Ben Wray – Israel, Iran and the media’s selective amnesia

If the media was doing it’s job, it would be asking probing questions about what happened to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and why politicians ignore Israel’s nuclear weapons?

Ben Wray is a freelance journalist and researcher based in the Basque Country, Spain. He is co-author of ‘Scotland after Britain: The two souls of independence’ (Verso, 2022).

Signatories to the Iran nuclear deal, 2015 (Picture by United States Department of State)

The biggest problem in European mainstream media reporting on the Middle East is not outright lying, although that does exist. The biggest problem is selective amnesia. When it’s convenient, historical events are poured over relentlessly to provide context to justify the actions of western governments. Just look at October 7 2023 as the ultimate example. The rest of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict has been erased, all that mattered is what Hamas did on that date, which is framed as the context for everything that has come since.

When it’s inconvenient, historical events are forgotten entirely, left for historians to pick-over while the media focuses on the really urgent questions of the moment. That is what is happening now in respect to Iran, it’s nuclear programme and the justification for Israel’s attack on the country on 13th June. The entire history of the Iranian nuclear program has been memory-holed, because to talk about it would be so inconvenient that it would seriously disrupt the entirely fraudulent narrative that now dominates western media coverage, which takes Netanyahu’s words – that he is primarily interested in stopping Iran obtaining an atomic bomb – at face value.

Let’s pick out a date which we have not heard much of in recent times: 8 May 2018. This was the day that Donald Trump, in his first presidency, pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an international treaty signed in 2016 by Iran, China, France, Russia, the U.K., U.S, Germany and the European Union for International Atomic Energy Agency oversight in the limiting of the Iranian nuclear program to levels which would make it impossible to develop an atomic bomb, in return for sanctions relief so that Iran would no longer be economically strangled by the West. Netanyahu had apparently convinced Trump of this move through his bombastic displays about how Iran was lying about its true intentions.

Given JCPOA prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, the very thing Netanyahu says he is trying to do now with his attack on Iran, one would think the Israeli leader would have been opposed to Trump’s move in 2018. Of course, Netanyahu was in fact JCPOA’s number one nemesis, so much so that the US Government (under Obama’s second term) went public in 2015 over Mossad’s spying on the JCPOA talks because Israel was actively working inside the US to stop the nuclear deal from happening. The last thing that Netanyahu wanted was a detente between Iran and the West.

Trump’s decision to illegally and unilaterally pull the US from JCPOA was opposed by other western governments, which vowed to defend the agreement with Iran. But European resistance to Trump’s move evaporated when the US President began to apply secondary sanctions to any corporation which continued to trade with Iran. Between the existential threat of being cut-off from the dollar and the nice-to-have of trading with Iran, European banks were only going to go one way.

Germany, France and the UK even sought to develop an alternative to the SWIFT dollar-based international payment system to facilitate trade with Iran, called INSTEX, but it flopped. The collapse of JCPOA, which had nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with American unilateral power, was a decisive blow to the notion of a ‘rules-based international order’, an always hypocritical idea that has since crumbled with the Gaza genocide, proving that Europe has little room to act without Washington’s consent. 

With Iran cut-out of dollar-trade by the US’ illegal breach of JCPOA, Tehran had lost all incentives not to increase it’s nuclear capacity. The inevitable result was that the prospects of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon increased immensely. When Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025, he was ready to make a deal with Iran to undo his own scuppering of JCPOA: and once again Netanyahu was the most vociferous opponent of any agreement.

It’s been largely lost in the fog of war that one of the people Israel assassinated on 13 June was Ali Shamkhani, who was leading Iran’s negotiations with the US over a new nuclear deal. The next round of talks in Oman were due to start on Sunday, 15 June. Shamkhani had been talking optimistically about a deal with the US. As late as March, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the US “continues to assess that Iran is not building nuclear weapons”. Netanyahu wasn’t trying to scupper Iranian nuclear weapons with his attack on the early hours of Friday morning, he was trying to scupper a new detente between Iran and the US, in favour of the policy he has always advocated: regime change. 

If the Iranian regime is able to survive this attack by Israel and the US, the chances of Tehran developing a nuclear bomb will go up massively. Look at it from Ayatollah Kamenei’s perspective: they know that the biggest military power in the world is trying to take them out, Hezbollah has been severely weakened by Israel’s attack last year, and Assad is no longer in power in Damascus, replaced by a regime that appears to be submissive to Israel. Given the forces lined up against them, it’s logical that Tehran would want to now prioritise developing a nuclear weapon above everything else as the ultimate guarantee of the regime’s survival. Netanyahu and Trump may be causing the very thing that they claim they want to stop. 

The other giant elephant in the room is Israel’s nuclear weapons, which the Israeli government has never officially acknowledged, nor has it allowed nuclear inspectors in the country to check. The biggest open secret in global affairs for more than half a century, the media appears perfectly happy to turn a blind-eye to Israel’s nukes, despite the fact that the vast majority of the world would be much more afraid of that genocidal regime having it’s finger on the button than the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Again, selective amnesia rules the roost in the broadcasting houses and major publications of the European press. They try to play on the ignorance of the public to manufacture consent for European governments’ unjustifiable support for Israel in light of its attack on Iran, but it’s unlikely to work this time: the Gaza genocide has removed Israel’s propaganda veil, with just 13-21% of publics in any western European country having a favourable view of Israel, while 63-70% have an unfavourable view. Europe’s presidents and prime ministers are out of sync with the public, who increasingly see Israel for the bloodthirsty, settler-colonial regime that it is.



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