Israel and the United States have unleashed a geopolitical earthquake whose depth and consequences for the region and the wider world remain impossible to predict. Washington seeks to reaffirm its status as the sole superpower on the planet, while the Israeli state aims to consolidate its dominance over the countries and peoples of the region, indifferent to the scale of destruction inflicted on societies and the global economy. Everything, it seems, becomes secondary when the objective is to “crush Iran,” because no power is permitted to remain except Israel and its expansionist project. In itself, this serves as a reminder that Israel, not Iran, remains the region’s existential and strategic threat.

Yes, Iran has often treated the Arab world as an adversary. Yet it remains an established state, and it is necessary to distinguish between acknowledging that reality and endorsing its policies or actions, which have turned it into an adversary for many who have suffered from them. That, however, does not justify being drawn into a regional military alliance against Iran under American leadership, especially when it is precisely U.S. policies and wars that have exposed the region and its peoples to what may become the gravest danger in their history.

The weak Arab position that convened to condemn Iranian missiles directed at American bases and interests, some of which also struck vital facilities in the Gulf without justification, did not assemble to condemn the forces that initiated the war, or more accurately, the aggression against Iran and against our own security and the safety of our societies. Condemning Iranian strikes is understandable, particularly when they hit targets beyond the American military presence. It is also notable that certain Gulf states, specifically Qatar and Oman, have consistently pursued mediation efforts aimed at de-escalation and ending the conflict.

It is also true that these American bases, established to consolidate Washington’s control over the region and to protect Israel, have effectively dragged the entire region into the flames of war. In other words, the United States has entangled us in a conflict it chose to ignite, driven by the impulsive decision of President Donald Trump and encouraged by the settler politician Benjamin Netanyahu.

Iran may have treated the Arab world as an adversary, but it remains a state with deep roots.

This is not even a war of American self-defense. Prominent members of the U.S. Congress, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Michael Murphy, and even Chuck Schumer, who is known for his support of Israel, have acknowledged that no credible threat justified the decision to go to war, whether against the United States or even Israel. Nevertheless, Netanyahu and Trump worked to inflame tensions, insisting that Iran, rather than Israel, posed the principal danger to the region, and pressuring Arab states to accept this narrative and seek security under Israel’s umbrella, a strategy that has been openly promoted under various political slogans.

For Israel, the war has also served another purpose: diverting attention from ethnic cleansing operations in the West Bank and entrenching a joint American-Israeli occupation of Gaza. The war there has not ended. Death simply arrives more slowly for the people of Gaza, but it has never stopped.

The notion that Iran constitutes an existential threat requiring an Arab-Israeli alliance under U.S. leadership is not new. For decades, particularly after the Iranian Revolution that overthrew Israel’s ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Netanyahu has repeatedly advanced this narrative. Long before rising to high office, he used every international platform to portray Iran as the region’s existential enemy while presenting Israel as a force for harmony and peace, often brandishing maps and data later proven misleading. For more than twenty years he has insisted that Iran stands on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb, repeating the claim relentlessly. Donald Trump echoed the same assertion without serious verification, using it to justify hostility toward Iran and, eventually, war.

Even before Trump, the United States routinely framed Iran as the region’s principal strategic threat, rather than Israel. Since the Iranian Revolution, Washington has targeted Tehran, and several Arab states joined this confrontation from the outset. It is also important to recall that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s decision to annul the 1975 Algiers Agreement, which had peacefully resolved border disputes, effectively amounted to a declaration of war.

It is no secret that U.S. allies in the region, particularly certain Gulf states at the time, encouraged and even supported Baghdad’s decision. This support culminated in the 1980 Amman summit, where most Arab governments declared their backing for the war and identified Iran as the primary enemy.

From that moment, a campaign began, openly encouraged by the United States, to reshape political consciousness by marginalizing the Palestinian cause. This effort reached a peak on the eve of the 1987 Amman summit, when major speeches characterized Iran as the Arab world’s strategic adversary. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was visibly sidelined, sparking demonstrations in the West Bank protesting the summit and the shifting rhetoric on Palestine. Yet the Palestinian intifada that erupted days later restored the issue to the forefront. Even so, Washington and Tel Aviv continued working to diminish the centrality of the Palestinian question in official Arab discourse and public consciousness, replacing Israel with Iran as the primary enemy, a narrative that aligned with Israel’s claim of facing an existential threat after the fall of the Shah and the emergence of a government in Tehran supportive of Palestinian resistance.

It must also be acknowledged that Iran’s own actions fueled Arab mistrust. Regional rulers, often intoxicated by power, also played their part. When Saddam Hussein signaled readiness in 1984 to withdraw from Iranian territory after Iraqi forces had advanced deep inside it, Iran insisted on continuing the war until 1988. Later, Tehran cooperated with the U.S. war against Iraq in 1991 and with the 2003 invasion, hoping to entrench the rule of Shiite parties aligned with it. These choices deepened Iraq’s suffering under occupation and compounded the devastation caused by years of sanctions. Subsequently, Iran’s strategic support for Damascus, initially justified as strengthening Syria against Israeli pressure, evolved into direct involvement in backing the Syrian regime’s violent repression of its own population, leaving wounds that remain raw and impossible for Syrians and others to forget or forgive.

At the same time, persistent popular Arab sympathy for Iran can largely be explained by the stark contrast between official Arab complicity, abandonment, and submission to Israel on the one hand, and a regional state that maintains its independence while supporting Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements on the other. That support, however, has also been tied closely to Iran’s own strategic interests. Hezbollah’s entry into the recent war, for example, provided Israel with a pretext to unleash unprecedented devastation on Lebanon, its land and its people.

Israel represents an openly declared settler-colonial project that can only succeed by erasing what remains of Arab identity.

In essence, Arab states have failed to develop any strategy that defends the interests of their peoples independently of the American agenda. Nor have they pursued collective action to address disputes with Iran. The official Arab system has not sought to safeguard public interests or national security. Instead, it has largely aligned itself with Washington, relinquishing an independent stance toward Tehran and allowing the region to become an instrument of American policy. This approach has weakened the Arab position vis-à-vis Iran and fostered acquiescence to Israel’s routine threats to violate the sovereignty of Arab countries, after already doing so in Palestine.

The political predicament of the Arab world has rarely been as severe as it is today. The immediate priority must be to end the war, because without stopping it, nothing else will matter.

It is difficult to predict, or even hope, that this ordeal might push Arab states toward a unified position built on protecting Arab national security without being drawn into alliances that transform them into tools in the wars of Israel and the United States. At the same time, it must be recognized that Iran can indeed behave as an adversary, one that has at times exploited the absence of a coherent Arab stance.

Yet Israel embodies a declared colonial settler project whose success depends on eliminating what remains of Arab identity, not in a chauvinistic or exclusionary sense, but in the context of confronting the Zionist project itself.

It is therefore impossible to continue approaching relations with Iran, or even Turkey, solely through the Israeli-American lens. Why should these countries care about Arab interests if those interests are already subordinated to Israel and the United States?

Al-Araby Al-Jadeed