The U.S.-Israel war with Iran is a continuation of Zionism’s project of expanding its hegemony in the Middle East, begun definitively with the Six-Day War in 1967 but ideologically with the formulation of “revisionist Zionism” in the 1923 article by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall.” In a March 11, 2026 article in Mondoweiss, Qassam Muaddi calls our attention to this expansionist project:
According to Palestinian historian Bilal Shalash, Israel has entered a phase where it is trying to bring its conflict with its enemies to a “decisive end.” This is clearly evident in its ongoing aggression in Iran and Lebanon, but the West Bank is another arena where Israel seeks to clear the deck. “Israel is motivated by the fact that its main sponsor and ally, the U.S., is trying to do the same thing at a global scale, from Latin America to Iran,” Shalesh explains. “And in the case of Iran, it also happens to be the center of opposition to Israel’s domination in the region.” (“Why is Israel trying to cause an ‘explosion’ in the West Bank?”)
The continuing genocide in Gaza is the prelude to this project, which envisions a Palestine ethnically cleansed of Palestinians and annexed by Israel, and a Middle East submissive to Israeli economic and military power.
It is not coincidental that the current IDF project of breaking all Palestinian resistance in the West Bank is titled “The Iron Wall” after the generative Jabotinsky essay, which is the ideological foundation for what comes to be known as “revisionist Zionism.” In the histories of Zionism, “revisionist Zionism” is distinguished from “labor” or “liberal” Zionism. So, for example, Peter Beinart maintains this distinction in his book The Crisis of Zionism (2012), where he expresses “The struggle for a liberal democratic Zionism” (Kindle, page 17 of 298) in opposition to “revisionist Zionism,” which he understands as gaining ground in modern Israel, threatening what he takes to be the foundation of a democratic Israel. Despite this distinction between the two Zionisms, the boundary between the two was at best always blurred by the fact of Zionism’s agenda in both cases, that is, Zionism’s common agenda, of a majority Jewish state in what was and is Palestinian land.
From its beginnings, Israel has been a Zionist project, and Zionism was and continues to be, whether liberal or revisionist, a project of settler colonialism, which the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has defined as “the elimination of the native.”
While professing a desire to live peacefully with the Arabs in Palestine, although insisting on a Jewish majority state, Jabotinsky, contradictorily enough, sees no way to bring about this peaceful cohabitation except through war. This, he argues, entails constructing an “iron wall” against Arab resistance, because “Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’” In formulating his militant approach to Zionist settlement, Jabotinsky openly acknowledges the Arabs in Palestine as the “indigenous” inhabitants and the Jews as “settlers.” A fact that Israelis today deny in their claims to being the indigenous people of ancient Palestine, the “chosen people.”
Comparing the Zionist settlement of Palestine to the European settlement of the Americas, Jabotinsky expresses typical settler ambivalence to the Indigenous inhabitants, at once lauding their resistant spirit while noting their intrinsic inferiority: “Culturally [the Arabs] are 500 years behind us, spiritually they, do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences.”
Here, then, in the beginning of the Zionist project in Palestine, we see the material of militarism and racism that, since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, has paved the road to the genocide in Gaza and Israeli expansionism, fully supported by the United States government. The Iron Wall in the rhetoric of Jabotinsky becomes the Iron Wall as a project in the annexation of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian territories in the 1967 war, intensively in Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023, and now in the Iran war with its offshoot in Lebanon. It is not surprising then that the renowned Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, has titled his history of “Israel and the Arab World” “The Iron Wall.” Beyond Shlaim and his particular reading of the Iron Wall, we need to understand the U.S.-Israel war with Iran within the history of the Iron Wall as a history of the continuity of settler colonial violence in the Middle East and Indigenous resistance to it.
