The five winds beneath Israel’s wings

About three years ago, I was living in the United States. Back then, I watched Israel’s image sink to record lows, in the media and across political and academic circles alike. More than once, I heard people describe it, in so many words, as “another shithole in the Middle East.”

Soon after, six Palestinian prisoners in Gilboa Prison escaped through a tunnel they had dug from inside their cell, patiently and over a long stretch of time. It was a story that reeked of an exceptional degree of security decay and internal corruption. Anyone who knows how prison inspections work in any country, however underdeveloped, can grasp that with ease.

A year and a half later, an Egyptian reserve conscript named Mohamed Salah managed to breach the border with Israel and kill several of its soldiers on his own, carrying out a plan he had devised himself based on his experience with video games. Was the martyred Mohamed Salah an exceptional individual, or was the slackness on the other side what was truly exceptional? Most likely, both.

Since early 2023, Israel has faced a political crisis escalating into serious confrontations. It stems from a clash between secular and religious nationalists over a plan by religious Zionists to curb the Supreme Court and give Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition control over judicial appointments. Secular nationalists revolted against what they saw as a judicial coup threatening the state’s civil character and public and personal freedoms.

The protests went on for four months, and some drew upward of a million Israelis. They were accompanied by levels of violence that Israel had not seen before, including protesters being run over with cars and sprayed with pesticides. At the time, Netanyahu accused his opponents of carrying out foreign agendas and said they were backed by the Jewish American billionaire George Soros and liberal American circles in an effort to undermine Israel’s sovereignty.

Then came Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, against this backdrop: the most painful operation in Israel’s history. It exposed astonishing levels of security vulnerability and military unreadiness—a swift defeat by militias despite Israel’s total air and technological supremacy. Some forget that the Gaza Strip is a besieged pocket within Israel itself, with all supplies subject to Israeli control.

Why rehearse all of these familiar details?

Because there is a profound shock now at Israel’s transformation from that politically exposed “entity,” exposed internally and externally, militarily and security-wise, into the “state” we see today, armed with the highest levels of deterrence, both real and performative. That deterrent power enabled it to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh in the heart of Tehran, then wipe out Hezbollah’s entire military leadership, culminating in Hassan Nasrallah himself.

So where did this capacity come from, the capacity to turn a strategic defeat in a single year into what looks like a strategic victory? Or, more bluntly, how did Israel turn in one year from a shaken entity into a project of regional extermination?

The support fronts: patrons, allies—and opponents

There are important internal Israeli dynamics, including its capacity to mobilize, organize, and project influence through diplomacy and intelligence. These are powerful capabilities. But they do not make Israel a complete whole, just as its role as an American extension does not reduce it to a mere zero.

The past year’s events confirm that Israel’s support fronts make up much of its current strength. Without them, it would be acutely weak. It remains aggressive and capable of harm due to its technological and military infrastructure, but that ferocity ultimately springs from deep weakness.

These support fronts extend beyond military supplies, political cover, or intelligence from patrons and allies. They also include conditions created by regional actors over decades that paved the road for Israel’s present madness and brutality. Support comes not only from friends but also from opponents and enemies—through weakness, confusion, stupidity, tyranny, political obsolescence, or betrayal of their causes.

The American front: The decision-maker

We hardly need to explain the relationship between the United States and Israel: the fifty-first state and the United States’ human military base in the Middle East. Of the world’s 16 million Jews, about 14 million live in the United States and Israel, with more in the United States—making the Jewish question globally, above all, an internal American matter.

Repeating these facts is tedious, but there is an important American development I pointed to in articles last year: Washington decided two years ago to bring the condition of global peace to an end.

Bringing that condition to an end does not mean the United States will immediately declare a new world war. It is enough that it no longer objects to conditions and conflicts slipping toward thresholds that could lead there.

In such a setting, the human cost of violence falls to unprecedented lows. By the arrogant, racist, class-bound standards used to rank human life, regions inhabited by “Mohammads” are cheaper to crush and exterminate—and serve as proving grounds for new weapons without a flicker of an eyelid.

The key to understanding American support for Israel lies not in Israel’s nature as part of the United States, but in the United States itself: an empire whose capitalist complexes have chosen to subjugate the world and its markets with bombs rather than competition. In that formation, Israel is the No. 9 striker in the American lineup in the Middle East.

The Gulf front: The boldness of declared alliance

The many layers of Gulf support require some unpacking. These regimes have never denied, even for a moment, their dependency on the United States. In a short video that says everything, former Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir tells his American hosts about the 80-year alliance between their two countries, through which they jointly defeated Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s and then the Soviets in the 1980s.

What changed over the past decade is that the distance the Gulf states once kept from Israel no longer exists. After the Arab Spring, popular uprisings themselves became the Gulf’s first and overriding enemy, before Iran and its allies.

In the winter of 2018, one prominent American think tank held a closed session. Someone who attended divulged some of its details with me. During the meeting, Turki Al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief, had said there without equivocation that his country would do any and every single thing to ensure that Egypt’s January 2011 revolution would never happen again.

The forces of Arab counterrevolution, it seems, had understood the revolutions better than the revolutionaries themselves.

It was in that context that the UAE left behind its role as the Arabs’ economic “wise man” to become a political actor that lays waste to every corner of the region. From that new position, it became an official ally of Israel, sharing information, political activity, investments and everything else.

Then, matters then evolved further. The UAE became an actor in its own right, expressing imperial and capitalist interests perhaps more complex than those represented by Israel in the region. The corporation-state now pursues regional projects whose characteristics surpass Israel’s own horizon in humiliating peoples and cheapening their worth.

In Riyadh, the Saudi regime still imagines it can control events according to its own vision. Since the mid-2000s, it has framed its main regional contradiction as a fundamentally sectarian struggle with Iran.

What it has never openly admitted is that its secondary contradiction with Israel has become far less secondary—approaching a near-declared alliance.

Saudi Arabia has no plan for the region—and not even for itself. With the NEOM project effectively dormant, Cristiano Ronaldo’s endorsment alone is not enough. Nor do I imagine the Saudis have any vision for how the region should be arranged after Iranian influence is uprooted, except perhaps being compelled to bankroll Israeli moves.

The Saudi regime imagines it can force Israel to recognize some form of Palestinian state according to the Trump–Kushner plan, once Israel completes its mission against Iran on behalf of the Gulf states. That way, the Saudis hope to save a little face by announcing that the Arabs had, at least, not left the party without any party favors.

In Egyptian parlance, that will happen “when pigs fly.”

Regime-loyal journalists in Egypt tirelessly repeat the chauvinistic refrain that everything in the region targets Egypt. In truth, the American target is Gulf money—capital with no Arab power to protect it and none it wishes to find, having fused itself with the Zionists, and now vulnerable once the conflict expands.

The Syrian front: The catastrophe of the Arab human

In Syria, Bashar Al-Assad had established a new benchmark for extermination, repricing human life in our region down to the gutter.

Former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman invoked that benchmark at the start of the current genocide when he rejoined to journalists accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing by reminding them that the death toll in Gaza had not yet reached 5% of the casualties of the Syrian war, where chemical weapons were used.

If Israel is yet “another shithole in the Middle East” by American standards—standards that regard the region as one collection of savages—then by our own Arab standards the deepest pit of filth in the region is Assad’s Syria.

Assad opened his country to Russian, American, Iranian, and Turkish domination. He transformed himself into the head of a security apparatus that props up and coordinates every form of occupation. At the same time, he turned what remained of his country into a massive factory for Captagon and hallucinogenic drugs.

The extermination Assad committed turned Syria into the benchmark for what catastrophe can become. Syria became the excuse of authoritarianism in Egypt: that we must endure whatever suffering comes our way to avoid its fate. 

That Syrian benchmark also emboldened Saudi Arabia to commit its crimes in Yemen, where aerial bombardment became routine. The same logic spread into political practice: the Saudi regime kidnapped Lebanon’s prime minister and its security services carved up dissidents inside diplomatic missions abroad.

If that is the Arab benchmark in dealing with Syria, then what of the Israeli benchmark? Back in 2016, as Assad was doing the unspeakable to the Syrian people, I foresaw that Israel would make his actions the benchmark for exterminating Palestinians, and any Arab people that came after them, without any restraint.

That is exactly what is now unfolding before our eyes.

The Egyptian front: A colony without occupation

This is the most tragic of all the fronts, because it is the result of historical choices that Egypt’s leadership once believed would reshape the region in its favor—only for those choices to turn into a strategically damaging predicament, both domestically and regionally.

In a 2016 article I argued that the Camp David Accords form the backbone of the entire Middle East. No political actor in Egypt can deny this reality or operate on a different assumption. Camp David is the ever-present past of nearly half a century, during which Egypt tried to wriggle out of its predicament through clever evasions, opportunistic choices, or simply burying its head in the sand.

Egyptian support is not merely an aftereffect of the peace treaty. Mubarak’s Egypt was bound by Camp David, but what we see today was not inevitable. The current level of support stems from Egypt’s protracted crisis since 2013, which has stripped its people of citizenship and agency—and the state of political resilience.

Egypt’s domestic front is not weak. It is nonexistent. When the regime allowed a handful of demonstrations at the beginning of the Israeli genocide, Egyptians went out into Tahrir Square and once again chanted, “Bread, freedom, social justice,” because truth has a way of imposing itself. The result, naturally, was the arrest of some of the very people the regime had supposedly allowed to protest.

The current ruling order is racing to preserve its power at the country’s expense, surrendering Egypt’s independence without a fight. Independence is a matter of will, and sovereignty means people’s control over their resources, lives, and dignity. Today we are farther from that than ever, as threats loom at the Nile’s sources and Sudan is torn apart—by an Emirati hand, ultimately an Israeli one.

In 2013, I told a senior Egyptian diplomat in a candid conversation that if Egypt intended to turn its back on the Arab Mashreq and treat the border with Israel as its only red line, then that isolationist choice should be complete across political, economic, and cultural levels—however unreasonable and unprincipled it would be given the inevitability of a shared Arab destiny.

His response was simple: a complete withdrawal was impossible because Egypt could not do without Gulf money and investment.

This unprincipled logic, expressed by my diplomatic friend, lies at the heart of Egypt’s crisis. Egypt’s rulers want Gulf capital and investment—and the inevitable alignment with Gulf political choices that comes with them—without allowing Egypt to play any role in shaping the future of the Arab Mashreq. 

The presence of Gulf capital in Egypt means that the fate of Egyptians will gradually come to resemble that of the peoples of the Mashreq: under Israeli-Gulf domination and within a region remade according to their designs. In other words, we will be subjected to colonization without occupation, humiliation without extermination, or perhaps extermination without bombs.

The Iranian front: The predicament of exhaustion

This front represents a form of negative support. Iran and its “resistance” project have largely exhausted themselves, even as Iran replaced Egypt as the main counterweight to Israel—an anomalous substitution that fits neither the region’s geopolitical realities nor Iran’s Persian character. The Islamic Revolution that rose as Egypt exited the conflict lacks the historical foundations and capabilities for lasting leadership, regardless of ideological zeal or vast resources.

As noted earlier, the Camp David Accords became the cornerstone of the region’s political order. From that moment on, regional actors remained confined to debates over how peace might come, when it might come, and at what price. From this framework emerged the concept of “resistance.”

Resistance means there is a peace project that certain regional powers resist because it does not meet their requirements and conceptions, as happened with Assad’s Syria when it entered peace and settlement negotiations that ultimately faltered because Israel refused peace, not the other way around.

The resistance project no longer exists, because there is no peace project left to resist. Nor is there a limited occupation with agreed borders to fight, as Hezbollah did in the 1980s and 1990s. There is only open aggression to remake the region through violence—an American decision under the Israeli flag—beyond the capacities of this axis, which belongs to a time already past.

Within the old boundaries of the conflict with Israel, Iran may have been able to lead this axis. But now that the conflict has surpassed those old limits, Iran’s withdrawal from it has become inevitable, with military defeat or without it. Iran has its own strategic calculations and its own internal currents, varied even from within the very system of “velayat-e faqih”.

Many of these currents seek to distance Iran from the confrontation in exchange for a historic settlement with the United States that would guarantee the regime’s survival. Like many Arab regimes, it governs through repression and political exhaustion, suffocating Iranian society while gradually disengaging from the spheres of influence it gained in the Arab Mashreq after the American invasion of Iraq.

It is often forgotten—especially in the Gulf—that Iran did not acquire this influence through conspiracies or clever maneuvering. Rather, it expanded into the vacuum created by the American occupation itself.

Iran inherited influence over parts of the Arab Mashreq from the wreckage of American failure: in Iraq through occupation, and in Syria through preserving Bashar Al-Assad. Under Assad, Hezbollah shifted from a resistance movement admired by many Arabs into a sectarian Shiite militia that preyed on Syrians and dominated Lebanese society—Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, and Druze alike.

Iran has also failed to govern the territories it expanded into after 2003. In Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, populations suffer under systems shaped or backed by Tehran. In 2019, Shiite middle classes led the Iraqi uprising against a corrupt order—and the Iranian and American influence sustaining it. In Syria, hostility toward Iranian involvement hardly needs explanation.

At the same time, Iran itself stands on the verge of a profound and destabilizing transition. As I noted in a previous article, the succession to Ali Khamenei is no trivial matter. The man stands near the end of his life, and his departure could place the entire system of “velayat-e faqih” at risk, since no successor can realistically wield the same authority he inherited from Khomeini.

Iran is a vast and complex country, with political tendencies that extend far beyond the simplistic conservative–reformist dichotomy presented to the outside world. No one can predict where this regime—one that has crushed five major popular uprisings with extreme brutality in the past seven years—will ultimately end.

None of this can be separated from the devastating blow that Hezbollah’s leadership suffered last week. What occurred cannot be reduced to a mere intelligence breach; it lies at the heart of political calculations and strategic choices. 

In the end, Israel’s current expansion—despite the signs of weakness I described at the beginning of this long article—is not a sign of strength or the expression of a coherent project.

It is chaos and failure itself.

It is the product of Israel’s own weakness, reckless American usage, Gulf choices aligned with Zionist logic, the Syrian precedent that devalued Arab life, humiliating Egyptian decline, and an Iranian exposure obvious to anyone with reason.

All Arab forces that wish at least to preserve the survival of our peoples must rebuild their visions and reorder their priorities in proportion to the gravity of the present moment.

That will be the subject of the next article.

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(*) The Arabic version of this article was first published on Oct. 3, 2024