Trita Parsi

did we pursue this degree of closure of the island so that they can't even get food, medicine, and fuel.

But guess who else just did this two years ago and is still doing it?

This is what the Israelis did to Gaza.

This is the excessive form of collective punishment that the Israelis pursued and continue to pursue in Gaza, which they normalized through their action.

And now it is being adopted by the Trump administration against the Cuban people.

And this is very important to understand, but so much about what was happening in Gaza was about exactly the destruction of these norms of the use of force and international law, these things that we have built up since Second World War to make sure that civilians are protected in conflict.

We may not be able to end conflict altogether, but we are giving rights to civilians so that they are protected.

Those are now being destroyed, first in Gaza, and now we see its replication in Cuba.

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Clearly, something happened on December 29th of last year when Netanyahu, almost six months to the day, came back to the US and said, hey, let's have another war with Iran.

But what we saw immediately after that was not that the Israelis would take the lead, but rather that the US would take the lead.

In fact, take a look at Netanyahu's profile on this issue since then, up until just a couple of days ago.

he was staying completely quiet.

He was letting Trump take the lead.

He was avoiding an impression that Israel is the country pushing the US into war because Trump essentially took full ownership of the war and was in the lead of doing an attack.

So I don't think that is actually what was being said.

I mean, it may have been that it was said, but it was not part of the final decision.

The final decision was that the United States would take the lead.

The reason why I think this is now being leaked, incidentally, by CBS, and you can draw your own conclusions about that, is because of an effort to sabotage the talks that are taking place and the next round that will take place tomorrow in Geneva.

The Iranians have made it absolutely clear there's not going to be any restrictions or at least limitations on the size of their missile program.