I don’t know how others have been following the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, but for the past month I’ve tracked it closely through long-form analysis on independent platforms.

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After one month of sustained attacks — launched under Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026 — the tone among critics has shifted dramatically. What began as cautious talk of escalation risks is now framed as systemic danger. Analysts openly discuss the possibility of direct great-power confrontation, even nuclear exchange, alongside cascading economic disruptions that are already beginning to register.

Yesterday, on March 28, the Houthis formally entered the conflict with direct strikes on Israel. This has expanded the war into a multi-front regional conflagration: Hezbollah resistance in southern Lebanon, and the official entry of Saudi Arabia and the UAE into the fighting. Meanwhile, strikes have killed nearly 1,500 civilians in Iran — including 236 children — destroyed 498 schools, hit hospitals, and damaged more than 42,000 civilian sites. The pattern echoes the normalized destruction and war crimes long familiar from Gaza.

This war is a threshold event — a rupture that reorganizes the political field itself. It collapses the boundary between foreign and domestic politics, suspends normal political time, and sets the conditions under which every other struggle — inequality, immigration, austerity — will now unfold.

In that context, one might have expected “No Kings Day,” the national day of protest against executive overreach and authoritarian governance held on March 28, to confront this reality head-on. One might have hoped the language of democracy and justice would be grounded in a clear reckoning with the war’s scale, risks, and decision-making failures — to treat it not as one issue among many, but as the operating system on which all others now run. After all, a nuclear exchange makes ICE raids moot.

Instead, what emerged — judging by Bernie Sanders’ flagship speech in St. Paul and reports from rallies nationwide — was the familiar pattern. Sanders declared,

“We are being lied to today about the war in Iran… Netanyahu started a war with Iran. This war is unconstitutional… This war must end immediately.”

He noted soaring gas prices, the trillion-dollar cost, and the human toll, including the bombing of 498 schools. Yet these points were not central. They were folded into a broader litany: wealth inequality, praise for Minnesota’s resistance to “Operation Metro Surge,” tributes to domestic protesters killed by federal agents, and standard anti-austerity appeals.

Across rallies from Oshkosh to West Michigan, the structure was consistent: opposition to Trump’s immigration policies listed alongside the war on Iran. NPR captured the flattening perfectly, summarizing the day as protests against “ICE ‘cruelty’ [and] Iran war.” The war was named, but it was not permitted to reorder the hierarchy of urgency.

Even as analysts warn of global war and systemic economic fallout, much of U.S. political speech continues to treat issues as if they can simply be aggregated rather than ranked by consequence. The result is a politics in which everything is urgent, but nothing is decisive. Every crisis is acknowledged, yet few events are allowed to determine the terrain on which all others play out.

This flattening is not accidental. It is produced and sustained by concrete mechanisms: the influence of the Israel lobby (including AIPAC and Christian Zionist networks), campaign finance discipline, bipartisan procedural norms, and media framing that raises the reputational cost of stepping outside the narrow consensus.

For more than two decades — since Iran was placed in the “axis of evil” — U.S. public understanding has been shaped by persistent threat narratives that erase historical context and Iran’s rationality: the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup, U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq War, and Iran’s legitimate grievances over broken nuclear agreements. Instead, Iran is cast as the permanent, irrational aggressor, rendering every escalation by the U.S. or Israel as defensive or inevitable.

These interlocking forces produce containment. Critique circulates freely, but within tightly bounded registers that leave the underlying policy architecture untouched. The public accumulates knowledge — of coups, lobbying power, and double standards — yet that knowledge rarely translates into reordered priorities or meaningful political action.

The word “catastrophe” now appears plainly and repeatedly in serious analysis — an echo of the Arabic Nakba, a term once reserved for the Palestinian experience and now describing a crisis engulfing Americans and much of the globe. The parallel is apt: Israel stands at the center of both.

Analysts across the spectrum — Ted Postol, Lawrence Wilkerson, Jeffrey Sachs, Alastair Crooke, Douglas Macgregor, John Mearsheimer, and Larry Johnson — converge on the same grim assessment. What the Trump administration framed as a display of coercive dominance is sliding toward a war with no clean military or political exit. The deeper failure is not merely stumbling into wider conflict, but mis-specifying the war from the outset: an inability to anticipate that Iran would fight as a civilizational state under siege rather than collapse; that Gulf basing, shipping lanes, energy infrastructure, and allied assets would be drawn directly into the battlespace; and that U.S. troops, logistics, and domestic legitimacy would erode as a limited operation morphed into open-ended entrapment.

This failure of imagination is now registering globally. The mere threat to energy corridors has triggered price volatility, insurance shocks, and supply-chain disruptions. Regional escalation is no longer containable. What was sold as a controlled demonstration of power is producing cascading effects far beyond the battlefield — financial markets abruptly pricing in geopolitical risk, fragile economies absorbing fresh inflationary pressure.

And yet the public sphere continues to absorb this moment as just another cycle in familiar political time — something to be debated, protested, and quietly folded back into the routine. Analysts sound urgent alarms, but American protesters often resemble Krypton’s leaders: confronted with clear signals of planetary destruction, they carry on with parliamentary debates as if no fundamental reordering is required.

The problem is not that Americans are unaware of the catastrophe. It is that the political and informational system treats systemic rupture as merely one more item on an endless list — preventing the knowledge from taking root and forcing a reordering of priorities.

By the time this war forces itself to the top of the agenda, it will not arrive as a question to be debated. It will arrive as a set of irreversible conditions to be endured.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. Visit the author’s blog.

She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image:No Kings Day, Chicago, March 28, 2026: Knowledge without reordering — a child’s drawing reduces the threshold event to playground taunt while ‘No War’ is answered with candy. (Source: Rima Najjar)

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