There is a peculiar silence that descends over Western foreign policy discourse whenever the subject turns to the eastern Mediterranean. It is a silence not born of ignorance, but of complicity. For months, the editorial pages of this newspaper and others across the continent have filled with careful, measured language about “escalation,” “de-escalation,” and the tragic but necessary “self-defence” of this or that party. Yet, in that careful dance of diplomacy, we have lost the plot entirely. We have inverted morality. We have, through the sheer exhaustion of repetition, allowed the aggressor to pose as the victim. It is time to speak plainly, without the usual equivocation. The Zionist regime of Israel is not a defensive outpost of liberal democracy surrounded by hostile wolves. It is an expansionist empire, armed to the teeth by the United States, and it is currently tearing the Arab world apart.
Meanwhile, Iran, a nation routinely caricatured in our press as the region’s chief bogeyman, finds itself in the peculiar and wretched position of merely defending its sovereignty against two relentless predators. Let us begin with the obvious, which has become the most obscured. The United States has spent the better part of two decades conditioning the Western public to view Tehran as an irrational, mullah-led menace. Any defensive action taken by Iran is instantly branded as the work of a “terrorist proxy.” Any missile fired from Yemen or Lebanon is attributed to the “octopus of Tehran.” However, what, precisely, has Iran done to warrant the current campaign of strangulation? It has not invaded a neighbor and annexed its territory. It does not hold a military occupation over millions of people in the twenty-first century, a colonial relic that would make Cecil Rhodes blush.
What Iran has done is build a deterrent. In a neighborhood where the United States maintains dozens of military bases, where Israel boasts a nuclear arsenal it refuses to acknowledge, and where the Gulf monarchies spend billions on American fighter jets, Iran has dared to seek regional influence and the technological capacity to defend its borders. For this sin of sovereignty, it is crushed under the boot of sanctions, saber-rattling, and the open threats of regime change. The current stance of the White House is not one of peacekeeping. It is one of active hostility. The United States has not only vetoed every meaningful resolution at the United Nations calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank, but it has also funneled billions in military aid to Israel as that state systematically dismantles the very idea of a Palestinian future.
We have watched, in real time, the live-streamed demolition of a society. Hospitals, universities, refugee camps, bakeries, churches, and mosques have been levelled. The International Court of Justice has used the strongest language available to describe plausible genocide and yet, the American response is to send another aircraft carrier. The American stance is to threaten Iran not for attacking Israel, but for daring to support those who resist the occupation. This is the crux of the hypocrisy. Israel, a state founded on the principle of a safe haven after the Holocaust, has mutated into the very image of the persecutor. Its current government, a coalition of religious nationalists and open annexationists, speaks of a “Greater Israel” stretching from the river to the sea. This is not a dog whistle; it is a bullhorn.
While the world agonizes over semantic debates about whether a particular airstrike on a school was precise enough, the Israeli cabinet is approving new settlement units in the West Bank, displacing families, and bulldozing villages. This is not security. This is land theft. This is the slow, grinding, methodical expansion of a regime that has learned that the world’s attention span is short and the United States’ veto power is long. We must condemn this without the usual caveats. To use those atrocities as a blank cheque to flatten an entire enclave, to kill thirty thousand people as a matter of policy, and then to turn the guns north toward Lebanon, is not retaliation. It is opportunism. It is the exploitation of tragedy to advance a territorial agenda. The current war is not a response to rockets; it is a smokescreen for annexation.
And where does Iran fit into this? Iran is the designated villain of the piece, but if one looks at the map, Iran is the only major power in the region actively trying to preserve a semblance of the status quo ante. Iran does not want a regional war. A regional war would destroy its economy, which is already strangled by sanctions. Iran wants what every sovereign nation wants: the right to trade freely, the right to develop nuclear energy for civilian purposes, and the right to have allies on its borders who are not hostile to its existence. Is that unreasonable? Only if you accept the premise that the Middle East is a feudal estate owned by Washington and Tel Aviv.
The British government, and the rest of Europe, have been shamefully silent partners in this crime. By failing to recognize the State of Palestine unconditionally, by refusing to sanction Israeli ministers who incite violence, and by meekly following the American line on Iran, London has abdicated any moral authority it once claimed. We cannot be surprised that the Global South looks upon our outrage over Ukraine and sees only the most cynical selectivity. The rules-based order, we are told, applies only to those without American protection.
We must be unequivocal here. The Zionist regime’s expansion into the Arab world is not a security measure. It is colonialism. It is the seizure of the Golan Heights, the slow absorption of the West Bank, the siege of Gaza, and the aggressive posturing toward Lebanon’s water resources. Every acre of land Israel occupies beyond the 1967 borders is stolen. Every settlement is a war crime. Every time an American president speaks of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” without mentioning the occupation that provokes the defence, they are lying to the public.
Iran, for all its flaws, for its own appalling human rights record and its suppression of its own citizens, is acting within its sovereign right when it arms Hezbollah or coordinates with the Syrian government. These are defensive alliances in a hostile neighborhood. If Mexico were armed by Russia to the teeth and had invaded Texas, Washington would not be sending flowers to Moscow. But because Iran is the ostracized “other,” its self-defence is reclassified as aggression.
We do not write this lightly. We write it with the weight of watching a genocide unfold on our phones. We write it with the understanding that to call out Israeli expansionism is not to deny the right of Israel to exist within its 1967 borders. It is to insist that a state founded on the promise of safety cannot survive forever on the sword of oppression. The United States must change course. Not because Iran is good, but because the current path leads only to a wider, bloodier, more disastrous war. And when that war comes, as it surely will if this madness continues, the blood of the region will be on the hands of Washington and Tel Aviv. Defend sovereignty. Condemn expansion. There is no other moral choice.
