How did it come to this? The world’s most oppressed and misunderstood people, denied a state of their own for a thousand years, dropping bunker-busting bombs on the stateless, poor and oppressed people next door.
People who live cheek-by-jowl with democracy and freedom and wealth and Eurovision, who see its benefits for others every single day, and still think they’re a bad idea.
A nation subject to United Nations inspections, swingeing sanctions, and an arse-backwards fundamentalism that thinks the Middle Ages were a bit too racy and modern, on the cusp of developing the most technologically-advanced weapons in history.
And the most powerful nation on Earth, which has guaranteed the security and scrutiny and non-nuclear conflicts, reduced to trolling the world because it doesn’t want to police the things that, if they’re not policed, mean it’s World War Three.
Never has there been a time where so many people wake up in the morning, to so little reason for optimism, and ask themselves just what the f*** is going on. And when all the world seems powerless, everyone in it feels there’s nothing they can do.
Well, you’re wrong there. Power comes from knowledge, and all you need to do is stop shouting or fretting or crying, and try to understand.
Israel lashes out because its people have been under the lash for centuries, and within living memory they were all but exterminated in the most gruesome ways humankind has ever invented. Trauma can enter the bones and be transferred in utero. Ask yourself what your grandchildren would do, if they grew up knowing it had happened once to your family already and were daily attacked by the unhinged bloke down the road.
Iran rains hellfire on Israel because it relies on fear and oppression and insularity for its sick interpretation of an otherwise-peaceful faith, for its power and its sense of self. Within living memory, the Satanic West has tried to overturn a popular uprising and prop up an oppressive monarchy for the sake of stripping its oil reserves. When that didn’t work, the Satanists let their mate move in next door, and gave him missiles.
And America – oh, America. A shining city on a hill, with an orange version of Jabba the Hutt unwilling to roll off his golden chaise longue unless there’s something shiny in it for him. Donald Trump rejects war of all sorts not because he’s a man of faith or peace, but because it’s a net cost and his bone spurs prevent him from experiencing any sense of active duty.
I’ve been around for almost half a century, and grew up watching TV footage of missiles and stone-throwers and bomb attacks and hostage-taking in the Holy Land. It’s never been as scary as now, from this distance, because nuclear war wasn’t a possibility. But the fear everyone closer to it felt then has led them to the place where there’s a real risk of radiation, in all senses of the word.
If Trump sends his B2 bombers in with the 13-ton bunker busters to destroy the enrichment plant buried inside an Iranian mountain, US troops and embassies and citizens worldwide will be targeted by Islamic terror. If he doesn’t, Israel will step up its own military action and the entire Middle East will spiral into war that won’t be a binary fight between two regimes, but a hydra-like conflict of infinite variety, with religions, sects, schisms, ethnicity, history and hatreds that you would never unpick.
And all in a place where the oil is. Where the trade passes. Where the migration, the domestic security threats, and the arguments all arise. If you wanted to make the world a significantly-worse and more appalling place, the best way of doing it would be to lob a bomb into the Middle East. And yet, if he doesn’t, the significant Jewish minority in his own country will turn against him, his arms industry would suffer, the US economy will hit the toilet and Iran could get a nuke inside a year and it’ll all go bang anyway.
There are so many areas of similarity between all these opposing arguments that you’d think they’d notice. They’re all angry old men. They’re ultra-conservative, corrupt, and absolutist. Trump’s the only one who eats bacon, but they’re all happy to send in the heavies and baton, tear gas, or shoot whoever gets in their way. And the power they wield all relies on making people afraid of the other guy, over there, even though he’s just like them.
You can ask how we got here by looking at eons of history, or the post-war consensus, or October 7. You can shrug your shoulders and say it’s always been a troublespot, or – as loudmouths and social media are forever encouraging us to do – you can pick a side and join the shouting.
But to steal a bit of fundamentalism back for the sake of common sense, what went wrong is everyone forgot what the Holy Land was for. All these men battle for power over a group of rocks in a part of the world where people used to have good ideas. It’s been raging for centuries, with the occasional pocket of peaceful co-existence. But the ideas seem to have run out.
Iran is a massive, beautiful country filled with the nicest people. Its regime is on its last legs, its leaders incompetent, and its citizenship thirsty for reform. Israel is tiny, disproportionately successful, and packed with lovely things, from Netta to diamonds and the vital ingredient for Jaffa cakes. Both have a total lack of hope, because the one nation in the world whose actual job is to be that beacon has put a grasping troll in charge of the light.
Lots of people see it. You are not alone in how you feel. And if everyone realised that how we got here was by failing to understand what it’s like to be someone else, then maybe we’d all be someone better.
And to prove the point, I suggest Ayatollah Khameni runs America for a day, Trump takes over Israel, and Netanyahu works out of Tehran. I swear, it’d be no bloody different, and that’s what people need to remember. There is no such thing as ‘the other guy’.