Realpolitik in the Middle East

Palestine is the mother of all Middle East conflicts, runs the lore. Solve the problem, and peace will break out.

The Middle East has always known war

Where war has ruled since pre-Biblical times?

“The Levant,” Israel’s Moshe Dayan once quipped, “is the elephant path of history” – and those pachyderms weren’t tranquil grazers. Nor is the “Zionist entity” the root of all misfortunes. The real stake is not justice for the Palestinians. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the power, stupid,”– the age-old rivalry of nations for gain and glory.

Look back to savor the point. When Israel declared independence in 1948, three major Arab armies – Egypt’s, Jordan’s, and Syria’s – sought to kill the Jewish state at birth (with four lesser ones in tow). Their purpose was not “Palestine,” but possession. Who would get the biggest chunk after the Jews had been driven into the sea? It was competitive land-grabbing, not solidarity with their hapless Arab brethren.

Nor were the next three Egypt-Israel wars about Palestinian statehood. In 1956, Israel unleashed a preventive strike against its strongest foe being armed to the teeth by the Soviets, as was Syria. No. 2, the Six-Day War of 1967, was classic preemption. Cairo had expelled the U.N. peacekeepers from the Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s lifeline to Asia. Egypt had allied with Jordan and Syria. After breaking the encirclement, Israel took the Golan Heights (Syria), the West Bank (Jordan) and the Sinai (Egypt) as buffer zones. This is how nations behave to stymie the next threat.

Realpolitik rules – and the Arabs understand the real threat (NOT Israel)

Nor was Palestine the issue in round 2. In 1973, Egypt and Syria pounced not to raise the Palestinian banner over Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, but to recoup their territorial losses. They failed, but in retrospect the Yom Kippur War was a historic turning point in spite of Arab tears for Palestine.

The “state is the coldest of all cold monsters,” taught Nietzsche. And so, realpolitik claimed its due. In 1979, Cairo signed a peace treaty, followed by another pact in Amman in 1994. These compacts have held in spite of Israel’s all-out war against Hamas, now centering on Rafah in the Gaza Strip.

Which on its face seems weird, given the Arab world’s “Palestine first!” mantra – no peace without statehood. Just as telling are Israel’s “Abraham Accords” with various Gulf states – and Riyadh as silent partner. Arab actions since Oct. 7 tell the true tale, which realists from Thucydides to Kissinger would understand – though the left in Joe Biden’s Democratic Party does not. Why do Nietzsche’s “cold monsters” forsake arch-enmities in favor of strategic realignment? The answer: “It’s Iran, stupid!” – and not Israel as the root of all evil.

Iran as the empire builder

The mullahcracy pays murderous homage to Palestine, but the real game is imperial expansion. These make-believe holy men want to kick Israel off the chessboard to check the American King. Of course, Iran will not attack nuclear-armed Israel directly, let alone the United States. The missiles of April, telegraphed in advance down to the hour, was for show – strategic signaling to dissuade Israel from destroying Iran’s almost-defeated surrogates in Gaza. Also, the U.S. must have assured Tehran that Israel’s retaliation would be measured – as it was – with only a single missile fired.

So, Iran does not face an existential risk. Why would it? Instead of facing the “Little Satan” Israel and the “Great Satan” America directly, Tehran has armed and trained its stand-ins, the three Hs: Hezbollah in Israel’s north, Hamas in the south, and further south the Houthis. These militias tie down U.S. and British aerial and naval assets in the Red Sea, the key trade artery from Europe to Asia. Iran does not bomb American positions throughout the Middle East. Let its surrogates do it. No fingerprints that way.

Let your proxies die

Let your proxies die: Hamas and the civilians of Gaza whom Iran has callously sacrificed for its own purposes. The icy calculus proved correct at least politically, when students all over the West turned against the Jewish state, especially in the U.S., from Columbia University to USC. Add the bulk of the Western media. Score another point in South Africa, which has dragged Israel before the International Criminal Court on the charge of genocide.

“Globalizing the Intifada” panned out as planned. Except: Iran did miscalculate strategically, and that is the best news in decades. In April, Iran was facing a strange but logical Nietzschean coalition. The U.S. and Britain helped down Iranian attack vehicles. Jordan opened its air space to NATO and Israeli craft while intercepting incoming drones. The Saudis and Gulfies delivered time-sensitive intelligence. In Qatar, the U.S. Central Command masterminded this complex operation, which will be studied in the world’s military academies for years to come.

The upshot is an unwritten “reversal of alliances” familiar to diplomatic historians. Set aside pan-Arab “Palestine über alles” slogans and recall that the PLO veto – no deal without a state of their own – began to wane as early as 1979. Back then, Anwar Sadat and Menahem Begin proclaimed “No more war.” Not because they had seen the light, but because of hard-headed strategic interests.

Khomeini changed the game, and now everybody in the Middle East knows what Iran wants

This was no fluke. That year marked the Khomeinist revolution and, with it, the birth of Iran’s regional revisionism. A new game was on now. As a result, the PLO’s dream of undoing Israel with an Arab force multiplier became ever more unrealistic, one Intifada after another. Nor would Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel help the Palestinian cause because Iran had bigger fish to fry – dominance over the Middle East. Israel was and is but a convenient cover for Iranian ambitions.

If the U.S. saw through Iran’s game, it did not show it. Obsessively, it has sought to midwife a Palestinian state, failing again and again all the way to James Carville’s boss Bill Clinton, who hoped to seal a deal (and win a Nobel Peace Prize) on his way out of the White House. Barack Obama  thought he could tame Tehran with a bagful of goodies – like the JCPOA deal of 2015, which would merely postpone an Iranian atomic bomb by nine years. Joe Biden followed up this folly by releasing billions in frozen Iranian assets. He reaped the Hamas murder spree of Oct. 7, which has made Palestinian statehood as real as a desert mirage.

Iran is the real threat – to everyone

Why the enduring frustration? Left-leaning Israeli historian Benny Morris has a chilling answer: “The Arabs don’t want it [a two-state solution], and the Jews don’t want it.” Even after Iran was parried by the U.S.-crafted alliance in April, Tehran will remain the chief threat to the Middle East. It will not dump its proxies, nor freeze – let alone scrap – its nuclear project. The young who scream, “From the River to the Sea” around the world do not fathom the realpolitik stakes of Iran’s imperial game. Nor do U.S. university administrations. It took them until May to start dismantling tent cities on campus.

What is the moral of this tale? If they cannot be defanged, grasping powers must be balanced and contained; that is the oldest rule of statecraft. Is the April coalition against Iran here to stay or just a polyamorous fling? History since Begin and Sadat says: National interests beat rhetoric, and so “Palestine” is fated to remain a side issue, as painful and demeaning as it is for its people. And a thorn that poisons Israel’s relations with the West.

The real threat is the Tehran theocracy, unless it is held in check and the United States continues to lead this multi-hued posse. It has no better option. As in millennia past, power is the hardest currency in this accursed world, from the Levant to the Persian Gulf.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.