I truly hope this Iran-Israel cease-fire holds and gets extended to Gaza — first and foremost to see an end to all the killing. But second, because I think this war will trigger in its aftermath much-needed debates in Iran, Israel and the Palestinian community.
These debates won’t happen the morning the guns fall silent, when leaders from every country involved will try to claim some sort of victory. But everything in my gut tells me these debates will happen the morning after the morning after — when all the internal politics will start to kick in.
Among Palestinians in Gaza, the question will be asked of their defeated Hamas leaders: “What in the world were you thinking on Oct. 7, 2023? You started a war with Israel, a vastly superior military foe, with no end game other than destruction, which only got the Jews to retaliate with no end game other than destruction. You sacrificed tens of thousands of homes and lives to win the sympathies of the next generation of global youth on TikTok, but now there is no Gaza.”
Among Israelis, the question that will be asked of Israel’s radical religious-nationalist government by the largely secular elements of that society — air force pilots, cyberwarriors, technologists, scientists, weapons designers and Mossad agents, the people who actually defeated Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — is this: “Where do you think you’re taking us? We were the ones who won this war and we will not let you leverage this victory to win the next election and carry out your plan to crush our Supreme Court, annex the West Bank, excuse the ultra-Orthodox from serving in the army and create a pariah Israel that our kids will no longer want to live in. No way.”
And among Iranians, the question that surely will be asked of its clerical leaders and corrupt Revolutionary Guards: “You spent billions of dollars trying to build a nuclear bomb to threaten Israel and remote-control Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. But you brought the war home to our country — our families had to flee Tehran and our generals were killed by Israeli drones in their own beds. All you did was destroy a few buildings and kill some civilians in Israel, and when Donald Trump attacked our three key nuclear facilities, your response was to put on a harmless sound and light show over a U.S. air base in Qatar. You were paper tigers, who only knew how to use technology to repress our own people. Meanwhile, our great Persian civilization is destitute, broken and miles behind the rest of the world.”
It may not happen overnight, but every bone in my body says these discussions are coming. Because we have never had a war like this in the region. That is, a war in which Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Israel are all led by religious nationalists who think God is on their side. A war in which Israel has made Gaza uninhabitable, after being humiliated by Hamas forces that killed more Jews in one day than in any day since the Holocaust. A war in which Israel was able to decapitate and largely destroy Hezbollah as a political force in Lebanon and Syria — where the pro-Iranian militia had helped crush the shoots of democracy since the 1980s. A war that saw Iran’s key nuclear facilities bombed by a U.S. president — something the Iranian mullahs never thought would happen.