Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently went on a podcast and called for Israel to go to war in the occupied West Bank and to “do there what we did in Gaza.” He called for dismantling the Palestinian Authority, annexing the territory Israel controls east of the so-called Yellow Line in Gaza and extending Israeli control in southern Lebanon as far as the Litani River. These are not allegations made by an anti-Israel commentator. He said these himself on an Israeli podcast.
The Western mainstream press’s immediate response was predictable. Smotrich is “far right.” Ben-Gvir is “far right.” Netanyahu has been captured by the “far right.” If only the moderate Israelis could return to power, we are told, perhaps the peace process could be revived and all of this Zionist extremism would disappear. I reject this framing. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir certainly represent an extreme and particularly ugly expression of Israeli politics, but settlements in the West Bank did not begin with Smotrich. The occupation of the Golan Heights did not begin with Smotrich. The occupation of the West Bank did not begin with Netanyahu. The denial of a Palestinian statehood did not appear after October 7. Israeli governments of different political compositions expanded settlements, preserved territorial control and treated the question of Palestinian statehood according to Israel’s security and demographic calculations. The difference between Israeli governments has often been one of pace, language and tactics rather than a fundamental disagreement over the strategic objective.
This is something Bashar al-Assad said many years ago at an Arab League summit, and I remember the statement because I think it captured how Damascus understood Israel. He basically said that from the Syrian perspective there was no Israeli left and right in the sense that Europeans imagined it. There was the right, the far right and then something even further to the right. I am paraphrasing him because I do not remember the exact wording or even the exact year—I think it was around 2002 or 2003—but you get the point. One Israeli government might negotiate while another government bombs. One may speak about peace and another may speak about annexation. But when we look at the expansion of settlements over decades, the permanent control over Palestinian territory, the occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights and recurrent Israeli military expansion inside Lebanon and Syria, then I think we have to ask whether the distinction between the “moderate” and “extreme” projects has sometimes been manufactured for Western audiences.
The Knesset itself gave us a useful example. In 2024, the Israeli parliament voted 68 to 9 for a resolution opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. This was not nine people voting against Palestinian statehood while sixty-eight opposed the resolution. It was the other way around. The motion received support beyond the most religious-nationalist factions and stated that a Palestinian state would pose a danger to Israel and reward “terrorism”. So when people continue telling us that the two-state solution is simply waiting for a more moderate Israeli government, I think they should explain to us where exactly this parliamentary majority for Palestinian sovereignty is supposed to come from.
Unlike other politicians, Smotrich is not hiding behind diplomatic formulas. When he speaks about annexing parts of Gaza and southern Lebanon, when he speaks about the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, he is placing the territorial question directly in front of us. Years earlier, in a documentary interview, he also spoke about a Jewish state whose future, according to the religious ideas he was citing, would extend toward Damascus.
The Israeli army will wake up tomorrow morning and attempt to occupy territory from the Nile to the Euphrates. States rarely implement ideological maps in one giant military campaign. They advance when conditions permit them to advance, and they stop when the balance of power forces them to stop.
When I look at what has happened in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and southern Syria, I think the picture is increasingly clear.
The language changes according to the front. In Gaza, the justification is Hamas. In Lebanon, it is Hezbollah. In Syria, it was Iran, Hezbollah, Assad and now increasingly Turkey or whatever armed formation Israel decides may become dangerous in the future. In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority itself can now be described by Israeli ministers as part of the terrorist infrastructure that must be dismantled. So eventually you reach a point where every political arrangement on the other side of the border can be redefined as a threat if that arrangement prevents Israel from exercising complete military dominance.
This is why I do not accept the argument that Arab governments can solve the problem by cutting deals individually with Israel. I am not against diplomacy. If there is a just and comprehensive peace that preserves the sovereignty and rights of the peoples of the region, of course I support peace. What I reject is the illusion that submission and peace are the same thing. The Oslo process did not stop settlement expansion. The Abraham Accords did not produce Palestinian sovereignty. Jordan and Egypt have peace agreements with Israel, yet Israeli politicians talk about expanding their borders to the countries they made “peace” with.
So, if diplomacy alone does not restrain Israeli expansion, what does?
The answer is deterrence.
In the Middle East, whether people like it or not, Iran remains the only state with the military depth, population, industrial base and network of regional partners capable of building a deterrent architecture large enough to impose meaningful costs on Israel. This does not mean Iran possesses some magical stick. I have criticized this illusion many times. People confuse what they want Iran to be capable of doing with what Iran is actually capable of doing. The blows suffered by Hezbollah, the loss of Syria as a central strategic partner, the destruction in Gaza and the wider confrontation with the United States and Israel all weakened Iran’s regional position. I do not believe this is controversial. The question is whether that deterioration is permanent.
My reading at the moment is that Iran is still primarily in the business of preserving Iran. Tehran does not believe the war is over. It sees military pressure, sanctions, intelligence operations, attacks on infrastructure and political pressure as different layers of the same conflict. Therefore, before Iran can seriously rebuild deterrence in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Syria or elsewhere, it has to survive the confrontation against itself. This is why I said during my recent stream that what I regard as Iran’s military success against the American-Israeli aggressions has not yet been transformed into a regional political project. Iran can absorb attacks and impose costs, but that is not the same thing as restoring the position it had in the region several years ago.
When Iran emerges victorious and imposes its conditions, that calculation will change. It can reinvest in regional partnerships. It can rebuild military supply lines. It can help restore the deterrent capabilities of actors in Lebanon and elsewhere. And if those capabilities are restored, Israeli expansion becomes more expensive.
This is exactly why the sectarian war taking place across social media is so destructive to the people of the region. While Israeli strategists think in terms of borders, military corridors, ports, energy, deterrence and political power, enormous numbers of Arabs and Muslims are still arguing about who is Sunni, who is Shia, who is Alawite, who is a real Muslim and who is not. Now the Yemen war has poured even more fuel on this. Suddenly, every development is translated into a sectarian question. Yemen attacks Saudi Arabia; therefore, this becomes an Iranian war against Sunnis. Iran supports Ansar Allah; therefore, Saudi religious sites are supposedly under a Persian-Shia threat. People repeat these narratives until the geopolitical conflict disappears and we are left fighting each other over identities.
We have seen this movie before.
Divide and rule is not some sophisticated twenty-first-century invention. Every empire used local divisions. Religious divisions, ethnic divisions, tribal divisions, class divisions. It does not really matter. If Syrians do not trust one another, if Lebanese do not trust one another, if Sunnis believe every Shia is an Iranian agent and Shia believe every Sunni is a Saudi or Turkish agent, then nobody needs to conquer the region with millions of soldiers. We will destroy the cohesion of our societies ourselves and then foreign powers will select the local faction that best serves their interests.
This is why I become suspicious when sectarianism suddenly becomes the dominant conversation at exactly the moment when Gaza has created something extremely inconvenient for Israel: a transnational, transreligious and transethnic solidarity movement. Christians, Muslims, Shia, Sunni, secular Arabs, Europeans, Americans, even many Jews came together around the Palestinian issue. Then suddenly people appear everywhere to tell us who is a kafir, who is a true Muslim, which sect committed which crime hundreds of years ago and why we should hate one another more than we hate foreign domination.
While the region is consumed by these divisions, something else is happening at the strategic level that I think may become even more important over the coming years: the United States is beginning to reconsider its role as the manager of the Middle East.
I was reading a recent article from The Economist that described America as “stepping back from a region it never managed to remake.” The important distinction in the article, and one I agree with, is that America is not leaving the Middle East. The United States will remain militarily, economically and diplomatically involved. It will sell weapons. It will conduct “counterterrorism” operations. It will maintain partnerships with Gulf states. It will protect trade routes when it believes American interests require it. But Washington appears less willing to continue playing the role it imagined for itself after 1991: the supreme security governor that reorganizes the region every time something goes wrong.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States appeared to have no serious competitor in the Middle East. It expelled Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, organized the Madrid peace conference and looked capable of writing the regional order almost by itself. And then what followed? Iraq. Libya. Syria. Yemen. Afghanistan, if we extend the geographic frame. Sanctions, occupations, regime-change operations, armed proxies, drone wars, military bases and trillions of dollars spent trying to rearrange political systems.
What did America actually achieve?
Iraq was invaded and Saddam Hussein was removed, but Iran emerged with far greater influence in Baghdad than it possessed before 2003. Libya’s government was overthrown and the state fragmented. The Syrian state was subjected to a regime-change operation and years of sanctions and proxy warfare, only for the result to produce another unstable country whose territory and politics are now contested by Turkey, Israel, Gulf states and others. Yemen became another battlefield.
Now we are watching another war, this time with Iran, producing enormous economic and strategic costs for America’s Gulf allies. The conflict disrupted energy markets, damaged infrastructure, brought attacks closer to countries that believed the American security umbrella would keep war away from them, and forced Gulf governments to think again about what hosting American military facilities actually means during a major confrontation. The question they are increasingly asking is: does the American base protect us, or does it make us a target?
This is where the future of the American military presence becomes interesting. The United States has already drawn down from Syria this year, including its withdrawal from al-Tanf and later from Qasrak as part of a broader departure. And as I am writing this, Washington is completing the withdrawal of its remaining troops from Iraq by September 30. This does not mean there will suddenly be no American military footprint in the Middle East. That is exactly why I use the word retrenchment rather than retreat.
Retrenchment is not retreat.
America will still have bases. It will still have fleets. It will still sell tens of billions of dollars in weapons. It will still bomb people when Washington decides that American security requires it. But the psychology of the region is changing. For decades, Gulf Monarchies built much of their security architecture around the assumption that if the problem became large enough, America would eventually arrive and solve it. I think that assumption has been badly damaged.
And America has reasons beyond the Middle East to reconsider this burden. The international system today is not the international system of 1991. China is not the China of 1991. Russia is again a major military power. Europe has its own security crisis. The United States cannot endlessly tie expensive aircraft, missile-defense systems, naval forces and ammunition stockpiles to one region without affecting what it can deploy somewhere else. The famous “pivot to Asia” became almost a joke under several administrations because every time Washington tried to pivot, another crisis dragged it back into the Middle East. But eventually material constraints become material constraints.
This does not mean America will successfully contain China simply by moving more assets into the Pacific. I think China has already become too large economically and geopolitically for the kind of containment strategy Washington used against smaller powers. But that is a different discussion. The point for the Middle East is that America increasingly has to prioritize.
And if America steps back, who fills the vacuum?
Israel clearly wants to become one of the principal powers shaping the post-American regional order. Turkey wants the same thing. Iran wants the same thing. The Gulf states want to protect their own monarchies but lack the independent military power of these three actors. There is no serious Arab nationalist project capable of balancing them. Egypt is weaker than it was during the Nasser period. Syria has been destroyed. Iraq remains divided by internal and external pressures. Lebanon barely possesses a functioning state. So if the United States no longer wants to run the region directly, the vacuum will not be filled by some harmonious “Middle Eastern community.” It will become a competition.
Syria already gave us a preview. Break the central state, weaken all indigenous institutions and eventually the most organized neighboring powers move in. Turkey expands from the north. Israel expands from the south. Gulf states finance political factions. Everyone speaks about security and stability while carving out the country.
The American and Israeli hope, in my opinion, was that Iran could eventually be subjected to a similar process. Break the state or force regime change, destroy its military capabilities, fragment its sphere of influence and allow a new regional architecture dominated by Israel and aligned Arab governments to emerge. Up until now, that has not happened. Iran remains intact, and this is why I believe the entire regional conflict has reached an intersection.
If Iran is eventually broken, then Israel will have an enormous opportunity to impose itself as the new empire. It would no longer face the only state that has spent decades constructing a military and political network designed specifically to challenge Israeli and American predominance. Under those conditions, the rhetoric of “Greater Israel” becomes more than the fantasy of a few religious extremists because there would be fewer material obstacles to expansion.
If Iran survives and rebuilds deterrence, then the opposite problem emerges for Israel.
This is why I think the war with Iran and the rhetoric of Greater Israel cannot be separated. They are part of the same regional balance-of-power question.
This, in my opinion, is why Iran is existential to the Israeli regional project in a way that Syria, Iraq or Lebanon individually were not. Israel can dominate fragmented neighboring states. It can bomb Syria. It can pressure Lebanon. It can operate inside Palestinian territory. But Iran possesses the scale to help reconstruct a competing architecture.
So when Smotrich speaks about annexing territory in Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank, I would not dismiss him as merely a crazy far-right politician saying crazy things on a podcast. His language is extreme, but it emerges inside a much larger historical moment.
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—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.
Editorial note: This article is an edited transcript of one of my livestreams. AI assisted with transcription cleanup and editorial editing. The analysis, arguments, and opinions are my own.