The 2300 workers at the Volkswagen factory in Osnabrück, northwest Germany, have been confronted with an unexpected plan for industrial transformation. Last month, it was reported that the car manufacturer was in talks with the Israeli state-owned arms company Rafael to make missile defence systems based on Israel’s Iron Dome. VW has never closed a factory in its home country, but in 2024 it announced that three plants, including Osnabrück, were at risk because of declining sales, high energy costs and competition from Chinese electric vehicle makers.
Last Friday afternoon, two days after the ceasefire was announced and two days before the peace talks in Islamabad failed, I went to a café. For the previous forty days we had been cut off from the world – not only because of the bombing, but because of the internet blackout. Making plans had been impossible; people either ran into each other or they didn’t.
The Trump administration’s levity doesn’t make the bombs any heavier. The real game is an old one, as American as stolen labour: when life gives you domestic scandals, foment a global crisis, with bonus points if you can hit oil. Trump’s war on Iran began in the midst of intensifying scrutiny of the Epstein files, three million pages of which had been released a month before.
Yesterday morning, after the ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran, many displaced people in Lebanon started heading back to the south. At around 2 p.m., Israel hit the country with a hundred airstrikes in less than ten minutes. It was a co-ordinated assault reminiscent of the pager attack in September 2024. Israel called it Operation Eternal Darkness. They hit locations in Beirut, the southern suburbs, Mount Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. A funeral was bombed near Baalbek, killing at least six people. A few hours later, a nine-storey residential building in the Tallet el Khayat neighbourhood was hit. In all 254 people were killed and more than a thousand wounded.
The Egyptian version of the treaty of 1259 BC at the Precinct of Amun-Re near Luxor (left) and the Hittite version (right), excavated at Hattusa in 1906, now in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul (Olaf Tausch / locanus)
The alliance is a very old political technology. The late Bronze Age, with its dense networks of trade and cultural exchange criss-crossing the Mediterranean, was grounded in treaties, with frequent gift exchange and regular correspondence between rulers and officials. One of the oldest treaties known to us, the Egyptian-Hittite Peace Treaty of 1259 BC, was concluded after the indecisive Battle of Kadesh, the Hittites’ last attempt to muscle into Canaan.
Péter Magyar is a conservative, but also the only hope for defeating the regime; hence he has effectively absorbed most of what used to be liberal and left-wing opposition forces. Unlike Orbán and his henchmen, Magyar does not consider it his mission to incite hatred of minorities, but he also makes a point of keeping away from the Budapest Pride parade.
Nine years ago, in the first years of Donald Trump's first presidency, I wrote about Harold Pinter's ranting poem ‘American Football’, and the way it anticipated the language of the president.