Iran says Israel is the enemy. The graves tell another story

“Know your real enemy.”

That was the message Iran’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei recently delivered to the rulers of the Muslim world, particularly the Gulf states. He urged them to unite against Israel and the United States, blaming Muslim division for much of the region’s misfortune and asking whether the Palestinians would have been left “so helpless” had Muslims stood together.

It is a familiar refrain from Tehran: Israel is the enemy. America is the enemy. Unite against them and the problems of the Muslim world can be overcome.

But history poses an uncomfortable question:

If Israel and America are the “real enemy,” who was responsible for the millions of Muslims who died in wars in which Israel played no part?

Former Israeli Ambassador Yoram Ettinger recently offered a provocative answer.

In his August 13 essay, Does US Policy Account for the Intra-Muslim Carnage? Ettinger assembled a remarkable catalogue of conflicts that receives far too little attention when the Middle East is discussed. His research and historical framework provided the starting point for this response.

Ettinger calculates that since Israel’s establishment in 1948, approximately 11 million Muslims have been killed in intra-Muslim wars and terrorism, compared with approximately 100,000 Muslims killed in Arab-Israeli wars. The precise totals can be debated—and casualty estimates from prolonged wars often vary dramatically—but the larger historical picture is unmistakable.

Consider only a few examples.

Sudan’s long north-south conflict cost more than 2.5 million lives, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Bangladesh war of 1971 produced estimates ranging from 500,000 to more than 3 million dead. Hundreds of thousands died during the Iran-Iraq War. The Syrian civil war killed hundreds of thousands more. The United Nations estimated that approximately 300,000 Somalis had died by early 1992 alone during the initial collapse of that country.

Then there is Yemen, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Algeria, Libya, Iraq, the Sahel and numerous other conflicts.

The precise numbers vary. The conclusion does not.

Israel did not cause these wars.

Israel did not create the ancient Sunni-Shiite divide. It did not cause Iran and Iraq to slaughter one another for eight years. It did not create the bloodletting in Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Algeria or Somalia.

Nor can the United States reasonably be blamed for centuries of religious, tribal, ethnic and dynastic rivalries that existed long before either the modern State of Israel or the United States itself.

None of this absolves Israel—or America—of mistakes. No nation is beyond criticism. Nor does it diminish Palestinian suffering.

But it does expose one of the great distortions surrounding`“the Middle East conflict,” and to suggest that the Palestinian question lies at the root of the region’s instability.

History tells us otherwise.

Indeed, there is a remarkable irony in Khamenei’s appeal to the Gulf states.

He tells their rulers to recognize their “real enemy,” yet the Gulf monarchies themselves have regarded revolutionary Iran as a threat for decades. And amid the present conflict, Tehran has struck American facilities and other infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.

Iran is therefore calling for Muslim solidarity against Israel and America while attacking targets inside Muslim countries.

Perhaps Khamenei has nevertheless asked the right question.

Know your real enemy.

The rulers of the Muslim world might take him seriously.

They might begin by examining the millions of graves stretching from Bangladesh and Afghanistan through Iran and Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, Yemen and Sudan, and across North Africa.

Those graves tell a story that slogans about Israel cannot erase.

The tragedy of the Middle East is far older and more complicated than the Arab-Israeli conflict. Sectarian hatred, religious extremism, ethnic and tribal rivalries, authoritarian regimes and struggles for regional supremacy have consumed Muslim lives on a staggering scale.

Blaming Israel is easy.

Blaming America is politically useful.

Looking inward is harder.

But if Iran truly wants the Muslim world to “know your real enemy,” perhaps that search should not begin in Jerusalem or Washington.

Perhaps it should begin with a mirror.

Author’s note: I am indebted to Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger’s August 13, 2026, essay, “Does US Policy Account for the Intra-Muslim Carnage?” for the casualty estimates and historical framework cited in this article. His extensive research and compilation of these conflicts provided the factual foundation and inspiration for this response to Iran’s recent claims.