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There would not now be a war between Israel and Iran without President Trump. It has been evident for two decades that there were only two ways of stopping Iran going nuclear: either diplomacy or war. On 14 July 2015 the USA, France, China, Russia, Germany, and the EU/UK agreed a Joint Plan of Action, (JPCOA), a nuclear deal to limit and monitor Iran’s stockpile and enrichment of uranium in exchange for significant sanctions relief. It had taken years of hard diplomacy to achieve this goal. In March 2018, the IAEA (international Atomic Energy Agency) stated it could verify that Iran had been implementing its JPCOA commitments notably to keep uranium enrichment below 3.67%. Diplomacy had prevailed.
On 8 May 2018, Trump announced the USA’s withdrawal from the agreement. Negotiators had carefully ring-fenced the nuclear deal from problems of Iran’s missile development, and its support for Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Syrian regime, but Trump re-introduced these issues as an excuse for sabotaging JPCOA. Heavy pressure from Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, seems to have been influential. A week before, Netanyahu had delivered an inflammatory speech in the White House citing documents allegedly found in a Tehran warehouse, but pertaining to the period before 2003, purporting to show Iran was lying about its claim that its nuclear intentions were peaceful. It took Sir Simon Gass, former British ambassador to Iran and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) 2019-2023, speaking on the BBC Today programme of 14 June, to point out Trump’s role in creating the conditions for war. Until the USA reneged on the JCPOA agreement in 2018, strengthening the hard-liners, demoralizing the Iranian public, and humiliating President Hourani, Iran’s preparations for making a nuclear weapon had been in abeyance. From the perspective of ordinary Iranians, you do not necessarily think possession of a nuclear deterrent is perversely irrational. Some, of course, are opposed to it. A number of States with a military presence near or around Iran’s borders have nuclear weapons: Russia, USA, UK, Pakistan and Israel. Iran/Persia has in the past suffered greatly from foreign interventions and invasion. JCPOA took a lot of selling to Shi’a hardliners. To allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thorough monitoring access to Iran’s nuclear facilities was a big ask. Despite the regime, in my experience, Iranian national pride is widely shared inside the country. You do not have to be a fanatical Revolutionary Guard commander to believe in national sovereignty and maintaining national security. These are basic principles in and derived from of the UN Charter. Not surprisingly, with American sanctions restored and in response to the assassination on 20 November 2020 of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the ‘Father’ of Iran’s nuclear programme, the Iranian Parliament in reaction passed legislation enabling installation of new centrifuges for uranium enrichment to 20%. After the Israeli attack on the Natanz nuclear facility in 2021, the hardline President Ebrahim Raisi (2021-2024) declared Iran would increase uranium enrichment to 60%. To justify its present war, Israel claims Iran is now able to assemble several atomic bombs and ‘weaponise’ them. That has been questioned by sources in the CIA. Remember Sadam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’? Iran pulled out of talks with the USA in Muscat on 15 June in Oman. Not surprisingly, Trump does not refer back to his historically damaging 2015 decision. Indeed, with his customary inconsistency, he has described the current Israeli attacks on Iran as “excellent” and called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”. Trumpian peace-making has three steps reminiscent of the school playground: decide who is winning, back them, deride the loser. Meanwhile Netanyahu is moving on from talk of Iran’s existential threat to Israel to regime change in Iran. However despicable the human rights record of Iran’s rulers, the velayat-al-faqih (guardianship of the – Shi’a – jurist) in which the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, supported by the Revolutionary Guards is a de facto dictator despite parliamentary trappings, interventions sponsoring regime change in Iraq and Libya are a dire warning to pursuing the same goal in Iran.. The current Iran war raises fundamental questions about Trump’s role in the new world disorder: the use of naked power, impunity, disinformation, and distortion of the past. In Stalin’s famously cynical words “It is always difficult to predict the past”. In Orwell’s words: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” A control largely managed through social media, what computer scientist Kate Starbird calls “participatory disinformation” (Sage Journals 2023). We now recognise this rewriting of history as a tool of populist authoritarianism. In Trump this manifests itself in his belief in an imaginary past and insistence on history as an exercise in narrating America’s greatness. Are we watching cognitive decline? calculated political manipulation of history? Mere wishful thinking? Probably all of these. While driving with young children on the back seat I once asked ‘did you see the stoat crossing the road”, a wonderful, fast elongate wiggling form, tail flowing out behind. Back came the answer ‘yes and it had a rabbit in its mouth’. It didn’t. (3-4 year-old children have yet to distinguish in their minds between what is true and what they would like to be true). And this is reminiscent of Trump’s assertion that the US 2020 elections were rigged, demonstrably untrue, and that the crowds at his first inauguration were bigger than those at Obama’s, pictures clearly showing they weren’t. The Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful country in the world also holds a children’s storybook versions of US history and is set on American children learning it. In a world of information dominated by the news-cycle everything is “Now Now”. On his Truth Social platform, sometimes touching on “what might come next”, Trump inhabits this world and frequently sets its agenda. Asking how we arrived at any situation, and perhaps how we might change it, often seems an afterthought, even on radio, TV and print media. For he who controls the present controls the past - even in democracies. We need a developed historical consciousness to deal effectively with the present. We also need creative imagination, integrity and a concern for the truth to create a safe and better future . Trump lacks all these attributes. He is a clear and present danger both nationally and internationally. At this critical moment in history, have we begun to take on board the magnitude of this misfortune? See TheArticle 19/06/2025
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2001, the year which ended with 9/11, started with Chocolat, a film whose fine performance by Juliette Binoche added to the sum of human happiness. It’s a tale of a single mother, Vianne, setting up as a chocolatier in a Burgundy village, blowing away its straight-laced Catholic gloom. Chocolat was shot in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain with its Eglise St. Geneste and Anis sweetie store just south of the no less beautiful, and more famous, Abbaye de Fontenay. The fictional village is called Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, probably a joke about soutanes, in English cassocks. Suffolk is doing its best to compete.
The Government has just announced it is investing a further £14.2 billion in Sizewell C nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast. Villages on the B1122 that runs south towards Sizewell B are soon to face the full traffic discomforts. A little before tiny Theberton, no match for Flavigny/Lansquenet, you come unexpectedly upon a Suffolk chocolate-maker. Mind you, not a chocolatier (they start with the pre-made chocolate melt) but Bean to Bar, back to chocolate basics, starting with cacao beans in hessian sacks. However amiable and engaging you find Deanna and Jonathan Tilston the local chocolate-makers, when it comes to jollying up Theberton there’s no competition with Juliette Binoche’s impact on Lasquenet. But this is not to undervalue the fun potential of the neighourhood. If you read The Yoxmere Fisherman you will see that at Theberton’s ancient church, part of the Anglican Benefice of Yoxmere, they “ …will be celebrating St. Peter’s Day, [28th June] once again with parachuting teddy bears from the tower”. Well, that does beat those licentious frissons from Lasquenet. Here is how chocolate making in rural Suffolk came about. Deanne Tilston, who originally taught deaf children, started by prescribing herself chocolate for a magnesium deficiency and ended up making award-winning specialty chocolate bars, 1,000 a week at full production. She and Jonathan named their company Tosier after Thomas Tosier whose wife, Grace, kept a shop selling hot chocolate on Chocolate Row, Greenwich, in the 1720s. In 1717 Thomas had a plum job at Hampton Court serving King George 1 hot chocolate in his bedchamber morning and evening. At the time chocolate was a luxury and “chocolate houses” were frequented by the wealthy, one up on coffee shops, and the only way to taste chocolate at the time. Beyond Europe chocolate has a more venerable history. The clue is in the (Greek) name for the cocoa tree Theobroma cacao “Food of the Gods”. Chocolate probably featured in religious practices. The actual beans come from large rugby ball shaped pods on trees that thrive in rain forests. In the highlands of Ecuador on the border with Peru cacao farming goes back some 5,300 years, the trees having survived the last ice age. A faster growing variety somewhat lacking in flavour was planted in colonial English and French West Africa with Ivory Coast and Ghana coming to account for over 60% of global production, supplying the big brands such as Hershey, Mars, Nestlé and Cadbury. Chocolate is – surprisingly - a fermented food and 90% cultivated by small-holders. Before they reach Suffolk, the farmers sell the ‘wet’ cacao beans, well cushioned in the pod, surrounded with mucilage known as Baba, to fermentation centres where the moisture content of the sticky fermented goo is reduced to 7%, by persistent raking the beans, before they are sent off to chocolate makers around the world. The craftmanship which goes into Tosier chocolate now comes into play. Inside the shop, located in converted farm buildings, shiny modern machinery (bought from Cocoatown, Atlanta USA) roasts and cracks the beans, grinds them in a melangeur and tempers by heating to above 45%. This is the temperature at which the crystals in what is now cocoa butter align, and the butter can be left to harden. Each step a matter of fine judgement, exact temperatures and timings. Chocolate making is not an easy start-up for a new small manufacturer now in their third year. A bucket of ‘wet cacao’ costs 44% more than last year. The price of cocoa butter has risen in the last 12 months from £325 for 20 kilos to £1,560. Climate Change, black beetle disease killing the trees, and general deforestation all have made prices shoot up. For once the primary producers are doing very well and big brands have had to search around to fill the gaps in their supply chain. What of the child-labour scandals that have beset both the growers and the buyers of cocoa from West Africa, globally the leading region for cocoa farming? In 2021 International Rights Advocates , a US organization specializing in labour abuses by multinational companies, initiated a lawsuit in Washington DC against some of the big brand chocolate companies on behalf of eleven Malians who claimed to have worked in Ivory Coast as forced – i.e. slave - labourers. Reliable data from US labour organisations at the time estimated over 1.5 million West African children in total were working in cocoa production in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Deanne and Jonathan aim to achieve the highest standards. The sacks in the Tosier shop when I visited were from Ecuador and Uganda. On beginning trading they became a B-corporation member, a global network of ethical companies, subscribing to, and held to, certification criteria devised by B-Lab, an NGO committed to transparency, accountability, sustainability and equitable economic relations. In B-Lab’s words “the B-Corp Certification label is a tool to signal a company’s ethical brand identity to concerned consumers deciding which products to support and endorse”. Tosier is also purist in being made without additives, emulsifiers and lecithin, the sort of processing found in the big brands. And, as the books arrayed in their shop testify, it is also dedicated to teaching shoppers how chocolate is made and should be made. Most of the money in these parts of Suffolk is from pigs or tourists. Both require careful handling and particular skills. But artistry can be found in a heartfelt pursuit of purity and quality in chocolate making. Not least in lives less ordinary in Suffolk. As the lawyer and writer, Louis Nizer said “A man who works with his hands is a labourer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist”. And for the work at Tosier read “man and woman”. You can find the Tosier Chocolate Tasting Rooms at Reckford Farm, Middleton, near Saxmundham, IP17 3NS. Open Wednesdays to Sundays. See TheArticle 12/06/2025 No-one who has looked at the images of extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust Memorial of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem will underestimate the impact of the appalling 7 October 2023 Hamas attack and hostage-taking on Israelis and Jews worldwide. No-one watching the daily TV coverage of the civilian dead and dying amongst the rubble of Gaza, and listening to radio reports of attacks on Palestinian communities on the West Bank, will underestimate the impact on our own public opinion and elsewhere.
The ability of Israel’s Jewish State to define the purpose of this violence – and the wider conflict with Palestinian nationalism - has reached its limits. It has created the current spiritual crisis in Judaism. Partly in response to public opinion, the tone and tide of Western governments’ reactions is changing. Why now? For a long time Western democracies voiced concern rather than condemnation of Israel’s conduct. Hamas, the sorcerer’s apprentice that had received funding from Israel to split the PLO (Palestine Liberation Movement), had perpetrated a face-to-face version of 9/11. The ravages of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, Europe’s millennia of antisemitism, all weighed heavily on the scales of foreign policy. The weapons kept coming from the USA. After months of bombing and blockade, Israel continued to promote a story that this was a war for survival - rather than a war for the survival for Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, propped up by religious extremists determined to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinians. Haaretz, Israel’s oldest and most influential newspaper, was writing on 18 April that there was “no longer a war, but an unrestrained assault on civilians”. The key to continuing unrestrained the invasion and destruction of Gaza while containing the volume of protest both inside and outside Israel, was to ‘kettle’ reporting and comment on public outrage in a wider story of antisemitism: to present as a further expression of antisemitism protest at the massive civilian casualties, blockade of Gaza, deprivation of all but the most rudimentary health care, near starvation and resultant malnutrition of a generation of Palestinians. But like most falsehoods it contained an element of truth. Islamic solidarity worldwide with the Palestinians can slip easily into antisemitism, and in the heated language of Left-wing protests sometimes Jews are conflated with the Israeli government. Some hate crimes have been prosecuted in Britain. As protestors increasingly emerged from Jewish communities around the world and inside Israel – albeit at first a small minority - dismissal of protest at the conduct of the war as merely antisemitism became implausible, even if frequently repeated by Israeli government sources. Moreover, IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) bombing and shelling put the lives of hostages in danger. On 13 May a number of British Rabbis called for an end to the blockade. “What is happening in Gaza is completely against core democratic values and what I would call Jewish values that we are all made equal in the sight of God”, in the words of their spokesperson Rabbi Janet Laura Klausner. Trump’s Riviera of the Middle East, AI-generated social media video brought out some 350 US Jewish leaders in denunciation. Dissent with the conduct of the war has been growing in Israel. Last week, 40 NGOs issued an urgent appeal to stop the war. A Catholic news service, Independent Catholic News, carried this significant story about civil society resistance to the war in Israel. I have not found it reported elsewhere in the UK. The organisations included - to give some sense of their range - Rabbis for Human Rights which has increasingly been supporting Palestinians on the West Bank against settler attacks, a co-operative village founded by Jews and Arabs, Neve Shalom Wahat Al Salaam, the Jaffa based Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and the veteran Israeli soldiers’ organisation, Breaking the Silence with over 1,400 willing to break cover. “All residents of the [Gaza] Strip are at risk of famine”, the appeal read, “while the healthcare system is collapsing due to severe shortages of medicine, medical equipment, and fuel. Israel is deliberately inflicting conditions that make life impossible in Gaza, with the declared goal of carrying out ethnic cleansing…. Israel's commission of war crimes, which could also amount to crimes against humanity, must not be met with continued silence and inaction by the international community”. https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/52440 In the past Israeli Government sources have spoken with candour. The Israeli director, Dror Moreh’s documentary The Gatekeepers, 2012, contains strikingly candid interviews with six former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. Avraham Shalom (1981-1986) warned of the dangers of occupation. “We are making the lives of millions of people unbearable … the future is bleak … we've become cruel … cruel to ourselves, but especially the occupied”. Former Prime Minister 2006-2009, Ehud Olmert, recently asked whether war crimes were occurring, spoke of “actions which can’t be interpreted in any other way”. The Refuser Solidarity Network is growing in numbers amongst IDF reservists and conscripts. So when did the tide begin to turn? The date 24 April 2025 stands out, Holocaust Memorial Day, the annual State occasion at Yad Vashem, the grieving heart of Israel holding the victims’ names. According to the 25 April Guardian, waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu and his Ministers at the entrance to Yad Vashem were a handful of people in the their 80s holding a banner with “If we lose our compassion for the Other, we have lost our humanity” in English and Hebrew. They were Holocaust survivors. The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz falling in January was widely featured in the UK. This not so. Veronika Cohen, one of the three survivors holding the banner, was born in the Budapest ghetto. “People here see Palestinians as the Other and that’s why they have created a barrier,” she said. “They have managed not to feel their pain and I find that incomprehensible. To me, when I read the stories of their suffering in Gaza, it blends completely into how I feel about the Holocaust.” This, the past’s call to the present for compassion resonating in the soul of Israel at this memorial to the victims of genocide, at this symbolic place of tragic memory, and on this day, sends a unique and unequivocal message. In a square in Jerusalem thousands had gathered holding pictures of Palestinian children killed during the Gaza war whilst some 50 lined a road in Tel Aviv dressed in black holding empty pots symbolising the hunger of the Gazan civilians. No-one should imagine Veronika Cohen as typical of Holocaust survivors, nor the Refuser Solidarity Network of the military, nor the many now protesting representative of the majority of the population. This poignant protest will not end the killing but it challenges any claim Netanyahu and the Israeli State makes to represent Jewish values. It is not impossible he may one day find himself and his repeated calls for more war on trial in the Hague. World opinion about Israel is changing. Future generations may see April 24th 2025 in Israel, under-reported at the time, as a turning point. But, please God, its protests may signal the beginning of the end to the intolerable suffering in Gaza. See TheArticle 02/06/2025 |
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