While a large part of the world is preoccupied with the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Israel continues, through fire and blood, to draw new realities on the ground in the Middle East and impose them as established facts.
Forget the saying that "religion is the opium of the people," as Karl Marx claimed. The real opium is football. And speaking of football, English football culture is famous for a remark by Bill Shankly, the Scottish managerial "genius" and architect of Liverpool's glory, who said: "Football is not a matter of life and death... it is much more important than that!"
Today, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is commanding the attention of millions, particularly in the countries participating in the tournament jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
At the same time, Israel's aggressive rampage continues in both the occupied Palestinian territories and the southern half of Lebanon, not to mention what we hear about plans and operations, both covert and overt, in Iraq and Syria.
Indeed, it would be exceedingly foolish to ignore even more dangerous developments in other important countries. These developments concern the complete contradiction between Israel's declining control over the political narrative in the major countries of the West and its tightening grip, in practice, over the levers of power and centers of decision-making.
This is now taking place from within governments and parliaments, extending to intelligence services, the media and communications technologies, and even reaching the judiciary.
What we gather today from various opinion polls indicates that public support for Israel's policies is declining in most countries around the world. This is tangible and observable even in the major Western countries that have been, and remain, the principal "incubators" of the Hebrew state, foremost among them the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Germany. If the latest polls are to be believed, Israel no longer enjoys high levels of support except in countries such as India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Argentina.
Against this backdrop, two notable developments were recorded yesterday.
In the United States, efforts by Republican Senator Tom Cotton emerged to "unify" the work of the American and Israeli intelligence services. In Britain, a British judge handed down convictions and prison sentences against four activists from the group Palestine Action on terrorism charges (!).
In reality, Senator Cotton's political background surprises no one who follows the American political scene. Like Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, he is an extreme Protestant Christian who barely distinguishes between his biblical Christianity and the Likud-oriented Jewishness of Israel. He is also from Arkansas, one of the states of the Deep American South, which, after briefly producing a liberal Democratic politician named Bill Clinton during recent decades, returned forcefully to the camp of the extreme Republican right and elected Huckabee as governor. Huckabee later passed that office on to his daughter Sarah, who served as White House press secretary during Donald Trump's first presidency.
That is on the personal level. On another level, however, one that is more important and more dangerous, we are currently witnessing the formation of a "strategic alliance" between the oligarchies of technology and both the old media, print and television, and the new media, cyber and future-oriented, on the one hand, and on the other, the Likud-aligned Israeli lobbies seeking near-total control over the American political arena.
America's major media institutions are collapsing before our eyes, without restraints or reservations, and with support and encouragement from the White House, into a state of monopoly unprecedented in the history of American democracy. This is the situation in the United States. In Britain, while appearances may differ somewhat, the reality on the ground is not very different.
Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the 1980s, the British media was associated with what became known as the "Lords of Fleet Street," who owned the major newspapers that generally reflected the interests of the Empire and the conservative right. Among the most prominent names were:
The Harmsworth family, whose best-known members included Lord Northcliffe and his brother Lord Rothermere. The family founded the Daily Mail and later owned The Times before it passed to Lord Thomson and eventually into the stable of Rupert Murdoch.
Lord Beaverbrook, whose real name was Max Aitken, owner of the Express group and a former British-Canadian minister.
The Camrose brothers, Lord Camrose and Lord Kemsley, whose most important holdings included the Telegraph group.
During the Thatcher era of the 1980s, the media became Americanized along with society and business interests. At the same time, Israeli influence expanded, whether under Conservative or Labour governments. Yet sections of the British public remained unable to grasp the scale of Israeli influence over Britain's "deep state." By this I mean the party, security, economic, media and cultural establishments.
Today the situation is changing, and time after time, occasion after occasion, we notice that ordinary citizens are discovering not only the depth of the Israeli lobby's penetration into the structure of the "deep state," but also its ability to anticipate the shifts that threaten it. This means developing effective pre-emptive methods to thwart and "demonize" any activity that threatens its interests, even if that activity consists merely of television interviews or street demonstrations.
This is precisely what the combined efforts of all the tools, levers and fronts of this lobby mean, culminating in the recent judicial ruling against activists supporting the Palestinian cause, under the supervision of a government dominated by parliamentarians from the Labour Friends of Israel grouping, led by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper herself.
In conclusion, based on my experience, not my contacts, we should not expect any peace or easing of the region's situation so long as a man named Benjamin Netanyahu remains in power.
