THE world risks being dragged into “forever war” by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and only citizens standing up for peace can stop it, an Israeli MP warned today.

Knesset member Ofer Cassif of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) told the Morning Star that the US-Israeli attack on Iran was based on lies — and was already a smokescreen for intensified violence and ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine.

It could even escalate into a world war, Mr Cassif said, noting that the United States had begun 2026 with attempts to take down two major Chinese oil suppliers, Venezuela and Iran, which is “no coincidence — one of [its] main interests is to make it harder for China to purchase oil. If they continue, and China believes it has no other choice… that’s the worst case scenario.”

Mr Cassif joins me by Zoom from his home in Israel; he has just returned from an air raid shelter, as Iran continues to retaliate to the US and Israeli strikes. But he doesn’t make too much of that. “The situation of the Iranians and Palestinians is much worse.”

He’s more concerned with where this war is heading. The US and Israel aim “to divide all countries and states in the Middle East to create chaos and take control.

“We saw it in Libya. We saw it in Lebanon, in Syria and in Iraq. The imperialist intention is to create a situation where Iran is divided — it’s not a coincidence that Netanyahu in his speech just after the attack began cited the names of all the ethnic groups” (the Israeli Prime Minister called on “Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Ahvazis, and Baluchis” to rise up and overthrow the Iranian state).

“But more important still, Trump wants to totally destroy the post-second-world-war world order.

“Not only the different conventions that were adopted in regard to the sovereignty of states, human rights and so on, but the consciousness.” Mr Cassif made a similar point in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz: “The attack on Iran should be understood not only as an attempt at ‘material change,’ that is, as an effort to violently change the institutional-regime world order, but also as a project of moral and ideological change in which the strong have the right to rule… the weak have the right only to bow their heads and morality is erased.”

That project is bigger than Israel or Iran. The Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, the alliance including the Communist Party) MP has no illusions about the extremism of the Israeli government: he has repeatedly been suspended from the Knesset for calling out its genocide in Gaza. But he doesn’t agree with those who say the US is dancing to Israel’s tune.

“Netanyahu wants forever war in his own interests. He’s interested in doing anything possible to keep himself out of prison, which by definition means staying in power, and he believes as long as the death and destruction in Israel doesn’t rise too high that war will help him in elections.

“Those around him, the coalition, are racist bigots — many of them, the majority are messianic and see this as part of a divine plan, and they’re bloodthirsty all right. But let’s not forget about Trump’s intentions.”

The relentless aggression is political, not just economic. Venezuela and Iran both have resources, most obviously oil, the US would like control over. But then there is strangling Cuba, threatening annexation of Canada, Greenland. “It sounds insane, and maybe we’re dealing with an insane president, but there’s a logic — if you like, a master plan.”

It’s not as new as it might seem — after World War II, Mr Cassif points out, the US shifted from the Monroe Doctrine (in which it primarily interfered with other countries only in the western hemisphere) to the Truman doctrine, where in the name of anti-communism it intervened to suppress independence and liberation movements worldwide.

“Trump — in opposition to his promises and opposed to his ‘Maga’ base’s perceptions — has radicalised the Truman doctrine. But it’s the same doctrine.”

US aggression has been ramped up globally since the start of the year, and there is nothing defensive about the war in Iran. After all it was Trump himself who tore up the agreement that did exist between Iran and the West on its nuclear programme — which even the chairman of the Israeli Space Agency Isaac Ben-Israel acknowledged Tehran did not deviate from “by one millimetre.”

Last year, both Trump and Netanyahu claimed to have obliterated Iran’s nuclear programme. Eight months later they say it’s a threat again. “They lie.” Indeed, their aggression makes nuclear proliferation more likely: “The majority of experts in Israel, let alone outside it, say the harbinger of an Iranian nuclear bomb is Netanyahu.”

That doesn’t mean Mr Cassif has any sympathy for the Iranian government. “It’s a fundamentalist, murderous regime that oppresses its own people — we saw what happened recently [in the violent suppression of protests across Iran]. We are all against it, but it’s up to the Iranian people to get rid of it, and not to people who use their suffering as an excuse.

“It’s all a sham — the United States never cared about the wellbeing of the Iranian people, any more than they cared for the Chileans or Nicaraguans or Afghans or Iraqis or Koreans or Vietnamese…” He shakes his head at the length of the list of US victims.

“Neither does Israel. Netanyahu speaks about the suffering of the Iranian people — this is a man responsible for genocide in Gaza, the killing of innocent citizens, women, children, the elderly, the sick.” Israel began its war on Iran by bombing a primary school, killing 150 girls, and Cassif fears that there will be “many crimes like this.”

How hard Israel has been hit in response is unclear even to those in the country, with strict censorship of military information. “We don’t know the level of destruction.” After the 12-day war in 2025, he notes, details of what damage Israel had suffered trickled out in the weeks and months after the hostilities ended.

What is already clear is that the CPI was right to warn Israel would use the war to accelerate ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

Even before October 7, Cassif was warning Israel intended to carry out the “decisive plan” identified by its self-proclaimed fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, which defines Palestine’s future in three options, “subjugation, expulsion and annihilation.”

Israel’s government plans to “annex all Palestinian territory without granting basic political or civil rights to Palestinians; expel all Palestinians who do not accept that fate; and kill those who try to resist.

“We saw that in Gaza — where the strategy was genocide. We see it in Israel, in fascism and the persecution of anyone who raises a voice against the government.

“And we see it in the West Bank. There is systematic ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and since the war with Iran began, it’s worse. Entire communities are vanishing.”

The shock troops in the process, those terrorising Palestinian villages, torching their crops and assaulting and sometimes killing their people, are settler extremists, “hundreds of them,” but “financed, encouraged and supported by the government, protected by the occupation forces.”

Peace campaigners in Israel often travel to occupied Palestine to act as witnesses and deterrents to settler violence. The very day before we spoke, the Israeli military declared a closed military zone across much of the West Bank, throwing out these activists — but leaving the settler gangs alone to continue their terrorism (they promptly demolished a Palestinian house).

Israeli citizens trying to defend Palestinian towns and farms are being attacked; last week settlers “beat the hell” out of a group of them with baseball bats. Three were hospitalised. The watching army did nothing.

The war against Iran is a war against Palestine too. Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza is part of that same plan to break down the postwar order, to replace the very concept of international law with a might-is-right free for all.

What can be done to stop it? People power — protest, says Cassif: governments must be made to stop doing what they’re doing.

In Britain as in the United States itself, significant majorities oppose the war already. That isn’t the case in Israel: “Marx said history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

“In Israel it repeats itself always as tragedy: as with the first Lebanon war, or in Gaza more recently, the vast majority of the public start out totally supporting the war of aggression.

“After a while, the pressure, or — perish the thought — the death toll of soldiers or citizens is on the rise and people begin to change their minds.

“On Gaza we were totally isolated [in opposing the invasion] for many months, not just in parliament but on the streets. We were marginalised, but later more and more people began to understand that it was wrong, even if not for all the same reasons as us, and eventually those opposed to it became the majority.

“We are a minority opposing war on Iran now. Not as tiny a minority, though. More people than before following the ordeal of October 7 and the genocide in Gaza understand that we are dealing with a government and prime minister who don’t care about the wellbeing of the people and only about their own power.”

Protesting in Israel is difficult, with a state of emergency due to Iranian missile fire. And that’s policed politically: Cassif notes that a recent street festival was ignored by police, while an anti-war protest, though held next to an air raid shelter and safe, was immediately and violently dispersed. But the CPI will be protesting where it can, and organising online rallies against the war. It is also working on a joint statement with the communist parties of Iran and the United States condemning the war.

Despite Tory demands that anti-war marches in Britain be banned, we don’t face the same repression yet. Stop the War and CND march in London on Saturday. We need to build a peace movement big enough to stop Netanyahu, Trump, and their war for a world “without law or heaven,” as the Chinese say: one where their power is untroubled by either rules or morality.