A Glimmer of Hope

Studio photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, London, 1931. Photo by Elliott & Fry via Wikimedia Commons

The treacherous assassination on Feb. 28 by the U.S. and Israel of Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many members of his family, and of Iran's nuclear scientists and military commanders — while Oman mediated talks about its nuclear enrichment program that were not only ongoing but had made considerable progress — is what has thrust humanity into an "Abyss of Despair."

Many decades ago, Gandhi averred: "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it — always."

The history of the 20th century validated his affirmation. Three highly militarized fascist powers — Italy, Germany and Japan — invaded, bombed and devastated most of Europe and East and Southeast Asia in the 1925–1945 period and had appeared invincible. But by August 1945, all three had been defeated. Benito Mussolini was shot by fellow Italians; Adolf Hitler committed suicide; and Hideki Tojo was hanged as a war criminal.

Post-1945, the U.S. and Russia — the latter in its new incarnation as the Soviet Union — emerged as global superpowers. Each had its military alliance: NATO with 15 members and the Warsaw Pact with eight. Gandhi-inspired Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru founded the Non-Aligned Movement in 1955 in collaboration with like-minded Asian, African and Latin American leaders to oppose these military alliances.

In an address to the UN General Assembly on Nov. 3, 1948, he said, "I am not afraid of the future. I am not afraid of the bigness of great powers, their armies, their fleets and atom bombs. That is what I learned from my mentor Mahatma Gandhi. India stood as an unarmed people against a powerful empire. We decided not to submit to evil."

From 1980 onward, Gandhi-inspired Soul Force revolutions brought down Communist dictatorships in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany and the Soviet Union. Most of them, or their successor states, emerged as democratic states and joined the European Union. Elsewhere, Soul Force revolutions ended Apartheid in South Africa, racial discrimination in the U.S., and military dictatorships in the Philippines, Chile and Bolivia. They gave the Philippines and Chile their first female presidents, Bolivia its first Aymara president, and South Africa and the U.S. their first Black presidents.

When the UN was founded in 1945, it had 51 members. By 2000, it had 189!

These radical changes were the most sweeping democratization of national politics and the international political geography in world history.

Roger Markwick has written about these revolutions in his book "From Violence to Velvet: A Century of Revolutions 1917-2017."

Ironically and tragically, while this impressive progress was being made in The Ascent of Man, Zionist collaborators with the genocidal Nazi regime were sedulously striving to create a genocidal state in Palestine.

On Aug. 25, 1933, the Zionist Federation of Germany signed the Haavara Agreement with the Nazi government for the emigration of 60,000 German Jews, along with a portion of their assets, to Palestine.

In December 1940, Lehi (Fighters for Freedom of Israel) submitted a formal proposal to the German naval attaché at Ankara that it would "recruit 40,000 Jews from Nazi-occupied eastern Europe to support Germany in its war against the Allied Powers if it would enable establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine." The proposal, passed by the attaché to the German Ambassador to Turkey, was forwarded to Berlin but received no response.

Most of Israel's founders were from the "Zibur" (Zionist Leadership) of Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, as their birthplaces indicate:

David Ben-Gurion (Płońsk, Poland); Moshe Sharett (Kherson, Ukraine); Levi Eshkol (Orativ, Ukraine); Golda Meir (Kyiv, Ukraine); Menachim Begin (Brest-Litovsk, Belarus); Yitzhak Shamir (Ruzhinoy, Belarus).

Four of Israel's prime ministers — David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon — were active members of the Haganah, Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang) and Irgun terror gangs. Most shocking of their terrorist acts were:

• Assassination of Lord Walter Moyne, British minister resident in the Middle East, in Cairo on Nov. 6, 1944.

• Bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the British administrative and military headquarters, on July 22, 1946, killing 91 people, including British officers and civilian staff.

• Assassination of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte on Sept. 17, 1948. His peace proposals had placed Jerusalem under international control, ceded the Negev to the Arabs and allowed Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

• The Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, in which 240 residents of this Arab village, including women and children, were killed. This massacre was then used to trigger the exodus of 700,000 Palestinians from neighboring villages. Palestinians still refer to it as the Nakba (The great disaster).

This massacre caused such widespread revulsion that 25 eminent Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo and Hannah Arendt, wrote a letter to The New York Times on Dec. 4, 1948, saying: "Among the most disturbing phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the Tnuat Haherut Party. Its political philosophy and methods are closely akin to Nazi and Fascist parties. Formed by former members of the Irgun chauvinist terror gang, its April 9 massacre of 240 men, women, and children in Deir Yassin village is shocking. Far from being ashamed, they invited foreign correspondents to view the corpses."

This was not the only "shocking" crime the "newly created state of Israel" has committed.

Ronen Bergman, in his book "Rise and Kill: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations," revealed that Israel has assassinated 2,700 of its "enemies" in diverse countries. As this book was published in 2018, this number is most likely more than 3,000 now.

Israel's agency for assassinating its "enemies" is Mossad. Formally known as the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations of the State of Israel, it reports only to the prime minister. Its present annual budget is $2.75 billion. It is among the world's best-funded espionage agencies.

Israel's egregious belligerence is recorded in its pre-emptive strikes against Egypt and Syria in 1956 and 1967, destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, occupation (1982–2000) of southern Lebanon, and feeding the U.S. with fake intelligence to induce it to attack Iraq in March 2003, Libya in December 2011, and Iran in June 2025 and February 2026. In all these cases it has claimed that these countries and their leaders pose existential threats to it. This, despite it being an undeclared nuclear power with approximately 100 nuclear bombs, and Iran being bound by a fatwa (religious edict) not to acquire nuclear weapons and having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel has not.

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, Israel has bombed 40,000 targets and dropped 70,000 bombs on Gaza, which has an area of only 360 square kilometers. In doing this it has used artificial intelligence. Among the approximately 100,000 Palestinians it has killed, 70% were women and children.

In recent months, an amazingly sinister Zionist project — honey-trapping political, diplomatic and corporate VIPs with sex — has come to light. Its prime architect, Jeffrey Epstein (who either committed suicide or was murdered in prison in 2019), was a Mossad agent.

The malignancy, which gestated with the collaboration of Zionist leaders with the Nazis in the 1935–1945 period, has metastasized since then into a global cancer that has infected even the highest levels of U.S. and West European polities. Sadly, it has also infected India, as its prime minister's visit to Israel and effusive support for it just two days prior to its treacherous Feb. 28 attack on Iran indicates.

Amazingly, Iran, despite the "decapitation" of its spiritual, political, scientific and military leadership, has neither collapsed nor surrendered and has made a remarkable riposte on U.S. and Israeli strategic assets in its neighborhood, including its two mega aircraft carriers. Its geographic size, mountainous terrain and large, intrepid and deeply spiritual population (1.65 million square kilometers; 93 million people) have been valuable assets for this. As important have been its strenuous efforts since the mid-1980s to devise a wide-spectrum asymmetric warfare strategy, make the requisite investments to produce weapons pertinent to it, and build secure storage bunkers for them. It has also trained and equipped militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen to assist it whenever necessary.

In its present confrontation with the U.S. and Israel, it has played its strategic cards skillfully. In the initial phase it fired its drones and conventional missiles, impelling the U.S., its Gulf allies and Israel to expend their high-cost Patriot, David's Sling and THAAD interceptor missiles. It then attacked their Iron Dome and radar installations. Thereafter it launched successive waves (85 of them by March 31) of its hypersonic missiles with payloads of more than one ton and multiple cluster bomblets. These have caused considerable damage to U.S. and Israeli strategic assets in Bahrain (where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based), Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE (which host U.S. fighter squadrons), Tel Aviv (where Israel's prime minister's office, Defense Ministry, Knesset and Ben Gurion International Airport are located), Haifa (where it has its naval base, oil refinery and electricity and desalination plants), Nevatim (its prime air force base) and Dimona (with its nuclear reactor and research center).

As Israel's entire territory is only 22,000 square kilometers, every part of it is within 10-minute reach of Iran's Mach 12 hypersonic missiles. So also are all U.S. strategic assets in Gulf countries.

Iran's blocking of the Hormuz Strait and its announcement that only ships paying for its oil in Chinese yuan would be permitted to transit it is another clever move. Asia Times has written: "Iran's Hormuz yuan move is a direct hit on the petrodollar. It is a deliberate attempt to fuse military geography with monetary strategy."

In June 2024, Saudi Arabia allowed its 50-year petrodollar agreement with the U.S. to lapse. Since then its oil is being sold in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. This is a significant shift in global financial dynamics.

The more the petrodollar is replaced, the more difficult servicing the enormous U.S. national debt will become. Between January 2024 and January 2026, it ballooned from $34.5 trillion to $39.5 trillion. Since Feb. 28, 2026, it has probably risen by a further $500 billion.

Iran's defense of its sovereignty and its countering of the U.S.-Israeli Feb. 28 attack has tilted the strategic balance of forces in its favor. It is the U.S. that requested the 14-day ceasefire. Iran agreed to it only after the U.S. accepted its 10-point agenda as the basis for negotiations. Israel will not participate in this negotiation, which Pakistan will host in Islamabad. This is a great humiliation for India and its foreign policy. As incumbent chair of BRICS, India should have organized this negotiation, and New Delhi should have been the venue. India's prime minister squandered this opportunity in order to align his and his political party's Hindutva ideology with that of the Israeli prime minister's Zionist ideology. In doing so, he has clearly established that these ideologies are two sides of the same coin.

Gandhi said: "He who fears fails." The Iranian people, by forming human chains on bridges and around their country's prime strategic and cultural assets likely to be bombed by the U.S. and Israel, have shown the world how fearless, patriotic and deeply spiritual they are and, in doing so, won the world's respect and admiration, particularly in the Global South.