The biggest geopolitical earthquake which struck the regions of West Asia and North Africa was the Arab conquests during the ascent of the Islamic Empire, which heralded a series of caliphates. The Arabs left such a deep religious, cultural and historical mark on the identity of the region that not even the Crusaders or Ottomans could dislodge it.
To their credit, the Ottomans governed the Arab World with a light touch, opting not to force the region into cultural assimilation. Furthermore, the Ottomans legitimised and unified their empire under Islam. As a result, the people in the Empire identified more with their local communities and religious groups, and with it their Arab identity remained in tact.
The Western Empire, first led by Britain and France and now America, dominates the Arab World — and not with a light touch. Israel remains as its sole settler-colonial holdout. As the world transitioned into nation states, the West evolved its model to ensure continued control. The American Neo-Empire consists of a world-spanning navy and numerous military bases to ensure an iron grip over the region.
America also maintains total economic and cultural control over the Arab World. Arabs scroll on their American social media, pay in American dollars, dress in American brands, and sip on their American Coca Cola like fish swimming in water.
Some are aware of this reality, and have surrendered to it. They see American domination as inevitable and inescapable. Furthermore, after decades of constant war and destruction, many are simply tired and want peace and stability.
As a result, an ideology of appeasement reigns in the region, much like an abused person fawns over their abuser in the hope of sparing themselves from further abuse. So after America has irreversibly destroyed their way of life, the Arab World looks toward ‘normalisation’ as the best path forward.
And yet, an abuser remains an abuser, no matter how much you appease them. The abuser derives their very identity from humiliating, hurting and violating others. A shark hunts. You cannot expect anything different.
Even after Syria fell, and the new self-proclaimed terrorist-president Al-Julani surrendered the country to the American Empire, Israel continues to bomb Syria to this very day. The Zionists even bombed the Hamas ceasefire delegation in Qatar only days ago to ensure that no ceasefire takes place in Gaza until its genocide is complete. The message is clear: The Empire will not stop until it has slaughtered your entire civilisation and eaten its remains — including the bones.
The Palestinians have understood this for a long time. The Lebanese resistance also. For over one-hundred years, Arab civilisation has been humiliated, and beaten, and cut to pieces one limb at a time. Libya, Syria and Iraq were brutally starved with sanctions and then annihilated through military violence. Jordan and Egypt were subjugated. The Gulf, with its decadence and hypocrisy, was forced to sell its very soul.
The other civilisation which also learned this lesson the hard way was China, the original victim of humiliation by the Western Empire.
When Empire Comes Knocking
In the 19th century, China, a three-thousand-year-old civilisation, was brought to its knees. What used to be the economic heartland of the world was overrun by the upstart powers of Europe, who had innovated, deceived and mass-murdered their way toward a globe-spanning ocean empire.
America, for its part, grew quietly, protected by an isolationist policy and two oceans. Meanwhile, China’s isolation had greatly weakened it, with its economic might dwarfed by a gallivanting Europe, which had established a sprawling trade network and discovered a New World with limitless resources; the Americas. Finally, the Europeans arrived on Chinese shores with their gunboats, and began calling the shots. The Chinese call this era the ‘Century of Humiliation’.
The defining humiliation of the Chinese was the Opium Wars. The British East India Company had begun cultivating opium in its Indian territories and passing the drugs onto smugglers, who subsequently flooded the Chinese market, creating an epidemic of dependency in the Middle Kingdom.
When the Chinese fought back, the British used their superior military power to crush them and force them into lopsided treaties. This included legalising opium within the country, paying reparations, and ceding territory including Hong Kong. That’s right, the British had forced illicit drugs onto Chinese society at the barrel of a gun.
Meanwhile, in the West of Asia, the next in line for humiliation were the Arabs, who remained oblivious to the horrors which would visit them in the coming century. When oil was discovered in the Arabian Gulf, the Europeans turned their greedy gaze toward the crumbling Ottoman Empire, ready to strike into the heart of their old foe, beginning a race toward the domination of the world on both sea and land.
A Deal With The Devil
Along with the Chinese and Russians, the Ottomans had ruled over Eurasia for centuries. Standing at the strategic intersection of Africa, Europe and Asia, the Ottoman Empire maintained a stranglehold on the land trade routes while also conquering swathes of South-Eastern Europe. This eventually led the resentful Europeans to hit the oceans and circumvent the ‘World Island’ with their ships.
Like the Chinese, the Ottomans had grown arrogant in their secure position at the centre of global trade. As the Europeans amassed enormous wealth and power, the crumbling Ottoman Empire teetered on the edge of collapse. It was World War I which eventually tipped the balance of global power and brought down the Ottomans, heralding a new order in West Asia.
With the Ottomans against the rope, the Arabs saw their chance at freedom. Meanwhile, the British saw an opportunity. They promised the Arabs self-determination — if only they revolted against the Ottomans. Seduced by the idea of an ‘Arab super state’ spanning the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, the Arabs, led by the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, mobilised their forces and won their independence — for all but five minutes.
As anyone who knows the treachery of the British Empire might guess, the Europeans had zero intention of allowing yet another major power at their doorstep, let alone one who controlled the world’s oil supply. The victorious British, together with the French, chose to slice the former Ottoman Empire into separate states which they could pit against each other and hence control. From one super state, a dozen or so Arab countries were carved into existence.
Hussein bin Ali rejected this plan outright, and was subsequently sidelined by the British. His lands were instead given to the Saudi family, who muscled him out using British-supplied weapons, forming Saudi Arabia on top of his former realm. Hussein’s sons Abdullah and Faisal were given scraps, allowed to rule Jordan and Iraq respectively as puppet leaders.
Much like the Chinese, the Arabs were then subjected to a defining humiliation: The creation of a settler-colonial ethno-supremacist homeland for the Jews on top of Palestine — in effect a Trojan horse for the West’s imperial designs for the region. From this came ‘The Nakba’, where three quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced, forced to squeeze into a tiny strip of land in the corners of Palestine, or to emigrate to areas outside of their ancestral homeland.
In 1948, the British and the Zionists had completed their regional coup, and the State of Israel was declared. Hussein bin Ali, the only real obstacle, was exiled, with the Saudi’s deal with the devil granting them the Arabian Peninsula. In exchange for the ungodly oil-money which they would earn over the next hundred years, the Saudis had handed the region to the imperial wolves on a silver platter.
A Century Of Defeat
After World War II, America rose as a world superpower, and took the mantle of hegemony over the Arabs from the British and French. The Americans then proceeded to arm the fledgling State of Israel to the teeth, giving them military and air superiority over the Arabs statelets, which they intended to keep weak and divided.
Naturally, there was resistance. As Zionist designs for the region became evident, the Palestinians rebelled. Civil strife broke out, increasing in time. When the United Nations officially declared the creation of Israel, the Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon invaded, and the first Arab-Israeli war began.
Many factors decided the outcome. For one, the Zionist militias were battle-tested from the civil war phase of the conflict. The Zionists had also prepared for this moment for many decades. While Theodor Herzl roused the Jews of Europe in the 19th century, and Lord Rothschild and Arthur Balfour came to an agreement in 1917 to steal Palestine, the Arabs remained occupied with local affairs and freeing themselves of the Ottoman yoke.
Finally, although America had not yet begun providing them arms, the Zionists still secured weaponry and aircraft from other sources and sympathisers. The final nail in the coffin was the Zionists’ supreme organisation in the face of Arab disunity and self-interest. After the Saudi betrayal, it was the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan who sold out next, gaining control of the West Bank in return for pulling its troops out of battle — a move which would come back to haunt it decades later.
The Zionists, having reluctantly accepted a majority fraction of Palestine, had now expanded their territory even further in the wake of the 1948 war. Knowing that they first needed to secure their foothold in the region, the Zionists took their gains and began consolidating their state. Their larger aim, of course, was to expand well beyond Palestine and create ‘Greater Israel’; a land encompassing Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq up to the Euphrates river, as well as parts of Saudi Arabia and the Sinai in Egypt up to the Nile River.
For now, however, the Zionists had to deal with a rising Egypt, which had been taken over in 1954 by the revolutionary nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Having overthrown the Western-puppet monarchy, Abdel Nasser moved to nationalise the Suez Canal and block Israeli shipping from passing through. Israel conspired with Britain and France to recapture the Suez Canal and invaded Egypt in 1956.
In a sign of the changing of the guard, the Americans, afraid of Soviet reprisal, forced the Israelis, British and French to back down. While Israel and company had had the military advantage, Abdel Nasser’s survival resulted in political victory for the Egyptians, and his legend grew as a result.
In the following decade, Abdel Nasser rose as a beacon of hope in the region who would unite the Arabs. Out of the defeat of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Abdel Nasser provided the Arabs a vision for the future which they could believe in.
Yet as would prove the case time and again, it was misplaced hubris and mistrust which would plague the Arabs. Nasser’s pan-Arab dream culminated in the formation of the United Arab Republic, which merged Syria and Egypt together. However, Syrian resentment at Egypt’s dominance over its politics ended the experiment prematurely.
Meanwhile, the Zionists had a Greater Israel to pursue, and could no longer tolerate a sovereign, powerful nation at their border. They made their move with a surprise attack against the Egyptian-led Arabs in 1967, effectively wiping out Egypt’s airforce before it could react. With air superiority and supreme planning, the Zionists defeated the Arab armies yet again, occupying the Sinai Desert in Egypt, the West Bank in Palestine and the Golan Heights in Syria. Once again, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced into exile in the other Arab states, including Jordan.
As part of a US plan to castrate Egypt, the Zionists gave back the Sinai in exchange for normalisation. The Americans did the rest, forcing the Egyptians into economic subjugation and effectively removing them as a threat. Jordan too was forced into subjugation, having lost control of its former Palestinian territory and left regretting its deal with the devil. In the West Bank, the Zionists went about enforcing a military occupation while building hundreds of settlements, with hundreds of thousands of settlers flooding into the region. The Zionists effectively annexed the Golan Heights in Syria. And with that, the coffin lid was snapped shut on Nasser’s pan-Arab dream.
A Century Of Hell
The following decades were dominated by Palestinian rage erupting both in the region and on the world stage. Palestinian militants hijacked airplanes, took hostages and established military strongholds in Lebanon and Jordan from which to attack Israel.
As a result of the massive demographic shift in Lebanon due to mass Palestinian exile, civil war broke out. This gave the Zionists the pretext to invade and occupy South Lebanon for the next two decades, a move which spawned the resistance group Hezbollah. Meanwhile in Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Organisation led by Yasser Arafat was crushed and exiled by the Hashemites. The Fertile Crescent had become a pressure cooker, fuelled by the presence of the Zionists, resulting in only more mistrust and anger amongst the Arabs.
After the Cold War had brought intrigue and further fragmentation to the region, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Now standing as the solitary superpower in the world, the Americans saw their chance at absolute hegemony over the Arab World. During this time, the ‘Clean Break’ strategy emerged, which entailed destabilising and crushing any nation that had not yet succumbed to Israeli/American control in the region.
Things went into overdrive once the 9/11 attacks struck on American soil, spawning America’s ‘War on Terror’. To manufacture consent for war, Israeli lobbyists and neo-cons in the Bush administration conjured a false story about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The Americans used this as a pretext to invade Iraq, leading to the nation’s destruction and the death of over one million people, unleashing unimaginable horrors on the region in the process.
Once Saddam was toppled, Muammar Gaddafi was next. The Europeans and Americans got to work during the Arab Spring, bombing Libya while supporting opposition groups, eventually leading to Gaddafi’s toppling. Meanwhile, the Americans initiated ‘Operation Sycamore’, which unleashed crippling sanctions on Syria while promoting the false narrative of the Assad government’s ‘chemical weapons of mass destruction’.
The Arab Century of Humiliation then came to a head on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian resistance group Hamas invaded Israel with a surprise attack, unleashing a geopolitical earthquake across the region.
The intention of October 7 was multi-layered. Firstly, the Palestinian cause had become sidelined globally and in the Arab World. The situation was aggravated by an extreme far-right coalition which had taken over the Israeli Knesset, with a leadership intent on destroying Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to make way for the Jewish Third Template. Jewish settlement in the West Bank had increased exponentially, with annexation only a matter of time.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Palestinians were held in Zionist detention, regularly tortured and beaten with no charge and no hope of release. So with one brutal, bold operation, Hamas aimed to put the Palestinian cause squarely back on the world’s agenda, while taking hundreds of Zionist hostages as bargaining chips for the release of the Palestinians kidnapped by occupation soldiers.
As always, the Zionists’ masterful propaganda machine spun into action. Using blatantly false stories such as mass rapes by Hamas militants and the ‘forty beheaded babies’ lie, the Israelis manufactured global consent to unleash a genocide on the Palestinians.
Finally, the moment had arrived for Israel and the Americans to settle all scores. The Zionists saw the opportunity to complete their long held vision of Greater Israel: a state spanning from the Nile to the Euphrates which had no peer competitor in the region. This plan aligned perfectly for America, who saw Greater Israel as a piece of the puzzle in its quest for global domination. Together, they unleashed hell on the entire region, along with a live-streamed genocide in front of the planet which continues to this day.
Hezbollah quickly engaged Israel to provide support for the Palestinian resistance. The ensuing war led to the decapitation of the entire Hezbollah leadership and destruction of most of South Lebanon. With Hezbollah weakened, the Israelis, together with the Americans, Turks and Gulf nations, unleashed their Al-Qaeda terrorist minions on the Assad government, toppling it in the process and installing an Islamic fundamentalist government parading as a democracy.
Syria and Lebanon had finally been crushed and subjugated. The Zionists then set their sights on their greatest enemy, the final victim on the Clean Break list: Iran. For four decades after the Iranian Revolution, Iran remained the only sovereign nation in the region actively supporting the Arab resistance in its fight against the American Empire and its bulldog, Israel. If the Iranian nation could be destabilised and destroyed, the Americans and Zionists would have complete hegemony, bringing the Arab Century of Humiliation to a brutal close.
The American playbook was predictable as always: Enforce crippling sanctions to weaken a nation’s resilience, accuse the leadership of seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction to discredit it, and finally, topple the government using military force.
On June 13th, 2025, Israel struck without warning, using a combination of sleeper cells inside Iran and fighter jets from the outside. Top Iranian leaders, military commanders and nuclear scientists were assassinated, while air defences were disabled from inside the country. Chaos initially ensued within Iran, which reeled from the cowardly surprise attack.
However, Iran proved far more resilient than Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Unlike in Lebanon, the Iranian people stood as one, and a war of attrition broke out, with Israel’s air superiority being pitted against Iran’s ballistic missile superiority. Iran struck deep into Israeli territory for 12 days, putting the American and Israeli air defence systems to shame, before a ceasefire was agreed upon.
Iran had survived — for now. As for the Arabs, the resistance axis had been severely weakened. The Zionists conquered the south of Syria and made headways into Lebanon, expanding their Greater Israel project. Meanwhile in Gaza, the Arab Century of Humiliation was being topped off by genocide and famine, with no end in sight to the apocalypse which the Western Empire had unleashed.
This is quite a useful analysis. My underlying thought however is only reinforced by the history since 1948: Israel is of no use to the world, and only useful to those interested in murder, domination, and spying. How long can a country continue like this?
I really enjoyed it. I was thinking about how Iraq under Sadam survived the Iraq-Iran war. How Iraq was not only one of the richest, powerful, and highly educated country in world. How Iraq was not only destroyed by Western and Arab countries led by the US but also lost its brains by a series of assassinations of its scientists, academia, etc most probably by the Israelis. Saddam was a powerful presence and was considered a threat to Israel and had weapons that had reached occupied Palestine to hit Israeli cities.