In the opening hours of the American-Israeli terror on Iran, a missile hit a girls’ elementary school in Minab and killed 165 children. Thousands packed the streets to bury them, row after row of small graves dug into Iranian soil during Ramadan. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted photographs of the graves and wrote: “From Gaza to Minab, innocents murdered in cold blood.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stood at a Pentagon press conference the same day and announced that the United States would operate under “no stupid rules of engagement” and would not fight “politically correct wars.” He said this. Out loud. In front of cameras. About a country where 165 little girls had just been put in the ground. And in case anyone missed the message, Trump told reporters the same day that “the big wave hasn’t even happened yet,” and that “we haven’t even started hitting them hard.” At least 787 people were killed in the first four days. Ten hospitals were struck, including Khatam al-Anbia and Gandhi hospitals in Tehran, where babies were moved from incubators while the strikes landed. A double tap strike on Niloofar Square on Sunday killed more than twenty people who were breaking their Ramadan fast at cafes. A man named Shahin, who survived the attack, described watching his friend be severed in half and putting him back together with his own hands. “All these people have died,” he said, “and they had nothing to do with nuclear bombs, they had nothing to do with missiles.”

This is what they mean by preventative.

Israel calls everything preventative. Preventative strikes. Preventative operations. Preventative killing of Palestinian children so they cannot grow up one day to resist the theft of their land. The word does enormous legal work for very little legal basis, because what Israel and the United States call prevention is what international law calls extrajudicial execution, what the Geneva Conventions call the willful targeting of civilians, what the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court calls a war crime, and what the Genocide Convention, in Article I, calls an act requiring third-party states not merely to condemn but to prevent and punish. The word preventative is how you take a bombed school and make it sound like caution. It is how you describe the charred body of a twelve-year-old girl as a security calculation. It is one of the great obscenities in the language of power, and the world has been swallowing it for decades, and what we are watching now across Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank is the accumulated consequence of that tolerance.

So apply the logic honestly, and in every direction. If preventative military action is legitimate when a state has declared its intent to destroy its neighbors — openly, repeatedly, on camera — then the world has more than sufficient legal and moral grounds to take preventative action against Israel today.

Article 51 of the UN Charter permits individual and collective self-defense against armed attack. The Responsibility to Protect doctrine, adopted unanimously by all UN member states in 2005, asserts that where a state is manifestly failing to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity, the international community has not merely a right but an obligation to act, including through collective military measures authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Article I of the Genocide Convention goes further: it requires states to prevent genocide, which the International Court of Justice confirmed in Bosnia v. Serbia means states must act when they knew or should have known that genocide was being committed or was imminent. The ICJ has already issued binding provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza. Israel has defied them in full view of the world.

And the manifested intent is not ambiguous. Finance Minister Smotrich declared “we are destroying everything in Gaza, the world isn’t stopping us.” Israeli officials have openly called Turkey “the next Tehran.” Senator Lindsey Graham, previewing the ambitions of this axis as though announcing a schedule, said Cuba is “next.” Netanyahu displayed his map of the “New Middle East” at the United Nations General Assembly with Palestine erased from it.

There is precedent for intervention. In Kosovo in 1999, NATO acted militarily to halt ethnic cleansing without Security Council authorization, on the basis that the humanitarian catastrophe overrode the procedural obstacle of Russian and Chinese vetoes. In East Timor, a multinational force deployed to stop atrocities carried out by Indonesian-backed militias. In Libya, Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized force specifically to protect civilians from a government killing them. Each time, the world acknowledged that sovereignty cannot shield slaughter, that delay means graves, that the legal architecture exists precisely for these moments. The same states that sanctioned Russia within days of the invasion of Ukraine, coordinated weapons shipments, invoked every instrument of international law with an urgency no one has ever managed to summon for Palestinians, have now watched Israel and the United States kill nearly 800 Iranians in four days, strike ten hospitals, bomb a girls’ school during the holy month, and responded with travel advisories. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Freight rates from Shanghai to Dubai have more than doubled. Pakistan has deployed troops and imposed emergency measures after anti-war protests killed 35 people. The region is being set on fire, and the arsonist is calling it self-defense.

What Israel and the United States are doing in Iran is not a response to an Iranian attack on American soil. Iran did not attack the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained the logic himself: the US “knew there was going to be an Israeli action” and acted first, preemptively, on Israel’s behalf, against a country that had not struck American forces, because the administration decided, unilaterally, that Iran was about a year to a year and a half from a nuclear threshold. This is not the law of self-defense under Article 51. This is the crime of aggression under Article 8 bis of the Rome Statute, defined as the planning, preparation, initiation, or execution of an act of war against the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of another state. It is the same charge for which Nazi officials were prosecuted at Nuremberg. The chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson, described aggression as “the supreme international crime” because it contains within it all the evil that follows. What follows in Iran has already begun.

The preventative action the world owes is seizure of Israeli military capabilities. It is arms embargoes backed by consequences. It is recognition that every country that has watched this unfold and done nothing is, in the language of the Genocide Convention itself, in breach of its own obligations. The school in Minab is not an isolated atrocity. It is an Israeli military tactic with a documented history: on April 8, 1970, the Israeli Air Force bombed the Bahr el-Baqar primary school in Egypt, killing 46 children and wounding more than 50. More than fifty years of precedent, and the world has learned nothing, or rather, has learned exactly the lesson Israel intended: that there are no consequences.

While the bombs fall on Tehran and the graves fill in Minab, Israel has simultaneously relaunched its ground campaign in southern Lebanon, and the word being used to describe what is happening there is evacuation. It is worth sitting with that word for a moment. The Israeli military has issued forced displacement orders for at least eighteen villages and towns in southern and eastern Lebanon. It has struck residential neighborhoods in the southern suburbs of Beirut for the second consecutive day, bombed a twelve-story building in Tyre, hit the headquarters of Al Manar TV in southern Beirut, and is directing troops to advance to sixteen additional positions across the border, with the UN peacekeeping force UNIFIL confirming it watched Israeli forces cross into Lebanon in several areas on the morning of March 4. Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz has said the military is weighing a ground operation to establish a “buffer zone” between Lebanon and Israel’s northern communities. Approximately 110,000 reservists have been called up. More than 40 people have been killed and 246 wounded in the past 24 hours alone. Over 100,000 people have already been displaced, and the UN Refugee Agency reports that many cannot even reach the shelters — they are sleeping in their cars on the sides of roads, stuck in traffic jams leading away from cities that are being bombed behind them.

 

This is not evacuation. This is the Gaza playbook, applied to Lebanon, with the same language, the same sequence, and the same intended outcome. In Gaza, Israel issued evacuation orders for the north in October 2023 and told the population to move south. Then it bombed the south. Then it drew the Yellow Line and declared 50% of Gaza permanently uninhabitable and began shooting anyone who approached it. The Lebanese cabinet, under Israeli and American pressure, has now formally ordered Hezbollah to disarm and directed the army to confine weapons north of the Litani River, which means that the state Israel is demanding Lebanon become is a state that has voluntarily surrendered the capacity to resist Israeli bombardment of its own territory. Hezbollah lawmaker Mohammad Raed rejected the order and noted that the Lebanese state had shown a “clear inability” to stop Israeli assaults — which is the point. You are being asked to disarm while you are being bombed. You are being asked to accept the conditions of your own defenselessness as a precondition for the bombing to stop. This is not a ceasefire negotiation. This is a demand for surrender dressed in the vocabulary of state sovereignty.

 

What is happening in southern Lebanon right now is ethnic cleansing, and the reason it does not get called that is the same reason the Gaza genocide did not get called genocide until the bodies were too numerous to explain away: the vocabulary of Western media and Western governments is fixed to protect Israel from the accurate description of what Israel does. Forced displacement of a civilian population through military bombardment, the systematic destruction of residential infrastructure, evacuation orders issued as cover for the permanent seizure of territory, a “buffer zone” that happens to expand Israeli control over Lebanese land — these are not the incidental consequences of a security operation. They are the operation. They are what a state that has spent the last two years proving it faces no consequences looks like when it moves to the next country on the list, carrying the same tactics, the same impunity, and the same confidence that the world will watch and produce statements.

 

The families sleeping in their cars in Lebanon tonight are not collateral damage from a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. They are the target. Displacement is the strategy. The buffer zone is the goal. And if the international community does not name this for what it is, the buffer zone in Lebanon will be followed by a buffer zone in Syria, and one in Iran’s north if the CIA’s Kurdish arming program succeeds, and each buffer zone will expand the territory under effective Israeli control, and each expansion will be called security, and each displaced population will be called evacuated, and the Greater Israel that Netanyahu displayed at the United Nations without Palestine on it will inch forward one “buffer zone” at a time, until there is no more land left to take and no more people left to displace and the map finally matches the ambition.

Americans Have Never Lived in a Democracy

America entered this war without the support of its own people. The majority of Americans oppose this war, which has not slowed it by a single sortie, because the United States is not a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a system in which a foreign apartheid regime and its domestic proxies can instruct the American government to commit the crime of aggression against a sovereign nation that has not attacked it, and the government will comply, and four members of the opposing party will openly help — Greg Landsman, Tom Suozzi, Josh Gottheimer, Jared Moskowitz, who received a combined $1.7 million from AIPAC in the last election cycle — while the bombs are already falling.

The War Powers Resolution exists specifically to prevent a president from unilaterally committing American forces to combat without congressional authorization. Trump bypassed it. The Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress. Congress was not consulted in any meaningful way. A classified briefing is not consent. And now Hakeem Jeffries is having to whip votes for a War Powers Resolution to stop a war that is already happening, that Congress did not authorize, against a country that did not attack the United States, while Texas and North Carolina hold primaries and Bill Clinton gives a deposition about Jeffrey Epstein and Republican senators hint that Cuba might be next.

We apparently require less evidence to bomb thousands of Muslims than to arrest one member of an international sex trafficking network. The Epstein files, which implicate scores of the people making these decisions, sit in the same silence that covers the mass graves in Gaza. Khamenei’s wife died from wounds sustained in the strikes that also killed him. His daughter, grandchild, daughter-in-law, and son-in-law were killed in the same attack. Drone strikes hit the US Embassy in Riyadh. Six American service members were killed in an Iranian missile strike on the Kuwaiti port of Shuaiba. Eighteen more were seriously injured. The State Department issued emergency advisories telling Americans to leave fifteen countries in the Middle East, including countries whose airports were already closed because of the war. The American people are less safe. The American economy is less stable. The Strait of Hormuz is closed and leading marine insurers have cancelled war coverage for ships in the Gulf. All of this, against the will of the people it is being done to, on behalf of a government they did not elect and a set of interests that have nothing to do with their survival. This is the democracy being exported. This is the freedom being delivered at Niloofar Square.

What connects all of this — the school in Minab and the school in Gaza, the double tap at Niloofar Square and the double tap at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis where Israel killed 22 people including five journalists, the CIA arming jihadists in Syria and now militias in Iran, the Epstein network whose clients governed the world and whose files are being buried under the noise of a regional war, the sanctions on human rights defenders, the ICC prosecutors threatened, the mass surveillance architecture built by Palantir and Paragon and Elbit and exported globally — is that none of it is accidental, and none of it is separate. The US-Israel axis is not a foreign policy preference. It is one of the most dangerous configurations of organized power in the world today, and its danger lies in what it has spent the last two years proving: that it can commit any atrocity, against any population, on any scale, and face no consequences, because the institutions designed to produce consequences have been systematically defunded, discredited, sanctioned, and threatened into paralysis.

The genocide in Gaza was a demonstration that every norm shattered there made the assault on Iran easier to launch. Every court sanctioned, every prosecutor threatened, every UN resolution vetoed, every aid convoy bombed, every journalist killed in a press vest, every 1,516 pages of names dismissed as Hamas propaganda — all of it was preparation.

The unraveling of international order that we are witnessing did not begin in Tehran last weekend. It began in Gaza, in October 2023, when a western-backed genocide was launched against a captive population and the world’s institutions, one by one, were shown to be either complicit or decorative. Reversing it requires starting where it started. Not from Iran, not from Lebanon, not from whatever city in Turkey or Cuba that Senator Graham has circled on his map for the next news cycle. From Palestine. From the accountability that has been deferred, denied, legislated against, and vetoed for seventy-eight years while the logic of elimination expanded outward in every direction it was permitted to go. There is no international order worth defending that was built on the ethnic cleansing of a people and sustained by their extermination, and reforming the edges of that order while the foundational crime continues is not diplomacy. It is the performance of diplomacy in the service of the crime itself.

The world that bombs schools and calls it defense will keep bombing schools. It will keep calling it defense. It will keep doing this until it is made to stop, and it will not be made to stop until the world is willing to go back to where the permission to bomb schools was first granted, and do what the law has always required, and what the bodies have always demanded: name it, prosecute it, end it, and make sure that the next school that is built on that land, in Gaza or Minab or anywhere else children go to learn, is built on something other than the tolerance of atrocity and the silence of those who watched and decided not to act.