Two years after the October 7th al-Aqsa Flood Palestinian resistance operation, the Arab–Iranian region’s molecular composition has been rapidly reshaped, as though the raid were a catalyst. Among its effects: mass shifts in popular consciousness, the incubation of populist anti-Zionist armies, the remolding of U.S.–Israeli strategies, and the erasure or disfigurement of the enemies of Western imperialism.
It has been a mainstay of Palestinian revolutionary thought since the 1960s that Palestinian popular mobilization was a “capsule of an effective and enormously powerful mine planted in the heart of this vast Arab continent,” in the words of Ghassan Kanafani. That was the perspective from the guerilla’s gun. It was also the perspective from the optical bombsight of Washington, which warned in 1975 of “the growing strength” of “rejectionist” groups, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and cautioned that “should Syria switch from a moderate to a radical mode, the combined strength of Saiqa and the ‘rejectionists’ would probably be enough to capture virtually all of the Palestinians, including Arafat.” Indeed, the U.S. was well aware that [Hafez] al-Assad’s Syria was a mercurial agent, a point to which we return in evaluating the current shatter-scape of U.S.–Israeli state fragmentation.
Before and after October 7th, shifts in U.S. policy must be seen within the broader U.S.–Israeli strategies for the Arab–Iranian region, strategies which are not static but formed against or through history. As the Egyptian political scientist Anouar Abdel-Malek writes, imperialism is not a “functional-structural system of blind hegemonic-dependent interchangeable units,” but is instead “a genuine dialectical pattern in which the inter-relations between hegemonic imperialism and anti-hegemonic national liberation movements unfold in a wide spectrum of modes.”
On a world scale, the U.S. has led a war against nationalist, integrated, and articulated development — that is to say, of rival blocs able to resist the imperial structures of dependency, through sovereign industrialization, through agricultures produced for their peoples, and through trading flows delinked from the vampiric Western system.
The Arab–Iranian region is rich with oil — a delicate commodity to profit from, given that historically there has been too much of it, not too little — which has required particular political engineering to keep its price just so. That engineering, furthermore, has had to deal with the balky peoples of the region whose occasional radical nationalizations and land reforms have destabilized long-term imperial planning. Chief among its priorities was the need to ensure that oil states remained undemocratic and under Euro–U.S. and later U.S. suzerainty, and that the oil profits could work to the benefit of U.S. capital — Bechtel, Kellogg Brown & Root, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Chevron, Exxon — a slush fund flowing into the U.S. financial system, treasuries, and stocks. In other words, a world system as Möbius strip.
U.S.–Israeli strategic options have always seesawed between containment — fewer land reforms rather than more, further U.S.-integrated industrialization and trade rather than less, détente through profitable arms build-ups — and wars to sow defeat, allowing for the ascent of more pro-capitalist and more pro-Israel forces within targeted states.
In a period of Soviet ascendance, the U.S. sought to bridle the regional resistance, but only rarely attempted to break it, aware that they could not usually directly overthrow Arab nationalism. They sought, furthermore, the demoralization of popular classes within the republics, stripping development of its working-class content, and pushing states toward normalization and accommodation of U.S. hegemony.
Under republics gradually disfigured by war and their own problems of mass participation, “stability” was preferable to the “instability” of a 1963 in Syria or a 1969 in Libya. Yet stability was never the goal in itself: Violence and political remolding of regional enemies have always been central to U.S.–Israeli policy. And while order has been most important in the more U.S.-aligned states, the pursuit of an even more favorable “order” has never been off the agenda.
Within this framework, the Israeli and U.S. states have had their disagreements. That is to say, the personnel at the service of a partially overlapping ruling class, each with different compositions vis-à-vis staffing, with different institutional histories — vulgarly, the Mossad versus the CIA, the IOF versus West Point — and with different pressures from their social bases — whether the settler movement or the minority anti-Israeli Republic voting bloc — have had their disagreements. It is precisely because capital is increasingly pooled, but state institutions remain separate, that this type of bickering occurs, but, fundamentally these differences have been tactical, still fitting within the overall goal of dispersing strategic obstacles.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the U.S.–Israeli strategy rested on the full-scale de-development of their enemies, alongside their economic sanctioning either after initial and further assaults (Iraq), or when assault was unfeasible (Libya, Iran). The result was a region that grew poorer; state sovereignty and regional security arrangements would become internally identified with repression, while the shimmering achievements of past periods dimmed to a dull reminder. (Not uniformly, it must be said, as with the Arab Maghreb, where sovereignty has remained a central axis of popular concern.)
As the “Arab Spring” emerged, the U.S.–Israel weaponized discontent and used it to melt apart strategic obstacles through a combination of war, sanctions, and partition. Throughout, the U.S.–Israeli advance met the obdurate resistance of popular mass mobilizing forces — above all in Palestine and Lebanon, and later in Yemen, all backstopped strongly by Iran and partially by Russia. Syria, too, was a critical logistical and political hub, which is why the U.S. and Israel sought to destroy it.
In the non-sovereign states, the U.S.–Israel attempted to crystallize defeat through alliances with aggressively pro-capitalist, pro-normalization forces that would express their fealty through permanent peace treaties with Israel. This would become the Abraham Accords project, a toxic wind that swept out to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Morocco, which remains a particularly useful warehouse for skilled and unskilled labor power alike for Europe, has experienced agressive clampdowns on its people by the government, amidst recurrent working-class and pro-Palestinian mobilizations.
Meanwhile, Iraq and Lebanon remained vulnerable due to post-war sectarian engineering, with popular militia unable to extend beyond the bounds of sect in their composition, even if within that sect, in Lebanon and amongst Hezbollah, in the words of al-Amjad Salama, was “comprehensive mobilization … of resources in all aspects of life surrounding the communities in which these forces operate.” The war against the remaining statist forces behind the anti-U.S. project was a microcosm of the larger strategic logic of war itself: war targeting state sovereignty, war pointed to “the creation of a disfigured being, one stripped of identity, dignity, and agency, who is incapable of resisting or confronting the occupation,” as put by the Palestinian writer Bahaa Shahera Rauf.
The U.S.–Israel created a regional landscape of perforation and striation where possible, usually through proxies and almost always bolstered by imperial force multipliers: specialized units and aerial bombardment. From 2014 onward, while the U.S. engaged through proxy in certain “hot” wars oriented to burning up foreign states — Yemen under Ansar Allah — it often opted for “turbulent order” through its funding of sectarian proxies in Iraq and Syria, providing enough money and weapons to destabilize and draw resources from the remaining Arab–Iranian states and standing armies, but not enough to burn what was left of the states to the ground. That decision for a “turbulent order,” in turn, was conditioned on the awareness of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s support for the Syrian Arab Army, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, in addition to Ansar Allah in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and guerrillas in the Gaza Strip.
Because of the military capacity of the al-Qassam Brigades and its cousins, Gaza, in this period, was able to join the rest of Israel’s regional opponents in forcing the Zionists to bet on containment: Israel’s attempt to prevent development of the productive forces, maintain political control over monetary transfers via Qatar, and disrupt the entire regional Axis defensive infrastructure through constant bombing. This is what the Israeli Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) characterizes as a “doctrine of deterrence and containment, assuming that adversaries — particularly non-state actor terror armies like Hamas and Hezbollah — could be managed through calibrated responses and a focus on cost-benefit analysis.”
The previous period of “containment” was punctuated with only periodic conflict, constant peppering and degradation, and partial semi-colonialism — the U.S.–Israeli strategy in Syria from 2019 to 2023. But now, post-October 7, the U.S. and Israel seek to successively raze the base from which regional populations may resist or organize to resist these policies. We must understand the dual nature of their program: oil revenues, financialization, and military positioning in the larger Arab East, paired with population warehousing, service and industrial subcontracting and export, unequal exchange in the Arab West. Meanwhile and as a result, Israel remains central to U.S. concerns. Its advanced economic and technological sectors are nearly inseparable from those of the U.S. ruling class, as evidenced by the cross-listing of shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, and the endless joint research-and-development projects from Microsoft Israel to the Technion. (This is to say nothing of the innumerable joint passport-holders, including Israeli soldiers.)
Indeed, the recent raids on Iran took place using an Israeli variant of the F-35, itself a manticore with body parts from NATO and non-NATO states alike. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has been delivering the wings of the machine to Lockheed Martin. Israeli warmaking, which is costly from the perspective of the public relations wing of U.S. capitalist gangsterdom, helps pay for itself by being also a lab experiment for the high-tech batons needed to enforce that gangsterdom.
The Israeli security strategy — one which the U.S. fully supports and is a senior partner to — is now based on the elimination of the will and capacity for resistance, by forces which JISS, with characteristic racism, glosses as “the ideological and religious motivations of jihadist decision-makers who are willing to incur immense costs.” Instead, writes Israeli military analyst Efraim Inbar, “Israel must also abandon the policy of restraint which was primarily intended to prolong periods of calm along the border and conserve blood and treasure. This approach has proven counter-productive. Over time, containment conveys weakness and an aversion to military confrontation.”
In Gaza, after two years of genocide, the problem remains that Israel is unable to eliminate al-Qassam and its allied resistance factions. After two years, massive ambushes continue against Zionist mechanized forces, and American intelligence has suggested that Hamas has recruited 15,000 fighters, or twice the number Israel has murdered. Against its inability to murder fighters, it murders non-fighters. This genocide — through bombing, starvation, and spreading plague — is not an alternative to war. It is war by other means.
Despite the openly admitted failure of direct military engagement, the war continues. The EU remains disinterested in sanctioning Israel sufficiently to put real pressure on the regime. Further, the EU and U.S. continue to provide unlimited armaments and intelligence. Indeed, this rises to self-identified American Crusader mercenaries in the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
The war also continues because significant battles, what the American scholar Patrick Higgins calls “two major breakthroughs,” have been won by the U.S.–Israeli axis of extermination. The Hezbollah strategy of a support front, in their case depopulating northern Israel and tying down extensive garrisons, met a decapitation strike through the pager attacks. As Amer Mohsen writes, “the ‘first blow’ that the resistance in Lebanon was subjected to was not ordinary. They are not exaggerating when they say it was the kind that causes armies to collapse. … Who holds firm under such impossible circumstances? This is precisely what happened in the South.”
Even more severe has been Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) final destruction of the Syrian state, armed by Turkey and fed by U.S.-chartered humanitarian organizations. Syria, then, has been subject to the Iraq model at light speed: the Israeli eradication of its industrialized defense system, wide-scale sectarian massacres, theft of Syrian territory, and critically, erasing Syria’s historic role as an arms transhipment point for the Lebanese resistance and as a political safe harbor for all the resistance factions.
A further bonus of the “opening” of Syrian airspace to U.S.–Israeli freedom of action was the use of Syrian flight paths to attack Iran. Zionist fretting over the failures of “containment” is also the fruit of U.S.–Zionist awareness that when one “contains” something in a box, that thing is in fact a collection of beings: a mobilized force, or a state with industrial and manufacturing capacity, filled with women and men who can think and learn and armor themselves to resist U.S.–Israel aggression, and even more so, subject it to devastating riposte. Iran, surrounded by sanctions and U.S. military barracks, has yet managed to produce a high-tech missile capacity capable of hitting out hard enough to force the U.S.–Israeli extermination axis to sue for peace.
Containment has its price, as does war. It is from these axioms — and, we can speculate, the interlinked fear of what a population subject to genocide might do once the extermination ceases — that the strategy congeals. Disarming Hamas from its generational accumulation of the means of resistance; disarming Hezbollah through the collective punishment of the popular cradle through devastated terrain warfare and financial torture — these have become the only path to victory in this critical Arab heartland for the imperial and settler-colonial forces which cannot understand defeat. The current checks on this process of disarmament are, first, the capacity to impose enough violence to collapse the imperial armies before they collapse the Gaza component of the Axis, and second, the seeming unwillingness of an international system to accept annihilation by starvation. For now, the war continues.
This piece appears in the twentieth issue of The New York War Crimes.