On April 9, 2026, Norman Finkelstein sat for an interview with Ashfaaq Carim on Middle East Eye’s Unapologetic. What followed was one of the most precise dissections of the institutional collapse now underway — not as abstraction, but as a lived sequence of events with identifiable dates, mechanisms, and consequences.

This is not a summary of that interview. It is an analysis of the argument Finkelstein constructs across it — an argument that moves from the specific (a UN resolution, a Security Council vote) to the structural (the end of the rules-based international order) to the philosophical (the return to what early modern thinkers called the state of nature). What follows draws on the interview, on the primary documents Finkelstein references, and on the broader context of Operation Epic Fury and the institutional architecture that enabled it.

Finkelstein dates the death of the United Nations to November 17, 2025 — the date the Security Council adopted Resolution 2803. The resolution endorsed the U.S.-backed “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” established a Board of Peace under U.S. authority, and authorized an International Stabilization Force. Thirteen members voted in favor. Russia and China abstained but did not veto.

His language is deliberate: the Security Council “handed Donald J. Trump the deed to Gaza.” Not a ceasefire. Not a framework for negotiation. A deed — a transfer of ownership. The resolution placed authority over Gaza’s future in the hands of the power that had armed, funded, and diplomatically shielded the operation Finkelstein and others characterize as genocide. The Board of Peace would operate under U.S. oversight. The stabilization force would deploy while “Israel phases out its presence.” The language of peace was the mechanism of dispossession.

What matters in Finkelstein’s analysis is not that the UN failed — he acknowledges it had been failing throughout the Gaza genocide. What matters is that it crossed from passive failure into active complicity. The institution didn’t just fail to stop the aggression. It ratified the outcome. The corpse was still standing, still passing resolutions, still convening sessions — but the animating principle, the idea that international law exists to constrain power rather than serve it, was dead.

If Resolution 2803 was the death, the Security Council’s response to Operation Epic Fury was the decomposition.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched approximately 900 strikes against Iran in twelve hours, assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of officials, and killing civilians including approximately 170 people when a missile struck a girls’ school adjacent to a naval base in Minab. Iran retaliated with missile and drone strikes against U.S. bases, Israeli targets, and Gulf state infrastructure, and closed the Strait of Hormuz.

When the Security Council convened, Finkelstein watched the emergency sessions live. What he witnessed, he says, was “breathtaking” — and not in the way that word usually signals admiration.

The Security Council adopted a resolution condemning Iran’s attacks on Gulf states, co-sponsored by 135 member states. Thirteen of fifteen council members voted in favor. China and Russia abstained. No one voted against. Iran — the country subjected to what Finkelstein calls “the most brazen, flagrant, egregious breach of the UN Charter in modern history” — was the one condemned.

Finkelstein draws the Gulf of Tonkin parallel explicitly. When the United States escalated in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson at least fabricated a pretext — a false claim that a North Vietnamese vessel had attacked an American ship. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie, but it was a lie that acknowledged the necessity of justification. Operation Epic Fury dispensed with even that. There was no pretext. The aggression was naked, and the institution meant to constrain it instead ratified it.

This is where Finkelstein’s argument moves from institutional critique to political philosophy. Once the Security Council condemned the victim rather than the aggressor, the system of international law didn’t just fail — it ceased to exist as a normative framework. In his words: “There was no longer any rule of law. We had returned to what the philosophers called the state of nature.”

He draws on two distinct philosophical traditions to make this case. From John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, he takes the concept of “wild beasts” — Locke’s term for those who place themselves outside the law of nature by acting with unconstrained violence. Those who behave as wild beasts forfeit the protections of the social contract and may be treated accordingly. Finkelstein assigns the roles explicitly: Iran is the “civilized nation.” The United States and Israel are the “wild beasts, unconstrained by law, unconstrained by any sense of morality.”

From David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he takes the argument that when a civilized nation faces adversaries who observe no rules — not even the rules of war — the civilized nation “must also suspend their observances of law, where they no longer serve to any purpose.” If the legal system doesn’t protect you, you have no obligation to it. The law becomes not a constraint but an instrument of your destruction.

This is not an argument for lawlessness. It is an argument about what happens when the institution of law is captured. The UN still exists. Resolutions are still passed. Votes are still taken. But the normative content — the idea that these instruments serve justice rather than power — has been evacuated. What remains is form without substance, a corpse going through the motions of life.

One of Finkelstein’s sharpest analytical moves in this interview is his appropriation of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine to justify Hezbollah’s intervention on Iran’s behalf.

R2P was developed in the early 2000s as a liberal interventionist framework. Its core premise: sovereignty is not absolute. When a state fails to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity — and when international institutions fail to act — other states bear the responsibility to intervene. The doctrine was used to justify NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011 and has been invoked (and contested) in virtually every humanitarian crisis since.

Finkelstein flips the framework. When the international institutions themselves become instruments of aggression — when the Security Council condemns the victim and shields the aggressor — the responsibility to protect doesn’t disappear. It migrates. It moves from the captured institution to whatever actor is willing to bear the cost of fulfilling it. In his reading, Hezbollah’s decision to intervene on Iran’s behalf wasn’t an act of proxy warfare. It was R2P fulfilled from below.

He’s honest about the cost. Hassan Nasrallah, during the Gaza genocide, “desperately tried to carve out a middle path” — to defend Gaza without triggering Lebanon’s total destruction. He couldn’t find it. After Nasrallah’s assassination, Hezbollah ceased operations in support of Gaza. But when the Iran war began, Finkelstein argues, Hezbollah made a different calculation: they chose to accept the devastation rather than allow a civilized nation to be destroyed by unconstrained aggressors.

He doesn’t minimize the Lebanese anger at this decision. Those outside Hezbollah’s community “didn’t want to sacrifice their lives for Iran. They had a right not to want to.” But the right of self-preservation and the responsibility to protect exist in tension, and Finkelstein refuses to resolve that tension cheaply.

Finkelstein grounds Iran’s retaliatory strikes — including its attacks on Gulf state civilian infrastructure — in the International Court of Justice’s 1996 Advisory Opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons.

The court’s ruling, which Finkelstein teaches in his international law courses, held that most uses of nuclear weapons would be illegal under international humanitarian law, given their inherently indiscriminate nature. However, the court could not definitively conclude that nuclear weapons would be illegal “in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.” The vote was split, decided by the president’s casting vote.

Finkelstein constructs an a fortiori argument from this: if the ICJ itself could not rule out the use of nuclear weapons — weapons that could trigger terminal escalation and the annihilation of humanity — when a state’s survival is threatened, then Iran’s targeted strikes on military bases and infrastructure in the Gulf states fall well within that threshold. Iran did “much less” than what the court contemplated as possibly permissible.

To the Gulf states’ grievance, he is blunt. He asks what the GCC did for Gaza throughout the genocide — and answers: nothing. Worse, the GCC’s first action after Operation Epic Fury began was to increase oil availability, which Finkelstein reads as a direct facilitation of the U.S.-Israeli aggression. A bloc that increased energy supply to enable the destruction of Iran, he argues, cannot claim victim status when Iran struck back at the infrastructure of that facilitation.

The final movement of Finkelstein’s interview turns to a problem he sees as potentially more dangerous than the war itself: the political vacuum on the left and who fills it.

He observes that the American left has effectively no presence in the media ecosystem that shapes political consciousness. A social media influence chart someone sent him showed Elon Musk as the dominant force, followed by figures like Jackson Hinkle. The only person on the chart who could be loosely associated with the left was someone Finkelstein dismisses as “just an opportunist” engaged in “Democratic Party lying.” The era of Noam Chomsky — a towering intellectual presence who could command attention from the institutional margins — has passed. What remains is “sub-mediocre.”

Into this void steps the anti-war right: Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens. And here Finkelstein makes a distinction that the left often refuses to make. These figures were right about Iran. Carlson visited the White House repeatedly before the war and counseled against it. He predicted disaster. He was correct. “Credit given where credit is due,” Finkelstein says. “I have no problem with that.”

But correctness on one issue produces a halo effect. “Most people, it’s a package.” If Carlson was right about Iran, his audience will assume he’s right about everything else — including the claim that Israel deliberately dragged the U.S. into war to weaken American power and facilitate an Israeli pivot toward India. Finkelstein calls this claim baseless — “I haven’t a clue where that comes from” — but recognizes that it will gain currency because the prophet (p-h-e-t) will also profit (f-i-t).

The consequences he foresees are grim. The “Israel’s war” framing, now amplified across the right-populist media ecosystem, transforms the historical charge of “dual loyalty” against Jewish Americans into something worse: treason. “You are aiding and abetting a foreign state to undermine the national security of your own country. That’s treason.” He takes no satisfaction in this prediction. “I’m not happy about that because I believe it’s factually incorrect.” But he also recognizes the self-inflicted dimension: “In part, you have reaped what you have sown.”

He is equally sharp with the left’s version of the same error. Max Blumenthal, Daniel Levy, and others across the spectrum insist the war was “Israel’s doing” — that the U.S. had no independent interest in the destruction of Iran. Finkelstein calls this “way off,” citing four decades of U.S. hostility toward Iran dating to 1979, including the approval and concealment of Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. The United States had Iran in its crosshairs long before the current Israeli government existed.

What Finkelstein describes — a political void on the left, filled by right-populist voices who happen to be correct on the most consequential issue of the moment — is not merely a media problem. It is an infrastructure problem. And it is the subject of Part 2 of this analysis.