Al-Qalam 
[Photo: The Australian]
By Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool
Is Iran the pre-final piece in the resetting of the Middle East puzzle that is now being put in place? It seems that if the Iran piece is put in place, then Israel and the USA would all but have achieved the endgame: a Middle East in the image of the West – pacified, emasculated, dominated.
This endgame – reaching for culmination with the domination of Iran – was in play from the moment Israel, with full backing from the West, decided on the extent and the severity of its response to Hamas’ putsch on October 7th, 2023, and how the response would be harnessed towards the objective of regional hegemony, for Israel and vicariously, its Abrahamic Alliance.
October 7th was just another act of resistance stemming from the original sin of violent occupation, displacement, and ultimately an apartheid-like system by Israel against the Palestinians and the Middle East. Yet October 7th was pounced upon, if not enticed by, the Israelis as the launchpad towards the endgame.
The pacification of the Gulf Arabs was all but signed in the Abraham Accords, and normalisation was a reality. The Golan Heights had been successfully transferred to Israeli ownership amidst a Syria in turmoil. Qatar had been pulled into line after enduring the wrath of the neighbours. Türkiye could be relied on for regular belligerence amidst business as usual. Lebanon was war-weary. And the West Bank in Palestine, through the Palestinian Authority, could be relied upon to ensure compliance with Israeli diktat.
So Hamas, on October 7, 2023, provided the much-needed pretext by Hamas with a combination of tactical cunning and strategic naivete, giving Israel its path to pulverising the remaining roadblocks to absolute hegemony – nay, domination – over the Middle East. The immediate target was the evisceration of Hamas, even if it took a genocide of over 50 000 Palestinian lives.
The secondary targets were the Houthis in Yemen, with the idea that Israel would weaken and the USA would attempt to finish the job, while Israel would decimate Hezbollah in Lebanon and confine them beyond the Litani River. The 3-H ‘proxies’ of Iran needed to be significantly degraded in order to go after Iran itself.
This military operation was years in gestation, from the time Donald Trump tore up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed between Iran and Obama and founded on the 2003 fatwa of Ayatollah Khamenei declaring nuclear weapons ‘haram’ (forbidden), thus achieving the objectives of Obama of significantly curtailing Iran’s nuclear capacity to verifiable peaceful levels.
This agreement was a major inconvenience to those who feared Iran’s regional strength, its support for Palestinians, and its antipathy, therefore, to Israel’s expanding footprint over Palestinian lands. Once the agreement was rescinded, with Iran now unconstrained in its enrichment ability, the plan towards the endgame was again fully in play.
Now, both Israel and the USA could once again plan for the domination of Iran and the decimation of its capacities, especially its military reach through its ‘proxies’ as well.
In the early hours of June 13, 2025, Israel launched its bombing campaign against Iran, especially aimed at its uranium enrichment facilities, targeting its senior military commanders and nuclear scientists, and simultaneously attempting to disable its military and missile capacity. While Iran did succeed in retaliating, sometimes spectacularly hitting cities like Tel Aviv, the emerging evidence suggests that Iran has been severely weakened, raising Western hopes that a regime change agenda was on the cards.
However, having reached a point of military incapacity in Iran, the war could have ended, except that in justifying the unprovoked attack on Iran as absolutely necessary because Iran was ostensibly days away from having a nuclear weapon, the charade had to be followed through despite nuclear inspectors, while saying Iran was not fully compliant, still asserted that a nuclear weapon was way off, corroborated by Trump’s own intelligence community. Yet the USA lured Iran into nuclear negotiations, lulling them into false security, and set them up for an attack by Israel to degrade Iranian military and nuclear capacities.
The USA was goaded to enter the war directly on June 22 with specialised weaponry penetrating deep underground to destroy nuclear infrastructure. But it remains dubious as to whether they destroyed the stockpiles of enriched uranium. Iran claims to have removed these, hence averting the loss of lives through nuclear radiation. Then, Iran telegraphed an attack on the US Military base in Qatar, allowing both the evacuation of personnel and the activation of defence systems to intercept Iranian missiles.
Thereafter, Donald Trump declared that now that Iran has its grievance out of its system, the Twelve Day War is now over, and a ceasefire will commence, however tenuous. Thus, a farce puts a seal on a series of tragedies, most notably in Palestine, but probably seals the US–Israeli endgame.
While ‘normalisation’ is not entirely formalised, it was practically visible through Arab governments intercepting missiles en route to Israel, suppressing any pro-Palestinian protests on their streets, and defusing any pro-Iran sympathy through the Shia dog whistle. Iran is now a shadow of the threat it supposedly posed because its nuclear weaponry was “obliterated” (or truly non-existent), and because Israel may have degraded its missile and military capacity in the 12-day war, with its proxies disabled, and threatening ‘regime change’ over Iran. Furthermore, the other threat to Israel – Syria – is in a very precarious transitional moment.
So, what is the outstanding piece of the puzzle of the Middle Eastern endgame for Israel directly, and the USA obliquely? It was, is, and always will be, the Palestinian question. Gaza has been razed to the ground and rendered uninhabitable, especially with an orchestrated starvation looming and food increasingly used to lure Palestinians to a slaughter. The West Bank is pockmarked with Israeli settlements, fragmented with roads and walls, and economically vulnerable through the diversion of water and the destruction of agriculture. Physically and geographically, the ‘patriacide’ – the massacre of even the idea and possibility of even a two-state solution has largely been successful because a single Israeli state from the river to the sea is emerging violently. But there is one remaining conundrum.
What to do with the Palestinians? A cocktail of solutions is being applied: firstly, accelerate the Palestinian genocide so that the magnitude of the problem reduces; secondly, squeeze the geography by increasing Israel’s security buffer and confining Gazans to a third of what they had, and annexing as much of the West Bank as possible for settlers. In the remainder of the Palestinian pressure cooker, thirdly, apply so much pressure to elicit two complementary responses: get the Palestinians to want out of Gaza and the West Bank; and force Egypt to open the Sinai to Gazans and Jordan to the inhabitants of the West Bank. These would be precursors to the formal annexation of Palestine.
The conditions and balance of forces have never been more favourable for the achievement of the endgame of Israel and the USA. As South Africans, however, we reserve, from experience, enormous trust in the resilience of ordinary people to resist, and we have seen how oppressors, flushed with victory, may falter and trip over their own hubris. This hubris may well be in how the US and Israel are alienating the world and hastening the multi-lateralism they fear.
