Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed on CBS’ 60 Minutes and said something that, a decade ago, would have sounded almost unthinkable from an Israeli prime minister: Israel should eventually stop relying on American military aid, and will start winding down to zero American aid over the next decade.

He argued Israel is a strong, wealthy, technologically advanced country—one that should be able to defend itself without permanent dependence on U.S. taxpayers.

No doubt, a rich, highly developed state should not want to be permanently subsidized by another country. Israel should be able to stand on its own two feet. Today, it has a higher GDP per capita than the UK and Germany.

Netanyahu is saying this at a moment when American support for Israel is collapsing. For the first time ever this year, more Americans claim to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. The old so-called “bipartisan consensus” on Israel is now dust in the wind. And it is not coming back any time soon. While many Republicans still broadly express support—including enthusiastic support—for Israel, the same cannot be said of most Democrats and Independents. And this is especially true among younger voters, who tend to view Israel in a negative light.

You can see the same shift in the way American media now talks about alleged Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

A few years ago, allegations of abuse or systematic mistreatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers or guards circulated mainly in Palestinian and Arab media, activist spaces, and left-wing publications already hostile to Israel.

Now, major media like The New York Times have begun to weigh in on these issues. A column by Nicholas Kristof published last week aired allegations of sexual violence, torture, and abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody. Kristof cited testimony from Palestinian men and women who said they had been raped, sexually assaulted, stripped naked, threatened with rape, attacked with dogs, beaten, starved, denied medical care, or abused in other ways.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry denounced the column as propagating a “blood libel,” and has said that it will sue The New York Times, although no lawsuit has been filed yet.

Since October 7—when Hamas jihadists broke into Israel and murdered, kidnapped, and, according to a report citing testimony from survivors, brutally raped and mutilated Israelis—Israel has carried out enormous military operations in Gaza. It has detained thousands of Palestinians, including some in the West Bank. Many were Hamas fighters. Some were militants from other factions. Others were civilians, unfortunately, caught up in the dragnet of war.

The problem for Israel, here, is that the combination of mass detention, an atmosphere of revenge, fear, and a captive population is combustible.

Such abuse has been perpetrated in many different countries before, including Western democracies. The United States had Abu Ghraib. There, Iraqi prisoners were stripped, humiliated, threatened with dogs, sexually degraded, and tortured. France had Algeria. There, electric shocks, waterboarding, rape, disappearances, and summary executions were used. Britain had Kenya, with detention camps for Kikuyu prisoners and suspected Mau Mau sympathizers where beatings, starvation, forced labor, and sexual abuse were used.

So far, a lot of the discourse in the pro-Israel sphere has focused on trying to discredit the allegations altogether. For instance, many have cited Euro-Med Monitor—whose founder Ramy Abdu has been accused by Israel and pro-Israel advocates of links to Hamas—as proof that the whole story is rotten. That may be a reason to treat some of the material Kristof cited with caution. Not every allegation is necessarily true. Indeed, Kristof has previously had to retract claims made in The New York Times after having been misled by a source.

But Kristof’s column included 14 separate Palestinian testimonies, Israeli media reporting, UN material, HaMoked figures, B’Tselem’s prison report, and the work of Amnesty International. It’s not the case that he took a single allegation and ran with it.

On one hand, there is a real danger here. Allegations like this can be weaponized in ugly ways. People who hate Jews will use stories of sexual abuse by Israeli soldiers as an excuse to demonize them as a whole group, rather than as specific allegations about particular individuals, particular institutions, and a particular war. They will fold these allegations into older antisemitic fantasies about Jewish cruelty, perversity, bloodlust, or hidden power.

That should be rejected completely by all sensible people.

But if Israeli soldiers or prison guards abused Palestinian detainees, the perpetrators themselves should be held accountable. The commanders who enabled them should bear responsibility. The politicians who created a permissive atmosphere should answer for it.

But Jews as a people are not responsible. Jewish civilians in London, New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, or anywhere else are not answerable for the alleged crimes of guards in an Israeli detention facility.

On the other hand, the risk of antisemitic weaponization cannot be allowed to become a shield against a thorough investigation. Individuals who abuse Palestinians must be held accountable, and such abuse, if it has taken place, must be stopped completely and should never, ever be allowed to recur again.

This is the best first step for Israel to rehabilitate their reputation.

Netanyahu seems to understand the reputation problem, but not its cause. In the same 60 Minutes interview, he pointed to social media, TikTok, and the speed with which images now spread around the world. There is some truth there. The information environment has changed. Israel no longer speaks to Western publics through a small number of sympathetic editors, television anchors, and foreign-policy elites. A video from Gaza can travel globally before any Israeli spokesperson has drafted a line.

But social media is the medium, not the disease.

TikTok is not responsible for Palestinian suffering. Israel’s reputation is deteriorating because the effects of the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians are now visible in a way they were not before. Images of destruction in Gaza, videos of settler violence in the West Bank, and growing allegations of abuse against Palestinian detainees are shaping global opinion far more than any propaganda campaign or algorithm ever could.

Israel should hold itself to a higher standard than a terrorist organization. That means taking allegations of sexual abuse and mistreatment seriously rather than dismissing them outright as propaganda. It means investigating abuses committed by soldiers, prison guards, or settlers, and ensuring those responsible are punished.

The real solution, for both Israelis and Palestinians, is not better public relations. It is resolving the conflict itself before the violence and mutual dehumanization destroys what little legitimacy and hope for peace still remain for both peoples.

Today, Middle East Uncovered will publish two pieces examining the growing media and political controversy surrounding testimonies of sexual violence connected to October 7 and the war that followed. These accounts are graphic, painful, and difficult to engage with honestly.

We are publishing them because we believe difficult testimonies should not disappear beneath ideological battles. Too often, public discourse has centered more on defending narratives than confronting what victims describe. Our goal is not to litigate suffering selectively or protect one political camp from scrutiny, but to examine how these testimonies are being received, contested, weaponized, and, in many cases, buried beneath the broader war over narratives.

Since October 7 and the war in Gaza that followed, much of the public discourse surrounding the conflict has turned into a battle over competing narratives. More recently, the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel camps have clashed over two separate reports involving sexual violence. The New York Times (NYT) published testimony from Palestinian prisoners describing sexual abuse in Israeli jails, while The Daily Wire covered a report by The Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, Children and Families documenting Hamas’s sexual violence against victims of October 7.

The timing intensified the dispute: The New York Times’ piece appeared less than 24 hours before the Civil Commission released its findings.

Those who viewed the NYT report as less credible, or rejected it entirely, focused heavily on its sources. One was the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, founded and chaired by Ramy Abdu, a Palestinian figure widely perceived by the pro-Israel camp as being close to Hamas circles—a connection used to cast doubt on testimonies collected through his organization. Another was Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an Israeli activist who shifted from outspoken pro-Israel advocacy to strongly anti-Zionist positions during the course of the war. Ben-Ephraim also amplified a claim circulated by Euro-Med Monitor alleging that Israeli forces used dogs trained to sexually assault Palestinian detainees, a claim many in the pro-Israel camp dismissed as antisemitic blood libel.

On the other side, many in the pro-Palestine camp dismissed the Civil Commission’s report outright because it came from an Israeli NGO focused specifically on documenting Hamas’s sexual crimes against victims of October 7. Others continued to deny the evidence surrounding Hamas’s sexual violence altogether, insisting that there is still not enough proof to conclude that such crimes took place.

The two reports include horrific, stomach-turning testimonies. Palestinian detainees described being sexually abused with objects such as metal batons and carrots by Israeli prison guards, while others recounted settlers in the West Bank zip-tying and violently pulling their genitals.

The Civil Commission’s report on October 7 documented multiple accounts of sexual violence committed by Hamas fighters during the attacks, including testimonies describing gang rape, mutilation, and the targeting of victims before and after death at sites such as the Nova music festival, where more than 370 people were killed. One survivor quoted in the report said he had been treated “like a sex doll” by his attackers.

Both camps have invested more time and energy in discrediting the messengers on the opposing side than in listening to the testimonies themselves.

Once that happens, the victims themselves disappear beneath the argument. This is despite the substantial evidence that Hamas used sexual violence against victims of October 7 and against hostages held in Gaza—evidence that exists regardless of which outlet covered it or who amplified it politically. The Civil Commission’s report, compiled over two and a half years from more than 10,000 photographs and videos and over 430 interviews, is not made less credible because The Daily Wire chose to report on it. A separate United Nations report likewise found “reasonable grounds” to believe that Palestinian militias committed sexual violence during the October 7 attacks.

The abuse of Palestinian prisoners is equally confirmed by a record of testimony that predates the most recent war. A leaked video from the Sde Teiman detention facility showed Israeli soldiers sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee. Five soldiers were arrested; the charges were later dropped. A survey published last year by Save the Children found that more than half of Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 17 had witnessed or experienced sexual violence in Israeli jails.

It is, of course, reasonable to scrutinize the organizations and individuals collecting evidence. But what matters more is listening carefully to the testimonies themselves and examining whether the accounts are credible and consistent. A victim’s nationality should matter far less than the violence they endured. Suffering is not determined by ethnicity or political affiliation, yet both sets of victims are increasingly being turned into instruments in a broader political struggle by camps more invested in defending a cause than confronting the human reality of what these people experienced.

Listening to their testimonies should not be limited to publishing them in an opinion piece or an independent NGO report, though both matter. It must be followed by programs that help those victims recover from what they have been through, and hold the perpetrators accountable. The conditions of Palestinian prisoners inside Israel require a serious, independent investigation. Since Ben Gvir became Israel’s national security minister, and more so after October 7, he has openly boasted of his goal to worsen conditions for prisoners, writing on X in 2024 that it was one of the highest goals he had set for himself in office.

There are no winners in the battle for narratives. Each side will continue defending its own version of events for years to come. But every hour spent arguing over the credibility of a journalist or the politics of an NGO is an hour not spent listening to survivors describe what was done to them.

The testimonies discussed here—those of Palestinian prisoners and those of October 7 survivors and hostages—are not competing claims that cancel one another out. They are separate accounts of violence committed against human beings by specific perpetrators, and they demand serious investigation, accountability, and long-term support for those who survived them. The political camps that have turned these testimonies into ammunition would do far more for the people they claim to defend if they focused on that instead.

The question being asked about Syria today—in diaspora living rooms, opposition circles, Western policy briefings, and homes across Syria itself—is whether there is still any chance for democracy. The tone in which it is asked usually implies the answer: “Probably not.” The new leadership replicates the authoritarian reflexes of the regime it replaced. Institutions are hollowed out or captured. Minorities are marginalized. The Islamist project consolidates discreetly while the pragmatic façade holds. What exactly is there to be optimistic about?

The pessimism is not irrational. But the question itself is subtly wrong—not in its urgency, but in its premise. It treats democracy as a destination that Syria either reaches or forfeits, a binary condition measured against which the verdict is clear, and the pessimists win easily. What that framing misses is the difference between democracy as an endpoint and democratization as a process—the long, non-linear, frequently ugly accumulation of experiences, failures, negotiations, and institutional habits that eventually make democracy possible. No society that has democracy today arrived at it ready. The question worth asking about Syria is not whether it has arrived, but whether it has begun—and more precisely, how long it has actually been trying, and what that history tells us about what is happening now.

Syria’s democratic project did not begin with the fall of Assad, the 2011 revolution, or even independence in 1946. It began in 1918 with the establishment of the Arab Kingdom and the convening of the General Syrian Congress, which, in 1920, produced the first democratic constitution in the Arab world: an elected parliament, guaranteed civil liberties, and a framework for self-governance. The French mandate extinguished that experiment within months, partitioned the territory, and imposed external sovereignty. But it did not end the democratic impulse, nor did it manufacture the pathologies that would eventually destroy it. Elections continued under the mandate. Syrians governed significant aspects of their own affairs, formed governments, and negotiated within representative structures. The factionalism, regionalism, and elite dysfunction that would later produce the coup carousel were already visible in that period—not as products of French interference, but as indigenous features of Syrian political culture expressing themselves even within the constrained space the mandate allowed.

The French, for their part, attempted to manage Syria’s diversity by creating separate administrative units for Alawites, Druze, and others. Whatever the self-serving motivations behind that approach, it reflected a recognition that diversity was real and required institutional management. Syrians rejected it in favor of unity—a legitimate and courageous political choice. But unity was asserted rather than constructed. The mechanisms, culture, and institutional framework that genuine unity requires were never built. Syria was not, after all, an ancient unified nation dismembered by colonial powers. It was a modern political project, born from the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, whose borders and composition were themselves contested and contingent. Insisting on unity without doing the work of constructing it was a choice—and it was Syria’s own.

Independence brought about the most direct democratic experiment: elections, parties, a parliament, and a press. It also brought more than two dozen coups and coup attempts in two decades. Each one divided the liberal and democratic elite not along principled lines but along factional lines, based on who supported this general, opposed that faction, and whose communal network aligned with which officer corps. The parties that claimed democratic legitimacy participated in, enabled, or acquiesced to military interventions whenever those interventions served their immediate interests. Institutions were treated as instruments rather than constraints. There is a tendency in some Western academic circles to attribute this coup cycle primarily to CIA manipulation, a case built largely on Miles Copeland’s self-dramatizing and internally contradictory recollections. The State Department’s own contemporaneous assessment of the 1949 coup found “no evidence” of outside participation and attributed it to internal military grievances. Patrick Seale’s enduring account locates the drivers where the evidence actually points: domestic factionalism, weak institutions, and inter-Arab rivalry. External actors mattered, but they did not invent Syria’s instability. The coups were Syria’s own work. So was the democracy they destroyed.

What the Ba’ath replaced that democracy with was not simply authoritarianism but a specific kind of social engineering—land redistribution, nationalization, the expansion of the public sector, the elevation of previously marginalized constituencies—all pursued simultaneously with modernization and development, but with regime consolidation always as the primary concern. When development served consolidation, it was pursued. When it conflicted with it, consolidation won. Bashar Al-Assad then completed the logic: by the end of his dynasty’s rule, the regime was consuming everything—democratic possibility, development, modernization, and the country’s basic physical and human infrastructure alike. The institutions that survived were not merely weak; they had been deliberately designed to serve control rather than public function, which means rebuilding them is not a technical problem of capacity but a political problem of purpose.

That history is the context for the current moment. Syria is not beginning to democratize. It is continuing a century-long struggle to democratize, under the worst conditions that struggle has yet faced. The pathologies that destroyed the post-independence experiment are not new diagnoses. They are the same pathologies, wearing new clothes, operating through new actors, in a landscape of institutional ruin that makes their management harder than ever.

The current governance picture is, by any honest measure, deeply discouraging. Ministries are staffed by loyalists reporting through informal networks. Politburo branches operate as parallel provincial authorities with more real power than officially appointed governors. Unions and chambers of commerce have been placed under direct state control. The constitutional framework concentrates all meaningful authority in a single executive with no independent judicial check. The replacement of Alawite Ba’athist loyalists with Sunni Islamist loyalists replicates the sectarian logic of the previous system under a new ideological banner. The deep state is being rebuilt with different personnel and the same underlying architecture.

And yet the deficit is not total. Civil society is thin but stirring. Activists from the Damascus Spring era are again attempting to carve out space for cultural and political expression, aided by a new generation of conscientious youth. The Bab Touma protests, the cross-communal response to the alcohol restrictions, the meager turnout at the Islamist counter-mobilization—none of these are signs of democratic health, but rather of democratic instinct: the reflexive pushback of a population that has not entirely surrendered its sense of what it is owed, and the equally significant signal that authorities, however reluctantly, can be made to retreat. The space for genuine politics in Syria is limited, but it is not zero. The difference between limited and zero is everything.

Democratization, understood historically, is the accumulation of conditions, habits, and experiences that eventually make democratic governance sustainable. It includes the formation and dissolution of political coalitions, however imperfect, and the negotiation of communal boundaries, however painful. It requires developing the expectation that power has limits and can be contested. And the experience of failure—the learning that only comes from having tried something, watched it go wrong, and been forced to reckon with why.

By these measures, Syria is engaged in democratization not for the first time, but in a new and particularly difficult chapter of a long attempt. The alcohol controversy produced a public pushback and a government retreat. The Kurdish autonomy negotiation produced an outcome nobody wanted, and both sides had to live with—which is, in fact, what democratic accommodation almost always looks like from the inside. This is what practicing democratic governance looks like. And practice, accumulated over time, is the only known path to anything better.

Those who care about the outcome for Syria must engage with these ideas honestly—or retreat into the fantasy of reconstruction, the despair of permanent impossibility, or the comfort of watching from a distance while setting temperatures they will never have to live in.

No society that eventually developed democratic governance did so from a position of readiness. What made the difference, where it was made, was not the arrival of the right conditions but the persistence of the attempt under wrong ones. Britain, France, and the United States all arrived at their current democratic arrangements through processes that were violent, exclusionary, and non-linear, and none of them has finished the work. Rwanda built a functioning post-genocide state not by waiting for readiness but by doing specific, hard things under difficult circumstances. South Korea’s democracy emerged from military dictatorship and student massacres. Japan’s was imposed by occupation and took decades to internalize. The endpoint looks “clean” because we know where it ended. The process was anything but.

Syria has had genuine democratic beginnings. Each was interrupted, captured, or destroyed before it could come to fruition. The current moment is not a fresh start. It is the latest attempt, made by a society that carries the full weight of everything that failed before, in conditions of fragmentation and institutional ruin that make it harder than ever. That is not a reason for despair, but for clarity about what is actually being attempted, what has failed before and why, and what it actually requires to work within real constraints.

Liberty is not a goddess to be worshipped but a necessity—like water, like bread. The march toward it does not culminate in transcendence. It culminates, if it culminates at all, in the acceptance of the mundane: the daily, unglamorous work of governing a society that has chosen, imperfectly and provisionally, to govern itself. Syria is not ready for democracy, but it is engaged in democratization. Those are not the same thing, and the difference between them is not failure. It is time, and practice, and the willingness to keep working in a space that is limited but genuine, for as long as that space exists and wherever it can be found.

It was March 2012 in Baghdad, Iraq, and I was busy preparing for my final-year baccalaureate exams. Electricity came in predictable halves, twelve hours on, twelve hours off, enough to plan around, enough to study by. I remember opening Facebook and seeing a headline that felt almost unreal: the Ministry of Electricity projected that by 2013, Iraq would not only meet its own electricity needs but export surplus power. I went back to my books with a sense of direction, as if my effort and time were finally aligned.

Fourteen years later, the power still goes out at nine in the evening. Five minutes later, it is back, courtesy of Abu Karrar’s neighborhood generator, and I go back to doom-scrolling and watching mediocre TV with the family. No one is phased by the outages anymore.

Growing up in Iraq teaches you things no classroom ever will. Plan for every scenario. Trust very little. Hope for the best—and inshallah, it will work out. Or at least, will work out enough to get by.

To understand Iraq, you have to look not just at what its people lack, but at what they have built to fill the gaps.

Abu Karrar owns two power generators and is one of the neighborhood’s unofficial bosses. He is quietly resented by everyone, but openly challenged by no one. His electricity subscription runs year-round, costing $30 to $100 per household per month. In winter, when the government grid manages only 18 to 24 hours of supply, paying feels almost wasteful. But summers in Iraq are always right around the corner. When June arrives, and temperatures climb past fifty degrees Celsius, the grid buckles under millions of air conditioners running simultaneously, and supply drops to eight or twelve hours a day. The subscription that felt unnecessary in January becomes a lifeline in July.

This is just one way Iraqis hedge against a system that continues to fall short.

Consider a dull February afternoon. My salary hits the bank account, and I head out to withdraw it. The teller greets me with the expression of someone who’s been personally wronged. I smile anyway. Sometimes the withdrawal goes through after a brief interrogation—questions that have nothing to do with my account, my salary, or any discernible regulation. Other times, I leave empty-handed, told there are “extra fees” to access my own money. Transferring funds abroad—say, to pay a friend back or cover university tuition—is an entirely separate ordeal, best approached with patience, a full afternoon, and low expectations. This isn’t an exceptional experience. It’s a Tuesday.

In November 2024, nearly 90 trillion Iraqi dinars, about $69 billion, representing around 92% of Iraq’s total money supply, remained outside the banking system, according to former Central Bank of Iraq official Mahmoud Dagher. Additional unquantifiable amounts are stored in gold, worn as jewelry, or kept at home. Gold cannot be rendered inaccessible overnight, as many discovered during Lebanon’s 2019 financial crisis, when savings became effectively untouchable. The generation that lived through the UN sanctions of the 1990s, when the Iraqi dinar lost so much value that people weighed their salaries rather than counted them, does not need an economics degree to understand why. As the saying goes in Iraq, “A woman’s jewelry is not an aesthetic choice. It is her portfolio.”

The logic of holding into gold extends beyond the bedroom safe and into marriage contracts themselves. In Iraq, as across much of the Arab world, a marriage proposal traditionally includes a dowry, or muqadam, a sum paid by the groom to the bride, typically in gold. The clichéd explanation is that it honors the bride. The more honest one is that it functions as a financial guarantee in a society where guarantees are scarce.

The muqadam is a down payment against uncertainty: a formal acknowledgment that if the marriage fails, if the groom has a change of heart or walks away, the bride is not left with nothing. It is contingency planning, written into the wedding contract. Today, as gold prices rise sharply, that tradition is becoming a barrier to entry, with fewer couples able to afford to get married.

Young Iraqis who want to marry find the expected dowry amount increasingly out of reach, and engagements are delayed or abandoned. Not for lack of feeling, but for lack of liquidity. The “golden cage,” as Iraqis sometimes call marriage, has never been more expensive to enter, partly because the metal that built it keeps getting more valuable, and nobody wants to be the generation that stops the tradition.

The side hustle completes the picture of a society that operates on contingency plans. Ask a professional in Iraq what they do, and you’ll often get more than one answer: a government engineer who imports spare parts, a schoolteacher who gives private lessons, a doctor who works in a public hospital by day and represents pharmaceutical products on the side, a public official who speaks in careful, conservative terms in formal settings but, in smaller circles, reveals a far more liberal set of views.

Officially, only about 2% of Iraqis hold more than one job, according to the Iraq Labor Force Survey 2021 (ILO), but this reflects only declared, formal employment.

The gap between that figure and what any Iraqi sees every day tells a clearer story: people have quietly built a parallel economy alongside the official one, driven by the simple understanding that a single income—in a country where salaries can freeze and emergencies arrive unannounced—is not enough.

Open the door to the storage room of almost any Iraqi home, and you are likely to find a curated archive of every crisis survived and every emergency anticipated. Large aluminum pots for cooking for forty, in a household of five. Cardboard boxes from appliances purchased 15 years ago. A suitcase inside a suitcase inside another suitcase. An old stereo, cord carefully wrapped. 15 stacked mattresses. Screwdrivers of every size, some rusty. Boxes whose contents no one fully remembers, preserved by the logic that says, “If we kept it this long, there must have been a reason.” Hoarding isn’t an Iraqi phenomenon per se, yet in this context, every object is a hedge against the next disaster.

But the archive is not only made of objects. During the worst years of sectarian violence and suicide bombings, a discreet and largely undocumented practice spread across Iraqi families: sending siblings to different schools. Not for academic reasons, but for the same reason a financial advisor tells you to diversify your assets: if one fails, the other holds. If one school was bombed, the other child would survive. No study has captured this formally, no policy paper has documented it, yet ask around in Baghdad, and all over Iraq, and you will find it in nearly every circle. A cousin, neighbor, or friend whose parents made that calculation without naming it, because naming it would have meant saying out loud what everyone knows but doesn’t want to admit: “Our children are not safe here.”

The same instinct, operating at scale, occasionally backfires. In March 2025, when Iran halted gas exports to Iraq after strikes on its gas fields, Iraqis felt the ripple before the lights had flickered even once. People flooded the markets, not just for food, but also for oil lamps, relics of the 1990s sanctions era that had sat gathering dust for fifteen or twenty years. Within hours, a lamp selling for $1 was selling for $7.50. Less than two days later, Iranian gas exports resumed, the lights stayed on, and the lamps went back into the storage room—joining the forgotten mattresses and screwdrivers to collect dust for another decade. Seven and a half dollars, successfully wasted, and a missed opportunity to tell our children we once worked under lamplight—the same story our parents used whenever we needed motivation, and they needed leverage.

We survived Saddam Hussein, the civil war, and ISIS, but we may not survive our own mothers buying up all the rice, beans, and oil lamps.

The outermost layer of the Iraqi contingency is the exit plan. A growing number of families own property abroad, in Turkey, Jordan, or a flat in a mid-sized European city, not because they plan to leave, but because having it means they could do so in case the worst happens. The numbers reflect this: Iraqis rank fifth among foreign property buyers in Turkey as of November 2025, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.

Acquiring a second passport is common, and it follows the same logic: acquired through investment or ancestry, held discreetly, renewed faithfully, and valued for what the Iraqi passport simply cannot offer. Iraq’s travel document ranks among the weakest globally, a fact that needs no elaboration for anyone who has stood in a visa queue and watched others walk through doors that remain closed to them.

Since 2005, Iraqi law has permitted dual citizenship, making it legally and practically viable to hold a second passport as a form of mobility and insurance. Since 2017, advisory firms have reported sharp increases in Iraqi applications for citizenship-by-investment programs, with interest rising during periods of instability. For those who can afford it, a second passport is another long-term hedge—a way to secure movement, access opportunities, and keep an exit option open if it’s ever needed.

In Iraq, stability is pieced together from whatever is available: a second income, a quarter kilo of gold, a safe in the closet, a phone call answered on the first ring, an oil lamp kept just in case. It isn’t assumed or inherited.

And in the corner of the storage room, behind the suitcases, there is an A3-sized family portrait from the late 1990s. The photographer instructed everyone to smile, and they did, two, perhaps three generations, lined up together, composed and present, despite everything crumbling around them. Wars, shortages, uncertainty. They lived anyway. They nurtured, planned, and adapted, and somewhere in that photograph is the origin of Iraq’s parallel economy. The need for contingency was not a burden they chose. It was an inheritance they had no choice but to pass on to the next generation.

Right next to it, there is just enough empty space where something used to be. Someone, finally, threw it out. It is a small revolution. It is a start.

The Arab League endures the way a long-abandoned structure does: still standing, still recognized, but no longer where anything important happens. Its summits continue on schedule, yet they no longer organize the region’s politics. Those have moved elsewhere—into bilateral deals, security pacts, smaller blocs, and arrangements shaped as much by outside powers as by the states themselves.

As the Arab League dies, it is time for its members to recognize the Gulf’s new regional order.

Whereas the Arab League has weak institutions and ideological ties, the Gulf, through the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has become the only successful bloc in the region, building something the average Arab can either be proud of or envy. The region needs results, and the Gulf must lead the charge.

The Arab League was born when Cairo emerged as the center of Arab political imagination. After WWII, wartime diplomacy produced the Alexandria Protocol of 1944 and, later, the founding Charter signed in Cairo on March 22, 1945. The League was built to bring the Arab nations under one roof, sharing a common cause and a sense of unity. Yet, the foundation depended on a central pillar: Egyptian convening power.

Today, that pillar no longer holds the same weight. While Egypt remains consequential, it also maintains constraints that render pan-regional leadership increasingly difficult. Economic pressure has tightened Cairo’s margin for geopolitical entrepreneurship. International Monetary Fund (IMF) reporting and international coverage show repeated stabilization cycles, reliance on external financing, and large Gulf-linked investment inflows have been critical lifelines in recent years.

Although a country managing macro and microeconomic stress may still influence the region, it cannot lead a project built on expansive regional coordination and ideological cohesion. The Arab League is missing its ideological anchor.

As Egypt’s Arabism shrinks, the Arab League collapses with it, as it never built mechanisms strong enough to function without a leader. This has become increasingly evident through state behavior, as the League’s basic maintenance has decayed. In 2017, Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit complained publicly that member states were not paying their dues: only 23% of the funding requirement had been received at that point in the year; only 44% of the budget had been covered the year before; and some members had not paid for three years.

Institutions that matter do not have to beg their members to bankroll their existence. That kind of refusal is evidence that the Arab League is on its way out.

The Arab League’s weaknesses are not episodic; rather, they arise from deep structural deficiencies.

First, the League’s early institutional instincts became its routine. Authoritarian leaders, most of whom arrived on coup tanks, learned to weaponize “Arab unity” as a shield to get the Arab League’s attention. They crafted agendas through collectivist language, got rid of accountability measures, and used the League as a stage to manufacture consensus, but never delivered its promised outcomes for the people. It became a vicious cycle: protecting regimes first, coordinating states second, and serving societies last—if ever.

In practice, the League evolved into an institution that normalized power grabs, sanctified repression through diplomatic language, and wielded “unity” as a tool to ensure regime survival. Its continuance preserved the illusion that something larger existed, even when member-states refused to act like members of anything.

The League’s voting decisions outlined in Article 7 of the Charter have effectively killed collective action. Today, unanimous Council decisions bind all member states while majority decisions bind only those states that accept them. This structure incentivizes veto-by-indifference. Any state can block a binding action simply by refusing unanimity, or can ignore majority decisions by refusing acceptance. To pass anything, the safest policy becomes the vaguest.

The Arab League also suffers from paralysis, caught in the same cycle with every crisis: internal division, carefully crafted public statements, delayed action, and outcomes shaped by actors outside the League.

The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is one of the clearest examples of Arab collective security failing to stop catastrophe.

Kuwait explicitly appealed to the Arab League to activate its joint defense mechanisms and organize a military response, but divisions among member states blocked any unified action; even a basic condemnation was never issued, with several governments refusing to sign and others opposing the use of force altogether An emergency summit was delayed by disagreements and ultimately produced a split outcome—some states backed intervention, others rejected it, and key actors hedged or abstained.

In the absence of an effective Arab response, the crisis was quickly absorbed into the international system: the UN condemned the invasion within days, and a U.S.-led coalition of dozens of countries—not the Arab League—carried out the military campaign that expelled Iraqi forces and restored Kuwaiti sovereignty. This pattern—internal division, procedural delay, and reliance on external power—has repeated across subsequent regional conflicts, where wars spill beyond borders, rival states back opposing sides, and the League’s consensus-driven diplomacy produces statements that register concern but rarely alter outcomes.

In the latest war, a new test arrived at the Gulf’s doorstep. As Iran’s missile and drone strikes hit Gulf states, the Arab League’s response followed its familiar script: an emergency ministerial meeting, condemnations, and a call for the UN Security Council to act. The GCC, meanwhile, spoke and coordinated as a bloc, demonstrating what functioning blocs do when they are attacked. While the League agonizes over issuing statements, the Gulf actually produces policy.

The League’s fiction depends on pretending that “Arab” is a sufficient category for strategic coordination. Geography and incentive structures would disagree.

What concrete mutual benefit binds countries such as Mauritania and Bahrain tightly enough to form a meaningful security or economic bloc? One sits at the Atlantic edge of North Africa; the other sits on the Gulf’s contested waters. Their threat perceptions barely touch, and their economies do not interlock naturally. Their strategic horizons do not overlap in ways that can ever produce shared policy outcomes. This is only one of many such examples.

Arab nationalism reached its peak when it was utilized for power, most famously under the former president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who turned pan-Arabism into an instrument for geopolitical and domestic legitimacy. Despite my opposition to Nasserism on almost every level, it did offer a sense of purpose—misdirected, coercive, and often catastrophic, but purpose nonetheless.

Then came the long, slow march toward decay. Arabism diluted as its leaders lost power, promoting slogans without capacity and unity without any enforcement mechanism. A vacuum opened for another supra-national glue to unite the region, one that political Islam rushed to occupy.

In practice, political Islam was a leech on the region, feeding on collapsing economies, converting grievance into recruitment, and treating institutions as prizes to be won. It destroyed whole states, leaving behind failed governance and an exhausted, often radicalized, public.

Arabism and political Islam lost favor by mistaking identity for strategy. While identity mobilizes crowds, only shared interests, credible institutions, and binding commitments can govern states—a lesson the Arab League refuses to absorb.

By contrast, the GCC maintains coordination and strong institutions, sharing waterways, facing exposure to energy-market shocks, harboring deterrence anxieties, and experiencing economic interdependence. That coherence does not guarantee perfection, but it at least produces functionality. Research on Arab regionalism has long pointed out that smaller blocs tend to function better than the Arab League. Groups like the GCC have been able to coordinate more effectively not just because they include fewer countries, but because their members share closer political priorities and face similar security concerns—making agreement and action easier to achieve.

Voices in Gulf discourse have finally begun saying the quiet part out loud. Withdrawal, or at least a serious downgrading of the League’s relevance, is necessary for prosperity. The region must replace frameworks built on ideological unity with practical alliances. Doing so, however, would trigger outrage from capitals that treat “Arabism” as a rhetorical shield while exposing what the League has become.

In practice, institutions like this don’t disappear just because they stop delivering results. The Arab League is likely to keep holding summits and issuing statements, maintaining the appearance of a unified Arab political arena, even as actual coordination shifts elsewhere—toward smaller blocs and ad hoc coalitions built around shared interests rather than shared identity.

A declaration of death would not betray Arab identity. It would admit that identity alone cannot govern, defend, or develop. The League was born to reflect the Middle East of the 1950s, but today that world is gone—and it is time to state that plainly, rather than preserve a fiction no longer anchored in reality.

War with Iran. Proxy escalation in the Levant. Great power maneuvering from Moscow to Washington to Paris and Beijing. Sanctions, shadow fleets, drones, assassinations, and covert deals. This is not chaos. This is transition.

We are seeing what a multipolar world looks like where power is no longer in the hands of a single hegemon but distributed among a constellation of actors. This is where the idea stops being a theory and becomes the driving force behind international politics.

Islamic theology presents the idea of barzakh, which refers to a middle realm—the suspended space between death and resurrection. That is where we are today: no longer in the American-led order, not yet in a multipolar one, but caught in an unstable passage between these two states.

Here, power does not disappear. It fragments.

In a multipolar world—rather, in the barzakh leading to it—imperial logic prevails.

Not formal empires with flags and colonies, but spheres of influence, leveraged via energy chokepoints, trade wars, technological advances and geography.

In this dispersed world order, trade is the overriding currency. Security is exchanged for access, oil for weapons, votes for protection, and silence for safety. It is survival of the adaptable, where inflexible, ideologically driven regimes struggle to survive.

To flourish, you must do business. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Levant and Iran, historic gateways at the crossroads of empire. Here, survival has always depended on managing the ambitions of surrounding powers: Rome and Persia. Ottomans and Safavids. Britain and France. The United States and Russia. Now China, Turkey, the United States and the Gulf.

The rule is simple: if you cannot balance competing interests, you become battle terrain.

For all its defiance, this is exactly what the Islamic regime has done to Iran. Through its inflexibility, Iran’s rulers have transformed it from a regional contender into a battlefield, bypassing opportunities to recalibrate and adjust.

For movements built on disruption and resistance, the adjustment is harsher. In a transactional multipolar world order, there are no permanent friends, only temporary patrons. These causes become instruments as militias morph into subcontractors and their ideology becomes branding.

Over time, many such movements mutate. They survive not through popular legitimacy but through underground revenue streams, trading in smuggling, drugs, human trafficking, espionage, and protection rackets. True believers fill the ranks. Crime lords manage the finances. The rhetoric remains revolutionary but the structure resembles organized crime.

In a fragmented world order, multipolarity does not eliminate resistance. It professionalizes, and often corrupts it. So, what of democracy? The institution that has dominated Western politics for decades will come under strain, incapable of absorbing the new imperative for pure transaction.

In places where democracy has strong institutional roots, this will resemble a crisis of confidence. Voters will grow cynical and polarization will intensify as transactional geopolitics tempts leaders to sacrifice principle for advantage. In time, democratic societies will be forced to renew themselves to remain relevant, or relinquish their foothold and hollow out from within.

Where democratic roots are weak, democracy will continue to hover beyond reach. Leaders will invoke sovereignty in the name of stability and citizens will be told to wait for security, growth and order. The waiting can last generations.

The transition to multipolarity is no clean reset. It is not the birth of a just equilibrium among civilizations. It is a renegotiation of power—conducted the way power has always been secured: through war, diplomacy, coercion, cooperation, and competition.

The end result will not be less flawed than the current order. It will simply be flawed differently. Eventually, there will be room to reassert principles and to rebuild norms but that moment will not arrive automatically. It will have to be fought for, intellectually and politically, inside societies as much as between them.

For now, we are in a free-for-all transition. The question is not whether multipolarity is coming. It is whether democracies can survive this transactional age without relinquishing their principles and becoming transactional at the core.

One way this will be tested is through the use of force. During the post-Cold War era, military action was justified through imminent threats—a regime about to attack, a terrorist network preparing a strike, or weapons programs crossing a red line.

In a transitional multipolar environment, the calculus broadens. Military action is not just for immediate danger. It is summoned by long-term positioning: containing an adversary before it consolidates power, securing critical corridors and supply chains, protecting access to energy and strategic minerals, reinforcing alliance systems, or denying rivals a technological or military advantage.

These are not threats that are easily grasped by the public. They unfold slowly, across regions and decades.

The temptation for governments is to argue that strategic action cannot wait for prolonged public debate. We see this playing out in the contest over Taiwan, where supply chains, maritime corridors, semiconductor dominance, and the balance of power across the Pacific are setting the timeline for China’s next move.

And we see it in the United States, where democracy appears to have been supplanted by strategic imperatives. The current war with Iran, initiated without explicit congressional authorization, has triggered a heated debate over executive war powers and constitutional limits.

For supporters, the strategic rationale is clear: preventing Iran from reaching a tipping point in missile and nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional balance of power justifies the actions taken. Critics respond that no imminent threat was demonstrated and reiterate the constitutional requirement for Congress to authorize war.

Both arguments reveal a deeper tension.

Democratic systems were designed for an era in which war was exceptional and clearly defined. Multipolar transitions are messier. They generate gray zones where strategic calculations collide with democratic procedures.

At the same time, the United States is entering this transition under conditions of intense polarization. Republicans and Democrats now interpret foreign policy primarily through the lens of domestic political competition. As each side mobilizes its base, narratives harden and nuance disappears. Facts are selectively deployed and strategic debate collapses into partisan signaling.

When that happens, democratic norms begin to erode—not because democracy has failed, but because it is struggling to operate under conditions it was never designed to withstand.

Yet this conversation cannot be avoided indefinitely. At some point, American political leadership will need to re-establish a minimal strategic consensus—a recognition that certain principles and procedures must remain intact even as the geopolitical environment becomes more volatile.

Without such a framework, the transition to multipolarity will not only reshape global power. It will destabilize the democratic systems meant to manage it. And so we return to the condition of barzakh, an in-between world where the old system has lost authority but the new one is not yet legitimate. The question is whether we can cross over without losing the principles that made the previous order worth defending in the first place. Because if we cannot, the world that emerges on the other side will not merely redistribute power. It will redefine our concept of legitimacy entirely.

In a 2009 interview on a Canadian-Islamic channel, Tariq Ramadan discussed his views on women’s rights in Islam. “I don’t think Islam has a problem with women—Muslims have,” he said.

Ramadan, then a professor at Oxford University, argued that Muslim societies are mostly concerned about the roles and functions of women, when “the starting point should be your relationship with God.” Muslims must “speak about women as beings,” he said, and the hijab must not be enforced. “It’s against Islam to impose on a woman to wear the headscarf, and it’s against women’s rights to impose on her to take it off,” Ramadan continued.

This was during the peak of his career. At the time, Ramadan was a star in the Muslim world, his charisma and progressive views on Islam drawing concert-sized audiences. Many women saw him as a defender of their rights, and Time magazine named him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004.

That all changed in 2017, when Ramadan was accused of sexual assault. Last month, a Paris court sentenced Ramadan—in absentia—to 18 years in jail for raping three women.

He had already been convicted in Switzerland in 2024 for a separate rape case.

Ramadan’s lawyers said the 63-year-old was being treated in Geneva for multiple sclerosis and condemned the trial as a farce. To this day, he continues to claim the charges are politically motivated, citing Islamophobia.

Though a warrant has been issued for Ramadan’s arrest, Switzerland does not have an extradition treaty with its neighbor. Ramadan also faces a permanent ban from French territory.

The long-awaited conviction marks the latest fall from grace of a man who posed as a leading “moderate” figure, despite his family background. Ramadan’s maternal grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, and his father, Said Ramadan, was one of the organization’s leading figures.

The making of his public persona can be traced to the 1990s, when, during his burgeoning interest in Islam, he undertook intensive religious studies in Egypt before returning to Switzerland. In his 2009 book, What I Believe, Ramadan describes his spiritual awakening as a desire to “build bridges” between the Western and Islamic worlds. He said that he favored an interpretive rather than a literal reading of the Qur’an.

Western liberals embraced Ramadan as a bridge between cultures. Born in Switzerland, fluent in French and English, he cut a suave, liberal figure for a Western audience while retaining a certain authority in the Muslim world.

Although he insisted that he disavowed the views of his fundamentalist grandfather, some observers noted that his dissertation on Hassan al-Banna’s work appeared sympathetic. Charles Genequand, his principal supervisor in the 1990s, said Ramadan’s thesis was “trying to place Hassan al-Banna within a reformist movement of Islam that existed in the 19th century, while camouflaging his very conservative vision.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose slogan is “Islam is the solution,” is designated as a terrorist group and banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The US government has taken steps to label specific foreign branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations.

Ramadan’s association with Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood cleric based in Qatar, also raised some eyebrows. Egyptian-born al-Qaradawi had previously defended suicide bombings and claimed the Holocaust was a “punishment” for Jews.

Ramadan’s ambiguity was further exposed during a televised debate on secularism and Islam. Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, tried to get the scholar to condemn the Islamic punishment of stoning for adultery. Instead, Ramadan said there ought to be a “moratorium” on such practices.

It’s no wonder the French writer Caroline Fourest argued that Ramadan presented a moderate face to Western audiences while conveying different messages to the Muslim world.

Despite these emerging contradictions, Ramadan’s rise continued. In 2005, he was awarded a fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and in 2009, he was appointed to the University of Oxford chair in Contemporary Islamic Studies funded by Qatar. Ramadan seemed untouchable. Ultimately, it was sexual misconduct that would undo him, as it has so many other powerful men.

In 2017, the #MeToo movement came for him with multiple allegations of sexual assault in France and Switzerland. One of the victims was Henda Ayari, a former Salafi Muslim. She said she approached Ramadan at a time in her life when she felt “lost and weak”. Ayari was separated from her husband and had been told to remove her Islamic veil to find work.

After contacting Ramadan online for advice, the mother of three agreed to meet him in his Paris hotel room in 2012. He “kissed” her, “choked me so hard I thought I would die,” “slapped” her, cursed at her, and “humiliated” her before raping her. “He pounced on me like a wild animal,” Ayari said.

She blamed herself for meeting him alone and remained silent for many years, claiming he’d threatened her children.

Another woman—a disabled Muslim convert known as “Christelle”—alleged that she was raped and beaten by Ramadan in a hotel in Lyon in 2009. She provided investigators with messages and identified an intimate scar on Ramadan’s body.

Then others began coming forward. Several women claimed Ramadan had conducted sexual relationships with them when they were underage students in Geneva. One girl who rejected his advances was 14.

Initially, Ramadan denied having sexual relations with the woman. But following his 2018 arrest in France, an investigation revealed text messages exchanged between him and Christelle that appeared to corroborate her version of events.

“I sensed your discomfort … sorry for my ‘violence’. I liked it … Do you want more? Not disappointed?” he wrote to her the following day. A few hours later, he wrote: “You didn’t like it … I’m sorry [Christelle]. Sorry.”

Ramadan was forced to admit he’d had affairs with at least five women, but insisted they were consensual. No wonder the married father of four wanted a “moratorium” on corporal punishment—under Islamic law, the punishment for adultery is stoning to death.

As legal pressure mounted, Ramadan was in and out of the hospital with multiple sclerosis. His lawyer argued that his condition was “incompatible with detention”, and he was released on bail after 10 months.

Throughout it all, the academic has framed the charges as being politically motivated, claiming most of it was down to Islamophobia. In his 2019 book Devoir de Vérité (Duty of Truth), he compared his legal troubles to the 19th-century Dreyfus Affair, claiming he was the victim of a political witch-hunt. Just as French captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason on account of his Jewish heritage, Ramadan was, he said, being framed in an “anti-Muslim” plot.

In some of the media coverage, Ramadan was able to claim, largely unchallenged, that he was the target of a “witch hunt” and that his enemies “worked together with the Zionists” on his downfall.

His accusers also feared they would suffer if court proceedings were open to the public. One woman alleged she was spat upon, slapped, insulted, and followed by his supporters.

Moreover, the response from institutions was far from immediate. Oxford University allowed Ramadan to continue teaching for three weeks before granting him a leave of absence. Eugene Rogan, the director of Oxford’s Middle East Center, argued that some students felt it was “another way for Europeans to gang up against a prominent Muslim intellectual.

“We must protect Muslim students who believe and trust in him, and protect that trust,” Rogan said.

This prompted concerns that Ramadan was being held to different standards on account of his religion. Then, in September 2024, a Swiss appeals court in Geneva convicted the scholar of rape and sexual coercion, overturning a previous acquittal from 2023. He was sentenced to three years in prison, with one year to be served, following an attack on a woman in a Geneva hotel in 2008. Two years on, a Paris court has found him guilty of raping three women.

As Ramadan was hospitalized in Switzerland, he was tried in absentia. Switzerland does not generally extradite its citizens, making it unlikely that he’ll actually serve his sentence. Ramadan has also announced that he will appeal.

For many years, Tariq Ramadan’s contradictions and doublespeak were glossed over by a Western audience that desperately wanted to believe in an Islam that could be compatible with European societies. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of women’s dignity—something, ironically, that this venerated Islamic scholar had been claiming to defend.

In July 2005, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement was formally established with a call signed by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, campaigning for three core demands: ending Israeli occupation of lands captured in 1967, recognition of full equality for Arab citizens of Israel, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees—nearly 7 million people, close to the number of Jewish citizens of Israel—as established under UN Resolution 194.

The movement markets itself as inspired by the international campaign against apartheid South Africa in the late 1950s. But unlike that campaign, which targeted racial segregation inside a single state, BDS operates in a national conflict between two peoples—one that includes issues of borders, competing claims to statehood, and one of the most complex refugee situations in modern history.

During its 21 years of work, BDS has achieved some milestones. It pressured several European pension funds into divesting from companies tied to Israeli settlement activity. In 2018, Airbnb briefly announced it would remove listings in West Bank settlements—the company later reversed that decision after legal complications—and the movement has been effective in raising awareness about Palestinian political rights on Western university campuses.

But alongside those achievements, BDS has built a habit of going after the wrong people, including its calls for boycotting the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land,” which describes the realities of the occupation in the Masafer Yatta villages, calling to boycott the civil society group “Standing Together,” and calling to boycott the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, co-founded by the Palestinian author Edward Said.”

Its calls for academic and cultural boycotts have drawn serious criticism, including from Iranian American author Arash Azizi, who argued in The Atlantic that such boycotts are both counterproductive and morally misguided. His sharpest point concerns BDS’s treatment of organizations that bring Israelis and Palestinians together. The movement sees this kind of cooperation as “normalization” and pressures supporters to reject it entirely. Practically, this means the people most likely to be boycotted are not Israeli government ministers or settlement builders — they are Israeli citizens who oppose the occupation, and Palestinians who believe engagement is more useful than isolation.

This is where BDS’s position becomes self-defeating. Normalization is a real concern when joint events are used to whitewash ongoing violations. But BDS has expanded the definition until it covers almost any sustained contact between Israelis and Palestinians who are not in conflict. That does not serve Palestinians living under occupation. It simply narrows the space for anyone trying to end it.

The most recent example makes this clear. In December 2025, the UK announced—in partnership with the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), a nonpartisan coalition of nearly 170 NGOs—that it would host a fundraising conference on March 12, 2026, at Lancaster House, as part of its new Middle East Strategy. This came the same year the UK formally recognized Palestinian statehood. Recently, the British government called for an investigation into the killing of five Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. ALLMEP’s member organizations lobby against settlement expansion and restrictions on Palestinian movement. The conference is designed to raise funds for Palestinian-Israeli dialogue work—not to normalize the occupation.

BDS rushed almost immediately, labeling the conference a “normalization event” and calling the UK government “complicit in genocide.” By February, it escalated and issued targeted action alerts against Lancaster House itself, where the crowdfunding is set to take place.

At the height of that peace process, the international community invested nearly $44 per capita annually to support civil society, dialogue, and reconciliation infrastructure. For Israelis and Palestinians, the equivalent figure is $2 per capita per year, twenty-two times less. The architecture that helped end one of Europe’s longest conflicts was built through exactly the kind of sustained, funded, people-to-people work that BDS is now campaigning to shut down.

A movement founded to end an occupation should not be in the business of targeting the spaces where Israelis and Palestinians try to build something different. It is possible for two things to be true at the same time: to oppose the military occupation of the West Bank and to call for dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. Without this dialogue, how does BDS expect this conflict to end?

On April 8, just hours after Washington and Tehran announced a two-week pause in hostilities to allow for direct negotiations, Hezbollah declared victory, as it has done previously, regardless of the facts. Minutes later, the truth exploded all over Lebanon. Israel unleashed the heaviest wave of strikes since its war with Israel began, killing at least 254 people and injuring around 1,200.

The latest wave of violence threatened the fragile ceasefire and prompted Iran to pull back on its promise to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The US and Israel have responded with claims that Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire agreement. Iran and mediator Pakistan say it is. Efforts to spin this as a “legitimate misunderstanding” fool no one. Lebanon’s exclusion from the deal was deliberate.

This is the moment the Hezbollah myth breaks in public: the organization that dragged Lebanon into the fire “for Iran” has discovered that Iran can protect its interests while Lebanon burns.

It is possible that Hezbollah was never included in the deal in the first place. In this case, the group was used as an auxiliary front, activated when Iran needed leverage, then sidelined once it secured a pause. Or, Hezbollah was included in theory, only to be carved out of the agreement in practice.

The second option explains the public contradiction. If Lebanon was discussed, it was discussed as an external file—a separate arena that Israel could continue to “sanitize” while Iran enjoys the benefits of a truce. That is what a carve-out looks like: the ceasefire protects the signatories, and the non-signatory becomes fair game.

Either way, Hezbollah’s strategic problem is exposed: once you choose to be a proxy, you are never guaranteed proxy protection.

The foundations of Hezbollah’s predicament were laid long ago, when the group’s founding doctrine pledged obedience to the Iranian jurist-leader and cemented its status as a mercenary group. In today’s politics, the relationship is described even more bluntly. A recent analysis cited Lebanon’s prime minister as saying that the IRGC commands Hezbollah, while commentators have claimed that the group cannot disarm without Iran’s authorization.

Hezbollah’s role in the conflict that erupted following US-Israeli strikes on Iran reflects this dynamic. Its entry into the war was not a Lebanese sovereign decision. It did it because it was ordered to do so, after the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader on February 28. That is the definition of a mercenary dynamic: a Lebanese organization initiating a Lebanese front in response to an Iranian trigger.

With that comes the consequences—the moment you learn your employer can stop the war and still watch your people bleed.

The strikes that followed the ceasefire on April 8 unleashed a wave of destruction across Lebanon, with central Beirut neighborhoods hit, hundreds killed nationwide, hospitals damaged, ambulances struck, and whole families erased in minutes. The UN described casualty reports as “appalling,” with the human rights chief calling the destruction “horrific.”

They are all to blame. Israel, for using civilian pain to squeeze political outcomes in what can only be described as a criminal act. Hezbollah for embedding within civilian communities and forcing ordinary people to become the canvas on which military messages are written. And the Lebanese authorities, for presiding over prolonged political paralysis. A state that cannot prevent war, cannot contain escalation, and cannot even establish a unified negotiating posture is less like a sovereign state and more like an emergency NGO issuing appeals over rubble.

The Lebanese government announced a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities last month after the group opened fire on Israel, but it was never backed by any action. The ban was another theatrical performance, nothing more.

The army, too, is caught in a crisis, reluctant to enforce the state’s monopoly over arms and confront Hezbollah. This undermines efforts to pull Lebanon out of war and separate the state from Hezbollah.

As officials scrambled to clarify whether Lebanon was included in the truce, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam insisted that no one negotiates for Lebanon except the state. This is the contradiction that kills countries like Lebanon, where everyone declares sovereignty but nobody wields it.

Clearly, the ceasefire has not ended the war in Lebanon, but it has clarified the status of a key political player. From now on, Hezbollah can no longer claim to be Lebanon’s shield; it is Iran’s instrument—manipulated by Iranian priorities and abandoned when they shift. The fatal weakness of mercenary politics has been exposed: the proxy is excluded from political processes and then left to count the dead. Beirut learned that lesson yesterday, and it will live with the consequences for years to come.

I was genuinely surprised.

Not by a statement from Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, but by an interview aired by Al Jazeera. Jasem Mohamed Al Budaiwi, Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council said:

“This is one of the most dangerous and sensitive phases the GCC has faced since its founding… comparable to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990… What Iran has done is unjustified aggression and unprovoked attacks against the countries of the region.”

For years, much of the Arab media ecosystem, including Al Jazeera, maintained a calibrated tone when it came to Iran. Critical at times, but often cautious, especially when Iran positioned itself within the broader narrative of resistance against Israel or the United States.

This interview was different. It reflected a level of clarity and frustration I haven’t seen before.

To understand why this matters, it is worth recalling how quickly the Arab position on Iran has evolved over the past decade.

There was a time not long ago when Saudi Arabia’s leadership described Iran’s supreme leader in existential terms. Mohammed bin Salman once warned that Ayatollah Khamenei was “the new Hitler of the Middle East,” capturing the depth of the perceived threat at the time.

But that phase did not last.

By 2023, the region had moved in a very different direction. Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to restore diplomatic relations in a deal brokered by China. The agreement was widely seen as a significant step toward de-escalation after years of proxy conflict, with the potential to stabilize key states like Yemen and reduce regional tensions more broadly.

This shift was part of a broader strategic calculation across the Gulf. The priority became stability. Economic transformation agendas, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, required a more predictable regional environment. Engagement with Iran was about risk management, not trust.

And for a brief moment, it seemed to work.

The region experienced a relative cooling of tensions. Communication channels reopened, and the prospect of a managed coexistence, however tenuous, appeared possible.

That moment is now over.

The current conflict has exposed the limits of that approach. Iran is no longer perceived primarily through the lens of ideological rivalry or distant proxy conflicts. It is now seen as a direct and immediate security threat.

The targeting of Gulf infrastructure, airports, and energy assets has had a profound effect on policy thinking. These are countries that, until recently, were actively pursuing de-escalation. They engaged diplomatically, avoided confrontation, and in some cases positioned themselves as intermediaries.

And yet, they were still targeted.

From a policy perspective, the assumption that engagement could meaningfully reduce exposure to Iranian ire is now being reassessed. What was previously seen as a strategy to lower risk is increasingly viewed as insufficient in the face of direct threats.

The language coming out of the Gulf reflects this recalibration. The tone is more direct, less hedged, and increasingly aligned across capitals that historically approached Iran differently.

The Gulf has never been a fully unified strategic bloc. Qatar’s mediation role, Oman’s neutrality, Saudi Arabia’s leadership ambitions, and the UAE’s strategic pragmatism have often led to policy divergence.

What is developing now is a more unified assessment of Iran as a shared security concern.

This does not necessarily mean escalation is imminent. Gulf states are deeply invested in avoiding a wider regional war. But it does suggest that the fundamental baseline has moved. Engagement may continue, but it will be pursued with fewer illusions and under stricter assumptions about risk.

For policymakers in Washington and European capitals, this moment should be read carefully.

The Arab position is adaptive and shaped more by events than by ideology. Over the past decade, it has moved from confrontation to cautious engagement, and now back toward a more skeptical and security-driven posture.

What is different this time is the speed and clarity of the shift.

And that is why the interview on Al Jazeera matters. It signaled that the way Iran is being framed, not just by governments but in broader Arab discourse, is changing again.

The region has seen these cycles before. But each time, the stakes get higher. The Arabs have changed their minds about Iran. Again. And whatever happens next will determine whether the Gulf’s reassessment of Iran leads to lasting change or another temporary adjustment.

A missile strike lands near Tehran. Within minutes, the footage is translated and shared across diaspora networks from London to Los Angeles. At the same time, families tied to Beirut refresh their phones as evacuation warnings spread and neighborhoods are reduced to rubble.

This is no longer a distant war. For millions of Iranians and Lebanese abroad, it is a daily reality, experienced in real time, shaped from afar, and argued over across borders.

But proximity has not engendered unity. It has exposed deeper disagreements about what the future should look like and who gets to define it.

As war and economic recession continue in Lebanon, the diaspora has become indispensable. Remittances are sustaining families, funding evacuations, and replacing basic state functions.

Alongside this economic role, a more controversial idea has resurfaced among segments of the Lebanese Christian diaspora: the possibility of an autonomous, or even independent, Christian-majority entity centered in Mount Lebanon.

This reflects a growing sense that the Lebanese state, in its current form, is no longer viable. Hezbollah’s military dominance, repeated cycles of conflict, and prolonged institutional breakdown have led some to revisit older visions of decentralization or partition.

Support for such proposals is limited and difficult to quantify. Among a smaller but increasingly organized current within the Lebanese Christian diaspora, the Christian Lebanon Initiative has articulated a structured proposal for the creation of a sovereign Christian state in Mount Lebanon. The movement presents its project as a lawful, phased strategy grounded in constitutional and international frameworks, outlining steps that include building transnational community structures, developing coordinated civic and economic networks, and preparing legal arguments for potential self-determination.

While these ideas remain contested and do not represent the majority of Lebanese Christians, their growing visibility reinforces how diaspora spaces can become arenas where competing, and at times controversial, visions of national futures are articulated and debated.

Within some segments of the diaspora, particularly among communities historically aligned with Hezbollah’s political base, there are voices that continue to view Hezbollah as a legitimate actor within Lebanon’s political system and as part of the broader Axis of Resistance. Supporters argue that its role functions as a deterrent in a volatile regional environment and represents a constituency that cannot be excluded from Lebanon’s power-sharing structure. From this perspective, calls for external pressure, disarmament, or structural exclusion risk destabilizing the country further.

At the same time, other voices within the Lebanese diaspora argue that Hezbollah should be disarmed fully and without delay, framing their position as consistent with Lebanon’s official commitment to place all weapons under state authority. They point to the government’s approval in September of the Lebanese army’s plan, presented by General Rodolphe Haykal, to bring all arms, particularly Hezbollah’s, under state control. For supporters of immediate disarmament, this decision represents an institutional mandate to strengthen the state’s monopoly over force and implement existing security commitments.

Their argument is shaped not only by frustration with prolonged conflict, but also by concerns about continued Iranian involvement in Lebanese affairs, which reinforces parallel military structures and complicates full sovereignty. From this perspective, completing the army’s plan is a necessary step toward restoring state authority, stabilizing the country, and creating conditions for long-term peace.

These positions, partition, reform-within-unity, and continued resistance alignment, reflect not a single diaspora narrative, but a divided political landscape that mirrors Lebanon’s internal divisions.

The Iranian diaspora is similarly divided about who should govern Iran.

One of the most visible tensions is between those who support a return to monarchy, often associated with the legacy of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and those calling for a democratic system that rejects both the current regime and Iran’s monarchical past. Among monarchist-leaning segments of the diaspora, his son, Reza Pahlavi, is increasingly seen as a legitimate successor or, at minimum, a unifying transitional figure. This support is visible in diaspora protests and echoed inside Iran, where slogans such as “Javid Shah” (“Long live the Shah”) have re-emerged, alongside chants calling for the return of the Pahlavi dynasty . These expressions reflect not only nostalgia for the monarchy, but also a search for recognizable leadership in the absence of a clear alternative.

At the same time, this vision is heavily contested. Some Iranians, continue to associate the monarchy with authoritarian rule, arguing that calls to restore it overlook the repression and inequalities that contributed to the Iranian Revolution. Critics within the diaspora often emphasize that replacing one centralized authority with another risks repeating patterns of exclusion and political repression. Instead, they advocate for pluralistic and democratic frameworks that prioritize institutional accountability over individual leadership. This divide is not only ideological but generational, reflecting different lived experiences of Iran’s past and different expectations for its future.

These divisions shape how diaspora communities engage with the outside world, what kind of change they advocate for, and how they frame Iran’s future to international audiences.

In both cases, distance does not remove people from political life, but reshapes how they participate in it. Calls for partition in Lebanon or restoration in Iran may gain traction abroad partly because the immediate consequences are less visible. The risks—renewed conflict, instability, unintended outcomes—fall primarily on those on the ground.

This does not make diaspora voices irrelevant. But it does mean they operate under different conditions, with different constraints. Despite their divisions, both diasporas play a real role in current events.

Lebanese abroad are sustaining an economy in free fall. Iranians abroad are shaping how protests, repression, and war are seen globally, through media, advocacy, and political lobbying.

They influence narratives, fund survival, and keep attention on crises that might otherwise fade from the news cycle. But they do so without consensus, and often in competition with one another.

Many in the diaspora live between two realities: physically in one country, but emotionally and politically tied to another. War, protest, and collapse don’t seem so far away—they show up daily, on screens, in conversations, and in the impossible choices people have to make.

This creates a form of engagement that is immediate but uneven. Close enough to care deeply, far enough to be removed from the full consequences of every decision.

The role of the diaspora in Iran and Lebanon is complicated. It is neither detached nor decisive, neither purely constructive nor inherently harmful.

The question is how to understand their influence without overstating it, or dismissing it. Because in both Iran and Lebanon, the future is no longer being imagined only within national borders. It is being debated, contested, and partially shaped far beyond them.

And that reality is becoming harder to ignore.

A government does not need to ban something outright to make its intentions clear. Sometimes it only needs to regulate it so tightly, so selectively, and so ideologically that the message becomes unmistakable. That is what happened in Damascus last week.

The controversy began when the Damascus governorate issued Decision No. 311, barring the serving of alcohol in restaurants and nightclubs across the capital, requiring bars and clubs to convert their licenses into café permits, and restricting the sale of sealed bottles to a few predominantly Christian neighborhoods, including Bab Touma, Bab Sharqi, and al-Qassaa. The decree also imposed location rules that require outlets to be at least 75 meters from schools and places of worship and 20 meters from security facilities, with businesses given three months to comply. Reuters described it as one of the clearest signs yet of the Islamist-led authorities’ turn toward conservative social enforcement.

After the backlash exploded, Damascus officials tried to walk it back without really withdrawing it. In a late clarification carried by state media, the governorate insisted the measure was merely “organizational,” not new in principle, and rooted in older regulations dating back to 1952 and later administrative decisions. It also said five-star hotels were exempt, apologized to residents of Bab Touma, Bab Sharqi, and al-Qassaa for the “misunderstanding,” and promised to review the designation of the three neighborhoods during the three-month implementation period.

But by then, the public had already understood the deeper meaning of the move. On Sunday, March 22, hundreds of Syrians gathered in Bab Touma to protest, carrying signs defending personal freedom and rejecting the sectarian sorting of Damascus neighborhoods. One AP photo from the protest captured the sentiment perfectly: “No to dividing Damascus neighborhoods along sectarian lines.” Protesters from different sectarian backgrounds chanted, “Syrians are united.”

And that is why the official defense of the decree has fallen flat. Its supporters have tried every familiar line. They say this is just regulation, not prohibition. They point to old Syrian laws, Ottoman precedents, and even the American Prohibition era, as though historical analogy could somehow neutralize the political meaning of a decision taken here and now. They say every state regulates vice. They dismiss critics as people who only care about drinking, nightlife, or have loose morals. But that argument has backfired because almost nobody protesting this decision is really protesting on behalf of alcohol alone.

If a regulation is designed so restrictively that it effectively bans most of the population, and if the authorities designing and enforcing it belong to a political current that already favors prohibition on ideological grounds, then this is not neutral governance. It is ideological social engineering disguised as public administration. The wording of the governorate’s own clarification gives the game away: the stated aims include “public morals,” “civil peace,” and neighborhood “specificity.” Those are the kinds of elastic formulas by which personal freedoms are gradually narrowed, selectively applied, and then normalized.

This decision did not emerge in a vacuum. It follows a widening pattern. In January, authorities in Latakia barred female public employees from wearing makeup during working hours, prompting immediate criticism before officials retreated into the usual language of “professional appearance” and “balance.” Earlier, the Tourism Ministry issued beach and pool guidelines requiring women on public beaches and in public pools to wear more modest swimwear, such as burkinis or body-covering suits, while allowing more relaxed standards in luxury hotels and private venues. That move, too, was defended as culturally sensitive regulation rather than coercion, before officials scrambled to soften its interpretation amid public outrage.

Seen together, these measures do not look incidental. They look cumulative. Makeup at work. Modest swimwear on public beaches. During Ramadan, tighter restrictions were imposed on those seen eating or drinking publicly. And now, the near-elimination of alcohol service in Damascus, except in a few Christian districts that are implicitly marked as socially distinct. Each measure is small enough, in isolation, for its defenders to ask, “Why all this fuss?” But politics is often revealed less by dramatic decrees than by patterns of administrative pressure. A state telegraphs what it aims to become through the habits it tries to impose.

This is why many Syrians reacted more strongly to the alcohol decree than authorities seem to have expected. The outcry was not limited to Christians, nor to secular elites. Damascus is full of Muslims who drink, Muslims who do not drink but still reject moral policing, and Syrians of all backgrounds who understand perfectly well what is at stake when the state begins sorting rights and restrictions by communal geography. AP reported that even some protesters who do not drink joined in because they saw the issue as one of personal liberty rather than consumption.

The constitutional dimension is impossible to ignore. Syria’s March 2025 Constitutional Declaration states in Article 12 that the state shall protect human rights and fundamental freedoms, and that rights guaranteed by the international human rights treaties ratified by Syria are an integral part of the declaration. Article 13 guarantees freedom of opinion and expression and protects private life. Critics of the Damascus decree, including the Bab Touma committee and legal advocates cited in recent reporting, have argued that the measure violates both the spirit and the text of those guarantees.

There is also a sectarian danger here that should be obvious to anyone exercising even minimal political judgment. By confining alcohol sales to Christian-majority districts, authorities are not “respecting diversity.” They are drawing a target on specific neighborhoods and implicitly assigning them responsibility for supposed violations of “public morals.” This is stigmatization by regulation. It invites resentment, fuels suspicion, and imposes symbolic burdens on communities already anxious about their place in the new Syria. Reuters, AP, DW, and regional outlets all captured this point in different ways: the backlash was driven not only by concerns over freedom, but by fears that the decision was recasting Christians as a tolerated exception and Damascus itself as a city to be managed through sectarian compartments.

This is where the defenders of the decision are most disingenuous. They invoke old laws as though reviving or enforcing neglected restrictions were somehow politically neutral. But laws that sat on the books for decades without shaping daily life are not the same as laws deliberately activated by a new political class seeking to redefine the public sphere. Historical continuity in text does not equal continuity in intent. The real question is not whether some old decree once existed. The real question is why this government, at this moment, chose to make this an administrative priority.

And that question leads to a larger one: what kind of state is Syria trying to become?

Syria is not entering a period of calm consolidation in which symbolic culture-war gestures can be treated as marginal. It is emerging from state collapse, civil war, sanctions, economic devastation, and deep social trauma. The European Union moved in 2025 to lift economic sanctions, and the United States formally terminated its Syria sanctions program effective July 1, 2025, while keeping measures on Assad-linked actors, rights abusers, jihadist groups, and Iran-linked networks. The EU has also pledged fresh recovery support. But none of this means reconstruction has suddenly arrived in any practical, transformative sense. Syria still faces enormous institutional weakness, political uncertainty, and the kind of administrative drag that makes actual recovery painfully slow.

In that context, decisions about alcohol, makeup, and dress are not distractions from “real” issues. They are among the real issues because they reveal the governing ethos of the people who make them. They show whether power understands itself as limited by citizenship or entitled to mold society in its own image. They show whether the state sees itself as an administrator of pluralism or as a guardian of virtue.

Syrian rulers, present and future, need to understand something simple: Muslims, as citizens, have the same right as everyone else to buy, sell, and consume alcohol if they choose. The state is not the custodian of their piety. Nor is it the custodian of women’s faces, clothing, or bodies. A government may regulate commerce, licensing, noise, nuisance, and genuine public disorder. But once it starts using these tools to impose a moral vision aligned with a particular ideological current, it leaves the terrain of neutral regulation and enters the terrain of coercive social transformation.

And that terrain is far more dangerous than some officials appear to realize.

There is a wider lesson here for Syria’s rulers. When governments push too far in an ideological direction, they not only provoke their own citizens; they also unsettle neighbors, alienate investors, and raise doubts among the very states and institutions whose support they need. At a time when Gulf states are trying to make their own societies more attractive to investors, tourists, and global capital by removing religious strictures, and when Iran’s model of religiously driven rule is under growing regional and international pressure, few will be eager to bankroll a Syrian order that appears to be drifting toward moral authoritarianism under an Islamic banner.

This does not mean that the world will require Syria to adopt secularism in the French sense, but it will expect pluralism to be real, rights to be meaningful, and ideology not to be smuggled into public life through municipal decrees and administrative circulars. The leaders of the United States, France, and Germany, among others, have made that clear. Syria’s priorities should be securing the country, restoring order, and creating an environment that feels safe, open, and predictable—not engaging in social engineering.

This is why the Damascus controversy struck such a nerve. For though the country witnessed over the last two years several horrific episodes of inter-communal violence, many Syrians still interpret it through the language of insecurity, militias, revenge, and state weakness. This issue felt different. It was unmistakably about power reaching into everyday life and telling citizens that their rights, habits, and neighborhoods would now be rearranged according to a moral hierarchy they had not chosen.

Syrians were not really taking to the streets for a cup full of arak. (A traditional, clear, anise-flavored spirit from the Middle East, known for its licorice-like taste and milky-white appearance when mixed with water.) They were taking to the streets for something larger and far more precious: the right not to be ruled as minors or categorized by sect, and to insist that citizenship in Syria must mean equal dignity, equal liberty, and real limits on state power.

Ali Larijani spent most of his career helping build and maintain the Islamic Republic.

He was a regime loyalist who seemed to surface at every center of power. Born into a powerful clerical family, he served in the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq War, went on to run state broadcasting and propaganda networks, became secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, later served as speaker of parliament, and remained close to the system’s core as an adviser to the supreme leader and a senior security official. In his final period, he was also reported to have been central to the January 2026 crackdown, in which tens of thousands of Iranian protesters were killed.

Larijani was killed last week in an Israeli airstrike near Tehran, along with his son and bodyguards. By then, the war had already torn through the upper ranks of the Iranian state. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was also assassinated in a strike on his compound in February, followed in subsequent weeks by a series of senior political and military figures, including intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, defence minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, armed forces chief Abdolrahim Mousavi, and Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani.

Multiple sources, including the Associated Press and the Jerusalem Post, reported that Larijani had effectively been running Iran after the earlier decapitation of its leadership. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of Ali Khamenei—remains hospitalized and reportedly in a coma following an Israeli strike on the first day of the war.

As of this morning, Israel is reporting Alireza Tangsiri, a chief naval officer charged with overseeing the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, has been killed. Iran has not commented on the claim.

The effect of these killings has been significant.

The Islamic Republic was built to survive shocks. It is, of course, a revolutionary movement designed for conflict against the West, including America. Power is dispersed across the Supreme Leader’s office, the Revolutionary Guards, the clerical establishment, the intelligence services, parliament, and a maze of councils.

On the military side, this overlaps with what the Iranian leadership calls the “mosaic defense” doctrine. The basic idea is simple: do not build a system that depends too heavily on one headquarters or chain of command. Instead, spread power, weapons, command structures, and local units across the country. If the center is hit, the rest of the system can keep fighting. The Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) developed this doctrine in the early 2000s to make Iran harder to defeat through airstrikes, decapitation attacks, or a conventional invasion. It relies on decentralization, redundancy, provincial commands, and the ability of local forces, especially the Basij and IRGC militias, to keep operating even if senior leaders are killed or communications are disrupted.

But as a consequence of losing so many leaders in a short span of time, the system is withering. The Israeli and American strategy is to decapitate the regime, and then to knock it back down if it tries to rebuild.

Ultimately, the United States and Israel are not likely to settle for less than regime change in Iran. The risks of a radicalized jihadist regime gaining a nuclear weapon are existential. Not only to Israel, but to the entire region and world. The Iranian regime—by indiscriminately attacking their neighbors, including Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan at the start of the war—illustrated that they are a rabid force, striking at anyone and everyone. Muslim or not. Zionist or not. American or not.

So far, Washington and Jerusalem have heavily degraded Iran’s navy and air force, destroyed large amounts of military infrastructure, and killed many of the men who coordinated the system from the top. Missile and drone launches by the regime have dramatically fallen since the start of the war.

The question now is whether the United States and Israel will spearhead a ground invasion of Iran or whether they will continue with air attrition and purported negotiations while waiting in hope for an internal coup or revolution.

A ground invasion was always going to be difficult. Iran is a massive and mountainous country. Any force entering Iran would have to deal with mountain ranges, long supply lines, and potential attacks from those who are still loyal to the regime. Or even those who are just anti-American.

But the prospect for an internal coup or revolution also remains uncertain. The regime has been badly damaged. But a state like this can lose ministers, commanders, and even a Supreme Leader and still keep functioning. At the end of the day, the IRGC has a lot of weapons, and the anti-regime protestors do not have any real military capacity.

One prospect is a targeted invasion at the coast to free the Strait of Hormuz and reduce any further threat to international shipping. And with Alireza Tangsiri reportedly out of the picture, this seems all the more likely.

That kind of operation would be easier to imagine—at least for now—than an imminent march on Tehran. The aim would be to seize or neutralize the parts of Iran’s military geography that give the IRGC leverage over the Gulf: islands, missile sites, drone bases, coastal batteries, naval facilities, and command nodes tied to the strait.

Such an operation would still be dangerous, of course. Iran has lost much of its conventional naval strength, but it still has mines, drones, anti-ship missiles, fast boats, coastal batteries, and dispersed IRGC units.

A regional coalition would make such an operation far more thinkable. If Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, Jordan, and perhaps Saudi Arabia concluded that Iran had already crossed the line from a hostile power to an immediate threat, then the political and logistical burden would no longer fall solely on Washington and Jerusalem.

The military path forward is uncertain, whether through limited operations or continued attrition. But the outcome will not be decided by geography alone. It will depend on how much strain the system can absorb internally.

The Islamic Republic was built to withstand the loss of individuals. But that capacity depends on depth—on enough experienced figures to connect institutions, manage crises, and keep the system coherent under pressure. Larijani was one of those figures. His death, alongside so many others, raises the pressing question of how many more losses it can absorb before that durability begins to give way.

Spend enough time in human rights conferences or policy discussions on the Middle East, and you hear the same assumption again and again: if enough people are angry at a government, it will eventually fall. It sounds reasonable, and it is politically convenient, but it does not hold up in practice or in history.

Across multiple cases from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and now the Islamic Republic of Iran, this expectation has persisted despite contrary evidence. Public anger, even when deep and widespread, does not by itself beget into regime failure. The more consistent predictor of regime change is not popular sentiment but the cohesion, incentives, and beliefs of those within the system who control the use of force.

This distinction is central to understanding both the durability of regimes and the limits of external influence.

Syria is often cited as proof that extreme violence can bring down a system, but the process is usually misunderstood. Large-scale defections from the Syrian army did not come from organized opposition or outside coordination. It began with individual decisions, made in specific moments, when soldiers refused to carry out orders.

Early in the uprising, there were accounts of soldiers being ordered to fire on crowds and hesitating when they recognized people in front of them. One former conscript described seeing his own neighborhood among the protesters. Another recalled lowering his weapon and walking away—not because he had joined the opposition, but because he could no longer carry out the order. These were individual decisions made under pressure, and together they began to weaken the system from within.

The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was a loose alliance of armed opposition groups formed in 2011 during the Syrian Civil War by defectors from the Syrian military. It sought to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s government, acting as a moderate, decentralized insurgent force supported by Western and regional powers. It emerged as a structure to organize men who had already crossed a personal threshold.

Defections are rarely ideological at the outset. They are typically driven by a combination of lines individuals won’t cross, perceived risk, and expectations about the regime’s future viability.

Iran, by contrast, has been deliberately structured to prevent such moments from cascading into systemic breakdown. The Islamic Republic has developed a layered security architecture in which responsibilities for repression are concentrated within ideologically committed units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As Afshon Ostovar, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, put it, “The IRGC… is tasked with both the defense of Iran and the much more amorphous safeguarding of Iran’s theocratic system.” This mandate goes beyond conventional military functions and is rooted in political and ideological objectives.

The implications are significant. A force designed to defend a system rather than merely a state is structurally more resistant to break down. Its durability is further reinforced by the IRGC’s expansive role beyond the military sphere. It is, as Ostovar describes, “a security service, an intelligence organization, a social and cultural force, and a complex industrial and economic conglomerate.” In effect, it embeds the regime across multiple layers of society, aligning political loyalty with economic interest and institutional belonging.

The regime’s approach to dissent reflects a similar degree of institutional learning. Following the protests of 2009, Iranian security forces refined their methods of control, developing a calibrated response that combines selective repression with managed tolerance. Large-scale protests are met with organized and often forceful responses, yet the system also demonstrates the capacity to shape and channel mobilization in ways that reinforce its authority. In some instances, actors affiliated with regime institutions themselves participate in demonstrations, blurring the line between opposition and state-sanctioned expression. This capacity to manage dissent stands in contrast to the early Syrian response, where indiscriminate violence accelerated divisions within the security apparatus.

The historical case of Iraq under Saddam Hussein provides a complementary but distinct model. There, regime sustainability was achieved primarily through coercion and fear, reinforced by overlapping security institutions and collective punishment mechanisms, including reprisals against family members, the destruction of homes, and the use of detention or execution to deter dissent within entire communities.

For years, this system held not because people believed in it, but because they feared the consequences of stepping outside it. To defect was not just to risk one’s life, but to endanger one’s family. That calculation kept the system intact far longer than many expected.

And then, in 2003, it crumbled all at once.

Soldiers abandoned positions, not because they had coordinated a defection, but because the system they feared no longer appeared unflappable. I was there. I remember entire units removing their uniforms and returning home within hours, as if the entire structure had been held together by belief in its inevitability. Once that belief disappeared, so did the system.

Systems built solely on fear may suppress defection, but they are vulnerable to sudden failure once the credibility of that fear is eroded. Systems that combine coercion with ideology, institutional integration, and material incentives, as in Iran, tend to be more resilient.

Robert Ames, a senior CIA officer whose career focused on the Middle East, approached the region with a disciplined curiousity that is often missing from policy debates. He understood that influence required engagement with the actual holders of power, not idealized versions of the opposition.

Ames spent years building relationships with figures many in Washington viewed only as adversaries. He believed that understanding how they saw the world was essential to predicting their behavior. Those who worked with him recall that he listened far more than he spoke, and that he treated even his adversaries as rational actors operating within constraints.

That approach came at a cost. Ames was killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, a reminder that understanding a system does not make it less dangerous. But his work powerfully illustrates that misreading how power operates in the region can be far more dangerous than engaging with it.

This lens is particularly relevant when assessing contemporary Iran. While public dissatisfaction is well documented, the critical variables, elite cohesion, control over coercive institutions, and the absence of a credible alternative center of power, remain largely intact. The IRGC and its associated networks continue to function as both a security apparatus and a socio-economic system, embedding the regime within key sectors of society.

It is also important to recognize that the emergence of an armed opposition is not solely a function of popular sentiment. The Syrian case demonstrates that such formations arise from defections within the security apparatus, not from external sponsorship or political leadership in isolation. Without armed defectors, territorial separation, and accessible supply networks, the conditions necessary for a sustained insurgency do not materialize.

In Iran, these preconditions are currently absent.

Strategies predicated on the assumption that economic pressure, public dissatisfaction, or external signaling will directly lead to regime change are unlikely to achieve the intended outcomes. While such factors may contribute to long-term stress on the system, they do not by themselves generate the internal fissures required to overthrow the regime.

A more realistic framework focuses on monitoring indicators of elite fragmentation, shifts in the behavior of security institutions, and changes in insiders’ perceptions of the regime’s durability. These variables, rather than public opinion alone, are more reliable predictors of systemic change.

The central analytical takeaway is therefore straightforward but often overlooked: regimes do not fall when they lose popularity; they fall when they lose their internal cohesion.

Until that threshold is crossed, even deeply unpopular systems can persist for extended periods, adapting to pressure while maintaining control. When it is reached, however, change tends to occur rapidly and unpredictably, often appearing inevitable only in retrospect.

Understanding this distinction is not just an academic exercise. It shapes how governments, analysts, and activists approach real-world crises. Misreading how power operates—assuming that anger in the streets will translate into change at the top—leads to flawed strategies, misplaced expectations, and, in some cases, prolonged instability and increased violence.

If change is to come, it will begin when those inside the system no longer believe it can endure.

On the first day of Eid, the festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, a quiet dread settled within me as I sent my usual “Eid Mubarak” greetings to family and friends across the region. The responses were heart-wrenching, matching this heaviness I’ve been feeling of late. “It is Eid, but it’s neither happy nor is it mubarak [blessed],” responded one friend. My Iranian friends in the U.S. and across the region are also marking Nowruz, the Persian New Year, either mourning for the losses they’ve witnessed in their country or with so much unease and mixed emotions as the U.S.-Israel-led war in their homeland marks its third week. To date, more than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, tens of thousands injured, and more than 3 million Iranians forcefully displaced. The Iranian people are cut off from the rest of the world as the regime continues its near-total internet blackout, unable to reach families and friends in the diaspora who are desperately waiting for proof of life.

In Lebanon, where Israel is determined to eliminate Hezbollah, around 1,000 people have been killed, and a million Lebanese citizens are now internally displaced. The Lebanese diaspora, which outnumbers the country’s population, is glued to the news. For some, it’s déjà vu as Lebanon has tragically lived through so many wars and crises, but that certainly doesn’t take away the anxiety of worrying about loved ones. Across the region where this war has extended, including the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, Northern Iraq, and Israel, the Islamic Republic’s attacks have crossed all red lines, damaging infrastructure, killing civilians (primarily in Israel, UAE, Bahrain, and Iraq), and destabilizing their daily lives and sense of security and peace. And all of this is unfolding after more than two years of war in Gaza that has devastated the strip and killed over 70,000 people, following the Hamas attacks on Israel that left 1,200 dead and more than 250 taken hostage.

For many of us with roots in the Middle East working in foreign policy and national security, the fog of war—seemingly without end—extends far beyond the battlefield. It weighs heavily on me as an Arab American with family in Jordan and friends and colleagues across the region, from Dubai to Doha. Showing up to work each day and maintaining dispassionate analysis carries a weight of its own. In conversations with counterparts and friends—Arab American, Iranian American, and Jewish American alike—that weight is both emotional and mental.

We wake with unease, compelled to check the headlines before anything else, and then to reach out to loved ones in the region. Social media fills with images of families sleeping in the streets in Lebanon, the sound of sirens echoing across cities from Manama to Erbil, and the visible grief of those mourning and those simply trying to survive.

These are images and sounds that stay with you, regardless of where you stand on the war. As psychologist Dalia Halabi wrote, “Distance changes how the brain experiences war,” noting that “the brain processes direct reality and distant uncertainty in different ways.” This does not diminish the devastation people are living through, but it helps explain why those on the ground can sometimes appear steadier, more accustomed to the rhythm of conflict. For many, this is not the first war they have lived through.

At the same time, social media offers glimpses of life continuing as it can—from Kuwait City to Doha to my hometown of Amman. Today, images of Palestinian children celebrating Eid with balloons felt bittersweet: bright colors set against grey rubble. As a friend in Dubai wrote to me, “We’re all carrying more than we show…different lives, different roles, but it’s there, and most of it goes unseen.”

It’s a privilege to receive such a message and fully understand it. It just clicks. And that’s why being from the region has its perks. It broadens our perspectives and enriches our analysis, given our connections to the textures of society, the culture, and the sociopolitical dynamics at play. As a native Arabic speaker, I access news coverage of the conflict across the varying Arab news outlets across the region, allowing me to better understand the geopolitics, the socio-politics, and the pulse of the people. It makes me a better analyst as it does others with roots in the region.

For my Iranian American friends and colleagues, their Farsi tongue enables them to see and understand the day-to-day in Iran, whether on social media or newscasts. It gives them the power to relay and translate the sentiments of the people, providing context for how perceptions form and why they matter in policy analysis. Our roots in the region empower us not only to understand complexity and nuance, but also to unpack it in the face of binary narratives that dominate the airwaves and the digital space, often steering audiences towards maximalist positions.

As my Iranian American journalist friend reported in Sky News a few days ago, many things can be true at the same time: “Iranians can oppose this brutal regime and celebrate the killing of its leaders, but also be wary and anxious of the war and what ‘day after’ scenario these bombings will bring.”

One truth we in the policymaking community and foreign policy sector should be aware of is that, while we are far removed from the battlefield, we’re all very much operating in an environment far from immune to the political divisions, tensions, and polarization unfolding in the region. To say it is tense is an understatement. More of a reason to not just hold steady, but to stay true to the mandate of non-partisan analysis, while also elevating diverse voices across the region and valuable expertise that brings in the necessary historical, sociopolitical, and cultural context.

Today, I am grateful to friends and colleagues who check in as I do with so many whose families have been affected. What proves challenging at times is operating outside of the working environment, in my interactions with those in our midst who either do not understand the nature of this work or, frankly, those who do not understand the implications beyond how it is reflected at the gas stations in America. I am sometimes shut down when I try to share what is going on—or met with aching silence.

I have come to understand, however, that people have their own capacities, and I let it be. Holding steady has proven to be a journey of self-rediscovery. When I feel the pressure, the sadness, and the frustration of uncertainty, as many of my colleagues working in this space do, I reach out to my community. It’s how the people of the region are coping, with solidarity and togetherness.

After a long day’s work following developments in the region, I get to come home to my sweet children and my loving husband. I am even more grateful and more energized to do the work—in an endless search for the hope for a better future that the people of the region so deserve.

As wars spread across the Middle East and great-power rivalry intensifies, talk of redrawing borders has returned with surprising confidence. Analysts and commentators are increasingly discussing the potential for a significant restructuring of the Middle East, with discussions centering on the possible division of Iran along ethnic lines, the emergence of a more defined Kurdish state, and the continued instability of a Syria divided among rival factions.

But borders are rarely redrawn simply because regimes fall or populations rebel. They change when powerful countries and neighboring states allow it. In other words, new states do not appear simply because a population wants independence. They emerge when internal upheaval, regional interests, and the decisions of major powers all point in the same direction.

When those forces align, borders can change. When they do not, revolutions may topple governments—but the map stays the same.

This dynamic can be seen in other conflicts. Kosovo, a former province of Serbia with a majority Albanian population, declared independence in 2008 and was recognized by the United States and most European countries. Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia that separated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, declared independence as well—but it is recognized by only a handful of states, mainly Russia and its allies.

The difference was not simply the will of the population. Kosovo gained broad international support, while Abkhazia did not.

The same logic explains why Syria still officially exists as a single state despite more than a decade of civil war, foreign intervention, and competing zones of control. Kurdish ambitions for autonomy, Israeli preferences, and regional rivalries have not led to a recognized partition because no major international agreement supports breaking the country apart. In fact, recent developments in northeast Syria suggest that many outside powers still prefer a re-centralized Syrian state to the risks of the permanent partition of the country.

Iran may soon test this same principle again.

Recent reports of Kurdish fighters preparing to launch operations from Iraqi territory into western Iran, combined with signs of military mobilization along Iran’s northern border with Azerbaijan, have fueled speculation that the Islamic Republic could face simultaneous pressure from multiple directions. Such developments would represent the first genuine multi-front external and internal challenge to the Iranian state in decades.

Yet even if the regime were to weaken dramatically, the fate of Iran’s borders would remain far from predetermined.

Iran is ethnically diverse. Persians form the majority, but large communities of Azeris, Kurds, Lurs, Arabs, Baloch, and Turkmen populate the country’s outer regions. Many observers, therefore, imagine territorial breakup along ethnic lines if central authority falters.

But Iran’s geography complicates that scenario.

Most of these populations lie along what might be called Iran’s northern arc—a strategic corridor stretching from Iraqi Kurdistan across the Kurdish regions of western Iran to the Azeri provinces of the northwest and onward toward the Caspian basin. Mountainous terrain, porous borders, and long-standing insurgent networks make this belt the most plausible entry point for outside forces.

But instability along this corridor would not automatically produce independent states. It would more likely trigger overlapping interventions and competing spheres of influence.

Turkey’s red line remains Kurdish territorial consolidation. Ankara has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use cross-border operations, proxies, and intelligence networks to prevent the emergence of a Kurdish corridor linking insurgent regions across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Kurdish advances inside Iran would almost certainly provoke Turkish countermeasures.

Even the Kurdish factor—often treated as the most obvious driver of territorial division—is more complex than it appears. Iranian Kurdish society is politically divided and geographically uneven, with strong nationalist currents concentrated in specific regions rather than across the entire Kurdish belt.

Azerbaijan presents a different but equally complex scenario. Nationalist narratives about “Southern Azerbaijan” have existed on the margins of Azerbaijani politics for a long time. If Tehran weakens, pressure may grow in Baku to assert influence over Azeri-majority regions across the border. More importantly, the unresolved question of a land connection to the Nakhchivan exclave has long driven Baku’s strategic thinking. While the proposed Zangezur corridor through Armenia remains the preferred solution, instability inside Iran could theoretically reopen other possibilities.

Yet outright annexation of Iranian Azeri territories would be a strategic gamble. The Azeri population in Iran is larger than the population of Azerbaijan itself, is deeply embedded in Iran’s religious and political structures, and is far more religious than Azerbaijan's staunchly secular population. Absorbing millions of new citizens could transform Azerbaijan itself into a far larger but less stable state.

Rather than seeking major territorial incorporation, Baku would more likely pursue influence or protectorate arrangements along the borders and in the region around Tabriz, securing strategic advantage without absorbing a politically complex population.

Other actors would also see opportunities in an Iranian crisis.

Another region that could draw external attention is Khuzestan, Iran’s oil-rich southwestern province along the Iraqi border. Home to a significant Arab population and the center of much of Iran’s energy infrastructure, Khuzestan is an economic lifeline and a political vulnerability for Tehran. Arab activists occasionally speak of “Ahwaz” as a separate entity, but local identities there are complex and deeply intertwined with the Iranian state. Even so, in a scenario of prolonged instability, neighboring actors could be tempted to influence events in the province—not necessarily through outright annexation, but through political patronage, proxy networks, or economic leverage. Given that a large share of Iran’s oil production and export facilities are concentrated in this region, any contest over Khuzestan would carry consequences far beyond Iran’s borders.

Control over Khuzestan has been contested before. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 began with an attempt to seize precisely this province, a reminder that Khuzestan sits at the intersection of ethnic politics, energy resources, and regional power competition. Iraq’s splintered political landscape today makes such an ambition unlikely. Yet as Ahwazi political movements begin positioning themselves amid the current crisis, prolonged instability could revive old strategic temptations around Iran’s most valuable province.

In Iranian Balochistan, local politics rarely align neatly with ideological movements. Tribal structures, cross-border trade networks, and long-standing patterns of state patronage often produce pragmatic alliances that complicate any straightforward narrative of separation. Indeed, some Baloch tribal leaders have reportedly pledged support for the central authorities even as separatist movements may seek to exploit the current instability.

The United Arab Emirates has never relinquished its claim to the islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, seized by Iran in 1971 at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. A severe weakening of Iranian authority could tempt Abu Dhabi to press its claim more assertively.

Qatar’s calculations would be economic rather than territorial. The world’s largest natural gas reservoir—the North Dome/South Pars field—is shared between Qatar and Iran. Because the reservoir functions as a single geological system, disruption on the Iranian side could allow Qatar to consolidate a larger share of its long-term value.

Yet the same actors who might exploit Iranian weakness also have strong reasons to prevent the country’s complete disintegration.

Turkey fears Kurdish statehood. Pakistan fears Baloch separatism. Gulf states fear maritime instability and the emergence of new militant actors along the Persian Gulf. Russia, preoccupied with Ukraine, would still seek to block Western geopolitical gains along the Caspian basin. China depends heavily on Iranian energy exports and would prefer a stable supplier.

This creates a profound paradox.

Many powers might welcome the fall of the Iranian regime. Almost none want the Iranian state itself to disappear.

That paradox echoes an older historical precedent. In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was famously labeled the “Sick Man of Europe.” For decades, observers predicted its imminent demise. Instead, the empire endured long periods of instability, losing influence along its periphery while its core structures endured.

Iran today may represent a similar case—the “Sick Man of West Asia.”

The Islamic Republic is weakened. Peripheral regions could become contested. External powers might cultivate influence along the northern arc. Yet the Iranian state itself could prove far more resilient than those predicting rapid partition expect.

In the emerging multipolar world, borders are rarely redrawn cleanly. More often, they blur, entrench, and reassert themselves through messy negotiations among competing powers.

The Islamic Republic may fall, but like the “Sick Man of Europe” before it, Iran may prove far harder to dismantle than the obituaries of its regime would suggest.

The war now unfolding in Lebanon, as Iran comes under direct attack, has forced a question the country spent decades postponing: what comes after Hezbollah? In recent days, the Lebanese government moved to ban the group’s independent military actions after it launched attacks tied to the Iran conflict—an extraordinary step in a country where the state has often behaved like a tenant living under an armed landlord.

Let’s call the project what it is. I am not neutral on Hezbollah. It is a terrorist organization—an armed apparatus built on violence, intimidation, and a command relationship with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It may cloak itself in the language of “resistance,” but its record, structure, and outcomes tell a different story: a militia that captured the state and used Lebanon’s people as its shield.

I like to call what is unfolding the “de-Hezbollahification” of Lebanon—a national hygiene project that dismantles a parallel sovereignty, removes the militia’s grip from institutions and streets, and restores the basic principle that only the state can declare or engage in acts of war. But one condition must be stated plainly before Lebanon repeats its mistakes: de-Hezbollafication cannot be driven by the desire for vengeance against the Shiʿa for supporting Hezbollah’s rise. It must rest on their equal citizenship—otherwise it will recreate the very vacuum that Hezbollah was born to fill.

Hezbollah rose from a long history of neglect. Before the civil war, Lebanon’s political system and economic priorities were structured around a hierarchy that left entire regions underdeveloped. Shiʿa communities in the south and the Beqaa faced some of the country’s worst poverty, the weakest public services, and the greatest exposure to border violence. They were Lebanese on paper but treated as peripheral in practice. Lebanon’s sectarian political system reinforced this pattern by dividing power along religious lines, making it harder for citizens to hold their leaders accountable.

Into that abandonment stepped Imam Musa al-Sadr, a progressive Shiʿite cleric with rare political instincts. He spoke about Shiʿa deprivation not as a sectarian grievance but as a national scandal—arguing that the neglect of Shiʿa communities was not just a problem for one religious group, but evidence that the Lebanese state itself was failing large parts of its population.

In 1974, he helped give marginalized Shiʿa communities a collective voice by co-founding what became the Amal Movement, linked to the “Movement of the Deprived.”

Al-Sadr mattered because he offered a different future to an already desperate community. His message was that the Shiʿa were citizens with rights, not a population meant to passively absorb the consequences of everyone else’s wars.

In 1978, he traveled to Libya with two companions at the invitation of Muammar Gaddafi—and then disappeared. They were last seen in Tripoli and never returned. Many Lebanese Shiʿa believe he was killed by the Gaddafi regime, though the full details are still unresolved.

His disappearance created a political and religious vacuum—the kind of vacuum external powers are quick to exploit.

Armed Palestinian organizations operated from southern Lebanon for years, launching attacks into Israel and drawing Israeli retaliation onto Lebanese villages. The “south” became a strike zone where civilians paid the price for decisions they had no hand in making.

Israel’s 1982 invasion unfolded amid that cycle, and the chaos of civil war created the conditions for a new actor to rise. In the early 1980s, with Iranian support, especially through the Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah seized the opportunity.

The group built its legitimacy by exploiting the state’s failure and offering an alternative system of security, welfare, enforcement, and discipline. It fought and absorbed rivals, monopolized “resistance,” and turned the border into its exclusive political terrain. Over time, the South learned a terrible lesson: the state cannot protect you, but the militia might. Hezbollah institutionalized that belief and benefited from it.

Here is the part Lebanon likes to say with moral superiority and little self-awareness: “The people supported Hezbollah.”

Yes. Many did. And the support carried responsibility because Hezbollah is not a neutral social service provider. It is an armed organization with a transnational agenda aligned with Iran, and it has a long record of violence and extremism.

But Lebanon cannot pretend that support was chosen from a menu of equal options.

This is the moral root of the trap.

When a community is treated as an afterthought for generations, it begins to internalize that citizenship won’t protect you. So when Hezbollah presented itself as the only force able to defend their villages from the next invasion, many embraced it—even if that protection came with a cost.

That does not absolve the decision to empower a terrorist militia, but it explains why the decision was socially understandable, even though it was nationally catastrophic.

The most unforgivable part is this: The same actors—Lebanese, Arab, and international—who later demanded change tolerated the conditions that made Hezbollah inevitable when change was still possible. By the time they discovered their principles, the Shiʿa were already trapped inside a structure where leaving Hezbollah would be social suicide and put you and your family at risk.

Everyone is responsible. Hezbollah’s supporters are responsible for enabling its ascent. Lebanon’s ruling class is responsible for creating the vacuum. And the far-right political narrative that governs Lebanon’s imagination—treating Muslims, and particularly Shiʿa, as a demographic problem rather than citizens—helped poison the soil long before Hezbollah planted itself in it.

Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 was Hezbollah’s coronation. Hezbollah claimed victory; much of the south idolized the “resistance” as proof that its model worked.

But the state still did not return. Neglect persisted. The south and the Beqaa remained underdeveloped. And Hezbollah—already armed, already organized—grew into a parallel sovereignty that increasingly dictated national decisions.

Over time, Hezbollah treated Shiʿa support as strategic cover. It embedded military infrastructure in civilian environments and wrapped its agenda in the bodies of its own people. It used the community as a human shield for a project that ultimately answered to Iran’s priorities, not Lebanon’s.

And now, in a war where Iran is directly targeted, Hezbollah has been pulled back to its core identity: defending Iran, even at the cost of Lebanon.

Lebanon already has a roadmap for change written into its postwar settlement, the Taif Agreement, which explicitly frames the abolition of political sectarianism as a fundamental national objective.

But Lebanon never implemented the spirit of that text. It implemented the mechanics that preserved the sectarian marketplace.

As long as Lebanon’s political system is based on sectarian quotas, citizens will continue to rely on their sect for protection rather than on the state. The constitution divides parliament equally between Christians and Muslims, and political power is still organized along sectarian lines.

The uncomfortable truth is that some of the biggest obstacles to change are the actors who benefit most from the existing privileges—particularly parties rooted in far-right Christian narratives that treat demographic equality as a threat to their existence.

The Lebanese Forces leadership (a civil war militia turned political party) has publicly questioned or cast doubt on calls to eliminate political sectarianism in the past, challenging the timing and motives. In broader electoral debates, major sectarian parties have repeatedly fought over reforms that could dilute sectarian leverage, including proposals linked to a single constituency and a senate, as discussed in Taif’s logic.

So yes, the same Lebanese Forces that loudly demand Hezbollah disarmament also benefit from the current system. Their anti-Hezbollah posture is often correct on the militia question. But the deeper national cure requires more than opposing an armed Hezbollah.

A truly equal civil state would reduce every sect—including historically privileged sectarian gatekeepers—to equal status. That is not an attack on Christians. It is the only way to build national unity without requiring armed patrons.

Complete De-Hezbollahification requires:

• dismantling Hezbollah’s armed capacity and parallel security apparatus;

• restoring state monopoly on war decisions and border policy;

• integrating social services into accountable state institutions rather than militia patronage;

• protecting Shiʿa communities during transition so they are not punished for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time;

• abolishing political sectarianism in practice—not only in speeches—by building institutions where the citizen is not filtered through sect.

Without that, Lebanon risks repeating its original sin: creating a vacuum, then watching a new armed “protector” rise from it.

The war has forced the question. Lebanon must answer it.

The Shiʿa made a disastrous political bargain with Hezbollah. They are responsible for the consequences. They are also the product of a state that failed them, a region that exploited them, and a political class that left them with the impression that the only reliable roof was a militia.

Lebanon now faces a choice it has avoided for decades. It can dismantle Hezbollah’s military power while leaving the political system that created the vacuum in which it rose, or it can confront the deeper structures that turned entire communities toward armed protection in the first place.

Hezbollah filled a void created by state failure. If Lebanon removes the militia without finally filling that void with equal citizenship and accountable institutions, history will eventually produce its replacement.

When the war in Iran began last week, no one really thought the United States would put boots on the ground.

That assumption was grounded in several obvious realities. A ground invasion of Iran would carry enormous military, political, and strategic risks. It could transform what some in Washington may have imagined as a swift decapitation campaign into a drawn-out and costly conflict, more like Afghanistan than a limited punitive strike. It would also expose President Donald Trump to profound political consequences. He rose to prominence condemning America’s endless wars and promising to avoid the kind of open-ended military adventures that defined much of the post 9/11 era.

But that assumption is being tested in real time.

On Monday, Trump signaled that he may be more open to a ground offensive than many expected. In remarks to the New York Post, he suggested that, unlike previous presidents, he does not share the same hesitation about sending troops into combat. Around the same time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also refused to rule out the possibility. Neither man explicitly committed the United States to an invasion, but both helped move the conversation into territory that, only days ago, seemed politically and strategically off limits.

The basic reason a ground invasion now looks more plausible than it did a week ago is simple. The two outcomes that Trump likely preferred at the start of this conflict appear less likely today.

The first was a Venezuela-style outcome: the death of the supreme leader followed by the emergence of a more pragmatic insider willing to stabilize the system and cut a deal with Washington. The second was regime change from within, driven by a wave of popular protests strong enough to overthrow the regime.

At the moment, neither seems close to coming to fruition.

If a regime insider takes power, the leading possibility appears to be Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late supreme leader. That is hardly reassuring for anyone hoping for de-escalation. Mojtaba is widely seen as more hardline than his father and, for ordinary Iranians, potentially even less competent. A figure like that is not likely to negotiate with the governments that just killed his father. Israeli officials have signaled that any successor would become a target regardless of his identity. In practical terms, that severely limits the space for an internal transition that preserves the Islamic Republic while simultaneously making it more pliable.

The protest scenario looks equally uncertain, at least in the short term.

Yes, the regime remains deeply unpopular, with 80% of Iranians opposing it. But war often changes domestic political psychology. The death of a national leader, even a deeply controversial one, can rally parts of society that were previously passive, fearful, or disillusioned. Social media footage suggests that pro-regime and anti-American demonstrations are, for now, more visible than anti-regime mobilization. That does not mean the regime has regained legitimacy, but foreign bombardment may be strengthening nationalist reflexes at the very moment Washington hoped to trigger internal revolt. Even if the citizenry wanted to depose the regime, the fact remains that they are unarmed.

This is the danger that external military action often creates. Instead of breaking a hated government, it can temporarily fuse state survival with national identity. Reports of strikes hitting civilian infrastructure, including a school and a hospital, only deepen that effect. Even many Iranians who loathe the regime may become less willing to rise up if they feel their country is under external assault.

So if neither a cooperative successor nor mass protest is likely to deliver quick results, Washington needs to make clear exactly what the military objective is and how it plans to achieve it.

Trump has now spoken of four major objectives: destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, annihilating its navy, ensuring Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon, and preventing Tehran from funding, arming, or directing proxies abroad.

Taken together, these goals amount to a project of total strategic neutralization. In plain terms, they imply that Iran must be demilitarized and stripped of its ability to project power beyond its borders. That is the kind of agenda that usually requires the enemy state to capitulate.

And that is where escalation becomes dangerous.

Air campaigns have a long historical record of producing dramatic tactical results. Air power can destroy infrastructure, eliminate commanders, degrade logistics, and disrupt communications. But it has a poor record of achieving broad political transformation on its own. Bombing can punish, weaken, and signal. It can rarely compel a deeply entrenched regime to surrender its core ambitions, especially one built around ideological commitment, corrupt institutions, and a long history of surviving pressure.

If Washington’s aims are truly maximalist, then air power alone may not be enough.

During the 1991 campaign against Saddam Hussein, the United States inflicted enormous damage from the air and encouraged Iraqis to rise against the regime. But the uprising was crushed, the regime survived, and Saddam remained in power for years. Air superiority did not automatically yield political victory. If anything, it exposed the limits of military force when not paired with a coherent, sustainable endgame.

That lesson hangs heavily over the current war.

There are signs that both Washington and its allies may already understand this. Reports suggest that outside actors are exploring whether Kurdish militias or special forces operations could do some of the work on the ground without requiring a full-scale American invasion. That would be the preferred option for any administration trying to avoid the domestic backlash of another major war. But if proxy forces prove inadequate, and if special operations cannot achieve strategic objectives on their own, then the pressure to consider a larger US ground role will grow.

Iran is one of the most difficult countries in the region to invade. It is vast, mountainous, heavily populated, and far more complex than the states where the American military has operated before. Any invading force would face immense logistical burdens, rough terrain, and the near certainty of prolonged resistance. Even a successful initial campaign could quickly turn into a brutal occupation with no clean off-ramp.

That is why the odds may still be below 50%. The regime could still be deposed from within. Iran could descend into a messy civil conflict, altering the strategic equation. Or Trump could simply decide that the cost of pursuing total victory is too high and declare partial success before stepping back.

But the important point is this: the probability of boots on the ground is now higher than it was just days ago.

That alone should alarm anyone who took Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric seriously. A president who built his brand attacking forever wars is now, at the very least, entertaining the possibility of entering one of the most dangerous and complex battlefields in the Middle East.

And once a war begins to outgrow its original ambitions, it often develops its own momentum that is difficult to contain. That is the true danger now. Not only that Washington may actively choose a ground invasion, but that it may drift into one because every other path to victory has begun to close.

After airstrikes by the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the Islamic Republic’s so-called “Supreme Leader”—on day one of the war, the world expected a response.

Israelis braced for missile fire, and Americans braced for attacks on their bases across the Gulf.

What fewer people expected was Tehran lighting up the entire neighborhood: missiles and drones not just toward Israel, but over and into Gulf capitals and “neutral” airspace too—Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, with blasts reported around Abu Dhabi and Dubai, including drone attacks on both the Burj Al-Arab hotel, and the Burj Khalifa, the tallest manmade structure in the world. To be clear, these are all American allies that host American military bases. But Iran has gone beyond targeting these bases, and has also attacked skyscrapers, airports, and other civilian infrastructure that have nothing whatsoever to do with the war.

This even included attacking states that have spent the last decade trying not to be at war with Iran, and in Oman’s case, acting as the region’s designated mediator.

Qatar—a sponsor of Hamas, and which has in the past provided the Islamic Republic with relatively favorable media coverage via its state-run Al-Jazeera network—has said it intercepted Iranian attacks aimed at targets including its international airports. Doha’s foreign ministry spokesperson didn’t dress it up as “miscalculation” or “spillover.” He framed it as a hostile action and said Qatar is not currently engaging Iran diplomatically. Multiple other states, including Saudi Arabia, have threatened a military response against Iran.

And Oman—which until a few days ago was trying to act as a mediator between the United States and the Islamic Republic, and even framed the negotiations as still going well right up until the last minutes before the war—has reported its first Iranian attack of this war, with a drone strike on Duqm port.

Meanwhile, Iran’s paramilitary proxy Hezbollah launched rockets and drones into northern Israel, explicitly framing it as retaliation for Khamenei’s assassination and in defense of the “axis of resistance.”

If you’re thinking, “that makes no sense; it just unites the entire region against Iran,”—you’re not alone. That was my first thought, too. And it seems to have done precisely this: the Gulf Cooperation Council has already issued a ministerial statement condemning Iran’s attacks on Gulf states (and Jordan) as a serious violation of sovereignty and international law. Even the UK prime minister has described Iran as increasingly “reckless” and warned of rising danger to civilians.

One way to make sense of Iran’s behavior is to treat it as a deliberate attempt to make the region feel ungovernable and unsafe unless Washington and Israel stop. The Islamic Republic may be trying to appear unstable and insane as a way to ward off the Americans and Israelis, and their foes across the region.

In that reading, Iran is trying to make the war operationally and politically unsustainable from the Gulf—by forcing airports to pause, ports to slow, cities to shelter, and air defenses to burn through interceptors. Even if every government condemns Tehran, the bet is that their first instinct may still be to pressure the Americans to wind down the strikes on Iran.

And then there’s the escalation that’s designed to frighten absolutely everyone: Hormuz. Iranian officials have now issued their most explicit warning yet that the narrow Strait—through which roughly 20 million barrels a day of oil flowed in 2024 (about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption)—is “closed” and that Iran will fire on any ships attempting to pass.

But here is the problem for Iran: chaos is not a precise instrument. The same missile-and-drone campaign that is meant to terrorize Gulf capitals into pressuring Washington toward de-escalation can just as easily push them into the opposite posture—treating Iran as the common enemy that must undergo regime change.

To me, Iran’s posture looks like a bad bluff that, far from de-escalating, will simply burn bridges with any states in the region and unify them with the Americans and Israelis.

As one viral tweet from a Palestinian critic of Hamas put it: “Iran has attacked more Arab countries in the last 24 hours than Israel in the last 10 years.”

In some respects, this is the best outcome that Israel and America could possibly hope for. The biggest problem that the Islamic Republic is facing is that it is losing the actual war really heavily.

Alongside Khamenei, a whole cadre of senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and political officials were killed in the initial wave of US–Israeli strikes.

Within the first days of the war, the U.S.–Israeli coalition had already achieved air superiority over key areas of Iran, including Tehran, meaning IRGC air defenses were no longer able to reliably challenge repeated coalition airstrikes and combat flights.

Just as importantly, Tehran is also taking punishment at sea. On March 1st, the U.S. military said it sank an Iranian Jamaran-class warship while it was docked at a pier in Chah Bahar, on the Gulf of Oman. President Trump has claimed the U.S. has sunk nine Iranian naval ships.

Hezbollah’s attempted retaliation has not gone well either. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s rockets by bombing Hezbollah targets in Southern Lebanon. But the bigger news is that Hezbollah’s attempt to enter the war triggered Lebanon’s government to reportedly move to ban Hezbollah from conducting military actions and force the paramilitary group to surrender its weapons.

So what does the Islamic Republic have left? Chaos, derangement, and unpredictability.

If Tehran’s goal was to stop the region uniting against it, it seems to have failed. If its goal was to make the war unsustainable, it may instead be making its own position untenable: burning the last bridges with states that once tried to mediate, and inviting the kind of regional alignment that turns a regime’s strategic problem into an existential one.

Rumors are now swirling that the Gulf states could join the war against Iran within 24 to 48 hours. And as of a few hours ago, breaking news suggests that as regime officials convened to appoint a new supreme leader, the gathering was hit by an airstrike. The building of Iran’s Assembly of Experts was reportedly destroyed.

A new Abrahamic alliance is coming into view—Jews and Arabs coming together to resist a common foe. The Islamic Republic of Iran is actively manufacturing the conditions for it—one drone, one missile, one burning skyline at a time.

On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the elimination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in a joint U.S. and Israeli airstrike on his leadership compound in central Tehran.

For large segments of Iranian society and many Shiite Muslims, Khamenei embodied the Islamic Revolution that began in 1978, led to the exile of the Shah, and culminated in the return of Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. A national referendum soon followed, formally establishing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yasser Arafat, the preeminent leader of the Palestinian national movement for over four decades, was among the first regional leaders to congratulate the new revolutionary leadership on its success.

From 1979 onward, Iran transformed into an Islamist state driven by revolutionary ideology and ambitions to export its model beyond its borders—not only to Shiite communities but also to Sunni groups. Central to this vision was opposition to the existence of Israel and hostility toward the United States.

To advance this agenda, the Iranian regime began backing militias in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Hezbollah was founded in Lebanon in 1982 by Shia Islamist militants, with support from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, in direct response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Emerging during the Lebanese Civil War, the group aimed to fight Israeli occupation and create a Shiite Islamic state modeled on the Iranian Revolution. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s, the concept of an “axis” of aligned forces gained prominence, later formalized after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011 as the “Axis of Resistance.”

This period coincided with the Palestinian leadership’s signing of the Oslo Accords in pursuit of a two-state solution—an approach the Iranian regime strongly opposed.

In response, Tehran invested heavily in Palestinian armed factions that shared its rejectionist stance toward Israel and the United States, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Iran promoted to these groups the vision of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea,” rooted in armed confrontation. That position stood in direct contrast to the unfolding peace process, particularly the 2000 Camp David summit, which centered on establishing a two-state solution. The negotiations focused on resolving core final-status issues: borders, the future of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, security arrangements, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. While imperfect and deeply contentious on all sides, they were a last-ditch effort to move from armed struggle toward negotiated statehood.

As talks faltered and eventually failed, the region was plunged into the Second Intifada. Waves of suicide bombings carried out by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targeted buses, cafes, and public spaces inside Israel. Each attack hardened public opinion, eroded trust, and pushed diplomatic compromise further out of reach—aligning with Tehran’s broader strategy of sustained confrontation over incremental agreement.

At present, Khamenei’s elimination does not automatically dismantle the ideological system he helped entrench. The Islamic Republic was structured around a doctrine that views confrontation as a source of legitimacy. That doctrine shaped the so-called Axis of Resistance and folded the Palestinian issue into a wider regional struggle.

For Palestinians, this moment offers an urgent opportunity for reflection. The lesson lies in the dangers of expansionist, maximalist fantasies—ideas that have repeatedly failed and risk distorting a legitimate national cause when they become consumed by rigid, absolutist ideology.

Equally important is the revolution’s framing of compromise and negotiation as weakness or betrayal. This mindset influenced factions within Palestinian politics, encouraging the rejection of incremental gains in favor of absolute demands. The cost of that approach is evident today. There is nothing noble about walking away from every negotiation, rejecting every imperfect proposal, or branding advocates of pragmatism as traitors.

Refusing incremental progress—declining to build institutions where possible, secure limited gains, and improve daily life where feasible—has not produced total victory. It has produced the reality before us: Gaza devastated, the West Bank subsumed, and Palestinian political representation weakened and divided.

No state can be built without a monopoly on force. When armed power is ceded to militias, institutional authority erodes. The pattern has played out in Iraq, in Lebanon, and in Palestine.

Once these militias adopted Iran’s ideological framework, they became deeply dependent on Tehran—financially and militarily—morphing from national actors into instruments of Iranian foreign policy.

That dependency undermined the Palestinian cause internationally and obliterated any serious efforts at state-building. Internal cohesion and institutional accountability matter more than ideological alignment with distant capitals. Without unified governance and transparent institutions, even the most powerful rhetoric cannot produce durable political outcomes.

From Hezbollah in Lebanon to Shiite militias in Iraq, from the Assad regime in Syria to the Houthis in Yemen, Tehran constructed a network designed to project power asymmetrically. These groups were not identical in origin or composition, but they shared a common function: to extend Iranian influence without triggering direct conventional war. Rockets in southern Lebanon, drones launched from Yemen, militias embedded in Iraqi politics, and weapons pipelines into Gaza were all nodes in a single architecture.

The Axis of Resistance allowed Tehran to surround Israel and challenge U.S. influence across multiple fronts, and entrench itself in vulnerable states where governance was already weak. In Iraq, militias integrated into formal politics while retaining parallel armed authority. In Lebanon, Hezbollah evolved into a state-within-a-state, holding veto power over national decision-making while maintaining its own military force. In Yemen, the Houthis’ growing missile and drone capabilities turned a local civil war into a regional crisis.

Wherever militias superseded state authority, instability followed.

Now, with Khamenei gone, the question facing the region is whether this network will hold together or begin to change. Proxy systems depend on funding, coordination, ideological cohesion, and a clear strategic center. Leadership transitions in Tehran will test that cohesion. Some actors may double down, seeking to demonstrate continuity through escalation. Others may recalibrate, prioritizing survival within their own domestic arenas.

For Palestinians, the implications are especially dire. If militias remain the dominant vehicle of political expression, the cycle of dependency and decay will continue. But if this moment initiates a long-needed reassessment—if armed alignment with external powers gives way to internal political reconstruction—there may yet be space for a different trajectory.

The future of Iran’s proxy network will shape the political futures of Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Sanaa, and Gaza. The architecture Khamenei helped construct won’t disappear overnight. But it is now entering its most uncertain phase since its inception.

States now have a real window and valid reason to reclaim the monopoly over force. We’re already seeing a shift in Lebanon, where the prime minister has just announced a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities.

Khamenei built a system that thrived on managed chaos and calibrated escalation. His absence creates a vacuum across the web of actors that depended on his strategic direction.

The coming months will test whether regional leaders are prepared to move beyond proxy warfare and ideological maximalism—and finally break a cycle that has denied generations the chance at stability, dignity, and shared prosperity.