For over twenty-five years, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has tracked Palestinian political opinion. Through wars, peace talks, intifadas, and four American presidents, one pattern remains strikingly consistent:
Palestinians have never been broadly pro-American.
That may sound counterintuitive. The United States has spent decades mediating the conflict, funding Palestinian institutions, and pouring diplomatic capital into the region. If goodwill were built by investment alone, the polling should show it.
It does not.
PCPSR rarely asks, Do you like America? Instead, it asks the more revealing questions: Do you trust the United States as a mediator? Do you want American involvement? Do you believe Washington is fair?
Across twenty-five years, the answers tell the story.
Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags
After the collapse of the 2000 Camp David Summit and the violence of the Second Intifada, positive views of America’s political role sat around 20 to 35 percent. Negative views often exceeded 60 percent. America was seen less as a broker than as Israel’s protector.
That became the baseline.
The mid-2000s brought modest movement. After Mahmoud Abbas replaced Yasser Arafat, some Palestinians supported stronger American engagement. Yet the support was tactical hoping that Washington might pressure Israel. That did not translate into trust.
Then came the only real exception.
Barack Obama produced the highest pro-American opening in the polling record. In 2009, roughly 60 percent supported a stronger American role in negotiations.
Washington read that as goodwill. The polling suggests something narrower: hope that Obama would pressure Israel.
Even at that high point, majorities still believed America fundamentally favored Israel. The atmosphere improved. The structure did not.
By Obama’s second term, positive sentiment had fallen back into the 20 to 30 percent range.
Then Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and trust collapsed into single digits.
In some surveys, roughly 90 percent rejected American mediation. The illusion of neutrality disappeared. America was no longer seen as merely tilted toward Israel, but openly aligned with Israeli claims to Jerusalem.
Palestinian Arabs burn American flag in 1998
Joe Biden lowered the temperature but did not restore trust. The numbers recovered slightly, climbing back into the teens and twenties.
Then came the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. With Washington backing Israel militarily and diplomatically, Palestinian hostility surged again toward its floor: single-digit trust, overwhelming distrust.
The pattern is unmistakable.
When America pressures Israel, Palestinian approval rises. When America stands with Israel, it collapses.
For twenty-five years, Palestinians have periodically wanted America involved. They have never wanted America embraced.
Not under George W. Bush. Not under Obama. Not under Trump. Not under Biden.
The names changed. The percentages moved. The structure held.
America, in Palestinian political opinion, has never been a friend. Only a force—useful when applying pressure, hostile when withholding it.
After a quarter century of polling, that may be the clearest finding of all.
Among the dead in Israel were a young Arab man and his fiancée in Yarka, shot dead together just weeks before their wedding. They were building a home, planning a life, and in a moment both were gone.
Their murders did not trigger an emergency session at the United Nations Human Rights Council. No international campaign formed around their names. No protests filled campuses demanding justice.
But the ratio matters.
For every SAP killed by a West Bank Jew this year, more than six Israeli Arabs have been killed by fellow Arabs.
Yet only one category reliably commands international attention.
When Jews kill Arabs, the broader human rights ecosystem reacts swiftly. The UN warns of “ethnic cleansing.” Condemnations follow. Activists mobilize.
Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva on March 26, 2024. Photo: Reuters / Denis Balibouse
When Arabs kill Arabs, the deaths rarely travel beyond the local crime blotter.
If Arab life matters, it should matter regardless of who pulls the trigger.
A human rights system that treats one dead Arab as an international crisis and six dead Arabs as a local inconvenience is not organized around human dignity.
It is organized around narrative.
Somewhere in Yarka, two families are mourning a wedding that will never happen.
And the world moved on because no Jew could be blamed.
When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had roughly 717,000 Jews and roughly 156,000 Arab citizens and residents. Those numbers were small, but what they carried was enormous: the ambition to reverse two thousand years of Jewish dispersion and gather a scattered people back into sovereignty.
Yet the first demographic fact that emerges from Israel’s modern history cuts against so much of the political mythology surrounding it. Since 1948, Israel’s Arab minority expanded at a faster proportional rate than its Jewish majority. The Jewish population grew from 717,000 to nearly 8 million, roughly elevenfold. Israel’s Arab population grew from 156,000 to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold.
That fact strips away one of the central distortions in the debate over Israel. The rise of the Jewish state did not require the disappearance of its Arab minority. Quite the opposite. Israel’s Arab population expanded dramatically under Israeli sovereignty. Two populations grew inside the same state, but through entirely different engines. The Jewish story was one of ingathering, especially during the early years.
Today, Israel stands at more than 10.2 million people, nearly 8 million Jews and more than 2.1 million Arabs. A state born in scarcity became a fully formed society. But the road from 1948 to 2026 can best be understood through four distinct demographic phases: ingathering, expansion, retention, and preservation.
The first phase was ingathering. At first, Israel was an immigration state, and its earliest years were powered by catastrophe. The survivors of Europe came first, the broken remnant of the Holocaust arriving in a country still fighting its first war. Then came the collapse of Jewish life across the Arab world. Ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and Libya emptied under expulsion, violence, and state pressure. More than 800,000 Jews left the Arab world, many rebuilding their lives in Israel.
Then came the Soviet opening. The collapse of the Soviet Union released nearly one million Jews into the largest migration wave since the founding of the state. Europe’s destruction, the Arab world’s expulsion, and the Soviet opening formed the three great waves of Jewish ingathering. Three different historical ruptures, one destination. That is how Jewish Israel was built.
While Jewish Israel was growing through migration, Israel’s Arab population was growing through birth. Higher fertility and falling mortality created uninterrupted expansion over decades. That is why the proportional growth of Israel’s Arab population exceeded the proportional growth of the Jewish population.
Then the second phase began: expansion. At first, Jewish growth depended on aliyah. Over time, it depended increasingly on birth. The immigrants became citizens, the citizens became parents, and the children of refugees became the country itself. The engine of Jewish demographic growth shifted from the airport to the maternity ward. That is the deepest demographic transition in Israel’s history.
In 2025, Israel recorded approximately 177,000 births. Immigration that year stood at roughly 24,600. Births now outnumber immigration by more than seven to one. What would have been unimaginable in 1948 has become ordinary in 2026. Israel began as a refuge. It now reproduces itself.
That changes the meaning of the state. Political Israel started as the answer to Jewish vulnerability, a place Jews could flee to when the world closed. That remains true. But demographically, it is no longer Israel’s primary function. Israel is no longer merely where Jews go when exile fails. It is where Jewish continuity principally lives.
And here, another old assumption collapsed. For decades, Israeli politics was shaped by demographic anxiety: would Arab fertility permanently outpace Jewish fertility? Would a demographic clock eventually run down the Jewish majority? That fear shaped strategy, borders, and diplomacy. For years, the numbers seemed to support it.
Then the numbers changed. Arab fertility declined as Arab society modernized. Jewish fertility remained unusually strong for an advanced economy. Today, Jewish fertility has reached parity with, and in some years slightly exceeded, Arab fertility. The demographic trajectory shifted. A generation of political strategy was shaped by a demographic clock that slowed while everyone kept hearing it tick.
Fertility Shift
1990 Arab █████ Jewish ███ 2026 Arab ███ Jewish ████
But demographic success creates its own new challenge.
For most of Israeli history, migration remained positive. Even when aliyah slowed, more Jews came than left. That changed in the last two years. In 2022, Israel absorbed more than 74,000 immigrants, driven heavily by war in Ukraine and departures from Russia. That surge faded quickly. By 2024 and 2025, net migration turned negative – more Israelis left than new immigrants arrived.
This is not a demographic crisis. Births still overwhelm migration losses, and Israel continues to grow. But the Zionist test has changed. For decades, the question was how many Jews Israel could gather. Now the question is how many it can keep.
The founding generations came because they had to. Future generations stay because they choose to. That is a different kind of national test. And the retention question is not merely numerical. If those leaving are disproportionately engineers, doctors, founders, investors, and elite military talent, the demographic issue changes shape. A state can absorb numerical loss. It feels the loss of capability much faster.
Above all these numbers sits the larger civilizational shift. In 1948, around six percent of world Jewry lived in Israel. Today, around 45% does. Soon it may be the majority.
Share of World Jewry Living in Israel 1948 ██ 6% 1970 ████ 18% 1990 ███████ 30% 2010 ██████████ 42% 2026 ████████████ 45%
There is one more demographic question hanging over Israel in 2026, larger than fertility, migration, or retention. It sits beneath almost every diplomatic formula and every argument about the future of the conflict.
The question is the scale and meaning of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) having a “right of return.”
For decades, the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations have insisted on a “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” and their descendants. The number most commonly cited is roughly 5.9 million. That number matters because it clarifies what the argument actually means in demographic terms.
Israel today has roughly 10.2 million people. Add 5.9 million Palestinian Arabs to that number and the demographic map changes overnight. Israel would become a country of more than 16 million people. Its Arab population would jump from 2.1 million to more than 8 million. Its Jewish population would remain just under 8 million. The Jewish majority would collapse into parity or slightly minority status.
That is not a marginal adjustment. It is a structural transformation of the state itself.
Put into historical perspective, the scale becomes even sharper. In 1948, Israel’s Arab population stood at roughly 156,000. By 2026, it had already grown to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold growth, already exceeding Jewish proportional growth over the same period. Add 5.9 million more, and that Arab population would stand at more than 8 million, representing more than fiftyfold growth since the founding of the state.
A “right of return” on this scale is not simply an immigration proposal, already stripping Israel a basic right of sovereignty to determine who to admit into the country. It further demands that the Jewish State cease to be one.
That is why this issue forms the fourth demographic challenge: preservation. Preservation of the demographic framework that allowed Jewish self-determination to return after two thousand years of dispersion and discrimination.
For most of Jewish history, survival meant enduring dispersion. In Israel, survival became concentration, then continuity, and now choice. The next phase may determine whether it remains preservation.
Very few countries have grown by over 10 times since 1948, and none in the developed “Global North”, with Australia and Canada leading the group at 2.5x and 1.9x, respectively (no European country even doubled its population). In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region which saw explosive growth due to the discovery of oil, no country has had the minority populations grow faster than the majority.
Israel is a true anomaly, a developed country with explosive growth, sitting in the MENA region which suppresses the growth of minority groups but the Jewish State still saw oversaw a faster growth of non-Jews. Despite the basic facts, the world still pressures the country to admit even more people adding to the population density, and with minorities who never lived in the country, in particular, undermining the demographic status quo.
As Israel considers its plans for the years ahead, retaining educated talent and ending the so-called SAP “right of return” rank as the leading causes to maintain a thriving democracy.
Two words sit on the same date and define the cultures of the respective people.
Yom Ha’atzmaut – Independence Day in Hebrew – marks the moment a dispersed people executed a long-planned return to sovereignty. The modern engine was Zionism, but the impulse runs far deeper. A people with an ancient memory chose to translate that memory into institutions, borders, and power. The declaration in 1948 was the culmination of a project that built governing bodies, an economy, and a military before the flag went up. It was construction with intent.
Across the same date sits Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic. The word is used to describe a collapse that followed a war. In 1947, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine offered a fork in the road: two states, side by side. Jewish leadership accepted a constrained map and moved to build. Arab leadership rejected the partition and moved to prevent a Jewish state from coming into existence in “any part of Palestine.” Local forces and surrounding Arab states chose war at the point of birth.
This is the hinge that still carries the weight.
One side organized for sovereignty and then defended it. The other side organized to block that sovereignty and then defined its politics around that goal. The result was not an abstract failure. It was a battlefield outcome with lasting consequences.
The pattern did not end in 1948. It hardened into a language and culture of rejection—of undoing the Jewish state rather than existing alongside it—reappears across decades, sometimes dressed in diplomacy, often in violence. When you look at public opinion at key moments, you see the persistence of that horizon. In surveys like those conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in June 2023 (before the October 7 massacre), the majority of Arabs in West Bank and Gaza expressed confidence that Israel would not endure to its centennial and endorsed continued “resistance” (violence) as the path forward. The expectation is not coexistence after compromise. It is reversal over time.
A standard question in Palestinian quarterly polls like the one above (Q67) asked whether people supported “armed attacks against Israeli civilians.” In Gaza, the percentage was 76.7%
This is where the narratives diverge in a way that matters for the future.
The Israeli story is anchored in a completed act of construction that must be maintained. It argues from existence. It invests in capacity—military, economic, technological—because survival depends on it. It measures success in what stands and functions.
The dominant current in Palestinian politics has been anchored in an unfinished act of negation. It argues from a horizon in which Israel is temporary. It invests in leverage—diplomatic pressure, internationalization, and violence—because the objective is to change the end state rather than to consolidate its own future alongside it.
You can trace every failed negotiation back to that split. Offers are read through different endgames. Concessions are weighed against different destinations. One side asks what it takes to secure a state that already exists. The other asks what it takes to transform the map.
There is a moral discomfort here that people try to smooth over with softer language. It doesn’t hold. History keeps intruding with hard edges. A decision to reject partition and wage war in 1948 set a trajectory. Repeated bets on pressure and violence to force a different outcome have reinforced it. Each round that ends without destroying Israel strengthens the very state the strategy set out to undo.
A century is a long time in politics and a short time in memory. The Jewish project marked its independence by building a country that persists. The opposing project has too often measured progress by how close it can get to erasing that country. That is a strategy that has not delivered a state.
The calendar will keep bringing the same day back. One side will celebrate a construction that proved durable. The other will revisit a war whose objective still shapes its politics. The future will turn on whether the goal shifts from ending a state to building one of its own.
The jihadi war begins in the headline: “Israeli colonists storm Al-Aqsa Mosque under police protection.” Before a single fact appears, the verdict is already written—by the Palestinian Authority’s media outlet—in words designed to inflame.
Colonists erases history, recasting Jews as foreign intruders with no connection to the Temple Mount.
Storm supplies violence whether any occurred or not.
Al-Aqsa Mosque collapses the entire compound into the most sensitive Islamic structure to heighten the sense of desecration.
Under police protection reframes standard security by the Israel Police, coordinated with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, as state-backed aggression.
Then the language tightens. “Talmudic and provocative rituals.”“Frequent Israeli provocations, including repeated raids.” These aren’t descriptions. They’re verdicts. Quiet presence becomes intent. Routine visits become raids. Silent prayer becomes something suspect.
And then the omission that completes the frame. The site is only described as Islam’s third holiest. It is never described as Judaism’s holiest. The reader is left with a single conclusion: sanctity on one side, violation on the other.
This is narrative design. Islamic Supremacy.
Strip legitimacy. Recast presence as desecration. Elevate exclusive holiness. Repeat it daily through a state-backed outlet overseen by the Palestinian Authority.
That is how a holy war is narrated into existence. By the “moderate” Palestinian Authority.
At Buchenwald concentration camp, the ground holds ash. It exists for a single purpose: to remember the industrial murder of Jews. The expectations are clear without being written—restraint, silence, humility.
Buchenwald concentration camp
Bring a keffiyeh into that space and call it “expression” and the word collapses under the weight of context. Symbols do not travel untouched. In that setting, it reads as intrusion—present politics laid over a site of extermination. Memory for mockery.
Yet the pro-Palestinian Arab mob wants to remind Jews that the genocide of Jews is not just in the past but in the present. They want their right of “free expression” precisely where it can hurt Jews the most. The right to bring a cause onto ground that was meant to remind people “never again” was targeted with “again now.”
In their antisemitic zeal, they push the opposite at Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. For centuries, Jewish prayer has pointed toward this place. Yet the pro-Palestinian crowd demands Jews be barred- not only no free expression but no freedom of religion.
“Status quo!” and “Provocation!” used very selectively, when Jews are the target.
The same principle—expression—stretches in one place and shrinks in another.
Expanded to override the norms of a concentration camp. Constrained to block prayer at Judaism’s holiest site.
That is the pattern.
It is not only a double standard. It is a antisemitism squared.
The past is diluted when a site of Jewish death is treated as open terrain for contemporary symbolism. The present is constrained when Jewish prayer is treated as a threat rather than a right.
Buchenwald should demand humility before the dead. The Temple Mount should allow the living to pray.
When those principles reverse, the fracture is not rhetorical. It is civilizational. And the pro-Palestinian camp continues to reveal the profound “deformity in its culture,” and how it revels in Jew hatred.
The images out of Gaza arrive stripped of their foundation. Open the The New York Times opinion pages this week and the story feels preassembled: civilians suffer, Israel strikes, outrage follows. It reads cleanly because something essential has been left out. This war does not begin and end on the surface.
Cover page of Sunday TimesTwo-page spread which never mentions Hamas or tunnels
It runs underground.
Beneath Gaza sits one of the most extensive underground military networks in the modern world, built by Hamas over years with money, materials, and time that could have gone elsewhere. The elaborate system of reinforced corridors, command centers, weapons depots, communications lines was designed to survive bombardment and keep a war going no matter what happens above.
Call it what it is: a vast network of bomb shelters.
Now say the part that rarely gets said clearly: Those shelters were never meant for civilians. They were never opened to families. They were never opened to children. They were never opened to the elderly. They were reserved—by design—for fighters, for leadership, for the preservation of the war machine itself.
In any other place, that would be unthinkable. Governments build shelters to protect their populations. When sirens sound, people go underground. Here, the system was inverted. Protection went below ground for those prosecuting the war. Exposure remained above ground for those living in it.
So when the bombs fall, the images follow. Families in rubble. Crowded rooms. Children pulled from collapsed buildings. The world reacts to an outcome shaped long before the first strike in this round of fighting. The protection existed. It was built. And Gazans were never allowed to use it.
That is the story that flips the frame.
This is not only a story of what Israel is doing. It is a story of what Hamas chose to build, and who it chose to protect with it. The tunnels are not just military infrastructure. They are a hierarchy set in concrete. Survival below ground for the regime. Exposure above ground for everyone else.
Once you see that, it becomes impossible to unsee. The destruction remains devastating but it has critical context. It sits alongside a governing strategy that hardened one layer of Gaza while leaving the other to absorb the war.
And that strategy is not finished. It points directly to what comes next. If Hamas remains, Gaza does not rebuild in the way people hope. It continues in the direction it has already taken. More tunnels. More infrastructure embedded beneath dense civilian areas. More resources pulled downward into war instead of upward into life.
The future of Gaza is not being debated. It has already been built.
It just was never built for the people living above it.
And the socialist-jihadi media like The New York Times, will paint a picture of pure fiction, one in which Gazans are the victims of rubble, not tunnels; victims of the Jewish State, not Hamas; victims of “genocide,” not perpetrators of genocide.
And for good measure, it will add a cartoon of a Jewish Holocaust survivor protesting about Israel committing a genocide in Gaza, to completely embalm its inversion of genocide.
Hamas built bomb shelters for the exclusive use of its terrorist army while it let women and children get attacked overhead. We are similarly witnessing the socialist-jihadi media build narrative shelters for those same jihadi terrorists, leaving Jews to take the brunt of the antisemitic tidal wave.
Jenin did not drift into the headlines after 2022. It started producing them.
What emerged in Jenin was a terrorist factory. Fighters from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades fused into a loose network called the Jenin Brigades that did not need a central command to be effective. Decentralized cells, shared infrastructure, constant regeneration.
The output showed up quickly. Bnei Brak shootings killed five. Tel Aviv shootings killed three. Elad stabbings and hacking with axes killed four. Different attackers, same origin point: Jenin.
Israeli investigations kept circling back to the same networks that planned, armed, and launched the murders. The response followed the pattern. Raids intensified through 2023 and 2024. Weapons labs were targeted and IED networks were dismantled. Yet the factory kept running, because the underlying condition never changed.
Governance had receded.
Palestinian terrorist from Jenin shot and killed three on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, 2022
By 2024, the Palestinian Authority was largely absent inside the camp. Armed groups operated openly. Weapons moved with little friction. Jenin functioned less as a governed space and more as an incubator.
When the Palestinian Authority finally moved in, it revealed the reality it had long avoided. Arrests. Clashes. Fighters targeted in the same streets that had projected violence outward. An internal confrontation that made clear what Jenin had become.
That move came under pressure. As the transition toward Donald Trump in January 2025 approached, the Authority needed to show it could control territory. It signaled to Washington that it could confront militias, that it could govern, that it still mattered. At the same time, it faced a harder truth: those militias had the street. Polling from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed strong support for armed groups, especially in places like Jenin where the Brigades carried both weapons and legitimacy. The Authority moved against forces that many Palestinians saw as their representatives.
68% support the formation of armed groups, such as the “Lions’ Den,” and 87% believe the PA does not have the right to arrest members of these groups – PCPSR poll, March 2023
And then the story is exported for western audiences.
“The Freedom Theatre,” founded in 2006 inside the same camp, showcases a different version of Jenin. Its language is culture, resistance, narrative. On April 12, 2026, that version appears in Kingston, NY with a screening and discussion at the Old Dutch Church.
What arrives there is a story stripped of origin. No Bnei Brak attack. No Dizengoff murders. No Elad hacking. No accounting for the networks that produced them or the infrastructure that sustained them. The factory disappears. The output is reframed.
Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Democratic Socialists of America amplify that version—one that travels without the genocidal bloodlust, speaks the language of “grievance” and “resistance”, and leaves out the mechanics of violence that made Jenin central in the first place.
Two things now move out of Jenin. One is violence, forcing constant military response. The other is narrative, reshaping how that violence is understood far from its source. They are not separate tracks. One conditions the other.
Jenin is no longer just a location. It is a generator—of attacks, of responses, of competing realities.
Some arguments don’t come as arguments. They come as word choices.
In a recent dispatch, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, made a choice that says everything. Israel appears as an adjective when attached to institutions. Its actions carry familiar condemnations. And the land itself is recast as “the 1948 territories.”
That is not reporting. That is positioning.
1948 is a year of war and statehood. It marks the moment Israel came into being and survived an attempt to erase it at birth. Turning that year into a place rewrites the present. It drags today back into a permanent opening chapter, where the outcome still hangs in the balance.
A country becomes a placeholder. Sovereignty becomes provisional. Everything sits on ground that the language refuses to make firm.
This is how maximal claims stay alive.
If a state only exists as “1948,” then its future remains permanently negotiable.
The contradiction is visible in plain sight. Daily coordination with a functioning state on one hand. A refusal to grant that state permanence on the other. Even more, that the very land of that state is illegal, stolen. The phrase allows engagement without acceptance.
That approach carries consequences.
Conflicts move when both sides deal with what is actually there. Language that recasts reality into a provisional state keeps the dispute locked at its most basic level. Every negotiation floats above a refusal that pulls it back down.
This pattern extends well beyond a single outlet. It echoes across official statements, classrooms, and international stages. Words are chosen with care because they preserve a claim that facts have long since settled.
Israel is a state with institutions, borders, citizens, allies, and critics. It participates in the global system, fights wars, signs agreements, and argues with itself in open courts. None of that fits inside a date.
Calling it “the 1948 territories” keeps the founding war alive in the present tense. And as long as that language holds, the conflict never leaves its opening scene.
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.
First One Through 