Diplomacy
Experts warn US-Iran war launched on ‘false premises’ risks decades of instability with no clear endgame
A panel of international affairs scholars has delivered a blunt assessment of the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, warning that the conflict was launched on “false premises,” has no discernible strategic objective, and risks drawing major powers into a broader confrontation that could reshape the global order for decades.
Speaking during a webinar hosted by Harici Media, titled “The Middle East at a Breaking Point: Escalation Scenarios and Future Outlooks,” three analysts — from Oman, the US, and Germany — painted a picture of a region engulfed by a war none of its inhabitants chose, waged by powers whose aims remain opaque even to close observers.
The panel was moderated by Hassan Ünal of Başkent University in Ankara, who also serves as director of the New World Research Center.
“The war has been decided between Tel Aviv and Washington and we are paying the price”
Abdullah Baaboud, a member of Waseda University’s Qatari Chair of Islamic Studies and a native of Oman, opened with a sharp indictment from the perspective of the Gulf Cooperation Council states. Speaking from Oman — one of Iran’s nearest neighbors — Baaboud said the war had been “decided illegally against a neighboring country” and launched under fabricated justifications.
“There are no strong excuses to enter into war,” Baaboud said. “The most powerful country in the world is conducting it with another powerful country in the Middle East. Both are nuclear powers, and they’re conducting it against a neighboring state under the false premises of nuclear arms or regime change or regional policy or missile technology.”
He noted that even the war’s architects appeared unable to articulate coherent objectives. “Even the people who created and entered into the war are not clear about their war objectives and the reasons for their war,” he said.
Baaboud revealed that Oman had been deeply involved in mediating between Washington and Tehran prior to the outbreak of hostilities — just as it had during last year’s so-called Twelve Days War. According to Baaboud, Oman’s foreign minister had indicated that Iran had agreed to virtually all US demands, going “way beyond” the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal. Tehran had accepted conditions on enrichment, stockpiling, and was prepared to discuss missile technology and regional policy. In return, Iran sought assurances that sanctions would be lifted and it would be permitted to trade freely with its neighbors.
“We were all very hopeful that this is going to avert a devastating war for the region,” Baaboud said. “And you all know what is going on now.”
He described a conflict in which not only military sites but civilian infrastructure, schools, and leadership figures had been struck. Iran, for its part, had retaliated against US bases, Israel, and Gulf states it suspected of hosting American forces. “We have become a victim of this war, not a war of our choice,” Baaboud said. Iran’s closure or attempted closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on oil installations had prompted some regional states to suspend exports, a development Baaboud warned would deliver a “huge impact on the world economy and the world energy needs.”
Looking ahead, he cast the conflict as an accelerant of the Gulf’s pivot toward Asia. “Their policies in the region are actually so perplexing for us that they are pushing us more towards Asia, towards China,” he said. The war, coming on the heels of what Baaboud described as “genocide and ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, had generated a profound crisis of confidence in the US as a strategic partner. “I think we are at a very serious inflection point where things are changing,” he warned. “It is madness, and we are paying a very high cost for this madness.”
“It’s not that difficult to manipulate President Trump”
Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, offered a forensic account of the policy failures that led to the current conflagration. He traced the conflict’s origins to the unraveling of the JCPOA, noting that even the Obama administration had undermined the deal’s spirit by imposing new sanctions while removing others.
“I think the approach of the Obama administration to the JCPOA was to treat it as if it was some type of corporate contract in which you could find loopholes,” Weinstein said. The first Trump administration then “destroyed that agreement” and assassinated Qasem Soleimani, steps that drew bipartisan applause in Washington even as they moved the US closer to open conflict.
Weinstein reserved particular scorn for the Washington policy establishment’s refusal to heed warnings. “If you were in the minority of voices that warned that this was creating the conditions for a potential war, you were sort of cast aside as being prone to hyperbole and being alarmist,” he said. Even weeks before the strikes began, the prevailing mood in Washington held that the Trump administration might conduct limited operations as a “coercive negotiating tactic” but would never embark on full-scale war. “Anyone who said otherwise was kind of deemed an alarmist. I mean, that’s just a fact.”
He was equally blunt about Iran’s miscalculations. The late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Weinstein said, had fatally misjudged the nature of the administration he was dealing with — one in which provocative social media posts could tip the balance from negotiation to invasion. “The late Supreme Leader was tweeting out AI images of US ships being sunk to the bottom of the sea and threatening to use Chinese weapons against US ships,” Weinstein recounted. “With a normal administration, that would be seen as domestic rhetoric and would be ignored. But with somebody like President Trump who quite literally spends a lot of time on Twitter, that has the power to shift his decision from maybe giving negotiations a little more time to invading the country.”
On Israel’s role, Weinstein was characteristically direct. “A lot of people give the Israelis a little too much credit. They claim that the Israelis have manipulated Trump or pushed Trump into embarking on this regime change war. It’s not that difficult to manipulate President Trump,” he said. “I think they’ve done it masterfully, but it’s not that difficult of a task.”
Weinstein dismantled the notion that the Trump administration was executing a sophisticated strategy. Conservative circles, he said, had convinced themselves that the successful abduction of Venezuelan President Maduro provided a blueprint for regime change in Iran. “The problem is that Iran is not Venezuela,” Weinstein said. “The Iranian regime has been preparing for this moment and the decapitation of the Supreme Leader for decades.” Unlike Syria, there was no organized opposition figure capable of uniting a critical mass of Iranians.
The Iranian diaspora, he argued, bore partial responsibility for Washington’s miscalculations. “Diasporas don’t necessarily give the best advice. They gave terrible advice on Iraq, they gave really incorrect advice on Afghanistan,” he said. The expected mass uprising had failed to materialize because there was no unifying leader and because the regime’s repressive apparatus — the Basij and the IRGC — had deployed immediately to suppress dissent.
Weinstein described the war’s supreme irony: a president who campaigned against nation-building was now inextricably engaged in it. “When you gratuitously bomb the capital of a large country like Iran and you bomb its government facilities, whether you like it or not, now you’re in the business of nation building,” he said. “We’ve created another generational crisis.”
The new supreme leader, he noted, was “as ideological as his father” but now carried “the added chip on his shoulder that his father, mother, wife, and one of his children were killed by the United States.” Day-to-day authority, meanwhile, had passed to the IRGC. “We’ve just made things a lot worse for ourselves,” Weinstein said.
He concluded with a bitter observation about squandered opportunity. Trump, he argued, had been uniquely positioned — as an iconoclastic second-term president with an obedient party — to negotiate a comprehensive deal with Iran, even to open a US embassy in Tehran. “Instead, he chose to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors, mistakes that he spent his entire political career criticizing.”
“The unipolar world is gone — it’s really gone”
The third panelist, a German analyst identified as Mr. Rahr, situated the Iran conflict within a sweeping geopolitical framework. He warned that the war carried the risk of a broader confrontation between nuclear powers, noting that direct or indirect clashes involving the US, Israel, China, or Russia were “at least conceivable.”
Rahr identified an unspoken US strategic objective: pushing China out of the Middle East and limiting its influence over Persian Gulf energy resources. He noted that China was closely observing the military situation, “particularly the strength and weakness of American air defense systems,” and suggested that Washington’s violation of international law in attacking Iran could influence Beijing’s strategic calculations regarding Taiwan.
On Europe, Rahr delivered a withering verdict. The continent, he said, was “simply too weak and disunited to create an autonomous pole in the multipolar world.” He identified a widening rift between northern European states — Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, the Baltics — focused on militarizing against Russia, and southern nations such as Spain, Italy, and Greece, which favored normalized relations with Moscow and were “more sympathetic to the Arab point of view.”
Europe’s strategy, such as it was, amounted to waiting for a change of administration in Washington. “The only strategy which I detect today in Europe is to wait until Trump maybe will be ousted by the Democrats, another president will be in power,” Rahr said. “But this is not a strategy.”
He argued that northern European states were supporting the US war against Iran as a transactional calculation: backing Trump in the Middle East in exchange for American support against Russia in Ukraine. Europe’s growing raw materials shortage, meanwhile, was driving deindustrialization while American energy and arms industries enjoyed “an unprecedented boom.”
Rahr’s personal forecast envisioned a tripolar world order: the US with a dependent Europe, China as the dominant partner in its relationship with Russia, and a volatile Middle East where “a coalition of Islamist forces could attempt to establish a new political order.” A long-term American-Israeli security architecture in the region, he warned, “would effectively mark a return to a new Cold War era” — one he judged unsustainable.
“We’ve lived through Pax Americana — and look at the result”
During the question-and-answer session, Baaboud traced the historical arc of Gulf security from British withdrawal to what he termed Pax Americana, cataloguing the crises that followed: the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, the invasion of Iraq, and the current conflict. He argued that the US was now positioning Israel as its regional security guarantor — a “Greater Israel” being “pushed down our throats” — after Iran and Saudi Arabia had both ceased to serve that function.
He also lamented Europe’s failure to build meaningful partnerships with the Middle East, noting that the Euro-Arab, Euro-Gulf, and Euro-Mediterranean dialogues had all collapsed. “We can’t talk about a particular European project that has been successful in this region,” Baaboud said, even as Europe remained “the most affected region by the development and the chaos in the Middle East.”
Weinstein, asked to assess how the war might end, offered a cautious and self-consciously uncertain projection. “If I had to make an educated guess, I would say that it ends in some sort of stalemate or negotiated settlement with an updated Iranian regime that is not any better on human rights or democracy but might be willing to make a few concessions to the Trump administration to stop the war,” he said. He dismissed the optimistic scenario of a democratic Iran emerging within five years as unrealistic given current conditions. “Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen in the next few years, including people in the US government, are lying,” he added.
He characterized the broader pattern as endemic to American foreign policy. “This is the US approach to the Middle East: to create seismic change and complete instability and have no idea how it’s going to end. And this is the US approach to the Middle East for the last 25 years. And we’re back at it again.”
Rahr closed the discussion by declaring the post-Cold War unipolar order defunct. “The unipolar world is gone. It’s really gone. And a new thing has to be created, probably a new Yalta,” he said. He expressed doubt that regional states would accept a Greater Israel but acknowledged the vacuum left by the war would need to be filled. “The Americans will return home after the war. The Chinese are economically intelligent. The Russians are out for the moment,” he said. “The vacuum will be filled by something which I don’t yet understand by whom, but it will be filled.”
The US has officially changed its designation of Hezbollah to identify it as a “proxy of Iran”.
Executive Order 13224 now explicitly states that Hezbollah is sanctioned for acting for or on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF).
Speaking to Al Arabiya, a US State Department official argued that this change underscores how Hezbollah operates with almost no regard for Lebanese sovereignty, the Lebanese people, or the Lebanese state.
The official continued:
“This decision formally recognizes that Hezbollah’s military operations, external security apparatus, and major financing networks function as an extension of the IRGC-QF—Iran’s primary instrument for executing terrorist activity beyond its borders. Hezbollah is not a Lebanese resistance movement.”
Pointing to repeated oaths of loyalty and allegiance by Hezbollah officials to Iran’s Supreme Leader, the official maintained that the Quds Force also exerts a decisive influence over the group’s military and strategic decisions.
The official stated that Washington remains committed to “disrupting the networks that allow Iran to use Hezbollah as an instrument to undermine Lebanese sovereignty, threaten regional stability, and advance Tehran’s terrorist agenda.”
The official further accused Hezbollah of dragging Lebanon into destructive wars with Israel twice within the last two years, stating that the group remains an obstacle to Lebanon’s sovereignty, stability, and economic recovery.
“The disarmament and dismantling of Hezbollah is vital for any credible path forward for Lebanon, and we are working with our partners to advance this goal,” the US State Department official said.
Assessing the escalating friction across the Middle East, Marmara University Faculty Member Prof. Dr. Barış Doster shared comprehensive geopolitical evaluations in an interview conducted by international relations scholar Dr. Elif İlhamoğlu on the Harici digital broadcast programme. The discussion focused on Israel’s recent strikes on the Abu al-Zuhur airbase in northern Syria, proposals for tripartite security mechanisms, regional defence agreements, and the confrontation involving the US, Israel, and Iran.
“Türkiye and Israel will not clash directly”
Opening the broadcast, Dr. Elif İlhamoğlu Akkoç recalled that Israel’s air assault targeting the Abu al-Zuhur military airbase in Idlib, northern Syria, had generated extensive international condemnation. The strikes drew severe reactions across Türkiye and Gulf states, as well as critical statements from US Special Envoy for Syria and Ambassador to Ankara Tom Barrack. The airbase, situated approximately 70 kilometres east of the Turkish border, had reportedly remained out of operational service since 2013. Following the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged responsibility while explicitly citing Türkiye’s military footprint in Syria among the justifications for the operation, bringing Ankara and West Jerusalem into renewed indirect confrontation.
Asked whether this indirect friction could transform into an active military conflict, Prof. Dr. Barış Doster dismissed the prospect of direct hostilities between Ankara and West Jerusalem. Doster stated: “I do not anticipate any physical contact, hot conflict, or direct military confrontation between the two countries. When one evaluates the historical ties, political bonds, diplomatic relations, and commercial links between both states, alongside their separate, overarching strategic engagements with the US, Türkiye and Israel will not clash directly.”
Emphasising the underlying dynamics of this bilateral dynamic, Doster explained that competition would persist through unconventional channels: “This rivalry will continue sharply across various regional theatres through indirect instruments and proxy forces. We are all well aware of the support Israel has extended to the PKK, PYD, and YPG terror groups for years, which it continues to maintain today.”
“Israel wants to see Syria divided into four parts”
Addressing Israel’s broader regional operations, Prof. Dr. Barış Doster noted that West Jerusalem’s aggressive posture is backed by major Western powers. Doster remarked: “Israel, which is committing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and barbaric acts in Gaza while showing absolute disregard for international law, the laws of war, and the legal frameworks governing armed conflict, enjoys the unlimited, unconditional, and frictionless backing of the US and Europe’s leading trio: France, Germany, and the UK. This audacity and aggressiveness are not new. We know what happened in Gaza; we know what happened in Palestine; and we are familiar with the actions taken alongside the US against Iran in the recent past.”
Underlining the limitations of international rhetoric, Doster stated: “We must and do register the strongest possible reaction against these moves. Yet we should not express astonishment. Israeli tanks have previously advanced to within 20 kilometres of Damascus. United Nations resolutions have repeatedly affirmed that the Golan Heights constitute sovereign Syrian territory. Nonetheless, Israel acts as an occupying and annexing force. During his initial presidential term, Donald Trump formally recognised this annexation. Following Israel’s declaration of Jerusalem as its capital, Washington relocated its diplomatic mission there, defying objections from Türkiye and the broader Islamic world. Past American presidents had avoided putting that relocation into practical effect, but Trump brushed those reservations aside. During all these developments, did a single deterrent measure or concrete sanction emerge from the Islamic or Arab worlds beyond verbal condemnation? No. Therefore, while vocal opposition is imperative, we must recognise that verbal condemnations lack deterrence against Israel.”
Doster linked the recent strikes in northern Syria directly to West Jerusalem’s long-term strategic objectives for the Syrian state: “From the beginning, Israel has explicitly sought a Syria partitioned into four distinct entities: Kurds, Arabs, Alawites, and Druze. Israel serves as the primary patron and backer of two of these groups: the Kurds and the Druze. When the PKK, PYD, and YPG terrorist apparatus was heavily battered on the ground by the Damascus administration in recent months, it was rescued directly by the US and Israel. While Washington and West Jerusalem did not grant the group everything it sought, they prevented its complete liquidation. They confined it to a smaller geographic pocket, preserved its political, military, administrative, and resource footprint, and kept it in reserve for future operational needs. Thus, responding to Israeli aggression is necessary, but being surprised by it is entirely unwarranted.”
“How can you establish a red telephone line with Israel?”
Responding to remarks by US envoy Tom Barrack—who argued after the Idlib strikes that a permanent security dialogue and cooperation mechanism should be established among Türkiye, Syria, and Israel—Prof. Dr. Barış Doster characterised such an architecture as entirely unviable under current geopolitical conditions. Doster asserted: “Such a mechanism is unequivocally impossible. First, Israel openly seeks the partition of Syria. Second, the degree of control and long-term durability of the Damascus administration remains uncertain. Although the current Syrian leadership receives support from Arab capitals and Ankara, American officials themselves concede that lasting stability in Damascus is far from guaranteed, even raising the prospect of coup attempts against Ahmed al-Sharaa.”
Evaluating the regional power balance in Damascus, Doster continued: “The influence of the US and Israel over Syria has peaked over the past two years. Ahmed al-Sharaa does not claim rights over the Golan Heights and has offered assurances to Washington that Damascus will not present a security threat to Israel, promising to restrain any attempts by Iran, Hamas, or Lebanese Hezbollah to do so. Concurrently, the historical clout of Iran and Russia in Syria has plummeted toward near-total marginalisation, with Moscow’s functional influence waning even within its military bases. Under circumstances where Israel does not take the Syrian administration seriously and actively seeks its partition, how can you establish a red telephone line or a trilateral security architecture? Furthermore, as long as profound political competition persists and Israeli military violence continues, establishing a functional crisis hotline or security mechanism between Türkiye and Israel is equally unattainable.”
Addressing Tom Barrack’s earlier diplomatic proposals promoting an energy and security corridor connecting the Caspian Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean via Türkiye and Israel, Doster dismissed the initiative as strategically unrealistic: “We will not allow Tom Barrack to insult our intelligence. A corridor of that nature is envisioned primarily between Türkiye, Azerbaijan, and Israel. Ankara and Baku share exceptional historical, cultural, economic, and strategic links under the framework of ‘one nation, two states’. However, having completed my doctoral dissertation on the Caucasus, Eurasia, and the Turkic world, I state emphatically that relations between Israel and Azerbaijan are no less deep, intensive, or comprehensive than relations between Türkiye and Azerbaijan.”
Doster observed that broader systemic opposition would block such an axis: “Regardless of how strong Baku’s ties with Tel Aviv and Ankara are, establishing this line is exceptionally difficult. At the regional level, actors such as Iran will fundamentally object. Globally, because such an axis seeks to sever China’s long-standing, capital-intensive Belt and Road initiative, Beijing will actively oppose it behind the lines. Finally, Moscow will vigorously resist any configuration that expands American strategic hegemony across the Caucasus and the Eastern Mediterranean.”
“When needs change, alliances change”
Evaluating the trilateral Mecca Agreement concluded between Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan—which contains collective defence clauses compared by Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to NATO’s Article 5—Prof. Dr. Barış Doster analysed the functional foundations of the pact. Doster remarked: “As I frequently observe, when needs change, alliances change, and every alliance inevitably generates an opposing counter-alliance.”
Interrogating the strategic rationale of the pact, Doster asked: “Against whom was this alliance formed? Was it created against the Houthis? Was it directed at India, Pakistan’s primary adversary? Was it designed to counter the US, or perhaps Qatar, given Riyadh’s fluctuating ties with Doha and Abu Dhabi? In reality, this alliance is positioned squarely against Iran. An alliance that implicitly targets Iran raises critical questions regarding its durability and its potential to deepen fragmentation across the Islamic world. The pact brings together Sunni Arab leadership represented by Saudi Arabia alongside two major non-Arab powers, Türkiye and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia possesses vast capital reserves and leads the Arab world alongside Egypt; Türkiye represents the pre-eminent military power in the Turkic sphere; and Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state maintaining operational energy cooperation and historically balanced ties with Tehran despite its existential rivalry with India over Kashmir.”
Doster elaborated on the structural vulnerabilities of the arrangement: “To attain institutional permanence, an alliance must be grounded in shared political values, compatible state regimes, uniform threat perceptions, and unified strategic interests. None of these elements align across these three states. While Riyadh views Tehran as an existential threat, Ankara maintains a historical, calibrated rivalry with Iran and does not define it as a mortal enemy. Similarly, Islamabad does not perceive Tehran as an existential peril. Therefore, whether this pact represents a premature birth or a stillborn initiative remains an open debate, but its anti-Iranian orientation is unmistakable.”
Noting the geopolitical reactions to the pact, Doster observed: “This formation inherently pleases Washington, which has already extended its formal congratulations. Despite Türkiye’s participation, it also serves Israeli strategic interests by containing Iran, even if West Jerusalem approaches Ankara’s inclusion with tactical caution. Despite the media commentary surrounding the Mecca Agreement, history shows that such ad-hoc initiatives rarely achieve enduring operational deterrence. The 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the 22-member Arab League—originally founded in response to Israeli expansionism in Palestine—have demonstrated virtually no concrete effectiveness. Without a clearly defined architecture of shared threats and mutual strategic goals, this pact will be perceived across the region exclusively as an anti-Shia, anti-Persian alignment. Even if Iran’s regional resistance axis has experienced severe attrition, Tehran’s demographic and geopolitical weight ensures that a exclusionary pact of this nature cannot achieve long-term viability.”
Commenting on proposals to incorporate Egypt or Iran into the mechanism, Doster described the inclusion of Tehran as strategically impossible: “Inviting Iran into this pact would be equivalent to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation offering membership to the US, or Washington inviting Russia to join NATO. Regarding Egypt, Saudi Arabia’s strategic agenda includes structural competition with Cairo. Despite Egypt’s severe economic vulnerabilities, its historical, political, and cultural gravitas within the Arab world means that Riyadh will not endorse Egyptian entry, as it would dilute Saudi primacy within the bloc regardless of Turkish diplomatic lobbying.”
“The US and Israel will not launch a wide air campaign”
Turning to the confrontation between the US, Israel, and Iran following the expiration of ceasefire understandings, Prof. Dr. Barış Doster assessed the military balance and the leadership posture of Donald Trump. Doster remarked: “By completely discarding classical diplomatic protocols, Trump has proven himself an unpredictable and unreliable political actor. One need only recall the assurances given during the NATO summit regarding CAATSA sanctions, the delivery of F-35 fighter aircraft, and engine procurement for Türkiye’s national combat aircraft KAAN. When dealing with an actor whose positions shift constantly, long-range diplomatic projections become exceedingly difficult.”
Analysing the battlefield dynamic between Washington, West Jerusalem, and Tehran, Doster concluded: “Despite sustaining severe losses across its administrative, military, and command cadres due to American and Israeli strikes, Iran currently maintains psychological ascendancy within its domestic public and broader international opinion. It is evident that the US administration has failed to secure its primary objectives through coercive rhetoric. Moving forward, the US and Israel will not launch a wide air campaign characterised by relentless, high-intensity strategic bombing. A ground offensive remains entirely out of the question, as I have maintained from the outset. While localised, low-intensity air strikes against specific Iranian targets may occur, a protracted, maximum-scale aerial assault conducted jointly by the US and Israel remains improbable.”
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has said the government will prepare “new, targeted sanctions” against Israelis involved in “illegal settlement expansion” in Gaza and the West Bank.
In a statement issued on Wednesday night (19 August), Miliband stated that following the Israeli government’s opening of tenders for the construction of 1,200 settlement homes in the strategically vital E1 area of the West Bank, the United Kingdom would not “stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution”.
“The E1 area will run straight through the heart of Palestine and risks cutting off the West Bank from East Jerusalem; this would jeopardise the viability of a two-state solution,” Miliband said, describing the Israeli government’s actions as “unacceptable and destructive”.
The British minister called on his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Sa’ar, to “halt the E1 plans immediately” and withdraw the tender.
Miliband also stated that he had summoned Charge d’Affaires Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, the country’s top diplomat in the UK, to the Foreign Office to convey these demands clearly.
Miliband said the UK would announce a “comprehensive range of measures in the coming weeks in response to the policies of the Israeli government”.
These measures underscore a harder line taken by the UK against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government under the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham.
This shift in stance was evident even before Burnham officially became prime minister. Burnham apologised for the Labour Party’s previous position on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza under his predecessor, Keir Starmer, saying the party “had not got it right”.
Last month, the UK’s new Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, stated that Israel was not “complying” with international standards in Gaza and the West Bank.
Other European allies have also hardened their stance towards Israel. Earlier on Wednesday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz strongly condemned remarks by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who called for nighttime assassinations in Gaza.
Israel, for its part, reacted against the London administration. Foreign Minister Sa’ar said: “The Jewish people have the right to live everywhere in the Land of Israel, just as the British have the right to live in London and throughout the UK.”
Maintaining that the British-issued 1917 Balfour Declaration “officially recognised the historic right of the Jewish people to re-establish their national homeland in the Land of Israel—including the area in question”, the minister pointed out that Britain still controlled colonial territories thousands of kilometres from its own shores.
Arguing that it was absurd for Britain to “lecture the Jewish people on where they can live in their historic and tiny homeland”, Sa’ar said the British Foreign Secretary’s statement condemned Israel while “turning a blind eye to Palestinian terrorism, incitement, and the Palestinian Authority’s ongoing financial support for terror—namely the ‘pay to slay’ policy”.
Sa’ar concluded his statement:
“The UK Government’s systematic policy of blaming only Israel while ignoring Palestinian extremism has already contributed to an enormous wave of antisemitic hatred and attacks against the British Jewish community. Continuing on this path will only make matters worse.
The British Government’s decision to damage relations between our countries is deeply regrettable. But Israel will not be a passive victim of this policy.
Israel will defend its rights, its interests, and its people.”
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