Pip: There is something clarifying about discovering that a political vocabulary you assumed was spontaneous had a drafting committee — and a host country.
Mara: Today we are following First.One.Through into the history of how anti-Israel rhetoric was systematically constructed, tracing the ideological architecture back to a 2001 conference in Tehran. Let's start with where that script came from.
The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001
Mara: The central question here is whether the language of "apartheid," "settler colonialism," and "genocide" applied to Israel emerged organically from events on the ground — or whether it was a pre-built ideological framework deployed strategically.
Pip: The post answers that directly. Here is the setup: this was February 2001 — Hamas had not yet seized Gaza, Israel had not disengaged, October 7 was over two decades away — and yet the declaration from Iran's UN preparatory conference already described Israeli policy as "a new kind of apartheid," "a crime against humanity," and "a form of genocide."
Mara: The upshot is that the vocabulary was not a reaction to events. The moral categories were assigned before the events now routinely cited to justify them existed.
Pip: And the post walks through exactly what that vocabulary contained: apartheid, settler colonialism, genocide, racial supremacy, alien domination, decolonization. The full lexicon, complete, in 2001.
Mara: What the post argues is that Iran understood something many Western governments did not — that narratives outlast battlefields. The framing is precise: "Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations."
Pip: The mechanism described is a kind of moral laundering. Traditional antisemitism had been discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was repackaged in the language of anti-racism and liberation. The old demand that Jews disappear became "decolonization."
Mara: The post traces how that vocabulary migrated — from the Tehran declaration into NGO reports, university syllabi, newsroom style guides, and eventually street protests. Students repeating those phrases today are, as the post puts it, echoing a script written by regimes that openly sought Israel's destruction.
Pip: The inversion the post identifies is the sharpest part: a regime animated by eliminationist antisemitism repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority, while recasting the Jewish state as the great racist evil of the modern era.
Mara: And the asymmetry in the Tehran document itself is telling — exhaustive attention to portraying Israel as racist, and nothing on antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, or the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries. That imbalance was not accidental.
Pip: The post's conclusion is blunt: October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.
Mara: Which raises the harder question — what it means to engage with that vocabulary now, knowing where it was built.
Pip: When the moral framework precedes the facts it claims to describe, the facts stop doing the work.
Mara: That is the thread worth pulling — how political language gets built, distributed, and eventually treated as self-evident. More on that next time.
Every modern humanitarian organization insists the same thing: suffering is not a business. The starving child is not a marketing asset. The bombed hospital is not a fundraising funnel. The crying mother under rubble is not a revenue generator.
Then the annual reports arrive.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders crossed roughly €2.3 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Then roughly €2.35 billion in 2023 and €2.36 billion in 2024. Three consecutive years above €2 billion. Ninety-eight percent of funding came from private donors. More than seven million donors worldwide.
The organization presents this as proof of global compassion. It is also evidence of something else: misery has become one of the most effective fundraising products on earth. Especially if loaded with charges: “Genocide.” “Starvation.” “Ethnic cleansing.”
The humanitarian industry now operates inside the same emotional attention economy that drives political campaigns, cable news, and social media outrage. The more horrifying the imagery, the more morally charged the narrative, the more emotionally shattered the audience becomes, the faster the money moves.
And nobody understands this dynamic better than MSF.
MSF’s public communications increasingly fused emotionally maximalist language with direct fundraising infrastructure. A visitor no longer encountered merely medical updates. They encountered emotional conversion architecture.
The modern humanitarian sector has discovered what every digital platform already knows: emotionally devastating content converts. A dusty child under rubble produces more engagement than a policy paper. A charge of genocide and starvation moves directly into emotional reflex.
The uglier the images and explosive the charges, the healthier the fundraising pipeline becomes.
Doctors Without Borders is very selective in its explosive terminology regarding Israel. For MSF, Israel is the cause of all the ills in Gaza, not Hamas. Israel is directly called out, not the genocidal terrorist group that launched the war and hides in tunnels without letting civilians use them for protection. No excuse proffered by Israel will satisfy.
Doctors Without Borders doesn’t do this in other conflicts. Not in Sudan nor Somalia. Not in Syria nor Haiti. In those wars, either no one is called out or “all sides” are vilified.
And MSF takes its anti-Israel campaign on the road. Wherever Israel is dragged into a defensive war against those determined to annihilate it, like Lebanon and Iran, MSF is standing guard and pointing fingers.
MSF does not limit itself to smear campaigns against Israel. It is a full lobbying shop, taking out full page ads in newspapers to rally the public against Israel. It pushes governments to stop supporting Israel in its defensive war.
So it is no surprise that MSF has officially backed the entire Iranian proxy war against Israel, telling the world that it rushes to protect “Gaza, Lebanon and Iran” from Israel.
Doctors Without Borders: 1) runs to assist jihadists in their active war against Israel; 2) raises money claiming the belligerent parties are the victims; 3) lobbies to have governments stop supporting Israel and 4) calls for the masses to protest the Jewish State. It does all of this, uniquely in Israel’s war.
Doctors Without Borders is not a humanitarian organization but an active instrument in the war to destroy Israel.
In February 2001, long before Hamas ruled Gaza, long before Israel withdrew from Gaza, long before the security barrier, and long before the phrase “genocide in Gaza” became a campus chant, a United Nations “anti-racism” conference in Tehran was already accusing Israel of being a racist apartheid state guilty of crimes against humanity and “a form of genocide.”
The language was not improvised after October 7. It was drafted decades earlier.
Buried in the archives of the UN World Conference Against Racism sits a document that now reads like the prototype for today’s anti-Israel activism. Hosted by the Islamic Republic of Iran as the Asian preparatory meeting for the infamous Durban Conference, the 2001 declaration accused Israel of “racial discrimination,” “settler ideology,” “apartheid,” and genocide years before the events now routinely cited to justify those accusations.
The Tehran declaration described Israeli policy as “a new kind of apartheid,” “a crime against humanity,” and “a form of genocide.” It condemned “foreign occupation founded on settlements” and portrayed Israel as a uniquely racist state. It attacked Israel’s Law of Return as “racially based” while endorsing a Palestinian “right of return,” and framed the conflict almost exclusively through the language of colonialism and racial supremacy.
This was February 2001. Hamas would not seize Gaza for another six years. Israel had not yet disengaged from Gaza. The major Gaza wars had not occurred. There was no October 7 massacre. There were no TikTok videos, no encampments, no “Globalize the Intifada” marches winding through Western capitals.
Yet the ideological framework already existed in complete form.
The core vocabulary was already there:
apartheid
settler colonialism
genocide
racial supremacy
alien domination
decolonization
The slogans were set. The distribution system under the framework of “anti-racism” needed time to become global.
Iran understood this battlefield earlier than much of the West did.
The Islamic Republic did not wage war against Israel on only one front. It developed a multi-front strategy: terror proxies, missile programs, regional encirclement, propaganda networks, diplomatic campaigns, university activism, NGO penetration and information warfare. The battlefield extended from southern Lebanon to UN conference halls.
Iran understood something many Western governments failed to grasp: narratives can outlive battlefields. Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations.
The achievement of the campaign was not inventing new hatred. It was laundering their own very old anti-Jew hatred through the moral vocabulary of human rights.
The regime in Tehran openly sought the destruction of the Jewish state while simultaneously helping construct an international framework portraying the Jewish state itself as the great racist evil of the modern world. The inversion was deliberate. A regime animated by antisemitism and eliminationist rhetoric repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority while recasting Israel as a global pariah.
Reality itself had to be inverted for the framework to function:
The Jewish people had to be stripped of indigenous identity despite Judaism being born in the Land of Israel and the core of the Hebrew Bible.
Jerusalem had to be detached from Jewish history despite being the holiest city in Judaism for three thousand years, and the direction of daily Jewish prayer.
Hebrew had to become the language of “colonizers” despite originating in the same soil activists insist Jews have no connection to.
The objective was to transform the Jewish state from a country that could be criticized into a moral obscenity that could not legitimately exist.
The Tehran document placed Israel into the moral category occupied by apartheid South Africa, colonial domination and crimes against humanity. Once a country is assigned that status, compromise becomes collaboration and coexistence becomes moral surrender.
Iran supplied the ideological fuel. Large parts of the Western activist ecosystem supplied the distribution network. The result was one of the most successful political rebranding campaigns of the modern era.
NGOs, academics, journalists, activist groups and eventually corporate and educational institutions absorbed the vocabulary and repackaged it as the language of progressive morality. Traditional antisemitism had become morally discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was translated into the vocabulary of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and social justice.
The old image of the malevolent Jew became the malevolent Zionist.
Ancient hatreds were repackaged as the language of anti-racism and liberation.
The old demand that Jews disappear became “decolonization.”
And because the rhetoric arrived wrapped in the language of human rights, millions of educated Westerners could participate while imagining themselves enlightened rather than radicalized.
The asymmetry inside the Tehran declaration is particularly revealing. The document devoted extraordinary attention to portraying Israel as the embodiment of racism while saying nothing about antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, or the openly eliminationist ideologies as the bedrock of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The imbalance was not accidental.
The conference was not constructing a universal anti-racism framework. It was constructing a hierarchy of permissible outrage in which Jewish sovereignty itself could increasingly be reframed as a moral offense.
The Durban process that followed later became notorious for antisemitic incidents, anti-Israel propaganda and efforts to revive the old “Zionism is racism” framework using newer terminology. Western democracies eventually began boycotting later Durban conferences because they viewed them as platforms for anti-Israel demonization masquerading as anti-racism initiatives.
But by then the political grammar had already escaped containment.
Over time, phrases first drafted in Iran migrated into university syllabi, NGO reports, newsroom style guides, faculty petitions, diversity trainings and street protests. Students who have never heard of the Tehran conference now repeat its vocabulary almost word for word, unaware they are echoing a political script written decades earlier by regimes that openly sought Israel’s destruction.
Long before October 7, the architecture had been built, the slogans drafted, and the moral categories assigned. More powerful than even the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, the new format for the 21st century is anti-Zionism is anti-racism.
For twenty years the distribution system slowly penetrated the world, and reframed Jew-hatred as morally acceptable under willing and unwilling eyes.
October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.
Wars do not simply end; they force institutions to confront whether they still address the world they are meant to secure.
As the regional war against Israel recedes from its most intense phase, one conclusion is increasingly difficult to ignore: Israel has been operating inside the West’s security perimeter while remaining formally outside the principal institution designed to defend it.
That institution is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.
This gap is structural—and increasingly consequential.
When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, crippling access to one-fifth of the global oil supply, the countries inside of NATO barely budged. Spain went so far as to send the United States a big middle finger.
Only Israel worked together with the U.S. in managing this global threat.
Israel already maintains deep bilateral ties with key NATO members, particularly the United States. Intelligence sharing, joint exercises, and technological collaboration are well established. The problem is that this cooperation remains fragmented, dependent on individual relationships rather than embedded within NATO’s institutional framework. In an era defined by interconnected threats, fragmentation is a liability.
Those threats no longer arrive neatly organized by geography. For more than two decades, Europe has experienced the effects of Islamist extremism within its own borders. Attacks tied to networks such as ISIS in Paris, Brussels, and Berlin were not isolated events. They reflected a broader system—ideological, financial, and operational—that crosses borders with ease. That same ecosystem includes actors such as Hamas, whose attacks triggered the current war.
These are not separate challenges. They are different manifestations of two networks confronting the western world: the jihadi axis of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis, as well as the national threats from Russia, China and Iran.
Israel has been confronting the jihadi network as a whole—mapping it, disrupting it, and adapting to it in real time. Europe, by contrast, has often encountered it in fragments.
Memorial for people killed from jihadi bombing at Ariana Grande concert
The two confrontational axis are linked by Iran. A NATO established to be a defense against Russia and communism must adapt to the new reality that the Russia-China-Iran alliance is buttressing jihadi regimes and terrorist groups to destabilize the west.
NATO, as currently structured, is positioned to respond to effects—naval patrols, sanctions, diplomatic signaling—but lacks a formal mechanism to integrate with the actor most deeply engaged in countering the source.
Israel is not a peripheral partner. It is a central node of capability.
Its missile defense systems operate under continuous pressure. Its counter-drone technologies are refined in live environments. Its intelligence capabilities integrate multiple theaters into a single operational picture. Its cyber operations are embedded directly into conflict environments that NATO is still working to fully integrate.
This is a partner NATO needs.
Geography reinforces the argument. NATO’s traditional focus on its eastern flank remains essential, particularly in relation to Russia. But the critical infrastructure of modern security—energy routes, maritime corridors, and digital networks—runs through the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Gulf. Stability in these regions is now directly tied to European and transatlantic security.
Israel sits at that intersection with capability, proximity, and alignment.
At the same time, pressures within the alliance itself are becoming more visible. U.S. political leaders—most notably Donald Trump—have underscored a structural imbalance: the United States continues to underwrite a disproportionate share of European defense while facing expanding global demands. That pressure reflects a broader need for NATO to adapt—both in burden sharing and in how it structures partnerships to address evolving threats.
Parallel to this, U.S. policy has begun to shift in the Middle East. Efforts to draw regional actors, including emerging leadership in Syria, away from Russian influence and toward Western engagement signal a changing geopolitical landscape. The region is no longer peripheral to transatlantic security. It is central to it.
Against that backdrop, integrating Israel into NATO’s partnership structure is not an isolated step. It is part of a broader realignment responding to the growing influence of Russia and Iran across multiple theaters.
This does not mean that Israel should join NATO as a full member with Article 5 protections. This proposal refers to formal integration within NATO’s Enhanced Opportunities Partner framework. It does not create automatic military obligations, nor does it commit NATO forces to regional conflicts.
It creates structure where there is currently fragmentation.
NATO should take three immediate steps.
First, designate Israel as an Enhanced Opportunities Partner, formalizing its integration into NATO planning, intelligence, and interoperability frameworks.
Second, establish a standing NATO–Israel coordination mechanism focused on counter-drone warfare, missile defense, cyber operations, and maritime security.
Third, integrate Israel into NATO’s southern and maritime operational planning, particularly in relation to the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Gulf energy corridors.
These steps would not expand NATO’s defense obligations. They would enhance its operational effectiveness.
Wars clarify.
This one has clarified that European security is shaped by forces operating far beyond its borders and that the countries are not up to the task of dealing with their own security needs. That terrorism, energy coercion, and hybrid warfare now form a single continuum. That regional boundaries no longer define strategic risk.
And that Israel is already operating at the center of that reality.
NATO was built to defend the system. It now needs to include those already defending it.
Iran did not remake the Middle East by conquering it. It reshaped sovereignty from within.
Through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its expeditionary arm, the Quds Force, Tehran spent decades cultivating armed movements inside other countries. Groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis operate locally while drawing training, funding, and strategic direction from Iran.
The method repeated. Build armed actors inside weak systems. Arm them. Fund them. Legitimize them. Let them grow until they rival the state itself.
The outcome depends on how far that process runs.
Start with Yemen.
The Houthis moved from insurgency to control, seizing the capital and displacing the recognized government. Authority fractured across multiple centers while regional powers deepened the conflict. The country unraveled into competing zones of control, each backed by different patrons.
Yemen reflects the far end of the spectrum. Sovereignty has fractured, authority is dispersed, and the state exists largely in name while power is contested on the ground.
Lebanon presents a more intricate equilibrium.
The government still operates. Ministries function. The army deploys. Daily life continues within the framework of a state.
Power, however, runs on a parallel track.
Hezbollah has evolved from militia to dominant armed and political actor. It maintains a military force outside state control, exerts significant influence within the political system, and operates along the southern frontier with Israel.
In a system where power sits outside the state, accountability thins out.
The Beirut port explosion laid that reality bare. The blast- largely attributable to Hezbollah stockpiling of weapons – devastated the capital and accelerated economic collapse.
Lebanon endures as a state whose authority is constrained and divided. Institutions remain, while decisive power is shared, contested, and at times displaced.
Gaza and the West Bank reflect an earlier phase of the same pattern.
Here, no single authority controls territory, force, and governance at once. Hamas governs Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority administers parts of the West Bank. Armed groups operate alongside political structures, and internal divisions prevent the emergence of a unified system.
Under these conditions, sovereignty never fully coheres.
Iran’s role reinforces these fractures. Support to armed factions strengthens one side of divided systems and complicates any path toward unified governance.
Three arenas. Three outcomes.
Yemen: the state fractures. Lebanon: the state is captured from within. Gaza and the West Bank: the state never coheres.
Systems that weaken the state at home rarely stay contained. They travel.
In Yemen, fragmentation has produced a prolonged humanitarian crisis. In Lebanon, economic collapse and institutional weakness have eroded daily life and public trust. In Gaza, civilians live within a structure where governance and armed control are tightly fused, with recurring cycles of conflict.
Members of Hamas bring back body of young Israeli woman into Gaza after killing her on October 7, 2023
These same structures project force outward. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis have all attacked Israel over the past few years. As has Iran.
And these forces are now all degraded, perhaps on their way to being defeated. The regional implication extends beyond Israel’s immediate security.
Weakening these groups can shift the balance inside the countries they inhabit. Space can reopen for state authority—unevenly, imperfectly, and with no guarantee—but space nonetheless.
Israel is acting out of its own security needs. It is very possible that the entire region will benefit once the Iranian proxies are removed.
Because hamentaschen were never just for a holiday. They are a response to something permanent. Every generation produces its own Haman. Today it comes dressed as an Iranian proxy war, spread across governments and militias that still build their purpose around destroying the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
The language changes. The intent does not.
So make hamentaschen.
Out of season. On purpose. As a refusal to let Jewish life run only on the calendar of threats. The lesson of Purim does not expire in Adar. It lives in every moment when enemies of the Jews believe time is on their side.
Knead the dough. Fill it. Fold it. Bake it.
There is something defiant in that simplicity. Jewish survival has never rested only on armies, though they matter. It lives in continuity. In ritual. In memory. In the quiet insistence on remaining who we are while others plan our disappearance.
That is what they never understand.
So make hamentaschen. Feed your family. Share them with friends. Mark the fact that Jewish life continues on its own terms, not theirs.
And pray.
Pray that those who seek Jewish destruction are defeated. Pray that their power breaks. Pray that the story ends the way it did before.
Abraham had two sons. That is not only history; it is the underlying structure of the Middle East.
From Isaac came Jacob (Israel) and the Jews. From Ishmael came peoples that would become much of the Arab world. One father. Two lines. A separation that began in a household and expanded into history.
“And the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight… and he sent her [Hagar and Ishamael] away” (Genesis 21:11–14)
A rupture in youth. Ishmael into the wilderness. Isaac remaining with the covenant, inheritance, and land. Two trajectories set before either became a nation.
They meet again only once.
“And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah” (Genesis 25:9)
The text records a moment that refuses to disappear: the separated sons standing together over their father.
History widened the gap.
The descendants of Ishmael became many: spread across vast geographies, largely Muslim, with enduring Christian communities. The region became overwhelmingly Arab.
The descendants of Isaac became few. Driven out, dispersed, conquered repeatedly, yet carrying something that would not yield: memory, covenant, and a fixed orientation toward their promised land.
Eventually, they returned. A small people, back in a narrow strip of that land, surrounded by a region that traced itself, at least in part, to the other son.
That imbalance defines the present.
Then something shifted.
The Abraham Accords – named for their common forefather – introduced a different possibility. Arab states choosing open relationship with Israel, shaped by economics, technology, security, and a recognition that the region was already changing beneath older narratives.
A shared pressure point sharpened that shift: Iran.
A Muslim non-Arab power, Persian in identity and imperial in ambition, projecting influence across Arab capitals and against Israel alike, forcing alignments that would have seemed implausible only years ago.
The Accords opened a door for a new future. Now widen it.
Bring the Abraham Accords to Hebron.
Bring them to the Cave of Machpelah, the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Jewish matriarchs as well. The place where the text records Isaac and Ishmael standing together.
Let the leaders of Israel and the Arab world stand there.
Let it be an invitation – especially to Saudi Arabia – to step fully into this framework, not only as a strategic actor but as a central inheritor of the Abrahamic story.
Let it also be a reminder closer to the ground.
To Jews and Arabs living in the disputed lands east of the 1949 armistice lines (E49AL) that includes Hebron, that their conflict sits inside a much older relationship. They are not strangers placed side by side by accident. They are descendants of a shared origin, living out a divergence that began long before modernity created borders.
Ishmael did not return to neutral ground. He came back to the land understood to be Isaac’s inheritance. He stood with his brother there and buried their father.
That moment carries a clarity that history has often obscured: the land of Israel is the Jewish home.
The Arab world does not disappear in recognizing that. It becomes something stronger—anchored in reality, aligned with its own long-term interests, and reconnected to a shared origin that was never erased.
The Abraham Accords can move from alignment to acceptance.
Hebron is where that truth can be stated without abstraction.
The region has spent centuries replaying the separation.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States can choose, now, during their common battle against Iran, to stand again at the place where Isaac and Ishmael met thousands of years ago, and acknowledge what each brought with them when they arrived: a common bond and their own roots in the region.
When Iran attacks neighboring countries, many observers react with confusion.
How could the Islamic Republic of Iran strike Muslim countries, they ask?
The question reflects a misunderstanding. Throughout modern Middle Eastern history, many of the region’s bloodiest conflicts have been Muslims fighting other Muslims. The idea of a unified “Muslim world” standing together against outsiders is largely a Western illusion.
Reality has always been far messier.
Muslims Fighting Muslims
One of the deadliest wars in the modern Middle East was the Iran–Iraq War. From 1980 to 1988, two Muslim-majority states fought a brutal conflict that killed hundreds of thousands and wounded millions. Both sides invoked Islam. It did nothing to prevent the slaughter.
More recently, the Syrian civil war has killed roughly 500,000 people, most of them Muslims, as factions divided along sectarian and political lines tore the country apart.
But these are far from isolated examples. Modern history is filled with wars in which Muslims killed other Muslims on a massive scale.
Major Muslim-vs-Muslim Conflicts
Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) ~500,000–1,000,000 killed Shia Iran vs Sunni-led Iraq in one of the deadliest wars in modern Middle Eastern history.
Syrian Civil War (2011–present) ~500,000+ killed Assad regime, Sunni rebel groups, ISIS, and other militias fighting largely Muslim populations.
Yemen Civil War (2014–present) ~350,000+ killed (including famine and disease tied to the war) Iranian-backed Houthis vs Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
Sudan / Darfur conflicts (2003–present phases) ~300,000+ killed Fighting largely between Muslim militias and factions within Sudan.
ISIS war in Iraq and Syria (2013–2019) ~200,000+ killed ISIS fighting governments and populations that were overwhelmingly Muslim.
Algerian Civil War (1991–2002) ~150,000–200,000 killed Islamist insurgents vs Algerian government.
Iraq sectarian civil war (2006–2008 peak) ~100,000–200,000 killed Sunni and Shia militias fighting for control after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Black September in Jordan (1970–1971) ~3,000–10,000 killed Jordanian army crushing Palestinian militant groups operating inside Jordan.
Hamas–Fatah conflict (2006–2007) ~600–1,000 killed Palestinian factions fighting for control of Gaza.
Together, these conflicts account for millions of deaths, overwhelmingly among Muslims themselves.
Members of ISIS about to burn Jordanian to death in a cage
Palestinians Killing Palestinians; Israel Arabs Killing Israeli Arabs
Even movements that claim to represent a single people often turn their guns inward.
In 2007, Hamas violently seized Gaza from Fatah, executing rivals and throwing some from rooftops in a bloody Palestinian power struggle.
The same pattern appears inside Israel.
Most Israeli Arabs who die from violence are killed by other Israeli Arabs, usually in criminal or clan disputes rather than in conflict with Jews.
Internal violence, not confrontation with Israel, accounts for the majority of these deaths.
Power Over Solidarity
Western observers often assume shared religion should produce political unity.
But the Middle East repeatedly shows otherwise.
Persians compete with Arabs. Arabs compete with Turks. Sunni compete with Shia.
Power, rivalry, and survival drive politics far more than religious solidarity.
A Familiar Pattern
Seen in this context, Iran attacking Muslim countries is not surprising.
It follows a long-standing regional pattern: Muslim states and factions frequently fight one another.
The Middle East’s wars are not unique. They follow the same rule that has governed politics everywhere:
Nations and movements fight for power and dominance—even when they share the same faith.
Every year, critics ask the same question about the roughly $3 billion in American military assistance to Israel. What does the United States get for it?
This week provided a reminder.
For decades that funding has supported joint missile defense systems, intelligence sharing, aircraft integration, cyber capabilities, and deep operational coordination between the two countries. American and Israeli militaries train together, build systems together, and prepare for the same threats.
The result is something unique in the Middle East.
The United States maintains major bases across the Gulf. American ships patrol the region. American aircraft fly from Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. But the United States has no bases in Israel.
It does not need them.
Israel itself functions as one of America’s most capable strategic partners in the region. Its fighters, intelligence networks, cyber units, and missile defenses are deeply integrated with American systems and strategy.
When Washington faces a threat like Iran, Israel is already positioned on the front line. Already armed. Already aligned.
That alignment was built over decades. American assistance helped develop some of the most advanced missile defense systems in the world. Israeli intelligence cooperation has repeatedly protected American lives and interests. Joint technology programs have shaped modern air defense, battlefield awareness, and cyber security.
There are many countries that receive American aid. None return value like this.
Israel is the only country in the Middle East whose military doctrine, intelligence culture, and technological infrastructure are so closely integrated with that of the United States that they can effectively act as a unit to dismantle the military capabilities of the leading state sponsor of terrorism which has sworn to destroy both countries.
It is one of the most effective strategic investments the United States has ever made.
Gilbert and Sullivan once mocked a Major General who knew everything except how to wage war. He dazzled with recitations while sidestepping reality. The humor lived in the gap between words and consequences.
That song has inverted.
With the coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the model shifted. Fleets were moved. Air defenses aligned. Hardened targets were hit. Decades of negotiation, sanction cycles, enrichment disputes, and proxy escalation culminated in direct consequence.
For forty years, the Islamic Republic built power through Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militias, and the Houthis while advancing missile capability and nuclear enrichment. Diplomacy stretched. Deadlines slipped. Centrifuges continued spinning.
The modern major general is no longer measured by speeches about red lines but by whether adversaries recalculate. Does sponsorship of terror slow. Does enrichment reverse.
Does escalation pause.
Khamenei’s death marks a rupture. It introduces instability, succession uncertainty, and the risk of retaliation. It also forces Tehran to confront survival in ways it has avoided for decades.
The nineteenth century satire mocked leaders who substituted knowledge for action. The twenty first century test asks whether action, applied decisively, can alter the behavior of a regime that fused revolutionary ideology with missile technology.
This is not opera. There is no chorus to soften it.
The new model of a modern major general does not sing about military matters. He imposes them.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) tried to cast America and Israel as racist, and invert the reality of the fight against genocidal jihadists
First One Through 