The developments of the past few days have rocked the world. Apart from the open Israeli aggression towards Iran, the continuing attacks on civilians and the murders of tens of thousands of civilians in Palestine are there for the world to see.
In the middle of all this, Israel launched a war on Iran on the basis of dubious intelligence. After much procrastination on whether he would or wouldn’t, US President Donald Trump came into the war. It was a one-attack wonder. And in the midst of all his very interesting tweets on regime change, and lo and behold, there was a change.
But we do have a ceasefire now. However, the daily killing of people in Gaza by Israeli airplanes at food distribution points is something that shocked the world.
Today, I’m joined by two very eminent people who know and understand the region: Professor Kingshuk Chatterjee of the University of Calcutta, an expert on Iran; and Bashir Ali Abbas, a researcher, scholar, and regular contributor to newspapers on the region.
Bashir, we suddenly see Trump calling for a ceasefire and virtually forcing the airplanes back. If news reports are to be believed, the Israeli airplanes that were out to bomb Iran. What changed and why the sudden ceasefire?
Bashir Ali Abbas: First things first, to clarify, we are talking of the potentially long war between the US and Iran, which seemingly abruptly stopped. But then the ceasefire announcement that the US President made was between Israel and Iran, which are third states vis-à-vis the US that will fight each other. I never believed that the US would enter into a long, enduring war with Iran. I believe that when the Israelis launched their strikes just before the sixth round of negotiations between the Americans and the Iranians, I believe that there was some degree of subversion involved because the Israeli Prime Minister has made it exceedingly clear over the years that he is not in favour of any deal whatsoever: Unless it’s one which, in his words, is Libya style, where you can walk in and dismantle all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, something that the US has never really publicly supported. When Trump finally decided to supplement Israel’s effort in Iran, no matter the confusion in Israel’s strategic objectives when it launched this war, it became clear that this was also going to be choreographed, as has happened in the past, between the US and Iran. The US carried out a one-off strike and it made sure that it communicated this to Iran. And again, by now, as expert analysis has shown, Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities have definitely been hit, but it by no means has been hit enough for either Israel or the US.
Coming to the ceasefire, I think the arrangement between the US and Iran, in a very reductive way, is rather clear. In January 2020, when the US killed Iran’s arguably most famous general, we saw this choreographed action where Iran absolutely needs to save its own agency to preserve the credibility of its deterrents. But it also wishes to limit the impact of its attack so that there’s no escalation. But at least the conflict is contained. In this case, we saw that when Iran hit the Al-Udeid base or at least attempted to, it’s the crown jewel of the US military in the region. So, we know the value that it would have had for the Iranian forces. But we also saw that it was thwarted. Trump wasted no time at all in sort of announcing the ceasefire. And I’ll just end with this: that when it comes to the word ceasefire, whether between Iran and Israel or between Iran and the US, just like how the words declaration of war is a little outdated, I think the word ceasefire is also a little outdated because these conflicts are not penned according to conventional lines where you have a distinct cessation of hostilities signed with pen on paper.
Professor Chatterjee I would like to ask you about this notion of ceasefire. How long it will it hold? What are the implications on the Iranian regime?
Kingshuk Chatterjee: In the course of the last year, as a result of what has been unravelling in Gaza, the Israeli defense policy seems to have been rewritten. So, after the outrageous events of October 7, Israel seems to have been looking for a military solution because it saw that a political solution was not likely to happen. And having embarked on sort of downgrading the military capabilities of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel was becoming a little more audacious in striking Iran and Syria a little more directly than it had ever done. But it virtually shredded Israel’s assumption that its military superiority would deter all direct attacks on it. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was very clearly looking at all kinds of possibilities where it could directly intervene to downgrade military capabilities. Some say that Netanyahu is doing this in order to keep himself relevant in Israeli politics and not have his political obituary written immediately.
The other argument goes that this conflict, apart from addressing the strategic dimension, is also a smokescreen for what’s going on in Gaza. So, you are looking at what’s happening between Israel and Iran, high on media attention, relatively low in terms of human casualties. But in the last 12 days, more than 800 lives have been lost in Gaza. about which not many people are talking. Once the conflict started the way it did, and the manner in which Israel played with Iranian aerial defense, that made Iranians realise that their preparedness was less than what they thought it to be because the missile strikes, while they managed to penetrate the Israeli aerial defenses, did not create that much impact. So both sides were wary of letting this continue. Iran was running out of missiles and missile launchers; Israel was running out of interceptors.
Professor Chatterjee, is it not ironical that we have less information on what happened in Israel, the country that calls itself the only democracy in West Asia, than we have on Iran?
Kingshuk Chatterjee:This is pretty regular. In the case of any conflict, truth is the first casualty. Information is the second. Misinformation is king in any conflict. Israel, of course, will not even allow the release of videos or images that have not been vetted. We do not have any information, except for what the government has released, on Israeli casualties. The Israeli military was wary about going in and it was keen on getting out because when the Iranian barrages began, they understood that they were not equipped to handle this in the medium term. None of their drone or missile or rocket capabilities come close to Iran’s.
A man person assesses the destruction of a residential property on June 29, 2025, in northern Tehran, Iran, after it was hit during an Israeli airstrike.
| Photo Credit:
MAJID SAEEDI
Bashir, we’ve seen the horrific daily killings happening in Gaza. With what has happened in Gaza and the fact that there is a warrant out for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu, is it now a situation where Netanyahu can no longer survive as a “peace time leader”? Does he need war to perpetuate his own personal survival.
Bashir Ali Abbas: From the time of Israel’s war on Gaza started there have beenmultiple attempts in the Israeli system to either limit Netanyahu’s power or to remove him from government entirely. Let’s not forget that for the past few years, Netanyahu was part of an active trial for breach of trust and corruption. And in December, last year, he became one of the first Israeli Prime Ministers to stand in the dock in a criminal trial. The day before Israel struck Iran, just before the June 13 strikes, the 12-day war as it’s now being called, there was an attempt in the Israeli Parliament to sort of dissolve the Parliament and call for early elections. Now, this again can’t happen for about another six months. Yair Lapid, arguably the principal opposition figure in the Israeli parliament today, first criticized the government after the vote saying that this can’t last, it’s not sustainable and Netanyahu’s government will fall. However, once the Israeli strikes were carried out, you also had Yair Lapid in support of Netanyahu’s actions against Iran. And this is a dichotomy that we’ve seen in Israel time and again where that court is against Netanyahu’s ways of functioning, including his allied political parties, which now include far-right Orthodox parties as well.
To answer your question very simply, it’s been very clear that Netanyahu, whether he can be a peacetime President or not is another matter because in the past he’s shown that he can be. But in the last 20 months, it’s been clear that his preference, however, is to be a wartime president because it makes it easy for him to sort of divert attention from a lot of issues, not just internal but external in Gaza as well.
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Professor Chatterjee, it appears Israel and the US were acting in concert and maybe this was some play acting because clearly Trump is enjoying the game. Do you think that this joint Israeli-American aggression on Iran, on the grounds of denying Iran this so-called nuclear weapon, is going to push Iran to building an actual nuclear weapon?
Kingshuk Chatterjee:I am reasonably suspicious that the Iranian establishment, even though they have failed miserably in protecting itself and the nation from Israeli attacks, would now use that very thing, that without a nuclear solution they cannot have any security. That argument would gain ground. On the other hand, however, the mere fact that the protagonists of the nuclear option have failed miserably in providing national security, they have also lost much of the argument as protagonists of national security. So, the hardliners may lose, but it is very difficult to see how an argument against a nuclear deterrent would win readily.
But we haven’t seen, Professor Chatterjee, Iran announcing a pullout from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). They haven’t done that.
Kingshuk Chatterjee:They might. For Iran, for nearly 25 years, there has been an unspoken consensus. Unspoken in the sense it has not come out in the public media that Iran would develop a nuclear capability. Now, the division was on this question: Would it actually build weapons and risk further economic isolation or stop at the threshold? But Iran should have the nuclear capability, which it could eventually weaponise later if pressed to the wall. There is no doubt about that.
Professor Chatterjee, the events of this 12-day war, as Trump called it, have changed much. What changes for Iran?
Kingshuk Chatterjee:One is the regime and its national security claim has taken a hit. So, the legitimacy of the hardliners in the establishment has taken a hit. On the other hand, those who are willing to negotiate with America, they also have a very difficult case to answer. Iran is going through a sort of cycle of change. This in itself would neither be critical nor decisive, but it would be very important. On the whole, the one thing that remains absolutely clear is that till now, Iran and Israel did not really have any real substantive ground for enmity. Iran’s posturing against Israel was mostly tactical. Its support for Hamas and Hezbollah had been tactical. So, this ceasefire, it’s a truce at best, nowhere close to a peace.
Bashir, what happens to the Palestinians now? Does this help them in any way in their own struggle for statehood?
Bashir Ali Abbas: Insofar as influencing Israel’s actions in Gaza goes, I would say no effect at all. I think in the past as well, Israel has shown this capability, regardless of intent and regardless of what the costs are, this capability to keep pushing. I would go one step further and argue that in fact, this new conflict with Iran that Israel substantially diverted international focus away from Palestine. Because let’s not forget, up until June 12, in those two weeks before that, you perhaps saw unprecedented and concerted European criticism of Israel that had only been sporadic in the past. A lot of it was triggered by the fact that Israel, especially since March this year, has effectively prevented any humanitarian aid from flowing through. Only recently has it allowed a trickle. All this while we have had, to put it rather simplistically, some rift between the military establishment and the political establishment in Israel vis-a-vis the day after in Gaza. But that rift has not manifested enough to put any halt on the degree to which Israel carries on. Now you have Trump coming out and saying again, based on what Steve Witkoff, his negotiator for West Asia has told him, that there’s progress again on a ceasefire in Gaza. But I personally wouldn’t put too much stock by it because it was Trump himself who rather successfully initially implemented a three-phase ceasefire in late January. But we couldn’t even get through phase one of that ceasefire. We are in a cyclical loop that continues.
Professor Chatterjee, why does Israel enjoy this impunity? Can you put this in some context for us?
Kingshuk Chatterjee:There is this sense of guilt that influences Western decision of not criticising Israel beyond a point. In Europe, there are a lot of critical voices against what Israel is doing to Palestine, but none of the governments are exerting the kind of pressure on Israel because the optics of it. Because, this would be the Israeli counter-narrative, that these are the very people who had embarked on that Holocaust, which made the creation of Israel a necessity. The moment you start opposing Israel, you are branded an anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is peculiarly Western phenomenon. It never existed anywhere in Asia. I do not dispute Israeli’s sense of victimhood in the hands of European antisemites in the first half of the 20th century. The problem is being victims of victims is no different.
Does this guilt extend to acquiescing to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, Professor Chatterjee?
Kingshuk Chatterjee:Who is going to fight for the Palestinian? Poor Gaza or West Bank, they do not even have oil? How many Arab capitals have you seen fighting for Palestinians? Please remember when the Arabs did fight for the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Lebanese, these are all people who were afflicted with the problem of Palestinian refugees. Palestinians who were being driven out of Israel-Palestine, the territory, and they were simply trying to push their brothers back to their own houses so that the burden of Palestinian refugees is not taken. How many shots have Saudi soldiers fired against Israel ever? The count is zero because the Saudis did not ever have a Palestinian problem. I’m being a little harsh, a little cruel and a little cynical, but Israel has the impunity because it is in no one’s interest to intervene in Palestine.
Professor Chatterjee, we’ve seen colonialism, now we have the term neo-colonialism. Are we seeing this colonial approach towards Palestine and other parts of the world? The Americans have bombed some eight or nine Islamic countries in the last few years. Is this aerial bombing colonialism?
Kingshuk Chatterjee:If you ask a Palestinian, it’s very clear. Israeli is a settler colonial state. These are people who have come from outside the region, settled down, and they are grabbing all the land. If, however, you were born in independent Israel, the category you call the Sabra, if there is to be no Israel, where would those people go? Their antecedents may have come from Eastern Europe, they may have come from Russia, they may have come from Germany, France, victims of the Holocaust. But those who were born in Palestine, either before ‘48 or after and haven’t seen no land other than Israel, where would they go? So, an ideal solution is the Oslo peace process. That is where you share the land. Now, the thing is, the Israeli state of the 1980s realised that you cannot have a military solution where a subject population has approximately 40 per cent of the total population strength of the state. That is when the Oslo peace process took place. Right now, the demographic balance is 50-50.
Bashir, what is the Indian position on what is going on in Palestine? What is the reason for this absolute silence?
Bashir Ali Abbas: I think it’s not that India has been silent. India has said what it needs to say, but it has been characteristically insufficient insofar as the peculiar dynamics of the Israel-Palestine conflict is concerned. And I would like to point this out to your viewers because this is constantly forgotten beneath all the noise on Twitter and elsewhere is that in the last 11 years, if you look at India, if you look at India’s voting record at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), towards the end of every year, the UNGA, especially in its plenary sessions, takes up a set of recurring resolutions on Palestine. These have to do with Palestinian sovereignty and the Palestinian right to self-determination.
A woman mourns over the shrouded body of a Palestinian killed during a reported Israeli strike on a humanitarian aid distribution warehouse in the Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza City, on June 30, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
OMAR AL-QATTAA
But what I’m saying is that our heart is not with the Palestinians, Bashir.
Bashir Ali Abbas: I agree but to continue where I left off. In the last 11 years, in all of these resolutions on Palestinian rights, India votes in favour. It doesn’t abstain. India continued and continues to vote in favour of the Palestinian case and against Israel at the UN. We also saw last year where our Foreign Minister at several points in time brought up the need for a two-state solution as the only sustainable path forward. What happened most recently? India abstained on yet another ceasefire at the UNGA and an attempt towards a ceasefire in Gaza, where India abstained, unfortunately, standing out from the global south. Technically, very strictly technically, the Indian position was consistent with its need that any such resolution should not refer to the International Court of Justice, because India believes that any solution has to be negotiated with all stakeholders, including the Israelis and the Palestinians, of course, without any such external punitive element. In December 2023, when we voted in favour of it, that resolution didn’t have any such references. This one did. But the question is – what is more valuable to us? That technical consistency? Or the need to stand with the Global South and the need to defend a position that India has consistently stood by?
Forget the UN for the moment, Bashir. Has the government of India issued any statement condemning the death of Palestinian citizens in a standalone statement?
Bashir Ali Abbas: No, it has not done that. But this is the kind of point that I’m trying to make: That we have also not done this in the past for any other conflict. We have issued stronger statements elsewhere, but the Indian priority always is to maximise its own choice. When I talk of the political value of the current Indian position, I would say that we are now at a point where not undertaking any sort of punitive language or critical language against Israel also harms our interests. One, the Israeli action of physically removing the actual facts on the ground, goes against a position that India has consistently defended, which necessarily demands a more proactive set of actions on India’s part.
Secondly, beyond rhetoric, which is condemnation or lack of condemnation. What is the actual effect on the ground? In September 2023, India embarked on a rather ambitious and unprecedented connectivity project known as the India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor. It is evident now that Israel’s continuing war without any achievable strategic objective whatsoever is at the heart of all of the obstacles to this corridor. Without that, no matter what effort you put in at any other point in the corridor, it is not going to proceed. And we also know that it is in the regional interest, the Arab interest, with whom we have partnered immensely in the last few years, also want the conflict to end.
For India, which is in a leading position for a lot of these efforts, it is at this point not just a recommendation, it is a necessity that plays a more proactive role to end this conflict and you cannot do that without bringing your influence to bear on a relationship that you proudly say you have cultivated in the past few years and that is right.
Professor Chatterjee, how do you see New Delhi’s position from your perch in Kolkata?
Kingshuk Chatterjee:Okay, so couple of things. First is, of course, there’s a split, shall we say, in the government of India between the political establishment and the diplomatic establishment. Now, I cannot reveal my sources as all journalists begin by saying, I’m told.
You’re wearing our hat now, Professor Chatterjee…
Kingshuk Chatterjee:Yeah, exactly. That is how I stay safe. The argument goes that the political establishment considers it essential to align closely with Tel Aviv because they say that the relations have improved to the point that in Palestine they had stood resolutely in India’s corner. So, we have to reciprocate. The diplomatic establishment wants to balance this thing as we always have done. So even when we were getting closer to Israel, friends should be able to criticise when other friends are going wrong. So, and believe me, from the little that I know of Israeli diplomatic thinking, in most cases, they know that even their closest friends will end up criticising them and they don’t hold it against the friends.
If you are more eager to please Israel than Israel needs to be, then you are asking for it. You are asking for the opprobrium we are getting. The good thing is the government of India, and more importantly, the people of India enjoy a kind of goodwill among Palestinians. Regardless of what the optics would be, India would always have leverage on both sides of the conflict.
And we saw this statement, Professor Chatterjee, from the Iranian Embassy in Delhi yesterday, which ended with “Jai Iran and Jai Hind”.
Kingshuk Chatterjee:This is the bit. The Indian diplomatic establishment has successfully cultivated goodwill on all sides of almost all conflicts. So, if only India would be willing to be a little bold, it would prevail. We do not have the heft that the US and China have. But go and speak to an average Palestinian on the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Gaza. China does not have any resonance. India does. India always did. And we could easily be the brokers of peace, When IMEC was being discussed, I thought that India is actually finally playing a winning card. It is a fascinating possibility. You bring the Arabs and the Israelis closer together. You might even build bridges across the two sides of the Gulf. India has that reservoir of goodwill. For some reason, you know, it’s the P.G. Wodehouse phrase, “Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would, sir”.
You may want to do something, or you may fear that if you try it, you would lose a lot. Only when we overcome our fear and try, we might fail. How does it matter? We are not getting anything with our silence. We are not getting any brownie points. Being in my perch in Bengal, I am safer to make this argument. I hope Bashir despite being in Delhi would push the same case.
What is the reason for this Indian diffidence, Bashir?
But within all of that, no matter the sort of great noise that is generated whenever we have clashes with Pakistan and certainly after a seemingly abrupt ceasefire, which to my mind was not that abrupt at all, it’s only because that risk aversion continues. Because, like a lot of the other states and not so dissimilar from the Arab states as well, our interest presently is also economic growth and a certain developmental objective that we have set for ourselves. It’s another matter that there are a number of challenges even in that objective, but those are internal. But when it comes to the external position, as we saw in the Russia-Ukraine case as well, we seem to be taking great risks to defend that risk averse position.
Amit Baruah: I’m afraid the one hour allotted to our webinar is coming to an end. But I don’t want to leave. I mean, we’ll discuss India another day, some more. But I just want to bring the focus back on the takeaways from this discussion, that how volatile the situation is, the impunity that Israel continues to enjoy, and the fact that the world is at risk. And I do hope I’m speaking for the two of you as well, that at least the aggression has ended, the hostilities have ceased and people can perhaps go about their business again.
Thank you very much, Bashir and Professor Chatterjee for your unique perspectives. And I’d like to thank all of you who’ve been watching and listening to our discussion in this Frontline webinar.
Amit Baruah was The Hindu’s Islamabad-based Pakistan correspondent from 1997 to 2000. He is the author of Dateline Islamabad.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity while preserving the speakers’ original arguments, terminology, and speaking styles.
Source:https://frontline.thehindu.com/world-affairs/israel-iran-ceasefire-gaza-2025/article69755466.ece