As Israel wages war on the whole region, the Arabs are finally turning

A demonstrator holds a poster labelling Benjamin Netanyahu as a criminal during a protest against Israel’s Gaza genocide, Paris, on 6 September 2025

Before he set off on a suicide mission to shoot Israeli soldiers on the Allenby Bridge, the main crossing between Israel and Jordan, Abdul-Muttalib al-Qaisi wrote a will.

In it he said: “Oh sons of my Umma, for how long will we stay silent about the ones that occupy the lands, will we stay silent until it reaches our land and violates its sanctities?” Al-Qaisi, and before him Mahir al-Jazi, another Jordanian who attacked Israeli forces at the border crossing last year, are not Palestinians. They are from the East Bank.

His message was to “the honourable free people everywhere and especially our brothers in the Arab clans in Al-Sham: Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.”

And it was this: what is happening in Gaza will be repeated in Arab countries. Our silence is complicity. Do nothing and Greater Israel will come to us.

If this message represents, as I believe it does, a mood that extends far beyond the outskirts of Amman where it was written, then Israel is making a misjudgement of historic proportions.

Israel: The existential danger

The continuous rhetoric from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, his finance minister and de facto pro-consul of the occupied West Bank, that Israel will be the only state west of the river Jordan is attracting an audience and creating alarm far beyond the borders of Palestine.

The threat Israel poses to the region is irrespective of alliances, politics, tribal identity or religion. Nearly two years of war have seen parts of Lebanon as well as Gaza devastated, southern Syria occupied, and Israeli warplanes have killed Ahmed Ghaleb Nasser al-Rahawi, Yemen’s prime minister, and knocked out Iran’s top military leadership.

Israel is not only becoming an existential danger to the Palestinians but to all states of the region.

Try to negotiate with Israel, and its warplanes will target your negotiating teams, as they have done twice now, when they attacked Iran before talks were due to take place in Oman, and then when they attacked the Hamas negotiating team in Doha.

Drunk with power, or so desperate to cling onto it, that keeping the war going is his only option, Netanyahu thinks he can impose Israel’s new borders on the region by force.

Israel will never again get a more permissive US president than it has now in Donald Trump. He has already allowed it to annex the occupied Golan Heights, has recognised Jerusalem as the undivided capital of “the Jewish State”, and is now allowing Israel to raise Gaza City to the ground.

Nor will it ever again get a US administration so dominated by Christian fundamentalists.

Speaking in a tunnel dug under Palestinian homes of Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Tel Aviv, called Jerusalem the “undivided, undisputable, indigenous capital” of the Jews “from eternity”. He said: “It was 4,000 years ago here in this city, on Mount Moriah, where God chose His people. He not only chose a people, but He chose a place, and then He chose for the people in this place a purpose. The people were the Jewish people. The place was Israel, and the purpose was to be a light to the world.” For Huckabee, there were no grey areas in this conflict. It was Good versus Evil.

“You don’t stand with Israel because you agree with their government…You stand with Israel because Israel is standing for a tradition of the God of Abraham.” This is the insanity that a man designated as US ambassador now speaks.

A religious war

But the insanity is less the ravings of an evangelical fundamentalist as it could be the starting pistol of a religious war.

In seeking total victory over a humiliated Muslim region, Netanyahu is making the mistake that many warrior leaders have done before him, notably Napoleon and Hitler, who attacked and were defeated by Russia.

He thinks that 7.7 million Jews in Israel can dominate 473 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, 92 million Iranians, or for that matter, two billion Muslims in the world. For that is what Netanyahu’s evocation of “super Sparta” means.

Because as this war has progressed, Israel’s military campaign has become less and less focused on erasing one armed group which attacked it, and more and more about extinguishing all regional rivals, first Iran and now Turkey.

Netanyahu’s “super Sparta” challenges the sovereignty of all nation states, young or old, near or far from Israel’s new borders. The threat Israel poses to the region is irrespective of alliances, politics, tribal identity or religion.

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