The Markaz Review:

By Lina Mounzer

We all knew this war was coming. Last year's 12 Day War was but a dismal prelude to what Israel and the US had in store for Iran, but this time, the stakes are far higher.

We all knew this war was coming. Perhaps as a Lebanese I was more attuned to it than most, given that our entire lives here have been lived under the shadow of the next Israeli war perpetually hulking our way. But since October 7, 2023, when we began to grasp the magnitude of Hamas’s action — not its “savagery,” or “barbarism,” as the Western media had it, but rather the size of its affront to Israel’s sense of righteous inviolability — this: war, its regional spread, its potential to be a shatterer of the entire world, seemed only a matter of time.

This is not to make it sound as though Israel is the sole instigator of this war. Even if, Netanyahu, in his own words, has been “dreaming of this war for 40 years.” No, it is not just Netanyahu. Nor is it just Trump. It is incumbent upon us not give into the lazy impulse of using their names as shorthand for the disaster of the current moment, or to get into debates about who is the tail and who the dog, when both are simply different heads of the same ravening beast.

Because this disaster has been building for decades upon decades, a malevolent seed of European colonialism, watered by the poisonous regime change projects of successive US administrations, by the toxic chemical runoff from Israel’s prohibited weapons of mass destruction, and finally, given an open environment in which to grow and mutate through the shattering of every possible law of war or moral of combat (as oxymoronic as the terms might be) by the genocide in Gaza. In some ways it feels like the history of the entire region since the end of the first World War has been leading to this — a multi-front battle that I am near-certain the history books will refer to as World War III.

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