With Netanyahu Gone, Will Israel Soften Its Stance on Iran?

On 13 June, before the new coalition government won a vote of confidence in Israel, the outgoing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made an incendiary speech in the Knesset.

‘Iran is celebrating’ the new coalition, he said. He claimed the government, led by religious-nationalist Naftali Bennett, would be dominated by the left-wing and therefore weak. 

Zarif’s Hardliner Misdirection

Attentive readers will have noticed an Iranian media campaign of late. Most recently, this has included a strange back and forth between Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, and Joe Biden’s special envoy on climate, John Kerry. Once the best of friends, Kerry and Zarif have fallen out. Zarif claimed that Kerry had told him details of Israeli strikes on Iranian assets in Syria, to which the Iranian minister says he listened with shock. Stretching credulity, Zarif claims all of this was news to him. 

European Leaders’ Response to Iran Protests Is Weak and Disingenuous

World leaders can claim to have been taken by surprise by the protests which have erupted in Iran over the past few days.

After all, many European politicians and American analysts confidently declared, as recently as October, that American sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its foreign operations apparatus had united the Iranian people behind the nation’s theocratic government and its security state.