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Over the past four decades, there have been at least three tectonic shifts in the geopolitics of the Middle East, often referred to as efforts at \u201cchanging the map\u201d of the Middle East.\u00a0 In 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon in order to destroy the threat of\u00a0 Yasir Arafat\u2019s Palestine Liberation Organization.\u00a0 In 2003, the Bush administration created the lie that Saddam Hussein had \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d in order to invade Iraq.\u00a0 Most recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated explicitly that he would use military force to \u201cchange the map\u201d of the Middle East as part of his campaign to annihilate Hamas in the Gaza Strip.\u00a0 The map of the Middle East has not changed, but hundreds of thousands of innocent Arabs have been killed.<\/p>\n
In every case, the \u201cday after\u201d was far different and far more threatening than anything that Sharon, Bush, or Netanyahu promised.\u00a0 Military campaigns and occupations that were supposed to last months turned into years.\u00a0 In the cases of Lebanon and Iraq, Israeli and American occupations lasted decades, and after two decades in Iraq there are still several thousand U.S. military troops in vulnerable positions there. The U.S. invasion of Iraq allowed Iran to become the chief outside influence in Baghdad, marking a huge strategic setback for the United States.\u00a0 As for Gaza, Netanyahu promised to make the Strip uninhabitable, and there is no reason to believe at this point that it will ever be habitable for Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Ariel Sharon devised a secret plan in 1982 for taking the invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut, which he didn\u2019t share with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had a nervous breakdown in the wake of the initial invasion and the war crimes that were committed at two refugee camps\u2014Sabra and Shatila.\u00a0 The operation was planned to last several days; Israeli forces formally withdrew from Lebanon 18 years later, and there are still Israeli units in southern Lebanon.\u00a0 The PLO was forced to leave Lebanon and the Middle East, and repaired to North Africa.\u00a0 But the PLO was replaced by a newer and far more threatening force\u2014Hezbollah\u2014with the assistance of Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard.<\/p>\n
In 2003, President George W. Bush lied his way into a military invasion of Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein didn\u2019t possess.\u00a0 The mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, played a key role in repeating the hundreds of lies of the Bush administration.\u00a0 Like Sharon, Bush wanted to \u201cchange the map\u201d of the Middle East by introducing democracy in Iraq that would become a model for other Arab states.\u00a0 Vice President Dick Cheney played a major role in favoring the creation of democratic governments, telling the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 2002 that the \u201cfreedom-loving peoples of the region\u201d will turn to democratic forms of government.<\/p>\n
Oil was also a factor in the partnership between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair who discussed dividing up Iraq\u2019s oil wealth, which was reminiscent of the talks between President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to overthrow the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953.\u00a0 The Suez War of 1956 was a huge disaster for the interests of Britain, France, and Israel. The commander of CENTCOM in 2003, General John Abizaid, when asked about Bush\u2019s war, said \u201cof course, it\u2019s about oil.\u201d\u00a0 All of these wars were driven by economic interests.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu is proclaiming that his war against Hamas, the attacks on Iran, and the new attacks on Syria will create a \u201cnew\u201d Middle East.\u00a0 Israel has been using military force against Syria for the past 12 years, but the mainstream media has paid little attention to this campaign. Netanyahu\u2019s claim of creating a \u201csterile defense zone\u201d with Syria was simply a case of opportunism, using military force without any indication of the policy that would follow.\u00a0 This has been typical of Israeli use of force since the Six-Day War in 1967 that found Israel with occupied lands, but with no idea of what would come next.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu\u2019s answer for all questions about the Gaza War was to stress \u201cchanging the face\u201d of the Middle East, which was echoed across much of the American and Israeli press.\u00a0 The Jerusalem Post typically explained \u201cIn the past year, Israel has done more for stability in the Middle East than decades of ineffective UN agencies and Western diplomats.\u201d\u00a0 (See the New York Times Magazine, July 27, 2025, \u201cNetanyahu\u2019s War,\u201d for an authoritative account\u00a0 of Netanyahu\u2019s prolonging the war in order to stay in power.)<\/p>\n
Trump has not been a direct collaborator in Netanyahu\u2019s efforts, but he campaigned on the promise that the \u201cMiddle East is going to get solved.\u201d\u00a0 Trump\u2019s first-term efforts on behalf of Israel made it clear that he would support Netanyahu\u2019s aggressive policies in the region.\u00a0 He emphasized that he had no preference for a two-state or one-state solution, and he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel without getting any concessions from Israel.\u00a0 He cut U.S. aid to UNRWA as well as to various Palestinian aid groups on the West Bank that were hostages to Israeli governments.\u00a0 Finally, he had no problem with the Israeli settlements on the West Bank that previous U.S. administrations and various international organizations had declared illegal.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s second term is far worse, marked by complicity with Israel\u2019s genocidal campaign, and ignoring the forcible starvation of the Palestinian people.\u00a0 As John Paul, a former State Department official who resigned from the Biden administration, remarked, politicians \u201ccannot admit they have been wrong, ignore the evidence of their eyes, and find some way to avoid facing the truth.\u201d\u00a0 Trump and Netanyahu most recently blamed Hamas for the starvation in Gaza, which Israel\u2019s high-level military commanders denied..<\/p>\n
The balance of power in the Middle East is probably more threatening now than at any other time in the post-World War II period because of Israel\u2019s military domination and its easy willingness to use military power.\u00a0 There certainly has been no \u201csign of stability.\u201d\u00a0 Historically, Israelis have claimed the high moral ground in their confrontations with the Arab states because of the Jewish suffering of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n
However, Israel\u2019s genocidal military campaign in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing campaign on the West Bank have contaminated that claim. It has also divided the Western world\u2014including the Jewish diaspora\u2014 on the legitimacy of Israel\u2019s self-proclaimed status.\u00a0 The United States had been in position to possibly expand the number of Arab nations in the Abraham Accord, but U.S. influence in the Middle East has declined.\u00a0 The \u201cno war, no peace\u201d situation in the region will continue, and the apartheid reality in Israel will only worsen the geopolitics of the region as it continues to erode Israel\u2019s moral standing.<\/p>\n
These three scenarios demonstrate that war will not \u201cchange the map\u201d of the Middle East, but rather create more chaos and tragedy.\u00a0 Conversely, there is the example of the way peace and diplomacy did \u201cchange the map\u201d of the Middle East.\u00a0 That would be the result of the 13 days of talks at Camp David in 1978 between Israeli and Egyptian leaders Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat that produced an historic agreement.\u00a0 It meant that Arab states, without Egypt, could not start a war against Israel.\u00a0 That certainly changed the map.<\/p>\n
Link : https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2025\/07\/30\/the-sad-history-of-changing-the-map-of-the-middle-east\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the past four decades, there have been at least three tectonic shifts in the geopolitics of the Middle East, often referred to as efforts at \u201cchanging the map\u201d of the Middle East.\u00a0 In 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon in order to destroy the threat of\u00a0 Yasir Arafat\u2019s Palestine Liberation Organization.\u00a0 In …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-policy"],"yoast_head":"\n