Back from the brink in Iran? Not while Palestine and Lebanon burn

Many in the Middle East and the world want to believe that we are on the brink of peace, but it is worth reminding ourselves why we find ourselves here in the first place.

In simple terms, we are here because the United States and Israel still subscribe to the claim that the only language their adversaries understand is force.

Despite their own history of warfare proving otherwise, they keep repeating the same violent approach, expecting different results. That, as the saying goes, is the definition of insanity.

The United States has not always followed this path. Between the Second World War and the Vietnam War, the newly crowned global superpower appeared to have absorbed important lessons from that earlier conflict.

The tactic of targeting civilians to engineer capitulation was deployed by all belligerents in the Second World War. The United States and its allies unleashed infernal bombing campaigns on Germany and Japan, incinerating hundreds of thousands from the air, culminating in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even then, historians argue that these bombings were not decisive in forcing Japan’s surrender; rather, it hinged on a strategic calculation of surrendering to the United States versus being overrun by the advancing Red Army in Manchuria.

Another lesson the United States learned, if only briefly, was the importance of a stable world order built on international law, shared interests, decolonisation, and the prevention of war, however selectively those principles were applied.

From its inception, this order contained its own contradictions. It coexisted with coups, proxy wars, and regime change operations from Iran to Latin America, where Washington reserved for itself a wide latitude of action.

Israel's settler-colonial project, backed zealously by the collective West, was not simply an anomaly within this order, but one of its clearest expressions: an extension of a system that proclaimed rules while exempting itself, and its allies, from them.

From its inception in 1948, Israel has effectively been granted a hall pass from international law, from binding Security Council resolutions, from nuclear non-proliferation norms, from defining its borders, from decolonisation, and ultimately from accountability for the biggest crimes of all: genocide.

The United States, sometimes for Israel's sake alone, dealt blow after blow to the very international order it claimed to uphold. One can trace this across multiple turning points, but a clear line in the sand in the Middle East is the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, a long-advocated project of Benjamin Netanyahu. A further, irreversible blow followed with the 28 February war on Iran, launched at his urging.

Alongside this came the full convergence of US and Israeli military doctrine and grand strategy, erasing all that remained of the lessons of the Second World War about collective punishment and international law.

It is no coincidence that the US–Iran–(Israel–Lebanon?) ceasefire announced on Tuesday night was both preceded and followed by threats of aerial annihilation from Donald Trump, and an Israeli blitz that set Beirut ablaze, killing hundreds of civilians on what has come to be known as “Black Wednesday”.

Thus it is doubtful that this partial step back from the brink reflects any lesson learned.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are not known for introspection, let alone self-doubt. The lull more likely reflects a cost–benefit calculation: that the war’s objectives would require far greater resources and impose a deeper economic toll than even “TACO Trump” is willing to bear, despite Netanyahu’s efforts.

Alternatively, as Khaled Al Hroub wrote this week, it may simply be a tactic to buy time, to mobilise those very resources while luring Iran into a false sense of security.

For this reason, any hope invested in the negotiations in Islamabad, and likewise those between Israel and Lebanon, must be tempered. No state in the region should let its guard down and a collective effort together with international allies must begin to address the root causes of the war, beyond a ceasefire.

The Israel–Lebanon negotiations are likely doomed. Netanyahu continues to wage war on Lebanon entirely, not merely Hezbollah. The balance of power ensures that Israel will accept nothing less than its full terms. Any agreement reached under such conditions would amount to a divisive surrender by Lebanon, unlikely to endure in the absence of national consensus on such an existential issue. In reality, Israel’s willingness to engage in direct talks with the US-backed government in Beirut may be less about peace than about denying Hezbollah the ability to convert its military performance into political capital.

Meanwhile, Trump and Netanyahu have shown themselves to be serially unreliable. Even if an agreement were to be reached, it would amount to little more than a temporary tranquilisation of the monstrous forces confronting the region.

That is, unless the root causes are addressed.

None of what is said above absolves Iran. The Iranian regime has committed aggression and war crimes in the course of its scorched earth defence strategy, targeting civilians and infrastructure from Syria’s civil war to the current conflict in the Gulf. It will pay a heavy strategic and economic price, and its standing among Arab neighbours has been deeply damaged. Iran, too, has succumbed to the same flawed belief in the utility of violence against civilians.

But it can also be argued that the Iranian regime, like many unsavoury actors in the region, is in part a Frankenstein born of the very superpower interventions that established, and then violated, the rules of the international order – in Iran manifested through Operation Ajax.

A return to the idealised vision of the post-war order is neither possible nor desirable. That order was never as neutral, nor as rules-based, as it claimed. Its collapse is but the logical endpoint of its internal contradictions.

What is emerging in its place is something less stable, but more honest: a world in which the United States can no longer act as the self-appointed arbiter of international order, having forfeited both the credibility and the restraint required to do so.

In this context, any durable peace in the Middle East will not come from restoring American primacy, nor from rebranding it. It will come from its limits.

That begins with confronting the region’s central fracture: the unresolved question of Palestine, the Greater Israel project that extends to Lebanon and Syria, and the exceptional impunity granted to Israel within the international system to pursue conquest and ethnic cleansing.

Israel’s ability to sustain its occupation, expansion, and defiance of international law has always depended on preventing the emergence of any regional balance capable of constraining it. In practice, this has meant the systematic weakening, fragmentation, or destabilisation of any adversarial state.

The result is a region locked into perpetual crisis. Israel’s wars expand outward, and theatres bleed into one another, including to the Gulf.

In this sense, the price of denying Palestinian self-determination is not contained within Palestine, but forever regionalised.

As Jeffrey Sachs argued on The New Arab's Brief In, peace requires compelling Israel to live within defined borders and a Palestinian state, return of the Golan Heights to Syria, and withdrawal from Lebanon.

Only then can the spillover effect in the Gulf be contained, and the question of Iran’s relations with its neighbours and role in the region be dealt with as part of a lasting peace in the Middle East.

The New Arab Editorial represents the collective voice of The New Arab’s editorial team, presenting views that promote authentic discourses on the MENA region and beyond. 

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