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How to stop the US-Israel war on Iran
Arab states must reject Israeli hegemony and build a regional security framework independent of Washington
Jeffrey D. Sachs & Sybil Fares | October 29, 2026 | Al Jazeera
The war that Israel and the United States launched against Iran on February 28 is in a lull, not at an end. Major combat has paused, diplomacy has stalled and both sides are preparing for the next round. To understand why the fighting will soon resume, we need to understand the motivations of the two governments that started it. Neither of them wants peace. Israel’s leadership seeks domination over the Middle East, and the United States seeks to preserve its domination over the world. Simply to state these aims is to underscore that both governments are operating in a world of delusion.
Israel’s political leadership is consumed by the belief that Israel’s survival depends on its military supremacy over the Arab world and on the permanent subjugation or elimination of the Palestinian people. This belief is a form of collective madness, yet it is the doctrine that governs Israeli policy. Israel’s leaders cannot accept that peace is within reach. In the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, the Arab states offered Israel full normalisation in return for a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, and that offer still stands. Peace cannot be built on genocide in Gaza or on hatred of the Palestinian people and the drive to remove them from their land. Yet that is the path Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen, and he now campaigns on it openly, with his “national religious” allies, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who twist religion in the service of hatred and killing.
The United States is consumed by its declining power. Iran has been a target for more than 70 years. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he nationalised Iran’s oil. The United States then installed the shah and backed his police state until the Iranian people overthrew it in 1979. The US has never forgiven Iran for escaping from US domination. The US backed Saddam Hussein’s deadly war against Iran in the 1980s, and followed with four decades of economic warfare, covert operations, cyberattacks and assassinations. Trump tore up the 2015 nuclear agreement in 2018, bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025, and then, in February of this year, joined Israel in open war, killing Iran’s supreme leader in the opening strikes.
Washington’s fixation on Iran is in the service of American hegemony. In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski named Iran one of five “geopolitical pivots,” states that matter less for their own power than for where they sit. Iran commands the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Brzezinski wrote that an “antihegemonic” coalition of China, Russia and Iran could emerge “only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.” Well, yes, Washington has been that shortsighted and reckless.
The signs that the war will restart are not hidden. This week, War Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Israel to discuss renewed joint strikes, and Israeli sources report that the plans target Iran’s petrochemical facilities and nuclear sites. The White House has promised that the United States will not attack Iran before the November 3 midterm elections, which is another way of announcing a timetable for war. The US naval blockade of Iran’s ports has passed its 100th day. Trump rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire in September, even though Tehran says the offer remains on the table.
Israel’s October 27 election adds fuel to the fire. On October 18, Trump endorsed Netanyahu, saying the United States would “finish the job” against Iran only with Netanyahu in charge. On October 21, at a rally in Dimona (home to the reactor where Israel secretly built its own nuclear arsenal), Netanyahu declared that the only way to end the Iranian threat is to overthrow the regime and said he had issued that directive to the army, Mossad and the security services.
Iran has understandably drawn its own conclusions. Its commanders have announced a new offensive doctrine that includes preemptive strikes and attacks on bases in neighbouring countries used for operations against Iran, and they warn that renewed attacks would bring a global energy crisis. Attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz reached a new peak this month.
This is the reality that the Arab world, especially the Gulf countries, now faces. The US bases across the Gulf did not bring security in this war. They turned their host nations into targets. The US-Israeli strategy of divide and conquer, which cast Iran as the region’s permanent enemy and invited the Arab states to shelter under American power while accepting Israeli hegemony, has brought war to the region, economic loss to the Gulf, and mass killings in Palestine and Lebanon.
The only way to stop this madness is for the Arab world to tell the United States that enough is enough. The Arab states should declare that they will never accept Israeli hegemony, that there must be a sovereign State of Palestine and that the region’s security will come from regional cooperation rather than from Washington. The solution could be two states, as in the Arab Peace Initiative, or one binational democratic state, or a confederation. What matters is that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, each about eight million people, live in peace, safety and self-determination. What is not possible is the perpetuation of Israel’s brutal apartheid state.
The beginnings are visible. Qatar has called for a regional dialogue among the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Turkiye and Pakistan, and Qatar, Pakistan and Oman have kept the channels of mediation with Tehran open throughout the war. These efforts should grow into a standing regional security framework that includes Iran, the Gulf states, Egypt, Turkiye, Iraq and Pakistan, built on mutual non-aggression, freedom of navigation, and a zone free of nuclear weapons that must eventually include Israel.
The Arab states have far more leverage than they recognise. If Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and their neighbours announced that their territory and airspace will not be used for another war on Iran, and that normalisation with Israel is off the table until a Palestinian state exists, the calculations in Washington and Tel Aviv would have to change quickly. And the American people, who hate the war on Iran and side with Palestine, would cheer.
The era of US-led divide and conquer, with Iran cast as the permanent enemy of the Arab world, is over, even if Washington and Tel Aviv refuse to admit it. The Arab states should say so openly now before the next round of war begins, and in doing so, open the way to a region that provides for its own security and peace.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/10/29/how-to-stop-the-us-israel-war-on-iran
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The Solution Staring Israel in the Face
What is needed from the opposition leaders? Nothing beyond decency. The government that ousts Netanyahu is the one that accepts the votes of Arab citizens.
Jeffrey D. Sachs | October 30, 2026 | Common Dreams
Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich decisively lost Israel’s election on October 27. The governing coalition of Likud, the far right, and the ultra-Orthodox parties fell from 64 seats in 2022 to 53, eight short of a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The other 67 seats went to parties that campaigned to replace the government: 48 to the Jewish-led opposition headed by Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff, and 19 to the two Arab parties. Turnout was 77.9 percent, the highest since 1999, and Arab citizens, who make up about one-fifth of Israel’s population, voted at an estimated rate of about 80 percent, up from 53 percent in 2022. The results make it clear: Israeli voters chose to end the Netanyahu government. The solution to Israel’s political crisis is in plain view. The only thing standing in the way of ousting the government is racism: the refusal of Israel’s Jewish opposition leaders to treat Arab citizens as part of the political community.
The racism is not hidden. On election night Netanyahu claimed a “decisive majority among the Zionist and Jewish public,” a formula that simply subtracts the votes of one citizen in five. His Likud party then viciously and absurdly declared that the election had been “stolen” by the Arab parties and demanded investigations by the police and the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. The purpose, of course, is to brand Arab votes as illegitimate, so that no government resting on them can be accepted.
The tragedy is that the opposition leaders have adopted the same premise. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, has said that the Arab parties “are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.” Avigdor Liberman has ruled out any government that depends on Arab votes, even a temporary one. Eisenkot has said that Ra’am’s leader “won’t be part of my next government,” and that he does not “see any Arab or Haredi parties who accept” his conditions for partnership. These leaders do not object to anything the Arab parties would do in government. With good will, they could easily negotiate a governing arrangement.
The consequences of the racism are predictable. If the opposition leaders hold to their refusal, only two outcomes remain. Israel will go to another election, with the current murderous government remaining for many more months, or the opposition will join a unity government in which Netanyahu stays in power. Netanyahu has ruled out abandoning his far-right partners. Either way, the opposition leaders would hand Netanyahu and his murderous colleagues the victory that the voters denied him.
There are no real policy obstacles to cooperation. Ra’am, the United Arab List, has already served in an Israeli government. In 2021 it joined the coalition led by Bennett and Yair Lapid, the first independent Arab party ever to do so. The other Arab party, the Joint List, has said it would vote with an Eisenkot-led government to establish an official inquiry into the failures of October 7, which is the opposition’s own first priority. Israel’s voters appear to be ahead of their leaders. A Hebrew University survey on election night found that more than 61 percent of opposition voters want Eisenkot to form a government with Ra’am, while only 20 percent prefer new elections. Arab and Jewish opposition voters want the same thing, which is to oust Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich.
A practical plan should follow directly from the arithmetic. First, when the new Knesset convenes, the 67 members opposed to the Netanyahu government should elect a new Speaker, giving the new majority control of the parliamentary agenda even before a government is formed. Second, Eisenkot should form a true coalition in which Ra’am sits as a full partner with ministerial posts, giving 56 seats, with the Joint List supporting the government from outside to reach 67.
The program of such a government would not be hard to negotiate, because the parties that would be in it already share most of it. The government would establish an official inquiry into the failures of October 7. It would adopt an emergency plan against the crime and violence that have devastated Arab towns, and it would invest in housing and services for Arab communities, including the unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Negev. It would restore the independence of the courts and the attorney general.
The government might last a year. Questions of borders and the Palestinian territories would not be settled by this government, but a non-racist coalition government now would move Israel toward a lasting peaceful solution, perhaps toward a binational democratic state or toward the two-state solution of the long-standing Arab Peace Initiative. In the meantime, and crucially, Netanyahu and the other war criminals would be ousted.
Israel’s leaders should also understand what is at stake beyond Israel’s borders. Israel’s racism and murderous campaign in Gaza and the occupied West Bank have profoundly alienated people all over the world. A Pew Research Center survey of 36 countries this spring found that a median of 67 percent of respondents view Israel unfavorably, including 60 percent of Americans. In Pew’s surveys this year, Israel was viewed more negatively than any other country it asked about. More Americans now sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The alienation extends to Jews all over the world. If the politicians double down on their racism now, they will confirm the world’s harshest judgments of Israel.
What is needed from the opposition leaders? Nothing beyond decency. The government that ousts Netanyahu is the one that accepts the votes of Arab citizens. Israel’s president has asked the party leaders to come to his consultations with an open mind. The majority to remove Netanyahu exists, provided that the leaders drop their racism.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/political-solution-after-israel-elections
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