Israeli settlers, under the protection of Israeli forces, raid the Old City of Hebron in the southern West Bank on January 31, 2026. [Amer Shallodi – Anadolu Agency]
“A people that oppresses another cannot itself be free” -Friedrich Engels –
Zionism is racism. I state this plainly, not as a slogan designed to provoke, but as a conclusion drawn from history, lived reality, and the political structure that has emerged in what is now called Israel. I am not interested in diluting this claim to make it more comfortable, nor in softening its edges to invite polite debate. Some ideas demand clarity, not compromise.
Zionism presents itself as a movement for Jewish self-determination. In isolation, that principle sounds reasonable—every people should have the right to shape their political future. But no political project exists in isolation.
Zionism did not emerge in an empty land, and it did not unfold without consequence. It took root in a place where another people already lived, and its realization required their displacement, their fragmentation, and their continued subordination.
The events of 1948 are not a tragic misunderstanding or an unfortunate byproduct of state-building. They are central. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, entire villages were destroyed, and a society that had existed for generations was systematically dismantled. Palestinians remember this as the Nakba – “the catastrophe”—and that name is not rhetorical exaggeration. It is an accurate description of a foundational rupture that continues to shape every aspect of Palestinian life.
What followed was not a temporary injustice but the consolidation of a system. Land laws, citizenship structures, and state policies were crafted in ways that privileged Jewish identity while marginalizing Palestinians, whether they remained within the borders of Israel or lived under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This is not incidental. It is the logical outcome of a state built to maintain a demographic and political majority for one group over others.
Supporters of Zionism often argue that it is not racism but national liberation—a response to centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. That history is undeniable and horrific.
The genocide of European Jews stands as one of the greatest crimes in human history. But historical suffering does not grant moral exemption. It does not justify the dispossession of another people, nor does it transform inequality into justice.
If anything, it should deepen the commitment to universal rights, not narrow them.
To point this out is not to deny Jewish history or identity. It is to reject the idea that safety for one people must be built on the exclusion or subjugation of another. A political ideology that enshrines ethnic or religious preference into law – especially in a land shared by multiple communities—cannot be reconciled with genuine equality. When rights are distributed based on identity, discrimination is not a flaw in the system; it is the system.
This reality is visible not only in historical events but in present-day structures. Palestinians in the occupied territories live under military rule, subject to restrictions on movement, access to resources, and basic civil liberties. Within Israel itself, Palestinian citizens face systemic inequalities in areas such as land allocation, housing, and political power. The fragmentation of Palestinian identity – into citizens, residents, refugees, and those under occupation – is not accidental. It is a method of control.
Language often obscures these realities. Terms like “security,” “conflict,” and “disputed territories” create the impression of symmetry, as though two equal sides are engaged in a balanced struggle. But the lived experience tells a different story: one of power and dispossession, of a state with overwhelming military and political dominance over a stateless people. Naming that imbalance matters, because without it, injustice can be reframed as inevitability.
There are those who challenge this system from within. Voices like Miko Peled—an Israeli raised within the Zionist establishment—have come to reject the ideology precisely because they see its consequences. Their critiques are not born of ignorance or hostility but of proximity and reflection. They demonstrate that opposition to Zionism is not synonymous with hostility toward Jews; it is a political and ethical stance against a specific system of power.
Critics of this position often respond by labelling it extreme or unfair. They argue that Zionism has multiple interpretations, that it can be reformed, or that it simply expresses the desire of a people to live in safety. But the question is not what Zionism claims to be in theory. The question is what it has produced in practice. And in practice, it has created and maintained a reality in which one group’s rights and freedoms are structurally elevated above another’s.
If we apply the same moral standards we claim to uphold elsewhere – opposition to segregation, to ethno-national supremacy, to systems that privilege one group over another—then the conclusion becomes difficult to avoid.
When a state defines itself in ways that systematically advantage one identity while disadvantaging others, it enters the realm of discrimination. When that discrimination is entrenched in law, policy, and daily life, it is not incidental. It is foundational.
This is why I say that Zionism is racism. Not as an insult, but as a description. It names a system in which identity determines rights, in which history is used to justify inequality, and in which the pursuit of one group’s security has come at the cost of another’s freedom.
There is a tendency to treat such statements as beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse, to insist that they are too harsh, too absolute, too divisive. But discomfort is not the same as inaccuracy. If anything, the resistance to naming the problem reflects how deeply normalized the system has become.
Conclusion: No system built on inequality can endure without resistance, and no injustice has ever been resolved by refusing to name it. If we believe in dignity, equality, and freedom as universal principles, then they cannot stop at the borders of Palestine, nor be conditional on identity. The choice is not between politeness and truth – it is between maintaining a system of domination or confronting it honestly. I choose honesty. And honesty demands that we say it without hesitation, without dilution, and without apology: Zionism is racism.
Efforts to single out the Israeli prime minister as uniquely responsible for state policy obscure a long record of expansion and repression
Joseph Massad
A demonstrator wearing a prisoner uniform and a mask depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes part in a 'No Kings Italy' march in Rome on 28 March 2026, part of a global day of action held alongside protests in the US, London and Athens (Marcello Valeri/Zuma Press Wire)
The recent right-wing campaign in the US - joined by many leftists - to blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for dragging Washington into a war on Iran is only the latest campaign to exonerate the US from its imperialist crimes and to absolve Israel of Netanyahu's alleged machinations.
This campaign continues a trend that began two decades ago by American, European and Israeli liberal critics of Israeli policies towards Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria, and the region more broadly, which has unfairly placed blame on Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government, whose more recent members are unjustly deemed responsible for veering Israel off its alleged pre-Netanyahu path of peace.
Israel's main American apologist, Thomas Friedman, does not tire of unfairly pointing the finger at Netanyahu as a spoiler of Israel's "peaceful" record. He is often joined by leftist Senator Bernie Sanders, whose fulminations against Netanyahu are coupled with ongoing efforts to absolve both him and Israel of their crimes.
Israel's expansionist ambitions, its unceasing aggression against its neighbours, the deliberate targeting of civilians, the daily pogroms carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, its genocide in Gaza, and the racist pronouncements of its leaders against the Palestinians - described during the genocide as "human animals" - are all depicted as some new direction in Israeli policy and rhetoric, based on Netanyahu's alleged right-wing commitments and those of his ultra-right secular and religious allies.
These are hardly new arguments, but rather libellous reiterations of the blame Israel's domestic and western critics had placed on Menachem Begin's government, which came to power in 1977.
It is incumbent upon Palestinians to vigorously defend both Begin and Netanyahu against such dissimulation and defamatory judgments, especially as all their crimes are no more than exaggerated repetitions of the crimes of all Israeli governments preceding them - a point Begin himself made in 1981 after being criticised for a massive Israeli bombing in Beirut that killed hundreds.
Blaming Begin
Begin, Israel's then-prime minister, was blamed for Israel's multiple invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and, more devastatingly, in 1982; its 1981 attack on Iraq's small nuclear reactor; and its annexations of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in 1980-81.
He was also blamed for intensified repression against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, including the creation of a Vichy-style "Village Leagues" leadership to speak for them, and the creeping annexation of the West Bank through the creation of the so-called "Civil Administration" to mask its military rule.
Moshe Dayan had described Palestinians as 'dogs' and 'wasps'
Add to that Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon through the mercenary Sa'd Haddad's Southern Lebanon Army to help it maintain its illegal occupation, the massive construction of Israeli settler colonies across occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories, and the racist pronouncements against the Palestinians, whom Begin described as "two-legged beasts".
At the time, liberal American and Israeli critics spoke of how Begin, and his right-wing Likud party, had "defiled" the "beautiful Israel" - as Noam Chomsky described this view - which, we were told, had only sought peace and compromise before Begin.
That before Begin and Netanyahu, Moshe Dayan had described Palestinians as "dogs" and "wasps", and Israeli Labor diplomat David Hacohen described them as "not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs", escapes the critics' judgment.
What is at stake for Netanyahu's critics in these slanderous depictions is the presentation of all Israeli colonial policies inside and outside Israel under Begin and Netanyahu, as incongruent with the very raison d'etre of the Israeli settler colony, which had allegedly only sought peaceful coexistence with its neighbours before it was "defiled" by Netanyahu.
None of this is true, of course.
To begin with, the Israeli military doctrine of deliberately targeting civilians begins with David Ben Gurion, who, in January 1948, more than a month after the Zionist conquest of Palestine began on 30 November 1947, stated: "Blowing up a house is not enough. What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place and casualties. If we know the family - [we must] strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent."
In his letter to the Israeli press, intended to expose the hypocrisy of his liberal critics, Begin provided a "partial list" of at least 30 attacks targeting civilians by the Israeli military on the orders of the previous Labor governments: "There were regular retaliatory actions against civilian Arab populations; the air force operated against them."
One of Begin's major critics, Israel's former foreign minister, Abba Eban, was horrified at Begin's advertising Israel's criminal history. Eban retorted by defending these attacks and, without questioning any of the facts Begin provided, stated that Begin's "partial list", which helps "Arab propaganda", shows "Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr Begin nor I would dare to mention by name."
Earlier pogroms
The current pogroms committed daily by illegal Israeli colonists in the West Bank are also hardly a new Netanyahu-era occurrence.
They began in the 1970s, soon after the settlers' theft of Palestinian land, and later included the 1980 blowing up of Palestinian mayors in their cars, the beating of Palestinian children, and attacks on the homes and orchards of Palestinians.
American-Israeli settlers and followers of Meir Kahane formed the terrorist group "Terror Against Terror" in 1975, during the tenure of a Labor government, and began to attack Palestinian civilians, including burning down newspapers, shooting at buses of Palestinian workers, attacking Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem and much more.
Netanyahu's recent invasions and occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territories are also hardly incongruent with established Israeli policies.
Israel's plans to expand its territory were neither a Begin nor a Netanyahu innovation, no matter how much liberal critics insist on historical amnesia. They were already in progress soon after the establishment of the settler colony, as was clear before and after the 1956 invasion and occupation of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.
After the 1956 conquest, the secular Ben-Gurion waxed biblical, telling the Knesset that the invasion and occupation restored "King Solomon's patrimony from the island of Yotvat in the south to the foothills of Lebanon in the north." "Yotvat", as the Israelis renamed "Tiran, "will once more become part of the Third Kingdom of Israel!"
When the Eisenhower administration insisted the Israelis withdraw, Ben-Gurion expressed outrage: "Up to the middle of the sixth century, Jewish independence was maintained on the island of Yotvat south of the Gulf of Eilat, which was liberated yesterday by the Israeli army…Israel terms the Gaza Strip an integral part of the nation. No force, whatever it is called, was going to make Israel evacuate Sinai. And the words of Isaiah the Prophet were fulfilled."
During the 1950s, these ambitions were constantly expressed. In 1953, Ben-Gurion suggested "the conquest of the Hebron area". In 1954, he added that Defence Minister Pinhas "Lavon proposed entering the demilitarized zones [on the Israeli Syrian frontier], seizing the high ground across the Syrian border [that is part or all of the Golan Heights], and entering the Gaza Strip or seizing an Egyptian position near Eilat".
Moshe Dayan also suggested Israel conquer Egyptian territory at Ra's al-Naqab in the south, or cut through Sinai, south of Rafah, to the Mediterranean. In May 1955, he went further, proposing that Israel annex Lebanese territory south of the Litani River.
In fact, the Israelis had proceeded with plans to steal all the land in the demilitarised zone on the border with Syria's Golan Heights, and between 1949 and 1967, they took over the entire DMZ. Israel's territorial ambitions continued to expand throughout the period from 1948 to 1967, awaiting the right opportunity to invade.
Expulsion strategy
Netanyahu's attempt to efface Gaza from the map since 7 October 2023, while a more radical measure than those pursued by Labor governments policies in the West Bank before him, is also in keeping with Israeli strategy.
After the 1967 conquest, the Israelis, under a Labor government, proceeded, as they had done in 1948, to wipe Palestinian villages in the West Bank off the map, including Bayt Nuba, 'Imwas and Yalu, expelling their 10,000 inhabitants. They then decimated the villages of Bayt Marsam, Bayt Awa, Hablah, and Jiftlik, among others.
In East Jerusalem, the Israelis descended on the Magharibah Quarter, named for Maghrebi volunteers from North Africa who joined Saladin's war against the crusading Franks seven centuries earlier. The neighbourhood has been owned by an Islamic endowment for centuries.
The thousands of inhabitants were given minutes to vacate their homes, which were immediately bulldozed to make way for the conquering Jewish masses to enter the Old City and celebrate their victory, facing the Buraq Wall - the so-called "Western Wall".
After the 1967 conquest, the Israelis, under a Labor government, proceeded, as they had done in 1948, to wipe Palestinian villages in the West Bank off the map
The first Israeli military governor of the occupied territories, the Irish-born Chaim Herzog, who would later become Israel's sixth president, took credit for the destruction of the densely populated neighbourhood, which he described as a "toilet" that they "decided to remove". He added: "We knew that the following Saturday, June 14, would be Shavuot Holiday and that many will want to come to pray… it had to be completed by then."
Israel's plans, announced immediately after 7 October 2023, to expel Palestinians from Gaza who have so far survived the genocide, are also hardly a Netanyahu original. Israeli Labor officials began a vigorous debate immediately after the 1967 conquest over what to do with the 1948 Palestinian refugees who remained in the camps in occupied Gaza.
They proposed expelling them to the Sinai or other Arab countries, or even resettling them in the West Bank. Israel's Labor prime minister, Levi Eshkol, showed no remorse about their fate, nor for those expelled during the 1967 war.
The Greek example of population expulsion and "exchange" in 1923 with Turkey remained most inspirational to the Israelis. Begin, who was a right-wing member of parliament at the time, intervened in the debate: "In Greece they took out Turks who were born there, and that was as part of an agreement."
Eshkol retorted: "That's exactly what I wanted to say, and I saw the way they were settled."
While the Greek-instigated expulsions took place four decades earlier, a young Eshkol "had traveled to Greece to learn about the resettlement of 600,000 Greek refugees from Asia Minor. It was 'an enormous and interesting project'", he wrote at the time, assuming it could be instructive in the context of Jewish settlement in Palestine.
Expansionist plans
The recent moves by Netanyahu's government to annex the West Bank, which the European Union condemned, are also in line with the policies of Israel's Labor governments since 1967.
The Israeli colonisation project of the occupied territories, known as the Allon Plan, was developed in 1967 by Yigal Allon, head of the Labor government's ministerial committee on settlements. The plan sought to annex one-third of the West Bank and most of Gaza, not unlike Netanyahu's current plans.
While no Israeli government formally adopted the plan, opting for an "anti-planning" ethos of colonisation, various annexation proposals were developed, including the Ra'anan Plan, the Dayan Plan, the Sharon-Wachman Plan and the Drobles Plan, conceived in 1978.
Indeed, already by 1977, 10 years after Israel's conquest, successive Israeli Labor governments had annexed East Jerusalem de facto and built 30 settler-colonies in the West Bank alone, and four in the Gaza Strip, with 15 more planned and under construction.
Upwards of 50,000 Israeli colonists had already moved to colonies established in East Jerusalem, which came to be misnamed "neighbourhoods". The Labor government also established most of the 18 settlements in the Sinai Peninsula before Likud was elected.
It was also Israeli Laborites who, in 1972, expelled 10,000 Egyptians after confiscating their lands in 1969. They went on to bulldoze and destroy their homes, crops, mosques and schools in order to establish six kibbutzim, nine rural Israeli settlements and the city-colony of Yamit in occupied Sinai.
A total of 18 colonies would ultimately be built in the Sinai. In the Golan Heights, the first one was Kibbutz Golan, which was established in July 1967.
Colonising Jerusalem
As for the accelerated and ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem over the last five years, this is also not a Netanyahu novelty, but a faithful continuation of Israeli policy since 1967.
The Israelis had then evicted all 4,000-5,000 Palestinian refugees who lived in the "Jewish Quarter" of East Jerusalem, which before 1948, was less than 20 percent Jewish-owned - Jewish property included no more than three synagogues and their enclosures.
In 1948, the quarter's 2,000 Jewish inhabitants fled to the Zionist side when the Jordanian army occupied East Jerusalem. The quarter, less than five acres in area, was never exclusively Jewish, as Muslims and Christians were the majority of the inhabitants, and most of the Jews who lived there rented their property from them or from Christian and Muslim endowments, which owned the properties.
After the Israeli conquest, the quarter was substantially expanded to cover more than 40 acres, 10 times its original size. The Jordanian Custodian of Absentees' Property kept all Jewish holdings in the name of their original owners and did not expropriate them.
Jewish property in East Jerusalem was returned to the Israeli Jewish owners after 1967, while the Israeli government confiscated all Palestinian property in the quarter. Palestinian property in West Jerusalem, which Israel confiscated in 1948, was not returned to Palestinians in East Jerusalem who now claimed it.
East Jerusalem was placed by the Labor government under the expanded municipality of West Jerusalem on 29 June 1967, effectively annexing it de facto, and dismissing its Palestinian-Jordanian mayor, who was later deported, and dissolved its municipal council, after which the entire city administration was "Judaized".
Immediately following the conquest, the city was declared "a site of antiquity", meaning no construction would be allowed. The Israelis began archaeological excavations underground in a desperate search for the Jewish temple, which led to the destruction of 14th-century Palestinian buildings, including the Fakhriyyah Hospice, al-Tankiziyyah school, and a dozen more.
The Likud government continued the process when it annexed the city de jure in 1980, a move declared "null and void" by United Nations Security Council Resolution 478. Excavations and drilling under and next to Muslim holy sites proceeded apace in search of the ever- elusive ancient first Jewish temple, assuming it ever existed.
Eviction of Palestinian Jerusalemites would also commence, especially through the confiscation of residency IDs of scores of the Palestinian inhabitants of the city, a practice that continues to the present. The closure of Al-Aqsa Mosque in recent weeks and the banning of Palestinian Muslims from praying there during Eid are just the latest of these measures, as is the subsequent prevention of the Latin Patriarch from holding Palm Sunday mass in the Holy Sepulchre on Sunday.
This is why any attempt to exonerate Israel and its monstrous crimes since 1948, and to undeservedly blame Netanyahu as an errant leader who stands apart from otherwise ethical Israeli policies and values, should be exposed for the propaganda and lies that they are.
Such lies seek to legitimise the Israeli settler-colony and cleanse it of its crimes.
Palestinians should be at the forefront of countering these libellous attacks on Netanyahu and defending him as no more or less a war criminal than all Israeli prime ministers who preceded him since 1948.
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.
A conflict with no neutral ground is redrawing alliances from Moscow to Beijing.
A view of the US aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford at a US Navy base in Souda Bay, Crete, where it is set to undergo repairs on March 23, 2026. [Stefanos Rapanis – Anadolu Agency]
The war consuming the Middle East is, at its core, a zero-sum contest between two incompatible survival imperatives. Israel’s long-term security, as defined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, requires not merely the degradation of Iran’s proxies but the dismemberment of the Iranian state itself — a fragmentation into six or seven ethnic ministates. Tehran, for its part, frames its own existence as inseparable from the resistance axis it has built across the Levant and Mesopotamia. As the late strategist Edward Luttwak observed, in the Middle East, peace processes tend to freeze conflicts rather than resolve them. Ceasefires here are not endings; they are pauses for rearmament.
The structural logic is unforgiving. A pro-Western government in Tehran would sever China’s Belt and Road corridor through Central Asia, tilt South Asia’s balance against Pakistan, and cut Russia’s only viable overland access to warm-water ports. These are not marginal interests — they are existential ones for Beijing, Islamabad, and Moscow alike. Iran’s survival, in other words, matters more strategically to its allies than Israel’s survival matters to its Western patrons, if only because the United States has the luxury of geographic distance. As scholar Vali Nasr has argued, Washington’s Middle East policy has long underestimated the depth of Iran’s regional embeddedness.
Washington: Winning the Battle, Losing the Map
The Biden-to-Trump transition has done nothing to simplify America’s position. The United States will announce a version of victory — citing degraded Shiite militias in Iraq and demonstrated naval dominance — but the strategic ledger is far murkier. Trump’s political capital is under severe strain.
A rising anti-interventionist chorus within his own MAGA coalition is already framing the conflict as Netanyahu’s war, not America’s.
“This is not our war,” the refrain goes. “American boys should not be sacrificed on the altar of Israel.”
A protracted war of attrition — or, worse, a catastrophic naval loss in the Strait of Hormuz — would accelerate a constitutional crisis. Congress will demand accountability. The questions will be pointed: What were the objectives? Were they achieved? Who authorized what? The historian Robert Kagan has warned that American credibility in the Gulf depends not on the willingness to strike, but on the clarity of purpose behind those strikes. Purpose, in this conflict, has been conspicuously absent from public discourse.
Israel: Tactical Strikes, Strategic Retreat
Israel may be the conflict’s most consequential loser. Netanyahu’s maximalist war aims — regime change, territorial fragmentation — were always implausible.
Iran’s deep state, its Revolutionary Guards, its nuclear knowledge, and its theocratic legitimacy are not targets that can be bombed into extinction.
Having failed to achieve any of those objectives, Netanyahu will return home to a Knesset demanding answers, and to three criminal charges — corruption, bribery, breach of trust — that had been conveniently submerged beneath wartime solidarity.
Israel’s deterrence posture, the invisible architecture on which its security doctrine rests, will be damaged. Hezbollah and Hamas will claim resilience. The Abraham Accords’ momentum toward normalization, which relied on the perception of Israeli invincibility, will stall. As former Mossad director Tamir Pardo has cautioned, military operations without defined political endgames risk transforming tactical wins into strategic defeats.
Iran: Survival as Triumph
For Tehran, survival is its own form of victory. The Islamic Republic has absorbed strikes from one of the world’s most technologically advanced militaries and the full weight of American air power — and endured. That narrative will echo across the Muslim world. Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Lebanon will absorb heavy punishment, but Tehran has rebuilt shattered proxies before; it rebuilt Hezbollah after 2006, and Hamas after each of its Gaza conflicts.
Iran’s alliances with Russia and China will deepen. Its role as the primary counterweight to American influence between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush will be reinforced. The political scientist Ray Takeyh has noted that the Islamic Republic has always been more adaptable than its adversaries expected. A state that survives this conflict will enter the next phase of regional competition emboldened.
The Wider Ledger
Russia gains disproportionately. American distraction in the Gulf offers Moscow strategic breathing room in Ukraine and Central Asia. Should the Strait of Hormuz close, even briefly, Russian oil flows eastward to China at premium prices — a windfall measured in billions. China, for its part, watches as the Belt and Road remains intact and American credibility erodes simultaneously — a dual dividend that requires no military expenditure on Beijing’s part.
Iraq and Lebanon absorb the heaviest collateral damage. Iraq’s Shiite political blocs and Iran-backed militias face decimation by US strikes, fracturing Baghdad’s fragile sectarian equilibrium. Lebanon, already a failed state in fiscal terms, may use Hezbollah’s weakening to push for disarmament — but the structural conditions that produced Hezbollah have not changed. The Gulf Arab states gain temporary breathing room; they also discover, again, that their security depends entirely on the durability of American commitment, a commitment that domestic American politics is steadily undermining.
A War With No Exits
The most dangerous feature of this conflict is not its destructiveness but itsirresolvability. Neither side can achieve its maximalist aims. Neither can afford to concede. Any ceasefire leaves intact the underlying incompatibility — two regimes whose founding ideologies require the destruction of the other.
The war will continue through other instruments: assassination, cyber operations, sanctions, proxy rebuilding, and the patient accumulation of nuclear capability.
The world’s major powers have placed their bets. Russia and China are, for now, on the winning side of a conflict they did not have to fight. The United States and Israel are on the costly side of a conflict whose objectives were never clearly defined. The Middle East’s civilians — in Gaza, in southern Lebanon, in Iranian cities — are on no side at all.
EU and West Asian officials fear Iran is preparing for a 'devastating battle scenario' that would lead to the destruction of key Saudi and Israeli infrastructure, the closure of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and the withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty
News Desk - The Cradle
Sources informed The Cradle on 1 April that an “Israeli-aligned current" within the White House, led by Jared Kushner, has been supplying US President Donald Trump with "manipulated information” that downplays Iran’s missile attack frequency and minimizes the casualties caused by Iraqi and Lebanese resistance strikes.
Furthermore, leaked information from the US National Security Council (NSC) indicates that, over the past 72 hours, senior officials, including War Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio, have been steering Trump toward a “broader escalation plan” ahead of his April 1 speech.
The misinformation operation allegedly also involves manipulated casualty numbers from Israeli National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and recent comments made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Hebrew media.
The sources indicated that as this escalation approaches, anti-war officials in the US, along with European and regional governments, have expressed fears that Iran may escalate to a “devastating battle scenario,” based on the course of the 33-day war.
"This would involve destroying Saudi oil production infrastructure and Israel's electricity infrastructure, followed by destabilizing and closing the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and ultimately withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” the sources said.
The Intercept reported on Wednesday night that the Pentagon is “refusing” to acknowledge that at least 750 US troops have been wounded or killed in West Asia since October 2023, and accused CENTCOM officials of a “casualty cover-up.”
This information comes as Trump is set to give an address at 9pm on Wednesday to “declare victory” in his war of aggression against Iran, people familiar with the matter confirmed to POLITICO.
The president is expected to “harshly scapegoat NATO allies for the biggest unresolved matter of the war, Iran’s ongoing restrictions of shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.”
Trump has also been threatening to exit NATO and insisting that nations that rely on fuel from the Persian Gulf should “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”
On Wednesday, the Financial Times (FT) reported that Trump threatened to “halt arms shipments” to Ukraine if Europe does not join a coalition to wrestle control of the Strait of Hormuz away from Iran, which has reportedly set up a “formal system” to allow vessels from friendly nations safe passage through the key waterway.
Since the start of the US and Israel's war against Iran, at least 10 countries around the world have implemented official emergency or crisis measures due to fuel disruptions stemming from the war.
At the same time, oil-rich nations in West Asia, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq, are facing production stops, storage issues, and force majeure declarations amid ongoing retaliatory strikes by the Islamic Republic.
Trump's victory speech will air on the same day as Wave 89 of Operation True Promise 4, which saw a combined operation by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, the Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF), and Hezbollah targeting Israel.
Persian Gulf water security now faces an existential test as desalination plants shift from pillars of development into strategic military targets, placing the continuity of urban life and investment flows across the region at unprecedented risk.
The structural dependence of Gulf states on seawater desalination for water security exposes a critical vulnerability under the ongoing US–Israeli aggression against Iran launched at the end of last February.
As reciprocal bombardments expand and persist, concern is mounting that the strategic focus of the warring sides will move beyond military sites and conventional energy infrastructure toward the waterfront itself.
Economic indicators show that any disruption to desalination plants threatens the continuity of urban centers and industrial activity in a region entirely devoid of renewable natural water resources.
A region engineered against its own limits
The Persian Gulf hosts the world’s largest desalination market, with roughly 3,401 operational plants – spanning major facilities, mid-scale reverse osmosis systems, and units embedded in industrial complexes.
Together, they produce more than 22 million cubic meters daily, accounting for nearly one-third of global output. The dependence is near total: Qatar relies on desalination for 99 percent of its water, Bahrain and Kuwait for 90 percent, Oman for 86 percent, and the UAE for 42 percent. Saudi Arabia depends on desalination for around 70 percent of its supply to major cities such as Riyadh and Jeddah.
These plants cluster along coastlines within range of Iranian missiles and drones, binding Gulf national security directly to the survival of these installations. Losing them would bring entire cities to a standstill.
Cities such as Dubai and Doha rely on uninterrupted water flow to sustain cooling systems in data centers and vast commercial complexes. A disruption lasting more than 48 hours would trigger economic and social fallout far beyond the capacity of local crisis management systems.
When water becomes a battlefield
Most desalination facilities in the Gulf operate through linear production systems, where damage to a single stage – high-pressure pumps or membrane units – halts the entire process.
Reports from the first week of the aggression pointed to damage at the Fujairah plant in the UAE and the Doha West plant in Kuwait caused by interceptor missile debris. Tehran accused Washington of striking a facility on Qeshm Island, while Manama blamed Iran for targeting a Bahraini plant. These incidents signal a potential shift toward targeting the infrastructure that sustains civilian life, raising the cost of war on every front.
These facilities are inherently difficult to defend. Their scale, exposure, and dependence on direct seawater intake limit hardening options. Protecting them demands extensive air defense resources, draining interceptor missile stockpiles in what is shaping into a prolonged war of attrition. A single drone breaching a central control unit could disable a plant serving one million people for weeks.
Energy and water: A single point of failure
Around 75 percent of Gulf desalination plants operate through cogeneration, tying water production directly to electricity generation. Any strike on gas supply networks or power stations would shut down water production without directly hitting desalination units.
This interdependence creates layered vulnerability: a single strike can knock out both electricity and water simultaneously.
It also complicates recovery. Destroyed transformers in desalination complexes require heavy, specialized imports – difficult to secure as maritime routes face disruption or ports come under fire. Restarting thermal plants after sudden shutdowns risks lasting damage to turbines and boilers due to abrupt shifts in temperature and pressure.
Desalination itself consumes enormous energy. Each cubic meter requires significant fuel or electricity input. As the US-Israeli assault enters its fifth week, Gulf energy sectors face mounting pressure to sustain domestic demand while maintaining export commitments.
The invisible war: Cyber frontlines
Modern desalination plants rely on complex digital control systems, opening a parallel battlefield in cyberspace. Iran has demonstrated advanced capability in targeting water and energy infrastructure through cyber operations.
Penetrating these systems allows attackers to halt production, damage internal components by altering rotation speeds or pressure, or manipulate chemical treatment levels – rendering water unsafe for consumption.
Cyberattacks are difficult to detect in real time and can cripple operations without visible destruction, complicating repairs and deepening confusion within crisis management structures. Operators are forced to allocate vast resources to cybersecurity, yet vulnerabilities persist due to globally integrated software and hardware supply chains.
Even minor software manipulation can trigger chemical imbalances, exposing populations to unsafe water before detection. Such attacks aim not only at infrastructure but at public confidence – weaponizing panic as part of hybrid warfare.
Pollution as a weapon of war
The Persian Gulf’s semi-enclosed nature makes it highly susceptible to rapid environmental contamination. Oil spills, whether deliberate or collateral, can shut down desalination plants by forcing the closure of intake points to protect sensitive membranes.
A repeat of 1991 – when Iraq released millions of barrels of oil into Gulf waters – would devastate modern reverse osmosis systems, which are far more sensitive to contamination than older thermal plants.
Strikes on Iranian coastal nuclear or petrochemical facilities could also trigger long-term radioactive or chemical pollution, rendering vast marine areas unusable and damaging ecosystems essential for natural filtration. The result would be higher treatment costs and sharply reduced equipment lifespans.
Protecting intake systems requires constant deployment of floating barriers and rapid response teams. In wartime, such operations face threats from naval mines or explosive-laden vessels. Disrupting the Jebel Ali complex in Dubai, for example, would sever water supply to a global commercial hub, triggering daily losses measured in billions of dollars.
Markets, capital, and the price of water insecurity
Threats to desalination infrastructure strike at the core of the Gulf economic model built on stability and predictability. Credit ratings hinge on the uninterrupted delivery of essential services to citizens and millions of expatriate workers.
Persistent threats to water systems drive up insurance premiums for industrial and coastal assets, raising the cost of doing business. The effects cascade: large real estate and industrial projects stall, foreign investment declines, and state budgets absorb the burden of emergency repairs and costly alternatives amid disrupted global supply chains.
Repeated attacks would accelerate capital flight toward more stable environments. Multinational corporations headquartered in Gulf cities will reassess expansion plans if water availability becomes uncertain. This places long-term economic transformation programs, including Saudi Vision 2030, under direct strain.
Building resilience under fire
In response, Gulf states are moving to reinforce water resilience. Mobile desalination units – mounted on ships or trucks – offer temporary relief, though their output remains limited.
More strategic measures are underway. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are investing in aquifer storage, injecting surplus desalinated water underground. Abu Dhabi’s system, for instance, can supply up to 90 days of emergency demand. Underground storage provides protection that exposed reservoirs cannot.
More effective solutions include strategic investments by the UAE and Saudi Arabia in water storage through aquifer injection of surplus desalinated water. The Abu Dhabi project, for example, provides reserves sufficient for 90 days of emergency consumption. This method offers greater protection than exposed storage tanks, as geological layers naturally shield reserves.
Saudi Arabia is also advancing decentralization by promoting smaller, distributed desalination plants. This disperses risk, making system-wide disruption far more difficult.
Additional measures focus on efficiency: reducing water loss in networks and curbing consumption in agriculture and landscaping to extend reserves. Regional water interconnection may also emerge as a collective safeguard, enabling transfers between states if infrastructure remains intact.
Law, war, and impunity
International humanitarian law, particularly Article 54 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, classifies water facilities as indispensable to civilian survival and prohibits targeting them.
Yet US and Israeli practice routinely treats such infrastructure as legitimate targets under the pretext of dual use. This logic risks escalation as Iranian retaliation could place Gulf desalination plants directly in the line of fire, pushing the region toward a full-scale humanitarian crisis.
Supply chains and fragile systems
The continuation of aggression and disruption of maritime routes threatens routine maintenance across Gulf desalination plants, which depend on imported technology and components from western and Asian suppliers.
These facilities rely heavily on specialized expatriate labor. Rising security risks may drive technical staff to leave, leaving operations understaffed and increasing the likelihood of failures.
Critical chemicals – chlorine, anti-scalants, and others – require stable supply chains. Any disruption degrades water quality or forces shutdowns to protect infrastructure. Securing these materials becomes increasingly difficult under sustained bombardment, potentially forcing reliance on costly air transport.
Much of the Gulf’s desalination backbone is already tied to foreign – often Israeli – technology, embedding external leverage directly into the region’s most critical infrastructure.
Water will decide what survives
The desalination front now stands as the defining security challenge for Gulf states. The current war has exposed a central reality: military strength and oil wealth cannot compensate for the absence of water security.
In its aftermath, Gulf states are likely to overhaul water policy, accelerating the use of renewable energy – solar and wind – to decouple desalination from fossil fuels and centralized grids.
Future trajectories point toward nuclear-powered desalination for long-term stability, localized systems to reduce dependence on centralized networks, expanded cyber and physical defenses for water infrastructure, and regional coordination for collective crisis response.
Water – not oil – will ultimately determine whether Gulf states can endure prolonged conflict, recover from systemic shocks, and maintain their position within the global economic order.
Without it, every development project, every city, and every economic vision risks collapse at the first sustained strike.
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