Category World News

After months of a crippling oil blockade on Cuba imposed by the United States, the fuel-starved country may now see some relief after the US government said it would begin authorising companies to resell Venezuelan oil, even as tensions between the two reach a head.

On Wednesday, the US Department of the Treasury said it would allow the resale of Venezuelan oil for “commercial and humanitarian use” in Cuba as the small island nation faces one of its worst fuel crises in decades.

Venezuela is the largest provider of oil to Cuba. However, since US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and imprisoned him to face drugs and weapons charges in a New York court, the Donald Trump administration has taken control of Caracas’s oil and halted exports to Havana.

Washington has long had frosty relations with Cuba, but Trump’s administration is specifically seeking regime change there by the end of 2026, US media has reported.

The US’s policy shift this week, however, comes after Caribbean leaders sounded the alarm about the dire situation in Cuba, an island nation of 10.9 million people.

At a regional meeting of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries on Wednesday, attended by US Secretary of State and Cuban-American Marco Rubio, Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness called on Washington to ease the pressure.

“Today, many Cubans are facing serious economic hardship, energy shortages, and growing humanitarian challenges,” Holness said. Cuba is not a CARICOM member but shares close ties.

“We are sensitive to their struggles. But we must also recognise that a prolonged crisis in Cuba will not remain there. It can impact migration, security and economic stability across the Caribbean, including Jamaica,” he added.

What’s the situation in Cuba now?

Cuba’s state-dominated economy was already struggling under a US embargo which has been in place since 1962, dating back to Havana’s alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Since then, sanctions on Cuba have eased and tightened under various US administrations.

The long-running sanctions have severely weakened Cuba, causing the country to become highly dependent on imports, and high inflation routinely leads to food and energy shortages. Mass emigration of Cuba’s skilled labour force, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, has added to the country’s difficulties.

With Trump’s latest oil embargo, the US has added a severe energy crisis to the mix. Widespread power blackouts of up to 20 hours at a time are now being reported across Cuba, impacting hospitals, businesses and households alike.

Surgeries have been suspended, schools have cancelled classes, and waste trucks are parked as rubbish piles up in the streets.

Four United Nations special rapporteurs warned in early February that the situation is contributing to a severe public health problem in the country and said it could lead to a “severe humanitarian” crisis.

Cuba has lost 90 percent of its fuel supply, and despite shutting beach resorts and restricting aviation fuel sales, the country could experience a total blackout as early as late February, according to Ignacio Seni, a risk analyst writing for the US-based intelligence firm Crisis 24.

Why has the US  blocked oil deliveries to Cuba?

Cuba produces crude oil but does not have the capacity to refine enough to meet domestic demand.

Venezuela was providing as much as 50 percent of Cuba’s oil before the US government took control of its oil industry at the start of this year, about 35,000 barrels per day.

Under a special barter agreement in place since 2000, Cuba provides support for education, healthcare, and security services in return for discounted Venezuelan fuel. Indeed, about 30 members of Maduro’s security detail who were killed in the operation to abduct him in January were from Cuba.

Then, days after Maduro was abducted, Trump turned his aim at Cuba itself, warning Havana to “make a deal before it is too late”. He did not, however, give details about what type of deal he wanted.

On January 29, Trump issued an executive order imposing new trade tariffs on any countries selling oil to Cuba because of what he called the “policies, practices and actions” of the Cuban government, which, he said, pose an “extraordinary threat” to the US.

Trump also claimed, without evidence, that Havana funds “terrorism”.

Besides Venezuela, Cuba was also sourcing oil from Mexico, Russia and Algeria, but all oil imports into the country ceased. Trump’s order, therefore, effectively amounted to a blockade.

The US has also reportedly seized fuel tankers in open waters transferring oil to Cuba, according to a New York Times investigation into ship movements in the Caribbean Sea published last week.

The US began building up its naval presence in the area in September last year as it prepared to attack Maduro, and its troops continue to patrol the waters.

In mid-February, one tanker loaded with Colombian oil was intercepted by the US Coast Guard as it came within 70 miles of Cuba, the Times reported. The vehicle, called the Ocean Mariner, was previously used to covertly transport oil between Venezuela and Iran.

Before Maduro’s capture, US forces also struck multiple Venezuelan boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean that the US claimed – without evidence – were trafficking drugs.

How have Cuba and others reacted to the US blockade?

Cuban authorities under President Miguel Diaz-Canel have accused the US of imposing collective punishment on the country.

On Wednesday, it also accused the US of links to armed men who entered the country’s waters on a Florida-tagged speedboat. Four Americans of Cuban origin were killed in the altercation, and two were injured.

In the past, Havana has said it is open to “reciprocal dialogue” with Washington, but Diaz-Canel has also said Cubans will “defend the Homeland to the last drop of blood”.

Meanwhile, on February 12, a UN expert panel condemned the US’s directive as illegal and said the claim that Havana funds terrorism “lacks credibility and appears designed to justify the use of extraordinary and coercive powers”.

“It is an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion with extraterritorial effects, through which the United States seeks to exert coercion on the sovereign state of Cuba and compel other sovereign third States to alter their lawful commercial relations,” the panel said.

Other countries are trying to help. Mexico has sent two deployments of humanitarian aid to Havana between mid-February and this week, while Russia has floated the possibility of sending fuel to Cuba.

On Wednesday, Canada pledged food aid with 8 million Canadian dollars ($6.7m).

What relief has the US announced now, and will it change anything?

Washington said on Wednesday it would issue companies with special licences to resell Venezuelan oil to Cuba “in solidarity” with the Cuban people.

That came after Washington announced $6m in humanitarian aid to Cuba to be distributed by the Catholic Church in early February.

However, “persons or entities associated with the Cuban military, intelligence services, or other government institutions” will be barred from obtaining oil sales licences, the US Treasury Department said this week.

Transactions should only support “exports for commercial and humanitarian use”, the statement added.

It is unclear if the new order will allow Havana to continue buying Venezuelan oil at a heavily subsidised rate as it was previously doing. If it does not, the situation may not ease significantly for Cuba, experts say.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has wrapped up a two-day visit to Israel, which was marked by a welcoming embrace from his counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a conspicuous silence about Israel’s genocidal war in occupied Palestinian territory.

During the visit, which began on Wednesday, the two leaders lauded their strong friendship, which they said has deepened bilateral ties, and signed agreements on a range of issues, including innovation and agriculture.

“You are a great friend of Israel, … Narendra. You are more than a friend. You are a brother,” Netanyahu told Modi when both leaders addressed the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem on Wednesday.

Netanyahu showed Modi around Yad Vashem, a memorial in Jerusalem to the victims of the Holocaust, and hosted a dinner after they had spoken to the Knesset, where Modi was conferred with the parliament’s highest honour.

This was the second ever visit by an Indian prime minister to Israel after Modi’s first visit in 2017. That time, he also did not visit Palestine despite India’s long history of supporting the Palestinian cause.

While India opposed the creation of Israel in 1948 and formalised diplomatic relations only in 1992, relations between the two countries have improved since then, flourishing particularly since Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014.

Since then, their ties have blossomed, anchored in defence and the shared nationalistic leanings of their leaders.

Here are five key takeaways from Modi’s trip to Israel:

Full support for Israel, silence on Gaza genocide

Wednesday was the first time an Indian leader had addressed the Knesset. Modi received a standing ovation after declaring: “India stands with Israel firmly, with full conviction, in this moment and beyond.”

Modi told the Israeli parliament that he carries “the deepest condolences of the people of India for every life lost and for every family whose world was shattered in the barbaric terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7” in 2023.

“We feel your pain. We share your grief. India stands with Israel firmly, with full conviction, in this moment and beyond,” he said. “No cause can justify the murder of civilians. Nothing can justify terrorism.”

The Indian prime minister referred to the Mumbai attacks in 2008, which New Delhi has blamed on neighbouring Pakistan, saying: “Like you, we have a consistent and uncompromising policy of zero tolerance for terrorism with no double standards.”

Modi also threw his weight behind United States President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan, stating that India “supports all efforts that contribute to durable peace and regional stability”.

While Modi said he backed “dialogue, peace and stability in the region”, he skipped any mention of the continuing genocide in Gaza, where the Israeli army has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians since October 2023.

Anwar Alam, a senior fellow at the Policy Perspective Foundation, a think tank in New Delhi, said the timing of Modi’s visit is “too poor and has grossly compromised India’s historical pro-Palestine stand”.

Alam argued that while New Delhi, a leader of the anticolonial nonalignment movement, can continue to maintain ties with Tel Aviv, “India cannot allow itself to display such insensitivity to Palestinian sufferings and stand with the coloniser.”

Modi emphasises ‘civilisational ties’ with Israel

One reason Modi, unlike previous Indian leaders, has displayed such warmth towards the Israeli prime minister is the Indian Hindu right’s enthusiasm for the ideology of Zionism, analysts said.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has roots in a philosophy, Hindutva, which ultimately seeks to transform India into a Hindu nation and a natural homeland for Hindus anywhere in the world – similar to Israel’s view of itself as a Jewish homeland.

During his speech to the Knesset, therefore, Modi doubled down on what he called the “civilisational ties” between the two nations. He started his address to the Knesset by announcing himself as “a representative of one ancient civilisation addressing another”.

“We are both ancient civilisations, and it is perhaps no surprise that our civilisational traditions also reveal philosophical parallels,” he said, quoting the Israeli “principle of ‘tikkun olam’ about healing the world”.

“In India, there is great admiration for Israel’s resolve, courage and achievements,” Modi said. “Long before we related to each other as modern states, we were linked by ties that go back more than 2,000 years.”

Modi mused about “returning to a land to which I have always felt drawn”. “After all, I was born on the same day that India formally recognised Israel – September 17, 1950.”

While India formally recognised Israel in 1950, two years after its formation, it only established diplomatic relations with it in 1992.

Deepening defence ties

These days, India is Israel’s largest weapons buyer, pumping billions of dollars into Israel’s defence industry each year. In 2024 as Israel waged its war on Gaza, Indian weapons firms sold Israel rockets and explosives, according to an Al Jazeera investigation.

On Thursday, Modi held talks with Netanyahu focused on further boosting ties in the areas of defence and security along with trade, technology and agriculture.

“We have decided to establish the Critical and Emerging Technologies Partnership. This will give new momentum to cooperation in areas such as AI, quantum, and critical minerals,” Modi said.

The two countries are also currently negotiating a free trade agreement.

Elevating strategic ties

India and Israel are reportedly inching closer to an alliance, along with other global powers, to boost security cooperation.

Before Modi’s visit, Netanyahu pitched a “hexagon of alliances” that he said would include India, Greece, Cyprus and other unnamed Arab, African and Asian states to collectively stand against what he called “radical” Shia and Sunni Muslim “axes” of adversaries in the region.

Modi has not confirmed this plan but did call for cooperation on multilateral projects, including the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and the I2U2, consisting of India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and US.

The IMEC envisions connecting India with the Middle East and Europe through an integrated rail and shipping corridor. The economic corridor would pass through India, the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe. It was unveiled in September 2023 during a Group of 20 summit in New Delhi.

“IMEC is very ambitious in bringing together these countries in ways that at one point would have been incomprehensible,” said Harsh Pant, vice president of the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank. “Today, it has become possible because India’s footprint has grown in the Middle East and in Europe.”

Geopolitical analysts have referred to the I2U2 as “the West Asian Quad” in reference to the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a forum of the US, Japan, Australia and India.

Modi also referred to the Abraham Accords, brokered by the US since 2020 for Gulf and North African countries to normalise relations with Israel, and “applauded your courage and vision”.

“Since then, the situation has changed significantly. The path is even more challenging. Yet it is important to sustain that hope,” Modi said.

‘Dehyphenating’ India from Israel-Palestine

Pant said, like some Arab nations, India wants to dehyphenate its relations in the region to suit its own strategic interests better. Dehyphenation is a foreign policy under which a country aims to maintain independent relationships with nations that may be in conflict with each other.

“India’s own relationships have developed to a point where India is no longer hyphenating its relationships in the region,” Pant said.

Analysts argued New Delhi has bet on Israel for its own strategic interests, even if at Palestine’s expense. From the Indian government’s point of view, “this is the beginning of a new strategic imagination for the region,” Pant told Al Jazeera.

Modi remarked in his speech to the Knesset that many Indians have migrated to Israel for work, adding that Indian youth have contributed to the building of modern Israel, including “also on the battlefield”. Thousands of foreign nationals have served in the Israeli military, including nearly 200 soldiers who are dual citizens of India and Israel.

Modi, however, did not mention Colonel Waibhav Kale, a former Indian army officer who died in May 2024 when a United Nations vehicle was struck by the Israeli army in Gaza. He was the first international UN worker in Gaza to die in the war.

“India’s stance is clear: Humanity must never become a victim of conflict. A path to peace has been created through the Gaza peace plan. India has fully supported these efforts,” Modi said before departing on Thursday.

However, analysts said the divergence from earlier Indian support for Palestine is stark and India will not call out Netanyahu for war crimes in Palestinian territory.

While governments before Modi laid the foundations for current bilateral ties, Modi has brought “this relationship out into the open”, Pant said. “What used to be hush-hush behind closed doors is now a matter of fact.”

“India is trying not to make ties with Israel a hostage to the issue of Palestine,” he argued.

Azad Essa, the author of the 2023 book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, said that earlier, India had positioned itself as a friend of Palestine “because it suited its national interests to be seen as pro-Palestine”.

Popular political forces in New Delhi have shifted that stance since then, however. Given the deep defence and security tie-up between Israel and India, Essa said, “It will be very difficult for opposition parties to promise a U-turn because being pro-Israel has become integral to the national interest.”

“To be pro-Palestine is now seen as being against the Indian national interest,” he said. Some have been detained and charged for expressing support for Palestine in India.

After the beginning of Trump’s second term, the connections between capitalism, white supremacy and imperial domination became increasingly clear. These have been highlighted through ICE raids as modern-day slave patrols, global criminal operations such as the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and United States assistance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a bipartisan US and transnational corporate experiment.

The growing understanding that people in the Global South, along with Black, Indigenous and other People of Colour (BIPOC) within the imperial core, face a common enemy has galvanised an anti-colonial, revolutionary movement committed to radical transformation.

And then the release of the Epstein files flooded public discourse.

Jeffrey Epstein was a financier convicted of sex crimes involving minors. After renewed federal charges in 2019, he died in jail (officially ruled a suicide). The case triggered public outrage about ruling class impunity, media focus on unsavoury associations between the political and corporate class and a plethora of conspiratorial narratives about cover-ups.

The Epstein case became far more than a criminal proceeding; it reflects a symbolic exposure of ruling class impunity and concentrated power and a spectacle of corruption within an empire in deep crisis and decline.

The Epstein case exposed ruling class criminality while simultaneously displacing structural accountability.

Importantly, “spectacle” does not mean “fake”; it means the organisation of politics through symbolic drama that displaces structural political analysis. With spectacle, social contradictions (inequality, social crises and instability) are dramatised rather than structurally challenged.

The enduring media and public fixation on the Epstein files, particularly as their release proceeds with little accountability and continued narratives that discredit and isolate survivors, serves less as accountability and more as a political diversion from systemic injustices: Racism, capitalism, the growth of the police state and ongoing international impunity.

More troubling still, it marks another step in the erosion of democracy and the consolidation of expansionist, war-driven fascism.

Fascist spectacle

In work by Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Guy Debord, Umberto Eco and others, fascist spectacle involves anti-intellectual and emotionally driven mass mobilisation around simple moral binaries (pure people v the corrupt ruling class), where action is revered while thought is reviled; the replacement of institutional process with symbolic imagery and drama; and mythic narratives of national decay and rebirth. Political theorist Roger Griffin calls this rebirth “palingenic ultranationalism”, that is, destruction as a precondition for rebirth.

The function of spectacle is to subvert principled analysis and resistance to oppression with emotion – outrage, disgust, despair and helplessness.

Conspiracy theories are the narrative engine of spectacle. They transform systemic crisis and social instability into simple, emotionally gripping stories of social taboo-breaking, centred on hidden and untouchable enemies, laying the groundwork through which authoritarian solutions are marketed as necessary and even redemptive.

When structural violence becomes visible, but accountability remains absent, public anger often seeks explanation through personalised and conspiratorial narratives rather than systemic analysis.

Amid growing distrust and corruption in mainstream media and the rise of citizen-driven and alternative social media ecosystems, conspiracy theories surrounding the Epstein case have blossomed: Claims of secret global cabals engaged in immoral sexual criminality, ritualistic fantasies involving human sacrifice, cannibalism and ancient symbolic structures and explicitly racist and anti-Semitic tropes about hidden rulers, among others.

Theories like these, whether wholly true, partially true or false, are not new; fascist movements have historically mobilised around the idea that the nation is being secretly corrupted by a degenerate ruling class, with a radical cleansing necessary to return to a righteous path.

These narratives do not expose a corrupt system; they obscure and mystify it. By sensationalising corruption into myth and providing explicit, though untouchable, targets for public outrage, they displace rigorous anti-colonial and material analyses of structural exploitation, greed and state violence with collective authoritarian longing for a strongman and the suppression of dissent to restore order.

The criminality of Epstein and the powerful figures who orbited him and participated in his abuses have come to symbolise a degenerate ruling class with identifiable names and faces, targets who could be exposed and jailed, thereby clearing the narrative space for a heroic white knight to ride in with promises of salvation.

As Hannah Arendt warned, conspiracy thinking thrives when trust in institutions collapses. The Epstein scandal intensified the sense of a ruling class operating above the law and of a justice system which protects its own, conditions ideal for authoritarian movements to exploit by insisting the system is irredeemably rigged and that only a strong leader can tear it down.

As such, the spectacle of the Epstein scandal can absorb and manipulate public outrage, redirecting it away from necessary structural accountability in the form of decolonisation and redistribution of wealth, ultimately reinforcing the very systems it appears to challenge.

In doing so, it promotes the aesthetics of politics – the spectacle – rather than grounded critiques of capitalism and imperial power. Further, it serves to distract from failures ultimately promoting oppression and war. According to Federico Caprotti, various forms of fascist spectacle produce a “collage” which both expresses and obscures the syncretic ideology of the regime.

The grand spectacle: War

When politics becomes theatre rather than collective progress dependent on accountability, transformation or reform, crisis becomes emotional drama, drama demands release (internal resolution) or escalation and escalation inevitably finds its expression in externalised war, in which the nation performs a grand spectacle of unity and sacrifice on the largest possible stage.

War acts as a stabilising force when internal contradictions cannot be resolved through collective mobilisation. With its uniforms and marches, war channels discontent by uniting a fragmented, outraged population against an externalised enemy, transforming righteous anger at the violence, oppression and greed of a ruling class into manufactured unity, heroism and meaning through violence against “the other”.

These dynamics, outlined by Benjamin decades ago, feel alarmingly familiar in the present moment, including in the spectacle surrounding the Epstein scandal.

In this context, external conflict functions not only as policy but as emotional consolidation, redirecting internal disillusionment towards collective national purpose.

Fascist forces deploy such spectacles to distract and mobilise, and are doing so presently; accelerating the dismantling of what remains of US democracy and the post-war international order, to be replaced by a system ruled by force and naked self-interest.

Spectacle politics does not require loyalty to specific leaders but to the emotional narrative they embody, rendering individual figures ultimately expendable.

In this logic, even Trump could be discarded, sacrificed to clear the way for a “purer” white male strongman (Vance? Pence? Carlson?) who promises to cleanse the ruling class and by extension its foreign so-called “handlers” (enemies like Russia, China and Iran or even allies like Israel and Europe, the latter already being threatened by Trump), of its unsavoury elements, particularly if Trump’s baggage with Epstein proves politically irredeemable.

By contrast, liberation and reconciliation and an end to capitalist oppression, with its accompanying genocidal violence and planetary destruction, require a steadfast structural framework aligned with broader leftist, antiracist and anti-colonial principles. Such a framework prioritises systemic transformation over spectacle. Within this view, the Epstein scandal is not treated as the disease itself, but as a symptom of capitalism’s inherent corruption.

A Palestinian mother from Gaza says she recognised her missing son, Mohammed Sharab, when he was shown shackled, blindfolded and listed as ‘for sale’ in a post shared by Israeli soldiers.

Recent comments by United States and Israeli officials supporting the concept of a “Greater Israel” have raised alarm bells across the region and shed light on a vision once only rarely publicly spoken about.

An interview aired last week by the American right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson with US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee started the current furore. Carlson, an influential figure who has been vocally critical of Israel over the past year, repeatedly asked Huckabee whether he supported Israel controlling all the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates River in Iraq.

Huckabee, a Christian Zionist, would not disavow the belief that the Bible promised that land to Israel – even though it now encompasses all or part of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said, leading to anger from those countries and others in the region, many of which are close US allies.

Then, speaking on Monday, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said that he would support “anything that will allow the Jews a large, broad, strong land and a safe haven for us”.

“Zionism is based on the Bible. Our mandate over the land of Israel is biblical, [and] the biblical borders of the land of Israel are clear … Therefore, the borders are the borders of the Bible,” the apparently secular Israeli politician said.

So what is Greater Israel exactly? And is it really an ultimate goal for some Israeli politicians?

Defining Greater Israel

The most expansionist claim for a Greater Israel is based on a biblical verse (Genesis 15:18-21), which narrates God making a covenant with Abraham that promises his descendants the land between the Nile and the Euphrates.

That would include the Jewish people, with the tribes of Israel believed to be descended through Abraham’s son, Isaac. But it would also include the children of another of Abraham’s sons, Ishmael (Ismail), regarded as the forefather of the Arabs.

Other definitions based on different biblical verses are narrower in their territorial scope and specify that the land of Israel would be promised to the tribes of Israel descended from Isaac.

How has Israel worked to achieve expansion?

The current state of Israel emerged from the British Mandate for Palestine in 1948. The mandate, created by the League of Nations in the wake of World War I and the occupation of Palestine by the British, geographically limited Israel upon its creation.

The 1948 war that followed the end of the mandate led to Israel taking control of all of Mandatory Palestine, with the exception of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But Israel soon expanded by force – in 1967 it defeated Arab forces and took control of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and Syria’s occupied Golan Heights. Israel continues to occupy all of those regions, with the exception of the Sinai, which it returned to Egypt in 1982.

Since then, Israel has ignored international law and continued occupying Palestinian and Syrian land, and has shown little respect for its neighbours’ sovereignty, occupying more land in Syria, as well as in Lebanon.

How popular is the idea of Greater Israel?

This needs to be broken down into two separate concepts – the expansion of Israel into the territory that immediately borders it, and the most extreme definition of Greater Israel: between the Nile and the Euphrates.

In terms of expansion into its immediate surroundings, Israeli Jews by and large support the annexation of East Jerusalem, which is occupied Palestinian territory, and the Golan Heights.

The Israeli government continues to move towards the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank. Israeli politicians vary in how open they are in their support for the formal annexation of the West Bank, but most mainstream Israeli politicians are supportive of the illegal Israeli settlements in the territory.

An expansion of Israeli settlements into Gaza is not as popular, but is supported by far-right Israeli parties.

A Greater Israel, including parts of Jordan, or the most irredentist definition between the Euphrates and the Nile, is more controversial. Pre-1948, many Zionists sought not just Palestine but also Jordan for their future state – one of the most important Zionist armed groups at the time, the Irgun, even included the map of both Palestine and Jordan in its emblem.

But after the foundation of Israel this took a back seat, and open calls for a vastly expanded Israel were largely restricted to the fringes. But those fringes – far-right figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – are now in government, reflecting a wider radicalisation within Israeli society itself.

That means the Israeli ‘mainstream’, politicians such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and centrists like Lapid, are either more open in their support for some form of Greater Israel beyond the West Bank, or less willing to publicly oppose it.

How threatened do regional countries feel?

Regional states have said that the annexation of the West Bank would be a red line, but have been unable to reverse Israel’s occupation.

Hints at a wider expansion have led to an angry reaction from Arab countries. This goes further back than Huckabee’s recent comments. For example, Jordan condemned Smotrich – Israel’s finance minister – when he gave a speech in 2023 at a podium that displayed a map that showed Jordan as part of Israel.

And Huckabee’s support for Greater Israel was roundly condemned by more than a dozen states, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkiye.

For Arab and Muslim states, the anger at the comments partially emanates from the sense of a lack of respect towards the sovereignty of regional states by a US official. But it also highlights fears that the balance of power in the region is weighted towards an Israel that is increasingly willing to attack across the Middle East, and has little interest in peace.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw a massive military parade in Pyongyang to wrap up the once every-five-years Workers’ Party congress. Kim reportedly shut the door to talks with South Korea but said cooperation with the US is possible if Washington gives due respect.