Kicking the Hornet's Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East from Truman to Trump

by Daniel E Zoughbie

Overview

The compelling, groundbreaking investigation of how the choices of twelve US presidents, from Truman to Trump, have fueled turbulence and turmoil in the Middle East. And the one president who chose a better way.

Kicking the Hornet’s Nest is a riveting exploration of how twelve US presidents have shaped the Middle East, often unleashing instability and conflict along the way. It is also the story of one US president who successfully charted a better course. From Truman to Trump, Daniel Zoughbie meticulously unpacks the decisions that have set the stage for today’s unrest. But this book is more than just a history lesson; it’s a sharp analysis of presidential decision-making and its far-reaching consequences.

Today, the Middle East stands as a volatile landscape, more tumultuous than at any time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Zoughbie paints a vivid picture of how nearly every major nation-state in the Middle East and North Africa has grappled with existential crises in the recent years, paving the way for terrorist groups to threaten national sovereignty and for local conflicts to destabilize world order.

Drawing on a vast array of primary sources and interviews with world leaders, the narrative explores pressing issues like nuclear proliferation, genocide, and nationalist conflicts fueled by sectarian fervor that have triggered global refugee waves. Kicking the Hornet’s Nest is an eye-opening study of US presidential decision-making and foreign policy. With compassion and insight, Zoughbie reveals the essential information necessary for anyone seeking to understand eight decades of US foreign policy and its profound impact on billions of lives worldwide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668085226
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Daniel E. Zoughbie is a complex-systems scientist, a historian, and an expert on presidential decision-making. He is associate project scientist at the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley; a faculty affiliate of the UCSF/UCB Center for Global Health Delivery, Diplomacy, and Economics; and a faculty affiliate at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge. He is also principal investigator of the Middle East and North Africa Diplomacy, Development, and Defense Initiative and author of Indecision Points: George W. Bush and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (MIT Press, 2014). His award-winning research has been published in journals such as PLOS Medicine, PLOS Complex Systems, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, JAIDS, and Social Science and Medicine. Zoughbie has been appointed to positions at Georgetown University, Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Bologna, University College Dublin, University of Athens, and Campus Bio Medico University of Rome. Zoughbie graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley. He studied at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship and completed his doctorate, also at Oxford, as a Weidenfeld Scholar.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue PROLOGUE
As I was FaceTiming with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert recently, I asked the seventy-nine-year-old statesman a poignant question: “Do you consider the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas your friend?” Sitting in front of shelves full of well-worn books, he thought for a moment before responding that he created an atmosphere with the Palestinian president that developed into a “friendly relation.” He went further to speculate that Abbas probably regards him as more of a friend than not a friend. His response reminded me of the ancient adage “The mightiest of the mighty turns an enemy into a friend.”

I asked him about recent proposals to clear out the Gaza Strip, transfer the population, and annex the West Bank. He sounded indignant. Practically, he pointed out that Jordan or Egypt might collapse. Morally, he did not want to live in an “apartheid” state.

Ehud Olmert has been called many things by many people. By his detractors, he has been described as corrupt and even a traitor for seeking peace with the Arabs. To admirers like former Israeli foreign minister and renowned historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, he was a good prime minister who was unfairly targeted by investigations because he compromised with the Palestinians.

Militarily, the low point of his time as premier was the prosecution of two wars, in Lebanon and Gaza, against Hezbollah and Hamas respectively; in both cases, Israel’s actions were condemned internationally, and its adversaries dug in deeper. The high point of his military achievement was unquestionably the destruction of Bashar al-Assad’s plutonium reactor in 2007 in an area of Syria that had been taken over by the Islamic State terrorists seven years later. Few regional governments today would admit the truth: that they secretly welcomed the loss of Syria’s nuclear weapons program. One can legitimately criticize Olmert’s conduct in war; but as this single operation in Syria suggests, a traitor who went soft on security he was not. It is precisely because of Olmert’s aggressiveness in military affairs—and in the case of Syria his destruction of their nuclear reactor—that his peacemaking efforts should be taken so seriously. In fact, the former prime minister’s most significant diplomatic failure turns out to be one of the most significant diplomatic accomplishments in modern Middle Eastern history. While he and Mahmoud Abbas did not consummate a peace deal for reasons that will be explored later, the two former enemies demonstrated clearly to the world that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not intractable. Olmert’s map (see page 249), which at the time was unavailable to the public, has now been revealed; two states, land swaps, a shared Jerusalem, multinational oversight on holy sites, peace and security. Abbas could not say no and he never did. No other Israeli prime minister—not Begin, not Rabin, not Barak—ever cracked this core code, presenting a deal that would be acceptable to Israelis, Palestinians, and the broader Arab and Islamic world.

Whenever the subject of peace in the Middle East arises, I think of this plan. While I have disagreed with many actions undertaken during Olmert’s time as premier, there is no other plan that has been demonstrated to be viable. The secret sauce is that it enables both nations to express their right to self-determination with dignity and security. It seeks to establish a modicum of fairness and justice, however unfair and unjust the situation actually is. I have every reason to believe that the vast majority of Jews and Palestinians would overwhelmingly support this plan—if they understood it—and if they understood that the other side was serious. For any world leaders looking to solve this conflict, starting with Olmert’s plan is a good place to begin.
The View from Below
Behavioral ecologists will tell you that hornets are terribly misunderstood insects. They are beautiful and indeed wonderful creatures, part of the diverse family of wasps, capable of building elegant social geometries, and vitally important to the global ecosystem. Most of us know only what happens when they and their homes are attacked. I thought this to be an apt metaphor for America’s engagement in the Middle East over the past eight decades—and also how the subject itself might be approached empathetically.

I have decided to begin with brief commentary on the events of October 7, 2023, and the events that followed, along with an autobiographical reflection, so that the reader might better understand some experiences, which I believe to be unique, that have been influential in shaping the questions I have asked as well as the manner in which I have drawn my conclusions.

Unlike many of my generation, I had first visited the Middle East as an impressionable child and witnessed firsthand the devastations wrought by war. But like many of my generation, my interest in U.S. foreign policy was shaped in the most basic way as a teenager, as I witnessed broadcasts of the Twin Towers collapsing on September 11. Subsequently, I watched my country, blinded by rage, stumble into two failed wars, the effects of which persist to the present. In college, the topic seemed to grow all the more important. By 2006, the UC Berkeley campus was brimming with anger over the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and then Lebanon. As an undergraduate, I did not feel I could add much value to campus arguments and so did not attempt to. I felt that I had too much to learn.

It was said of Eleanor Roosevelt that she would rather light a candle than curse the darkness. I wanted to do the same. And so I launched a campaign against one of the greatest killers in the Middle East region: type 2 diabetes. Few people I spoke to in the region understood how destructive this disease is to virtually every organ and bodily function. Few doctors were prepared to deal with the enormous public health and economic implications of type 2 diabetes and its associated co-morbidities. I thought then and still think that the global noncommunicable disease pandemic is a threat to regional stability and also constitutes an international security threat.

I traveled to the West Bank and, using funds I won through the Haas and Strauss Scholarships competitions, worked to improve public health for refugee and low-income communities. My trips would result in the invention of the “microclinic” model, which my colleagues and I eventually scaled throughout the Middle East, with the aid of Queen Rania of Jordan and her Royal Health Awareness Society, the Jordanian Ministry of Health, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which was requested by the Israeli government to serve refugees with its full cooperation in the West Bank and Gaza.

Over a decade ago, my colleagues and I ended up training tens of thousands of lay health-care workers, who serve millions of refugees and low-income individuals in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Despite the many terrible things occurring in the political arena, as a matter of empirical fact we knew that our work had improved metabolic health and saved lives. And in the process, I had learned lessons that could not be gleaned from books.

When I started my humanitarian efforts in 2005, I did so at a basic level, working with individuals and their families in the West Bank before branching out to other countries. I was pained as I met ordinary Palestinian families—grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, fathers, and especially beautiful children and babies, many of whom had lost aspects of what I would consider a “normal” childhood.

I visited people in their homes and, despite rampant poverty, was welcomed to meals with great hospitality and inspired by stories of resilience—of births under curfew and near misses with bullets. I visited the local university, where I also saw a worrying rise in support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Most troubling of all, I saw what happens when politics fails: the supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a small but growing group, were gaining traction.

This latter organization, while thus far espousing nonviolence, shares objectives with Al Qaeda and ISIS insofar as it wishes to resurrect a global caliphate and bring Muslim and non-Muslim societies under the rule of Islamic Law. Interestingly, it is opposed to all Middle Eastern governments, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority. I considered the possibility that misguided U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan had made nostalgia stronger for a selective reading of Islamic history. My worry was that if things got desperate enough, Hamas and Islamic Jihad could one day be replaced with something even more extreme, such as a violent version of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

My fears would be actualized, not in Palestine in 2005, but in 2014 in Iraq and Syria, where the so-called Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) would desecrate the legacy of two powerhouses and historic seats of the Islamic “Golden Age”—Iraq and Syria—committing genocide against religious minorities and hijacking vast oil resources. ISIS came close to seizing Syria’s chemical weapons, and as mentioned previously, had Olmert not destroyed Syria’s nuclear program, they may have seized a plutonium reactor as well.

In a failed attempt to secure a meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, I had visited Syria in late 2010, standing in awe of its beautiful landscape, culture, and history. Soon thereafter, the uprisings of 2011—known to the wider world as the Arab Spring—left the government so severely compromised that al-Assad had to be propped up by Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia. In a failed attempt to meet with former prime minister Fouad Siniora, I had also visited Lebanon, where I saw posters of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah plastered across the country. When Hamas sided against Assad and Hezbollah during the Syrian Civil War, it occurred to me that most American policymakers did not grasp the enormous significance of this fissure and therefore would not factor it into their decision-making. Put plainly, the Syrian Civil War had set at odds two of the Middle East’s most notorious Islamist movements.

Throughout my sojourns in Palestine, I encountered the rare Communist Party member, as well as supporters of secular Arab nationalist parties—but the pendulum was clearly swinging in the direction of a politics based on religious nationalism. One observed during the middle of the 2000s decade, and one still observes, large complexes, run by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, dedicated to caring for orphans, providing education, and administering religious activities. To learn more about the vital role of Islamists organizations in providing social services, I decided to interview senior members from these groups.

I was surprised when one Hamas official told me that his organization would in fact agree to a two-state solution. I came to realize that Hamas was a big, decentralized organization that, yes, engaged in horrific terrorist acts indiscriminately targeting civilians in their most vulnerable moments, and, yes, was committed to an Islamic state, which by definition is a threat to secular and non-Muslim communities. But I learned, too, that the organization provided critical welfare services to much of the Palestinian population, and had therefore enmeshed itself in the people’s DNA, just as its parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, had done in so many other countries. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are also political parties, including among their members many nurses, doctors, garbage collectors, shopkeepers, construction workers, bakers, teachers, and so on—ordinary people who cannot simply be eliminated from Palestinian society. And just as importantly, the members of huge Palestinian families often span multiple parties, even those that are ideologically opposed. For example, the imprisoned secular Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, who is described by some Palestinians as their “Mandela,” is related to Abdullah Barghouti, a prominent Hamas bombmaker. This is a fundamental reason why Hamas cannot simply be eliminated through brute force.

From my research, I learned that Hamas, and to a lesser extent Islamic Jihad, was effectively running a shadow government; I realized that, as with any organization, it contains more extreme elements as well as perhaps more levelheaded individuals willing to make hard compromises. I recall the aforementioned Hamas official telling me something profound: “jihad” for him was about putting food on the table. He did not seem keen to dwell on the topic of suicide bombings. He also got along with his Christian neighbors.

On another occasion I met an Islamic Jihad supporter. He was not an official, but a poor man whose child had been killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and was therefore designated a “martyr.” The man just wanted to sell me some groceries from the sparse shelves of his store. While he identified with Islamic Jihad, the shopkeeper clearly did so in the same way as one might identify as Democratic or Republican in the United States. I later learned that many poor families like his receive financial handouts from Islamic Jihad or Hamas and therefore are ingratiated to them and their Iranian sponsors.

As I observed all this in the summer of 2005, I considered the possibility that the United States and its allies could learn something from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Iran: chiefly, that they should engage in development in a more serious way regionally. If Iran and its proxies could deliver foreign aid in such a way that would incentivize people to die, surely the United States could help give desperate people a reason to live. We needed a way to engage supporters of extremist organizations, especially those individuals who were less ideological and more concerned with satisfying basic needs. What would it take for this poor man, who had lost a child, to have a more positive view of the United States? It would not be easy; yet he seemed quite encouraged by the American pilgrims who purchased items from his store as they made their way to the nearby Church of the Nativity. Improving health care and providing economic opportunity seemed like vital ingredients to any lasting political solution.

My mind was absorbing all this anthropological data when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was truly at an inflection point. Israeli settlers were being pulled out of the Gaza Strip, where they had illegally established residential compounds and farms. Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was on the decline, as was Israel’s Labor movement, as was the “peace process.”

Here, a bit of history is helpful. During the 1990s both “peace parties” had a moment in the sun, before being sabotaged, in large part by Hamas’s wave of suicide bombings, on the one hand, and by the Israeli right-wing extremist campaign to blow up the Oslo Accords, on the other. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a former general, was killed by a Jewish Israeli extremist for pursuing negotiations. Hamas, initially supported financially by Israel’s right wing as a counterweight to the PLO, had maintained this unholy alliance throughout the years. In a very real sense, Hamas and Israel’s right wing were collaborators, the best of enemies. As EU foreign minister Josep Borello recently summarized, “Hamas was financed by the government of Israel in an attempt to weaken the Palestinian Authority led by Fatah.” And this collaboration is not a thing merely of the past. As explosive revelations in 2023 now prove, suitcases of cash were recently delivered to Hamas with the Netanyahu government’s blessing and an Israeli escort. And in addition to Hamas, Iran would also remain a direct collaborator with the Israeli right wing, even up until the horrific attacks of October 7, 2023. Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian summarized the unifying principle of this alliance on December 11, 2023: the only thing that they agreed on, he said, was that they were all against the two-state solution.

This general sense that peace was undesirable by the extremists was further solidified by other conversations. Israel’s former foreign minister Dr. Shlomo Ben-Ami confirmed mutual sabotage of the peace process, telling me that Israel’s right-wing prime minister Ariel Sharon provided the spark for the Second Intifada in 2000 by visiting the Temple Mount with a legion of snipers. But then, during his time in office, and with President George W. Bush’s blessing, Sharon did something far more reckless. During the 2005 unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, an area of minimal cultural or religious importance to Israel, Sharon refused to properly coordinate the security handover with the Palestinian Authority headed by the secular and democratically elected Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas. Unilateralism meant that a security vacuum ensued; Hamas filled the void, launching a propaganda campaign and claiming that violent resistance had achieved what years of negotiations could not. The message was well articulated and the cornerstone for October 7 was laid.

Contrary to the official messaging, Israel had not given the Palestinians an opportunity to build a democracy, together with the opportunity to build an economic engine like Dubai or Singapore in Gaza; they instead promoted Hamas to the position of sub-warden of the world’s largest open-air prison, with air, sea, and land borders essentially controlled by Israel. The only thing Hamas borrowed from Dubai and Singapore was an authoritarian system.

As the Hamas-Fatah rivalry heated up, I suspected that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would have a good chance of winning the 2006 parliamentary vote, and I questioned whether the United States was acting in its own interests by forcing an election that Fatah would lose to Hamas. Ambassador John Negroponte, one of the United States’ most prominent diplomats and the first director of national intelligence, later confirmed that George W. Bush was obsessed with elections.

There were four indicators that the election might swing toward Hamas, instead of Fatah. First, Hamas strategically deployed its message that their resistance had finally forced the Israelis out of Gaza and would soon do the same in the West Bank. Second, I saw that Hamas had secured a good showing in the 2005 Bethlehem municipal elections and in Bethlehem University’s student elections. As the birthplace of Jesus Christ, Bethlehem is a town with a sizable Christian minority, and Bethlehem University is a Catholic Jesuit institution. The strength of a party intent on establishing an Islamic state was surprising to me, especially after a local Hamas official suggested that the organization would impose a special jizya tax on the few Christians who remained.

The third reason I felt that Islamic extremists would win was because the message was compelling to many disaffected Palestinians. This propaganda seemed to be at least partially borne out by the facts. The Oslo peace process had indeed failed to improve the lives of the average family; instead, extremist Israeli settlers had built over one hundred new illegal outposts on Palestinian land, including under an Israeli Labor government. It did not seem well understood by the Palestinians, as previously detailed, that Hamas, alongside its Israeli counterparts, had been the principal arsonists behind the Oslo dumpster fire.

The final reason for Hamas’s popularity was because it had gained a reputation for providing social services and health care, on the surface at least—their vast portfolio of buildings was plain to any citizen walking down the street. They were also viewed as more pious and honest than the corrupt Fatah Party.

So when Hamas ended up sweeping the election in 2006, I was hardly surprised, even if U.S. policymakers were befuddled as to why the Palestinians would not vote for George W. Bush’s favored Fatah Party. What did in fact surprise me was that the policymakers themselves were so surprised. The United States had forced a fair and free election, monitored by the Carter Center, and it would now look hypocritical by boycotting the winner—Hamas. This petulance was furthered when the U.S. helped instigate the 2007 civil war in Gaza, a conflict that was devastating for Palestinian nationalism. It led to the total takeover of the strip by Hamas, with the support of its Iranian overlords. The lack of a secure transition of the strip to the PLO, the suitcases of cash being delivered to Hamas, and the periodic Israeli attempts to “mow” the metaphorical lawn in Gaza, in other words its failed military operations there, all were foundational to October 7, 2023. Over a decade and a half, rather than feeding the hungry, Hamas used external funds to build up a vast military “metro,” tunnels capable of transporting weapons and even vehicles for miles. And they did so with North Korean and Iranian assistance.

I believe my skepticism of U.S. democracy promotion in the Middle East more broadly, and especially of U.S. democracy promotion under military occupation, is now validated by the facts. Upon assuming control of Gaza, Hamas showed what it would do if it were put in charge of the entire Palestinian polity. With respect to elections, it has been as bad as, if not worse than, Fatah and the PLO; there has not been a competitive, multiparty election in Gaza since 2006. The age-old adage that those who storm the Bastille will eventually build a replacement of their own certainly rings true in the Strip. Just as the PLO had used its political power to enrich its party leadership at the expense of the Palestinians, Hamas built a successful business model around “resistance,” sending desperate young Palestinians to their deaths in the name of jihad.

Hamas also engaged in torture and violence against its own people, claiming that the real collaborators were those who opposed it. When Muhammad Abed, a West Bank Palestinian Preventive Security agent, called Hamas an Iranian proxy, the group tracked him down and shot him in the leg. Reports of vast stores of foreign wealth tied to shell companies that enrich a few families as they live in luxury abroad debunk any notion of Hamas as an organization fighting on behalf of the common man. Even a Hezbollah-allied journalist mocked Hamas leader Khaled Meshal’s detached calls for jihad, made from five-star hotels in Sunni Arab Gulf capitals. That Hamas had sided against Assad and Hezbollah in the Syrian civil war was not to be soon forgotten by the Shi’ite Iranian proxy.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas demonstrated a capability that seemed more sophisticated, shocking, and debased than the suicide bombings that it had previously carried out during the 1990s and 2000s. It was willing to besmirch the legitimate Palestinian cause by committing shocking atrocities and acts of terror. Its fighters raped and maimed: they abused elderly Holocaust survivors, babies, and disabled persons—even peace activists who had devoted their lives to Palestinians. They also killed and kidnapped fellow Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, including one paramedic who bravely gave his life trying to save his Jewish compatriots from the violence. Another Palestinian Arab Israeli, Samer Talalka, and two Jewish Israelis were accidentally killed by the IDF as they escaped Hamas captivity in Gaza. One brave Palestinian Arab Israeli Druze woman used her Arabic to trick Hamas attackers and save her family; others were not so lucky. Gazan political scientist Mkhaimar Abusada, who personally knew the late Hamas prime minister Yahia Sinwar, calls it like it is: “taking women and babies hostage… that is definitely not compatible with Islamic or even Arab teachings.” While massacres are not new to the Middle East, those who perpetrate them generally try to cover their sins, rather than celebrate them on TikTok.

In a response to these events, Israel and the United States reacted exactly as Hamas and Iran had anticipated. As historian Avi Shlaim is fond of saying, the U.S. gives Israel money, weapons, and advice. Israel takes the money and weapons, but rejects the advice. President Biden failed to anticipate this basic point and wrote Israel a blank check for Gaza, earning him a new nickname that helped sink his reelection: “Genocide Joe.” Israel unleashed an attack so fierce one fails to see any reasonable level of proportionality being used. As Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has succinctly concluded, Gaza has become a “demolition site.”

While this Israeli bombardment played out, President Isaac Herzog of Israel dismissed the idea of there being innocent civilians in Gaza at all. Yet Palestinian political scientist Amaney Jamal’s Arab Barometer has shown empirically that of the roughly 53 percent of Gazans who are not children, the majority despise Hamas. The fact that half of the adult population voted badly seventeen years ago is largely irrelevant; a poll conducted prior to October 7 showed that three-quarters of the population saw Hamas as corrupt. About as many reported trouble finding adequate food.

In the weeks and months after October 7, there was no shortage of incendiary and explicitly genocidal rhetoric being used in Israel. One politician called for Gaza to be nuked; another suggested the “voluntary” depopulation of the strip; and still another floated the idea of emptying it like Auschwitz. Graphic videos depicting sexual abuse, this time against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, prompted a rare State Department condemnation. With these sobering facts, together with estimations of at least 45,000 direct casualties and 180,000 indirect, it is little wonder that U.S. foreign policymakers have been worried about Israel being brought before the International Criminal Court to answer charges of genocide.

In February 2025, in the pages of one of Israel’s most esteemed newspapers, conservative Israeli historian and public intellectual Benny Morris published an essay with a shocking title: “Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza. But It May Be on the Way There.” Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, two distinguished Israeli Holocaust scholars from the Hebrew University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, went a step further with their essay’s title: “There’s No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It’s Still Genocide.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch came to a similar conclusion. To think that Israel, a country established in the wake of a genocide, would be brought alongside Hamas, while its hostages were being held by them, to answer charges of genocide, and that these charges would be bolstered to varying degrees by world-renowned scholars of Israel and the Holocaust, is truly remarkable.

Still more remarkable is the fact that despite Hamas’s attacks being widely viewed as an attempted genocide against Jewish Israelis on October 7, 2023, and despite the fact that many of the 251 hostages were taken and held in conditions that left them looking like Holocaust survivors, Bibi Netanyahu did not appear to make their release his top priority. Israel’s former defense minister Yoav Gallant has now alleged that current minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir, minister of finance Bezalel Smotrich, and Netanyahu’s people intentionally sabotaged his attempts to get the hostages released earlier and has stated categorically, “I do not believe that the government of Israel did everything it could to bring the hostages home.”

At the time of writing, things have taken a turn for the worst. Removing the population of Gaza has gone from the fringe to mainstream discourse. As Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, stated at Harvard University in March 2024: “Gaza is waterfront property…. I would do my best to move people out and clean it up.” Trump went further, suggesting that the Palestinians would not be allowed to return and that the U.S. would own the strip. Proposals for relocation have included Somalia, Somaliland, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Trump also appeared to endorse annexation of the West Bank. Journalist Tom Friedman best summed up the challenges associated with this view: “As much as Israelis hate Hamas, I am confident that many soldiers, outside of those on the far right, will refuse to be part of any operation that could be compared with the rounding up and transferring of Jews from their homes during World War II.” The largest U.S. Jewish denomination put a finer point on it:

The transfer of two million Palestinians from Gaza to undetermined locations as well as the imposition of U.S. control over Gaza will cause additional regional instability. It poses grave security risks to Israel. It undermines Palestinian self-determination. It jeopardizes the current ceasefire and hostage release deal, as well as their future phases. And it impedes the longstanding principle of a negotiated two-state solution, which, despite everything, still holds the best possibility for peace, stability, and a secure, viable future for all those in the region.

Indeed, if the transfer plans were actualized, it could pose an existential threat to Jordan, Egypt, and other allies who are at risk of being overthrown by the Muslim Brotherhood. There would be a risk of turning their borders with Israel into conflict zones. Even if this transfer plan were never to be actualized, it could still set a dangerous precedent for other global or regional powers that the solution to ethno-religious conflicts in the twenty-first century is demolition followed by transfer and annexation. Conceptually, this takes us back to the era of world wars.

Despite the Iran-backed October 7 attack, this all could have played out very differently with strategic U.S. leadership. Again, some historical context is important. When Jewish Israeli settlers, incited by one of Netanyahu’s ministers, attacked the Palestinian village of Hawara in 2022 and 2023, all major U.S. Jewish organizations unequivocally condemned these acts of terrorism, as did Palestinian Muslims and Christians. I was hoping for a similarly rare moment of consensus to be brought to bear on the events of October 7, and those that followed, at least by Americans and American organizations. Are not babies still babies and preschoolers still preschoolers, whether they were born in Kibbutz Kfar Aza or Khan Younis?

Alas, my hopes for a commonsense response were in vain. Hamas and Israel, and their respective supporters, fell into one another’s traps. Predictably, the former’s attack fed the right-wing Israeli propaganda machine, which has for years strived to conflate legitimate Palestinian national aspirations with terrorism, Al Qaeda, and ISIS: #HAMASISIS trended on social media while, at the same time, ISIS sympathizers launched attacks against Western targets in response to Israel’s actions. Even Joe Biden could not help but make the comparison, before he appeared to give Israel free rein in Gaza:

More than 1,300 innocent Israelis killed, including at least 31 American citizens, by the terrorist group Hamas. Hundreds—hundreds of young people at a music festival of—the festival was for peace—for peace—gunned down as they ran for their lives. Scores of innocents—from infants to elderly grandparents, Israelis and Americans—taken hostage. Children slaughtered. Babies slaughtered. Entire families massacred. Rape, beheadings, bodies burned alive. Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world.

Israel also took Hamas’s bait, hook, line, and sinker when they fell victim to the Islamic movement’s grassroots global propaganda machine and responded with disproportionate violence. Here again Tom Friedman is insightful: Israel did exactly what Hamas wanted them to do. On October 7, most reasonable people unequivocally condemned Hamas’s actions, even if they also unequivocally condemned the background violence of Israel’s siege and occupation of the Palestinian territories.

The point is that on October 7 Israel enjoyed the sympathy of the vast majority of the world. Yet within weeks, Israel went from being another “Ukraine” to being another “Russia,” from victim to aggressor. Put another way: in just a few weeks, Israel went from being the United States on September 11, 2001 (a victim with a questionable history in Afghanistan) to being the United States on September 11, 2006 (an aggressor). Israel failed to anticipate that while most Westerners were horrified by the October 7 carnage, most reasonable people were equally horrified by the thought of a six-month-old Gazan baby being killed as she sheltered with her grandparents in her hometown church, or by the news that power was cut from a hospital as helpless lives perished. As importantly, just two months into the war, most U.S. leaders understood that Israel’s actions, powered by U.S. weapons, were imperiling American military and economic interests and could possibly even trigger war with Iran—or World War III.

Instead of supporting collective punishment, the United States could have acted with an ounce of enlightened self-interest; surely Biden understood that the world, including many living within Arab and Islamic societies, was appalled on October 7, especially when it became clear that Arabs had been targeted, and women raped by doped-up fighters. Surely he understood that Russian citizens had also been held hostage and Russia might cooperate to get them back. Even China had reluctantly condemned the attacks. For once, most of the world was behind Israel and the United States. What would have happened if the United States had conditioned military shipments to ensure Israel only acted in self-defense, not retribution, surgically sealing the border and protecting against rocket fire—all while tasking the ICJ (International Court of Justice) and ICC to investigate Hamas and Iran for war crimes?

Let us imagine a different path. What would have happened if the U.S. tasked the UN Security Council with authorizing a NATO peacekeeping force to disarm Hamas before Israel lost the support of the world? Former Israeli prime minister Olmert, who knows a fair bit about challenging wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, seemed to think that could work. What if Turkey, as an Islamic country with strong ties to both Hamas and Israel, had been publicly asked by Biden to lead this UN-sanctioned peacekeeping mission? Turkey is after all occupying Cyprus next door and has a formidable army in the neighborhood looking to regain the glories of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish troops serving under a NATO banner would have been protected against the Israeli military owing to Article 14—an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. On behalf of NATO, Turkish troops could have served—and may still yet serve—as a transitioning force to a peaceful Palestinian state.

What if the United States used the moment, with Israel pacified and Hamas disarmed, to push through the Saudi-Israeli peace deal, combined with a Palestinian state consistent with the terms that Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert practically agreed to in 2008?

What if the United States tried to get Syria’s Assad to be part of a peace deal, an achievement that nearly occurred in 2009? This may be possible, even now that Assad is out of power; if post-Assad Syria transforms into a stable U.S. ally, then perhaps history will look kindly upon the efforts to oust him. If what follows in the years to come is anything similar to the chaos in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Iraq, then the efforts to oust Assad and replace him with a former ISIS commander may prove to be yet another long-term miscalculation on the part of the U.S. I hope that reports of massacres against Alawites and Christians, together with a five-year interim government, do not suggest the latter outcome.

The positive alternatives outlined above would constitute an unprecedented win for U.S. interests and a catastrophic loss for Iran and its allies. The U.S. would win hearts and minds regionally, stabilize its allies, and weaken Iran. Even if the United States’ efforts to create an immediate international solution were blown off, it could have at least showed that it seriously tried to mobilize the world to deal with Hamas diplomatically before Israel went it alone.

As the failures of the Netanyahu government’s go-it-alone strategy are now apparent, it is becoming equally clear that his failures did not start on October 7. He failed to act upon clear intelligence warnings, and his government is increasingly coming under scrutiny from its Western supporters for Israel’s military aggression. And assault on democracy. Netanyahu and his vision of “Judeastan” on the West Bank is analogous to the problem of “Hamasistan” in Gaza. In both cases, fanatics seek to weaponize religion to achieve eschatological victory.

To be clear, the Israeli Iron Wall doctrine, the doctrine of a Greater Israel, and the doctrine of peace through war, were utterly decimated on October 7. As has also become clear, tunnels go under walls, paragliders and drones go over, and nuclear arsenals can do little to deter attacks from the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies. As Kissinger once observed, the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. Hamas is alive and well and has reconstituted its forces. Hezbollah is alive and well. The Houthis are alive and well. Syria is now led by a former ISIS commander. And as for Iran, major attacks from the U.S. and Israel have done significant damage; but as a result of the conflict, its near bomb-grade uranium is presently unaccounted for by IAEA inspectors. One hopes that intense diplomacy can rectify this dangerous situation, which resulted in a U.S. base in Qatar being attacked. But diplomacy does not appear to carry much value these days. In Netanyahu’s own paraphrase of the Bible, “You think there is a magic wand here, but I disagree. I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword—yes.” Netanyahu should have kept reading what was actually answered in the Book of Samuel to which he referred: “Knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end?”

With Iran a threshold nuclear state and Islamist movements engaged in a long campaign to draw a nuclear Pakistan into the region, Israel is stuck between a rock and a hard place. In the future, when Israel comes under attack, it will be forced either into capitulation via a ceasefire or combat in densely populated civilian areas, leading to global condemnation, war crimes investigations, and possibly dangerous nuclear ultimatums. In the future, weapons will be even more deadly, more technologically advanced, and more easily masked. Had Israel supported the first Iran deal, Iran’s nuclear program would be far, far less advanced than it is today.

As former CIA director Leon Panetta told me in July 2025, there is not much question that after the U.S.-Israel June 2025 attack, the Iranians moved enriched fuel around and put them into secret locations. And so, Iran still remains a threat. Trump’s walking away from the nuclear agreement in 2018 was a pivotal moment. For all its limitations, Iran was abiding by the JCPOA; but when the U.S. withdrew, it gave Iran a license to proceed with enrichment. Prior to the June 2025 attacks, Iran’s leaders do not appear to have made the decision to build a bomb from the fissile materials in its possession. Panetta warned, now that they have had the “hell kicked out of them,” they have every reason to build a bomb. And one should remember that a sophisticated delivery system is not required for detonation.

And while the future looks bleak for Israel, so does the outlook for the Palestinians. Hamas ostensibly wanted to free Palestine, but their incompetence and recklessness have only served to “free Palestine” of roughly 180,000 Palestinians who died directly or indirectly as a result of this war. By one of their own leader’s admissions, Hamas has done immeasurable damage to the Palestinian national cause; if left unchecked, they may well destroy what is left of Palestinian society. Hamas’s broadcasting of its fighters’ heinous crimes using GoPros and social media resembled ISIS’s deft use of social media. Objectively, even their most fervent supporters cannot deny this. Any Middle East scholar knows that Hamas is not ISIS and Hamas is certainly not the Taliban. Conflating the two prevents one from understanding differing motivations. But Hamas is nevertheless a jihadist movement that employs terrorism and seeks to hold a referendum on the creation of an Islamic state in Palestine.

One can of course blame the Iraq War for the emergence of ISIS, or the U.S.-Soviet Cold War for the emergence of the Taliban. As this book does, one can also blame U.S.-Israel policy for the emergence of the extreme Hamas government in Gaza and the socioeconomic desperation that leads zombified young men to enact such carnage under the influence of drugs. Yet Hamas is increasingly doing a very poor job of distinguishing its agenda from those of other jihadist groups. Educating women and tolerating Christians is not enough to clearly distinguish Hamas from the Taliban; and Hamas’s limiting of its mission geographically to liberating Palestine is not enough to distinguish it from ISIS’s global ambitions. Assimilating Palestinian national interests to those of Iran is not an act of brave resistance, but a cowardly act of capitulation to a foreign theocracy.

To be clear, it is inconceivable that October 7 was done without Iranian support. Hamas would not risk blindsiding their principal backer, especially given the risks of Iran being drawn into a regional war. On December 27, 2023, Iran confirmed this obvious fact, finally claiming responsibility for the attacks, noting that it was retribution for Donald Trump’s assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. After the attacks, Iran started to increase production of highly enriched uranium, suggesting the logical conclusion that the attack also may have served to divert attention from Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

It is likely, and in fact probable, that Hamas and Iran expected Israel to overreact and destroy Gaza. For starters, Hamas prime minister Yahya Sinwar had spent years languishing in Israeli jails, spoke Hebrew fluently, and knew the Israeli mindset well. Plainly and simply, this was a suicide mission that Sinwar launched on behalf of 2.4 million unwitting Gazans who were at once hostages of Hamas and inmates within an Israeli open-air prison sealed by air, land, and sea.

Now, as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 45,000, no one has summed up this terrible reality more eloquently than the imprisoned Hamas minister of communications Yosef Almansi:

The [October 7] achievements of Hamas are the killing and destruction of more than 60% of the buildings, infrastructure, streets, and public facilities [in Gaza]. This is a group of lunatics that [Hamas leader] Sinwar leads…. They destroyed the Gaza Strip; they set it back 200 years.

Renowned Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Christian and Muslim respectively, put it more succinctly in 1994. Referring to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Abu-Lughod stated that “they are losers and in the end have nothing to offer.” After the moderate PLO was sidelined by the Oslo Accords, Edward Said concurred, also extending the same treatment to Arafat’s PLO. It did not take three decades for Abu-Lughod and Said to have been proved right; but October 7 was the most convincing empirical evidence that Hamas, like their partners on the Israeli right, have “nothing to offer” except death and destruction.

It has become common to hear foreign politicians and commentators articulate some version of the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s or even the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb’s thesis that oppressed peoples can make themselves free from the violence of colonialism through the use of greater violence. Less often articulated is what one will be free for the day after, and whether one would be willing to sacrifice one’s own life, livelihood, and loved ones to escalate a conflict.

After one hundred years of war, it is important to remember that entire Palestinian families have been wiped out, vast numbers of homes lost or destroyed, and multiple generations of children damaged physically and psychologically beyond repair. War has only given Israeli extremists a pretext to act and overreact, as it did after October 7. After the war of 1948, Palestinians became a nation of refugees. In the 1967 war, the West Bank and Gaza were occupied. After the 1973 war, Palestinians were sidelined for Egyptian peace. In 1982, Lebanon was heavily damaged. During the First Intifada, which was largely nonviolent, Palestinians gained the sympathy of the world. During the Second Intifada, which was largely violent, they lost this sympathy. As a result of the latest war, most Gazans’ lives have been destroyed, and half the population faces starvation. Gaza has been demolished, and the present discussion is about where to transfer the Palestinians who remain. I earnestly ask, what has been achieved through terrorism, suicide bombings, and massacres? Dispossession, death, and destruction. What was gained through the nonviolent resistance exhibited during the First Intifada? The sympathy of the United States, the world, and the historic recognition of Palestinian national aspirations at Madrid. There is a pattern that does not work, and one that does.

It has become common to hear comparisons between Hamas and the African National Congress. Certainly, comparisons can and should be made between apartheid South Africa and where Israel is headed in the occupied Palestinian territories. In fact, such analogies are nothing new; Israelis have been warned about apartheid by none other than four former Israeli prime ministers, David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Shamir, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert.

In fairness, it is important to recognize that Israel’s Arab citizens who live within its 1967 borders have sometimes achieved high positions of prestige and power, even while struggling with numerous forms of discrimination such as the Nation State Law; there are many Palestinian Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and Druze who are full Israeli citizens and serve as top doctors, judges, politicians, renowned scientists, university administrators, and titans of industry. Israel’s Palestinian Arabs are a critical swing vote in national elections, when they choose to exercise that tremendous power. The resilient Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, comprising 20 percent of the population, show what the Palestinian people are capable of and prefigure what peaceful coexistence could start to look like. Their relatives in Gaza, starving and unhoused, prefigure the alternative.

While there are indeed legitimate parallels between Israel’s conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories and South African apartheid, the differences between Hamas and the ANC are vast. As detailed in Mandela’s statement at the Rivonia Trial, the South African leader specifically prioritized a path of nonviolence, and when this path was closed by the white South African regime, he carefully evaluated different types of violence—sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution—and chose the first option, which would minimize loss of life, especially civilian. Mandela shunned terrorism as a strategy precisely because he defined what he wanted his people to be free for—that whites and Blacks would one day live with each other in peace—an ideal for which he was “prepared to die.”

I am often asked by students and colleagues, “What do you think the solution is? Are you for one state or two?” In response, I often joke that I am for two states: one for all the people who want to live in peace and the other for those who do not. Or I say I am for as many states as it takes to stop the bloodshed. If I respond more seriously, as I will do here, I simply say that this conflict is unlikely to be resolved as long as the core issue is overlooked, ignored, and, as is the case on both sides, flat-out denied: this conflict is about nationalism—the idea that the individual’s highest loyalty belongs to the nation. If one wants to argue that this is about dueling nationalisms with either settler-colonial or jihadist-terrorist undertones, so be it. If one wants to argue it is about nationalism with ethnic cleansing or genocidal overtones, so be it. But it is still fundamentally about nationalism. Nationalism is arguably the most powerful political force in the history of humanity: 120 million people died in one cold war and two world wars largely because of it.

As political scientists John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt have argued, one should not try to defeat nationalism. It is a variable with staying power, and, I would argue, one that explains why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not be another example of white Westerners leaving the Middle East with their tails between their legs as they did in Algeria, Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere. Even if one considers Ashkenazi Jews to be merely nonindigenous colonizers akin to the British or French, the Holocaust, the mass displacement of Middle Eastern Jews after 1948, two-hundred-plus nuclear weapons, an Israeli state composed mostly of Middle Eastern Jews, an Israeli military populated in large part by Jewish Arab, Jewish Iranian, and Druze Arab indigenous peoples, helps us understand why this is likely not going to end up like South Africa, where less than 10 percent of the population were Europeans, with zero historical connection to Africa.

As will become apparent in the introduction, in 1917 the British Balfour Declaration offered a one-state solution—a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority. In 1939, the British rescinded this, offering another type of one-state solution—a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority. In 1947, the United Nations offered a two-state solution, which has since been the only realistic hope of resolving this conflict insofar as it satisfies both parties’ needs for national self-determination.

There is a commonly told myth today: the two-state solution is dead. It is not. The Olmert-Abbas negotiations, which resulted in the 2008 map previously mentioned, is a good attempt at what a viable deal might look like today given the power dynamics in the world. The West Bank might be sliced and diced, but Olmert and Abbas nearly un-sliced and un-diced much of it. In 2005 Israel showed it could evacuate settlements, and in 2023 it quickly relocated large portions of its northern population for security reasons. If extremist settlers wish to remain in what they consider to be Judea and Samaria, they could always be given citizenship in the new Palestine and live as minorities, just as the Samaritan community does in Nablus and the Palestinian Arab community does in Israel. Providing a passport is a lot more appealing than apartheid, ethnic cleansing, civil war, and genocide in a nuclear-armed Greater Israel.

Without displacing the Palestinian population, the creation of a tourism economy off the stunning Mediterranean coast of Gaza via the construction of Dubai-esque artificial islands, would add land and much-needed jobs to the Palestinian state—a feat that is achievable via new construction technologies. As part of a grand bargain, numerous Palestine refugees in neighboring countries could be given vested title to the homes they have lived in for decades, unlocking tens of billions of dollars in dead capital. What if the global Palestinian diaspora voted in a referendum on the Palestinian state and contributed to an investment fund? What if major art, science, and innovation hubs were built in the new Palestine, providing collaborative opportunities similar to those currently provided to Arab-Palestinians in Israel? For example, in 2024, Palestinian neurobiologist Dr. Mona Maroun was appointed rector of the University of Haifa. Palestinians in the West and in the Gulf are among the most educated and prosperous communities in all the world and could play an integral part in building a state.

The leaders of the world need to listen to the Israeli and Palestinian people who are tired of war and want genuine peace. In Yertle the Turtle, Dr. Seuss reminds the powerful to consider the view from below, for the stability of their thrones depend upon it. In my opinion, the view from below is the most important view. Be it within a national or international context, the power of the powerful is contingent on what happens at a grassroots level. World War I was sparked by the Black Hand’s assassination of Archduke Ferdinand; the global War on Terror was sparked by the 9/11 attacks launched by Al Qaeda. The Arab Revolutions starting in 2011 by an act of self-immolation entirely changed the political dynamics in both the Middle East and the European Union. To adapt an insight from anthropologist Margaret Mead, never doubt that a small group of disaffected, committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it is often the only thing that ever has.
The View from Above
In addition to investigating Middle East affairs from the perspective of the poor, the powerless, and the disenfranchised—the view “from below”—I have also put considerable effort into learning about the perspectives of those in power, the view “from above.” My first engagement with politicians occurred in 2006, prior to my graduation. I had met former World Bank president A. W. Clausen at Berkeley, and struck up a friendship with him and his wife, Helen. He became a personal mentor, telling me stories about his career leading Bank of America and the World Bank, as well as his relationships with U.S. presidents Carter, Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. Mr. Clausen’s stories piqued my interest in presidential decision-making. More and more, I wanted to understand policymakers as human beings with human motivations, rather than as abstract figures.

My second engagement with politicians was much briefer and a result of my selection as a Marshall Scholar from the Bay Area in 2006. As a new scholar on my way to the University of Oxford, I was invited by the British consulate to the San Francisco penthouse of former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz, whose wife was hosting an intimate reception for a special visitor: Prime Minister Tony Blair. I had never met a former secretary of state before, much less a British prime minister, and knew not what to expect.

After passing through minimal security, I took the elevator up to the Shultz penthouse and there found myself amid a who’s who of Silicon Valley, including the CEOs of major companies; Mayor Gavin Newsom; George Shultz and his wife, Charlotte; Nobel laureate Steve Chu; and Stanford president Gerhard Casper. The Lebanon War of 2006 was raging. For different reasons, people in the Bay Area and across the world were outraged. Condoleezza Rice was trying to put out the fire, but due to the Bush administration’s unpopularity, she was persona non grata in Lebanon and could not even land her plane in Beirut.

After completing the Marshall Scholarship, I then earned a Weidenfeld scholarship to embark on doctoral studies at Oxford under the direction of Avi Shlaim, a renowned Israeli-Iraqi British scholar. Throughout the course of my research, I got to know Lord (George) Weidenfeld, for whom the program was named. I learned that Lord Weidenfeld was a former chief of staff to the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, and throughout his life established relationships with everyone who was anyone—from Pablo Picasso to Pope John Paul, and from Henry Kissinger to King Hussein of Jordan. He was also very close to Shimon Peres and Teddy Kollek, founding fathers of Israel’s nuclear program and Mossad, respectively, and a dear friend of Harold Wilson, the British prime minister who was a staunch ally of Israel. During Wilson’s premiership, Britain not only backed Israel in the 1967 war but also sold plutonium and other materials that may have helped advance the country’s nuclear program during a crucial period.

One of the principal skills I have tried to develop as a researcher is empathy. As I reflect on my research subjects, I often ask myself what I would think or do if I were in X or Y or Z situation. What would I think or do if I were born in Gaza under siege? What would I think or do if I were born in Iran and lived under the brutal SAVAK? In this situation, I asked myself what I would think or do if I had escaped the Holocaust, as Weidenfeld had done, leaving behind family members who perished. I have come to know and understand the perspective of individuals descended from Holocaust survivors who are anti-nationalism. Given his background, I could also understand why Lord Weidenfeld had a partisan view of the Middle East and devoted himself to a nationalist cause. Given the unprecedented academic achievements of the Germanic civilization he escaped, however, I wondered why he felt so strongly that education could be relied upon to improve the world.

But he did. Despite Lord Weidenfeld’s partisan commitments, he believed, as his personal motto suggested, that arms must give way to the gown. For this reason, he ensured that the Weidenfeld scholarship program be offered to students from across the globe, including predominately Arab and Muslim countries. The program did not, and could not, prescribe what scholars should believe or study; it simply provided unrestricted financial support for graduate studies at Oxford. Before Lord Weidenfeld died, his last project was to support 150 Syrians who were seeking safe haven from ISIS. He had received aid from British evangelicals during the Second World War; his final act therefore was to repay this debt.

The main lesson I learned from Lord Weidenfeld was the importance of networking, an art he had mastered. Throughout my research, I tried at every opportunity to supplement my understanding of the view from below with an understanding of how and why global figures make the decisions they do. I cast the net wide and sought out all sorts of people. For example, I was once at a birthday party for Lord Weidenfeld hosted at famed architect Lord (Norman) Foster’s château in Switzerland. In attendance was legendary journalist Barbara Walters, the Begum Aga Khan, Princess Firyal of Jordan, Lord Rothschild, and, one of my dinner partners, former British deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine. After Walters gave the toast, everyone played musical chairs and switched dinner partners. I wound up sitting next to an Israeli ambassador’s wife. And seated across from me was James Wolfensohn, a former president of the World Bank and, more importantly for my interests, the former U.S. envoy to Gaza.

I followed up with Wolfensohn, requesting an audience, and he graciously agreed to an interview at his office in New York. When my first book was published, he provided a warm endorsement, saying that it provided “readers an understanding as to why America and the international community at large cannot afford to turn their backs on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—or even worse, be indecisive about it.” I thought that he captured my point perfectly, but given the relative calm over the past fifteen years or so, one could have been forgiven for wondering if the conflict really did still matter. President Trump’s Abraham Accords seemed to bypass the matter totally, as did Biden’s efforts to conclude an Israeli-Saudi peace treaty. It was not until October 7, 2023, that Wolfensohn’s words “cannot afford” hit home. As this present book also shows, the conflict not only still matters, but is also interconnected with everything else. Most importantly, there is and has been for some time clear escalatory pathways to global nuclear war. In virology, there are pathogens with pandemic potential (PPPs); SARS-CoV-2 is one of these. In international security, there are conflicts with extinction potential (CEPs). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of these.

I learned a great deal from my interaction with James Wolfensohn, and over the next few years I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting many other global leaders who, like him, helped me learn more about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. As I did in the refugee camps and in my everyday interactions with street vendors, taxi drivers, and students, I came to my meetings with an open mind and a desire to learn, listen, and empathize. All in all, I interviewed fifty-one prominent individuals, speaking to secretaries-general of the United Nations and the Arab League, to presidents of the World Bank, to secretaries of state and defense, to prime ministers and foreign ministers, to intelligence chiefs, and to the archbishop of Canterbury.

The present book is the culmination of nearly two decades of research. It reflects lessons I learned walking the sewage-filled streets of Middle East refugee camps, and lessons learned in the marbled palaces of power. But it is built first and foremost upon an extensive evidentiary record of archival, newspaper, and academic sources, which all point to a singular conclusion: that the one who desires peace should not only prepare for war but also for peace.

During a Robin Hambro seminar in England, I was faced with tough questions posed by Sir Isaiah Berlin (borrowed, of course, from St. Paul of Tarsus) in Two Concepts of Liberty. In that study, he argues that it is very easy to be free from something. I thought about all the things modern societies want to be free from: communism, capitalism, monarchy, dictatorship, occupation, or even bad American foreign policy. But there is an equally if not more important question: What is one then free for? It occurred to me that many books on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East focus on the former question. In this book I try to grapple more seriously with both and to do so in a realistic way.

At the same Robin Hambro seminar, I also spent time with Professor Nicholas Rengger, to my mind one of the most brilliant political theorists I have ever encountered. Nick’s intellect was matched only by his kindness and humility. He helped me to think through what answering that second question might entail. As we were discussing my work one evening, he related to me a conversation he took part in with Kenneth Waltz, one of the most influential international relations theorists of the last century. When asked to sum up his political philosophy, Waltz humbly quoted the theologian and philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr: “The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.” It struck me that if Nick Rengger, Kenneth Waltz, and Reinhold Niebuhr thought this lesson to be important, I should take it to heart. And so it is in the spirit of this lesson, which forms the epigraph for this book, that I begin.

D. E. Z.

San Francisco

June 27, 2025

Editorial Reviews

“Learning the lessons recounted in this book will inform whether U.S. foreign policy succeeds or fails in the future."
—Leon E. Panetta, former Director CIA, Secretary of Defense

“This book is a must-read for those wanting to understand the complexities involved in Middle East conflicts and the reasons why our policies have failed.”
—General Anthony Zinni, USMC (retired), former commander in chief of CENTCOM, and former US special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority

“Daniel E. Zoughbie tracks the tensions in foreign policy—the incidentals of urgent personalities and the fundamentals of enduring national interest—between the shallow and the deep. Most importantly, he underscores the need for wisdom and reflection when interfering in the affairs of other nations. I wish I had read his book years ago.”
—Sir Mark Allen CMG, former head of MI6 Counter-Terrorism and honorary fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford

“I strongly encourage you to read this thoroughly researched study from Daniel E. Zoughbie.”
—Admiral Bobby R. Inman, US Navy (retired), former director of the National Security Agency, and former deputy director of the CIA

“An engrossing account of how the blunders, indecisiveness, and exalted hubris of 12 presidents from Truman through Trump’s first term have transformed the Middle East into a destabilizing force…A stimulating, well-researched examination.” 
—Kirkus, starred review

“A thought-provoking examination of American policymaking in one of the world’s most volatile regions. Whether readers agree with Zoughbie’s conclusions or not, his book will force them to reconsider whether decades of intervention have done more harm than good.”
—The Washington Post

"Full of keenly observed historical detail and trenchant critiques of US policy gone wrong."
—The Financial Times

From the Publisher