Violence has a paralyzing power. What is the power of the word in the face of the planes that sow destruction and death, and the flying ballistic missiles? When I see people around me paralyzed or going crazy with fear in the face of the destruction that the Iranian missiles have sown, I cannot help but think of the resilience of the residents of Gaza, who go through seven circles of hell every day with no relief in sight.

But the missiles and planes are the continuation of politics by other means. Many words have been spoken, and many agreements have been concluded to create and set in motion the instruments of destruction and death. As far removed from reality as it may seem now, it is important to speak out today in order to understand the roots of the war and how we can resist and stop the looming disasters.

In Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran—it’s the same war

During the first year of the “war,” the Israeli public overwhelmingly supported the genocide in Gaza, with no significant reservations. But in recent months, we have seen doubts and disillusionment on the part of large sections. Now, when we stand in protest vigils demanding an end to the killing, the feeling is that most of the public on the streets of Haifa supports us. More and more Israelis, including established media outlets, former senior politicians, and generals, have begun to speak out about the war crimes that Israel is committing. An Israeli and international consensus has begun to form that the Israeli government deliberately avoids striving to end the war, and is working to expand and perpetuate it, for reasons of narrow political and personal interests or out of messianic extremism.

But suddenly, when Israel initiated the expansion of the war into an all-out attack on Iran, which will inevitably bring further death and destruction in both Iran and Israel, we began to see again the power of violence to take over the human psyche and paralyze thought. Suddenly, the automatic Israeli consensus stiffened again, with the media and the public celebrating the spilled Iranian blood. Even a sinking Europe, which had begun to show remorse in its support of the genocide in Gaza, became enthusiastic again, with Germany, France, and Britain literally begging for their share of the pound of flesh and blood.

The root of the evil here, and the source of all the current wars, is the role that Zionism has assumed as the crushing force of imperialist control in the Middle East. This is the declared strategy of the United States: to ensure Israel’s military superiority over any regional coalition. To secure Israel’s place as a military power that can strike at anyone who threatens American hegemony, the United States must keep Israel in a state of constant conflict and constant danger. 

This strategy paid off on a colossal scale for the United States in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, when the crushing Israeli victory over three Arab states led, within a few years, to the collapse of the dreams of independence and Arab socialism of the Nasserists and the left wing of the Ba’ath Party, and the establishment of reactionary and submissive dictatorships.

Since then, much water has flowed through the region’s rivers, hundreds of millions of residents have been added, there has been progress in education and the economy, and the equation that relies on the fortress of Jewish Sparta to maintain imperialist supremacy in the region is becoming less and less sustainable. The United States itself paid a heavy price for its military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and emerged from them without any real achievement. Israel failed twice in its wars over Lebanon, in the Eighteen Years’ War (1982-2000) and in its brief adventure in the summer of 2006.

Meanwhile, the wider regional picture has also changed. Instead of pro-Western dictatorships in Turkey and Iran, populist Islamist governments have risen in the two regional powers, which are more responsive to public opinion in their countries and tend to identify with Palestinian suffering and resistance and to denounce Israel’s aggression.

For a long time, imperialist politics in the region were based on the principle of “divide and rule.” The main axis of nurtured conflict among the Muslim population was between Sunnis and Shiites. The grand idea was, within the framework of the “Abraham Accords,” to establish a defense alliance under Israeli-American auspices that would protect the oil kings and emirs of the Arabian Peninsula from the “Iranian threat” (and from their own people), in exchange for continued effective American control over the region’s natural resources and economy.

Even as the Palestinians did not receive massive support that would allow them to exercise their human and national rights, the Palestinian struggle was and remains a central axis that challenges the system of imperialist control in the region. The identification with the Palestinians by both Sunnis and Shiites, and, more recently, the shock of the unbridled violence perpetrated by Israel since October 7, and the exposure of the racist Pavlovian instinct of all Western powers in supporting the genocide in Gaza, all of which have changed and are still changing the map of the region for the long term.

Meanwhile, Israel has become embroiled in war on many fronts, struggling to achieve a decisive victory and reap the fruits of its military superiority. In Six Days in 1967, Israel militarily defeated three Arab countries and occupied vast areas. Now, for more than 600 days, it has been unable to defeat Palestinian resistance to the occupation of the Gaza Strip, which had been under a suffocating siege for many years before the current genocidal war. 

The only arena in which Israel has achieved a military and political victory is its struggle against Hezbollah in Lebanon, due to a combination of tactical failures on the part of Hezbollah and the fact that, as a representative of the oppressed Shiite minority, it had no full Lebanese legitimacy to intervene in the war. However, in Lebanon too, Israel’s insistence on continuing to hold occupied territory within Lebanon, with constant offensive military activity all over the country, keeps this front in the context of a violent conflict that has not ended and with no end in sight.

In Yemen, the government that came to power in Sanaa on the waves of the Arab Spring, and survived an all-out war by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Emirates, continues to try and pressure an end to the attack on Gaza through a naval blockade and repeated attacks. Even before the conflict with Israel, Yemen was the poorest country in the region and is still torn by civil war. Despite its limited capabilities, repeated attacks by a coalition of Western countries led by the United States and Israeli attacks on economic infrastructure have failed to change Yemen’s position.

The expansion of the war into Syria after the fall of the Assad regime adds another layer to the logic of the conflict. The new Syrian regime, which emerged after 14 years of revolution and civil war at the cost of about a million lives and immense destruction, declared from the moment it was established that it was committed to the 1974 armistice agreements and that it did not want conflicts with any neighboring country. Despite this, and despite the military erosion of the multi-front war, Israel decided to open another front against Syria, conquering additional territories (in addition to the Syrian Golan Heights captured in 1967), bombing all over Syria, and threatening the new regime. This completely exposed the logic of the “villa in the jungle”: in order for the villa to remain a villa, it must ensure that the jungle remains a jungle, and any attempt to build a normal society and state in the region is an existential threat to it. 

The attack on Iran took this logic a step further. Israeli strategic superiority must be guaranteed not only against four hundred million Arabs but also against all other countries of the region. The Israeli method of killing Iranian scientists, which did not begin with the latest attack, brutally presents the concept of how the colonialist “local branch of Western culture” will be able to maintain its technological superiority.

On the nuclear question

As a university student, I took a course on “International Relations After World War II,” that is, the Cold War between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. The lecturer always talked about how Western leaders planned to confront “The Soviet Threat.” In “Operation Unthinkable,” which was to begin as early as July 1945, Churchill planned to mobilize the surrendered Wehrmacht troops to attack the Soviet Union and drop (American) atomic bombs on Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kiev. In 1949, the US planned a larger operation (“Operation Dropshot“) that involved the use of 300 atomic bombs and the destruction of 100 cities and towns in the Soviet Union.

In 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear weapons test, which cooled America’s enthusiasm for a direct confrontation with it. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, after the Soviet Union had proven that it could create a real nuclear threat to the U.S., talks began between the parties, and the Cold War gradually moved into the “détente” phase.

In my naivete, I asked the lecturer: According to what you taught us, as long as nuclear weapons were only in the hands of the West, we were on the verge of a nuclear war. Only when a “balance of terror” was created did the tension subside. How does this fit in with saying that the problem was “The Soviet Threat”? It seems the opposite is true…

He replied that from the perspective of the sequence of events, what I said made sense, but “no one in political science would agree” with my conclusion…

As far as is known (“according to foreign sources”), Israel possesses a large number of nuclear weapons, which the Western powers helped it develop. To this day, they defend Israel’s “right” to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in all international forums. Israeli politicians and various experts have said that Israel has already considered using nuclear weapons against Arab countries several times, in moments of crisis. The climax came during the latest attack on Gaza, when lunatic extremist politicians fantasized about using an atomic bomb to annihilate Gaza as “revenge.” And, please, don’t tell me that the lunatic extremist right is far from the center of decision-making in Israel. As long as nuclear weapons are in the hands of one side in the region, there is a temptation to use them, thus creating an existential threat to the residents of the entire region. Clearly, the best situation is to have the entire region free of nuclear weapons. But history has proven that a nuclear balance of terror can also guarantee that nobody uses these weapons.

The West’s position on the Iranian nuclear issue is, on a regional scale, a repetition of its position on the denial of legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance. No matter how much Israel occupies and oppresses Palestinians, robs their land, destroys their homes, and kills them. Israel always “has the right to self-defense” and the Palestinian who defends his rights is always the “terrorist”. The ultimate way to ensure Israel’s “strategic superiority” in the region is to allow it, in a “time of need,” to wipe out millions of the inhabitants of the region using atomic weapons. This is the essence of the “Western Values” that they claim to stand for. 

The Gulf states, which grovel to the rulers of the United States and Europe, thought they were buying their favor, so that they would stop the massacre in Gaza. They also hoped to prevent the war with Iran, which endangers the security of all the countries in the region. Instead, surprise, surprise, it turns out that the money they gave to the U.S. continues to fund the genocide against Palestinians and the bombings of Lebanon and Syria. Furthermore, they are effectively paying the United States for the privilege of being on the receiving end of a future nuclear annihilation.

Where are we going from here?

As the saying goes: It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

It is difficult to know what will happen, but there are many things that are unlikely not to happen. At the beginning of the current “war” in Gaza, the American administration’s emissaries used to ask Netanyahu what were his plans for “the day after.” What is your end game?

To this day, they have not received an answer, and this is not by chance. Israel lives from war to war and is unable to imagine a different reality, let alone take action to create it. The historical logic was that Israel attacks in order to impose the American “day after” on the Arabs. For this equation to hold, there should be an American administration that is capable and willing to stop Israel’s aggression and force concessions on it. In the meantime, the Americans have fallen in love with Israel’s aggression. Even more importantly, the United States really has nothing to offer the region these days.

We are living at the end of “the American era.” Today, China is the main economic partner for trade and development for the countries of the region, as well as elsewhere. The United States still retains its military superiority, at the price of huge military investment. To benefit from this superiority, it is inclined to militarize international politics, as is evident in Ukraine and East Asia, just like in our region. Israel’s military and political power is a reflection of American superiority. 

The U.S. military advantage is eroding as it loses its economic and technological leadership. When it uses military force to try to preserve or restore its world hegemony, it is not advancing itself but trying to push others backward. Humanity is paying an awful cost, but the U.S. decline is also accelerating.

The current war in the Middle East is part of a desperate effort to preserve the remnants of colonialism and Western superiority over the peoples of the Third World. The Palestinian people are paying a terrible, unbearable price for this. But the future will not be determined by the politicians of the West or the corrupt rulers of the region who grovel to them, but by the peoples who will stand up for their right to determine their own destiny.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.