Does the World Know How Neighbouring Countries Are Fed Up With the So-Called Terrorist State of Israel? The Occupation of Palestine

This is not a political essay. It is a memory - a collective memory that stretches back seven centuries to the Mamluks who broke the Crusaders, to the generals who crossed the canal in 1973, to the mothers who watched their children return from Taba in 1989. It is a story about land, about dignity, about the refusal to forget. And it is a question posed to a world that has looked away for too long: do you know? Do you know what it means to be a neighbor of the occupation?

THE DEEP ROOTS OF RESISTANCE

The Liberators Who Came Before

Long before the world spoke of Zionism, before the maps were redrawn, before the refugees began their long march, there were men who understood that Jerusalem was not a city to be bargained away.

In 1187, Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi rode out from Egypt at the head of an army that would change the course of history. For eighty-eight years, the Crusaders had held Jerusalem. The Kingdom of Jerusalem had been carved from Muslim blood, its churches built on foundations of conquest. Salah al-Din did not come as a conqueror. He came as a liberator.

At the Horns of Hattin, he broke the Crusader army. When he entered Jerusalem, he did not repeat the massacre that the Crusaders had committed ninety years earlier, when they rode through streets slick with the blood of Muslims and Jews alike. Instead, he offered terms. He opened the gates. He restored the sanctity of a city that had been defiled by occupation.

Seven hundred years later, another Egyptian general would carry the same banner. Saif al-Din Qutuz, the Mamluk sultan who defeated the Mongols at Ain Jalut in 1260, understood something that modern politicians have forgotten: that Palestine is not a piece of real estate to be traded. It is a trust. It is the land of the Prophets. It is the first qibla of Islam, the city of the Night Journey, the soil that has absorbed the blood of generations.

When the Mongols came - the terror of the age, the army that had sacked Baghdad and ended the Abbasid Caliphate - it was an Egyptian army that stopped them. At Ain Jalut, in the Jezreel Valley, Qutuz and his general Baybars broke the Mongol advance. The world changed that day. And the men who changed it were Egyptians who understood that the defense of Palestine was not a favor to its people - it was a duty.

This history matters. It matters because the occupation that began in 1948 did not appear from nowhere. It landed on a land that had been liberated before, defended before, cherished before. The people of Egypt, of Syria, of Lebanon, of Jordan - they carry this memory. It is not nostalgia. It is a warning: that Palestine has always been worth fighting for, and that those who forget the liberators of the past will be forced to become the liberators of the future.

The Nakba: A Wound That Never Closed

In 1948, the world watched as a state was carved from a land that was not empty. The United Nations voted to partition Palestine - a land where Palestinians had lived for centuries - into two states. The Palestinian state never materialized. The other state did.

The massacres began before the armies crossed the borders. At Deir Yassin, on April 9, 1948, Zionist militias killed more than 100 Palestinian civilians - men, women, children. The stories spread like wildfire through the villages: the bodies mutilated, the women raped, the survivors paraded through the streets of Jerusalem. It was a message. It was meant to be a message. And the message was: leave, or die.

The people of Palestine did not leave because they wanted to. They left because they were forced. The systematic depopulation of Palestinian villages - over 400 of them - was not an accident of war. It was a plan. Plan Dalet, as it was called, laid out the blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Village after village was emptied. The inhabitants who did not flee were expelled. Those who resisted were killed.

By the time the armistice was signed, 750,000 Palestinians had become refugees. Their homes were occupied. Their land was taken. Their keys - the keys to houses that no longer existed - were passed from parents to children, from children to grandchildren. They are still waiting.

Egypt, in 1948, was not the Egypt of Salah al-Din. The monarchy was weak. The army was unprepared. The British still held sway. But the Egyptian soldiers who fought in Palestine did so knowing that they were defending a sacred trust. They lost. But the loss did not erase the duty. It deepened it.

The Years of Waiting

For the nineteen years that followed, Gaza was Egyptian. The Strip, that narrow coastal sliver that would become the world’s largest open-air prison, was administered by Cairo. It was not a comfortable occupation. There were no settlements, no colonies, no attempt to change the character of the land. It was a trusteeship - an awkward, temporary arrangement that everyone understood would end when Palestine was free.

Those years were not peaceful. The fedayeen - the Palestinian fighters who crossed the armistice lines to strike at the occupation - operated from Gaza. Egypt supported them, but cautiously. The monarchy was gone. Gamal Abdel Nasser had risen to power, and with him, a new vision for the Arab world: a vision of dignity, of sovereignty, of resistance to the powers that had carved the region into colonies and client states.

Nasser’s Egypt was not the Egypt of today. It was a nation that nationalized the Suez Canal, that defied Britain and France and Israel all at once, that became the voice of the Arab world. In 1956, when Israel, Britain, and France colluded to attack Egypt, the Egyptian army did not break. Port Said was bombed. Civilians died. But the resistance was fierce enough that the invaders withdrew - not defeated, but bloodied.

The lesson of 1956 was not lost on anyone. Israel had shown that it would strike, that it would expand, that it would use war to redraw borders. But Egypt had shown that it would not bend. The United Nations Emergency Force was deployed in Sinai. The Straits of Tiran were opened. And for a decade, an uneasy quiet settled over the border.

But the quiet was an illusion. Israel was preparing. The maps were being drawn. And when the storm came, it would not be a squall. It would be a hurricane.

The Year the World Changed

In June 1967, the quiet shattered.

Egypt had demanded the withdrawal of the UN peacekeepers from Sinai. Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The drums of war were beating, and they were loud enough to reach Washington, to reach Moscow, to reach every capital that watched the Middle East with a mixture of calculation and dread.

On the morning of June 5, the Israeli Air Force struck first. In a matter of hours, the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed on the ground. The planes that were supposed to defend the skies of Cairo, of Alexandria, of Port Said, were burning in their hangars. The strike was not a surprise to those who were watching - the intelligence had been clear, the warnings had been issued. But the response was not what had been promised. And within six days, the map of the region was redrawn.

Sinai was occupied. The Golan Heights was occupied. The West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied. Gaza, which had been Egyptian, was occupied. The Palestinian refugees who had already lost their homes in 1948 lost the hope of return.

For Egypt, the defeat was existential. Nasser, the voice of Arab dignity, appeared on television and announced his resignation. The people poured into the streets - not to celebrate, as the world assumed, but to plead with him to stay. He stayed. But the wound remained.

The years that followed were years of attrition. Egypt launched the War of Attrition in 1969 - not a war to retake Sinai, but a war to make the occupation unbearable. The canal cities - Port Said, Ismailia, Suez - were shelled relentlessly. The Egyptian Second and Third Armies dug in on the west bank of the canal, waiting for the day when they would cross.

And then, on October 6, 1973 - the tenth day of Ramadan, the day when the Muslim world remembers the revelation of the Quran - they crossed.

The Crossing

Operation Badr was not a miracle. It was a meticulously planned military operation, years in the making. Egyptian engineers had studied the Bar-Lev Line - the massive sand wall that Israel had built along the canal - and they had found its weakness: water. High-pressure hoses, brought from Germany, were trained on the sand. In hours, the wall that was supposed to be impregnable was breached.

The Egyptian army crossed the canal in force. The Israeli defenses crumbled. For the first time in decades, Arab soldiers stood on land that had been taken from them. The flags of Egypt flew over the east bank of the Suez Canal, and the world - the world that had written off the Arab armies after 1967 - was forced to watch.

The war did not end in victory. The Egyptian army, having crossed the canal, stopped. The Israeli army, reinforced and rearmed, counterattacked. The Third Army was encircled. The ceasefire came not a moment too soon. But the crossing had changed something fundamental.

The October War - the Ramadan War, the Yom Kippur War - was not a defeat. It was the end of the myth of Israeli invincibility. It was the proof that the armies of Egypt, of Syria, of the Arab world, could fight. It was the foundation upon which the peace that followed would be built - not a peace of surrender, but a peace of mutual respect, of exhaustion, of the recognition that neither side could destroy the other.

For Egypt, the war was also a beginning. The negotiations that followed - the disengagement agreements, the Sinai accords, the long road to Camp David - would eventually return the land. But the land was not the only thing at stake. There was also dignity. There was also memory. And memory, once awakened, does not sleep.

The Peace That Was Not a Reconciliation

In March 1979, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin shook hands on the White House lawn. The Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty was signed. The world celebrated. Another Nobel Peace Prize was awarded. The headlines called it a breakthrough.

In Egypt, the reaction was different.

Millions poured into the streets - not to celebrate, but to weep. To chant slogans of rage and defiance. To call Sadat a traitor. The treaty was not a reconciliation. It was a transaction. Egypt got Sinai back. Israel got peace on its southern border. And the Palestinian cause- the cause that Egypt had carried since 1948 - was set aside.

The treaty was signed, but the people never signed. The Egyptian street, the Egyptian heart, the Egyptian memory - these did not make peace with occupation. They could not. The children of 1948, of 1956, of 1967, of 1973 - they did not forget the dead. They did not forget the refugees. They did not forget that the land they had fought to liberate was still occupied, still suffering, still waiting.

The Sinai was returned in stages. By April 1982, the Israeli flag was lowered over the peninsula. But one piece of land remained: Taba, a small resort town on the Red Sea coast. Israel claimed it was not part of Egypt. The maps were ambiguous. The diplomats argued. And for seven years, the last piece of Egyptian land stayed in the hands of the occupation.

It would take a two-year legal battle at the International Court of Arbitration in Geneva to settle the matter. The court ruled in Egypt’s favor. On 19 March 1989, the Israeli flag was lowered over Taba, and the Egyptian flag was raised in its place. Moufid Shehab, a member of the Taba National Committee, said years later: “Our military and diplomatic battles over the years amply demonstrate that Egypt will never give up an inch of its land.”

The return of Taba was a moment of quiet pride. But it was also a reminder: that the occupation had not ended. That the land that Egypt had liberated was not the whole land. That Palestine was still waiting.

THE LEBANON WOUND

The Invasion

On 6 June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon.

The stated reason was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, by the Abu Nidal Organization - a Palestinian faction that was, by then, a bitter rival of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO condemned the assassination attempt. They had been observing a ceasefire for eight months, a ceasefire that UN peacekeepers reported had been breached not once by Palestinian fighters.

The ceasefire was an inconvenience to those who had already decided that the PLO must be destroyed. The invasion had been planned long before the bullet that wounded Argov. It was, as the Israeli historian Benny Morris and others have noted, a war of choice, not necessity.

The Israeli army swept north, bypassing Palestinian strongholds, heading for Beirut. The siege of the city lasted for months. Israeli warships blockaded the port. Israeli artillery shelled the western suburbs where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians were trapped. The world watched. The United States brokered a deal. By August, the PLO fighters had evacuated, under the supervision of a multinational force that guaranteed the safety of the refugees left behind.

On 11 September 1982, that multinational force withdrew. The guarantees were forgotten. The refugees were left alone.

The Massacre

On 14 September 1982, the newly elected Lebanese president, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated. The explosion that destroyed his headquarters also destroyed the fragile peace that had held since the PLO withdrawal. Israel, which had promised not to enter West Beirut, violated its agreement. Within hours, Israeli tanks and troops were rolling into the city.

The stated reason was to “prevent chaos.” The real reason, as the subsequent Israeli inquiry would reveal, was different. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, and Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan had agreed that the Israeli army should not enter the Palestinian refugee camps. Instead, the Lebanese Forces - the Christian militia that had been Israel’s ally throughout the war - would do the job.

At 6:00 am on 15 September, the Israeli army took up positions around the Sabra neighborhood and the Shatila refugee camp. They sealed the exits. They set up checkpoints. And then, for three days, they allowed the Lebanese Forces to enter.

What happened in those three days was not war. It was slaughter.

The militiamen moved methodically through the narrow alleys of Sabra and Shatila, killing everyone they found. Men, women, children. Families huddled in their homes. People running for safety. The old, the young, the sick. They were shot. They were stabbed. They were hacked to pieces. The killing went on through the night, and through the night, the Israeli army shot flares into the sky to light the work of their allies.

Deborah Thornton-Jackson, a British woman living in Beirut, drove to the Gaza Hospital after hearing what was happening. She found a scene of unimaginable horror:

“Children, women, animals, anything that moved - they had massacred. It was like a scene from what I would have imagined happened in World War Two to the Jews. They had been executed. It was horror in there, it was horror. The stench, the massacre. They are war crimes.”

The final toll is disputed. The Lebanese government counted 3,500 dead. Other sources estimated between 1,300 and 3,500. Whatever the number, it was a massacre. It was genocide, as the United Nations Commission chaired by Sean MacBride would later conclude.

When the world learned what had happened, the outrage was immediate. The Israeli government, under pressure, established a commission of inquiry. The Kahan Commission, as it was called, found that Israeli military personnel had failed to take any serious steps to stop the killings despite being aware of the militia’s actions. The Commission deemed that the IDF was indirectly responsible for the events and forced Ariel Sharon to resign as defense minister “for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge.”

Sharon resigned. But the massacre did not end with his resignation. The dead did not return. The wound did not heal.

And the Lebanese, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Egyptians - all those who had watched the invasion, the siege, the slaughter - they learned something that day. They learned that the occupation was not satisfied with the land it had taken in 1948, in 1967. It wanted more. It wanted Lebanon. It wanted the Golan. It wanted the Shebaa Farms. And it would use any means - any ally, any violence, any lie - to take them.

The Occupation That Never Ended

The Sabra and Shatila massacre did not end the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Israeli forces remained in southern Lebanon for another eighteen years, controlling a “security zone” that they had carved out of Lebanese territory. The occupation was brutal - a daily grind of checkpoints, arrests, shelling, death.

Hezbollah rose in response. The resistance movement that the world now knows as a formidable military force began as a small group of Lebanese Shia determined to expel the invaders. For eighteen years, they fought. For eighteen years, they died. And in May 2000, when the Israeli army finally withdrew, it was not because the occupation had become inconvenient. It was because the resistance had made it impossible to stay.

But the withdrawal was not complete. The Shebaa Farms - a small strip of land on the border between Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights - remained in Israeli hands. The Shebaa Farms were Syrian territory before 1967, but Lebanon has claimed them since. The United Nations certified the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, but it did not settle the status of the Farms. And Hezbollah, which had been formed to resist the occupation, refused to lay down its arms until every inch of Lebanese land was free.

The Shebaa Farms became a symbol. A symbol of incompleteness. A symbol of the occupation that had not ended, that would not end, that could not end until the land was returned and the refugees could go home.

The Bombing of Syria: Iran’s Consulate and the Red Line

The war that began in Gaza in October 2023 did not stay in Gaza. It spread, as wars in the region always spread, to Lebanon, to Syria, to Iran.

On 1 April 2024, Israeli F-35 fighter jets launched six missiles from the occupied Golan Heights at a building in Damascus. The building was not a military target. It was the consular annex of the Iranian embassy. It was protected by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. It was, by any standard of international law, inviolable.

The missiles destroyed the building. At least seven people were killed, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Zahedi was not an ordinary soldier. He was the commander responsible for Iranian operations in Syria and Lebanon. He was, in the eyes of Israel, a legitimate target. But the building he was in was not.

The attack was a deliberate escalation. It was a message. It was a violation of the sovereignty of Syria, of the diplomatic immunity of Iran, of the international law that the world pretends to respect. The Syrian Foreign Minister, Faisal Mekdad, called it a “flagrant violation” of the Vienna Convention. Iran vowed retaliation. The world held its breath.

The strike on the Iranian consulate was not an isolated event. It was part of a pattern. Israel had been striking targets in Syria for years - Iranian supply convoys, Hezbollah weapons depots, Syrian military installations. But this was different. This was an attack on diplomatic soil. This was a crossing of a red line. And it came at a moment when the region was already burning.

The Syrian people had suffered for thirteen years. They had been bombed, starved, displaced. They had watched their cities turned to rubble, their children killed, their country broken. And now, in the chaos after the fall of the Assad government in late 2024, Israel saw an opportunity. It bombed Syria on the day the government fell - not to shape the transition, but to destroy what remained of Syrian military capacity. It bombed the Golan, which it has occupied since 1967, and it expanded its presence on Mount Hermon, looking down on Damascus from the heights.

The Syrians, like the Lebanese, like the Palestinians, like the Egyptians, watched. And they remembered.

The Golan and the Shebaa Farms: The Land That Cannot Be Forgotten

The Golan Heights is Syrian land. It was taken in 1967, occupied since, and annexed in a move that the world has never recognized. The Shebaa Farms is Lebanese land, or Syrian land claimed by Lebanon - the status is contested, but the occupation is not. It is Israeli. It has been Israeli since 1967. And it has never been returned.

In August 2025, reports emerged that the new rulers of Syria - Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the group that had seized Damascus after the fall of Assad - were holding secret talks with Israel about a territorial exchange. The proposal was simple: HTS would recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in exchange for Israel transferring the Shebaa Farms to Syrian control.

The reports, carried by Israeli media and cited by Press TV, were alarming. Not because a territorial exchange was likely - it was not, as the Shebaa Farms does not border Syria and any transfer would violate international law. But because the very discussion of such an exchange revealed something important: that the occupation of the Golan was not a temporary condition. It was a permanent theft, dressed up in the language of diplomacy.

Hezbollah, the dominant resistance movement in Lebanon, condemned the talks. It reiterated its right to resume resistance operations in the Shebaa Farms. It rejected any attempt to alter the status quo. And it reminded the world that the land was not a bargaining chip, that the resistance had not been defeated, that the occupation would not be normalized.

The Golan is Syrian. The Shebaa Farms is Lebanese. The people who lived there before 1967 - the farmers, the shepherds, the families who worked the land for generations - they are still waiting to return. They have been waiting for fifty-nine years. They are still waiting.

And the neighbors watch. The Egyptians, who returned every inch of Sinai, who fought for Taba, who waited for the International Court of Arbitration to rule. The Syrians, who lost the Golan and never got it back. The Lebanese, who were invaded, occupied, massacred. The Jordanians, who lost the West Bank and made peace, but did not forget.

They are waiting. And they are watching. And they are asking the same question that has been asked since 1948: does the world know? Does the world see? Does the world care?

THE COLD PEACE

The Transaction That Was Not a Reconciliation

The peace treaty that Egypt signed with Israel in 1979 was a transaction. It was not a reconciliation. It was not a friendship. It was a recognition of mutual exhaustion, of strategic necessity, of the simple fact that neither side could destroy the other.

For ten years after the treaty was signed, the relationship between the two countries was described by scholars as a “cold peace.” Ann M. Lesch, writing in a chapter on Egyptian-Israeli relations, divided the period into phases. The first phase, from 1977 to 1982, was focused on negotiating the treaty and implementing its terms. Ambassadors were exchanged. Accords were signed in trade, tourism, culture. The withdrawal from Sinai was completed - except for Taba.

But the wider aspects of the accord were never realized. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin argued that there should be no linkage between the bilateral treaty and progress on the West Bank and Gaza. After the Knesset resolved that unified Jerusalem should be the eternal capital of Israel, negotiations over Palestinian autonomy halted. The final summit between Begin and Sadat, in August 1981, was bitter. Begin was unwilling to make any moves on the Palestinian issue. Sadat was confronted with protests in the streets and demands that he recall the Egyptian ambassador from Tel Aviv.

When Sadat was assassinated in October 1981, his successor, Hosni Mubarak, inherited a contradictory inheritance. He had to maintain the treaty without embracing the Israeli government that was now bombing Lebanon, settling the West Bank, and expanding the occupation. He had to mollify the Egyptian people, who had never accepted the peace, without breaking the agreement that had returned Sinai.

The balance Mubarak struck was careful. He financed bilateral accords. He allowed Israel to participate in international fairs in Cairo. He permitted the opening of an Israeli Academic Center. But he refused to visit Jerusalem. He released the politicians and intellectuals that Sadat had imprisoned. He allowed the opposition press to resume publication. And when the Israeli invasion of Lebanon began in June 1982, he withdrew the Egyptian ambassador from Tel Aviv.

The second phase of Egyptian-Israeli relations, from 1982 to 1986, was the period of the “cold peace.” Egypt protested the occupation of Lebanon, the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, the continued settlement of the West Bank. The relationship was maintained, but it was guarded, circumscribed, transactional. It was a peace of necessity, not of choice.

The Return of Taba

The final piece of Egyptian land was returned on 19 March 1989. Taba, the small resort town on the Red Sea, had been a point of contention since the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai in 1982. Israeli negotiators claimed that Taba was part of Israel. They pointed to the administrative border between Palestine and Egypt that had been demarcated in October 1906. They argued that the border was ambiguous. And they had built two Israeli hotels on the land they claimed as their own.

Egypt did not accept the ambiguity. The 1979 Peace Treaty allowed for disputes to be referred to the International Court of Arbitration. Egypt took its case to Geneva. For two years, a legal battle was fought - not with tanks and planes, but with maps and documents and arguments before an international panel.

The Court of Arbitration ruled in Egypt’s favor. The border that had been drawn in 1906 was the border that would stand. Taba was Egyptian land. The Israeli hotels were on Egyptian soil. And the Israeli flag that had flown over the Red Sea for seven years would be lowered.

The ceremony was quiet. The Israeli troops sang their national anthem as they left. The Egyptian flag was raised. And Moufid Shehab, who had presented Egypt’s case in Geneva, spoke words that would echo through the years: “Our military and diplomatic battles over the years amply demonstrate that Egypt will never give up an inch of its land.”

Taba was returned. The Sinai was whole. But the return of Taba was not an end. It was a reminder. The land that Egypt had fought for, negotiated for, waited for, was restored. The land of Palestine was not. The Golan was not. The Shebaa Farms were not. The occupation continued.

The Uprising

In December 1987, a car driven by an Israeli military official struck a van carrying Palestinian workers in the Gaza Strip. Four Palestinians were killed. The accident was not a massacre. But it was the spark that lit a fire that had been smouldering for twenty years.

The First Intifada was not a military campaign. It was a mass uprising - a spontaneous eruption of a people who had nothing left to lose. Young men with slingshots faced soldiers with tanks. Women with olive branches faced soldiers with tear gas. Children with stones faced soldiers with bullets. And the world watched.

The Intifada lasted for five years. By the time it ended, more than a thousand Palestinians had been killed. Tens of thousands had been wounded. The occupation had not ended. But something had changed. The world had seen the images - the stones, the slingshots, the children. And the Palestinian cause, which had been set aside in the pursuit of peace treaties and normalization agreements, was back on the agenda.

Egypt watched the Intifada with a mixture of sympathy and caution. The peace treaty with Israel was still in place. The Egyptian ambassador had returned to Tel Aviv. But the Egyptian people - the same people who had never accepted the peace - watched the uprising with pride. This was the resistance that they had carried in their hearts since 1948. This was the dignity that they had hoped for, prayed for, waited for.

The Intifada did not liberate Palestine. But it proved that the occupation could not be normalized. That the people would not accept their dispossession. That the land would not be forgotten.

The Neighbors Who Never Normalized

There is a word that haunts the region: “tatbi” - normalization. It is the process by which Arab countries establish diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations with the occupation. Jordan normalized in 1994. The United Arab Emirates normalized in 2020. Bahrain normalized in 2020. Morocco normalized in 2020. Sudan normalized in 2020.

But the people did not normalize. The Egyptian street, the Jordanian street, the Moroccan street - they did not accept the normalization that their governments had signed. They remembered. They remembered the massacres. They remembered the refugees. They remembered the land that had been taken.

A survey conducted in 2025 found that 82 percent of Americans agree that “elites are out of touch with the realities of everyday life.” In the Arab world, the number would be higher. The elites who signed the peace treaties, who normalized with the occupation, who accepted the theft of Palestine - they are not the people. The people have never accepted. And the people will never forget.

The neighbors of Palestine are not the governments. They are the families who have hosted refugees for seventy-five years. They are the soldiers who crossed the canal in 1973. They are the mothers who watched their children return from Taba in 1989. They are the ones who have been waiting, generation after generation, for the occupation to end.

And they are fed up.

They are fed up with the promises that are never kept. They are fed up with the treaties that are never honored. They are fed up with the world that looks away while their brothers are killed, their land is stolen, their dignity is crushed.

They are fed up with the so-called “terrorist state of Israel” - the state that calls itself the only democracy in the Middle East while it bombed an Iranian consulate, while it massacred Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, while it occupies the Golan and the Shebaa Farms, while it expands its settlements, while it builds walls, while it keeps millions in open-air prisons.

The neighbors know. The neighbors have always known. And the neighbors are waiting for the day when the world finally knows too.

THE ACCOUNTING

The Bombing of the Consulate

The strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on 1 April 2024 was a turning point. Not because it changed the balance of power - it did not. Not because it ended the war - it did not. But because it was a violation so clear, so deliberate, so brazen, that it could not be ignored.

The consular annex of the Iranian embassy was not a military target. It was protected by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, an international treaty that every nation - including Israel - has signed. The attack was, as the Syrian Foreign Minister called it, a “flagrant violation” of international law. It was, as the Iranian Foreign Ministry declared, a violation of all international obligations and conventions.

And it was an attack on Syrian sovereignty. The missiles that levelled the building were launched from the occupied Golan Heights - Syrian land that Israel has occupied since 1967. They flew over Syrian territory. They struck a building in the Syrian capital. And they killed people who were guests of the Syrian government.

The Syrian people had already endured thirteen years of war. They had been bombed by their own government, by the opposition, by the United States, by Russia, by Turkey, by Israel. Their cities were rubble. Their children were dead. Their country was broken. And on the day that their government fell - in late 2024, when the Assad regime collapsed and the chaos of transition began - Israel bombed again.

The bombing of Syria on the day of the government’s fall was not a military operation. It was a message. It was the same message that Israel had sent in 1982, in 2006, in 2023: that the occupation would not be limited, that the land would not be returned, that the neighbors would never be safe.

The Massacres Inside Lebanon

The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was not the first Israeli incursion into the country. There had been raids, bombings, occupations before. But it was the first full-scale war. And it was the war that produced the massacre.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre is the worst of the massacres committed against Palestinians inside Lebanon, but it is not the only one. During the eighteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon, there were others. The bombing of villages. The shelling of refugee camps. The killing of civilians who had nowhere to go.

The South Lebanon Army, the Israeli proxy militia that controlled the occupation zone, was known for its brutality. It was made up of Lebanese collaborators who had been given weapons and impunity by their Israeli patrons. They arrested, tortured, killed. They did not answer to Lebanese law. They answered only to the Israeli officers who commanded them.

When the Israeli army finally withdrew in May 2000, the South Lebanon Army collapsed. Its members fled across the border with the retreating Israelis. Some of them are still there, living in Israel, waiting for the day when they can return to the land they betrayed.

The land they left behind is still occupied. Not by Israel - the withdrawal in 2000 was certified by the United Nations. But the Shebaa Farms remain. And Hezbollah, which was formed to resist the occupation, still holds its weapons. Not because it wants to fight, but because the land is not free.

The Lebanese people, like the Palestinians, like the Syrians, like the Egyptians, are waiting. They are waiting for the land to be returned. They are waiting for the refugees to go home. They are waiting for the occupation to end.

The Golan That Was Never Returned

The Golan Heights is Syrian land. It was taken in 1967, in the same war that took Sinai, that took the West Bank, that took Gaza, that took East Jerusalem. Sinai was returned. Gaza was unilaterally withdrawn from in 2005. The West Bank is still occupied. East Jerusalem is still occupied. And the Golan is still occupied.

In 1981, Israel passed the Golan Heights Law, annexing the territory it had occupied for fourteen years. The law was condemned by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 497, which declared the annexation “null and void and without international legal effect.” But the condemnation did not return the land. The Golan remained in Israeli hands.

The people of the Golan - the Druze, the Alawites, the Syrians who had lived there for generations - were given the choice: accept Israeli citizenship, or become permanent residents with identity cards that marked them as foreign. Most chose the latter. They carried Syrian passports. They sent their children to Syrian universities. They waited for the day when the land would be returned.

That day has not come. The Golan is still occupied. And the Shebaa Farms - the small strip of land that Lebanon claims - is still occupied as well. The neighbors watch. The neighbors wait. The neighbors are fed up.

The War That Is Not a War

The war that began in October 2023 has not ended. It has spread. It has consumed Gaza, and Lebanon, and Syria, and Iran, and the Red Sea. It has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, thousands of Lebanese, thousands of Syrians, and it is not finished.

The Israeli government speaks of self-defense. It speaks of the need to destroy Hamas, to destroy Hezbollah, to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. But the neighbors know that this war is not about self-defense. It is about expansion. It is about the same project that began in 1948: the project of taking land, of expelling people, of creating a state that stretches from the river to the sea.

The neighbors know because they have lived through this before. They lived through 1948, when the Palestinian villages were emptied. They lived through 1967, when the rest of Palestine was taken. They lived through 1982, when Lebanon was invaded and the camps were massacred. They lived through 2006, when Lebanon was bombed again. They lived through 2024, when the Iranian consulate was destroyed.

They know. And they are waiting.

THE WIDER FIRE

The War Beyond Borders

What is unfolding is no longer a contained conflict. It is not Gaza alone, nor Lebanon, nor Syria. It is a widening ring of fire that now touches the edges of the entire region.

The strikes on Iranian targets, the shadow war that has moved from covert operations to open confrontation, and the increasing involvement of the United States have transformed the conflict into something more dangerous: a regional war without a formal declaration.

Iran is not Gaza. It is not Lebanon. It is a state with alliances, with reach, with the capacity to respond beyond its borders. Any sustained confrontation between Israel and Iran does not remain bilateral. It pulls in the region.

The Gulf watches.

In Saudi Arabia, in United Arab Emirates, in Qatar, and in Kuwait, the calculation is no longer theoretical. These are states whose economies are tied to stability, to oil, and to the uninterrupted flow of energy through narrow maritime routes like the Strait of Hormuz. Any escalation with Iran places that lifeline at risk.

Missiles do not need to land on oil fields to shake markets. The threat alone is enough.

Energy markets react not only to destruction, but to uncertainty. A single escalation in the Gulf can send prices soaring, disrupt supply chains, and ripple through economies from Asia to Europe. The conflict does not remain regional - it becomes global through oil, through shipping lanes, through market fear.

And yet, the burden of that instability does not fall equally.

The neighboring Arab states are placed in an impossible position:

• If they stay out, they risk being dragged in.
• If they engage, they risk becoming battlegrounds.
• If they align, they risk internal fracture.

This is not a war they chose. But it is a war that can reach them.

For Israel, however, the equation is different.

A region consumed by fragmentation is a region less capable of unified pressure. A Middle East divided between fronts - Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Red Sea -is a Middle East where no single axis can consolidate strength.

This does not require conspiracy. It requires only outcome.

The weakening of surrounding states - economically, politically, militarily - shifts the balance of power without a formal victory. It creates a reality in which normalization becomes less a choice and more a necessity for some, and resistance becomes more costly for others.

And so the war expands without being named.

Not declared, but lived.
 Not unified, but connected.

From Gaza to southern Lebanon, from Damascus to the Gulf waters, the lines are no longer separate.

They are one map now.

And the neighbors know it.

A Question for the World

Does the world know? Does the world know that the people of Egypt, of Syria, of Lebanon, of Jordan, are fed up? That they have been fed up for seventy-five years? That they have watched the occupation expand, the settlements grow, the refugees multiply, the children die - and they have been told, again and again, that the peace process is working, that the two-state solution is viable, that the occupation is temporary?

The world does not know. Or the world does not care.

The American media does not show the bodies. The European politicians do not speak of the massacres. The international community does not enforce the resolutions. The neighbors are left to watch, to wait, to remember.

The neighbors will not forget. They will not normalize. They will not accept the occupation as permanent.

The Egyptians, who returned every inch of Sinai, who fought for Taba, who waited for the International Court of Arbitration to rule. The Syrians, who lost the Golan and never got it back. The Lebanese, who were invaded, occupied, massacred. The Jordanians, who lost the West Bank and made peace, but did not forget.

They are waiting. They are watching. And they are asking the world: do you know?