There’s One Nation Destabilising the Middle East, and It Isn’t Iran

We have arrived at the six month anniversary of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza. In that time, Israel has violated the agreement literally thousands of times, bombing, shooting, raiding, shelling and demolishing buildings, killing hundreds more Palestinians, expanding military buffer zones, and mimicking other areas in the Occupied Territories where de facto annexation has taken place. 

In a case of disturbing déjà vu, Israel is also disrespecting the fragile ceasefire in the US-Israel-Iran war. Israel launched a fresh assault on Lebanon overnight, after prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that “there is no ceasefire in Lebanon” – in a direct contradiction of US president Donald Trump’s “low-key” comments – and the IDF ordered citizens to flee the Jnah area of Beirut, which includes two major hospitals.

But let’s not lay all the blame for our poisoned geopolitics at Israel’s feet. Western leaders’ enabling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has not made only the butchery in Lebanon – but the entire war that’s currently destabilising the Middle East – possible. 

One state in the region is having an outsized impact on preventing peace. And it ain’t Iran. 

We hear a lot of yap from Western politicians about terrorism and terrorist organisations. I’ve extensively covered this Labour government’s authoritarian crackdown on free speech and expression through the mass-arresting of grannies and disabled people as ‘terrorists’. But the people really responsible for seeding ‘terror’ in civilian populations – and it’s clearer this week than perhaps ever before – are leading the governments of our good old allies: the US and Israel. 

On Tuesday, we braced ourselves after Trump’s genocidal Truth Social pronouncement – threatening to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization “never to be brought back again” unless he got his way. Was the world staring down the barrel of a nuclear holocaust? Would our prime minister Keir Starmer address the situation? Was it a good night to rewatch the 1984 classic Threads? 

The answer was ‘no’, on all three fronts – Starmer was of course too busy tweeting about banning a rapper from entering the country to headline Wireless. 

By Wednesday, the ceasefire (agreed barely an hour before Trump’s deadline to obliterate Iran was set to expire) was already in jeopardy thanks to Israel. The IDF launched an unprecedented wave of airstrikes, bombing Lebanon 100 times in just ten minutes. An estimated 300 people were killed in Lebanon – including two journalists – and at least 1,000 injured, with scenes of carnage and destruction reverberating across social media. 

Netanyahu was utterly unrepentant, saying the ceasefire didn’t include Lebanon (it did, according to Iran and ceasefire-broker Pakistan). Lebanese parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri called the attacks on densely populated areas a “full-fledged war crime” and a “serious test for the international community and a blatant challenge to all international laws, norms and conventions, which Israel violates daily through its unprecedented campaign of human assassination in modern history”.

Israel has, since October 2023 and long before, issued ‘blatant challenges’ and ‘serious tests’ to the international community due to its occupation, apartheid and systematic murder of the Palestinian people. And it continues to do so. 

On Wednesday, Israel also killed an Al Jazeera journalist who was driving on a main road west of Gaza City – one of at least 262 journalists killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 2023. On Thursday, Israel shot and killed a nine-year-old girl who was attending a lesson in a makeshift school tent in northern Gaza, in front of her classmates. And this week, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the ‘Greater Israel’ expansion project – including Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. 

Ceasefires mean nothing to a rogue state. International norms mean nothing. International law means nothing. 

And how has the international community responded? With stunning inaction, to say the least. Some states bear more responsibility for their complicity – or in the case of the US and our own government in the UK, actively participation – in the genocide than others. 

Emboldened and unsanctioned, Israel has been free – in the past few months alone – to pass an apartheid death penalty and plunge (hand-in-hand with the US) into a war on Iran that Netanyahu has always dreamed of. 

Even the vicious bombing of civilian areas of Lebanon was met by a milquetoast statement from foreign secretary Yvette Cooper. “That escalation that we saw from Israel yesterday,” she said, “I think was deeply damaging and we want to see an end to hostilities in Lebanon.” Starmer said the attacks on Lebanon “should not be happening”. 

Netanyahu will be quaking in his boots, I’m sure. 

There seems to be literally nothing Israel can do that will move our government to any meaningful degree. When Trump famously said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for him, maybe the Israeli state was taking notes.