The War That Was Always Coming

This morning, Israel launched what it called a “preemptive strike” on Iran. Explosions were heard across Tehran, the United States confirmed its participation, and a state of emergency was declared across Israel. None of this should surprise anyone who has been paying attention.

The attack on Iran is not an isolated escalation but the logical extension of a doctrine that has governed Israeli policy for years: the belief that military force, applied with sufficient brutality and frequency, can permanently reshape the region in Israel’s favor. This doctrine began in Gaza, expanded to Lebanon and Syria, and now reaches Tehran. The geography changes, but the logic does not.

Since October 2023, the Israeli government has pursued what can only be described as regional domination through destruction. The aim is not regime change in any single country but something more ambitious and more reckless: the dismantlement of state capacity, the dissolution of institutional order, and the fragmentation of societies across the Middle East. Israel does not want functional neighbors. It wants a region too broken to resist.

This approach follows a Zionist principle that long predates Netanyahu: the “Iron Wall,” raised higher and higher, backed by a long hand that bombs, assassinates, surveils, and destroys. The architects of this approach believe that enough force, applied across enough fronts, will establish Israel as the region’s sole military hegemon, a power that sells security technology and surveillance systems to whatever remains of governments in the Middle East, all from behind the walls and fences it has built. This is the stated posture of a government in which figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich are not fringe voices but decision-makers, and in which the fate of an entire region is subjected to the political survival needs of politicians with delusions of grandeur and biblical fantasies.

Look at the trajectory. In Gaza, Israel destroyed most of the Strip and murdered tens of thousands. The international community did not take a stand. Israel then repeated the same logic in Lebanon, bombing infrastructure, razing entire towns, destroying what it could. In Syria, while Syrians worked to rebuild their country after years of civil war, Israel occupied new territory, bombarded state assets, and exploited sectarian fault lines to divide and conquer. Every crime committed in Gaza that went unpunished was repeated elsewhere on a larger scale. The impunity built in Gaza became the template for the region, and now it reaches Iran.

The advocates of this war should stop lying and admit what this is. The real aim is to enthrone Israel as the only major military power with the only functional regime in the region, to tip the balance of power in its favor for decades, and to achieve through war what it could not achieve through schemes like the Abraham Accords, which lost any modicum of legitimacy after Gaza. Israel is a military base with a state, not the other way around. There is no meaningful civil society debate about this war, no trace of internal resistance to a campaign that will devastate the entire region. The democratic facade exists to shield the military apparatus from criticism in moments exactly like this.

We are past the point of no return. The fire that began in Gaza has engulfed the region and beyond, exactly as many of us warned it would, and today’s strike on Iran confirms that war and more war is the only trajectory on offer. The entire region will eventually find itself in a position where it either fully submits and surrenders to this regime OR fights to rid itself of it. There is no middle path being offered, and the architects of Israeli policy have made certain of that.

There are “educated” people around the world, especially in the West, who look at every catastrophe caused by Israel and consider it a worthwhile price for the realization of the Zionist project. If this is not a total dehumanization of millions of Palestinians, Iranians, Lebanese, Syrians, and everyone else caught in the path of this doctrine, then what is it? The international community has one obligation it has failed to meet at every turn: accountability through arms embargoes, sanctions, and the enforcement of international law. These are not radical demands but the minimum owed to the people of this region, who are not passive recipients of this destruction but political subjects with precious lives, histories, strategies, and the will to resist.

Palestinians warned the world. We said this fire would spread, that impunity in Gaza would become the model for the region, that the silence was not neutral. The world did not listen.