There’s a joke that to a foreigner, a “Yankee” is an American; to an American, a “Yankee” is a Northerner; to a Northerner, a “Yankee” is a New Englander; and to a New Englander, a “Yankee” is someone who eats apple pie for breakfast. The opposite is true for the term “America.” It grows with proximity.

To a foreigner, a “America” is the United States of America, the nation between Canada and Mexico. But to people in the neighborhood, “América” is the whole supercontinent. Canada and Mexico are American nations, as is everyone else in the Western Hemisphere.

The musician Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl was an ode to pan-Americanism. Although it wasn’t particularly subtle — he sings “God bless America, be it Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay…” while leading a parade of flags — the history might be lost a little on foreigners. Or people from the United States, for that matter.

Bad Bunny himself comes from a place with a bit of a strange relation to being “American.” Puerto Rico, conquered by the United States in 1898, has never tasted independence. Its people are U.S. citizens, but their territory is not one of the United States, and therefore they do not have a say in the way the country is run.

Bad Bunny is part of the small but growing independence movement in Puerto Rico. His song “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” performed by Ricky Martin at the halftime show, warns Puerto Ricans not to let themselves go the way of the ethnic Hawaiians, a conquered and assimilated culture.

His frequent collaborator, Residente, is much more explicit in these politics. And Residente leans into pan-Americanism alongside his Puerto Rican nationalism. His song “This Is Not America,” which I’ve cited before on this blog, lays into the two meanings of the phrase. Puerto Rico is not the United States, in his view, and the United States is not “America.” The music video starts out with the Puerto Rican guerrilla attack on Washington in 1954, and against the backdrop of imperialist crimes, Residente sings:

America is not just the USA, papa
It’s from the Tierra del Fuego up to Canada,
You have to be such a brute, so empty-headed,
It’s like saying that Africa is just Morocco

Pan-Americanism doesn’t have to be left-wing or anti-imperialist, though. And lest anyone forget, the term “Latin America” was invented by the French Empire to justify its intervention in Mexico. Arguably the most successful pan-American political project of all time was the Monroe Doctrine. During the Cold War, the U.S. leaned heavily into pan-Americanism as an alternative to Communism. It’s not hard to see U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as many internet memes did, as a pan-American conqueror.

Before he became the face of Marxist guerrilla war, Che Guevara was a pan-Americanist with a fairly U.S.-sympathetic outlook. In his Motorcycle Diaries, the memoir of his travels during his student days, he recalls a Peruvian professor telling him that, despite its “skyscrapers” and “cars,” the United States is still a young country and a “sister” to the rest of America. A few days later, on his 24th birthday, Guevara gave a drunken speech:

Although our insignificance means we can’t be spokespeople for such a noble cause, we believe, and after this journey more firmly than ever, that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is completely fictional. We constitute a single mestizo race, which from Mexico to the Magellan Straits bears notable ethnographical similarities. And so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United Latin America.

The idea of youth and mestizaje, or “mixing,” are really the heart of pan-Americanism. What makes America different is that all of its societies were built on the ashes of colonialism. These nations are not weighed down by “the tradition of all dead generations.” They are a blank slate, something totally new, where all the peoples of the world came to mix.

Mexican nationalists often call themselves la raza cósmica, “the universal race,” after a 1925 essay by the philosopher José Vasconcelos. He presents history as a series of race mixings, and predicts that a powerful “Fifth Race” will emerge from all the races brought together in America, building a society called Universopolis that conquers the world with love rather than violence.

This idea of mestizaje, of course, runs counter to the rigid U.S. racial system, which Vasconcelos himself points out. His essay, in fact, is a call for Latin America to unite against U.S. hegemony, even if he does imagine a peaceful union at the end. And that is the contradiction of pan-Americanism. The most powerful American state has never wanted to unite on anything approaching equal terms.

But that is also exactly what pan-Americanism is responding to. It says that the little people of America have a right to demand that equal footing from their neighbor. And the reception of Bad Bunny’s show suggests that it is an idea whose time has yet to come.

I think, research, and write a lot about the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It is safe to say now that this relationship is driving the entire U.S. policy towards the Middle East. A couple years ago, I tried to explain this relationship, writing that “American elites have decided that they want to be ‘pro-Israel’ in general — and that Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies — so pro-Israel institutions get to define what that means.”

But that ultimately is circular logic. Why have these elites decided to be pro-Israel? Rob Ashlar, a writer whose work I am familiar with, and Kali de Armas, whom I am not familiar with, have been debating this question on Substack. De Armas backs the “aircraft carrier” theory, which posits that U.S. support for Israel is a natural outcome of larger imperial interests, and Ashlar backs the “Israel Lobby” or “Zionist parastate” theory, which posits that a faction within the American empire has pushed its own interests at the expense of the broader system.

In other words, is the dog wagging the tail or vice versa?

Ashlar and de Armas agree on one broad point: American elites identify Israel’s interests with their own interests. Their disagreement is about the mechanism of that identification, and the broader costs to the U.S.-led order. I agree with Ashlar that the “consanguineous and culturally co-mingled” nature of American and Israeli elites — in other words, social networks and elite socialization — make Israel different from other U.S. client states. However, I believe that both writers misapprehend the nature of the costs for the empire.

The real price of U.S. support for Israel is in path dependence and opportunity costs. The fanatical nature of American politics around Israel means that Washington cannot say no to Israeli ambitions, and the guaranteed nature of U.S. support means that Israel’s ambitions will always continue to grow. The United States is thus locked into an endless cycle of sunk costs in the Middle East, and cannot back out of projects that are more troublesome than they are worth, as it did with the war in Afghanistan.

Although Israeli wars subsidize parts of the domestic American industrial base that are important for military readiness, as de Armas argues, those resources are now being used up on weak states and substate entities in the Middle East instead of helping counter America’s more serious imperial competitors. Palestinians, Yemenis, Lebanese and Iranians took the bullets that would otherwise be fired at Russian or Chinese troops. Rather than being mutually reinforcing, these commitments are mutually competing.

American security elites had a robust debate about the tradeoffs between supporting Ukraine and preparing for conflict with China. This debate did not happen for Israel, despite the fact that the standoff munitions and missile defense systems that the U.S. military is burning through in the Middle East are far more relevant to a Pacific conflict than the artillery and armored vehicles that Ukraine uses. Whenever the “pivot to Asia” (supposedly the core U.S. strategic concern of the 21st century!) conflicts with support for Israel, the latter wins.

The case of U.S. military planner Elbridge Colby demonstrates both the mechanisms for and costs of maintaining U.S. support for Israel. Colby, the grandson of a CIA director from a family with a long history of military service, is an American blueblood if there ever was one. More clearminded than most American strategic thinkers about what maintaining U.S. hegemony would take, Colby is an advocate for drawing down from other theaters of war outside the Pacific, pointing to U.S. support for Ukraine as an example of a wasteful liability that Washington cannot afford when Chinese power looms.

Although he bent over backwards to accommodate Israeli concerns and signal his willingness to “defer more to Israel’s judgement,” Colby was preemptively attacked by pro-Israel factions as a dangerous isolationist, simply because he would prioritize something over U.S. commitments to the Middle East. Pressured heavily by Congress during his confirmation hearing, Colby ended up recanting his belief that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is more of an “existential” problem for America than a nuclear-armed Iran.

That is the revealed preference of American elites. Just as George Orwell called pacifism “objectively pro-Fascist,” the pro-Israel consensus is objectively pro-China, a bizarre contradiction in the empire’s strategic logic.

The argument that war in the Middle East is preparation for conflict with China, which de Armas cites hawks making, is not a real expression of their motives. It is a self-serving, post hoc justification. The closest analogy is President Donald Trump’s Loony Tunes obsession with using Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to fight China. The idea was floated in 2021 by then-Congressman Mike Waltz — who believed in a “generational” struggle against Islamists — amidst other bad faith, desperate arguments for staying in Afghanistan from congressional hawks.

Israel’s enemies are not proxies for China, which is happy to buy from and invest in every faction in the region, including Israel itself. Any damage done to Chinese interests by Israel is incidental, and more crucially, comes at an even higher cost to U.S. interests. Rejecting diplomacy with Iran in favor of regime change, for example, meant throwing out an opportunity to deal with a country that was quite eager to take American investment and even cooperate on certain security issues.

Worse yet, maintaining conflict with Iran until Israeli goals are met — that is to say, the forced collapse of the Iranian state, which itself would require U.S. management of the fallout — means embracing a constantly increasing and never-ending strain on American resources. Many other Israeli ambitions are similarly limitless. With Israel bombing Qatar and preparing for conflict with Turkey, two U.S. allies home to crucial military bases, the U.S.-Israeli order in the Middle East has become downright cannibalistic.

The strongest argument for Israel from the perspective of U.S. material interests is that Palestine provides a laboratory for counterinsurgency methods. But again, it comes at a high cost with marginal benefit for great power conflict. Israeli counterinsurgency methods are much more useful for the types of wars that Israel would like the U.S. to keep fighting. Do Poland and Taiwan, on the other hand, really get so much out of Israeli surveillance tech? Does that benefit justify such intense investment by their patron?

Positing that the U.S. supports Israel because of the boon to the military-industrial complex is a circular argument. Sure, bureaucratic inertia and entrenched interests keep the system in its current configuration. But why has the system decided to distribute resources this way in the first place? Is it the best for the overall health of the system? Even if the defense industry is strategically necessary to build up, or politically necessary to appease, why does it have to happen through hot wars in the Middle East? Wouldn’t the hot war in Ukraine or cold war with China be sufficient?

After all, industrial capacity is not necessarily fungible. Trump is learning the hard way that the Iron Dome, tailored for Israel’s wars against lightly-armed guerrillas, does not make a good model for continental missile defense. That is to say nothing of the physical basing infrastructure, the allocation of human capital into specific regional/language expertise (every Harvard kid who learns Persian is one who didn’t learn Mandarin), the creation of bespoke intelligence-gathering capabilities, and other expensive investments that cannot be moved from the Middle East to other theaters.

However, Ashlar overstates the cost of domestic and international discontent with U.S. policy. Attachment to a “deeply reviled pariah state,” he writes, is “ruining Western global political standing in the process.” But as one of the commenters on his article asks, “who ultimately cares what a few ants think?” Neither protests nor diplomatic censure have really damaged U.S. state capacity, and in fact have probably reinforced pro-Israel political commitments through a feeling of siege.

Indeed, Ashlar’s own essay offers an explanation of how Israeli isolation is not a cost from the perspective of American elites. Citing Josh Messite, he points out the importance of the War on Terror as America’s post-Cold War organizing logic. American elites fear a Third World (and particularly Muslim) horde that wants to take away everything they’ve built out of irrational jealousy. The Palestinian is supposed to stand in for that entire horde, and Israel is a symbol of how far America will go to stop it. Willingness to stomp on Palestine in the face of widespread disapproval is a useful loyalty test for both domestic supporters and foreign clients.

Of course, rather than being a dispassionate calculation of U.S. interest, this logic comes at the expense of preparing for the next great power conflict, and is born from a strong ideological identification with Israel.

That brings us to the importance of elite socialization and social networks. The elite identification with Israel is both genuinely felt and something that has to be maintained through political work by specific actors within the system. Much of the professional pro-Israel activism in America is focused on grooming the next generation of elites to identify with Israelis, whether by sending low-level officials on free junkets to Israel, sponsoring the think tanks that train early-career foreign policy apparatchiks, or identifying rising stars in Congress to shower with support and attention.

This socialization becomes self-reinforcing and expands outwards from the people who are directly targeted. Philippe Lemoine calls it, rather crudely, the “Nagging Wife Model” of the Israel Lobby. While only a few American elites have a kid in the Israeli army, most Americans in high places know someone who has a kid in the Israeli army, or visited Israel, or religiously identifies with Israel. Especially when the issue seems like an emotional minefield, it is easier to simply defer to those peers.

Israel Lobby theorists often overstate the role of direct coercion, such as bribery and blackmail. Although these things happen in the breach, they are usually a sign of elite socialization failing. The famous 2018 documentary series The Lobby covers, in large part, the pro-Israel movement’s response to pro-Palestine student sentiment. Encouraged by the Israeli government, Israel’s supporters resorted to astroturfing and hostile surveillance on campus because universities were no longer organically producing pro-Israel students. These tactics, unsettling as they were, were ham-handed and ultimately failed, as the April 2024 encampments demonstrated.

The paranoid Great Replacement style conspiracy theories about Jews being pushed out of liberal institutions reflect this failure. Educated Americans are no less likely to have Jewish peers nowadays, but they are more likely to have friends who are Palestinian, or have been to Palestine, or religiously identify with Palestine. You can be “cancelled” in either direction now. The pro-Israel consensus within the Jewish diaspora itself is starting to visibly crack up, which bolsters the permission structure for supporting Palestine.

Crucially, this unravelling has imposed an immediate personal cost on many American elites, in parallel to the structural strains of Israel on the empire. Precisely because Israeli ambitions are so totalizing and extreme, the bar for loyalty has increased. Being “pro-Israel” used to mean symbolic deference to the more Americanized side of a conflict that felt very far away. Now it means active support for morally objectionable and practically costly U.S. interventions abroad, as well as submission to increasingly intrusive surveillance in the virtual and physical spaces where young elites congregate.

The baseless conspiracy theory that Israel assassinated conservative organizer Charlie Kirk demonstrates a similar development in non-liberal elite spaces. By all indications, Kirk was a true believer in Christian Zionism, but felt pressure to address increasingly anti-Israel (if not pro-Palestine) voices within his base. Even bare minimum gestures towards accommodating (and ultimately neutralizing) dissent provoked a backlash from pro-Israel conservatives, who were demanding 100 percent alignment. To someone unfamiliar with the typical hyperbole of pro-Israel advocacy, the threatening tone of this backlash and Kirk’s public frustration seemed intense enough to point to murder.

But even if Americans can now articulate the costs of supporting Israel, path dependence makes it hard to do anything else. Trillions of dollars and many elite careers have been made from maintaining U.S. empire in the Middle East, with Israel as its crown jewel. Those investments have created powerful constituencies with material interests in maintaining the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Yet those interests decidedly do not overlap with the health of the empire as a whole. And the harder they make themselves to remove, the more painful the overall adjustment will be.

The case of wealthy sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in custody in 2019, has left a lot of unresolved mysteries that demand answers. As I’ve argued, contrary to popular expectations, there probably is no “Epstein List” waiting to be revealed. Many critics understood that to mean that there’s nothing more to see.

In fact, I meant the opposite. Rather than a single binder in the FBI archive outlining the whole story, there were probably scattered scraps of information on Epstein and his connections, which demanded effort to be pieced together. A few months ago, I stumbled upon one of those scraps: the leaked email inbox of Epstein’s former business partner, retired Israeli Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak.

Reason just published my investigation into the leaked emails. All of them come from mid-2010s, after Epstein’s sex trafficking operation had been shut down, when Epstein was trying to branch out into other lines of work. And indeed he did. In his attempts to break into the defense and surveillance industries, Epstein connected with security elites from America, Russia, Israel, and possibly even China…

I really recommend reading the story at Reason. Since my article came out, a few other journalists have covered the email trove. One of the emails, regarding Britain’s Prince Andrew, made the front page of the Sunday Times. (It includes the cryptic sentence, “weathy chines looking for to start personel protection co in beijing, kidnapping has begun”) Straight Arrow News has also been really diligent about digging through. And I joined the TrueAnon podcast — which often insists that they are comedians, not journalists — to discuss the story more in depth.

To be clear, the emails don’t show that Barak was Epstein’s Israeli intelligence handler, as Tucker Carlson insinuated a few months ago. Instead, they show Epstein using Barak to make connections and seek out investment opportunities. Of course, these business opportunities include some pretty spooky stuff, politically sensitive technologies useful for spying.

These emails came from Distributed Denial of Secrets, which obtained them from Handala, a hacker group that targeted several former Israeli officials’ inboxes. They were originally shared exclusively with a select group of journalists and researchers. A few hours after my article was published, Distributed Denial of Secrets published the Handala trove in its entirety.

The leak demonstrates how much more there is to see in the “Epstein files,” which are much bigger than just the infamous case file at the Department of Justice. His contacts with Barak are likely only a small slice of Epstein’s activities in this time frame. And investigators are demanding to see more.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D—Ore.) is calling on the authorities to follow up on “thousands of wire transfers and more than $1 billion dollars flowing in and out of Epstein’s accounts” contained in U.S. Treasury records and to “subpoena internal bank records” from private companies.

The House Oversight Committee sent a subpoena to the Epstein estate for a variety of documents, including communications, bank records, calendars, home surveillance footage, and the infamous birthday book reportedly containing a letter from President Donald Trump. The existence of that book turned out to be key to verifying that the Barak emails were real, by the way.

While we wait for that information, go read my Reason reporting. It’s really worthwhile. This case is not going to go away. And sex crimes are not the only thing that digging into Epstein’s networks can reveal.

I have nothing original to say about the violence. I have not reported on Druze issues and I do not have contacts in either the city or province of Sweida; everything I know is from either reading the same news as everyone else, or talking to Syrians and Druze outside the region. Instead, I would direct readers to the blog of Aymenn al-Tamimi, who has been reporting on the Syrian civil war for years and now lives in Syria, and New Lines Magazine, which has published quality journalism throughout the crisis.

This post is primarily meant to give people an idea of the geography of the region, often known as Jabal al-Druze or Mount Druze, and its environs. Although I have not been to Sweida myself, I have been to regions of Jordan directly across the border from Mount Druze, the so-called “Black Desert.” Mount Druze is part of a (geologically quite young) volcanic field known as Harrat al-Sham, which has been a historic crossroads between the Levant and the Arabian desert.

My previous writing focused on the Desert Castles, a line of outposts running east to west from the Jordan Valley towards the Azraq Oasis in present-day Jordan. That line is bisected by the Decapolis, ten ancient cities between Damascus and Philadelphia (present-day Amman). One of the most important of them was Bostra بُصْرَىٰ, sitting where Jabal al-Druze hit the Hauran plains. Bostra was incredibly important for both early Christianity and early Islam; the Prophet Muhammad often passed through as a child.

Although most of Bostra is north of the present-day Syrian border, a suburb of Bostra known as Umm el-Jimal ام الجمال sits on the very edge of the Jordanian side. It is an untapped archaeological splendor. The ruin, overlooked by Jordanians and tourists alike, are made of black volcanic basalt and are very well preserved for a city of that age.

Back in the modern day, Israel has tried to present itself as a protector of Druze Syrians, given its own large Druze community and its wariness of the Syrian central government. However, any Israeli plans to intervene on Mount Druze run into a fundamental problem: distance. In between Sweida Province and the Israeli line of control sits Daraa Province, which roughly corresponds to the non-Druze portion of the Hauran.

Israel airdropped aid into Sweida during the present crisis. However, in order to reach Mount Druze in significant numbers, the Israeli army would either have to run supply lines through Daraa Province—with a population that is larger than the entire Syrian Druze community and increasingly hostile to Israeli designs—or somehow gain Jordan’s cooperation to bypass Syria.

Jordan has reportedly been cold on requests to open an unofficial border crossing to Sweida, let alone assist in a foreign military operation there. It’s not hard to see why. Bedouin clans in Jordan have publicly threatened to intervene in Sweida on behalf of their Syrian kin. Beyond the immediate local context, Arab states generally support the new Syrian government and don’t want to be seen as undermining its sovereignty.

And the Jordanian-Syrian border is a sensitive region. Umm el-Jimal, after all, is down the road from both the Zaatari refugee camp and King Hussein Air Base. Jordan began reaching out to the previous Syrian government in late 2022 and early 2023 about border security issues. The Jordanian government wanted help dealing with violent organized crime on the border (particularly drug smuggling gangs) and returning Syrian refugees home. Those interests have not changed with the new government in Syria.

A tenuous ceasefire is now in effect in Sweida. Druze militias have taken control of the city, while the Syrian government has evacuated Bedouin civilians from the province. Hopefully the ceasefire holds, and all sides can resolve the outstanding issues without further bloodshed. And although I know it’s not important in the grand scheme of things, I hope I can visit Bostra in a free, peaceful, and prospering Syria.

“Oh for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin1 reaching for the Beaufort Sea,
Tracing one warm line through a land so white and savage,
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.”

Stan Rogers, “Northwest Passage,” the unofficial anthem of Canada

My feature article on Iqaluit, the capital of the Canadian Arctic, has finally been published at Reason Magazine. It focuses not on the native Inuit or the white Canadians who settled there, but more recent immigrant communities who have come to work in the Arctic mining and defense boom. Iqaluit is truly a global city, with residents from surprising and far-flung parts of the world, including and especially tropical regions.

My trip came during Easter weekend, which also happened to overlap with the spring festival of Toonik Tyme, a sort of Inuit version of Nowruz. I got a chance to spend time with both the Muslim and Catholic communities, both of which are made almost entirely of non-white immigrants, though there were Inuit converts to both religions.

It’s cliche to say, but I felt incredible hospitality and warmth from the people I visited. Everyone there was “a stranger in a strange land,”2 so to speak. Father Barry at the church was quite patient and generous with his time, and everyone at mosque made sure I was taken care of, driving me around town and feeding me at the weekly potluck.

Immigration to the Arctic comes with many of the same anxieties and tensions as immigration everywhere. It’s particularly acute because Inuit are already a tiny, threatened minority culture within Canada, so a small number of immigrants has a big impact. There was a complicated interplay between Inuit, white Canadians, and non-white newcomers that I almost certainly did not get a chance to fully explore.

At the same time, the conditions of the Arctic seem to serve as a buffer. Most people who come for work don’t want to stay, and those who do stay are those who really want to find a place in the community. At the dogsled race, a white government employee sheepishly insisted to me that she didn’t speak Inuktitut, then rattled off different words and even the differences between dialects in (what sounded to me like) a perfect accent.

A perfect symbol of Iqaluit’s cultural synthesis, I think, is Yummy Shawarma. Run by Lebanese immigrants, and decorated with a combination of Arab and Inuit aesthetics, it’s the main fast food joint in town. (I’m told that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and opposition leader Pierre Poilievre both ate there, though neither office responded to my questions about it.) When I visited, the owner had a great rapport with his regular customers, and told me he had even learned to speak a “little” Inuktitut.

A potentially more pernicious dynamic is the feeling of economic exploitation. While migrants who come and go quickly may not threaten the local culture, they do soak up resources. To be frank, a lot of Inuit resent that the investment in their region is going to outsiders who don’t even like living there, and many immigrants feel that they’re doing work Inuit aren’t capable of or interested in doing to develop the region. The old colonial dynamic rears its ugly head again.

One last note: the article was written in the shadow of the Trump administration’s threats to annex Greenland, and Silicon Valley’s interest in building high-tech colonies there. Developing the “Arctic passageways, and Arctic naval routes, and indeed in the minerals of the Arctic territories,” in Vice President J.D. Vance’s words, is going to create a huge demand for labor, attracting immigration in the same way Iqaluit has.

Any future American Arctic settlement will probably look a lot like Iqaluit, a fundamentally Inuit town peppered with different immigrant cultures. It will not look like the Hyperborean Übermensch fortress of Silicon Valley’s fantasies, because upper-middle-class Americans are probably the least likely group to want to live and work at higher latitudes than Alaska.

Anyways, I highly recommend reading the article itself. And that won’t be the ending of my writing on Iqaluit and the Arctic. Even though my trip was only for a few days, I learned and thought about a lot more than can be contained in a 2,000 word article.

Joel Rayburn, a political operator who I’ve reported on quite a few times, is the Trump administration’s nominee to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. At his confirmation hearing on Thursday, quite a few interesting statements about Syria were made. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D—N.H.) made perhaps the most interesting, as first reported by the Middle East Eye.

Shaheen: I have been concerned by some rumors that I have heard in some circles that have been repeated to me by people from the Middle East that they have heard in foreign policy circles of the administration that one options that's been suggested is assassinating the new leader of the Syrian government, Mr. Ahmad al-Sharaa. Can you just talk about what the implications of that kind of action would mean for Syria and for the region?

Rayburn: Senator, I'm not familiar with efforts like that but I think that's clearly not in line with the President's intention that he stated or his description of Mr. Sharaa in the past couple of days. I agree his meeting sounded like it was very positive and that that's good news.

Shaheen: I think one of the things that was pointed out to us by King Abdullah [of Jordan] was that a change in leadership of that kind would create an all-out civil war in Syria. That would not be good to take advantage of the opportunity we have to move that country forward.

Shaheen and two other Democratic senators pressed Rayburn on whether he would actually execute President Donald Trump’s order to fully lift economic sanctions on Syria. Without mentioning sanctions specifically, Sen. Rand Paul (R—Ky.) brought up Rayburn’s former boss, Amb. James Jeffrey, bragging about playing “shell games” to confuse the White House about the U.S. presence in Syria. On the other hand, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch (R—Idaho)1 implied that Trump’s announcement went further than Washington really wanted, and that it could be reversed.

Risch: Myself and this committee and Senator Shaheen were all instrumental in getting the Caesar sanctions2 put in place that we think were at least helpful in bringing [former Syrian ruler Bashar] Assad down and now we're under pressure to do the opposite of that and start removing them. We had actually written the President and asked him to relieve the sanctions and now he has done that a little more robustly than we made in mind. Nonetheless we're still in a wait and see, and those sanctions that were taken off, they can be put back on. We're going to continue to watch this. We really hope this works out. Syria's a proud country, long history. They have the ability to do this. Whether they can do it or not remains to be seen but in any event, your thoughts on where we're heading there?

Rayburn: Senator, thank you for raising this. I think the President is giving the Syrian people and the Syrian interim authorities a golden opportunity, a chance to rebuild after half a century under oppressive rule and especially the debilitating war that they went through, where the people suffered largely at the lands of the Assad regime and its Iranian and Russian and Hezbollah allies. He's giving them a chance to turn the page on that and chart a new course. He's also been very clear, as has Secretary [Marco] Rubio, that there are expectations as we move along the path, as the United States moves along the path of giving them this opportunity. The President has certain expectations. Secretary Rubio has laid out certain expectations that they're going to move and turn the page commensurately by a normalization agreement with Israel…

Some supporters of the Syrian revolution were displeased by what they heard in the hearing. The revelation that someone in the Trump administration was plotting to kill Sharaa needs no elaboration; as King Abdullah made clear, it would be a way to plunge Syria back into civil war just as the country is starting to recover. Of course, who exactly pushed that idea is still an interesting mystery. I have some guesses, but I don’t want to speculate wildly in public. If you know anything about it, you can always reach me anonymously and securely on Signal at matthewpetti.24:

Risch and Rayburn’s comments on sanctions also seemed, to New Lines Magazine editor in chief Hassan Hassan, a “way to shift & qualify Trump’s policy.” Syrian-American lawyer Hamdi Rifai accused the State Department bureaucracy of “actively working to block Congress from terminating the most severe sanctions against Syria.” Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned about the possibility that “certain people in the Trump administration are trying to slow implementation of [Trump’s] decision” to lift sanctions.

I’ve also heard down the grapevine that Syrian diaspora activists have felt a deep sense of betrayal, particularly from pro-Israel hawks. Though they were on the same side on question of whether to sanction Syria under Assad, they are now completely at odds. While Syrians of all stripes are looking for ways to reintegrate and rebuild the country, Israel immediately began looking for ways to undermine and partition the new Syria, including by opposing sanctions relief, because any sovereign and strong neighbor would be an obstacle to maximalist Israeli aims.

A distinct yet overlapping group with the pro-Israel lobby are the War on Terror dead-enders. Though they were happy to see one enemy destroy another, they see Assad (via his backers in Iran) and Sharaa (via his former comrades from Al Qaeda in Iraq) as two heads of the same Islamist hydra. White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka is the most public figure pushing for an aggressive approach to the new Syria.

Rayburn also falls into this camp. The author of the U.S. Army’s official history of the Iraq War, he has quite an open desire for vengeance against anyone who frustrated the U.S. occupation there. As Middle East Institute expert Charles Lister points out, Rayburn’s think tank whined about Trump’s outreach to Sharaa in light of his “ongoing terrorist designation and his empowerment of jihadist factions.”3

Another irony is that doves in Washington, whom many supporters of the Syrian revolution identified as opponents due to their opposition to sanctioning Assad, are now among of the most friendly factions to the new Syria. My former employer, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, immediately called for “official lines of communication with the new regime” and sanctions relief — with no preconditions — after Assad fell.

“Syria’s transition will almost certainly entail human rights violations,” the institute (correctly) predicted, but sanctions should remain “a last resort, given their negative impact on reconstruction and on positive policy formation in the new Syria.”

The opposition to sanctions under Assad and the opposition to sanctions under Sharaa come from the same principle: that this kind of economic pressure punishes ordinary people and poisons internal politics. Opposing additional sanctions on Syria in 2023, the Quincy Institute wrote that such “policies have failed to remove Assad from power, and there is no evidence that they will succeed in doing so now or in the foreseeable future.” That prediction turned out wrong, although for reasons that neither doves nor hawks could have foreseen.

I suspect that many hawks actually shared4 this view of the Syrian revolution as a tragic lost cause, which is exactly why they aligned with the revolutionaries on the questions of sanctions. In the name of keeping the hope of revolution alive, they could keep the country burning forever.

That’s not to say all hawks were this way. Zelin and Lister, who speak for hawkish establishment think tanks, have been consistent about supporting the transition against hostile outside pressure. Rep. Joe Wilson (R—S.C.), who had a red-faced temper tantrum about the New York Times honoring dead Palestinian children in 2021, has become a surprisingly vehement supporter of sanctions relief. Still, observers from across the political spectrum would have considered Sharaa taking power an unmitigated disaster just six months ago; no one predicted the government to collapse in a week, with “only” a few hundred casualties, followed by a rapid consolidation of power.

There are also some actual pro-Assad figures who opposed sanctions under Assad and support them under Sharaa. While most of these voices amount to farts in the wind, there is one exception: U.S. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard. Years ago, I covered her supposed humanitarian opposition to sanctions in Congress. Now, she’s reportedly aligned with Gorka on preventing engagement with the new Syria. I suspect that she represents a specific kind of War on Terror dead ender, whose hostility to Sunni Muslim causes led her to identify Assad as a sectarian lesser evil.

The reconstruction of Syria — and the Middle East writ large — will only be possible if the U.S. drops all of its vengeance-driven politics. In the same speech announcing the end of sanctions, Trump expressed excitement with the idea that “some of the closest friends of the United States of America are nations we fought wars against in generations past.” Rather than a liability, Sharaa’s past with Al Qaeda is an asset in Trump’s eyes, because it represents the possibility of turning enemies into friends.

The people encouraging this mentality now are the supposed “tankies” on the Left and “isolationists” on the Right. The old class of “Middle East hands,” with big plans for the region, has too many pent-up vendettas against those who would frustrate those plans.

Many of Israel’s defenders in America identify as libertarians or classical liberals. Although Israeli treatment of Palestinians is pretty much the definition of top-down arbitrary rule, there’s an argument that Israel at least has a liberal system of government internally, and there is a far more liberal culture worth saving in Israel than in the rest of the Middle East.

An American-Israeli settler interviewed for Louis Theroux’s recent BBC documentary lays out the argument. “We are the tip of the spear fighting the battles of America and defending the entire Western world, and not just the Western world, anyone who wants any semblance of freedom and liberty in their lives,” he says. Asked about Palestinians’ freedom, he says “I don’t have tremendous compassion for a society that has an unquenchable, genocidal, theological bloodlust. It’s like a death cult.”

But a document recently published by former U.S. official Josh Paul casts the conflict in a different light. In 2008, Paul was part of a study of the Palestinian Authority’s counterterrorism regime in the West Bank, meant to address Israeli government concerns. The study found that many Israeli complaints arose from Palestinians’ insistence on due process and the rule of law. Israeli authorities not only opposed but seemingly failed to grasp the need for evidence-based, transparent system for detaining suspects.

Israel’s accusation that the Palestinian Authority is too quick to let terrorism suspects go, the authors found, “reflects a disconnect between Israeli understandings of the authorities of its security forces in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, versus the Palestinian understanding of the rule of law.” There was a clash between liberal and illiberal cultures — specifically, between the would-be Palestinian state-builders who wanted a real court system, and the Israeli military authorities used to ruling by force and fear.

Reading the study’s recommendations for really drove home what the gap was about. While its recommendations for the Palestinian Authority were mostly about institutional consolidation and efficiency, its recommendations for Israel touched on fundamental problems with the government’s mentality:

Recommendation 3.2: It should be incumbent upon Israel, when making requests for security and judicial action by the Palestinian Authority Security Forces and criminal justice system, that the content of such requests should be compliant not only with Israeli legal requirements, but with Palestinian ones as well. While a protocol should be agreed by both sides, such compliance should at the least include sufficient evidentiary materials to meet Palestinian prosecutorial and judicial requirements to press charges; or else, such lists should be considered no more than recommendations for further development by the Palestinian intelligence sector.

Mind you, Paul was representing the Bush administration, which was not exactly known for respecting the rights of detainees. But the Bush administration’s kidnapping and torture programs in the war against Al Qaeda were an extraordinary measure that American institutions pushed back on and did not (yet) expand or bring to other theaters. Arbitrary arrests and indefinite detention, on the other hand, are a decades-old institutionalized part of the Israeli security regime. As the report states:

Israel does not try every Palestinian it detains, nor, although statistics are not available at this time, does it detain for significant periods every Palestinian it arrests. Rather, arrests and detentions form a regular part of intelligence gathering activities for the Government of Israel, and are often thought to be more pre-emptive or deterrent than they are reactive to specific threats. As Israel focuses on threats to its own state and citizens, it likely prioritizes these threats above those which are directed against the Palestinian Authority. From a Palestinian perspective, therefore, it is often seen that Israel, aside from the legality of its actions in arresting and detaining Palestinians, does itself maintain a revolving door, releasing a large proportion of those arrested within a short period of time.

…

A final element to be considered here is the method by which Israel does transfer requests for arrest, detention, or other security actions to the Palestinian Authority. The common mechanism for this is the provision by the Israeli security establishment to elements of the Palestinian security establishment, of “lists” of targets (which may be people or institutions) and ‘actions requested,’ such as arrests or closures. These lists, which are not displayed in this report due to their sensitive nature, but examples of which have been viewed by the reporting team, commonly lack any evidence to substantiate the validity of the targets. Indeed, Palestinian reviews of the lists have shown many of them to be inaccurate or outdated, requesting, for example, the detention of deceased persons. These lists, then represent the meeting of the thin requirements of the Israeli military and intelligence establishment with the rather more weighty ones of the Palestinian criminal justice system. The P.A. cannot simply arrest and administratively detain persons because Israel wants it done; it has processes it must follow, and these processes coincide, for the most part, with international human rights and legal best practice.

If the State of Palestine was being built by eager, scrupulous lawyers, their influence has since waned. The report was written right after the split between the West Bank and Gaza. In the former territory, the Palestinian Authority has not held a single election since 2006 was written, instead growing more repressive and reliant on Israeli backing to stay in power. In the latter, Hamas has installed a one-party regime of its own.

Meanwhile, the fundamental character of Israeli rule over the West Bank has not changed. Today, 70% of Palestinian families have a relative in prison, and a full 40% of all Palestinian men have passed through those prisons since 1967. Many were tried in Israeli military courts with a 99% conviction rate — or simply never charged with a crime at all. Around 35% of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel today are held under “administrative detention.”

The irony of the Palestinian question is that, although its greatest backers have been Communists and Islamists, the Palestinian grievance is a basically liberal one at heart. Palestinians’ country was taken over by an arbitrary regime that treat their life, liberty, and property as forfeit. Of course, the experience of being oppressed is no guarantee against becoming an oppressor, as Israeli history itself demonstrates.

However, the image of Israel trying to preserve a liberal system against an illiberal Palestinian horde is simply incorrect. Palestinians are not rebelling against individual rights or rational government, but against a system that rules by denying both. And there are Palestinians who really do want an alternative rooted in freedom and liberty.

Back in July 2023, two editors at the neoconservative Tablet Magazine made a remarkable plea to cut U.S. military aid to Israel. They argued that such aid was actually a form of golden handcuffs, “in which Israel ends up sacrificing far more value in return for the nearly $4 billion it annually receives from Washington.” U.S. aid was a way of “bringing the snarling Israeli attack dog to heel,” the authors complained, particularly against Iran.

I responded in Responsible Statecraft with a challenge:

Washington could stay out of a war by explicitly distancing itself from Israel’s actions. The U.S. president could take the podium and declare: “U.S. forces will neither hinder nor help an Israeli attack on Iran, in any way. If American lives are threatened by any country, we will strike back hard. Otherwise, this fight is not our fight. Best wishes to Israel and God bless America.”

President Donald Trump now appears to be doing just that, in almost exactly those words. “I didn’t stop them. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them because I think we can make a deal without the attack,” Trump told Time Magazine in April, speaking about a potential Israeli attack on Iran. Although he has not even pretended to restrain Israel against Palestinians, he has begun to take the U.S. out of any regional conflict, signing a separate peace with the Houthi government in Yemen.

Surely the editorial staff of Tablet Magazine is overjoyed that Trump is finally cutting Israel loose from the tyranny of U.S. patronage. Israel is now free to “offer the highest bidder” its “considerable advantages,” as the editors wrote, and deal with the Palestinian issue without Americans “treating the Jewish state as a moral allegory.” They must be celebrating and egging on the Trump administration’s “America First” turn on the Middle East, right?

Right?

Instead, Tablet seems to be in denial. Last week, it published a rambling conspiracy theory tract asking whether the reports of Trump’s turn on Israel are actually an astroturf campaign by “lifelong Democrats, Koch-network operatives, Iran lobbyists, and Qatar PR representatives.” It insisted that the Washington Post reporting on former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz — the Post reported that he was fired for planning a U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran behind Trump’s back — just “didn’t make sense.”

Liel Leibovitz, the first author of the July 2023 article, hasn’t commented publicly on the latest developments in the Trump camp. His coauthor, Jacob Siegel, obliquely complained about it, tweeting that America Firster talk show host Tucker Carlson “has made Mau Mauing the Jews a full time sport for an influential segment of the American right.” (The Mau Mau uprising was an infamously brutal rebellion against British rule in Kenya.)

Of course, I had predicted exactly this kind of reaction in my Responsible Statecraft article. Should the President actually declare a policy of non-interference in Middle Eastern conflicts:

The pro-Israel movement would probably wave the bloody shirt, declaring the U.S. president a traitor. (Siegel and Leibovitz themselves sneer at the idea of a world where the “interests of traditional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia would be ‘balanced’ with those of their mortal enemy, Iran.”) And cutting Israel loose to fight its own fight would indeed break from the “non-negotiable commitment to Israel’s security” that the past few U.S. presidents have promised.

As I wrote at the time, Leibovitz and Siegel really just wanted to “make a tactical retreat, giving up aid in order to secure other forms of U.S. backing.” U.S. military aid to Israel had become too much of a political lightening rod. Having to argue for a blank check to a foreign army, at a time when the Left was souring on military spending and the Right was souring on foreign aid, put the pro-Israel movement on uncomfortable ground.

Besides, there were bigger prizes on the horizon. The Biden administration was planning for a U.S.-Saudi-Israeli megadeal that would leave Palestinians (or any other independent-minded Arabs) in the dustbin of history, and on a separate track, for a U.S.-Israeli war against Iran under the pretext of stopping nuclear weapons proliferation. None of us knew at the time that Hamas was planning to bring the Palestinian nation screaming back into history with a Mau Mau style uprising of its own.

The ensuing bloodbath shattered the illusions that the pro-Israel movement needed in U.S. politics. Liberals had told themselves that genocidal Israeli rhetoric was all bluster, and Israel would come around to a sustainable (if not exactly just) arrangement with Palestinians in the end. Conservatives had told themselves that Israel really would “police their region of the world” independently, taking the burden off of Americans.

Instead, Israel threw gasoline on the regional fire and asked the United States to play firefighter. American troops were asked to fight for Israel in multiple theaters more directly and blatantly than they had before. On Gaza itself, the Israeli government took an all-or-nothing bet on ethnic cleansing, refusing to plan for a solution except for the physical removal of the Palestinian population; of course, getting any state to actually take Palestinians in would require heavy U.S. lifting.

Once those the policy questions were put on the table, support for Israel rapidly fell to a minority position among Americans. Tablet can try to obfuscate for its readers all it wants, but the general public understands pretty well what the U.S. government is being asked to do, what the stakes are for Americans, and whether they want to be a part of it. Surprisingly, support for Israel has also dropped rapidly among Republicans under the age of 50.

Rather than a stopgap of pro-Israel sentiment among the youth, the young Right is starting to look like the Bad Cop to the Left’s Good Cop. While Democrats feared looking weak on terrorism or antisemitic — an accusation Tablet certainly liked to throw at polite liberals — young Republicans don’t care about being seen as either of those things. Some are actual, unabashed anti-Jewish racists.

After years of shadow boxing, the Tablet crowd is finally getting the enemy they wanted: a U.S. administration that sees Israel as an obstacle to American interests and whose support base increasingly blames it for America’s problems. And such an administration came from a faction of U.S. politics that Tablet considered friendly. No wonder the disbelief.

Some of my followers may have seen my cryptic social media posts about going to the Arctic. No, it wasn’t a joke about fleeing from civilization. A few weeks ago, I made the trek to Iqaluit, pretty much the furthest north city in Canada you can get to without snowmobiles or bush planes. I’ll be writing about it, but I want to share some of what I saw (and the stunning views) with you here first.

Iqaluit is the capital of Nunavut Territory, a semi-autonomous region that most North Americans don’t know much about. It’s almost entirely Inuit, the indigenous Arctic people. (A single member of the group is called Inuk.) Who else would live there, other than nomads who know how to survive extreme cold and live off of sea animals? The autonomy arrangements are somewhat controversial, with some Inuit feeling that they are still exploited by Canada, and some non-Inuit resenting the explicit ethnic preference.

Other threats are pressing in from outside. Climate change is creating a scramble for the soon-to-be ice-free lands of the north. U.S. President Donald Trump’s infamous threats to annex Greenland and Canada are only a particularly ham-handed example. Canada, Russia, and Europe are all signaling their intention of military buildups in the north. China has staked its own claim by calling itself a “near-Arctic state,” a phrase that’s maybe too clever by half.

What do these powers expect to find up there? Vice President J.D. Vance laid it all out during a recent visit to Pituffik Space Base, the American ice fortress in Greenland:

Other nations are taking an extraordinary interest in Arctic passageways, and Arctic naval routes, and indeed in the minerals of the Arctic territories. We need to ensure that America is leading in the Arctic, because we know that if America doesn't, other nations fill the gap.

Pituffik and Iqaluit are both legacies of the same World War II era project, the Crimson Route, which sought to connect America to Britain via an Arctic air route. Although Inuit nomads had been roaming around the area since time immemorial, the first permanent settlement in Iqaluit was a U.S. Army airfield. The military continued to build up Iqaluit as part of the Distant Early Warning Line, a Cold War air defense network designed to stop Soviet bombers from coming over the Arctic.

Because it was a center for air transport and government presence in general, Iqaluit was made the capital when Nunavut won autonomy in the 1990s. An influx in investment from mining companies and the Canadian government has created lots of high-paying jobs, drawing in both Canadian internal migrants and foreign immigrants from some surprisingly warm places, including tropical countries. You’ll hear more about that in my writing.

The city is really visually striking. The architecture is a combination of spartan, boxy buildings — the necessarily of building in a harsh place where materials don’t come cheap — and traditional Inuit architecture. The centerpiece of the skyline is an Anglican cathedral built like a big igloo. (That’s an Inuit word, by the way.) The presence of radar dishes everywhere, along with the otherworldly Inuktitut alphabet, give Iqaluit a little bit of a science fiction vibe.

The harbor is frozen a majority of the year, from December to July, and it was thick enough to drive a truck over when I arrived. The tides still come in and out, leaving wave-shaped structures in the ice. There’s something absolutely mind-boggling about standing on what feels like solid ground on top of what would otherwise be open ocean. And the sea ice extends really far in every direction. It’s like a frozen steppe.

And, of course, the aurora borealis (northern lights) are visible at night, the streamers of solar radiation pulled towards the poles by the Earth’s magnetic field. (Iqaluit is too far south to experience true “midnight sun,” so you get a full day-night cycle throughout the year.) Inuit mythology has a very specific and evocative explanation for the lights: the spirits of the dead playing soccer with a severed walrus head.

Funny enough, there’s no premodern European mythology around the aurora, despite the fact that Scandinavian countries are famous for the lights today. The stories about aurora being Valkyries from Valhalla are a modern invention. Apparently the magnetic field has shifted over the centuries, and the only medieval Europeans who could see the aurora were Vikings in Greenland, who seemed confused and curious about the celestial glow more than anything. It is a baffling, awe-inspiring place for sure.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here! Between recent academic work and my journalism — you can still catch me at Reason Magazine — I’ve had way less time to blog frequently. Spending on serious, structured work is not a bad thing, of course, although I do miss going down niche rabbit holes for a small audience. Hopefully, you’ll see more of that soon.

Not today, though. This post is meant to draw your attention to some useful information on a topic of broad public interest.

As longtime readers will know, my only real experience with U.S. federal authorities was a brief, pointless interrogation by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on the way back from Jordan. However, people I know have had much more unpleasant experiences with CBP. Such encounters are getting more frequent, and more intrusive. There were three high-profile cases over the past month involving CBP searching travelers’ phones: Rasha Alawieh, an unnamed French space scientist, and Amir Makled.

So what should you do if CBP asks to open your device? I wrote a guide at Reason Magazine, with the help of lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I highly recommend reading it. Seriously, I am posting the link here four times so that you open it. Although the lawyers wanted me to emphasize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and so some of the advice may appear vague, I hope that the guide (fifth time!) gives you some underlying principles to inform your decisions.

The bottom line — and a common through-line in all my reporting — is that the U.S. government is highly constrained in what it can do to citizens but almost completely unrestricted in what it can do to foreigners. If you’re an American citizen, you cannot ever be stopped from reentering the country, and therefore have very wide latitude to refuse invasions of your privacy. If you’re a foreign visitor, CBP officers can put the burden on you to prove that they should let you enter.

And, of course, the best cure is prevention: Simply don’t have data on your devices that CBP can hassle you over. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent technical guide on how to practice information hygiene when crossing borders. This advice is useful in dealing with a range of different governments beyond U.S. border authorities, by the way.

As an Iranian-American friend of mine recently wrote: “I have always factory reset my phone before leaving America and once I was going to return, too many authoritarian third world regimes trying to snoop through my stuff (adding America to that list now)”

The apparent battlefield defeat of the Axis of Resistance, the array of Iranian allies in the Arab world, is an event that requires explanation. One explanation gaining currency is that Iran was never really serious about fighting Israel or standing up for Palestine, and that its commitments to the struggle were always paper-thin.

“It wasn't designed, this so-called Axis of Resistance, to liberate Palestine, or to help the Lebanese liberate the bits of south Lebanon that Israel controls,” renowned Palestinian-American academic Rashid Khalidi said in an interview with the Bad Hasbara podcast. “It was intended to protect Iran, and it disappeared, and Iran is more vulnerable, and that may be a good or bad thing. It has nothing to do with the Palestinians. I honestly never believed that there was such a thing as an Axis of Resistance. There was an axis of protection for Iran.”

The famous Lebanese-American academic As’ad Abu Khalil responded with a social media thread arguing that “Iran has been under savage Western sanctions and facing Israeli conspiracies for decades all because of its support for Palestinian and Arab resistance to Israel.” In a strange overlap with Iranian supporters of Israel, he claimed that this Iranian support is a purely ideological money pit and Iran would be economically better off for dropping the Palestinian cause. For Abu Khalil, this kind of support in the face of adversity is a sign of Iranian selflessness.

Whether Iranian leaders were acting selflessly or selfishly is the wrong question. As the saying — paraphrased from Lord Palmerston, falsely attributed to Henry Kissinger — goes, nations have no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. Iranian revolutionaries shared with many Arab societies a strong, even existential interest in confronting the U.S.-led order. And Iran has been the only state actor in the region willing to seriously commit to such a confrontation. What comes next, then?

Although Iran’s enmity with the United States and Israel is tied to domestic politics, the policy is not as ideological as it seems, as Trita Parsi argues in the excellent history, Treacherous Alliance. When the Soviet Union and Iraq’s Arab nationalist regime were major threats in the 1980s, the revolutionary government of Iran was willing to continue under-the-table cooperation with Washington and Tel Aviv. It was a continuation of the policy of the old Iranian monarchy, which had also funded Shi’a Lebanese movements and made a public fuss about Palestine while cooperating with the United States and Israel on security.

After 1991, with communism and secular Arab nationalism defeated, the victorious United States tried to cement a permanent regional order built around Israel and the Arab monarchies. To riff on the old saying about NATO, the goal was to keep the Israelis in, the Iranians out, and the Arabs down. The Bush administration invading Iraq and suggesting that Iran would be next only confirmed the sense of danger. (The term “Axis of Resistance” is a play on former U.S. President George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech.) Fear of being encircled, Parsi argues, led Iran to put up much more serious and militant opposition to the U.S.-led order than before. Because Israel is so central to both U.S. strategy and American domestic politics around the Middle East, challenging that order inevitably meant championing the Palestinian cause.

For all the claims that Iran “exploits” Palestinians’ plight, it has had a less exploitative relationship to Palestine than many other supposed champions of the cause. Arab monarchies pay lip service to Palestinian rights while underwriting the cost of Israeli occupation and buying Israeli military technology tested on Palestinians first. Turkey profits from Palestinian suffering twice over, first by selling Israel the means to keep its military machine going, then by building soft power abroad through loud denunciations of Israeli crimes. Iran, on the other hand, is the only state willing to arm Palestinian factions directly, with few strings attached. In other words, Iran is a source of the independent hard power that every other state is determined to deny Palestinians.

However, there were also serious conflicts of interest between Iran and the Arab downtrodden. In order to keep its supply lines, the Axis of Resistance backed a repressive Syrian regime known not only for mass torture and waging war on its own people, but also for backstabbing everyone it could, including Palestinians, on multiple occasions. By 2019, the Iranian-backed factions in Iraq and Lebanon had also become symbols of a rickety, unpopular sectarian status quo rather than any kind of liberation. Another rift was revealed by the October 7 attacks; while Iran wanted to sit tight and consolidate its counter-order, Palestinians’ situation was continually getting worse, and Hamas believed that only a violent regional shakeup could save the Palestinian nation.

That last divergence allowed Israel to “stagger the resistance by partitioning the experience of war,” as one anonymous Twitter user put it. Hamas had only shared the proposal for the October 7 offensive with its allies a few months beforehand — likely in vague terms that left them unprepared — and Iran seems to have given a noncommittal response. Once the war had started, Iran believed that it could carefully manage any escalation. Even after Israel directly attacked Iranian soil in July this year, Iran held back on its retaliation because of U.S. promises to broker a ceasefire, Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian more or less admitted.

Israel, a small country with no strategic depth, was thus able to cut down the Axis of Resistance into smaller pieces and confront each one individually. It completed its ground invasion of Gaza, then escalated in Lebanon, then smashed Syrian air defenses. Iranian hesitancy left its Arab allies in the worst of all positions, unchaining them enough to provoke Israel but not enough to constrain Israeli action. As I wrote in September, Israel was well suited to fight a war of lightening victories, and Iran was well suited to fight a war of attrition. Israel got what it wanted, and Iran did not.

To argue that Palestinians should be grateful for Iran’s “sacrifices” adds insult to injury, by demanding a participation trophy for failing to stop a genocide. To say that “Israel's victims rightfully wish to hold Iran accountable” is misdirected to the point of self parody, by trying to punish Iran for what its enemies did once Iranian strength was sapped. Iran has lost the battle, and thus its ability to influence events in the Levant. Israel is now the relevant party. What remains to be seen is how Tel Aviv will manage its newfound position of strength, and what could constrain it.

Those two questions are linked. Israel and the United States could very well overplay their hand and create new threats to their own power. Pushing the Palestinian Authority into an self-destructive confrontation in the West Bank, testing the limits of Lebanon’s fragile ceasefire, attempting to aggressively reshape Lebanese internal politics, attacking Syria despite its new government not wanting war, and threatening direct war with Iran do not suggest that they are looking to carefully consolidate their gains. Israeli society does not seem to know when or even how to stop.

Too much is unclear at this juncture: Will Iran build a nuclear bomb? How stable is the Iranian state internally? What will the stance of the new Syrian government, after consolidating power, towards Iran and Israel be? Where do Lebanese politics go from here? Will incoming President Donald Trump force a ceasefire in Gaza? It’s safe to say, at least, that the ascendant Axis of Misery is an unstable order. There will continue to be resistance — not because of some cosmic justice, but because the victors literally do not have a way to deal with the vanquished — whether or not Iran backs it.

“Indeed, Pharaoh elevated himself in the land, and made its people into factions, persecuting a sect, slaughtering its sons and sparing its women. Indeed, he was one of the corrupters. But We willed that We would favor those who were downtrodden in the land, making them leaders and heirs.” - Qur’an 28:4-5

America is feeling that it has won the Arab world. With the seeming retreat of Iranian forces from the Levant, there are few obstacles left to the United States imposing its will on the region.

“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East, through this combination of support for our partners, sanctions, diplomacy, and targeted military force when necessary. We now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region,” President Joe Biden gloated on Sunday. “It's also an opportunity, though far from certain, for a more secure and prosperous Middle East where our friends are safe, and our enemies are contained.”

Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East Institute at London’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies, even compared the fall of the Syrian government to the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. “The defeat of Iran’s revolutionary project will pave the way for widening the scope of normalization between Arab countries and Israel on the basis of shared business, political, and security interests,” she wrote in Foreign Policy. “Just as the Cold War ended with the defeat of communism, decades of confrontation in the Middle East will end with the defeat of the resistance ideology.”

The Axis of Resistance has been replaced with an Axis of Submission — and submission to what, exactly? No need for speculation, because the answer is already in front of us, in places where the United States or its allies already have absolute power. As I wrote for The American Conservative today:

In southern Lebanon, it means to demolish every village within reach, including Christendom’s ancient heritage, and to put the population under the semi-permanent surveillance of killer drones. In Gaza, even on paper, Israel’s “day-after” plan is a horror of horrors: starving Palestinians herded into “humanitarian bubbles” and subjected to communist-style brainwashing. In practice, Israeli policy for conquered territory has been and continues to be gangster rule. Israeli soldiers have been filmed (or filmed themselves) shooting unarmed civilians waving white flags, executing the elderly at home, burning down houses, looting women’s lingerie, gang-raping captives, and more.

The other members of Washington’s Axis of Misery have been similarly destructive to the societies over which they have power. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates countered “Iranian influence” in Yemen through starvation, terror bombing, mercenary assassinations, and proxy militias no less predatory than Iran’s allies. What finally reigned in the Gulf states’ ambitions there was simply hitting the limits of their hard power. In Sudan, where the Gulf powers do not even have the excuse of Iranian meddling, the United Arab Emirates has profited from its investments in parasitic rapist militias. And as icing on the cake, the Saudi-Emirati coalition has shuttled mercenary units containing child soldiers between Yemen and Sudan.

…

Lest we forget, the “Iranian proxy network” in Iraq is itself a result of catastrophic American success. It was the United States that dismantled the Iraqi government, handed over pieces of the state to religious paramilitaries, and unleashed unlimited sectarian war. Iran simply managed to buy off U.S. clients in the country. People whose life’s work was to destroy an independent Iraq now write about promoting “Iraqi sovereignty” for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, simply because they’ve lost control of what they created.

(I highly recommend reading the whole thing.)

One estimate, often waved around by U.S. officials, stated that Iran spent $16 billion from 2012 to 2018 on propping up its Axis of Resistance in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen. The United States dramatically outspent that in one year, throwing $23 billion at its proxy wars from October 2023 and October 2024. Maintaining an Axis of Misery is expensive.

These are not just whataboutisms, a way to drown out the horrors of Sednaya with the horrors of Sde Teiman. If the triumphalists are right — and I think they are counting their chickens before they hatch— then Iran and its allies are no longer relevant to the future of the region. The model to look at now is what the United States does to captive, defeated populations. And for the past thirty years, especially in the Arab world, the model has been unlimited chaos and tyranny, repression and dependence.

That is where the 1989 comparisons break down. The United States offered the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe a path to integration, peace, and economic development after the Soviet collapse. The same does not exist for the majority of the Arab world. The Abraham Accords cement the economic power of a handful of small nations, themselves built on a caste of citizens ruling over noncitizens, while the populations around them either stagnate or starve. And those states have gotten less generous with their economic capital, not more, to their neighbors.

It’s not over, though. The Syrian uprising succeeded to the extent that it defied the wishes of the United States and U.S. partners. As economist Adam Tooze points out, the Yemeni attacks on global shipping are a reminder that there are limits to how much wealth can flow through the Red Sea with millions of hungry mouths on each side. And Israel’s political elite seems pathological incapable of consolidating wins; its first reaction to the Syrian revolution was a loud, inflammatory land grab. The same contradictions that the Axis of Submission has to spend billions of dollars glossing over annually aren’t going away.

“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him.” - Proverbs 26:11-12.

Blowback. It’s a term for the unintended consequences of intelligence operations, made famous by the left-wing history podcast by the same name. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria has bought back the term in popular discourse. After all, isn’t a case of militant Islamists taking over a country with U.S. backing? Might they attack America later?

Hypotheticals aside, Assad’s fall is already a clear case of blowback — just not on the part of the United States. The Assad family was one of the most cynical actors in the modern Middle East, having dealt with and backstabbed almost every major player in the region. And many of those double games came back to bite Assad at the last moment.

Of course, the social rot of the old regime, U.S. economic pressure preventing reconstruction, and broader geopolitical shifts were important structural factors that brought down the Syrian state. But the specific actors that brought down Assad — breakaway Al Qaeda and the Kurdish-led democratic confederalists — were both ones that the Assad dynasty had played footsie with. And the curious lack of support from Assad’s most important patron, Iran, was likely the result of more backstabbing.

The democratic confederalist movement exists today because Assad’s father had helped Kurdish exiles from Turkey settle in Lebanon in the 1980s. In order to gain leverage in Syrian-Turkish border disputes, Syria backed a variety of Turkish and Kurdish dissidents. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) first trained with Palestinian guerrillas, then set up its first headquarters in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.

It’s a history that is well known and often brought up by Syrian nationalist opponents of the Kurdish movement and their American sympathizers, who portray the PKK and its offshoots as stooges of Assad. Of course, these opponents speak less about Assad’s falling out with the PKK. In 1998, as part of a Syrian-Turkish normalization agreement, the Syrian government expelled the PKK, allowing for Turkey to capture its leadership, and stepped up its repression of Syrian Kurds.

That crackdown ended up awakening a sleeping giant. Their peace with the Syrian state broken, local Kurds founded the underground Democratic Union Party to fight Assad’s regime. (The 2004 soccer riots between Arabs and Kurds in Qamishli were a particularly important turning point.) Once civil war broke out, the Democratic Union Party took control of the situation in Kurdish towns and swiftly booted out government forces. The party later became the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which conquered a third of Syria, including some of the country’s most valuable natural resources, and welcomed in a U.S. military presence.

Around the same time that it was cracking down on Kurdish aspirations, the Syrian government opened its territory to Iraqi guerrillas fighting the U.S. occupation, including Al Qaeda in Iraq. Assad likely believed that he was killing two birds with one stone: raising the cost of U.S. regime change efforts while getting restive dissidents killed in a foreign struggle. In the words of writer Rob Ashlar, “AQI took the aid since it viewed the regime as fools whom it would later betray. The regime thought it was being clever. It wasn't.”

Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the current prince of the Syrian Islamist rebels, was a Syrian veteran of Iraq’s struggle. He crossed back into Syria in 2011, linking up with other Islamists released from Syrian prison to create a local branch of Al Qaeda. The new organization, which has undergone several name changes and paint jobs since then, proved to be a far more competent fighting force in the burgeoning civil war than the patchwork of disorganized militias and foreign-funded warlords that made up the rest of the opposition.

To an extent, the rise of Al Qaeda in Syria benefited Assad. Jolani’s organization both consolidated power over the rest of opposition and made it politically radioactive. The emergence of the Islamic State from Al Qaeda’s ranks then sucked a chunk of Syrian Islamists into a losing war against the entire world. But Jolani proved himself to be a clever operator, ruthlessly splitting from Al Qaeda and embarking on a state-building project in the last remnants of Islamist-held territory. Last month, the opportunity finally came for Jolani to unfreeze the conflict and overthrow Assad once and for all.

Throughout the civil war, Assad had relied heavily on the Iranian military and Iranian-backed paramilitaries to hold territory. During the later frozen stage of the conflict, when it looked as if Assad had finally won, he began looking for a way to dump his patron in favor of a richer one. Thus began the Arab normalization process, in which the Arab monarchies began welcoming the Syrian government back into the fold in order to weaken Iranian influence.

The bet seemed to pay off. Assad confiscated the Yemeni embassy in Damascus from the Houthi government, which is close to Iran, the day after the October 2023 war in Gaza broke out. Afterwards, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates opened their own embassies. Iran also began to suspect something darker was happening, that Assad was welcoming Israeli air raids against Iranian forces. Israel was certainly able to gain intelligence on Hezbollah and other pro-Iran militias through their presence in Syria, although it’s not clear whether Assad himself was selling information or his government was simply vulnerable to penetrate.

At the last moment, Assad blatantly tried to sell out Iran to save his own skin. According to Bloomberg News, he reached out the United States via the United Arab Emirates, offering to cut all ties with Iranian-backed paramilitaries in exchange for U.S. help stopping Jolani’s offensive. Iran, of course, could play the same game. The Iranian government reached out to Jolani, who agreed to protect Shi’a Muslim communities in Syria in exchange for Iran withdrawing without a fight.

Assad played everyone, and in the end, he was left with no one. His army melted away, and old Assad loyalists swiftly welcomed the new Jolani regime. The man himself slinked away to Russia, where he will likely have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life, given the short life expectancy of clients who annoy Moscow.

The double dealing with the Kurdish movement, Al Qaeda, and Iran are only a small sample of the Assad family’s Machiavellian schemes. The mass release of Syrian political prisoners brought back memories of all the people and movements Assad had stabbed in the back, from Communists to Palestinian nationalists. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that karma exists in this world, when evil gets away with so much. But a certain level of treacherous behavior will always end badly.

The frozen conflict in northwest Syria is now unfrozen. After years of a front line enforced by Russian-Turkish agreements, several opposition groups have launched a lightening offensive against the government of Bashar al-Assad, and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (the “Levant Liberation Committee”) has successfully stormed Aleppo. The surprise offensive, called Operation Deterring Aggression, was supposedly a response to Assad’s sporadic terror bombing of civilians in rebel-held Idlib. The more obvious proximate cause was Assad’s patron Iran getting bogged down in Lebanon.

There’s a lot of controversy over whether HTS, a former affiliate of Al Qaeda that violently broke away, is “extremist.” (I recommend reading Dareen Khalifa and Aymenn J. Al-Tamimi, who has also been doing some excellent journalism on Operation Deterring Aggression, on the group’s recent history.) The problem with the Syrian National Army, the Turkish-backed rebel coalition in the area, is actually the opposite: They’re not ideological at all. From years of serving as Turkish mercenaries, these rebels have been reduced to behaving as “thugs, bandits, and pirates,” as a U.S. official briefed journalists in 2019.

By the way, one of the most infamous crimes by an HTS faction was the 2016 beheading of Abdullah Tayseer al-Issa, a 12 year old Palestinian boy accused of fighting in Assad’s army. The murder created political shockwaves not only because the victim was a child, but also because the faction involved — the Nour al-Din Zenki Movement — had received CIA support. A video of the beheading apparently drove President Donald Trump to cut CIA support for Syrian rebels. And what happened to the Zenki Movement? It split from HTS due to internal factionalism…and fled behind Turkish lines to dissolve into the SNA, just in time for the Turkish invasion of Kurdish territories.

During the Turkish invasion of Syria in October 2019, an SNA faction seized Kurdish Syrian politician Hevrin Khalaf from her car, tortured her, and executed her on the side of the road. The U.S. State Department refused to condemn the killing due to Trump administration politics.

My good friend Alexander McKeever has done some of the most in-depth research on Turkish-occupied, SNA-governed regions. Here’s a selection of journalism I’ve done on the same topic:

• “The Olive Oil in Your Local Store May Be Funding Syrian Warlords,” The Daily Beast, 23 November 2020.

• “Turkish troops present at Afrin torture sites, U.N. says,” Ahval News, 4 March 2021.

• “US sanctions Syrian rebel group for crimes against Kurds,” Responsible Statecraft, 28 July 2021.

• “US slap sanctions on formerly CIA-backed Syrian rebels,” Responsible Statecraft, 22 August 2023.

Although both HTS and the SNA are “authoritarian,” these are different kinds of authoritarianism. HTS runs a tight ship in Idlib, based on one-party rule and economic developmentalism. The SNA governs through organized crime and controlled chaos. For Syrians, it probably is a bit of a silver lining that HTS has the initiative within the opposition. It’s also probably not a coincidence, because HTS was much better poised to move quickly and independently in response to events on the ground.

The understandable focus on “jihadists” versus “moderate rebels” over the years has been a bit of a red herring. The “moderate rebels” are not some kind of nonexistent unicorn; they are a large part of the problem. To be a “moderate” in Washington’s eyes was to have no ideological vision for Syria, and to be willing to accept American aid with American strings attached. Although not every U.S.-backed rebel was a mercenary, the process definitely selected for mercenaries. Organized violence that doesn’t serve a political project and isn’t guided by values is just called gangsterism.

Take the example of SNA commander Sayf Bulad. A lot of hay has been made about the fact that he rubbed shoulders with both the CIA and the Islamic State. But that doesn’t mean that Bulad is a sleeper agent waiting to turn against his patrons to wage religious warfare. More likely, he’s the sort of person who’s willing to fight (and kill) for any patron who offers a good deal. He thrived in a war filled with fickle foreign patrons.

The two rebel factions that avoided this trap were HTS and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Both are highly ideological — from opposite sides of the spectrum — and no foreign patron wanted to touch them in the beginning of the war. The SDF became Washington’s chosen partner because it was the only force organized enough to fight the Islamic State. Turkey was forced to accept HTS because it had ruthlessly crushed all other rebel factions in Idlib, including its former allies in Al Qaeda. No surprise, then, that these two forces now dominate Aleppo, while the SNA tries to nibble its way in from the outside. What happens next remains to be seen.

Israel and Lebanon agreed to a U.S.-French ceasefire proposal yesterday. What happens next remains to be seen, but it seems fair to say that the war ended in a frustrating military stalemate for both the Israeli army and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which is why both had to pull back. A separate peace between Israel and Lebanon is also bad news for Palestinians in Gaza, who have even fewer international protections than before.

Something curious happened, though. The morning after the ceasefire, France walked back its position on the International Criminal Court war crimes warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. After stating that it “will always apply international law” several days ago, the French foreign ministry suddenly announced that “immunities apply to Prime Minister Netanyahu and other ministers in question.”

The straightforward interpretation is that international law is fake, because powerful countries will shield their allies (and particularly their golden calf Israel) from any kind of institutional accountability. But on closer examination, France appears to have traded away enforcing The Hague’s warrants in exchange for important concessions from Israel. Rather than being a useless piece of paper, the international court order was something with real material value — which is why it could be exchanged.

Although France is unfriendly to Hezbollah, its interests in Lebanon are directly opposed to the Israeli and U.S. plans for the country. All Israeli political factions wanted to abolish Lebanese sovereignty, from the nationalist settlers calling for full annexation to the opposition leader Benny Gantz, who wanted Israel to have the same security control over southern Lebanon that it does over the Palestinian territories. At a minimum, Israel demanded the right to keep firing even under a “ceasefire.”

France, on the other hand, feels protective over Lebanon as a crown jewel of its former empire. French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot publicly stated that the Israeli demands were “not compatible with the sovereignty of a strong country.” The French government told Lebanon in private not to accept a ceasefire under these conditions, to the personal annoyance of U.S. secretary of state Tony Blinken. Israel in turn demanded that France be cut out of any international peacekeeping force.

In the end, Israel and the United States relented. Rather than being able to unilaterally attack Lebanon for alleged violations of the ceasefire, Israel will have to lodge complaints with a U.S.-French monitoring committee, which will set a deadline for the Lebanese state and United Nations peacekeepers to respond. Again, although it remains to be seen how this deal plays out, the agreement as written gives international backing to the principle of Lebanese sovereignty over Lebanese territory.

According to Israeli state media, Israel and the United States demanded that France “declare that Netanyahu will not be arrested” as a condition of being part of the peacekeeping process. Of course, that probably wasn’t the only factor in accepting French demands; there were limits to what Israel and the United States could impose on Lebanon without putting American boots on the ground. But at the very least, Washington and Tel Aviv saw an international legal decision as a bargaining chip that could be exchanged for concessions in the military situation.

And that had a real effect on Lebanese people. The Israeli military ordered civilians not to come back until the withdrawal was complete, but it could only do so much to stop them under the ceasefire terms, leaving Israeli journalists to stew in their rage that Lebanese civilians dared approach areas cleansed by Israeli troops. In an indirect way, The Hague’s order mattered.

So why did The Hague’s order matter? Why was it something that France could hold over Israel’s head? That question could take up an entire series of books. Lawyers, political scientists, historians, anthropologists, and other disciplines will all have different answers. And the negotiations that led to yesterday’s agreement will provide plenty of material to work with.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton created a lot of controversy last week while campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris. “Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians. They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable. Well, I got news for them. They [Israelis] were there first, before their [Muslims’] faith existed,” he said. Unprompted, Clinton also referred to the West Bank by the Israeli nationalist term “Judea and Samaria.” Clinton follows in a tradition of those who believe that Palestinian nationalism is a cheap imitation of Zionism at best, or an attempt to spite Jews and trick them out of their ancestral homeland at worst.

Thinkers who are far more critical of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians also seem to have been stuck in a framework where Palestinian nationalism only exists as a reaction to Zionism, and Palestine would not have existed if not for Israel. I choose the following examples not because I think these writers are fanatics like Clinton, but because I think they’re not; if even thoughtful, open-minded liberals have this hangup around Palestinian identity, then it must be deeply rooted in English-speaking culture.

The American novelist Michael Chabon, for example, wrote an alternative history called The Yiddish Policeman’s Union in 2007 about a world in which the State of Israel was strangled in the cradle and the Jewish homeland was instead created in Sitka, Alaska. While the novel is a delightful and thought-provoking read about the Jewish condition, its references to the Middle East struck me as a shallow stereotype. (To be fair, Chabon’s views have evolved, and his wife Ayelet Waldman recently wrote a fascinating critique of liberal Zionism based on her own family’s history with it.) This is how Chabon imagined Palestine without Zionism when he wrote his novel:

The Holy Land has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka. It is on the far side of the planet, a wretched place ruled by men united only in their resolve to keep out all but a worn fistful of small-change Jews. For half a century, Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists and nationalists and monarchists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists, traditionalists and the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel [‘the Land of Israel’] and worried it down to bone and gristle. Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles. Observant Jews around the world have not abandoned their hope to dwell one day in the land of Zion. But Jews have been tossed out of the joint three times now—in 586 BCE, in 70 CE and with savage finality in 1948.

More recently, in 2019, the journalist Ben Judah (now an adviser to the British government) used the biography of Israeli founding father David Ben Gurion and his American friend Sam Fox to reflect on the different paths that Eastern European Jews took at the dawn of the 20th century, the ways in which both history at large and specific people’s lives are so contingent. He imagines different turning points at which Zionism could have failed, whether it’s because European Jews aren’t forced to leave Europe or because the nascent State of Israel loses foreign support. As for the fate of Jews in the Holy Land itself:

The population of this unworldly and absurd experiment, their kibbutzim abandoned, crammed behind American GIs and barbed-wire into Camp Tel Aviv, would have had to emigrate or be evacuated, as Palestine was partitioned—not between Israel and the Hashemites, but between Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.

But why would Palestine, left to its own devices, have to be partitioned at all? If the creation of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel depends so much on the twists and turns of history, why are Palestinians doomed to lose their country no matter what? Are Syria, Egypt, and Jordan — countries whose borders are no less a product of European colonialism — more “real” than Palestine? Why wouldn’t the British Mandate of Palestine become the Palestinian Republic, with its own national identity and sovereign institutions?

A quick look at every other nation in the area suggests that the experience of British colonialism, and the borders drawn by the British Mandate, would have made Palestine a “real” country. The French Mandate of Syria and the Lebanon became the Syrian Republic and the Lebanese Republic. The British Mandate of Iraq became the Kingdom of Iraq. The same goes for Egypt and Jordan, two nations that Israeli hardliners often insist are more “real” than Palestine. The colonial administrative units formed the basis of a new national identity everywhere in the Arab world.

Going deeper than that, Professor Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity makes the cast that Palestinian nationalism “has been shaped by much more than the century-old contest with Zionism,” and started to form before Europeans partitioned the region. Ottoman-era elites in Jerusalem, he argues, saw their country (which they did call Palestine) as distinct within both the Ottoman Empire and the Arab world. After all, the Holy Land is The Holy Land. Not only its Jews but also its Christians and Muslims understood that their prophets were born here and not in some other land. Zionists were just one of the many foreign groups who had an intense interest in the land, and helped shape it at the dawn of modernity.

There’s an obvious and understandable discomfort, visible in Chabon and Ben Judah’s fantasies, with the idea that Jews could lose a war of independence and the other people living there would go on living happy lives in a normal country. Indeed, by mid-1948, the civil war in Palestine had gotten to a point where there probably was no happy ending in sight. But a U.S. intervention would not necessarily be like the evacuation of “Camp Tel Aviv” that Judah pictured. In 1958, the U.S. Marines landed in Beirut to impose an uneasy settlement on clashing Lebanese political factions. It took another two decades for civil war to erupt, by which time Lebanon was an established nation-state; the fight since then has been over what kind of nation-state it would be.

And that is the absolute worst-case scenario. Had the Zionist movement petered out early, had Jewish migration to Palestine been well-integrated like the Armenian influx, then there is no reason to assume that different sects would automatically come to blows over Palestine after independence. Even Lebanon’s civil war, which was finally tipped over the edge by a Palestinian refugee influx, is impossible to separate from circumstances under which Israel was created. Without the sudden and violent reshuffling of the Levant’s ethnic landscape in 1948, why wouldn’t Palestine and Lebanon look more like Egypt and Jordan, dealing with the “normal” issues of middle-income postcolonial nations?

In that world, political conflict between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Palestinians might look a lot like modern, peacetime Lebanese identity politics. Jewish Palestinians might even argue that they’re more Palestinian than their Christian and Muslim neighbors. In Lebanon, (predominantly Muslim) Arabists identify with Lebanon’s Arab heritage, opposed by (predominantly Christian) Phoenicianists who use the ancient city-states of Phoenicia to identify Lebanon as the cradle of Western civilization and Arabness as a foreign imposition.

There’s plenty of raw historical material to create different Palestinian nationalisms. Partisans of different sects would play up Palestinian’s ancient Hebrew or Greco-Roman or Arabic heritage. Genetic studies would be trotted out to prove that all the different sects in Palestine descend from the same ancient Canaanite stock. (“Phoenicia” and “Canaan” are two different names for the same ancient ethnicity.) It’s not hard to imagine a local version of Nicholas Nassim Taleb arguing that “Palestinian Arabic” is really a distinct, Hebrew-influenced language in its own right.

(By the way, you really should read Taleb’s wide-ranging essay on the Levant, which covers why the false East-West distinction is false, how “Indo-European vs. Semitic is merely linguistic, not racial,” and what “being on the radar of the United States State Department” does to a society.)

Look at some of the early Zionist messaging, from when “Palestine” was the matter-of-fact name of the place, and let your imagination run wild. Zionists in the (then Ottoman, now Greek) city of Thessaloniki used to sing “viva viva Palestina.” The Jerusalem Post was called The Palestine Post. The famous “Visit Palestine” poster used the beauty of the Aqsa Mosque to attract Jewish immigrants. (Modern-day Israeli nationalists, including Israeli government itself, tend to wish away the Aqsa Mosque instead.) The strange twist of history is not that Palestinian nationalism exists, but that Jews weren’t a part of it.

Of course, we don’t live in the world of counterfactuals. Zionism happened. Jewish Israelis, who have state power behind them, don’t identify as Palestinian. Almost everyone else living under Israeli rule does. Palestinian nationalism can only exist today in response to that reality. Any political solution will have to reckon with the existence of two, mutually opposed nations. So what’s the point of theorizing about what could have been?

The problem is that American political culture cannot see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in normal terms, a postcolonial ethnic war no more or less vicious than all the others. Palestinian nationalism only exists to American as the last modern nationalism opposed to Jews, the latest iteration of the antisemitic mind virus, the final boss villain in the story of Judeo-Christian reconciliation, the obstacle to overcoming the Holocaust. By clinging onto their lost homeland, like every other exiled nation in history, Palestinians seem to be demonstrating sinister intent.

Palestinians often complain that American culture dehumanizes them. That’s not just a moral statement. The view of Palestinians as a fake nation removes them from the world of normal human motivations and places them in a paranoid, conspiratorial realm. Their predictable, human reactions to events makes them seem even more inhuman. Nothing they want is comprehensible except in terms of some irrational, esoteric hatred. Although Clinton claimed that “you can’t kill your way out of this,” it’s hard to see what else there is to do in his worldview. To believe that Palestinian nationalism exists only out of spite is an abdication of rationality, a surrender to the world of “blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles.”

“Surely oppression makes the wise foolish, and a bribe corrupts the heart.” - Ecclesiastes 7:7

Today is an awkward day to be part of the pro-intervention faction of Iran’s exiled opposition.

Before the Women Life Freedom uprising of 2022 and the explosion of regional war in late 2023, it had been a consensus among all the opposition that no one would dare call for a war with Iran. Even the more hawkish factions insisted that they were just asking for nonviolent regime change, and took offense at the claim that they were seeking war. Over the past year or so, however, some factions of the opposition began to tease their openness to a regime change war while cozying up to Iran’s archenemy Israel.

The vision, which some were more explicit about than others, was a targeted military campaign against Iran’s hated Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and clergy. Iran’s regular army — a conscript force that is widely seen as a politically neutral institution — would be spared, not to mention Iran’s civilian infrastructure. Some imagined the regular army turning its guns against the IRGC in the name of the Iranian people.

Last night, that vision came crashing down on itself dramatically. Israel launched air raids on Iranian missile production facilities, the first foreign attack on Tehran since the Iraqi invasion of the 1980s. In order to do that, Israeli forces had to break through Iranian air defenses, which involved killing Iranian regular army troops. Citizens woke up in the middle of the night to terrifying explosions, and woke up again the next morning to news of at least four confirmed deaths, none of them from the IRGC and all of them from the regular army.

The interventionists seem to be dumbstruck. Hours after claiming on live TV that “targeting an IRGC base in Iran is not an attack on the soil of Iran, not an attack on people of Iran,” United Against Nuclear Iran research director Kasra Aarabi had to sheepishly insist that the killing of regular army troops still doesn’t count, because the specific people killed were not conscripts. Voice of America journalist Masih Alinejad, who had once insisted that Iranians would “welcome” an Israeli attack, was left complaining that the Iranian government didn’t provide air raid sirens for the terrified masses. Former crown prince Reza Pahlavi has been completely silent as of publication time.

This paralysis is a reminder of some conventional wisdom that Washington chose to forget. For a long time, liberal doves insisted that overt foreign support would hurt the Iranian opposition and cause Iranians to rally against foreign pressure. The events of 2019 through 2022 seemed to disprove that logic, and even I was convinced that doves had overestimated the strength of Iranian nationalism. But the aftermath of the Israeli attack highlights how foreign intervention does put the opposition in a compromising position.

The belief that a hands-off approach would best empower Iranian liberals was most popular in the early 2000s. The ascendant class of “Iran experts” in Washington at the time had experience with the Reformist movement, and believed that a nationalist loyal opposition was the future of Iran. American liberals, reeling from the failure of the Iraq War and the subsequent false start of the Arab Spring, were willing to hear what they had to say. President Barack Obama took that theory to heart. He maintain a careful distance from the Green Movement of 2009, and later pursued diplomacy with Iran meant to moderate the country by opening it up.

Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, seemed to prove the theory wrong. The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign didn’t quiet down opposition in Iran. On the contrary, at the peak of the pressure campaign, the Islamic Republic faced the most violent and threatening unrest since the 1979 revolution. An increasingly large part of the opposition, including Reformist queen bee Faezeh Hashemi, was willing to openly defend U.S. sanctions. The Biden administration did not return to Obama’s opening, and an even more serious uprising broke out in 2022. In response, Obama himself conceded that not taking a harder line in 2009 was among his greatest mistakes.

But there was a gap in expectations between the Iranian opposition and the American elite. More and more Iranians were willing to defend U.S. sanctions, which they felt only indirectly, or surgical interventions like Israeli assassinations of Iranian officials. Many fantasized that these actions would make a revolution easier on the Iranian people. Hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv, on the other hand, were quietly planning for regional ultraviolence, and wanted to use Iranian discontent as a weapon in the coming showdown.

Foundation for Defense of Democracies head Mark Dubowitz said in an online panel in 2020 that the Iranian government “will turn their guns on their own people.” That same year, Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) head and former Bush administration official Michael Makovsky advocated for forcing a “regime collapse” in Iran that he explicitly compared to Libya and Yugoslavia’s civil wars. At a later JINSA event, former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror advocated for policies that he admitted might lead to “a very bad war from the point of view of civilians in Lebanon, and Israel, and probably in Iran as well.”

Of course, these dark prophecies were not broadcast to Iranians, who instead were fed a steady stream of conspiracy theories and magical thinking by foreign-funded media. Some figures in the interventionist camp even tried to cast any warnings about war as an Islamist talking point. “[I] don't know of anyone credibly pushing war with [I]ran…it's a regular scare tactic used to stop people from pushing for a change in regime, which is what is actually needed,” wrote Macdonald-Laurier Institute senior fellow Kaveh Shahrooz in September 2023. Being tied to U.S. and Israeli war planning did not hurt Iranian opposition figures — so long as most Iranians were not too aware of these ties.

Yet there were warning signs that foreign patronage could become a liability, as the breakdown of the Georgetown coalition in early 2023 showed. During a power struggle within the umbrella opposition in exile, Pahlavi tried to flaunt his powerful foreign connections by making a pseudo-state visit to Israel as crown prince. Instead of a coronation, the trip ended up being a petty, humiliating slight against Pahlavi, who was also being accused by his opponents of literal cuckoldry at the time. The crown prince was chaperoned around by the Israeli intelligence minister (certainly an interesting message to send!) and had a sad-looking backroom meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At a banquet, the Israeli flag flew directly above the Iranian monarchist flag.

Meanwhile, Pahlavists were trying to muscle out another rival by lobbing accusations of antisemitism at Alinejad, who had once written eloquently linking the Palestinian and Iranian struggles for freedom. Alinejad, who risked losing her U.S. government patronage if she were branded an anti-Israel antisemite, defended herself with a sycophantic pro-Israel statement. Other members of the Georgetown coalition simply quit. Although they cited Pahlavi’s overbearing behavior rather than his pro-Israel politics, the open competition to impress foreign patrons was clearly embarrassing for a movement that branded itself as an Iranian nationalist reaction to rootless Islamist imperialism.

Then there was the question of what happens once the opposition had outlived its usefulness to its patrons. Saudi Arabia normalized relations with Iran in March 2023, and the two countries reportedly agreed to cut loose support for each other’s internal opposition movements. Although the details of Saudi support for the Iranian opposition have never been clear, the immediate aftermath of the Saudi-Iranian deal demonstrated that Saudi resources were quite important.

By mid 2023, money and political influence were clearly drying up in some quarters of the opposition. Pahlavi’s visit to Israel also occurred soon after the Saudi-Iranian deal. Of course, none of this is proof that any particular figure was on the Saudi payroll. Rather, it shows that Saudi Arabia’s cutoff had shrunken the overall pool of resources available to the opposition, and forced previously secure factions to compete for funding. Opposition institutions were clearly bloated beyond what the Iranian diaspora could support by itself.

As the big showdown between Washington and Tehran approached, the limits that foreign patronage imposed on the opposition really became apparent. An obvious criticism of the Islamic Republic is that it is unable to defend Iranians from foreign hostility. But many oppositionists had boxed themselves into taking a much more toxic position; they had to argue that those enemies, their patrons, meant no harm to the Iranian people, and that foreign pressure is actually a good thing.

Probably the most egregious case came after the January 2024 bombing in Kerman by the Islamic State. While the perpetrators were still unclear — and widely speculated to be Israeli — several opposition figures jumped to claim that the victims had it coming.

Today, probably no one in the opposition is more stuck than Pahlavi. His entire appeal is based on a return to the old national institutions of Iran, including the regular army, in which he served as a fighter pilot. (A much younger Pahlavi actually volunteered to return to Iran and fight alongside the Islamic Republic against the Iraqi invasion.) Pahlavi’s theory of change is built on having loyal soldiers from that army rise up for the good of Iran. Yet his foreign patron is killing those very soldiers.

If he embraces the Israeli attacks, Pahlavi will be betraying not only his cause, but also his actual former comrades in arms. If he denounces it, he will not only be cutting off a source of material patronage, but also admitting that he had made a grave mistake by cozying up to an enemy of Iran. The strongest case for Pahlavi was that his name recognition allowed him to be a decisive leader in a divided country. Now, sitting in the proverbial cuck chair, the former crown prince has nothing to say about a pivotal moment for his nation.

Even if doves didn’t exactly predict the mechanism and timescale, they were right that foreign interference would compromise the Iranian opposition. On one hand, the influx of outside resources selected for an opposition that could tell foreign patrons what they wanted to hear, rather than an opposition that could build a real support base among Iranians.

On the other hand, keeping foreign support often meant avoiding straightforward appeals to Iranian patriotism. The need to make Iranians believe that supporting foreign pressure is actually the nationalist thing to do, a belief that is absurd on the face of it, can explain at least part of the conspiracy theory culture among the opposition. For some foreign patrons, the latter tension may have been a good thing. Domestic politics did successfully polarize some Iranians into taking a pro-Washington and pro-Israel (or more specifically, an anti-anti-Israel) stance.

But that stance was sustainable only as long as Iran’s conflict with Israel and the United States was an abstract, distant issue, a faraway money sink for the Islamic Republic. Just as Americans who oppose military aid to Ukraine or downplay Russian influence operations would not be happy to see Russian missiles slamming into their hometown, Iranians willing to entertain U.S. State Department talking points about sanctions or Hamas are not enjoying watching from the rooftops as Iranian conscripts are bombed.

“Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life sacrificed for Iran,” goes the protest chant against the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy. Aarabi wrote about the first part as a vindication of maximum pressure. He does not seem to have thought too hard about what the second means for his politics.

Philippe Lemoine recently published an essay, “The Israel Lobby as a Collective Action Problem,” that tackles the domestic politics of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. His argument is that the “US officials face a well-funded and well-organized lobby willing and able to impose a significant cost on them should they withhold support from Israel and on the other hand they don’t face any pressure to do that” because the costs are “distributed relatively equally over the population and spread over many years while being relatively limited in the short term.”

The same could be said about a lot of U.S. foreign policy issues, where the hawks are well-organized and able to inflict acute political pressure, while the general population is passively dovish but doesn’t care too much because they don’t bear direct costs. (I’ve written about this very dynamic before.) The irony is that these pressures encourage American leaders to sleepwalk into wars that do cost a lot, or as Lemoine writes, “the incentives that US officials face are misaligned with the interests of the US and the only thing that could align them is precisely what their alignment would have been useful to prevent in the first place.”

However, I think that Lemoine misunderstands the Biden administration’s own view of U.S. interests, and the degree to which it’s not just motivated by domestic political pressure. He writes that the idea of President Joe Biden supporting Israel’s current “rampage” is just not:

plausible though, because Israel’s policy has few if any benefits for Washington, whereas it exposes the US a high risk of being dragged into a very costly regional war and will cause massive reputational damage to the US even if that doesn’t happen, not to mention that it has already cost the US billions of dollars in direct and indirect assistance to Israel. Protests by US officials are also consistent with standard US policy and doctrine about Israel, so to assume that in fact they fully back Israel’s rampage in Gaza and Lebanon, one would have to assume that a complete doctrinal reversal has taken place in Washington after October and that’s just not plausible.

Lemoine and I would agree on this view of U.S. interests, but that doesn’t mean the current U.S. leadership does. There is quite strong evidence that the Biden administration — and, of course, the American elite writ large — see Israel crushing its enemies as an end in itself rather than a means to some greater end. They are willing to pay steep costs to accomplish this goal in the same way they would be willing to pay steep costs to defend the territorial integrity of the United States, because they believe that this situation is what having resources is for.

President Joe Biden himself identifies with Israel on a personal, emotional level, and he has repeatedly said so. He thinks that prosecuting this war is a sort of higher moral duty for Americans, and Biden is not the only one to feel that way. (I just got out of a speech in which Trump spokesman turned Biden surrogate Anthony Scaramucci said basically that; he kept bringing World War II, the Holocaust, and his own personal tours of Israel into it.) Meanwhile, figures like White House adviser Brett McGurk have long been attracted to ambitious schemes for reshaping the Middle East as a path to personal glory.

The idea that Washington has undergone more than one “complete doctrinal reversal” over the past few months is not so far fetched. The October 7 attacks had a deep emotional impact on the Biden administration. And in the beginning of the war, U.S. officials were mostly focused on protecting Israel from itself, preventing it from biting off more than it can chew. As they grew more and more confident that Israel’s enemies were on the back foot, they came to embrace more ambitious war goals.

These shifts also point to Lemoine overestimating how much of a coherent, unitary actor “Washington” is. By Politico’s account, which I have no reason to disbelieve, McGurk and U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein quietly, privately encouraged Israel to pursue war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, against the opposition of those in “the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.”

In other words, U.S. policy emerged from a factional competition in the administration, unrelated to the kind of domestic politics where the Israel Lobby plays a role. Within a Democratic administration, there were hawks more confident that Israel could get away with aggressive military action and doves who were more wary. None of them disagreed fundamentally that Israel’s wars are America’s wars and Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies, because once Israel inflicted started inflicting damage on Hezbollah without taking damage in return, doves lined up behind the hawkish strategy. Or in Politico’s words:

The internal administration division seems to have dissipated somewhat in recent days, with top U.S. officials convening Monday at the White House with President Joe Biden to discuss the situation on the ground. Most agreed that the conflict, while fragile, could offer an opportunity to reduce Iran’s influence in Lebanon and the region.

Of course, the top levels of the administration also hedged its bets. (Or as Politico described it, “what looks like a rift is just the United States pursuing multiple routes at once.”) Keeping rhetoric about diplomacy and de-escalation alive allows Biden to avoid taking the blame for the war’s negative consequences. Indeed, now that Israel is running into serious friction from Hezbollah and Iran, the Biden administration is once again making a show of demanding Israeli restraint.

No one said that they were good at long-term planning or matching actions to consequences. Never underestimate the degree to which “strap-hangers,” the guys in suits who get shuttled around in military helicopters, like to bask in their own importance. The Biden administration seems particularly prone to the illness of “being too clever by half.”

What Lemoine calls “standard US policy and doctrine about Israel” reflects a few things. On one hand, the two-state solution is baked in from the 1990s — a bygone era when Washington was still focused on Israel but not as fanatically hawkish, and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking was a solid career path for ambitious young strap-hangers — even if political leaders don’t really believe in it anymore. On the other hand, the mid-level professionals in the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community do have a more pragmatic view of U.S. interests than the political echelon. They push back through the bureaucracy to the extent that they can.

Finally, the political leaders find the rhetoric about deescalation and human rights a useful shield. As Lemoine acknowledges, they “have political incentives to pay lip service to the importance of achieving a ceasefire even if they actually were on board with Israel’s policy.” This lip service allows Washington to play “good cop” in a game of “good cop, bad cop.” Both domestically and internationally, the Biden administration can present itself as a reasonable actor that really wants to help Palestinians, if only they’ll take this offer, because our buddy Israel is not feeling so forgiving right now…

Lemoine is right to point out that “publicly and clearly stat[ing] their opposition to a particular step just before Israel takes it on such a regular basis” has left the Biden administration “humiliated” and “makes their problem with pro-Palestine Democrats even worse.” Again, no one said that Biden is particularly good at it. But he also probably sees Israel the same way indulgent parents see a bratty teenager, rather than an opponent that he can even be humiliated by.

None of this is to deny that the Israel Lobby is a real and significant actor. I have written about how well-funded pro-Israel organizations help reproduce elite foreign policy ideology and police the boundaries of the debate. And on the margins, the incentive structure that Lemoine describes does shape the political calculus around this issue. However, the idea that the Biden administration is unwillingly being dragged into Israeli wars is wrong. Whether it’s because of an emotional attachment or delusions of grandeur, a lot of people near the top want this.

Last year, seemingly millions of Americans — including people I knew personally — were convinced that Hamas had declared October 13 the “Global Day of Jihad” and was poised to unleash terror on American cities. Schools were closed, people stayed home from work, and police stepped up patrols.

Of course, no such thing happened. There never was a “Global Day of Jihad” or a wave of attacks on American soil. The reaction to the rumors did incite violence, when a talk radio fan hopped up on paranoid fantasies stabbed his six-year-old Palestinian neighbor, Wadea al-Fayoume, to death the next day.

I had assumed that, once October 13 had passed without incident, Americans would realize they had been suckered. Instead, it was quickly forgotten. None of the people who had promoted the “Global Day of Jihad” suffered a hit to their credibility. They simply moved on to the next moral panic.

It was exactly the kind of story that needed a follow up. My editors at Reason Magazine were quite supportive of the idea. Last week, they published my feature, the fruit of months of reporting and collecting documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents, which include an exclusive FBI memo, are posted to my DocumentCloud account.

To be honest, I was expecting to write about government agencies using terrorism fears to justify their budget, as has happened in the past. Instead, when the “Day of Jihad” panic hit, law enforcement turned out to be the more coolheaded actor—with a few exceptions. While tabloid journalists and firebrand politicians screamed from the rooftop that the terrorists were coming, the FBI and various police departments tried to convince the public that they had everything under control.

However, law enforcement’s attempts to calm the community became part of the cycle. Political pressure and media coverage forced police agencies to address the alleged threat; those police statements about vigilance then became evidence to journalists and politicians that the “Day of Jihad” was a real phenomenon to worry about.

A wave of violent Hamas attacks on October 13 was quite a specific prediction that did not come true. Like the UFO cultists in When Prophecy Fails, the true believers in counterterrorism simply moved the goalposts. The New York Post covered pro-Palestinian protests as if those were the “Day of Jihad” all along. Congress continued to grill the FBI about continued threats to the homeland, and the FBI agreed that something bad could still happen.

Of course, the terrorism panic was also hard to separate from the effort to manufacture consent for war. The “Day of Jihad” panic was useful in getting Americans to feel that Israel’s war is their war, even though Hamas does not have any history of targeting America. Some hawks actually seemed to wish that America would be attacked, in order to make Israel’s case.

So what are you waiting for? Go on, read the article!

“The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” - Israeli prime minister Abba Eban, 1973

“I can tell you very unequivocally, all of us are willing to guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state…Can you ask Israeli officials what is their end-game — other than just wars and wars and wars?” - Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi, 2024

In the ramp up to the current Israeli war on Lebanon, an Israeli cabinet member argued that Lebanon “does not meet the definition of a country” and is therefore fair game for ethnic cleansing. "A renewed buffer zone, free of enemy population is the order of the hour and it is the right and most just thing to do both from a security point of view, both from a political and moral point of view," diaspora minister Amichai Chikli stated.

Since then, Israel has launched a massive air campaign, which is ostensibly against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah but is systemically dismantling society across southern Lebanon. According to Lebanese officials, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had agreed to a ceasefire before Israel kicked off its air campaign by assassinating him. Israeli forces have fired on the Lebanese government and bombed hospitals out of commission. Around 1.2 million people have been forced to flee. The Israeli government has more or less given up on trying to achieve a hostage deal in Gaza as it buckles down for an all-out war with Iran.

The current Israeli coalition, including Chikli, belongs to the “neo-Revisionist” school of thought. The manifesto of Revisionist Zionism is a famous essay, written by Zeev Jabotinsky in 1923, which called on Jews to build a state “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” Yet Jabotinsky did not want to live behind the wall forever, and believed that the endpoint should be Jewish-Arab coexistence. His doctrine, then, is a victim of its own success; the power of the Iron Wall has convinced its owners that they do not ever need to stop.

Anti-Zionists often use Jabotinsky’s essay to demonstrate that Zionism has been a colonial project from the beginning. “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised,” he wrote, comparing Palestinians to Native Americans and the Zionist movement to past European empires.

Indeed, Jabotinsky argued that “vegetarian” liberal Zionists were the real racists, because of their “childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people,” that Palestinians are “a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.” Instead, he argued, it would be “utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”

Jabotinsky acknowledged that Palestinians would want to avoid a scenario in which “the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews” because “a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out.” And since the Zionist movement was operating under the protection of the British Empire, he argued, the only real difference between hawks and doves was about whether “the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers” or British ones.

However hawkish he was in his time, Jabotinsky would be considered a far-left dove in modern Israeli politics. Unlike his present-day followers, Jabotinsky considered ethnic cleansing “utterly impossible,” and acknowledged that “there will always be two nations in Palestine.” Once “there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall,” he believed:

the [Palestinian] leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizen, or Arab national integrity.

And when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbours.

History did not quite play out as he foresaw. Jabotinsky died in 1940, and the organization he founded, the Irgun, went on to commit some of the worst atrocities of the 1948 war, which featured heavy ethnic cleansing. Since then, the successful creation of an iron wall has not led to “mutual concessions.” In fact, the more secure Israel has become in its power, the more extreme the Revisionists themselves have grown. Even before October 7, the spiritual descendants of Jabotinsky were proposing a genocidal solution to the Palestinian question and hinting at the conquest of neighboring states.

Although Jabotinsky was right that Arab weakness would lead to compromise, he could not see that the converse was true: Israeli strength would lead to intransigence. Arab concessions and U.S. protection gave Israelis the confidence that they could either manage Palestinian resistance forever, or do away with Palestinians (and perhaps even other nations) entirely. The “goodwill of the Jews,” to borrow Jabotinsky’s phrase, was not enough to overcome that confidence.

In place of Jabotinsky’s cold realism, the neo-Revisionists adopted a dark, fatalistic view of the world. Palestinians are not rational actors whose behavior could be changed through material pressure, the view goes, but heirs to an irrational antisemitic mind virus that has always and will always exist. Many Israelis replaced belief in their own agency with a mentality that Jewish-American cartoonist Eli Valley called “I am pariah! I am messiah!”

The political scientist Ian Lustick pointed out in 2008 that the Israeli government’s complaints that Palestinians do not recognize its “right to exist” as a Jewish state is actually an:

abandonment of the Iron Wall strategy and the political pedagogy it represented. Indeed this new demand is evidence of a fundamental withdrawal of many Israeli leaders, and of much of Israel as a whole, from the realities of the Middle East and from a commitment to engage and change those realities, whether through force or diplomacy.

Jabotinsky’s whole argument, after all, was that Palestinians should not and could not be expected to like the creation of a Jewish state on their land. The point of the Iron Wall was to force them to deal with it as an unchangeable reality. Coming to respect Israel’s “right to live in peace and security,” as the Palestine Liberation Organization explicitly promised to do in 1993, was supposed to matter more than whether Arabs loved Zionism in their hearts.

Of course, hubris is not the only possible reason why the Iron Wall mentality faded away. It’s easy to see why a generation that lived through the Holocaust could believe that their enemies were irrational and wanted nothing less than extermination. The slow breakdown of Oslo peace process and the brutality of the Second Intifada also convinced many Israelis that Palestinians were too warlike to appreciate Israeli concessions.

But Lustick does not place the turn away from the Iron Wall after the Holocaust or the Second Intifada. Instead, he traces a long and complex process from the 1960s to the 2000s. (Israeli journalist Amos Oz also documented this process well in the 1980s.) Israeli society abandoned its “efforts to ‘teach’ Arabs anything” and its concept of warfare as a “persuasive instrument in service of political or diplomatic aims,” replacing it with never-ending but “emotionally satisfying” campaigns of “punishment, destruction and psychological release,” Lustick writes. A popular Israeli military slogan from the 1980s was zbeng ve gomarnu, something like “hit it and quit it” in English.

U.S. support was a major factor in detaching actions from consequences, as Lustick addresses in his 2020 book. Washington can bring an unmatched, unprecedented quantity of guns and money into the Middle East, and American politics have shifted towards protecting Israel from any kind of material harm or political setbacks. When Americans constantly replenish Israel’s arsenal or simply fight Israel’s enemies for it, then the protests of Israeli liberals seem unnecessarily alarmist.

Like a rich parent pampering a drug-addicted scion, however, there is only so much that the United States can do to shield Israel from physical reality. Even with American funding, factories cannot produce an infinite number of Iron Dome or David’s Sling interceptors. (The old adage that “the bomber will always get through” seems apt.) The heavily-censored aftermath of the Iranian missile attack on October 1 and the increasing penetration of Hezbollah rockets suggest that the tables are turning in a very dangerous way for Israel.

And in the long term, there is a hard demographic limit to Israeli expansion. The logic of preserving a Jewish state means that, by definition, Israel cannot so easily absorb conquered territory. Palestinians and Lebanese will not be converted into Israeli citizens en masse; they must be ruled over by Israeli troops or expelled and replaced by Israeli settlers. Jewish immigration to Israel, the source of new soldiers and settlers, has net negative numbers.

Israel, like the United States, refused to wind down its conflicts from a position of strength when it still could. The Oslo accords, like the U.S. openings with Iran and Cuba, were politically unpalatable at a time when strength felt infinite. Now that these opportunities have passed, the best case scenario for Israel and the United States alike is that they can continue to “mow the lawn” and inflict even greater damage on their potential rivals than they incur.

But America is an expansive, continent-spanning civilization. If and when this strategy fails, it can afford to retreat from overseas empire into its own vastness, as it has before. Israel is enclosed by quite a small iron wall, and as Jabotinsky recognized so long ago, cannot simply disappear its neighbors. There is no hitting it and quitting it.