The Iran Attack: A War for the Future of the Middle East and Palestine

By Jeremy Salt

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (R) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

Not that the attack on Iran is about nuclear weaponry anyway, but rather Israel seeking the destruction of a state standing in the way of its full regional hegemony.

After centuries of dominating the Muslim and Arab worlds through war, invasion, occupation and subversion, the ‘west’ is close to what must be the apogee of its unbridled, insensate, racist violence. A reminder, of course, that the war on Muslim countries has been all along a subset of the half-millennium war by the imperial ‘west’ on the rest of the world.

The outcome of the war on Iran will reset the scene for the next century. Either Iran successfully resists or the Middle East will fall under the ‘western’ hammer for the next century.

Iran is defending more than Iran. It is defending Palestine, it is defending the hopes and aspirations of Arabs and Muslims everywhere to decide their own future instead of constantly having it wrenched away from them. By extension, it is defending the same hopes and aspirations of the entire global south.

The conquest of the Middle East and North Africa began with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798. It collapsed after a few years but set off the race for domination, which gradually embraced the entire region. The language was ‘civilization’, the means the most technically superior weapons of the time, available only to the Europeans.

Thus the date pit bullets coated with lead the Algerians shot at the French in the 1830s, thus the spears and rifles the Sudanese warriors had against the Maxim guns lined up by the British at Omdurman in 1898; thus the ‘stealth fighters’ and ‘smart bombs’ used in the war on Iraq in 2003; thus the armed drones killing women and children in Yemen and Palestine; thus the ‘bunker buster’ bombs about to be dropped on Iran; thus the nuclear weapons readily available if all else fails.

This is not the supposed moral superiority of a civilization but the superiority produced by technology generated by wealth in a modern industrial society. It does not always win and can fail when the unexpected happens, such as when Japan defeated Russia in their war of 1904-05. The military triumph of an ‘Asian’ power shocked the ‘west’ but showed that Europeans could be defeated at their own game, and gave hope to the oppressed of the world everywhere.

In the 19^th century ‘great game’ between Russia and Britain, Iran was right at the crossroads between British India and Russian-dominated Central Asia. The efforts of Iranians to free themselves from the menace of these two powers and the misrule of the corrupt Qajar shahs began in the late 19^th century.

The ‘tobacco revolt’ of 1890, when Iranians refused to smoke tobacco until the shah withdrew full control over the growth, harvesting, and sale of tobacco he had given to a British national, was a key event. Successful, it was followed by the rise of a constitutional movement supported by all sectors of Iranian society in which women played a powerful and even radical role.

In 1906, mass protests forced the shah to declare a constitution and then open a parliament. The battle between the people and the shah over constitutional government continued until the Shah called in thousands of Russian troops in 1911 and closed the Majlis. The disruption of the First World War ended with the downfall of the Qajar shahs and the British-backed installation of the first Pahlavi shah.

These events need to be seen in the context of imperial aggression against other Muslim lands at the time even as their thirst for territory was bringing the European powers closer to a war amongst themselves.

Almost all of Africa had been brought under their control when the ‘Agadir crisis’ of 1911 brought Germany and France close to open conflict. In the same year, an Italian army invaded Ottoman Libya, and in 1912, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro invaded Ottoman Macedonia, with the scarcely concealed covert support of their powerful imperial allies.

By this time, the discovery of oil at Masjid al Sulaiman in 1908 had locked Iran in as an indispensable ‘western’ asset to be held, whatever the cost to others. Oil and not coal was now the energy source of ‘western’ military and industrial power. Countries with it could not be allowed to be independent.

In 1911, an outsider, an American, W. Morgan Shuster, was appointed Iran’s Treasurer-General. While his job was to reorganize Iran’s finances, it brought him face to face with British and Russian intrigues.

He sums up his reaction in his book The Strangling of Persia (1912) when he writes of how difficult it was to “adequately portray the rapidly shifting scenes attending the downfall of this ancient nation – scenes in which two powerful and presumably enlightened Christian countries played fast and loose with truth, honor, decency and law.” The same phrases are apt to describe the unprincipled and lawless wars the ‘west’ has launched against Muslim countries since 9/11 created the opportunity. 1

Shuster’s book foreshadows Trump’s intention to murder Ayatullah Khamenei. Occupying Tabriz in 1911, the Russian military governor hanged the senior religious figure in the city. As Shuster writes, quoting a British journalist, “the effect of this outrage on the Persians was that which would be produced on the English people by the hanging of the Archbishop of Canterbury on Good Friday.”

In 1951, a nationalist government led by Muhammad Mossadegh nationalized oil, then in the hands of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In 1953, he was overthrown in a joint operation by the CIA and M16. Fleeing the country shortly beforehand, Shah Reza Pahlavi was reinstalled, this time determined to rule and not just reign, which he did largely through his infamous SAVAK secret police and intelligence network.

Time finally ran out in 1979 when he fled the country ahead of the return from exile of the Ayatullah Ruhullah Khomaini, who had been launching open attacks on the regime since the 1940s, had been thrown out of his country and had helped to orchestrate the overthrow of the regime from France.

This was an Iranian Islamic revolution. One of the first acts of the new government was to hand the Israeli embassy over to the PLO, which brings us to the central point of what the current attack on Iran is all about: Palestine.

Had Iran dropped the Palestine question. it could have had peace with the US at any time. That is all it had to do. In fact, from President Rafsanjani’s time onwards, Iran made it clear it was ready to work with the US, and allow US corporations to set up businesses in Iran under favorable conditions. President Khatami extended the same olive branch in his time, only for sanctions to be tightened.

The problem always was Palestine. Iran stuck to the letter of international law and would not budge despite all the threats and inducements. Moreover, Israel was continuously engaged in brutal military attacks on the Palestinian civilian population and on virtually all countries surrounding Palestine.

The attack on Lebanon alone in 1982 took the lives of 20,000 people and was a harbinger of much worse to come, as seen in the attacks on Gaza leading up to October 7, 2023, and on Beirut and southern Lebanon in the year after that event.

Through all of this, Iran never budged from its principled position as the anchor in the ‘axis of resistance.’ The US tried to destroy it in the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1989, but failed. It suffered terrible casualties but soon recovered and became a leading figure in BRICS, the contemporary equivalent of the non-aligned movement in the 1950s.

Thwarted, Israel tried to pull it down at every opportunity, assassinating its scientists in Iran, its military commanders in Syria and attempting to cause chaos through electronic warfare sabotage.

Netanyahu was obsessed but could not persuade the US to launch a joint attack. The second-best choice was the proxy war on Syria (2011-2024), which was an attempt by the ‘west’ and Israel to destroy the central arch in the strategic alliance between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

This succeeded in December 2024, when the Syrian government collapsed and a puppet installed himself as president. By this time, in September, Israel had killed or maimed hundreds of Lebanese civilians in its pager attacks and had assassinated key figures in Hezbollah’s military and political chain of command. It had previously assassinated Hamas’ chairman Ismail Haniyeh when he was in Tehran for the inauguration of President Raisi, himself soon to die in a helicopter ‘accident’ that has all the hallmarks of a Mossad assassination.

From Israel’s perspective, these were very successful years; genocide in Gaza without anyone to stop it; the overthrow of the Syrian government and the crippling of Hezbollah’s leadership.

Sykes-Picot placed the Middle East in the hands of the ‘west’ for the last century, and if Iran can now be dismembered, it will be ‘safe’ for the next century, too. The great beneficiary will be Israel, free to expand to its biblical borders, at the expense of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps even Turkey.

Trump seems to be in two minds about whether to join Israel in a mass attack on Iran, but that could be propaganda. The plans have already been drawn up, but if he hesitates, it’s because he does not have his administration, the Congress, the American people or even his own MAGA movement behind him. Moreover, Americans have had enough of Middle East wars and do not want to be caught up in another one, especially on behalf of one that is widely recognized in the US as a genocidal state.

Even taking all this into account, Trump seems ready to go. He prefers Netanyahu’s lies to the findings of his own intelligence network, as summarized by Tulsi Gabbard, that Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon. Not that the attack on Iran is about nuclear weaponry anyway, but rather Israel seeking the destruction of a state standing in the way of its full regional hegemony.

This is Netanyahu’s big moment in history, the one he has planned for decades, and he is not about to let it slip away. He is already indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but there will be plenty of time for future generations to wonder why such a depraved criminal was not stopped before he pulled the world to the edge of the abyss. Over it remains to be seen.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.