Image: The Media Line Ltd
On March 7th 2026, Jeff Halper added this introduction to the ICAHD statement about the attacks on Iran.
Following is ICAHD's statement condemning the Israeli-American assault on Iran. It was issued last week, but since then we can add Lebanon, where Israel has ordered some half a million people to leave their homes in the south, in the Bakaa Valley and in the Shiite neighborhoods of Beirut. (And let us not forget the ongoing military attacks on Palestinians In Gaza and the West Bank, where violent settlers have joined in driving Palestinians from their homes, all of which have disappeared from public view.)
There are so many levels on which the combined operations must be condemned. But beyond the immediate atrocities, we need to relate to their broader implications. The ICAHD statement focuses on two.
First, Israel's motivation. As I have been saying since Trump and Netanyahu inaugurated the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Arab and Muslim world back in 2020, we have entered the final stage of Zionism's 130-year campaign to Judaize Palestine, to replace an Arab Palestine with a Jewish Israel. Once Palestine has been settled by Jews, who gain military and political control over Palestine and its people and the Palestinian population displaced, the colonization and transformation of Palestine is made permanent through normalization.
Normalization is an almost invisible, vague and undramatic process, which is why it escapes public attention. (When was that term used in any demonstration or webinar you ever attended?) But it is super-dramatic. It marks a closure, the triumph of a settler colonial project: a "Greater" Israel is recognized by the Arab regimes and most of the Muslim ones, as well as the US and de facto by the entire international community, while the Palestinians are left with no choice but to accept apartheid, a miserable existence in dispersed ghettos on 10-15% of their homeland.
There is no political space for struggle after normalization. Normalization is normalization, and the world moves on. Netanyahu says that the Iran war will bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, the jewel in the crown, but as a condition for ending the assaults on Iran and Lebanon, both will have to normalize with Israel as well. That is understood by Syria as well.
But there one condition that has as yet to be met, and this is what the combined operations in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Iran are all about for Israel: normalization requires industrial quiet, the end of all resistance, military pacification. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Iran and its proxy Hezbollah represent the last vestiges of effective resistance. Once they are pacified, the process of normalization can finally be concluded -- and in the next few months.
I have called for an urgent Campaign Against Normalizing Israeli Apartheid, but so far no one's picked up on it, Palestinian or international, for reasons I cannot politically fathom.
The second focus of ICAHD's statement was on the illegality of the attacks on Iran. International law has been of little if any use to us in the Palestinian struggle because it is unenforceable. All rulings of the ICJ, ICC and UN resolutions go through the Security Council where the US has the veto power. Israel fears no sanctions no matter how gross its violations of international law, up to and including genocide. But in a world devoid of it -- which is what Trump, Netanyahu and frankly all authoritarian rulers desire -- what is happening to the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon and Iran can happen to all of us. We will enjoy no protections whatsoever.
Pacification by definition ignores with contempt international law; not only Israel and the US, but virtually any of the signatories to the Abraham Accords find it a constraint on their freedom to do whatever they want in their own political and corporate interests. Once it is set aside, whatever Israel does to illegally pacify the Palestinians and impose on them an illegal apartheid regime is, in fact, normalized.
ICAHD focuses on Palestine, Israel and what we call Global Palestine, of which the war on Iran is clearly a part. But the global implications of this war pose a mortal threat to us all.
March 3, 2026
ICAHD condemns the combined Israeli-American attack on Iran, which serves only their imperial interests. Regime change has nothing to do with relieving the Iranian people of an admittedly oppressive regime. For Israel, it serves to restore to Iran a “pro-Western/pro-Israeli” regime, part of an ongoing Israeli campaign to create conditions – though military force in the case of the Palestinians, Iranians and others who resist its regional colonialization, through making its military force available to autocratic partners like Egypt and the UAE – in which a “Greater” Israel will find its place in the region. But for Israel to normalize its presence in the region it needs the support of world hegemons. Indeed, “serving the hegemons” has been a Zionist strategy since the beginning. If, for the Americans, bringing Iranian resources and its strategic geopolitical position under American domination, Israel is happy to put its military prowess at their disposal.
Like the Palestinians, the Iranian people will be sacrificed to these imperial and colonial interests. Indeed, if they do not cooperate and accept whatever “Western” regime is imposed on them, they will again fall under tyrannic rule – a repeat of the American-British overthrow of the democratically-led Mossadegh in 1953, only this time from repressive regime to repressive regime kept in power this time by the return of the Shah’s CIA/Shin Beit/SAVAK security apparatus.
Regime change is illegal under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter which prohibits the use of force against the political independence of another state. True, humanitarian intervention is permissible, even obligatory, for replacing extremely brutal regimes that have lost the support of their peoples under the principle of Responsibility to Protect, but only with Security Council approval. Regime change by external actors was never authorized, nor is it intended to genuinely benefit the population’s freedom.
ICAHD also condemns the illegality of the American-Israeli attack, also a blatant violation of Article 2(4) which prohibits the threat or use of force against other sovereign states without Security Council authorization. The US and Israel did not seek such authorization in part because their primary justification for striking Iran, self-defense from an attack that is imminent and overwhelming, was totally lacking, and “preventive war” against some future threat is patently illegal as well.
The more sinister reason for not seeking UN authorization was, however, contempt for the international system of laws and rules (weak as it is) and Trump’s intent to replace it with American unilateralism. The unjustified attack on Iran in the midst of negotiations violated all norms of diplomacy, just as does Trump’s corporate take-over of Gaza through his “Board of Peace” sidelines the UN, international law and the rights of the Palestinians to determine their own future.
What is happening to the people of Iran and Palestine alike is evidence of the dangers we all will face if a new US/NATO dominated system is allowed to replace the rules-based international system. International law and international institutions only constrain the actions of powerful authoritarian states; the impulse towards unilateralism goes far beyond Trump. The fact that thirteen of the fifteen Security Council members voted in favor of replacing the UN in Gaza with Trump’s Board of Peace, including Algeria and Pakistan, is worrying enough. That China and Russia, the leading powers behind the BRICS Bloc, the supposed Global South alternative to a G-7/NATO-dominated world order, allowed such a coup to happen by abstaining rather than vetoing it, should compound our alarm. So, too, should the feting of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi of India, another country central to the BRICS Bloc, by both the US and Israel in the weeks leading up to the attack on Iran – not to forget the collusion of the Arab states in normalizing Israeli apartheid through the Abraham Accords and their hosting American military bases.
All of which portends the emergence of a new authoritarian international regime that strips us all of any legal protections – international or domestic – against massive military and police repression supported by totalitarian surveillance technologies. In light of all the concerns the attacks on Iran raise:
ICAHD calls for the immediate cessation of military attacks on Iran.
ICAHD calls for a forceful response from the international community, governments and civil society alike, if any attempt is made to impose on the Iranian people a regime that prejudices its rights of self-rule or threatens it with continued repression.
ICAHD calls for a forceful response from the international community if Israel attempts to reinvolve itself in the internal affairs of Iran, whether by vetoing any new government that does not profess itself “pro-Israeli” or reinstalling its security services (the Shin Beit).
ICAHD calls for a forceful response from the international community if Israel exploits the crisis in Iran to cover its continued genocide and destruction in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and for an immediate end to all arms sales and joint weapons development projects with Israel.
ICAHD calls for a forceful response from the international community over America’s ongoing efforts to destroy the international system of law, rules and international bodies and replace it with an imperial system of its own, supported not only by NATO countries but by authoritarian regimes the world over.
Solidarity with the Iranian and Palestinian peoples!