By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle
From Israel’s early alliance with the Shah’s Iran to the rise of messianic Zionism and expanding regional warfare, a pressing question has resurfaced amid the 2026 assault on Iran: what truly lies behind Israel’s confrontation with Tehran? In this critical reading, Ilan Pappé argues that the answer extends far beyond security or nuclear concerns, locating the conflict instead within a broader ideological project rooted in Zionism, territorial expansion, and the long-standing effort to reshape the Middle East in ways inseparable from the Palestinian question.
Any analysis of Israel and Zionism needs to distinguish between patterns of continuity rooted in Israel’s ideological foundations and patterns of change resulting from circumstances and the passage of time.
This is also true when we analyze Israel’s policies toward Iran, from the days of Israel’s inception until its current assault on Iran.
Until the fall of the Shah and his regime in 1979, Iran was an important member of the coalition of non-Arab countries that both Israel and the West tried to build against the influence of the Soviet Union and the emergence of progressive Arab regimes committed to pan-Arabism and the liberation of Palestine. This alliance led to the infamous connection between the Shabak, the Israeli secret service, and the Savak, the Iranian secret service, employing similar oppressive methods against Palestinians in the former case and against the regime’s dissidents in the latter.
This axis was dismantled after the Iranian Revolution. Iran identified with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and directly aided political Islamic groups that were offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Palestine, dating back to the early 1930s (hence, the Western narrative claiming that these groups were established by Iran is false).
After the Iranian Revolution, and particularly given the new regime’s commitment to the liberation of Palestine and its rejection of the idea of a Jewish state, the strategy against Iran resembled Israeli policy toward Arab countries that appeared determined to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
In the 20th century, this strategy focused on clandestine interference in the affairs of those states. This meant sowing divisions within societies and supporting minorities seeking to secede from the mother country.
In Iran, this involved attempts to establish connections with the Kurdish minority, but unlike the ties established with the Iraqi Kurds, this never materialized. The overall aim was to significantly weaken countries that both threatened Israel’s regional hegemony and were still willing to offer support to Palestinian resistance.
In this century, the policy has become much more overt and aggressive. The reason is the emergence of messianic Zionism as a hegemonic political force in Israel. This coincided with the rise of Christian fundamentalism as a force within the Republican Party in the United States, as well as the emergence of fascist and neo-right parties in the West. One might also add the rise of Narendra Modi to power in India to this mix.
What this policy amounts to is a return to the kind of territorial imperialism that devastated large parts of the world in the late 19th century. This means that the territorial ambition of creating a de-Arabized Greater Israel extends beyond the boundaries of historic Palestine.
This reflects a desire to recreate a theocratic biblical kingdom, feared by its neighbors and dominant in the region. In this respect, it is important to note a remark by the American ambassador to Israel. When American journalist Tucker Carlson asked whether the biblical state envisioned by him and the current Israeli government could stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates, effectively encompassing much of the Middle East, he replied: “It will be fine if they take it all.”
What the old and new strategies have in common is the assumption that in order to complete the Nakba and lead to the total decimation of the Palestinians, one must subdue the region, deter it, assault it if necessary, and build an alliance based on fear and awe. In the past, at least some countries were offered the opportunity to benefit from Israeli know-how in technology, medicine, and agriculture. Such offers are no longer part of the arrangement.
The willingness to act openly in total violation of international law and with disregard for the sovereignty of Middle Eastern countries has taken us back to the 19th-century age of imperialism. But countries in the Middle East are no longer colonies, and one wonders when they will react to this disregard for their integrity and sovereignty.
This new territorial imperialism by Israel was manifested by expanding the same lethal forms of attack that for years the state had employed against Palestinians and the Lebanese into other parts of the Middle East.
This new policy began in 2009 with attacks on alleged Iranian bases in Sudan and intensified in 2012, when the Israeli Air Force bombed Damascus and other major Syrian cities while Syria was embroiled in a civil war that disabled its army from responding to these attacks. It culminated in the bombing of Doha in a failed attempt to kill members of the Hamas delegation that was, at the time, negotiating with Israel to end the war in the Gaza Strip. Other targets included Iraq and Yemen.
It was only a matter of time before Tehran itself would be targeted. The reason the assault came so late—although threats to attack Iran dated back to the beginning of Netanyahu’s effective rule in 2009—was that Iran did not provide an easy pretext for attack, despite endless Israeli provocations.
It was not easy to justify an attack. It was clear that Iran had nothing to do with the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, had restrained Hezbollah from joining the operation, and had shown considerable restraint after Israel assassinated its scientists and diplomats.
Netanyahu understood that to pursue this policy further, he needed to take several preliminary steps. One was to purge anyone in the army or Mossad who might have objected to an attack on Iran.
The second stage was persuading US President Donald Trump to take a leading role in an assault on Iran. Trump, in his second term, was an easy target due to his personality, the entourage surrounding him, and his domestic incompetence, which required an external distraction.
Also, the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro and the takeover of Venezuelan oil—which occurred without repercussions—may have led him to believe that this operation would similarly be swift.
This adventurism has so far inflicted immense human suffering. By May 2026, there are six million refugees because of these policies: two million in Gaza and the West Bank, one million in Lebanon, and three million in Tehran.
Its ability to inflict further misery depends on the positions of regional and global powers. Britain and the European Union’s refusal to join the United States in the assault on Iran might indicate a shift in policy regarding the continued violations of international law by Israel and the United States.
Similarly, the very low support for the war in the United States has the potential to translate into changes within the Democratic Party, culminating in a reevaluation of the broader American approach to both the Middle East and Israel.
The position of the Arab world will also be crucial, especially the policies of countries that normalized relations with Israel and, by doing so, normalized the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians. Clearly, the fundamental destabilization of the region as a whole should awaken them to the fact that this policy has failed dismally, and that a lack of reorientation could eventually lead to opposition within these countries maturing into regime change.
More than anything else, Palestine and Gaza remain the core issues that, if ignored and not placed at the center of efforts to prevent another war in the Middle East, will ensure the continuation of American-Israeli violence in the region.
At the center of the Palestine issue is Zionism as a state ideology that informed the assault on Iran and Lebanon, the current ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the continued incremental genocide of the people of Gaza, and the growing pressure through quiet transfer on Palestinians in Israel to leave.
The lesson for Western political elites is that their comfortable assumption—that only Palestinians, and perhaps some Arabs, are paying the price for Israeli policies—has proven misplaced. There should now be a realization that the world at large can be severely and negatively affected by the unabated aggression from which Palestinians have suffered since the 1920s, aggression that was ignored and, in many cases, justified by the West.
Israel will not defeat Iran as such; its policies of annexation will be resisted in neighboring countries, and Palestinians will continue to show resilience. But it is time to disrupt the narrative—still prevalent in too many places—that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, engaged in self-defense for its own sake and for that of “Western civilization.”
- Territorial Imperialism Returns: What Lies Behind the Israeli Assault on Iran? - May 25, 2026
- We Can Defeat the Lobby - July 11, 2024
- The Collapse of Zionism - June 21, 2024