‘By the Way, the World is Not Stopping Us’: The Secret of Israel’s ‘Success’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Design: PC)

As the slaughter continues across Palestine, Smotrich threatens Egypt. If it dares attack Israel, there will be no Sinai, by which he means it will suffer the same fate as Gaza.

In the same speech, he refers to the clearing above and below the ground of south Lebanon.

‘They ’-the ethnically cleansed Lebanese – won’t be coming back, and in the end it will be ours, Smotrich said. “And by the way, the world is not stopping us,” he crowed.

Herein lies the reason why the wrongly named ‘Palestine problem’ (the problem is and always was Zionism and Israel) has metastasized to such a catastrophic level. The world is not stopping Israel and never did stop it. Only now, decades too late, is it waking up to the menace it has let loose at the heart of West Asia.

It is not just Egypt but Turkiye that Israel now threatens. The overthrow of the Syrian government in 2024 brought Turkey and Israel together as occupying forces in the same country, Turkey in the northwest and Israel in the south.

The final triumph of the ‘West ’, its regional allies and their Syrian proxies in 2024 was an opportunity Israel quickly grasped. It reoccupied that part of the occupied Golan Heights it had returned to Syria in 1974 and went on to seize more strategic territory along Lebanon’s eastern border as well as other parts of southern Syria.

Since October 7, 2023, as the Times of Israel points out, Israel has occupied more territory than it has for decades; in fact, since the 1967 war, about 1000 sq kms (386 square miles) in total, including 608 sq km in Lebanon (274 square miles) and 235 sq km (91 square miles) in Syria. In addition to these land grabs, Israel now has full military control over about 70 percent of the Gaza Strip.

In all cases, the arguments – pretexts – for occupation are the same as they have been in the past eight decades: buffer strips and closed security zones, defined by colored lines that are not actually drawn on a map and result in anyone crossing these lines without being aware of where they are being shot.

Syria is now a catspaw for a string of countries: the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE. Jolani/Shara’a cannot escape any more than the mouse can. Even if the cat lifts its paw, there will be another one waiting to put it down again.

At present he is running to Saudi Arabia with the offer of help in its foundering war on Yemen, although what practical help he could give is hard to see, as the Syrian military was almost totally destroyed by Israel in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of the government in 2024. Probably he has manpower in mind to make up for the extensive losses suffered by Saudi Arabia’s mercenary forces.

Now that Turkey and Israel are occupying different parts of the same country, Israel is threatening Turkiye and Turkiye is responding in kind. An air attack on a disused air base in Turkey’s ‘sphere of influence’ in northern Syria was an indication of how far Israel is prepared to go.

The broader context for these developments is the strategic alliance being formed in the eastern Mediterranean by Israel, Greece and the government of southern Cyprus. All three have emphasized economic cooperation, centering on the exploitation of natural gas in EEZs (Exclusive Economic Zones) stretching deep into the Mediterranean and amounting to 98, 707 sq km for Cyprus and 25,995 for Israel. In the future, for Israel, there is also the exploitation of Gaza’s extensive offshore natural gas reserves if occupation can be turned into annexation.

Corporate interest serves as a cloak for a rapidly developing military strategic alliance between the three governments.

In May 2023, the Cypriot National Guard and Israel staged the ‘Blue Sun’ military exercises in southern Cyprus. Israeli spy planes were flown into Paphos International Airport, along with F-16s, Apache helicopters, and Maglan special forces transported in C-130s. Even earlier, Israeli units had been training in the Troodos mountains and Paphos forests because of the similarity of the terrain to southern Lebanon. In return, Cypriot troops have trained in occupied Palestine with the ‘elite’ Egoz commando brigade.

Augmenting the military and corporate connections, thousands of Israelis have settled in southern Cyprus since October 2023, opening hotels, restaurants, schools and synagogues and constructing apartment buildings.

They are the human leverage Israel can use whenever it wants to crank up the propaganda campaign against the ‘threat’ from northern Cyprus and the Turkish mainland. The people of southern Cyprus do not like or want the Israelis in their midst, but accommodating them is built into government strategy.

In February 2026, the southern Cypriot government opened a Maritime Cyber Security Center, which serves as what has been described as the ‘nerve center’ of a protective early warning network for undersea cables, natural gas platforms, ports and maritime traffic. The government has installed the Israeli Barak MX integrated air and missile ‘defense’ system against missiles, winged aircraft, helicopters and UAVs. In a 3.5 billion euro deal with Israel, Greece has also purchased the Barak system.

The UAVs are especially relevant as targets considering Turkiye’s global lead in the manufacture and sale of UAVs and armed drones. With an air ‘defence’ shield extending to as much as 460 kms, the Cypriot-installed Barak system covers part of southeastern Turkiye, which has responded to these developments by strengthening air defences in northern Cyprus while moving ahead with its Mavi Vatan (Blue Homeland) maritime defence program.

In July 2025, Shay Gal, a former vice-president of IAI (Israel Aerospace Industries), which produces the Barak system, wrote that Israel should make plans with Greece and the government of southern Cyprus to “liberate” the northern part of the island.

Cyprus was divided in 1974 following the overthrow of its Turkish president by the Greek military junta. ‘Enosis’ (union with Greece) was to follow, but Turkish intervention led to the collapse of the junta in Athens, the liberation of the Greek people, and the restoration of constitutional government.

Now Cyprus is in the news again as a strengthened vector of Israeli operations. In coordination with Greece and southern Cyprus, the aim is control over the eastern Mediterranean through the containment and exclusion of Turkiye. The Greek coast is 395 kms from the Cypriot coast; the Turkish coast is about 90 km, so Turkiye’s concerns are hardly imaginary.

While Israel continues to kill Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians, and threaten countries it has not yet attacked, the search for the remains of buried bodies continues in Gaza. As Israel still refuses to allow heavy machinery into the strip, most of the digging through the rubble has to be done by hand.

The remains of entire families are being dug out. Since November 2025, more than 630 bodies and body parts have been recovered. Between June 27 and August 27, 2026, 233 bodies were recovered from 407 believed to be buried under 20 destroyed buildings, including 74 children and 106 women.

By September 15, 96 bodies and human remains had been recovered since the beginning of the month from one site alone, the Al Zeytun neighborhood near Gaza City. They included 58 children and 23 women.

The UN Office for Human Rights says that where Israeli troops are deployed, sites “continue to be bulldozed with no respect for the dead under the rubble,” but when there is no respect even for living Palestinians, this is hardly surprising. An estimated 8000 Palestinians still lie dead under the shattered remains of their towns and cities.

Despite the statistics, the apologists for genocide continue to insist that all the figures are false, are cooked up by Hamas, and bear no relationship to the true figures as affirmed by the IDF. As the IDF has been affirming lies since October 2023, and for many years before that, it has no credibility, and neither do those using it as their source.

Israel is now striking out in all directions and on all fronts. For the moment, the war on Iran has been slowed down while the US builds up its military around the Gulf, ahead of the expected third attack.

There are reports that Trump has given Israel the green light to use nuclear warheads – but only small ones. That should be no comfort to anyone. Once the nuclear cat is out of the bag, it will be hard to push back in. If the smaller warheads don’t do the job, logic will dictate reaching for a bigger one.

Having tried and failed twice so far to destroy Iran, the US and Israel can be relied upon to throw everything into the next attack. Iran knows that and is preparing. One would hope that wiser heads would prevail, but to say the least of the moral delinquents running the show, there are none in the current Washington and Tel Aviv regimes.

All of this is sure to come to a terrible end at some point in the future. Having arisen by fire and sword, Israel is likely to fall the same way. Only a blanket ban on all dealings with this genocidal state – political, economic and military – might avert such an outcome but there is no hope of the ‘international community’ agreeing on this. 

BDS has done a great job, but in the US, despite the steep decline in public support for Israel, 27 states still have legislation on their books banning boycotts of Israel. Executive or administrative orders ban boycotts in seven other states.

The peace Israel wants, a single Jewish state over all Palestine, mostly cleansed of its Palestinian inhabitants, is not peace but a guarantee for more death and destruction extending deep into the future.

But this is the only peace Israel is willing to settle for. No two-state solution is remotely conceivable, and the one Jewish state is no answer. Israel has boxed itself in so deliberately by packing East Jerusalem and the West Bank with settlers (now about 750,000) that no real peace is conceivable based on two states.

Thousands of Palestinians had been killed by Israel in Gaza since 2006 before Hamas launched its response on October 7, 2023. If civilians were killed on that day, it is because, in the interplay between occupation and resistance, civilians are always killed and always in far greater numbers on the side of the oppressed.

Had a multinational military force been sent to Gaza to protect the Palestinians, Israel would have had to choose between confrontation and withdrawal, but this option wasn’t even considered by an ‘international community’ committed to upholding the international law Israel was smashing. If direct action had been taken to stop this openly flaunted genocide, tens of thousands of Palestinian lives could have been saved.

As the murderous fanatic Smotrich says, ‘and by the way, the world is not stopping us.’ At some time in the future, that could be the epitaph on Israel’s tombstone: the world did not stop us and look where we are now.

– 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.