@ZahiraJaser It is indeed pink, but this pink color looks a lot like white against the red carpet, which I think was intentional on the part of the designer.
Stephen Walt is undoubtedly Harvard's most renowned professor of international relations.
Here is what he says on Iran's strike, which is an immense departure from what we commonly hear in Western media 🧵
https://t.co/AV5jDPPe3r
First of all, he writes that Iran's general support of Hamas is legitimate under international law: "According to the Geneva Conventions, a population living under 'belligerent occupation' has the right to resist the occupying force. Given that Israel has controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, colonized these lands with more than 700,000 illegal settlers, and killed thousands of Palestinians in the process, there is little doubt that this is a 'belligerent occupation.' Acts of resistance are still subject to the laws of war, of course, and Hamas and other Palestinian groups violate them when they attack Israeli civilians. But resisting the occupation is legitimate, and helping a beleaguered population do so is not necessarily wrong, even if Iran has done this for its own reasons and not from a deep commitment to the Palestinian cause."
Secondly, he qualifies Iran's response to the bombing of its consulate by Israel as reasonable: "Iran’s decision to retaliate after Israel bombed its consulate and killed two Iranian generals is hardly evidence of innate aggressiveness, especially given that Tehran has repeatedly signaled that it had no desire to widen the war. Indeed, its retaliation was conducted in a way that gave Israel considerable warning and seems to have been designed to signal that Tehran did not want to escalate further. As U.S. and Israeli officials typically say when they use force, Iran is simply trying to 'restore deterrence.'"
Lastly, he says that "the responsibility [for what's happening] lies more in Washington than in Tehran." How? Basically because the U.S. "provides Israel with billions of dollars of sophisticated military equipment every year, along with repeated assurances that U.S. support is unconditional".
Walt writes that "states with unchecked power tend to abuse it, and Israel is no exception. Because Israel is vastly stronger than its Palestinian subjects—and more capable than Iran, too, for that matter—it can act with impunity against them, and it typically does. Decades of generous and unconditional U.S. support have enabled Israel to do whatever it wants, which has contributed to its politics as well as its behavior toward the Palestinians becoming increasingly extreme over time."
He also notes that a situation has been allowed to develop whereby only effective armed resistance tends to have an effect on Israel: "Only on those rare occasions when Palestinians were able to mobilize effective resistance—as they did during the First Intifada (1987-1993)—were Israeli leaders such as former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin forced to acknowledge the need to compromise and attempt to make peace. Unfortunately, because Israel was so strong, the Palestinians so weak, and U.S. mediators so one-sided in Israel’s favor, none of Rabin’s successors were willing to offer the Palestinians a deal they could accept."
He concludes that they're an immense irony here as "the individuals and organizations in the United States that have been the most ardent in shielding Israel from criticism and pushing one administration after another to back Israel, no matter what it does, have in fact done enormous damage to the country that they were trying to help."
He describes the current situation where 1) "the two-state solution has failed", 2) Israel is "turn[ing] into a pariah state", 3) "support among younger Americans—including many Jews—is cratering", and 4) Iran is "close to having a nuclear weapon, and thwarted U.S. efforts to isolate it".
Unescapable conclusion: "if the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies were capable of self-reflection, they’d be mortified by what they have helped Israel do to itself." And, I'd add, all the suffering they've unleased on the Palestinians (if they were capable of basic human empathy, that is).