return, known to be policed very lightly, is a gateway allowing Jews to use their dual nationality to commit crimes and then swerve justice under an ethno-supremacist legal regime set up to protect them. Some succeed in avoiding justice, some don’t.

Of course one of the biggest ironies in seeing Israelis prosecuted by the US legal system for financial crimes is that the biggest Israeli criminals of all, those charged with committing the highest crimes possible, are not pursued by the US justice system. Netanyahu is free to visit the US, as he did last week, without fear of arrest for his role in ordering the genocide of Gaza and the systematic destruction of life. Destruction that continues to this day, with more children slaughtered just yesterday.

While Netanyahu’s treatment by US legal authorities might be different to the treatment meted out to a binary options trader, a country that acts with a smug, lawless arrogance raises and attracts those very same people.

Impunity begets impunity. A place founded on thievery draws thieves to it naturally.

As I have written about before, for a future where justice is pre-eminent, where morality means something and our collective humanity is restored, we must de-Zionise the world and dismantle Israel.

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Each time I return to the West Bank, I tell myself—against all available evidence and my better judgment—“Maybe it’ll be calmer this time.” Never have I been proven wrong so thoroughly as I was this past month. I’m back home in New York now, and as ever, I have more material than I know what to do with.

The story, at the most basic level, is that the settlers have seized more land. With the full support of the government, they have just about finished their takeover of Area C and have moved on to Areas A and B—ostensibly under Palestinian Authority control and off limits to Israelis—something that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago. Villages that had never seen a settler before are now finding themselves encircled by outposts, facing daily attacks.

I’ve had countless settler encounters over the past several years, but never have I seen them come out swinging the way they are now—showing up in a village and wasting no time before physically assaulting people. Of course it’s because they know that they are far more likely to be rewarded than punished; they are, after all, doing the state’s bidding.

There are stories I want to tell about the courage of Palestinians—men, women, and even children—whom I watched fend off settler attacks, resisting the occupation with whatever they could find. They are brave because they have no choice. But I can’t tell those stories without risking their lives. This is a riddle about writing on Palestine I haven’t yet solved.

In my first dispatch from the West Bank in January 2024—You Don’t Understand How Bad It Is Here—I wrote:

So there is my next obstacle: the struggle to convey the utter pervasiveness of the occupation’s cruelty. I worry that each story I share undermines this essential aspect by implying a start and stop when the reality is more like a poison coursing through every inch of soil, emitting noxious fumes into schools, museums, hospitals, and homes, causing constant pain and suffering and degradation and, on occasion, a seizure or toxic shock or explosion of blood and death. I am convinced that no reasonable person could spend even a week here and come away believing the occupation is morally defensible under any circumstances; the trouble is that most will neither come nor even look too closely.

I haven’t solved that problem either, but I’ve committed to several larger projects that will let me dive more deeply into individual communities. Those will take time, so the pace of my posts here may slow for a bit.

For now, here’s a brief “travelogue”—written in a jetlagged haze shortly after returning home—that I hope conveys something of what it feels like on the ground in the West Bank right now.

In Bethlehem, I met Fahed Abu Haikal, whose seven-month-old son Sam was shot dead by an Israeli soldier weeks earlier while sitting in his mother’s lap inside the family car. Fahed remembers everything. He remembers the soldier’s nonchalant expression as he raised his weapon toward the car’s windshield. He remembers slamming on the brakes, then watching the soldier pull the trigger—the first bullet shattering the windshield, passing through his hand, into his baby’s face, out the back of his tiny head, and then into his wife’s face and chest. He remembers pulling Sam from the car and trying to plug the hole in his head as thick, hot blood poured out, before realizing he was holding his dead child. The car seat is still stained a dry, crusty brown. When Fahed got home from the hospital, the first thing he did was disassemble the crib and hide the parts, along with Sam’s box of toys—including the rattle he was holding when he was shot in the face—so his wife wouldn’t have to see them when she returned home.

Fahed believes they will get justice because the footage of the shooting so clearly shows a cold-blooded murder. He believes his baby’s killer will go to jail. I do not.

Just beyond Bethlehem, in Beit Sahour, settlers took over an abandoned Jordanian military base late last year, chased Palestinian farmers off the surrounding agricultural land, and installed a handful of mobile homes. Months later, the Israeli government retroactively authorized it as a legal settlement and allocated it more than 100 dunums of Palestinian land, including a public park belonging to the town of Beit Sahour. In other words, the settlers’ land grab—illegal even under Israeli law—was rewarded with post-facto legalization and even more land. That’s the whole game: violent settlers are the tip of the spear in Israel’s project of annexing the West Bank. So it goes. That night, Beit Sahour’s semi-pro basketball team beat Qalandia Refugee Camp 66–62. It was the talk of the town.

I returned to Turmus’ayya, where a group of Palestinian farmers and I were attacked by settlers last October. After footage of that attack went viral, Israeli authorities arrested the man who nearly clubbed a grandmother to death. I told them that their arrest would mean virtually nothing if they didn’t dismantle the settler terror network in the olive fields. You arrested a grunt, I told them, good for you. Now do something to actually stop the violence. You have a playbook for this sort of thing, I reminded them, you do it to Palestinians every day. Arrest their leader, Amishav Melet, the notoriously violent armed settler who established the illegal outpost. Demolish their structures. Tear gas them if they try to return. They told me they would—that they were serious about cracking down on settler violence. I told them I didn’t believe them. They said they’d prove me wrong.

The outpost has tripled in size since then. When I arrived at the lookout point, a cement truck, escorted by the IDF, was pouring the foundation for a large new structure. The large Palestinian home visible in the background of the October attack video is now occupied by settlers and off-limits to its owner, a businessman who lives primarily in Chicago. Amishav Melet is still menacing any Palestinian who dares approach their farmland. While I was there, he stole a man’s ATV at gunpoint. The settlers have taken the entire field, and the battle line has moved to the village itself. Settlers now routinely march through Turmus’ayya carrying machine guns, terrorizing residents. They want the homes. They want the whole village, of course. Maybe they’ll get it.

In neighboring al-Mughayyir, I visited the site of a school shooting in April, walking the grounds of Al Mughayyir Secondary School with its principal, Bassam Abuassaf. He showed me where a settler with a rifle crouched on a hill, peered through the scope, and took aim at panicked students trying to evacuate. Where 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan was shot in the back of the head and killed as he frantically searched for his little brother. The whole town is traumatized. Of course it is. That’s what happens after a school shooting. But in this case, the shooter roams free, and the entire village remains under constant attack.

After the shooting, Bassam told me, Israeli authorities never even reached out to take a statement. A school shooting—and the police couldn’t be bothered to speak with the principal! But he was determined to get his students back in the classroom, and he did the following week. He found he could no longer focus on education or administration. Instead, he became consumed with protecting his nearly 500 students and staff, pacing the school’s perimeter from the first bell until dismissal. “I just thank God we made it through the school year,” he said.

I met the father of Jihad Abu Naim, the 32-year-old good Samaritan who was shot in the chest while rushing to the school to help. He showed me a photo of Jihad’s infant daughter—his new granddaughter—who was born weeks after her father was killed. Then he showed me a photo of his son’s corpse. This is a common occurrence in the West Bank: someone showing you a picture of their dead child.

As he scrolled through his camera roll, he landed on video of Israeli forces uprooting his olive trees, perhaps as punishment for having a dead son. He showed me a map, and I saw how the people of al-Mughayyir have been boxed into a fraction of their village, encircled by settler outposts and cut off from their farmland. The local economy, which relies almost entirely on agriculture, has collapsed. Military gates seal off the community for days or weeks at a time.

While I was in town, I met a friendly local who took me to see his home, which is, in fact, a pile of crushed stone and mangled rebar. The Israelis demolished it. He never found out why. Next door to his would-be home stood a house under construction, now indefinitely stalled because its owner was killed by settlers. I visited Um Saleh, the woman whose near-fatal clubbing in Turmus’ayya I documented last year. She cannot hold heavy objects with her right hand and still feels pain when walking downhill, but otherwise she is much improved. It was wonderful to see her laugh. A fundraiser after the attack helped her family buy a small flock of sheep, which now produces enough milk to support them, with virtually all other work in the area gone.

Almost in passing, she mentioned that two months earlier, soldiers had entered her home, beaten her son in front of her and his own child, slapped his wife, and stolen all the money from his wallet before leaving. She didn’t know why. They rarely do.

Last week, armed settler militias began a new round of daily, violent raids on al-Mughayyir. Another student at Al Mughayyir Secondary School, 17-year-old Fadi Al-Nassan, was shot. Months earlier, he had been filmed sprinting toward his cousin, 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan, after Aws was killed in the school shooting.

Fadi, who had just finished 11th grade, had his leg amputated. He was supposed to play on the national soccer team next year, and his family dreaded the moment he’d wake up and realize his leg, and his dream, were gone. Then, on Friday, he died.

In Taybeh, I visited a tiny Bedouin community—Naif—that is perhaps in the process of being run off its land. A settler arrived on a donkey with a herd of camels. Camels serve no real purpose for the settlers, I learned, except to eat Palestinians’ crops—which is, in fact, the opposite of no purpose for a group whose raison d’être is tormenting their indigenous neighbors. The camels fed from Naif’s olive trees for more than an hour as the settler rode increasingly tight circles on his donkey around a small shed, throwing the occasional stone to frighten the children playing inside.

I followed him for as long as I could, trying to keep myself between him and the home, but at a certain point I realized he was laughing at me—wearing me down so that he could later cut their water pipes with less interference. A few nights later, settlers burned down a small home there.

Khallat al-Sidra, a Bedouin village on the outskirts of Mukhmas that I visited last year, had already met the fate that may await Naif: ethnically cleansed from the land, like more than 60 other communities since October 7. It once served as an incidental buffer for the village of Mukhmas itself, absorbing the worst of the settler violence. But after settlers burned it to the ground for the third time, the Israeli military finally intervened—not by protecting the community, but by expelling the people from their land.

And so the settlers pushed the frontier once again, now setting their sights on Mukhmas, where they shot an American teenager dead in February. Nasrallah Abu Siyam may be gone, but he is everywhere in the village. A ghost. Like so many Palestinian villages, the martyr is painted on walls, displayed in restaurants, dangling from rear-view mirrors. Nasrallah was the point of reference for everyone I met in Mukhmas—Nasrallah’s aunt, his cousin, his very best friend.

I visited his father, Mohammed, who was building a house for his son when he was killed. He was a wreck. Regret was eating him alive: he’d asked Nasrallah to stay and help with the farm when he’d considered moving to America. He could barely speak. He couldn’t understand why it had happened. What had they ever done to deserve any of this? Why couldn’t it have been him instead of his son? Nasrallah’s horse, a dapple gray mare named Shams, is still out back, but Mohammed can’t bear to ride her. So Nasrallah’s friends come every day to care for Shams—to clean her pen, feed her, and take her out for rides.

I hung out with the shebab—the young men of the village who have been forced into the role of its protectors. A farmer, a student, a car mechanic.

What can you say? The man loves cars. When it was quiet, we went for drives into the mountains. Tested the boundaries—the outposts were always in view. We smoked cigarettes and talked shit. I rode on the back of a motorcycle. We went to a local honeybee farm, but the beekeeping suits left something to be desired. Like, say, full-body coverage. Like a true seal. Between the four of us, we were stung maybe a dozen times. Let me tell you, it was pure chaos. I don’t remember the last time I laughed like that. The honeycomb was warm and chewy, and I’ve never tasted anything so sweet.

I love the shebab of Mukhmas. Fearless—minus the bee thing. I joined their night watch, guarding against settlers who come from all sides, on ATVs and in trucks, smashing windows, pouring kerosene, and setting buildings on fire. Menacing with their guns. You become fast friends after nights like this.

Days after I left, a car full of Haredi settler kids being chased by Israeli police—probably on account of the clown-car number of people packed inside—drove into Mukhmas at 4 a.m. The police car turned around and left as soon as they entered the village, leaving the kids to joyride through its streets and wake its residents before they crashed straight into a wall and ran screaming for the hills. Nobody in Mukhmas ever saw them—only the car tearing through their narrow streets—but the kids reportedly called the army and pleaded for help. And so the army came in force: dozens of jeeps, drones, even helicopters. Soldiers kicked down doors, dragged people from their beds, zip-tied them, and beat them senseless. “We didn’t ask for any of this,” my friend later said. By 8 a.m., Israeli media was reporting that the Haredi boys had been “rescued” from Mukhmas and were safe. But that didn’t stop the raid from continuing until 3 p.m. Fifteen boys and men were arrested that day in Mukhmas. It appears soldiers chose their targets after stealing someone’s phone and searching a group chat for people who had warned about the settler and soldier incursion. Incriminating texts like, “Be careful.” They broke the mechanic’s jaw in four places, along with his shoulder and a rib. He said it all happened in his bedroom, seconds after he woke up. The soldier pulled him out of bed then teed off on him with haymakers and jackboot kicks before he'd even registered what was happening. Today, two young men remain in jail. Nobody knows what they’re even being held for.

I left Mukhmas for Tamoun in the Jordan Valley, where I stayed with the family of Aymen Ghreyab, a local activist and journalist who has been in jail since November over his social media posts about state and settler violence. He was taken away just weeks after his daughter’s first birthday. His wife knows what happens inside those jails—the torture, the sexual assault, the starvation. She hasn’t heard a word from him. She cries all the time, but she has young children to raise.

I visited farmland being severed in half by Project “Crimson Thread”—Israel’s plan to build a wall across the entire Jordan Valley, from the occupied Golan Heights all the way to the Red Sea. The Jordan Valley is the most fertile land in the region, the “breadbasket of the West Bank,” so it’s only natural that Israel would try to take it. The plan would annex everything east of the wall, roughly 22 percent of the West Bank. Communities there would be expelled. Everything in the wall’s path would be demolished, and a buffer zone west of the wall would make tens of thousands more dunams of land inaccessible to farmers.

From Tamoun, I traveled north to Jenin, stopping just outside the city, next to a Palestinian amusement park, to see Israeli forces rebuilding the settlement of Ganim, which was evacuated in 2005 as part of the disengagement. It’s one of four settlements they’re rebuilding in the north. Israelis resettling the northern West Bank is one of the most underreported stories in the region right now, and you can see it in the widespread construction, multiplying outposts, and attacks in Areas A and B becoming increasingly routine.

The plan had been to venture into the Jenin refugee camp, whose more than 20,000 residents were forcibly evacuated in February 2025. The Israeli military has occupied the camp ever since, leveling entire neighborhoods, leaving parts of it looking more like Rafah than anywhere else in the West Bank. From the outside, you could see buildings speckled with bullet holes, gaping craters left by drone strikes, homes turned to rubble. The IDF is currently building a military base inside the camp, the first base in Area A since the Oslo Accords.

In the end, locals warned us not to go into the camp. They insisted, in fact. May have stopped me by force—for my own safety. Too many Israeli snipers hiding inside. It’s where they killed Shireen Abu Akleh, after all. We drank coffee and ate cookies instead. I thought about the familiar online taunt: “Go to Jenin as a Jew and see how they treat you.”

We raced to Zabouba, just outside Jenin, where the earthy smell of freshly uprooted trees hung in the air after IDF bulldozers destroyed an olive field. Kids danced and played among felled trees, but the landowner walked solemnly, cursing the destruction of the land that had sustained his family for generations.

From Jenin, I drove southwest to Tulkarm, where two more refugee camps—Tulkarm and Nur Shams—remained destroyed and abandoned after the same military operation that cleared out the Jenin camp. I met Fadwa, 55, who stayed in Tulkarm Camp for nine months after the mandatory evacuation, hunkering down in her home with her cat, Koshkosh, and her dog, Jean Valjean. She had enough food and all of her books, her own private library, so she saw no reason to leave—until her health deteriorated to the point that she had no choice. I met a young man who was expelled from Nur Shams and later watched from a nearby hilltop as his home was demolished. During the demolition, Israeli soldiers shot at his feet to force him away.

I made it into the Nur Shams camp with a few other independent journalists in press vests. The word is apocalyptic. So much destruction, but so much evidence of recent life still there.

When we exited, a neighbor of the camp warned us that an IDF jeep was racing out behind us. We ran for our lives. Later that night, I got this message from a friend I made in Tulkarm:

I traveled southeast to Qusra, where settlers had recently stolen a Palestinian home on the peak of the highest hill and were using it as a launchpad for attacks on the village. In February, they beat two Israeli activists, including an elderly woman, nearly to death, cracking their skulls with clubs. In March, they shot a Palestinian man dead and nearly stabbed his father to death. The surviving members of that family, strawberry farmers, have imprisoned themselves inside a cage to keep the settlers out.

I stayed with the shebab in another home on the stolen hill, where they kept a 24/7 watch. The attacks were constant. They went on all night. A pickup truck full of settlers arrived and unloaded a flatbed of large stones on us. They came with clubs and knives. Eventually, the army arrived. Soldiers chatted with the attacking settlers, smoked cigarettes with them, before coming to the home and throwing four Palestinian men against the wall. They were there to investigate the settlers’ claims that the Palestinians had thrown rocks at them. They had no answer when I asked why the settlers were allowed to live in a stolen home and attack locals from it—but the stones allegedly thrown in response were treated as a matter of grave concern.

Nobody was abducted, fortunately, perhaps because an American journalist was sticking a camera in their faces. But the settlers returned minutes after the soldiers left, cutting the electricity, blacking out the home—including the security camera system—and attacking again, nearly scaling the wall and making it inside. Fortunately, we had an amateur electrician inside who MacGyvered a new power source.

The next day, we watched a settler grazing sheep just outside the home. “Those are my sheep,” one of the guys told me. The settler had stolen them. “That’s my land, my crops. And he’s living in my uncle’s home.” That night, settlers broke into another home on the hill and stole the doors and windows right out of the frames.

I went from Qusra to Sebastia, where the town’s beautiful archaeological sites were teeming with Israeli workers. I’ve been reporting on this town for years, but I have never seen so much occupation activity. The day before, they had stolen a newly excavated Roman column, lifting it with a bulldozer onto a truck and driving away with it. Looting the town’s treasures—exactly what they accuse the Palestinians of doing to justify their takeover of heritage sites. At a wedding, I bumped into Ayman Schaer, who was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier with a butterfly bullet during one of my visits in 2024. I saw him last October, and he was still undergoing surgeries, still unsure if he would ever walk again. He was grimacing in pain, sweating just from sitting up to talk. At the wedding, he was on his feet and smiling—the first time I’d ever seen him like that. Outside, soldiers were raiding Sebastia again, kicking in the municipality’s door.

In Masudiya, next door to Sebastia, settlers had stolen the historic Ottoman-era railroad station, where families from across the region once gathered for festivals. It’s the same story, over and over: Settlers showed up one day and planted a flag. Then they built a fence. Then their flocks were grazing there. Then local farmers were beaten and tear-gassed for trying to reach their own land. It had only been a few months, but settlers had already taken over 4,000 dunams of land—everything in Area C—and were now pushing into Areas A and B. I met a young woman who had just graduated from Birzeit University and returned home to Masudiya. Already, she wants to leave again. “I can’t even leave the house by myself anymore,” she told me.

In Burqa, settlers had stolen a natural spring that supplied water for the village and many neighboring ones. Imagine stealing a spring. They’d cut all the pipes, built a swimming pool for settlers, and rerouted the flowing water into the nearby outpost.

Next to a wall commemorating the town’s 72 martyrs since 1936, soldiers spent the night with an electric saw, cutting down a thick metal statue of Handala, the Palestinian cartoon icon. Only its two feet remained.

I drove all the way south to Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills, staying in Umm al-Khair, where a settler murdered Awdah Hathaleen less than one year earlier. I’d planned to spend a week visiting different villages in the hills, but the situation in Umm al-Khair was so bad that I wasn’t able to leave for more than a short day trip. The outpost had grown exponentially since I was there in October. Israeli flags were everywhere, including covering the sign welcoming visitors to the small hamlet. A new gate was installed and closed at will by soldiers and settlers alike, blocking the only road in and out of the village. One indication that a settler attack was coming was that they’d locked the gate. A close friend of mine there told me he’d been diagnosed with depression. “I just see no hope,” he told me. “It’s all so dark.” Another told me he’d quit activism. “What’s the point?” he said. “It accomplishes nothing.” Before Portugal vs. Spain, he’d told me, “All I have left is Ronaldo.” We watched together. “If Ronaldo played for Israel, I’d have no choice but to cheer for them,” he said. He spit out his soda laughing. After Portugal lost, I barely saw him again.

The settlers’ latest gambit was attempting to steal an entire home. Salim’s home. They had been showing up in his backyard, ripping out his fence, and planting Israeli flags. They had kicked a woman out of a bathroom. On my first night there, they attacked, trying to push through the backyard and reach the house. The Palestinians and international activists formed a defensive line to try to stop them. Many of them were beaten. The settlers threw chairs and razor wire. A settler with a pistol swept my legs out from under me with a metal rod, then three men jumped on me, one of them swinging at my head. The soldiers came and arrested three activists. They declared Salim’s home a closed military zone—a classic technique to clear the area of activists—which did not stop the settlers from returning the next morning to drink coffee in his yard. Salim had not been able to reach his livestock in nearly a week. They had no food or water.

I spent time with Hanady, Awdah’s wife, and her three small children. She has been baking a lot because it is the only thing she enjoys. She discovered that I would eat anything she made. Her kids are afraid. She doesn’t know what to do. She wants to leave, but she has nowhere else to go. More than anything, she misses her husband. “Our love story was so rare,” she told me. “There’s no one else like him.”

One morning, two bulldozers drove into neighboring Deirat, accompanied by dozens of soldiers. We followed them and watched as families in every home along the demolition crew’s path scrambled to salvage their belongings. When the bulldozers stopped in front of their targets, soldiers began firing sound grenades and dragging people out with zip-tied hands. The smell of a demolished home is acrid. It burns your eyes and throat. A soldier took a video, panning from the home being demolished to the weeping women and children watching it happen. Maybe for TikTok. A young girl screamed. Her father was in jail, and now they took her home. The homes they destroyed had been beautiful.

Congressman Ro Khanna came to visit Umm al-Khair. The locals took him in, showed him how the state was erasing their lives. Shortly after he left, I got frantic texts from one of his staffers saying that their bus had been hijacked by machine-gun-wielding settlers. When soldiers showed up, they sided with the settlers. Days later, when the story made international headlines, Israel’s allies would claim it was embellished or entirely fabricated. Obviously, it was not. There is nothing remarkable about what happened there. In fact, they got off easy.

I didn’t respond to the staffer’s texts right away because I was busy being attacked myself. Shimon Attaia, the sadistic settler who established the outpost in Umm al-Khair, showed up with a mob of his vicious young disciples. They were trying to steal another tract of land. First they went for the men. I was hit more times than I could count. Kicked repeatedly in the inside of my kneecap. Punched in the gut. Jabbed in the throat. You cannot fight back, because they’ll take revenge on the community itself. It’s just what they want, and when we wouldn’t give it to them, they turned on the women and elderly. Hanady’s mother was thrown to the ground. She had to be hospitalized. Attaia kneed an old man in the groin. But it still wasn’t enough. Attaia threw a tantrum and flipped a dumpster. He called his friend, who showed up with an assault rifle that got tangled in his dog leash. Attaia called the army and stamped his feet, pointing at who he wanted arrested. I was one of the chosen ones. They detained me for thirty minutes, demanded I unlock my phone and give it to them. When I told them I was calling my lawyer, they left without a word.

(More videos from the attack can be found in this thread.)

Khanna would go home and talk about what happened to anyone who would listen. It was great exposure, I thought. You can read his account here. He said he’d never experienced racial profiling like he did in the West Bank. Then he started getting pressed on his policy positions. No to broad economic sanctions on the state. No to a full arms embargo. No to blocking the sale of Iron Dome parts. Israel had a right to defend itself, he said, but Palestinians should focus on nonviolent resistance. I found it inexplicable.

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My last stop was al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya. This is where Mohammed Ibrahim, the 16-year-old Palestinian American kid who was abducted by soldiers and held in military prison for nearly ten months, is from. And also his first cousin Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by settlers there on July 11, 2025. I went there for the anniversary. To accompany his father, Kamel, to the site where his son was killed. Settlers had occupied the land since last April. Anyone who went near was attacked, including me, when I tried last October. The mayor of neighboring Sinjil warned us that a settler with an M16 lived on the mountain and shot from afar. We knew it was dangerous. Kamel traveled in an armored SUV with a CNN crew. I followed behind in a rental Kia with a few other independent journalists. Of course, we were attacked.

(You can watch the Democracy Now! segment about the attack here.)

I talked to an Israeli soldier after. I informed him that the settlers who attacked us were living in a Palestinian home in Area A. “Are you sure?” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.” He told me he’d visited the home and was pretty sure it belonged to the settlers. Of course I wasn’t wrong.

CNN aired the footage of the attack. Millions of people saw it. It was another PR disaster for Israel, and so they went out and arrested four settlers. It was just like Turmus’ayya—they arrested a few grunts to quiet the critics, but unless the settlers were removed from the land they had stolen, it would be meaningless. The settlers told a judge they had been sent down to detain us by the leader of the outpost. They said there was a “gun attack threat.” Ha ha. One of them was 14 years old—a child soldier. How about going after the leader?

It was a terrible week of press for Israel when it came to settler violence. First Ro Khanna, then the CNN attack. Here’s the part that didn’t make headlines in the US: that same week, Israel approved dozens of new settlements in the West Bank—including the retroactive legalization of violent outposts—committed more than a billion shekels to building them, and announced plans for new access roads to connect them. In the Jordan Valley, the government distributed drones and other military equipment to settlers living in illegal outposts. The IDF’s West Bank chief then appeared at a conference for settlers living in illegal farming outposts, many of which have been linked to violence and the displacement of Palestinian communities, where he told residents that they “greatly strengthen security.” “I love you,” he said. “I appreciate you, and I appreciate what you do.” How nice.

Five days after the anniversary of Sayf’s death, settlers came down from the same olive fields where they’d attacked us to assault Sinjil with fire and guns. Apparently those four arrests didn’t make the problem go away.

With CNN cameras gone, the military responded by tightening the siege on Sinjil, a community already trapped inside a cage. As I write this, the attacks by both settlers and soldiers are ongoing. The West Bank is the most predictable place on earth.

The Iran War is going on and on, and I've been AWOL. I'm in China with family, and trying to move my tech stack behind the Great Firewall, so either I'm breaking things or my son is on the verge of, excuse my mess and absence. With your leave, this is a short update.

Zerothly, if you want up-to-the-minute information, I refer you to my 'How To Follow' guide from the first iteration of devastation. My sources, and song, remain the same. The only thing I'd add (to the sourcing) is that Fotros Resistance is the best (and least voluminous) source for Iran in particular. All the usual disclaimers apply, merely possessing this information is dangerous in the White Empire, especially since the IRGC has been designated a terrorist organization in terrible places like the UK. I assume you know all this by now, but if you don't, get out of here now. There's very little you can do with this information, but much can be done to you. With that/them out of the way, here is my unsolicited opinion.

I refer again and again to the report a former CENTCOM commander made to his Jewish masters (literally, JINSA). This McKenzie character's point was the all of the US Gulf Bases were (militarily) indefensible in the case of all-out war, which is the case now. He advocated retreating to a second line of defense in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and 'Israel', which is what's happening now. But this is still indefensible, as we are finding out.

The current phase of war has Iran hitting Greater Israel's frontline of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and even Oman, but also their backline of Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. They're near the goal now. People ask 'why not 'Israel'' and I repeat that we are facing the final boss of colonialism now, the White Empire entire, and 'Israel' is increasingly irrelevant. Indeed, they're currently sitting this one out, and even asked 'America' to leave Ben Gurion Airport ('Israel' is, ironically, the one place 'America' doesn't have a base).

It has been a journey, and the real Greater Israel was the fiends they made along the way. The Arab Apostates that paid to occupy themselves, who preoccupied themselves with football teams and toy planes. Now that's all in flames. 'America's' debasing across the region is being methodically cleared out by Iran, as much as the White media tries to hide it. But follow Fotros for a day and see, Greater Israel is getting hammered on the daily.

This is the first war (what Bikrum Gill calls the first anti-imperial war) where the natives have not only missile defense but air superiority. 'American' bombers are too scared to fly over Tehran (which as of press time has not really been bombed) and Iran is unafraid to bomb every 'American' position in the region. Iran's smart-missiles are superior in both quantity and quality to 'America's' and 'America' cannot use their dumb-bomb advantage without losing some planes, and they are fundamentally cowards. So they continue targeting cancer hospitals and fisherman and flee from men in the field. I would say like the 'Israelis', but it's the same thing.

This is thus the first war where the Empire can't just bomb from afar, have a Burger King, and laugh about it. 'American' soldiers are being killed, as you'll find out from all the hiking accidents and people falling off boats and dying of explosive diarrhea in the weeks and months to come. Those HIMARS and ATACMS don't fire themselves and 'Americans' are in the line of fire. They are arriving vertically and leaving horizontally. They are even being hit, like at the Crowne Plaza in Oman, in targeted assassinations.

US bases on the frontline of Greater Israel (along the Persian Gulf) were well-nigh uninhabitable after the 40 Day War, and things are even worse now. And now things are getting as bad in Jordan (which hilariously says it doesn't have US bases, but just US soldiers hanging around) and Saudi Arabia (which also wants to start a war with Yemen for some reason). These were never morally defensible positions, and now they're obviously not militarily defensible either.

The other point (chokepoint) is Hormuz, which is even more closed than before, but not before Iran scooted a bunch of oil out during the MOU. Now China has turned the teapots on again and the imperial economy is going to boil soon. I'd make some money if I knew exactly when, but Trump said they had four weeks about four weeks ago. Trump trying to whip the Persian Gulf into shape is as useless as Xerxes the Great trying to whip the Hellespont to take Greece. Trump is no Xerxes and both attempts failed.

'America' will never take Iran, as you could see from the Imam Khamanei's funeral. The Islamic Revolution has been reignited in millions of hearts. At this point. the Islamic Republic is holding its people back more than driving them forward, they want revenge, and they want Trump dead, as they have said through red flags and posters. They are protesting for the regime, and have been since the day Khamenei was martyred. Trump said a civilization would be destroyed, but as the oracle story went, he didn't say which one.

What is happening is that the White Empire is being pushed back. Not out of Iran, as in anti-colonial wars like Vietnam, but out of the frontline of Greater Israel, out of its backline of Jordan and Kuwait, and finally 'Israel' itself. As the late, great Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, when 'American' soldiers arrive vertically and leave horizontally, they will eventually leave the region, and we may not even have to fight 'Israel' at all. And this is happening. Follow Fortros for a day and you'll see it happening. But today, from behind the Great Firewall, let me just say, 'America' lost the Iran War long ago. Now they are losing Greater Israel and soon, inshallah, the White Empire itself.

Please forgive me for barely editing this, I'm sleepy. Some completely unrelated China photos for paying subs:

What do the Ukraine, 'Israel', South Korea, and Taiwan have in common? They are all governed by the same devilish equation. Divide and conquer. As Vladimir Putin said, "The formula they apply has been known from time immemorial – divide and rule. There is nothing new here." Or as Nasrallah said, "it ['Israel'] was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world." Or as Kim Il-Sung said, "U.S. imperialism’s basic strategy for world aggression at the present stage is to destroy the small and divided revolutionary socialist countries." Or as Mao said to the Palestinians, putting it all together, "You are the front gate, and we are the rear. They created Israel for you and Formosa [Taiwan] for us." 

This tactic has been known since time immemorial, as Putin said, but damned if it don't still work a devil's charm. If you sow division inside a city (or a world), then they'll open the gates for you, sometimes without firing a shot. It doesn't even take much of the population, just a few dumb, devious, or naive enough. The Trojan Horse metaphor is apt because this is indeed how 'Greek' democracy works under the White Empire. Democracy™ is a system they know how precisely to corrupt (they themselves have legalized corruption) and if you bring it inside your nation, bankers and CIA agents and soldiers pile out. You're in debt and occupied before you know it and if you dare elect someone they don't like, they'll rig the election, wreck your economy, and lawfare or warfare them out. It really is a foolproof system. It's fooled people over and over and the proof is in the pudding. Almost the whole world got cooked, except for the people they're attacking now. Those they call 'authoritarians', meaning just that they claim sovereignity outside the Empire. That's what the widely propagandized drama of 'democracies vs. authoritarians' means in the real world. It's anyone claiming their own authority vs. a demos driven crazy from without. And if you're wondering where you are, if you're not actively fighting the White Empire, you're in it. Good luck.

They reap what they sow, and the White Empire cultivates dissidents and activists and religious fundamentalists and entire breakaway provinces or states if it can get them. Hence in Ukraine they USAID Sorosified liberals, doing it for the 'democracy', and CIA neo-Nazis, doing it for the White Fuhrer (an actual person). In Palestine, they used Zionists—once a fringe within the Jewish population—to corrupt the Jews in general and frack an entire region. They'll use corrupted takfiri groups like ISIS or the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia too. They're largely agnostic, any traitor will do. In South Korea they used oligarchs and a military dictatorship and in Taiwan they use the breakaway losers of a civil war. It's the same formula. Add shit, and stir.

It's important to understand all of these 'conflicts' as civil wars fomented from without. Ukrainians—including Zelensky—speak or understand Russian and were one people with Russians. They're naturally connected to Russia, as is Europe, but this 'America' (10,000 km away) does not want, so here we are. 'American' foreign policy has been on autocratic autopilot since the 1980s and it's unclear if they know the USSR has fallen. They're still trying to foment civil war within the USSR and now they've got what they wished for. They'll happy to fight to the last Ukrainian. Who cares about a little Slavic civil war? Certainly not the Nazis that won.

Take Palestine, also, as the White Empire did. Jews lived peacefully in the Muslim World (unlike in Europe) until Palestine was turned into a Jewish ghetto to dump European Jewry. It's well established that Europe didn't want to give them their homes back and 'America' didn't want them either, so they used their own mythology to get the Jews to deport themselves, and volunteer their grandchildren as conscripts in the imperial army. This is not to absolve the Jews, but to condemn the White Empire entire. Some Jews were native to the region, but from that foothold they were used to divide (multiply) and conquer an entire region.

Then take South Korea, as the Empire did, or Afghanistan or Vietnam where they tried. They setup puppet governments in all these places, which didn't even have to be 'democracies'. South Korea was a brutal military dictatorship for many years, until people protesting (and dying) got them this current fig-leaf democracy, where almost every President ends up in jail because the society is so corrupt and their military is under the command of foreigners. Korea is the most obviously divided and conquered. It's cut in half and the 'American' imperialists use the southern part as a conscript colony.

Finally, take Taiwan, as the KMT did after a Chinese civil war, which is still going on until the whole is reunited. Both China and Taiwan claim to be China and both are populated by people that consider themselves Chinese. Reunification would be much easier if 'America' wasn't trying to keep them divided.

All these divisions are not coincidences. They are not unrelated local problems, they are an intentional, international strategy. This is the White Empire in action, or more specifically, inaction. 'America' is the most indirect incarnation of the beast, but even the British and Dutch used local squabbles to cobble an international empire together. As Shakespeare said, "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean." If people are fighting amongst themselves, they're not fighting them. If you feed different factions with petty privileges (Nobel prizes, titles, book contracts, celebrity) and other factions with raw weapons, you can get entire populations to throw themselves at their neighbors, or even their family.

It's important to understand that none of these 'conflicts' would be happening without imperial meddling. We live under one White Empire and World War II never ended for most of us, what they call the Cold War was, for us, just World War Too, and what they call the War On Terror was World War III and is still going hot and heavy. None of the people I listed would be fighting each other naturally, without someone thousands of kilometers away pitting brother against brother for their own benefit. It is simply common sense to not fight with a larger neighbor, unless you think you have someone even larger behind you. And you don't even need a majority of the population to think this way, just a fraction willing to betray the other for petty privilege, or just to get one over on their local enemy.

You can see this in Ukraine, which should have and did have decent relations with its giant neighbor until distant 'America' intervened. Ukraine had a Russia-friendly government and even Zelensky said, in 2014, that "Russia and Ukraine really are brotherly nations." He was Russian speaking. But that Ukrainian government was couped and the corrupt comedian began persecuting Russian speakers and banning political parties and religions and so on, before throwing the entire male population into a meat-grinder and cancelling elections in a bloodbath of corruption. It makes no sense for Ukraine to be fighting Russia, and it made sense for them to take a deal in 2022 when it was offered, but because the country has been lobotomized by foreign interests, it keeps lumbering forward. They have been divided from their natural instinct for self-preservation and conquered, not by Russia, but by the White Empire.

You can see it in Palestine, also, where Jews were given refuge by Muslims from European predation, but their desire to be Europeans made them worse than Nazis in the end. It makes no sense for such a minority population to anger everyone in the neighborhood, but with White Empire behind them, that's how they're behaving. It's the same for South Korea, which is literally split along family lines and which really does not want to be divided in half, or for Taiwan, which is deeply integrated with the mainland. None of these conflicts would be happening without the White Empire fomenting them, while pretending it's 'just helping'. Helping themselves, more like it.

The benefit of divide and conquer is that you don't actually have to conquer much. You get other conquered people to do the fighting for you. You get them to fight each other, and they're not fighting you. All you have to do is give a narrow class of hyenas some scraps and you can take the lion's mass. And if you let a certain class use your weapons against their enemies (usually the masses), they'll line up to betray each other, for petty advantage. This worked since time immemorial, as Putin said, but now it isn't working because of people like him, like Nasrallah, like the Kims, or like the CPC. Who are refusing division and conquering the White Empire instead. All White Wars have division and conquest in common. But there is increasingly common cause in uniting and defeating them.