Eurasia Press & News
When Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu visited U.S. President Donald Trump in early February 2025, he gifted him a golden pager, an allusion to Israel’s booby trapping of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon that had been ordered by Hezbollah, intercepted by Israel and turned into lethal weapons. The devices were exploded remotely in September 2024 as unsuspecting carriers were going about their business. The gift was a stunningly crass celebration of terrorism that killed at least 37 people and injured some 3,000, many of them blinded.
The golden pager was a fitting token of the link between these two colonial powers. Trump mused during the same visit that the U.S. would take over Gaza, expelling its people to some unknown location while the U.S. built beachfront apartments (for the benefit of Westerners, presumably). It was the most honest expression of colonialism uttered in the Oval Office in a long time: The president of the United States was advancing the idea of ethnic cleansing (a war crime) and stood to make a buck (or several) in the process. And he was doing it in response to conditions brought about by Israel, which has been a destabilizing force in the Arab world since its establishment in 1948.
Israeli and U.S. gangsterism has come out in the open; in the past, colonial powers were more subtle. In 1916, British Mark Sykes and French François Georges-Picot signed a deal to delineate their countries’ spheres of influence over the Arab parts of a disintegrating Ottoman empire. As representatives of two colonial powers, they felt entitled to do so without giving much thought to the wishes of the peoples of those regions. By the twenty-first century, however, Western countries opted for regime change to shape societies.
Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration developed an ambitious plan to overthrow seven Muslim-majority governments in Western Asia in five years. The plan, premised as it was on the belief that the U.S. need not be constrained by respect for the territorial sovereignty of any nation, was a stunning display of U.S. power and hubris. Among the seven were Iraq, Syria and Lebanon—Iraq and Syria because of their historic role and significance in the Arab world and their unwillingness to obey Western diktats; and Lebanon, incubator of a resistance movement that liberated southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000.
The U.S. began with Iraq. Having weakened it through sanctions that were imposed in 1990, it invaded that country in 2003, launching a shock and awe campaign from which it still has not recovered. Israel and its minions in the U.S. government lobbied hard for that war; its consequences are described in a 2024 interview posted on YouTube with Hussein Askary, the Iraqi-Swedish vice-chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden. The interview is worth listening to; it describes in detail how a well-functioning, sovereign state was reduced to little more than a protectorate.
In Askary’s view the U.S. destroyed Iraq, not because it believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or even because it wanted to seize control of Iraq’s oil, but because it wanted to assert the principle that it could ignore state sovereignty and determine the fate of nations. Today Iraq is not a sovereign country; the constitution, rewritten after the U.S. occupation, turned a secular republic into a sectarian parliamentarian system, and Iraqi society has been transformed into a consumer society. Iraq’s oil revenues go directly to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, from which the U.S. sends monthly amounts of cash to Iraq to cover civil service salaries. With so much cash changing hands, corruption is guaranteed; with its reserves in U.S. hands, its freedom to act independently is circumscribed. And thus a country known as the cradle of civilizations is at the mercy of the colonial overlords that deliberately destroyed its infrastructure, killed its citizens, caged its people, sadistically tortured them, and (with its coalition partners) encouraged the looting of its national wealth and cultural heritage. More than two decades after the shock and awe campaign of the “coalition of the willing,” electricity blackouts for hours at a time are a fact of life in Iraq.
Regime change in Syria was a longer and messier process. Like many Arab governments, the Assad government hovered oppressively over its population; nonviolent citizen demands for reform in 2011 were met with repression, which opened the door to an armed resistance and ultimately to foreign actors fighting proxy wars on Syrian soil. In December 2024, the United States got its wish, and the Assad government was overthrown (although that seems too violent a term to use for a government that just sort of vanished one day). It was replaced by an al-Qaeda militia offshoot, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, went out of his way to reassure Israel and the United States that he did not regard either country as an enemy. This was surprising, considering that Israel has been occupying the Syrian Golan Heights since 1967. And since Bashar al-Assad’s discreet departure, Israel attacked Syria more than 400 times, bombing weapon warehouses, ammunition depots, research centers, airports and naval bases; it set up military bases; and it extended the Golan Heights territory it occupied. It then went on to occupy about 440 square kilometers of Syrian territory, including the Yarmouk riverbed and Al-Wahda Dam, which supplies water to Jordan. Is Israel not an enemy to Syria?
Middle East Monitor reported in late 2024 that the U.S. has about 2,000 troops in Syria and that it has occupied Syria’s oil fields since 2014, denying the government access to the revenue it needed for reconstruction. Various forces—Turkey, Israel, the U.S., Kurds and rebel groups—occupy Syrian territory. Syria’s restoration as a fully functioning state with territorial sovereignty seems far off.
Much smaller, politically chaotic Lebanon was targeted for regime change because it has a resistance movement that defies Western powers. When Israel occupied southern Lebanon in 1982, the Lebanese created a militia, Hezbollah, to force it out; and when war broke out in 2006 in southern Lebanon, it fought Israel to a standstill. Israel, that Western outpost planted in Palestine, a nuclear power with impressive firepower, was in effect defeated by a militia.
You know you’re looking at a colonial arrangement when one party has an air force and tanks and doesn’t hesitate to use them against people it can bomb, starve, make homeless and withhold fuel from without fearing a commensurate response.
When Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, Hezbollah opened a support front to relieve the pressure on the Palestinian resistance. (So did Yemen, another one of the seven countries slated for regime change.) It was an act of deep solidarity, prompted by the principled position that Gaza should not be left to fight Israel alone. The movement and the Lebanese people paid a price for that but are not deterred.
It would be hard to exaggerate the threat posed by Israel to the people in the region (and arguably beyond). Israel’s lethality has been on display for more than 18 months—genocide and scorched earth in Gaza; devastation and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, where the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, Faraa, and Nur Shams have been almost completely depopulated; bombardment of Lebanon. Since the putative ceasefire with Hezbollah, Israel has been acting viciously, occupying parts of southern Lebanon it could not enter while Hezbollah was engaged, killing noncombatants and demolishing entire villages.
It has become depressingly familiar that with each spasm of Israeli violence, Arab states scramble to foot the bill for reconstruction. Never is Israel (or the U.S., or Germany, second only to the U.S. in its feverish support for Israel’s genocide) made to pay.
One wonders at what point governments will ask the obvious question: Why should a Jewish supremacist state, constantly on the lookout for more land and more water resources to usurp, a state whose existence is premised on the nonexistence of indigenous people—why should the existence of such a state be defended?
This is the same question the world has already answered in connection with other genocidal entities that thankfully no longer exist. Today, who laments the demise of Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa? Was the dissolution of the U.S. Confederacy a loss to humanity? Those entities ended not through population elimination or ethnic cleansing but rather through the transformation of social and political systems. It is long overdue for Israel to meet that fate, for it to enter history books as a cautionary tale about the evil that results when a supremacist movement is armed and unrestrained.
