An Eruptive Volcano: The New Middle East

Two weeks ago, I was working on this article to show you how the world’s anti-Israel rhetoric and its constant desire to minimize and weaken the Jewish State were evolving. However, the recent preemptive operations by the Israeli Armed Forces in Iran completely overshadow this literary work and force me to refocus the purpose of this writing.

Thus, what has happened in the Middle East during the period mentioned above, and how did we arrive at this point?

To answer this question, it is necessary to divide the analytical focus of our text into various topics to coherently converge on current events and understand the implications of this reality for the future.

Two weeks ago, the ‘woke’ international movement focused its battle against Israel by talking about, promoting, and disseminating the supposed “moral” achievement that Greta Thunberg was leading. In her supposed “humanitarian feat,” Greta intended to reach the coast of Gaza with several of her international coreligionists, enter the Palestinian enclave (I do not know if to meet the same fate as pro-Hamas Italian journalist Vittorio Arrigoni), and show the world “that the Israeli occupation and their naval blockade are weak.”

In the end, despite a supposed human herd that was supposed to accompany her (these supposed protesters intended to join her via Egypt; however, they did not even reach the Egypt-Gaza border, as they were arrested and deported by Cairo), Greta was captured by Israeli naval forces. She and her henchmen were subsequently fed, given lodging in Israel, and before being deported to their respective countries (three of them even ended up leaving yesterday through the Jordanian border due to the current situation), they were offered to watch a video about Hamas’ October 7th, 2023 massacres. Still, they rejected this because, for them, Hamas is a “national liberation movement,” not a “terrorist group.”

Upon her arrival on European soil after having completed an adventure far less exciting than ‘Indiana Jones’, Greta (leader of a group of rioters in command of a boat financed by a Palestinian-British man with ties to Hamas and other Salafist Palestinian terrorist groups) argued that she was kidnapped by Israel (ignoring the now famous photo in which she smiles at an Israeli soldier while receiving a pastrami sandwich from him), avoided confirming that on the boat she only carried protein bars and expired milk to give to the Arabs in Gaza after docking at port, and accused Israel of having endangered her life by supposedly sending drones to spy on her and of causing her a “sensory crisis” given her “aspergism” spectrum. Nevertheless, the reality is that the drones she reported were used by the Greek Navy to monitor the movements of her fleet as they passed near the Greek coast, and her physiological response is because individuals with the neurodevelopmental disorder she suffers from are 60% more likely to have a panic or anxiety attack in comparison to individuals who do not suffer from this condition.

Despite Greta’s lies, the world turned out in support and praise for the young millionaire who promotes the consumption of grass “to achieve happiness” under the slogan of the “2030 Agenda” and even helped her promote the idea that the “Israeli naval blockade is killing Palestinians” (while ignoring the fact that what still separates the north and east of the Gaza Strip from Israel is a metal fence, while what separates Egypt from Gaza in the southern part of the Strip are three concrete walls (each 8 meters high) filled with mines and artificial lakes filled with salt water to erode the tunnels between the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza).

However, the State of Israel effectively handled this negative strategy of the international left (who now, through Greta, but also New York City’s mayoral candidate Zohran Mandani, question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state) and demonstrated that pressure does not make it lose its way.

Coinciding with this event, and in the face of Greta’s strategic failure, France (one of the main leaders of modern Europe; a continent that spends today more than 15 billion dollars a year purchasing Israeli military weapons while permanently criticizing, doubting and attacking Israeli survival strategies) and Saudi Arabia are now announcing that the act of international support for the Palestinians that they intend to carry out at the United Nations does not seek to recognize a hypothetical “Palestinian state,” but rather “to lay the groundwork for the recognition of a future Palestinian state”, and that due to the current events it will have to be postponed.

Evidently, the “Palestinian international recognition” key aspect was partially reversed, as Germany announced that this would send a bad signal, would just reward Palestinian Islamist terrorism, and would be pointless since the borders of the hypothetical “Palestinian State” do not exist.

Clearly, this French-Saudi betrayal created an unforeseen crisis in the heart of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that led Mahmoud Abbas -the PA and Fatah dictator operating in a portion of Judea and Samaria, and Hamas’s bitter rival- to send a letter to Paris and Riyadh pledging to condemn Hamas’ terrorist crimes on October 7th, 2023 (after having declared this horrific event “a great achievement for the Palestinian people” less than a month ago), willingness to lead the peacekeeping force in Gaza after the war, and to supposedly carry out a series of reforms including the creation of an executive vice presidency, ending corruption, and pushing for democratic elections for the first time since 2005.

Recently, even a pro-PA newspaper called on Hamas leaders to “emerge from their tunnels in Gaza armed with two bullets: one to use against Hamas’s political leaders living a luxurious life in Qatar, and the other one to use against themselves.” They ended this article by arguing that “suicide would be preferable to the shame they should feel for the countless Palestinian deaths in Gaza”. Despite all these hypocritical efforts, the French-Saudi duo has still not responded to Abbas and has abandoned him in his “fight for freedom”.

Ironically, just as the Palestinians betrayed the Jordanians by attempting to overthrow King Hussein of Jordan in 1970 and massacring the local Bedouin population, just as the Palestinians committed genocide against the Maronite Christians in Lebanon and started a civil war, just as the Palestinians brought the Muslim Brotherhood to Tunisia and sowed chaos, and just as the Palestinians betrayed the Gulf Arab states by allying with Saddam Hussein during the invasion of Kuwait, today coherent Arab states are doing the same against them.

This “Arab betrayal” (as Hamas defines it) is so obvious that the Arab press itself recently highlighted that “Israel has invested more than 700 million shekels in the new humanitarian aid distribution system in Gaza, and more than two-thirds of all the water and electricity consumed in Gaza is provided by Israel free of charge”.

The “Arab treachery” -as Ismail Haniyeh once called it- is such that, surprisingly (more than my astonishment at not seeing a single Palestinian flag on my first visit to Jordan two weeks ago), the new Syria, under the leadership of Ahmed Al-Sharaa (a former member of Al-Qaeda and ISIS), signed a $7 billion agreement with Qatar, Turkey, and the “great evil” (aka the United States) to drill, produce and distribute energy from the natural gas fields of the “Hawk of Quarish”. As part of this national renewal strategy, Syria has also agreed to allow international nuclear organizations to verify the four possible sites where the previous regime carried out nuclear activities, and Damascus even condemned the recent launch of two missiles from southern Syria into Israeli territory by the “Islamic Resistance Front in Syria” (a small Iranian proxy based in Quneitra).

To top it all off, President Al-Sharaa -after meeting with President Trump in Saudi Arabia- not only acknowledged that his diplomatic and security team has met with Israeli officials in the United Arab Emirates on multiple occasions but has already confirmed that they are doing so directly and without the need of mediators. After meeting in several other neutral locations, both the new Syrian president and the Israeli prime minister are interested in reaching a formal peace agreement -with the help of the US government’s special envoy for Syria, who recently visited Israel to discuss this matter- to end the historical tensions between the two countries.

To this end, key Israeli demands, such as not allowing Iranian military forces, the Turkish army, or Hezbollah to reestablish a permanent presence in Syria, allowing US troops -alongside UN peacekeepers- to help oversee future border agreements, and negotiating the fate of the Golan Heights (two-thirds of which were annexed by Israel in 1981), are being seriously considered by the new leadership in Damascus.

From another angle, it is important to highlight that in this ‘Troyist’ spiral, the United States has played an essential role in the turbulent atmosphere that has unfolded in the region over the past two weeks. While the Palestinian press celebrates that the leader of Al-Qaeda in Yemen threatened to kill tycoon Elon Musk and President Trump amid their media-led political and ideological divorce, the United States blocked a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire agreement in Gaza, while 1) ignoring the release of the hostages, 2) the disarmament of Hamas, and 3) the withdrawal of the terrorists from Gaza. Within the framework of its new regional strategy, the United States supports the new Syrian government’s idea of integrating more than 3,500 jihadists into its new army, operating in a unit similar to the French Legion (a key demand by Damascus for negotiating peace with Israel). On the other hand, Washington reopened its embassy in Damascus after 15 years of closure, seeks to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood and classify it as a terrorist organization (curiously, a month after Jordan did the same), and sanctioned four judges of the International Criminal Court due to their biased cases against the United States and Israel.

Topping it off, former Arkansas governor and current US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said that the United States would not yet recognize a Palestinian state and even clearly declared that it could perhaps be established elsewhere, not necessarily in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. To justify this, he argued that if the Muslim world were a continent, Israel would fit in it 644 times (only in the Arab world, Israel fits 595 times). Therefore, according to Ambassador Huckabee’s perspective, by having so much land -most of it empty desert- other countries in the region should allow the Palestinian state to be founded in one of those places.

Amid this process of geopolitical mutation, some news last week in the international media was not positive for Israel at all. First, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, and Peru will begin to prosecute nationals of these countries who have taken part in the Israel Defense Forces military operations after October 7th, 2023, because they argue, they “may have committed war crimes in Gaza”. Worsening the situation, the Israeli press reported that a Tel Aviv-based company has trained the Qatari military in cybersecurity, despite the Jewish State’s government current desire to impose sanctions on Doha (not only for supporting and hosting Hamas in their luxurious hotels, but also because the Qatari regime has recently been exposed conspiring with Hamas to prevent the “Deal of the Century” (which President Trump proposed during his first term to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) from moving forward).

As if this were not enough, former Israeli Defense Minister and current Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman appeared in the Israeli press and said without hesitation that the current Israeli administration is funding the Yasser Abu Shabab Palestinian militia, “Popular Forces”. Abu Shabab, a member of the Tarabin Bedouin tribe, managed to escape from a Hamas prison after an Israeli air strike destroyed the penitentiary compound. Upon his escape, he recruited members of his tribe to create this new organization, whose main objective is to ensure that Hamas does not steal humanitarian aid from the civilian population in the Rafah area, where the tribe has a significant presence. Furthermore, this militia -made up mostly of members of the aforementioned tribe and mainly recruited through the PA intelligence services- is also believed to be involved in activities such as surveying and clearing landmines in Gaza and have even been fighting against Hamas (who just saw their leader in Gaza killed by the Israeli aviation while hiding in the tunnels of a hospital funded by the European Union).

Although Lieberman and much of the Israeli press and key political figures have linked this group to ISIS and have called them a “gang of thugs” (given the fact that the Tarabin tribe is linked to many illicit activities in Gaza), the reality is that the Tarabin -who have presence in countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc- have fought ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula, and have fervently confronted the Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

Despite being a risky gamble, this move is an extension of Israel’s new 21st-century “Doctrine of the Periphery (DP),” which aims to weaken the Palestinian enemy from within while expanding its military efforts, and where confrontation is crucial. In other words, the 20th-century DP that sought to use 1) minorities within enemy Arab states to weaken them, 2) non-Arab Muslim states surrounding the Arab enemy to keep an eye on them, or 3) non-Arab/Muslim states that did not have good relations with their Arab neighbors, has mutated into a pillar for weakening the enemy within its borders and eradicating the modern Islamist terrorism. Indubitably, this geopolitical resilience paved the way for the foundational basis of the peace agreements that the Jewish State has reached in the region with some of its neighbors.

As if that was not enough, amid a week in which the world was only talking about the burqa controversy within Reform UK, the Ukraine-led “Operation Spider’s Web” (which eliminated a third of Russia’s nuclear bombers), the abrupt departure of Geert Wilders from the governing coalition in the Netherlands, and the attempted assassination of the Colombian right-wing presidential candidate by hitmen of the current president (a “distinguished” member of the terrorist group ‘M-19’ who after the hit dared to say that the shooter who tried to assassinate his political rival was merely a “young man with good aim”), several European and Western countries sanctioned two Israeli ministers on the same day that Iran announced it had obtained thousands of documents related to Israel’s nuclear program. In my opinion, that is when everything changed.

After two months of negotiations between the United States and Iran regarding the ayatollahs’ nuclear program, Tehran decided to reject all US proposals and cling to the ideological “establishment” they have had on this issue for the past 30 years. In other words, Iran is vehemently focused on obtaining a nuclear bomb and surpassing the 60% uranium enrichment threshold to build their future nuclear warheads. Under this diplomatic horizon, which was certainly going to fail, Iran leaked to the press that 1) it had already half a ton of enriched uranium, and 2) it had ordered thousands of tons of key ingredients from China to produce more than 10,000 ballistic missiles per year.

Oddly, after Western pressure to put sanctions on the State of Israel for what they call “an unjustified massacre in Gaza” (even though more than 30,000 of the supposedly 50,000 deaths in the Gaza Strip—according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health—are members of the terrorist groups operating there), President Trump publicly called on Israel to halt operations in Gaza, and the Israeli parliament was nearly dissolved (given the ultra-Orthodox parties’ rejection of their coreligionists serving in the Israeli armed forces).

But, like any good ‘political animal’, Netanyahu survived. Not only did he succeed in preventing the bill to dissolve parliament from being passed, but he also got Argentina’s President, Javier Milei (who is converting to Judaism, who has outlawed Hezbollah, and who has helped lift the dark cloud surrounding the AMIA massacre and the attacks on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in the 1990s), to announce that the only constitutionally Catholic nation in the world -besides the Vatican City- will be moving its embassy to Jerusalem next year.

To partially distract the public from the issue of ultra-Orthodox recruitment into the armed forces and complete his political move, Netanyahu finally decided to attack Iran’s nuclear program not only because the Persian-US talks had failed, but also because Iran was plotting to attack Israel -and even occupy it- with its armed forces, and the proxy regional terrorist groups it finances. However, before carrying out this plan -which had already been decided last year- Netanyahu and the Trump administration had peddled the idea that President Trump was discouraging Netanyahu from attacking Teheran because it “could affect the talks between Iran and the United States”; in fact, Netanyahu had even said that he was going on a vacation to northern Israel and the local media informed that his son would be getting married in the coming days.

Thanks to this layer of smoke, the operation against Iranian territory gained momentum and was flawless. But, how?

1) The Mossad managed to trick Iran’s top military commanders into gathering in one place and eliminated 20 out of the 22 key leaders of the country’s armed forces and intelligence pillars. Eventually, 2) Israel managed to deploy Mossad operatives and dozens of drones (which were assembled on Iranian soil after being trucked to Tehran) to inhibit the activation of the ayatollah’s anti-missile systems before the attacks Israeli F-35s attacked. 3) Jerusalem then proceeded to destroy more than 40% of the country’s nuclear and atomic scientific research infrastructure (although the core of Iran’s uranium enrichment, Fordo, has not been neutralized because the Israeli air force does not have the necessary bombs to fully penetrate the depth of this underground facility). 4) Furthermore, the Israeli air force has destroyed Iran’s main oil export ports and production centers, 5) the vast majority of Iran’s missile production factories of all types have been affected and one-third of all the Persian missile launchers have been eradicated. On the other hand, 6) the Jewish State has hit part of the key hydraulic infrastructure for the Iranian regime and 7) moral support has been given to the local population -80% of which reject the ayatollahs regime- to rebel against the dictatorship as we have seen after the explosion of 5 car bombs in Tehran.

Although this special operation puts the lives of members of the Jewish communities abroad where Iran has diplomatic missions at risk (particularly in Belgium) and could lead to regional terrorist groups supported by Iran to attack Israel in a coordinated effort, as we have seen with the Houthis (although pressure from Lebanon’s new moderate government has caused Hezbollah to back up against the wall and they will likely do nothing), the reality is that Tehran is in a state of shock as it watches the regime crumble while its “international allies” have only paid lip service.

In my opinion, if this operation continues a little longer and Israel can achieve its goals, the United States will likely act (although Iran has not yet attacked US troops in the region; currently, the US red line for action) and successfully end this conflict by destroying Fordo. But before this, Israel will likely proceed to eliminate Iran’s Supreme Leader, which would undoubtedly have the immediate effect of completely destabilizing the Shiite Islamist dictatorship and the real possibility that the Iranian opposition -led by the exiled monarchy- could regain power.

On the other hand, the Arab world’s astonishment at Israel’s courage in vigorously and unabashedly destroying its enemy could lead weaker Arab countries in the region under Saudi Arabia’s orbit (such as Lebanon and Syria) to accelerate their desire to make peace with Israel. Certainly, under this framework, Iran would cease to be an existential threat to the West and Israel (therefore, Tehran’s “Palestine Square” clock that counts down Israel’s “remaining existence” would stop “per secula seculorum”), Saudi Arabia could likely accelerate its ‘2030 Saudi Vision’ project, and the idea of a transnational economic and political project in the region could start becoming a reality. Hence, in the short term, this context of chaos and exceptional circumstances will allow Netanyahu to hold out until next year’s elections, will boost the country’s morale by precisely solving a key issue for the very existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, and will lay the foundations for Netanyahu to form again a governing coalition alongside his allies in 2026.

In conclusion, it is important to recognize that the 21st-century Middle East will be one of vanguard and prosperity thanks to the courage of the only country that, after the greatest massacre of its people since the Holocaust, dared to eliminate all the leaders and opponents of the terrorist groups that threaten its security. Without a doubt, this country has the fearlessness and courage to do what no one in the West dared to do with transcendence and guts: attack with force, dignity, and audacity the main financier of global Islamic terrorism.

The Middle East has changed, and it will develop and prosper, just as we in Israel have managed to build a country from the flakes of sands that inhabit this land. The barbaric struggles of the past and the threats of radical Islam will be part of the last gasps of those doomed to fail in the face of a new social conglomeration that seeks peace and prosperity.