One Continuous War
On Iran, Palestine, and the Regional Zionist Order
Israel is a lie. Not just because it was founded on a lie, but because lying was required to make its existence appear natural, moral, and inevitable. They built a world out of the lie, and then taught the world to believe it. They said they were coming to a land without a people. They said they were coming to a barren desert, a wasteland of rocks, thorns, and swamps—and that they made it bloom. But Palestine was neither empty nor barren—for thousands of years there had been farmers who knew and loved the land through olives, onions, strawberries, and oranges. It was a country with newspapers and magazines, cinemas and theaters, a developed civic and agricultural life. None of this could appear in Zionist propaganda, because the existence of a people would have exposed the fraud on which the entire story depended. So the people had to be written out of the story before the land could be taken. That is why Israel is a lie.
The tragedy is that even we—Arabs—have begun to believe this lie. The greater tragedy is that the world has accepted the original lie and continues to believe the lies Israel tells about itself—its innocence, its survival, and its restraint.
What the world’s acceptance of these lies made possible was a war against Iran—built on pretexts nobody believed, with objectives shifting by the day, producing ruin nobody will account for. Netanyahu, at least, has been candid. This, he said from the first day, is what he has hoped to achieve for forty years: forty years of warnings about an Iranian bomb that never materialized, forty years of failed attempts to drag Washington into his war. It took an American president of singular arrogance, indifferent to the world he was driving into chaos, to finally give him what he wanted.
Trump exploited the Iranian people—their wounds, their aspirations, their rights—as the war’s justification. These are not invented grievances, but neither Trump nor Netanyahu will ever be their champion. Within days Trump had dropped the demand for “regime change” and replaced it with the demand to choose Iran’s next “great and acceptable” leader, from the same government, himself. The Iranian people had gone from justification to afterthought—they had served their purpose, which was the license their suffering provided.
This war presents itself as a crusade for freedom against theocracy, between a people and their oppressors. What it enacts is the oldest binary: colonizer and colonized. And the colonial project advancing under that guise is Greater Israel—a biblical mandate, a regional plan, and a map that has been waiting for this moment.
Greater Israel is a territorial claim. It imagines a region stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates: running northeast through the Sinai, north up the Mediterranean coast through Palestine and Lebanon into Syria, and east to the Euphrates in southeastern Turkey, where the river rises. From there, it traces the river south through Syria and Iraq, with its southern arc taking in Jordan and the northern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula. This is the territory Netanyahu has called a “historic and spiritual mission” to claim.
When Tucker Carlson asked Mike Huckabee, the United States Ambassador to Israel, whether Israel was entitled to the sovereign territories of Arab states across the region, Huckabee did not hesitate: “It would be fine if they took it all.” This Zionist vision claims a vast territory; the order behind it reaches further still. Every state within its shadow—Iran, the Gulf states, Turkey, Egypt, and the states of North Africa and the Horn, from Morocco to Somalia—faces two futures, and no others. The first is subservience: a regime autocratic and loyal enough to Israeli and U.S. power to contain whatever resistance its population might generate. The second is fragmentation: the breaking of a state into sectarian and ethnic cantons warring with each other, too consumed by internal conflict to organize any external resistance.
A state that accepts subservience is held up as proof that the region can be integrated peacefully. A state that has been fragmented is held up as proof that resistance leads to ruin. What the order cannot accommodate is a state that remains coherent, armed, and refuses both conditions—and so, as long as the lie that is Israel exists, the wars will continue: wars to destabilize, wars to neutralize, wars to expand, each one pulling another state into subservience or leaving it in ruins.
The assault on Iran is the latest act in a single continuous war against every force in the region that resists the order Israel and the U.S. have imposed over decades. That order’s foundation is the permanent dispossession of Palestine—and from that conquered center, the violent reorganization of the entire region around Israeli dominance.
Palestine is the question on which every other question in this region depends. Every war has been fought to settle it, and every negotiation has been calculated to defer it. What is happening now is the latest attempt to liquidate it, and in that sense, Gaza and Iran are two theatres of the same war. The genocide in Gaza established the terms under which Iran is now being destroyed: that a campaign of mass killing could be conducted in full view of the world, with the financial and military backing of the U.S., while the world watched. What the Security Council delivered, veto after veto, was time—time for the killing to continue, time for the facts to become irreversible. What the world allowed in Gaza, it is now allowing in Iran—and the killing it allows in Iran, it will allow again.
There is a kind of knowledge that comes from being on the receiving end of this order. We learn that power, at a certain threshold, no longer requires convincing lies. Justification becomes perfunctory—a formality performed for a world that had already decided the killing was acceptable.
We have been here before. Not we as in the Western world, which calls itself civilized while deciding, again, that it may start war without consequence. We as in those for whom the wars have never stopped.
You can bury the truth under power,
under war,
under silence.
But like seeds in forgotten soil,
it waits.
And one day
it grows again.
History cannot be erased forever. The people of Palestine, their land, and their story remain.