Piece by Piece, Inch By Inch: Israel-US Wars in West Asia

The American-Israeli war against Iran represents a new turning point in the region, undoubtedly the most dangerous war and the most significant transformation the region has witnessed. It confirms that Israel is working to redraw the map of the entire region and to dominate it.

What has changed since June 2025 when the 12-day war against Iran erupted?

What has prompted Washington and Tel Aviv to resume their bombardments of Iran?

What has transpired in the past seven months to bring the war back, despite US President Donald Trump's declaration at the time that the 12-day war had achieved its objectives, destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, and that the matter was settled?

What has changed to warrant the launch of a much more deadly and intense attempt to obliterate Tehran and other targets in Iran?

The fact is that Israel and America do not only want to eliminate the Iranian nuclear project. There is another project that does not stop at this level. Indeed, the negotiations between Tehran and Washington have expanded over the past weeks to go beyond the framework of the nuclear project. They now include other American demands, such as the destruction of all Iran’s non-nuclear missiles and an end to Iranian support for allies in the region. This basically means that both Washington and Tel Aviv want foreign-imposed, imperialist regime change in Iran.

Israel has waged a ruthless genocide against the Gaza Strip for two years to destroy the capabilities of the Palestinian resistance movements and infrastructure of the coastal enclave. It then moved to the West Bank, where it managed to weaken the Palestinian Authority and start a process of ethnic cleansing that is currently underway.

In between, it launched strikes that led to the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon. And since the end of 2024, it has been conducting silent and covert military operations inside Syrian territory and has seized large areas in the Golan Heights.

After successfully wiping out all fronts that could have been used to support Iran, Israel has resumed the war against Tehran with its American ally. By targeting key Iranian leaders for assassination, it became clear that the Israeli-American objective was to topple the regime and bring about a radical change in Iranian policy, transforming it into a weak state, or destroying the state entirely.

Everything happening in the region currently points to one undeniable conclusion: Israel seeks to dominate the region and control it completely.

This means that the Arabs will emerge as the biggest losers in this conflict. The collapse of Iran would mean that Israel would become the sole hegemonic power in the region, the ultimate authority, and would subordinate all the region's countries to it - not just Palestine, Iran, Lebanon and Syria but also the rest of the Arab world, as made clear by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his fascist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich, and even the American ambassador to Israel, Michael Huckabee.

One of the consequences of the American-Israeli bombardment of Iran has been the escalation of the oil crisis. This is a natural and logical development given the tanker congestion at export terminals, the dangers facing the Strait of Hormuz through which 20% of global oil consumption passes, and the dramatic increase in insurance costs. Consequently, oil prices have risen at varying rates, reaching 13%, with Brent crude exceeding $80 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate around $72 per barrel.

Furthermore, the profound humanitarian repercussions of the bombardment of Iran, whether about a new chapter of American-Israeli aggression against the peoples of the region—including the ongoing genocidal attacks against the Gaza Strip—or the sowing of a wedge of hostility in neighborly relations between the Iranian people and the peoples of the region, also fall under the category of war-related devastation.

I conclude that nothing has changed since last summer that would justify Israel and America resuming the war against Iran.

In fact, Iran was weakened in the 12-day war. But Iran’s military capacity is not the issue - the Israelis do not accept the existence of Iran, a country with a 2500 year history and one of the world’s oldest civilisations, even if it is weak. Rather, they want to isolate this region, devour it piece by piece and inch by inch, and completely subjugate it.

Netanyahu wants to be the one who gives the orders and makes the final decisions. In fact, we should view the war on Iran in the context of desperate efforts to rehabilitate the settler-colonial Israeli regime after it was classified as the most rogue regime in the world because of the genocide that it continues to perpetrate against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, supported and aided by the colonial West, led by the United States, whose president has appointed himself emperor of the world with his newly formed “Board of Peace”.

As prominent American economist Jeffrey Sachs has stated, the primary reason behind the attack on Iran is to secure and consolidate Israel's regional dominance, which also fuels the United States' imperialist ambitions for global hegemony. This attack also reflects Israel's immense influence on American policymaking related to the region.

Haidar Eid, a reputed scholar from Gaza, is currently Researcher at the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.