Israel's war of regional supremacy will not end with Iran
Sid Shniad
Israel's war of regional supremacy will not end with Iran
If Netanyahu is successful in crushing the Islamic Republic, his violent expansionist vision will turn towards Arab Gulf states next
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on 3 March 2026 (Sajjad Hussain/AFP)
Israelis and some in the Iranian diaspora celebrated when the first blow in the third Gulf war was struck early on Saturday morning, as Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of other military and political leaders were wiped out.
The Iranian delegations at the talks in Geneva and Oman had just made a substantial offer, according to the chief negotiator, Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi. It was to dilute Iran’s entire stock of highly enriched uranium, with independent verification, thus making it unusable as bomb material.
US President Donald Trump responded with war.
The talks had been a sham all along, just as they had been last June, when the US and Israel attacked Iran for the first time.
The CIA had been tracking Khamenei’s movements for months, and the operation had been waiting for the moment when Iran’s top leadership was gathered. On Saturday, it came in two meetings in adjacent buildings - and Israel struck.
As if speaking from the same script, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Iranians to take to the streets and rise up against the regime, as they had attempted to do in January.
But that is not what happened. Within a couple of hours, Iran had replied with its first barrage of missiles.
When confirmation of Khamenei’s death came through, Iranians did take to the streets, but they were full of mourners.
There were neighbourhoods of Tehran like Ekbatan, where people cheered from the relative anonymity of their apartments. But there were screams in other parts of Tehran, and plenty who did neither, but feared what was to come.
Regime change
From the first moments it became clear that this war was about regime change, not about Iran’s uranium enrichment or its missiles.
Regime change was the very thing that Trump and the entire Maga movement campaigned against, both before he was elected president for the second time and afterwards.
As a presidential candidate at a speech in Derry, New Hampshire, in 2023, Trump vowed: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers, those horrible warmongers, from our government - those stupid, stupid people. They love seeing people die. We will drive out the globalists.”
As president, Trump said in Riyadh last May: “The so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built - and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
What Netanyahu has in mind is the destruction of Iran as a regional power. Liberation from autocracy is far down on his to-do list
Now that he has started a major war in the Gulf, he is hard put to explain why. He has cited Iran’s nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, help for the protesters, and regime change.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio added a fifth reason, claiming that the US attack was pre-emptive. The US attacked because it knew Israel was poised to attack, and if that happened, the US would bear the brunt of the retaliation.
Was Rubio thus admitting that his commander in chief was led by the nose by Israel into a full-blown Gulf war? Trump sought to dispel the notion on Tuesday, telling reporters at the White House that “if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand”.
Regardless, Netanyahu has been much more consistent about his desire to deal Iran, which he has called Amalek, a crippling blow.
He has been praying for this day for the better part of 47 years. As prime minister, then as opposition outcast (when I first talked to him), then as prime minister again, he has tried repeatedly to get his military and the US to mount an attack like the one which was launched on Saturday morning, but was rebuffed several times.
Not a time-limited strike, as happened last June, but an all-out war to topple the Islamic Republic.
Dismantling Iran
In his speech on Saturday, Netanyahu was clear about Israel’s strategy. He pointedly addressed Iranians by their ethnicities, not their nationality: “Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Balochs, Abkhazians, and all other citizens of this wonderful nation”.
The bombs that had already fallen by then spoke to the same strategy. They targeted all currents of the Iranian political elite - reformists, leftists, past presidents, as well as the principlists.
Neither Netanyahu’s words nor his actions were aimed at building a new elite that could take over after the fall of the Islamic Republic. Both were intended to permanently disable Iran by turning it into a weak confederation of ethnic cantons, just as Israel has tried, and so far failed, to do in Syria.
“Take your destiny into your own hands,” Netanyahu said. “Hold your head high, look to the skies; our forces are there, the pilots of the free world, all coming to your aid. Help has arrived.”
Instead, Iranian citizens have seen the pilots of the free world bombing a school and killing 180 people, most of them young girls and boys, while also attacking hospitals and most major cities.
Israel is setting about dismantling the cities of Iran in the same way that it has levelled Gaza, or parts of southern Lebanon and Beirut. As a consequence, the casualties of “pinpoint” bombing have soared to more than 750 deaths in Iran in just four days.
What Netanyahu has in mind is the destruction of Iran as a regional power.
Liberation from autocracy is far down on his to-do list. There has been no postwar planning. Minimal thought has been given to what sort of regime could replace the Islamic Republic if it falls, and what real popularity or following any Iranian political figure or movement in the diaspora has inside the country itself.
The destruction of Iran as a regional power is part of a bigger plan that would accommodate and sustain two words increasingly on the lips of Israeli leaders of all political shades: Greater Israel.
Alliance with India
It is no coincidence that in the immediate run-up to this attack, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said to Tucker Carlson that it would be fine if Israel took all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. Or that Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, immediately agreed.
“I support anything that will allow the Jews a large, broad, strong land and a safe haven for us, our children and our children’s children. That I support,” Lapid told a Kipa News reporter, noting that Israeli territory could expand as far as Iraq.
It is also no coincidence that shortly before launching this war, Netanyahu rolled out the red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
This is the dream that Zionists of many hues have harboured for decades: that Israel will one day run from the Nile to the Euphrates
My colleague and author of Hostile Homelands, Azad Essa, says that Delhi has emerged as Israel’s strongest non-western ally. “There is strategic cooperation and ideological convergence between the two, which actually strengthened during the course of [the Gaza] genocide,” Essa said, noting that on his recent visit, Modi promised to allow 50,000 more Indian citizens to work in Israel in the coming years.
“India would bring a combination of economic scale, market access, labour, and technological expertise to such an alliance. In many ways it already has,” he added. “India is already co-producing weapons with Israel, meaning that it is being primed to become a factory for Israel. India will therefore back up Israeli shortfalls and become a form of labour replacement for Palestinians.”
The second point about this war is its timing.
Netanyahu calculates correctly that Israel will never again have a US president as pliant and easy to manipulate as Trump. No Republican or Democrat will ever be as friendly to Israel as Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have been. The genocide in Gaza has seen to that.
But Trump’s second term has already gifted Israel a prize of much higher value than the US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, or the annexation of the Golan Heights, the gifts of his first term. Trump has now gifted Israel Washington’s blessing to expand its borders to any land it can control, whether in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or Egypt.
This is the dream that Zionists of many hues have harboured for decades: that Israel will one day run from the Nile to the Euphrates.
New reality
This is thus the time not just to crush the Islamic Republic and shatter its regional network into shards, but to use this vacuum to expand Israel’s control over the region as a whole.
Iran as a regional power is the last and only obstacle to Netanyahu realising his dream of expanding Israel’s borders and establishing a new international alliance - his so-called hexagon of states - with India as its eastern wing, and Somaliland as its southern tip.
This alliance would underpin Israel’s position as the regional military hegemon, with air bases all over the region. The major Arab states whose support for Israel will never happen without a Palestinian state would be forced to accept a new reality: a diminution of their territory and sovereignty, as in Syria today and Lebanon tomorrow.
With support from India in place, Israel would become less dependent on its umbilical cord of funding, arms and political support from Washington. The future of this relationship is in any event far from guaranteed, if US opinion polls are any guide.
Israel knows that the Gaza genocide has destroyed its image as a noble project in the West. The war against Iran is its insurance policy.
The Islamic Republic is now fighting for its life. Its leadership, so often dubbed fundamentalist and reckless, has in reality been far too cautious.
It has realised too late in the day that the war of total annihilation Israel has been waging in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria would arrive on its doorstep. It got suckered into negotiations twice, and each time, the US treated the talks as cover for a military decapitation campaign.
Fatal mistake
Iran’s predicament goes all the way back to how it reacted to the events of 7 October 2023. Iran and Hezbollah’s immediate reaction was to reject the Qassam Brigades’ pleas to infiltrate Israel from the north and start a simultaneous second front.
October 7 was conceived not as a limited campaign to strike an army base in the south, but as the start of a war of liberation. When both Hezbollah and Iran initially refused to get involved, each allowed themselves to be picked off one by one by Israel.
Iran made the fatal mistake of listening to the messaging it and Hezbollah were getting from the Biden administration. It took time for him to react, but when he did, the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called the 7 October attacks by Hamas a “100 percent Palestinian operation”, noting that neither his organisation nor Iran was aware of what was coming: “It has no relation to any regional or international issues.”
By the time he spoke, Hezbollah had already lost 57 men in border exchanges, so it was not doing nothing. But it allowed itself to be gradually sucked into a war of Israel’s timing. Thus Hamas, Hezbollah and now Iran have all been picked off in turn. None of them acted in conjunction with each other.
Belatedly, Iran has learned these lessons. It is now waging a different campaign to the one it fought during 12 days last June.
Then, it concentrated all of its firepower in salvos of rockets towards Israel. Today, Iran’s main targets are the US and its allies in the Gulf.
As the Iranian commentator Trita Parsi posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Tehran has concluded that Israel’s pain tolerance is very high - as long as the US stays in the war. So the focus shifts to the US … Iran understands that many in the American security establishment had been convinced that Iran’s past restraint reflected weakness and an inability or unwillingness to face the US in a direct war,” he noted.
“Tehran is now doing everything it can to demonstrate the opposite - despite the massive cost it itself will pay. Ironically, the assassination of Khamenei facilitated this shift.”
Heavy price
So within 24 hours, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, pounded Dubai, halted Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil refinery and Doha’s production and export of liquefied natural gas. Ships at the mouth of the Gulf are aflame. Most flights have been suspended. Oil and gas prices have surged.
Iranian drones have also targeted a French military base in Abu Dhabi and the British Royal Air Force base Akrotiri in Cyprus. Iran seeks to internationalise Trump’s attack by making it as expensive as possible for the global economy.
If Iran folds, then we can be sure of the devastating consequences across the Gulf. A civil war in Iran has the capacity to send millions of refugees westwards
Under heavy and sustained fire, the Gulf states have - so far at least - avoided escalation. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman had been warning Trump for months not to strike Iran. He ignored their advice, and now they are paying a heavy price.
When US Senator Lindsey Graham boasted that he had got Mohammed bin Salman “on board” for an attack on Iran, the Saudi crown prince was in fact doing the opposite. He told his Gulf neighbours to avoid taking any steps that could trigger a response by Tehran or its proxies and push the region towards a broader conflict.
Riyadh has good reasons for caution. It has maintained a ceasefire with the Houthis in northern Yemen, and they have yet to get seriously involved.
But even after the US bombing campaign last year, the Houthis remain a fighting force, armed with missiles with ranges of 2,000 kilometres and aerial drones with ranges of up to 2,500 kilometres.
So, too, are the Iraqi militias: it was from their territory that drones were launched at Aramco’s oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia in 2019.
Redrawing the map
How long the Gulf states can maintain this position is doubtful, as Iran is pushing the whole of the Gulf Cooperation Council up the escalation ladder.
There are two main scenarios now for Iran. Either the US-Israeli bombing campaign will engineer a total collapse of command and control, and the regime will fall - or the regime will retain control and steer the war successfully to a ceasefire.
The killing of Khamenei during Ramadan could in fact be the spark that rejuvenates the Iranian revolution, giving it new purpose. This in itself would constitute victory - because Iran knows that the weak link in this war is Trump himself.
If Iran continues the war for long enough, it will negatively impact Trump within his Maga constituency. It will expose the truth that Israel drafted Trump into a war that neither his backers, nor the US, needed.
But if Iran folds, then we can be sure of the devastating consequences across the Gulf. A civil war in Iran has the capacity to send millions of refugees westwards.
Nor will Netanyahu’s war have ended. Israel is betting on the weakness of the Arab states to defend themselves, and is seeking to weaken them further.
For it is only around the contours of a weakened neighbourhood that Israel can redraw the map of the Middle East and institute a new Sykes-Picot.
Then, it is only a matter of time before Netanyahu declares Turkey to be Israel’s next Amalek.